Gallantry Part 39

GRAND d.u.c.h.eSS OF NOUMARIA, a capable woman.

BARONESS VON ALTENBURG, a coquette.

SCENE

The Palace Gardens at Breschau.

THE DUCAL AUDIENCE

_PROEM:--In Default of the Hornpipe Customary to a Lengthy Interval between Acts_

Louis de Soyecourt fulfilled the promise made to the old Prince de Gatinais, so that presently went about Breschau, hailed by more or less enthusiastic plaudits, a fair and blue-eyed, fat little man, who smiled mechanically upon the mult.i.tude, and looked after the interests of France wearily, and (without much more ardor) gave over the remainder of his time to outrivalling his predecessor, unvenerable Ludwig von Freistadt, who until now had borne, among the eighteen grand dukes (largely of quite grand-ducal morals) that had earlier governed in Noumaria, the palm for indolence and dissipation.

At moments, perhaps, the Grand Duke recollected the Louis Quillan who had spent three months in Manneville, but only, I think, as one recalls some pleasurable acquaintance; Quillan had little resembled the Marquis de Soyecourt, rake, tippler and exquisite of Versailles, and in the Grand Duke you would have found even less of Nelchen Thorn's betrothed. He was quite dead, was Quillan, for the man that Nelchen loved had died within the moment of Nelchen's death. He, the poor children! his Highness meditated.

Dead, both of them, both murdered four years since, slain in Poictesme yonder.... Eh bien, it was not necessary to engender melancholy.

So his Highness amused himself,--not very heartily, but at least to the last resource of a flippant and unprudish age. Meantime his grumbling subjects bored him, his duties bored him, his wife bored him, his mistresses bored him after the first night or two, and, above all, he most hideously bored himself. But I spare you a _chronique scandaleuse_ of Duke Louis' reign and come hastily to its termination, as more pertinent to the matter I have now in hand.

Suffice it, then, that he ruled in Noumaria five years; that he did what was requisite by begetting children in lawful matrimony, and what was expected of him by begetting some others otherwise; and that he stoutened daily, and by and by decided that the young Baroness von Altenburg--not excepting even her lovely and multifarious precursors,--was beyond doubt possessed of the brightest eyes in all history. Therefore did his Highness lay before the owner of these eyes a certain project, upon which the Baroness was in season moved to comment.

I

"The idea," said the Baroness, "is preposterous!"

"Admirably put!" cried the Grand Duke. "We will execute it, then, the first thing in the morning."

"--and, besides, one could take only a portmanteau--"

"And the capacity of a portmanteau is limited," his Highness agreed. "Nay, I can a.s.sure you, after I had packed my coronet this evening there was hardly room for a change of linen. And I found it necessary to choose between the sceptre and a tooth-brush."

"Ah, Highness" sighed the Baroness von Altenburg, "will you never be serious? You plan to throw away a duchy, and in the act you jest like a school-boy."

"Ma foi!" retorted the Grand Duke, and looked out upon the moonlit gardens; "as a loyal Noumarian, should I not rejoice at the good-fortune which is about to befall my country? Nay, Amalia, morality demands my abdication,"

he added, virtuously, "and for this once morality and I are in complete accord."

The Baroness von Altenburg was not disposed to argue the singularity of any such agreement, the while that she considered Louis de Soyecourt's latest scheme.

He had, as prologue to its elucidation, conducted the Baroness into the summer-house that his grandfather, good Duke Augustus, erected in the Gardens of Breschau, close to the Fountain of the Naiads, and had en tete-a-tete explained his notion. There were post-horses in Noumaria; there was also an un.o.bstructed road that led you to Vienna, and thence to the world outside; and he proposed, in short, to quiet the grumbling of the discontented Noumarians by a second, and this time a final, vanishment from office and the general eye. He submitted that the Baroness, as a patriot, could not fail to weigh the inestimable benefit which would thus accrue to her native land.

Yet he stipulated that his exit from public life should be made in company with the latest lady on whom he had bestowed his variable affections; and remembering this proviso, the Baroness, without exactly encouraging or disencouraging his scheme, was at least not p.r.o.ne to insist on coupling him with morality.

She contented herself with a truism. "Indeed, your Highness, the example you set your subjects is atrocious."

"And yet they complain!" said the Grand Duke,--"though I swear to you I have always done the things I ought not to have done, and have left unread the papers I have signed. What more, in reason, can one ask of a grand duke?"

"You are indolent--" remonstrated the lady.

"You--since we attempt the descriptive," said his Highness,--"are adorable."

"--and that injures your popularity--"

"Which, by the way, vanished with my waist."

"--and moreover you create scandals--"

"'The woman tempted me,'" quoted the Grand Duke; and added, reflectively, "Amalia, it is very singular--"

"Nay, I am afraid," the Baroness lamented, "it is rather notoriously plural."

But the Grand Duke waved a dignified dissent, and continued, "--that I could never resist green eyes of a peculiar shade."

The Baroness, becoming vastly interested in the structure of her fan, went on, with some severity, "Your reputation--"

"_De mortuis_--" pleaded the Grand Duke.

"--is bad; and you go from bad to worse."

"By no means," said his Highness, "since when I was nineteen--"

"I will not believe it even of you!" cried the Baroness von Altenburg.

"I a.s.sure you," his Highness protested, gravely, "I was then a devil of a fellow! She was only twenty, and she, too, had big green eyes--"

"And by this late period," said the lady, "has in addition an infinity of grandchildren."

"I happen to be barely forty!" the Grand Duke said, with dignity.

"In which event the _Almanachen_ dating, say, from 1710--"

"Are not unmarred by an occasional misprint. Truly I lament the ways of all typographers, and I will explain the cause of their depravity, in Vienna."

"But I am not going to Vienna."

"'And Sapphira,'" murmured his Highness, "'fell down straightway at his feet, and yielded up the ghost!' So beware, Amalia!"

"I am not afraid, your Highness,--"

"Nor in effect am I. Then we will let Europe frown and journalists moralize, while we two gallop forward on the road that leads to Vienna and heaven?"

"Or--" the Baroness helpfully suggested.

"There is in this case no possible 'or.' Once out of Noumaria, we leave all things behind save happiness."

"Among these trifles, your Highness, is a duchy."