II FLYING ARROWS

Princess Nachmeister was the most disagreeable old woman in Munich and quite the most powerful. Herself a Prussian, she was a lifelong friend of the Queen-mother, and one of the few women ever admitted to the presence of the King; her genius for social leadership had been cultivated for forty years, and she had a “palace” in the K?nigenstrasse, whose high-walled garden extended through to the Kaulbachstrasse. Ordham, in his rather listless walks, had often glanced longingly over the flat coping at the grounds, half formal, half wild, crowded with trees and set with Italian seats and fountains, noseless satyrs and empty urns. The princess boasted that she was the first to “discover” him, and after the season opened he found himself dining or attending parties at her house several times a week. At the moment, so great was the depression, owing to the persistent seclusion of the King, that few besides Excellenz Nachmeister had the spirit to entertain on the grand scale. Luncheons, kettle-drums, diplomatic dinners, were not infrequent, and occasionally one of the minor royal palaces opened its doors for a rout; but had it not been for the old lady whom all vilified and courted, society would have been moribund. No one was more aware of this than Excellenz herself, for one secret of her uninterrupted success in a city that still hated Prussia was her genius for seizing and holding the strategic position.

She took Ordham to the routs that were given, to private tea-parties at the Residenz, where frequently the only other guests of the Queen-mother were her ancient ladies-in-waiting, and, in time, invited him alone of all the unofficial young men to her dinners given in honour of the diplomatic corps. She knew that he barely tolerated her, that he came to her house so often, not only because he found much to amuse him there, but because he was far too good-natured to refuse any one that pressed hospitality upon him; but she would have forgiven more to his manners, which she pronounced the finest in the world; and the old court intriguer honestly admired the diplomatic talents which inspired him to express the proper amount of deference and polite gratitude without sacrificing his dignity in the fashion of many that craved something more than a mere entrée to the Palast Nachmeister; then, later, when to be the enfant gaté and the formal man-of-the-world.

Ordham, indeed, began by disliking her intensely. Her thin dispraising nose, which, he reflected, looked as if it had a pin in it; her narrow mouth, whose corners seemed to drip poison; her hard, round, brilliant eyes; her red wig and emaciated figure,—all offended him; but her manifest and disinterested friendship (she had not a young relative in the world), her many favours, and the more subtle influence of Time, to say nothing of her discretion in not inviting him to make love to her, inclined him to indulgence, and he even began to find good points in her,—after his habit with people whom he tolerated at all.

And he was never bored in her house, for he met in it a far more cosmopolitan society than he had been accustomed to in England or even in Paris. The United States had not yet discovered Munich, but it was always refreshed, this beautiful art city of mid-Europe, by Russians, Hungarians, Austrians, Italians, and odd and interesting people from the Balkans and the Porte. Moreover, he loved beautiful things, and the Nachmeister’s house was an essential reincarnation of the rococo, even to the dinginess of the gilt, so fatally neglected by Ludwig in his brand-new palaces, Linderhof and Herrenchimsee. Her rooms and her grounds satisfied him so completely that he could not go to them often enough, and he was able to exclude their owner from his memory unless she stood in front of him.

Nor did she deny him anything he craved. When the rather nervous young man, who blushed so often, and yet was as automatically sure of himself as only an Englishman of his class can be, told her flatly that he wanted to meet the King, whom no stranger met, the audacity of the request took her breath away, but she managed the interview through the Queen-mother; and Ludwig, who happened to be in one of those intensely lucid tempers when he was sick unto death of shams and hypocrisies, and the vileness he found in the men that cringed at his wavering feet, fancied that he saw in the clean high-bred young Englishman something of the nobility and beauty of his own untainted youth, and impulsively invited him to Neuschwanstein for the following evening.

It was quite in keeping with the curious complications which at this period began to deflect John Ordham’s feet from the sunny highway into dim by-paths ending in the mazes of life, that he should have met Mabel Cutting before he made even the bare acquaintance of Margarethe Styr. She was just eighteen, and her mother had brought her to Munich for a few weeks of German and music before launching her into London society. Princess Nachmeister, giving a garden party soon after the squares and gardens of Munich had burst into the vivid young greens of spring, begged Mrs. Cutting, whom she had known for many years, to bring the new American beauty to decorate her “gloomy old park.” This with her romantic loveliness—she was tall and slim, her hair was golden, her big eyes were brown, sad, remote, her little nose and mouth cut with the sharpest and most rapid of chisels—Mabel accomplished with much complacency; she was not only quite aware of her charms, but that her smart Parisian gown made the greater number of the Bavarian aristocracy look like housemaids. But she was bored by the strange babel of tongues about her, and, unable to interest herself in the stiff young officers that clicked their heels together in front of her, permitted them to be captured by ladies with whose methods they were more familiar. She was sitting alone,—save for her pug-dog, LaLa,—on one of the curved marble seats under a large tree, flanked by a pink hawthorn on one side and a white lilac bush on the other, when Ordham, who had arrived late, as usual, caught sight of her. A few moments later, his hostess, congratulating herself upon her subtlety, had steered him to the maiden’s side and casually presented him.

Mabel enlivened immediately when the tall “boy,” as she defined him, very dignified and very diffident, stood blushing before her, and talked so fast that Ordham subsided into a chair with the welcome sensation of being spared all trouble. He was fascinated not more by the sparkling flow of empty words than by the play of dimples in the pink and white cheeks, and the flecks of golden light which the large pathetic brown eyes seemed to intercept from the aureole of her hair. She talked of England and Paris, which she knew far better than New York, “adoring” both, delivered her soul of her hatred of all things German, from the music to the shops, spoke with admiration of his mother who was a great friend of “Momma’s,” and admitted that she was simply dying to see the inside of Ordham Castle and its romantic recluse, Lord Bridgminster. Occasionally she dammed the stream of her eloquence with a question, answered by a glance from Ordham’s smiling eyes. Then Mrs. Cutting, who had been detained within, bore down upon them, and Mabel rose to her feet like a willow branch slowly released from the water.

“Momma!” she cried, “this is Mr. Ordham, Lady Bridgminster’s son. I have asked him to call. Do invite him for dinner to-night. He is the very nicest boy I ever met. You are sure to like him, for he talks so splendidly, and says such amusing things.”

Ordham had much ado to refrain from laughing outright, and Mrs. Cutting caught the flash in his eyes which made him suddenly look older. He cultivated—or perhaps, in his conventional hours, it was quite natural to him—a somewhat infantile expression, and Mrs. Cutting, observing him from the window, had concluded that he was a mere boy, and quite safe to sit alone with her little daughter at a formal German party. But as she stood talking to him,—he was now quite at his ease,—this woman whose keen American brain had never for a moment been clouded by passion, whose nerves were mere magnetic needles for the thousand complexities of the world she lived in, experienced a subtle response to something hard under the plastic surface of this charming young man. It was remote, a whisper from the unknown, as evanescent as a quiver along the branches of the tree that cast its shadow on the young pink of the hawthorn; and in a moment she forgot the impression in her general approval. But she recalled it long after, that fleeting response in herself to the germ of ruthlessness under that sincere and boyish desire to please her.

Then and there she made up her mind that he should marry Mabel. The serious quest of her life was the son-in-law who should make her one with the aristocracy she had selected as the best this world had precipitated. She was a woman as fastidious as she was ambitious, for she belonged to the aristocracy of her own country, and there was still much of the Puritan in her, albeit none of the provincial. She would give her immaculate daughter to no man whom she knew to be unworthy, no matter what his rank; and, unsuspected, she had examined and rejected all the young unmarried noblemen she had met during her last two seasons in England. As it happened, she had never met Ordham, although she enjoyed something more than a passing acquaintance with Lady Bridgminster. Always a favourite of fortune, she realized at once that this garden party had been arranged by the august recipient of the prayers she never omitted to offer up when the exigencies of fashion took her to church.

“Certainly you must dine with us to-night, if you are not ‘invited,’ as they say over here,” she exclaimed in her bright cordial voice which retained not a taint of the national crudity. “Mabel is a chatterbox and I shall send her to bed; but you and I will have a delightful gossip about London, from which I have been banished so often these last three years—since my husband’s death there has been so much tiresome litigation in New York. It is a delight even to look at an Englishman once more, especially here in Germany, which—let me whisper it—I hate as much as I love Paris. I am still a good American, you see, even if I did migrate long since to England. And you will come at eight?”

Ordham murmured his thanks, almost as much fascinated by the mother as by the daughter. Mrs. Cutting was not yet forty, very slim, Parisian, high-bred, not in the least faded, and her grey eyes, if cold, were very bright; her small mouth could accomplish smiles dazzling, arch, sympathetic, merely sweet, and she held her head higher than any lady of the court of Queen Marie. Ordham had met Americans of all sorts, but never any that attracted him as strongly as this distinguished couple that said nothing so charmingly and liked him so spontaneously. He felt the utter passionlessness of the older woman’s nature, but after the tempestuousness of certain of his foreign acquaintance this but added to her charm. As for the exquisite Mabel, she suggested all enchanting possibilities, although perhaps more than aught else the divine white flame of Wagner’s Elizabeth; that is to say (he was dreaming over a midnight cigarette at his window in the Legation when these reflections took shape), she would resemble that exalted ideal when she passed the chatterbox stage, that inevitable phase of the young American female. But, barring the fact that she talked too much and really knew nothing at all, she was quite flawless.

He dined, lunched, drove constantly with the Cuttings during the ensuing fortnight, writing pathetic notes of apology to those that had booked him long since; and as Mrs. Cutting dined in her private suite, his many good friends almost wept as they thought on his sufferings. He answered their notes of sympathy in terms of passionate gratitude and regret (which made him more popular than ever) and gave not a second thought to the writers save when endeavouring to fix each particular excuse in his memory. He was enchanted with his new friends. Mrs. Cutting talked smartly, and on all subjects which she discovered appealed to him. Mabel was not sent to bed, and a great deal of quiet flirting went on under Momma’s discreetly averted eye. Frequently Mrs. Cutting was summoned into an adjoining room by her “dressmaker” (she would not have worn a German gown into her coffin), but certainly Ordham never felt so much as a passing suspicion that the girl was being thrown at his head, nor that his ideals, peculiarities, vague desires, were being carefully sounded and analyzed. When they departed he missed them so acutely for a few days that he was almost melancholy; then, by rapid gradations, forgot them. Mabel bedewed her pillow for many nights, and Mrs. Cutting, as soon as she had opened her house in London, and presented Mabel at Buckingham Palace, devoted herself to ripening her pleasant acquaintance with Lady Bridgminster into friendship. It was not long before those two astute dames understood one another, and the pliant Mabel, by no means without the craft of her sex, was put into training.