XVI THE IVORY TOWER OF STYR

Two days later Styr stood in the tower of her living room, awaiting Excellenz, who had sent her a succession of hasty notes. As always, when the river was full, she had the sensation of floating on the current of the lovely light green waters. The birds were singing in her garden and in the deep glades of the park. The Isar itself sang of the glaciers and snow peaks that gave it birth. From the fields, beyond the heavy trees, came the dainty uplifting scent of newly mown hay. Usually this scene of sylvan isolation fed the poetry of her secret life, and in these morning hours, when the park was deserted, she might people it with satyrs and dryads, even with Valkyrs, if she wished. But to-day it seemed only the romantic annex to the exciting drama into which she had precipitated herself; and it required but a slight effort to conjure up the gorgeously dressed little butterfly with her ugly old soul in her desperate face, and the perplexed, doubtless terrified, young man, dragging his feet beside her.

Styr was by no means in a philosophic frame of mind. She fully realized that this license in which she had indulged for the first time in many years, this luxury of active interest in a human being, other than a student or a chorus girl in distress, would lead far—unless she promptly locked the gates again. Already her brain was showing a disposition to offer hospitality to more than one of the great interests with which the world palpitated. Yesterday she had been on the point of buying a newspaper. If Ordham continued to call, they would inevitably discuss all interests under the sun; books alone would never occupy them; one by one the atrophies in her uncommonly complete nature would disintegrate, disappear. And she had lived the inner life so completely, so jealously, almost as isolated in her villa by the Isar as had it been one of those schlosses on its lonely peak that decorate the German landscape! That sense of unviolated liberty! It had at times lifted her spirit to that exalted pitch to which music raises the emotional capacity of speech. There are more forms of happiness than one in this world, and Margarethe Styr had solved the greatest problem of woman’s existence: she was quite happy, and not because she had found the man of her heart, but because she had eliminated man from her existence altogether. Whether Nature, that inexorable slave-driver, would have permitted her to dwell in peace with art and her soul had not circumstances first made all men hateful to her, was beside the question. But although she had found happiness, it was at the expense of far more than the one dream to which most women cling until the last of their days. She had denied her mind much that it naturally craved, and she had suppressed those superficial frivolous instincts which have their own appetites. She often longed to dress (and show herself), in marvellous Paris frocks, and, never before having known women with whom she cared to associate (save briefly on Atlantic steamers), she would have derived much honest enjoyment from long gossips with these friendly sophisticated women of Munich; she would have liked to know and discuss all the little comedies, tragedies, diverting weaknesses, in the lives of her new compatriots. But she had not dared, and the results she had achieved by her fidelity to the life long since prescribed by her too enlightened brain, encouraged her to persist. She half resolved that, having done her obvious duty by a fellow-creature, she would withdraw from further intercourse with him at once. Better snap this link while her surfaces were merely rippled, not drift on until all that was feminine in her was caught in the net of the world again, and this ideal existence destroyed.

It was at this point in her meditations that Princess Nachmeister was shown into the gallery, and she went hastily through the arch to meet her.

“What a picture!” exclaimed Excellenz politely, although, indeed, she had long since reached the age when she could candidly enjoy feminine loveliness. “Fancy being able to wear unrelieved white in the morning! How do you like my new Paris frock? My maid says that the overskirt has too many pleats on the hips, but for my bones, I think not.”

Princess Nachmeister looked very smart in a costume of dark brown camel’s-hair and silk and a little bonnet of brown leaves, but Countess Tann gave it but a perfunctory glance, and Excellenz herself was too excited to demand more.

“Fritz arrives to-night and comes directly to me!” she announced. “I telegraphed yesterday afternoon that I must see him at once upon a business so important that he was not to waste time imagining it, but to come. He replied that he would leave Berlin this morning. Lotte made a sworn statement, and has obtained leave to visit her sick mother for two days in order to be out of the way of Hélène’s claws when the bolt falls. She is locked up in my house; but I do not wish her to see Fritz, lest his questions should lead to other revelations that would induce even him to sue for a divorce. And that would leave Hélène free to practise on the susceptibilities of our jüngling. No, I shall convince him—and present the subject in such a way that he may escape apoplexy. Three days hence Frau Hélène will be locked up in that castle in Hungary in good old medi?val style. I know my Fritz. His heart will never trouble him again until it develops fatty degeneration; but in his outraged vanity he will roar like a bull, he will be vicious, relentless, and in the confusion of his mind will follow blindly every suggestion I make. How he will hate her, and how he will make her pay! He will give out that he retires to Hungary for his health, taking, of course, his dutiful wife. Later, official matters recall him, but the Frau Geheimrath is afflicted with a goitre and desires to remain in seclusion. The season over, nobody thinks of her in any case. Oh, La Belle Hélène is disposed of, and our charming young friend is free to get himself into another scrape.”

“Not for some time, I fancy. He has had his lesson and is by no means a human caldron. He will not suspect that she has been shut up on his account. A young Englishman’s chivalry must be reckoned with—”

“Whatever he may suspect, he will discover nothing. Fritz will whisk her out of Munich to-night. From Hungary he will compel her to write Ordham a commonplace letter that will set him quite free.”

“Heavens, how old-fashioned and romantic you still are over here! The United States might be on another planet. But there is law for women in Europe. Will she not appeal to it? She has money of her own. Will she not escape from his castle and flee to her villa in Italy?”

“In theory, but not in fact. Fritz will not be made ridiculous in the eyes of Europe, no, not if he has to pour hot lead into her ear. But a threat of extinction and the hope of his speedy demise will keep her quiet, to say nothing of the fact that she will never escape from that castle. It is in the mountains near the Roumanian border. His servants are the wild creatures of that region, and will obey their master, not only because he is their master, but a mighty sportsman, and they revere that. I have visited there. What a romantic spot for a honeymoon! But as a prison—Ach Gott! She will never even get a letter out. When she has calmed down she will affect compliance, and take care of her complexion till Fritz dies. Then she will run to Paris, where she will be very smart and very wicked until she is fifty, when she will take to opium, religion, or roulette—all three, no doubt. But ach, dear Gr?fin, what a tableau we shall miss in imagination! I could regret it, for I had every detail from Lotte. Mr. Ordham, with blank rigid face supporting the hysterical Hélène in the Pompadour boudoir, bored, vaguely apprehensive. Enter Lotte, followed by Fritz in his dressing-gown and nightcap. I am convinced he wears a mustard-yellow flannel dressing-gown like the one in which Salvini strangles Desdemona! Behind them the other servants, that the matter cannot be hushed up. It was a clever and a dramatic plot! It is almost a pity that it should not make its chapter in the unwritten history of society. And Gott! Gott! Fancy being still able to love like that! It makes one almost envious. It is the last love that makes a fool of the woman, and the first love that makes a man look as foolish as he is.”

“I suppose something interesting is happening every moment in your world?” said Styr, somewhat wistfully.

“All those little dramas are more or less alike. Only you are original, dear Gr?fin, and do, for the sake of this tired old brain, remain so. If ever you succumb to your sex, I shall curse you. You are a great artist in histrionics, but I am a little artist in Life, and quite as exacting. Pay me fifty marks. I had to give that voracious Lotte a hundred, besides the promise of a position in the Residenz.”