It was indeed the fact of the lady’s swoon which troubled me. Her natural repugnance to meeting the Countess was not motive enough. Nor did I believe her sufficiently sensible to shame for that feeling to work on her to such purpose. It seemed of a piece with the terror which she had subsequently shown on her recovery. The miniature, I conjectured, had something, if not everything to do with it. Resolving wisely that I had best ascertain the top and bottom of the matter, I called upon Marston at his house in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, close to the new college of Franciscans, and asked where his sister stayed, on the plea that I would fain pay my respects to her, and assure myself of her convalescence.
“I can satisfy you on the latter point,” he returned cordially, “but at the cost of denying you the pleasure of a visit. For my sister left London on the next day, and has gone down into the country.”
“So soon?” I asked in some surprise. For Lady Tracy hardly impressed me as likely to find much enjoyment in the felicities of a rural life.
“Her illness left her weak, and she thought the country air would give her health.”
For a moment I was in two minds whether to inquire more precisely of her whereabouts and follow her; but I reflected that I might encounter some difficulty in compassing an interview, for it was evident that she had fled from London in order to avoid further trouble and concern in the matter. And even if I succeeded so far, I saw no means of eliciting the explanation I needed, without revealing to her the unscrupulous use which her brother had made of her miniature; and that I had not the heart to do. The business seemed of insufficient importance to warrant it. There was besides a final and convincing argument which decided me to remain in London. If I journeyed into the West, I should leave an open field for my rival, and no ally with the Countess to guard against his insinuations; and I reflected further that there were few possible insinuations from which he would refrain.
On this point of his conduct, however, I was minded to teach him a lesson, which would make him more discreet in the future, and at the same time effect the purpose I had in view when Lady Tracy inopportunely swooned. For when I came to think over the events of that morning, I recollected that after all Lady Tracy had not spoken as I had asked her, and though the last words Ilga had said to me as I left the house seemed to show me that she no longer believed the calumny, I was none the less anxious to compel Marston to disavow it.
Now it was the fashion at the time of which I write for the fine ladies and gentlemen of the town to take the air of a morning in the Piazza of Covent Garden; and choosing an occasion when Marston was lounging there in the company of the Countess and her attendant, Mademoiselle Durette, I inquired of him pointedly concerning his sister’s health, meaning to lead him from that starting-point to an admission that Lady Tracy was until that chance meeting a complete stranger to me.
But or ever he could reply, Ilga broke in with an air of flurry, and calling to Lord Culverton, who was approaching, engaged him in a rapid conversation. She was afraid, I supposed, that I meant to break the promise which I had given her upon the stairs, and tax Marston with his treachery; and I was confirmed in the supposition when I repeated the question. For she shot at me a look of reproach, and said quickly,—“I was telling your friend when you joined us,” she said, “of my home in the Tyrol.” She laid some stress upon the word ‘friend.’ “’Twere hard, I think, at any season to find a spot more beautiful.”
“’Twere impossible,” rejoined Culverton, with his most elegant bow, “For no spot can be more beautiful than that which owns beauty for its queen.”
“The compliment,” replied Ilga, with a bow, “is worthy of the playhouse.”
“Nay, nay,” smirked my lord, mightily gratified; “the truth, madame, the truth extorted from me, let me die! And yet it hath some wit. I cannot help it, wit will out, the more certainly when it is truth as well.”
“Lady Tracy, then—” I began to Marston.
“But at this time of the year,” interrupted the Countess immediately, “Lukstein has no rival. Cornfields redden below it, beeches are marshalled green up the hillside behind it, gentian picks out a mosaic on the grass, and night and day waterfalls tumble their music through the air. Yet even in winter, when the ice binds it and gags its voices, it has a quiet charm of silence whereof the memory makes one homesick.”
As she proceeded the anxiety died out of her face, and she grew absorbed in the picture which her memories painted.
“Madame,” said Marston, “I should appreciate the description better if it spoke less of a longing to return.”
“It is my kingdom, you see,” she replied. “Barbarous, no doubt, with a turbulent populace, but still it is my kingdom, and very loyal to me.”
Culverton paid her the obvious flattery, but she took no heed of it.
“The tiniest, compactest kingdom,” she went on in a musing tone, “sequestered in a nook of the world.” She seated herself on a chair which stood at the edge of the Piazza. “Indeed, I shall return there, and that, I fancy, soon.”
“Countess!” replied Culverton. “That were too heartless. ’Twould decimate London, let me perish! For never a gallant but would think himself to death. Oh, fie!”
Marston joined eagerly in the other’s protestations. For my part, however, I remained silent, well content with what she had said. For I recollected the evening when I first had talk with her, and the construction which I had placed upon her words; how she would never return to Lukstein until she was eased of the pain which her husband’s disaster had caused her. The notion that her memories had lost their sting thrilled me to the heart, and woke my vanity to conjecture of a cause.
“Then,” said the Countess, “would my friends be proved heartless. For it is their turn to visit me, and I would not be balked of requiting them for their kindness to me here. ’Tis not so tedious a journey after all.”
“I can warrant the truth of that,” said Culverton. “For I have been as far as Innspruck myself.”
“Indeed?” said the Countess. She looked hard at him for a second, and then laughed to herself. “When was that?” she asked.
“Some six years ago. I was on the grand tour with a tutor—a most obnoxious person, who was ever poring over statues and cold marble figures, but as for a fine woman, rabbit me if he ever knew one when he saw her. He dragged me with him from Italy to Innspruck to view some figures in the Cathedral.”
“Then you must needs have passed beneath Lukstein,” said the Countess, “for it hangs just above the high-road from Italy.”
Culverton would not admit the statement. Some instinct, some angelic warning, he declared, would surely have bidden him stop and climb to the Castle as to a holy shrine. The Countess laughingly assured him that nevertheless he had passed her home, and with a fond minuteness she described to him its aspect and position.
Then the strangest thing occurred. She leaned forward in her chair, and with the tip of the stick she carried, drew a line on the gravel edge of the pavement.
“That represents the road from Meran,” she explained. “The stone yonder is the Lukstein rock, on which the Castle stands.” She briefly described the character of the village, and marked out the windings of the road from the gates at the back of the Castle down the hillside, until she had wellnigh completed a diagram in all essentials similar to that which Julian had sketched for me in my Horace.
“From the village,” she said, “the road runs in a zigzag to join the highway.”
She traced two long, distinct lines, but stopped of a sudden at the apex of the second angle, where the coppice runs to a point, with her face puckered up in a great perplexity. Culverton asked her what troubled her.
“I was forgetting,” she said. “I was forgetting how often the road twisted,” and very slowly she drew the final line to join with that which she had marked to represent the highway in the bed of the valley.
It struck me as peculiar for the moment that, with her great affection for Lukstein, she should forget so simple and prominent a detail as the number of angles which the road made in its descent. But I gave little thought to the matter, being rather engrossed in the strange coincidence of the diagram. It brought home to me with greater poignancy than ever before the deceit which I was practising upon my mistress. For I compared the use to which I had put my plan of the Castle with the motive which had led her unconsciously to reproduce it, I mean her desire that her friends should appreciate the home in which she took such manifest delight.
But while I was thus uneasily reproaching myself I perceived Marston separate from the group, and being obstinately determined that he should admit before Ilga the tenuity of my acquaintance with his sister, I called him back and asked him at what period Lady Tracy might be expected again in town.
This time the Countess made no effort to divert me. Indeed, she seemed barely to notice that I had put the question, but sat with her chin propped on the palms of her hands gazing with a thoughtful frown at the out line which she had drawn; and I believed her to be engrossed in the picture which it evoked in her imagination.
“It appears that you feel great interest in my sister, Mr Buckler,” said Marston curiously.
Doubtless my question was a clumsy one, for I was never an adept at finesse; but this was the last answer which I desired to hear. “Nay, nay,” I said hurriedly, and stopped at a loss, idly adding with my cane a line here and there to Countess Lukstein’s diagram.
To my surprise, however, Ilga herself came to my rescue, and in a careless tone brought the matter to an issue.
“Perhaps, Mr Buckler,” she remarked, “is an old friend of Lady Tracy’s.”
I raised my eyes from the Countess, fixing them upon Marston to note how he took the thrust, and with a quick sweep of her stick she smoothed the gravel, obliterating the lines. That I expected to see Marston disconcerted and in a pother to evade the question, I need not say, and ’twas with an amazement which fell little short of stripe-faction that I heard him answer forthwith in a brusque, curt tone,—“That can hardly be. For my sister has been abroad all this year, and Mr Buckler in the same case until this year.”
I turned to Ilga. But she seemed more interested in Lady Tracy than in the fact of the admission.
“Ah! Lady Tracy was abroad,” she said. “When did she leave England?”
“In September.”
“The very month that I returned,” I exclaimed triumphantly.
The Countess turned quickly towards me. “I fancied you only returned this spring.”
“I was in England for a short while in September,” said I, regretting the haste with which I had spoken.
“September of last year?”
“Of last year.”
“Anno domini 1685,” laughed Culverton. “There seems to be some doubt about the date.”
“September, 1685,” repeated the Countess with a curious insistency.
“There is no doubt,” returned Marston hotly. “I could wish for Betty’s sake we had not such cause to remember it. She was betrothed to one of Monmouth’s rebels, curse him I and Betty was so distressed by his capture that her health gave way.”
I was upon tenterhooks lest Ilga should inquire the name of the rebel. But she merely remarked in an absent way, as though she attached no significance to his words,—“’Tis a sad story.”
“In truth it is, and the only consolation we got from it was that the rebel swung for his treachery. Betty was ordered forthwith abroad, and she left England on the fourteenth of September. I remember the day particularly, since it was her birthday.”
“September the fourteenth!” said the Countess; and I, thinking to make out my case beyond dispute, cried triumphantly,—“The very day whereon I bade good-bye to Leyden.” The words were barely o my lips when Ilga rose to her feet. She stood for a moment with her eyes very wide and her bosom heaving.
“I am convinced,” she whispered to me, with an odd smile. “I ought not to have needed the proof. I am convinced.”
With that she turned a little on one side, and Marston resumed.
“That proves how little Mr Buckler is acquainted with Lady Tracy.”
I spoke as though I had been endeavouring to persuade the company that I was intimate with his sister; he almost challenged me to contradict him. I could not but admire the effrontery of the man in carrying off the exposure of his falsity with so high a head, and I surmised that he had some new contrivance in his mind whereby he might subsequently set himself right with Ilga.
One thing, however, was apparent to me: that he had no suspicion of his sister’s acquaintance with Count Lukstein.
“It was on the fourteenth that Betty set out for France,” he once more declared, and so walked away.
“Where she married most happily three months later,” sniggered Culverton. “As you say, madame, it is a very sad story.”
The Countess laughed.
“She was not over constant to her rebel.”
“In the matter of the affections,” replied Culverton, “Lady Tracy was ever my Lady Bountiful.”
It seemed to me that the Countess turned a shade paler, but any inference which I might have drawn adverse to myself from that was prevented by a proposal which she presently mooted. For some other of our friends joining us about this time, she proposed for a frolic that the party should take chairs and immediately invade my lodgings. Needless to say, I most heartily seconded the proposition, apologising at the same time for the poor hospitality which the suddenness of the invitation compelled me to offer.
Since by chance I had the key in my pocket, we entered from the Park by the little door in the wall of the garden. I mention this because I was waked up about the middle of the night by the sound of this door banging to and fro against the jambs, and I believed that I must have failed to lock it after I had let my friends into the garden, the door having neither latch nor bolt, but was secured only by the lock. For a while I lay in bed striving to shut my ears to the sound. But the wind was high, and, moreover, blew straight into the room through the open window, so that I could not but listen, and in the end grew very wakeful. The sounds were irregularly spaced according to the lulls of the wind. Now the door would flap to three or four times in quick succession, short and sharp as the crack of a pistol; now it would stand noiseless for a time while I waited and waited for it to slam. At last I could endure the worry of it no longer, and hastily donning some clothes, I clattered downstairs.
The moon was shining fitfully through a scurrying, rack of clouds, but as I always placed the key of the door upon the mantel-shelf of the larger parlour, and thus knew exactly where to lay my hand on it, I did not trouble to strike a light, to which omission I owed my life, and, indeed, more than my life. I stumbled past the furniture, crossed the garden, locked the door, and got me back to bed.
In a few moments I fell asleep, but by a chance association of ideas—for I think that the banging of the postern must have set my thoughts that way—I began, for the first time since I came to London, to dream once more of the door in Lukstein Castle, and to see it open, and open noiselessly across the world. For the first time in the history of my nightmare fancies, that door swung back against the wall, It swung heavily, and the sound of the collision shook me to the centre. I woke trembling in every limb. It was early morning, the sun being risen, and, to my amazement, through the open window I heard the postern bang against the jamb.