by Isak Dinesen
But the terrible news was not unwelcome to him. After his last walk by the Leda fountain with Ehrengard he had passed a bad night and had left his work untouched in the morning. Now he saw that although they had been playing him a trick, those dangerous playfellows of his, the Gods, were with him still. The course of things was inspiring, and of all things in the world Herr Cazotte really with his whole heart wanted only one: inspiration. From the present situation almost any other might arise, and Herr Cazotte was a collector and connoisseur of situations.
The first of these presented itself when Ehrengard came into the room, in her riding habit and just back from her ride, and Madame Poggendorff turned from Herr Cazotte to fall on the neck of the girl, sobbing as unrestrainedly as an hour before had Lispeth in the cart and on the road. As soon as she was enlightened upon the catastrophe Ehrengard again pulled on her riding gloves to go in pursuit of the criminals. Countess Poggendorff begged her to go with Herr Cazotte in his gig, she did not like the thought of her facing these scoundrels all alone, and it was getting late. No, said Ehrengard, she was not afraid. Wotan was quite fresh, she had been out exercising Prince Lothar’s mount for him, and she would be quicker on horseback than in a carriage. She knew all the roads and paths in the neighborhood, and if she were to stay out late she was used to riding at night.
Herr Cazotte did not try to hold her back. If she had the advantage of getting off before him, he on his side had a surer track to go upon. During the minutes in which he stood watching the tearful older and the flaming younger woman, a succession of charming pictures passed through his mind. He would be presenting the regained child to the girl to give back into its mother’s arms, he might even be on his knees before her to do so. An amorino, the Princess had called her baby, an amorino indeed, joining, as with a garland of roses, a human couple. Would the girl not feel then for a vertiginous moment this particular amorino to be, spiritually and emotionally, her own child—and his! He himself got her into the saddle.
Wotan was in high spirits, when Ehrengard reined him in to question people on the road he reared, and she was so filled with indignation against the kidnappers on whose track she was trotting that she beat her mount with her riding whip. All the same she was happy, it was as if for a long time she had yearned to be angry. She was Ehrengard, no one could take that away from her, and, strangely, it was a privilege. The evening air was getting cooler, she rode through many spheres of fragrance: clover, flowering lime trees, and drying strawberry fields, through them all the ammoniac smell of the lathering horse was the strongest. She drew in her breath deeply, and ran on, with raised head and distended nostrils, a young female centaur playing along the grass fields.
She had the hunting instincts of her breed, it was not difficult to her to run the fugitives to earth in “The Blue Boar.” The cart was still standing outside the stable, and she learned from an ostler of the inn that the man, the woman and the child were in the house, possibly, she thought, behind the lighted window above her head. She left Wotan in the man’s care, ordering him to walk him up and down for half an hour and then to rub him well with a wisp of straw. There were, she noticed, a number of soldiers about the place, she felt happier still at this sight, they were people of her own kind, and it was as if she had got home.
Up in the small room behind the lighted window a temporary peace ruled. Lispeth had fallen into a short slumber with the child still at her breast. But Matthias was wide awake on his stool with his back to the wall. For a long hour he had been trying hard to sound the depth of his misfortune, from time to time also wondering what his fellow conspirators were doing, or thinking of him. The presence of his wife, however, the familiar sight of her suckling a baby and the familiar feeling that she would be able, somehow, to put things right, in the end had quieted his nerves. When she woke up, he reflected, he would drive her straight back to Rosenbad. And possibly all might still be well.
He was startled out of this state of hope when the door was flung open and Ehrengard stood on the threshold. The girl in the ride had lost her hat, her long fair hair streamed down and framed her face and figure, to the guilty man those of a young destroying angel.
Lispeth, waking up too, saw the girl in the same light, but conscious of her innocence she at once welcomed the angel of revenge in a glance as expressive as an outcry. She remained perfectly still on her chair, only in a hardly perceptible movement of her arm she raised the baby’s head so as to show that he was unhurt.
Ehrengard’s gaze responded to Lispeth’s in a declaration of perfect trust, then she turned to the kidnapper. The inviolable obligation of silence controlled the girl as well as the woman, she said not a word. But here, at the final goal of her ride, the old feudal consciousness of the right to punish seized and held the daughter of the Schreckensteins. She would have died rather than have foregone her office of chastiser.
She had left her riding whip with the horse and was barehanded for the execution, she gripped Matthias by his long hair and three times knocked his head against the wall behind him till the room darkened and swam before his eyes. He gave out a row of low wails which, however, far from frightening his tormentor, infuriated her into striking him in the face with her fist, so that the blood spouted from his nose. In actual fear of his life, of being knocked to pieces by the strong young hands that held him, he made his cries for help ring through the house.
Down at the officers’ dinner table the talk happened to have turned upon ghosts. One of the party had been recounting an old tale of “The Blue Boar” itself. A hundred years ago a jealous husband had followed his runaway wife and her lover to the inn, had found them together in a room upstairs and had dealt the seducer the treatment of Abelard. At certain times at night the gruesome scene was repeated in the room. At this moment Matthias let out his screams.
These were indeed pitiful enough to have moved the hearts of the dinner party, who probably feared the lot of the victim in the tale more than anything else in life. At the same time they were so far from being connected with any idea of romance that the short alarmed silence round the table was immediately swallowed up in laughter.
“You go up, Kurt,” the colonel cried to that young officer, “and find out if it be ghosts or people. And come back whole yourself.”
The tall young man pushed back his chair and left the room, followed by various loud and gay remarks. As he ran up the stairs, the screams from above were repeated.
He opened a door, and in a dimly lit small room caught sight of a deadly pale man pressed up against the wall by a slender young woman in a riding coat with long waves of golden hair flowing down her back. From a chair by the window a woman with a baby on her lap, with wide-open eyes but without a word, watched the scene.
When she heard the door open behind her, the Amazon let go her hold of the man and turned round.
“Ehrengard!” Kurt von Blittersdorff cried out in the highest amazement.
The girl’s cheeks as she tossed back her hair were all aflame and her eyes shining. She opened her lips as if to cry his own name back, then stiffened, like a child caught red-handed.
The whole absurd situation was so much like one of their childhood romps that the young man almost burst out laughing. At the same time he felt uneasy about the girl’s presence in the inn, with his fellow officers waiting for him downstairs.
“Ehrengard! What on earth are you doing here?” he asked.
The released sufferer profited by the respite to wriggle himself out of reach of his assaulter. He fumblingly ran his fingers through his hair, making it stand up straight like the quills of a hedgehog, and whimpered a couple of times. Although he was at the moment safe from molestation, he realized his position to be graver than before. He was a gentleman, an officer, obviously a friend of his enemy and welcomed by her, unexpectedly on the stage. With three judges upon him what hope had he? Still, as a silence followed on the officer’s exclamation he blindly groped for a way out and started on a harangue of defense.
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“So God help me, Sir,” he said, “I am a perfectly innocent man, and this is a very unfair attack on the part of the lady. That,” he went on, pointing at the woman with the baby, “is my lawful wife. You ask her yourself, Sir, she will not deny it. Has the lady, has the lodge-keeper, has the Prince’s valet, or has he himself, then, got any right to keep her away from me? They have not, Sir, and they know so themselves. For what God has joined together,” he cried in a stroke of inspiration, “let man not put asunder.”
He stopped for a moment, but his nerves could not bear the continued silence of the others in the room.
“So God help me, Sir,” he started again, “it is I who am wronged. I want my lawful wife back, that is all I want. She tells me she cannot leave the child. Well, then let her take the child with her. I have not tried to stop her from taking the child with her. Only ask her if I have done so.”
The lasting silence, Ehrengard’s fury a little while ago, his wife’s despair in the cart, and the persuasion and promise of the two gentlemen from town, if Matthias had been able to see these things as a whole, by now might have made the entire pattern dawn upon him. It was not so, his sore head reeled, anything might have thrown him in any direction. But hares, when the hounds are after them, in their wildest side leaps will show a kind of genuis. Something in the atmosphere of the room suddenly told him where his chance of escape lay. It was with the child.
The child, who after the strenuous journey was now firmly asleep on Lispeth’s bosom, was the mystery which his wife and the angry lady did by no means want solved. If he let out that he could do so if he wished, they might think more highly of him, they might even consent to buy his silence. As he spoke on he felt that he was on the right track.
“My wife, Sir,” he said, “will tell you that I have got no claim on the child, for it is not mine. If that is what the lady is going to tell you as well, let them tell you whose child it is.”
Kurt gave Lispeth a short glance, then looked back at Ehrengard. Both women seemed to have been struck dumb by the man’s speech. The situation, till now merely inexplicable, began to take on a different, a more momentous aspect. He must, he felt, put an end to a scene obviously beneath the dignity of his fiancée.
“Come,” he said, “you cannot stay here. What have you got to do with these peasants? Why do you not leave them to settle their quarrels between themselves? I shall arrange at once for some convenience to take you back to Rosenbad.”
He had not succeeded in getting one word out of her, neither did he do so now.
“There you see, Sir,” cried Matthias triumphantly. “Neither of them will tell you.”
There was a short pause.
“Well,” Kurt asked in a steady voice. “Do tell me, Ehrengard. What child is it?”
At this moment they heard light steps coming up the stairs. It was Herr Cazotte who had arrived in his gig and who now entered the room.
He took in the situation in one glance. But he felt that at the moment and under the circumstances it did not fall to him to interfere. He placed his hat on the bed and after a minute sat down on the bed himself. There he remained, like some highly intelligent looker-on in a fauteuil d’orchestre, keenly interested in the drama on the stage and in full understanding with the fact that none of the dramatis personae took any interest whatever in him himself.
“You see, Sir,” Matthias repeated in the same way. “They will not even answer you, neither of them.”
Kurt, moved by a new strange, deep concern, again followed Matthais’ lead.
“What child is it?” he asked.
Ehrengard still met his eyes and still did not answer.
“But if you will not answer me,” Kurt said lowly, “I cannot help this woman or interfere with her husband.”
She stood up straight, as if pondering his words.
“If you will not answer me,” he said, “How am I to understand that you be here at all?”
Ehrengard said: “It is my child.”
The young man had drunk a good deal during dinner, but up in this room he had believed the effect of the wine to have left him. Now at her declaration his head failed him, he must, he realized, have drunk more than he had been aware of. He laughed.
“Say that again,” he cried. But as he would by no means have her say it again he went on: “Are you all mad up here? Come away with me.”
“I shall say it again,” said Ehrengard, and after a moment: “It is my child.”
“You may ask Lispeth,” she went on, “she will bear me up. This man, who is really, as he tells you, her husband, has kidnapped both the child and his nurse. I have gone after them and have found them here.”
There was a long pause.
“It will,” said Ehrengard, “as you say, be the best thing to get a carriage and go back. It is good of you to offer to help me. But I cannot accept your help unless you will give me your word that when you have brought me back to Rosenbad you will leave me forever.”
Slowly and solemnly she once more announced, “For it is my child.”
Kurt had grown very pale, his mind ran wildly through the time in which he had not seen her. His instinct of self-preservation cried out to him that she had gone mad. Again he laughed, a short pathetic laugh. But he could not go on laughing in front of her deadly earnest face, in a little while he became as grave as she.
“You will have to believe me,” Ehrengard said. “I have never in my life lied to you.”
He stood on looking at her. There had been, he now saw, a change in her since their last meeting six months ago. With the candle behind her and her mass of hair hanging down, she seemed to float in a mist of gold, much lovelier than he had ever seen her, much lovelier than any woman he had ever seen, a goddess or a demon. How was it that he had known her so long, had played with her, ridden with her, wrestled with her, had known that some day he was to marry her, and that until this hour he had not known that she was the most lovely thing on earth, and the one thing necessary to his happiness? This state of mind of his lasted for about a minute, then he knew for certain that he had always known.
It took him some time to form an answer. His faith in her, of so many years, together with his new need of her, contracted his throat and made it impossible for him to get out his voice.
“You will help me, then,” said she, “and take me home. Then we must part. You must never speak of me. You must never think of me.”
To Ehrengard, too, something was happening as here she stood up straight, face to face with Kurt’s straight figure. She too felt, in a new way, the depth of life. There was a sweetness in it which till now she had never known of, there was a terrible sadness as well. She would never have believed, had anybody told her, that to meet and to part with Kurt von Blittersdorff could mean so much. The recognition at this moment was, she felt, the outcome of her stay at Rosenbad.
“Yes,” Kurt said at last. “I shall do as you ask me. I shall go now and get the carriage to drive you back. I shall then leave you forever. I shall not speak of you more than I absolutely need. I shall try, as you say, not to think of you.”
There was another pause.
“But,” he went on slowly and lowly, “there is one quesion to which I must have an answer from you. I have no right to ask you. But neither have you any right to ask me never to think of you again. And that cannot be done, I cannot possibly leave off thinking of you, unless you answer it. Who is the father of the child?”
A silence. Neither the young man nor the girl could have told whether it lasted for a minute or an hour. The other people in the room sank through the floor, he and she were alone as on a mountain peak.
“It will be, Ehrengard,” he said, “a secret between you and me, a thing which, in the whole world, only you and I know of.”
Ehrengard had grown as pale as he. So colorless did her face become that her light eyes seemed dark in it, like two cavities. Then she turned and looked straight at Herr Cazotte. Under her glance the gentleman rose
from the bed.
The girl’s glance was strong and direct, like an arrow’s course from the bowstring to the target. In it she flung her past, present and future at his feet.
She lifted her arm, like a young officer at his baptism of fire indicating to his men the entrenchment to be taken, and pointed at him.
“It is he,” she said. “Herr Cazotte is the father of my child.”
At these words Herr Cazotte’s blood was drawn upwards, as from the profoundest wells of his being, till it colored him all over like a transparent crimson veil. His brow and cheeks, all on their own, radiated a divine fire, a celestial, deep rose flame, as if they were giving away a long kept secret.
And it was a strange thing that he should blush. For normally an onlooker in a fauteuil d’orchestre would grow pale at seeing the irate hero of the stage suddenly turn upon him. The actual situation held very grave possibilities to Herr Cazotte. A duel might be the immediate consequence of it, and Herr Cazotte, as it is known, disliked the sight of human blood outside the human body. Any gallant warrior of Babenhausen, knowing Kurt von Blittersdorff’s reputation with a sword or a pistol, might have gone white, even white as death.
But Herr Cazotte, who was an artist, blushed.
Here ends the story of Ehrengard.
But as I gave you a prelude to my story, said the old lady who told it, I shall give you an epilogue.
No duel took place. By the mediation of Prince Lothar and Princess Ludmilla a full understanding was obtained. A week later the betrothed couple Kurt and Ehrengard were present at the baptism of the new-born Prince in the Dom of Babenhausen.
Upon this occasion the girl wore, across the bodice of her white satin frock, the light blue ribbon of the Order of St. Stephan, the which is a distinction given to noble ladies for merits in the service of the house of Fugger-Babenhausen.
Herr Cazotte to the surprise of the court was not present at the ceremony. He had been called back to Rome to paint a portrait of the Pope.
