Anecdotes of Destiny and Ehrengard (29 page)

In the picture the face of the bather would be turned away. By no means would he betray or give away his maid-of-honor. He might show his masterpiece to Princes and Princesses, art critics and enraptured lay lookers-on, and to the girl herself at the same moment, and no one but he and she would know the truth. The connoisseurs round her would break out in delight at the beauty of the bathing figure; in little expert remarks they would, with their thumbs in the air, minutely
go through this latest and loveliest nude of that great painter Cazotte. She would be, in the midst of the brilliant crowd, alone with him.

Her mind never worked quickly, it would take her two or three minutes to grasp her position. Three facts she would at the end of them have made her own. That she was beautiful. That she was naked—and already in the third chapter of Genesis such a recognition is reported to be fatal. And, lastly, that in being thus beautiful and naked she had given herself over to the Venusberg. And to him.

The figure on the canvas would remain chastely silvery before the ardent eyes of the spectators. But the maiden by his side would slowly become all aglow. Behind the shawl, silk gown, embroidered petticoats and dainty cambric, the straight, strong, pure body from heel to forehead would blush into a deep exquisite crimson, a mystical
rose persan
, which no clear water of a mountain lake would ever wash away. Into that Alpen-Glühen upon which night follows!

No one in the world, and least of all she herself, would ever find words for the relation between her and him. But from that moment whenever he bid her farewell, he would be abandoning and forsaking her.

Herr Cazotte drew a deep sigh.

But indeed, indeed, he went on after a while, the Gods are dangerous playfellows, and he would have to be wary and watchful to the utmost degree. He must lie in wait, dead still, like the lion waiting for the antelope by the water hole. The faintest movement might ruin him forever. For had not, from the very beginning, he himself, the artist and arbiter, the true lover and servant of his young womanhood decreed that she were to blush not with indignation at an assault, but with ecstasy at a revelation, not in protest or self-defense, but in consent and surrender!

Herr Cazotte was of small assistance to Princess Ludmilla in the arrangement of her program. All through the evening he was so silent that in the end Prince Lothar laughingly cried to him: “Wolfgang, you are planning a new picture!” The painter looked up, grew a little pale, and after a moment very gravely answered: “Yes, forgive me. But I have got an order for a new picture.”

The next day he travelled to Babenhausen in order to buy canvas, brushes and paint. And the following morning found him among the bush of the bank, setting up his easel and stretcher, and then waiting patiently for sunrise and for the vision of three days ago. The sunlight was on the higher slopes of the mountains and on the treetops when once more he caught the low, gentle women’s voices approaching. The scene was the same as the first morning, and the whole of Herr Cazotte was in his firm hand as he put down his primary contours on the canvas.

Time was short, all too short, in a quarter of an hour she was gone. The sun shone on the lake and the landscape, but their soul had left them, leaving him himself in a vacuum as if he had suddenly gone blind. He took down his easel and collected his drawing things. He would have, every morning, this divine
quart d’heure
. For the rest of the day he kept the vision behind eyes closed to everything else. He locked the door to his study and kept the key in his pocket.

He worked on for a week, radiating a new mystic happiness, but silent, humble in mien and manner and particularly humble and submissive towards Ehrengard when the two were brought together by the daily life of the chateau. Only every morning he had a heart-rending moment when his nymph went away.

Then on the last day of the week her disappearance seemed to him more sudden than before, indeed inexplicably sudden.
A sigh or a short subdued outcry, which could not have come from Ehrengard but might have been the maid’s, went through the morning landscape—then it was like watching a doe in a wood: she was there, and then she was there no more, the space was empty.

He needed more tubes of paint and again went to Babenhausen. There in the colorshop he was struck by an instantaneous deadly apprehension. Ehrengard or her maid, he thought, might have spied him in the morning, and that might have been the reason for their supernatural disappearance. He dismissed the idea, he knew from experience that sooner or later in the course of a piece of work he would be the victim of some such terrible nervous misgiving. But he could not free himself of it, and on his return journey was both longing for and dreading his next meeting with Ehrengard. Would her face tell him without a word that there was to be no more bathing of Diana and that the glory of his life was never to be achieved?

He came back to Rosenbad late in the afternoon and found the ladies of the court assembled in the Princess’ pale blue boudoir, which was filled like an aviary with twitter and trills of laughter.

During this last week the court had been curiously moved and agitated. For at the end of it the little Prince was to make his legal and ceremonial entry in the world. On Saturday the goal would be reached, the danger would be over, and therefore everybody was gay. But on Saturday, too, a strange, a dreamlike period would come to an end, the child would no longer be the secret of Rosenbad, and therefore everybody was a little sad.

The Princess today was
coiffée
for the first time and dressed in a pretty white negligée. She had watched the nurse bathing the baby, had snatched him from her aproned lap, and insisted
on carrying him into her own room, still all shining like a figurine in the midst of a fountain. She was now, on the sofa, gently rolling him about on her knees and rubbing him in the lace of her peignoir. The Oberhofmeisterin, in an armchair by the sofa, repeatedly assured the mother that the child was really smiling. Ehrengard was standing up looking at the baby.

“O my dear friend,” the Princess cried out at the sight of the painter, “you have come at the right moment. I feel, I am convinced, that never again, not even tomorrow, will he be as adorable as he is this afternoon. Do catch this perfect moment …”

“This momentary perfection,” put in Countess Poggendorff.

“… Pin it to your canvas and preserve it for the world to adore.”

The child had grown lovelier with each of his sixty days, his small body was firm, smooth and dimpled, and as light as if he might at any moment lift himself and fly off. He was an easy and amiable baby and was seldom heard to cry. Herr Cazotte from time to time had been drawing up in charcoal and pastel small portraits of him, the which in due time, in September, would be shown in the Babenhausen gallery as illustrations of the infant’s progress.

“Look at him, dear Herr Cazotte,” the Princess exclaimed. “Surely you will be needing a model for an amorino in a scene of love. I lend him to you for the purpose.”

The gardener had just brought up a very large flat basket filled with fresh, abundant white stocks, and the lackey had placed it on the floor.

“Hand me the basket, sweetest Poggendorff,” said Ludmilla. “I am sure that it is exactly like the basket in which the Princess of Egypt found little Moses amongst the rushes. Poor, poor Princess, how she must have wept at the thought that he was not her own.”

As the Oberhofmeisterin lifted up the basket, the Princess placed the baby upon the fragrant couch. “You have not looked at him nearly enough,” she cried to Herr Cazotte. “Take the basket, Ehrengard, and hold it up for the Master to inspect.”

At her request Ehrengard lifted the basket and the child from the Princess’ knee, and on her strong arms presented them to Herr Cazotte. The painter, still reluctant to look her in the face, let his eyes rest on the baby. But the pose of her figure recalled to him a group by the great sculptor Thorvaldsen, “Psyche selling amorini.” For a minute he stood quite still, his face like hers bowed over the fairy cradle. The scent of the stocks, an invisible cloud of Venusberg incense, encompassed their two heads. She was calm and happy, he felt; he might be calm and happy with her, with full confidence in the Gods.

“Princess,” he said, “you have given me a more than princely gift. For as the hart panteth after the water brook, so panteth the soul of the artist after his motif. And who knows whether the motif does not long for that work of art in which it is to be made its true self.”

Lispeth appeared in the doorway, anxious about the unorthodox treatment of the baby. The little Prince was lifted from his bed of flowers, given back to the arms of his nurse, where he immediately began to squall, and carried away. Ludmilla drew Ehrengard down to her side on the sofa and put her arm round her waist.

“O Ehrengard,” she said. “How I do wish that Prince Lothar and I had been even more thoughtless than we have, and that we had got a month more at Rosenbad.”

The evening of that day was the most glorious of the summer. A golden light filled the air as golden wine fills a glass.

The Princess went to bed early. The Oberhofmeisterin, the maid-of-honor and the court painter made their usual tour of the garden. But Countess Poggendorff began to feel the air a little cool and was the first to return to the house, the two younger people following her slowly on the gravel path. Herr Cazotte wondered whether Ehrengard, as upon an earlier evening, was thinking of nothing at all.

As upon that earlier evening they passed the Leda fountain. Ehrengard slowed her steps, stopped and stood for a moment with the tips of her fingers in the clear water of the basin from which the breast and the proud neck of the swan rose toward’s Leda’s knees. As she lifted her head, turned and faced Herr Cazotte, she was a little pale, but she spoke in a clear voice.

“My maid tells me,” she said, “that you want to paint a picture. Out by the east of the house. I wish to tell you that I shall be there every morning, at six o’clock.”

Herr Cazotte wrote:

Here, said the old lady who told the story, finishes that second part of my story which I have named “Rosenbad.” It has gone a little slowly, I know—so, generally speaking, do pastorales. Now, to make up for the lost time, the last movement of my small sonata shall be a rondo, which perhaps you may even find to end up
con furore
.

It has been told in the beginning of this tale that there existed in the Grand Duchy of Babenhausen a lateral branch to the dynasty. These fine people with their head, the Duke Marbod, a gentleman who had spent most of his life out of his own country and had married a lady-in-waiting to the Queen of Naples, we have been able to leave for a while to themselves, since they had been lying low from the time of Prince Lothar’s wedding. Some of them had even shaken the dust of Babenhausen off their feet and taken up their residence elsewhere. Now unfortunately they come back into the tale as they came back into the country, sneaking upon a track and drawn by a scent.

For there is a strange quality about a secret: it smells of secrecy. You may be far from getting the true nature of the secret itself, you might even, had it been told you, be highly skeptical and incredulous of it—yet you will feel certain that a secret there be.

The early misgivings of the Grand Duchess in regard to the all too celestial nature of her son had been vague and undefined, she lacked knowledge of the world and of the nature of man to put them into words. Duke Marbod and his friends, who were of a grosser fabric, had had no scruples in setting up on their own a definite hypothesis of the case. Something about the Rosenbad establishment and the complete seclusion of the Princess and her court, set a cantankerous imagination running, and in the end a highly fantastic story circulating in the gang. Young Prince Lothar, it was declared, was incapable of being the father of a child, and Princess Ludmilla’s pregnancy was all a farce. The ruling house, forseeing its doom, was quietly preparing to hoodwink the nation, to carry through the pretence and in the end, in
order to keep their rivals out of their rights, to present to a loyal people a child of obscure origin as heir to the throne. Absurd and unseemly rumors about pads provided for the transformation of the Young Princess’ slim figure were made up—enough of that. The pack, as we ourselves will know, was running on a wrong scent; all the same, as we will also know, it was running on a scent.

Duke Marbod himself, who was never a man of many ideas, at the utmost reflected that it may always pay to fish in troubled water. But his partisans let their ideas multiply. In the end two of them, one a former officer of the hussars, the other a man about town, a wine merchant, took up their abode in “The Blue Boar,” the inn of a village some five miles from Schloss Rosenbad, awaiting a chance to pry into the stronghold.

A very small and poor fish caught in their net was mistress Lispeth’s husband, a young peasant named Matthias. This boy by his father-in-law, the gamekeeper, had been suspected of poaching and had long held a grudge against the whole of his wife’s family. Now he felt himself ill-used beyond endurance by being robbed of his pretty wife. The mother of a suckling baby and of two children only a few years older had been tempted away from her home in order to act as chambermaid to a spoilt great young lady, who must needs have all her whims attended to, for, as his wife had definitely informed him, there was no baby to nurse at Rosenbad. The thing went against his peasant’s sense of decency, it was as if you would have a fine milk cow cart flowers to market. On top of all he was from the very beginning jealous of Prince Lothar’s valet.

Matthias had come up from his farm a couple of times and had been allowed into the lodge of the chateau to see his wife and give her news of the children. But his querulousness
and jealousy on these visits had upset Lispeth, after each of them the little Prince had yelled his protest, and Professor Putziger had had to put an end to the meetings. Still the unhappy young husband would or could not go home, but came prowling round the forbidden area.