Baron Bruno; Or, The Unbelieving Philosopher, and Other Fairy Stories. Louisa Morgan
exploit of the boys to the Lord High Chamberlain. Bombastes now impatiently beckoned the latter to his Grand-ducal chair, and insisted upon hearing the whole root of the matter. Sanftschriften, who was himself a parent, and naturally kind-hearted, tried to soften down the affair; but as Bombastes listened, his large, round, prominent eyes seemed as if they would absolutely start from his head at the recital of this outrage on decorum. He sternly commanded the culprits to retire to bed; and, glancing wrathfully at Edlerkopf, Pfenig, and Wild Kranz (who sat quaking in their shoes), he added further: "As to the well-brought-up sons of these great noblemen, their domestic life is beyond the control of their poor sovereign; but for the next month I give orders that no dessert of any kind shall pass the lips of Prince Bertrand, who has thus misbehaved himself in so shameful and public a manner." Princess Berta and the other little girls, distressed at the disgrace of their playmates, rose also at once from the table, and accompanied them from the hall. Thus it came to pass that the court children had no very pleasant associations with the day of Baron Bruno's wedding. Indeed, you may be very certain that the three ministers gave their sons the same punishment as Prince Bertrand; and therefore for a whole month the boys had good reason to remember the marriage feast, as their tutors, governesses, and nurses, were strictly enjoined to carry out the Grand Duke's peremptory edict. Princess Berta and the other small girls, tender and soft-hearted as little maidens ever should be, did their best to alleviate the punishment of their playmates by voluntarily depriving themselves of all sweet things for the same period, which, I am sure you will agree with me, required much self-denial, on the part of those dessert-loving damsels, and was no small proof of affection.
In the meantime Bruno had taken his bride to a small cottage he owned on the borders of a wide and gloomy forest. Here they passed the few days which, by the indulgence of his royal master, Bruno was enabled to spare from the affairs of state. When they were alone together, his wife expressed to him her conviction that some ill-disposed person had tampered with the holy water, so as to affect that which was sprinkled over them. She had also felt during the ceremony the near presence of an anti-pathetic and malign influence. Alcyone furthermore explained to her husband that the gem on her forehead was a talisman, which paled and grew dim on the approach of danger, or when exposed to poison. The Baron at once remembered the dull appearance presented by the jewel when the holy water fell near it, but he also became unreasonably vexed when his bride refused to loosen it, even for one moment, from her hair, to permit him to examine it in his hand.
He gradually grew to regard its brilliance with a certain amount of suspicion, and more than once, when the gentle Alcyone laid her head upon his shoulder, he felt as if a fiery eye shone guardian over her and watched unsleepingly his every movement. When in his vexation Bruno allowed himself to speak harshly for the first time to his young wife, Alcyone tearfully deprecated his displeasure. She assured him her life was bound up in her talisman, and that if she parted with it, for ever so brief a space, she must at once return to the regions whence she came. After this explanation Bruno rarely referred to the disputed point, but it is not too much to say that the lurid ray of the strange gem often in their happiest moments sent a sudden thrill to his heart's core, and gave a feeling of insecurity to his most private hours of retirement.
"It is the little rift within the lute
That by and by will make the music mute,
And, ever widening, slowly silence all.
"The little rift within the lover's lute,
Or little pitted speck in garnered fruit,
That rotting inwards slowly moulders all."
I have already hinted that Bruno was of a sceptical turn of mind. Possessed of rare intellectual powers, he had studied metaphysics to such an extent, and become so thoroughly master of the strange theories propounded by the deep-thinking German philosophers of the day, that he could not bend himself to the simplicity of that religion which only demands the faith of a little child; he disbelieved the immortality of the soul, and professed to doubt the existence of a future state.
But though he and his bride widely differed in faith, yet day by day she became more and more endeared to him, by the lovely nature of her mind no less than by the graces of her person. Her exceeding humility and true-hearted simplicity showed to him in a new light those religious duties at which in less peaceful days he was wont to cavil. Well would it have been for both could their lives have been thus spent far from the busy world, in the calm retreat, where for the first time the gray-haired man recalled soft prayers which a mother's lips (long since silent and cold) had murmured over his infant head.
But the calls of duty had to be obeyed, and ere long the prime minister and his bride returned to Aronsberg, to take their place at court and in society, and to have endless fêtes and receptions given in their honour. Here Alcyone's gentle unassuming manners, added to her great beauty, made her a universal favourite. The malicious Gräfin von Dunkelherz, however, disseminated strange stories concerning the new Baroness, and aroused the suspicions of those who were already perhaps somewhat jealous of the many charms united in the fair person of the young stranger.
Amid the series of festivities given in honour of the newly-married couple, it was observed that whenever a storm of thunder and lightning broke over the neighbourhood Alcyone was painfully agitated. Wherever she and her husband might be, she implored him to convey her home as soon as possible; the electric influence so entirely overcame her that more than once she seemed completely gone—so utterly did she lose colour and consciousness—so deadly pale did she become. To Bruno's impetuous nature this unfortunate tendency proved a serious annoyance. He considered that by a little firm exercise of moral courage his wife could have retained her senses. Often after conveying her home and reappearing alone (by her earnest request) at some state banquet, he would be universally rallied about her captiousness, and even made to see (owing to Olga's kind offices) that his friends considered the whole affair in a somewhat mysterious light. It will be remembered that Alcyone stipulated for one night of retirement every month, when, undisturbed and alone, she spent long solitary hours upon the roof. She entreated Bruno, by all his affection for her, neither to approach the place himself nor to suffer any one else to intrude upon her privacy. Somehow or other this circumstance, with numerous additions, became bruited abroad, and it was whispered that the Baron's wife was in regular communication with demons. Bribed and listening servants heard voices of no earthly timbre, speaking in an unknown language. More they were unable to say, for Bruno as yet kept faithful guard over his wife's hours of mystic retreat.
At last, however, the time approached when the sittings of the Reichstag terminated, and when all who could forsook the dusty purlieus of the town for the mountains, the sea, or their country dwellings. People began to be too busy making their own plans to attend to those of their neighbours, and Bruno retired once more with his Baroness to Tiefträume Forest. There in their small cottage, with its low long veranda covered with creepers, they spent weeks—nay, months—of uninterrupted happiness. On one side of their home patches of wild moorland were beautifully interspersed with cultivated oases of garden. Towards the east rose the dark masses of the pine forest, giving with their sombre colouring an ever-fresh beauty to the foreground of lovely flowering shrubs. Passing through tangled masses of bramble and fern, the path led by bare gray rocks and tufts of purple heather to some ivy-covered bower; or you came upon some exquisite smooth-shaven little lawn, jewelled in bright patterns of many coloured flowers, and adding brilliance and perfume to the scene.
Here Alcyone and her husband wandered together, or, perhaps descending the steps at the end of their garden, stood on the brink of the little river Naecken, which tumbled and hurried through its narrow rocky channel, thus dividing them from the forest. Lower down the streamlet formed a small lake, on which a boat was kept, and where Bruno was wont to row his wife, and try to teach her unskilful hand to guide the oar. He laid these lines beside her one morning towards the end of their country sojourn when, fresh and fair as Aurora herself, she took her place at their morning meal:—
BARON BRUNO AND ALCYONE.
P. 22.
"One moment let me live the time again,
The