The Goose Girl - Harold MacGrath

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loves music; she comes here often. The next time she is annoyed by Wallenstein or any one else, you report it to me. I'll see that it reaches his highness."

      "I shall gladly do that, your Excellency."

      Carmichael left the gardens and wandered with aimless step. He was surprised to find that he was opposite the side gates to the royal gardens. His feet had followed the bent of his mind. Yet he did not cross the narrow side street. The sound of carriage wheels caused him to halt. He waited. The carriage he had seen by the fountain drew up before the gates, and the woman in black alighted. She spoke to the sentinel, who opened the gates and closed them. The veiled lady vanished abruptly beyond the shrubbery.

      "I wonder who that was?" was Carmichael's internal question. "Bah! Some lady-in-waiting with an affair on hand."

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       Table of Contents

      "Count, must I tell you again not to broach that subject? There can be no alliance between Ehrenstein and Jugendheit."

      "Why?" asked Count von Herbeck, chancellor, coolly returning the angry flash from the ducal eyes.

      "There are a thousand reasons why, but it is not my purpose to name them."

      "Name only one, your Highness, only one."

      "Will that satisfy you?"

      "Perhaps."

      "One of my reasons is that I do not want any alliance with a country so perfidious as Jugendheit. What! I make overtures? I, who have been so cruelly wronged all these years? You are mad."

      "But what positive evidence have you that Jugendheit wronged you?"

      "Positive? Have I eyes and ears? Have I not seen and read and heard?" This time the duke struck the desk savagely. "Why do you always rouse me in this fashion, Herbeck? You know how distasteful all this is to me."

      "Your highness knows that I look only to the welfare of the country. In the old days it was a foregone conclusion that this alliance was to be formed. Now, you persist in averring that the late king was the chief conspirator in abducting her serene highness, aided by Arnsberg, whose successor I have the honor to be. I have never yet seen any proofs. You have never yet produced them. Show me something which absolutely convicts them, and I'll surrender."

      "On your honor?"

      "My word."

      The grand duke struck the bell on the chancellor's desk.

      "My secretary, and tell him to bring me the packet marked A. He will understand."

      The two men waited without speaking, each busy with thought. The duke had been in his youth, and was still, a handsome man, splendidly set up, healthy and vigorous, keen mentally, and whatever stubbornness he possessed nicely balanced by common sense. He might have been guilty in his youth of a few human peccadillos, but the kingly and princely excesses which at that time were making the east side of the Rhine the scandal of the world had in no wise sullied his name. Ehrenstein means "stone of honor," and he had always carried the thought of this in his heart. He was frank in his likes and dislikes, he hated secrets, and he loved an opponent who engaged him in the open. Herbeck often labored with him over this open manner, but the mind he sought to work upon was as receptive to political hypocrisy as a wall of granite. It was this extraordinary rectitude which made the duke so powerful an aid to Bismarck in the days that followed. The Man of Iron needed this sort of character as a cover and a buckler to his own duplicities.

      Herbeck was an excellent foil. He was as silent and secretive as sand. He moved, as it were, in circles, thus always eluding dangerous corners. He was tall, angular, with a thin, immobile countenance, well guarded by his gray eyes and straight lips. He was a born financier, with almost limitless ambition, though only he himself knew how far this ambition reached. He had not brought prosperity to Ehrenstein, but he had fortified and bastioned it against extravagance, and this was probably the larger feat of the two. He loved his country, and brooded over it as a mother broods over her child. Twice had he saved Ehrenstein from the drag-net of war, and with honor. So he was admired by fathers and revered by mothers.

      The secretary came in and laid a thin packet of papers on the chancellor's desk. "It was the packet A, your Highness?"—his hand still resting upon the documents.

      "Yes. You may go."

      The secretary bowed and withdrew.

      The duke stirred the papers angrily, took one of them and spread it out with a rasp.

      "Look at that. Whose writing, I ask?"

      Herbeck adjusted his glasses and scrutinized the slanting hieroglyphics. He ran over it several times. At length he opened a drawer in his desk, sorted some papers, and brought out a yellow letter. This he laid down beside the other.

      "Yes, they are alike. This will be Arnsberg. But"—mildly—"who may say that it is not a cunning forgery?"

      "Forgery!" roared the duke. "Read this one from the late king of Jugendheit to Arnsberg, then, if you still doubt."

      Herbeck read slowly and carefully.

      Then he rose and walked to the nearest window, studying the letter again in the sharper light. Presently his hands fell behind his back and met about the paper, while he himself stared over into the royal gardens. He remained in this attitude for some time.

      "Well?" said the duke impatiently.

      Herbeck returned to his chair. "I wish that you had shown me these long ago."

      "To what end?"

      "You accused the king?"

      "Certainly, but he denied it."

      "In a letter?"

      "Yes. Here, read it."

      Herbeck compared the two. "Where did you find these?"

      "In Arnsberg's desk," returned the duke, the anger in his eyes giving place to gloomy retrospection. "Arnsberg, my boyhood playmate, the man I loved and trusted and advanced to the highest office in my power. Is that not the way? Do we ever trust any one fully without being in the end deceived? Well, dead or alive," the duke continued, his throat swelling, "ten thousand crowns to him who brings Arnsberg to me, dead or alive."

      "He will never come back," said Herbeck.

      "Not if he is wise. He was clever. He sent all his fortune to Paris, so I found, and what I confiscated was nothing but his estate. But do you believe me"—putting a hand against his heart—"something here tells me that some day fate will drag him back and give him into my hands?"

      "You are very bitter."

      "And have I not cause? Did not my wife die of a broken heart, and did I not become a broken man? You do not know all, Herbeck, not quite all. Franz also sought the hand of the Princess Sofia. He, too, loved her, but I won. Well, his revenge must have been sweet to him."

      "But your daughter has been restored to her own."

      "Due to your indefatigable efforts alone. Ah, Herbeck, nothing will ever fill up the gap between, nothing will ever restore the mother." The duke bowed his head.

      Herbeck studied him thoughtfully.

      "I love my daughter and she loves me, but I don't know what it is, I can't explain it," irresolutely.

      "What can not your highness explain?"

      "Perhaps the gap is too wide, perhaps the separation has been too long."

      Herbeck did not press the duke to be more

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