CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

RIVAL INFLUENCES

Von Hügelweiler had spoken true when he said that the expedition had started against Weissheim. Two days after Trafford had so narrowly escaped the violence of the Weidenbruck mob the various regiments were entrained at the great terminus in the Bahnhofstrasse. The sight of men being despatched to kill their fellow-men always rouses enthusiasm in the human breast, and there was abundance of flaunting banners, martial melody, and sounding cheers from the stay-at-homes. And in the rolling of drums and the reverberation of cheers Gloria herself seemed to have forgotten her original prejudice against the campaign. And as the engine screeched and the royal train, decked with the green and yellow bunting of her House, moved slowly from the station, she felt a Queen going forth to re-conquer a rebellious province, a just instrument of picturesque vengeance, rather than the player of the unwelcome role of blood-guilty adventuress. She put her head out of the window, and bowed and smiled and waved her hand, a thing of girlish excitement with the minutest appreciation of the underlying grimness of the situation.

That day they steamed to Eselbruck. At this point the railway was cut. The great stone viaduct that spanned the deep ravine was a thing of shattered piers and broken arches, an interesting problem for the engineer, and an object-lesson in the effective use of detonating cartridges. At this point, therefore, the units were derailed, a depôt formed, and on the next morning the whole force,--shod with skis and in full marching order,--set itself in motion towards Weissheim. During the march Trafford neither saw nor heard from Gloria. He was not unhappy. The fine air, the healthy exercise, the splendid uplands through which they were passing, won him to a mood of strong content. Something had lit a fire in his heart that no wind of disfavour or adversity could extinguish. He knew that he was a living man again, moving among creatures of flesh and blood; not a spiritless mechanism in a world of automata. He had seen, or fancied he had seen, a spark of human love in the young Queen's heart, and that spark he swore to kindle into flame by deeds of reckless heroism. And the great energy that was his birthright,--stimulated to its highest capacity by the bracing air of the snow-clad passes and the extraordinary beauty of the land,--filled his spirit with a vast and comforting hopefulness.

In the course of the afternoon he found Bernhardt by his side. Trafford began to thank him for his rescue from the mob, but Bernhardt interrupted him.

"I know about your secret marriage," he said, "and though I think it folly, it is the sort of folly I admire. Von Hügelweiler told me about it. To the people he told another story,--a less respectable story without ring or sacrament."

"So I gather. But I can fight calumny as I can fight other enemies of my Queen."

Bernhardt nodded approvingly.

"They breed men in your country," he said, and then asked: "Are you tired?"

"It is impossible to be tired in such air," was the reply.

"Ski-running is a new sport to you, and you are in love."

Trafford laughed lightly.

"I am in love with Grimland," he said. "Weidenbruck is a villainous place; but these gorgeous mountains, with their great, sombre forests and limitless snow-fields, make up a picture I shall never forget. I should like to be king of such a country."

"One never knows," said Bernhardt. "A great and striking victory, and your dream may be realised. But for the present, remember that you are a soldier, not a consort. Our friend Von Hügelweiler has an evil tongue, and he has spread cruel slanders about you and the Queen. Evil things win quick credence in Grimland, and the only way to give them the lie is for you and Gloria to see nothing of each other at present."

"That is a little rough on a newly-married man."

"Your marriage is nothing. The Grimlander, who is fickleness personified,--and who would like a change of dynasty once a week,--is never a Republican. He would not tolerate the idea of his sovereign mating with a commoner. The only possible chance of such a step being accepted is for you to do something quite out of the ordinary in this campaign. It will hardly be wise even then--but we might chance it."

"I believe in fate," said Trafford stubbornly.

"Comfort yourself your own way," said Bernhardt. "I, for my part, wish you well. There is a dash of the devil about you that wins my best wishes. But I have no further time to waste discussing your affairs. I am wanted here, there, and everywhere, and the time is one of war, not of love. Only, remember my command, my advice if you prefer it; keep your mind fixed on your military duties, and avoid her gracious Majesty Gloria as you would the plague."

That night they encamped at Schafers-stadt--a quaint old town lying in a sunless valley between precipitous hills. Next day they started early, reaching Wallen, a mountain village within easy striking distance of Weissheim, shortly after sunset. Here accommodation was somehow found for the considerable force under Bernhardt's command. Shelter had to be obtained for all, for to sleep out of doors at such an altitude during the winter months meant awakening in another world. Food had also to be provided on a large scale, for the force was what is called a "flying column"; that is to say, it was proceeding across country in the most direct line to its objective, and not relying on road or railway for a continuance of supplies.

The only transport accompanying the force was of a grimmer nature. A number of pieces of ordnance were being conveyed on flat-bottomed sleighs, specially constructed for the purpose. And these had to be drawn, with infinite labour, by men on skis, for the way lay over a countryside many feet deep in snow, and horses would have been absolutely useless for such a purpose. Trafford, therefore, was busy on his arrival unearthing cheeses and loaves, wine-casks and other fascinating objects, from the cellars of the more or less hospitable Walleners. Whilst so employed he was, approached by a private of the Guards with a note.

"_Come to the big house in the Market Square--the one with the carved escutcheon over the door--at 6.30, and I will give you dinner.--Gloria R._"

"I will write an answer," said Trafford.

"There is no answer, Excellency," said the man, and with a salute he was gone.

Trafford rubbed his hand thoughtfully up and down the back of his neck. Bernhardt had been quite definite in his command to him not to see the Queen, and though the order was little to his liking, he approved its prudence. But the letter in his hand was also a command, and it came from a higher source than even Bernhardt's dictum.

Accordingly, at half-past six he presented himself at a big balconied house in the Market Square. A simple meal was spread for two in the dining-room,--a low pitched apartment panelled from floor to ceiling in dark pine, and garnished with a wealth of cumbrous, antique furniture.

He waited alone for a few moments, cheered by a most appetising and savoury odour of cooking, and then Gloria entered, smiling, cordial, eminently composed.

"I am so glad you have come," she began.

He took her outstretched hand and kissed it.

"I am a soldier, and I obey," he said.

"When it pleases you," she laughed. "And I hope it does please you to dine tête-à-tête with me."

"I can conceive no greater felicity."

"None?"

"None," he answered. "I have the excitement of a military campaign, my eyes are continually feasted with magnificent scenery, and my lungs with matchless air. Then, on the top of a day of most exhilarating exercise comes an invitation from the lady who is my wife on paper, and whom I have sworn to make my wife in the sight of all men."

Gloria looked him fully in the face and pressed a small hand-bell that reposed on the table at her side.

"Gaspar," she said to the orderly who had entered, "bring in the dinner. You know that our friend Bernhardt has forbidden us to meet," Gloria continued, after a dish of _yungfernbraten_--roast pork and juniper berries--had been set before them.

"I know," said Trafford, "and he was right."

"Why?"

Trafford hesitated.

"Von Hügelweiler seems to have coupled our names in an unpleasant manner," he said at length.

Gloria flushed.

"Then you should not have come," she said.

"You gave me no option. As your husband I might have refused. As your officer I had to obey."

"You might have exercised your discretion."

"I might if I had any," he replied. "But I am a most indiscreet man. To-morrow, so I understand, I am going into action. I may win fame or I may be shot through the head. As the latter alternative is not unlikely, I am anxious to spend what may be my last evening on earth with the one woman whom I really----"

A forcible ring from Gloria interrupted the sentence's conclusion.

"Gaspar, fill this gentleman's glass. As you were remarking, Captain, Grimland is a very beautiful country."

"It is a very cold country," Trafford growled, plunging his fork into the steaming viands.

"To-morrow night I shall be sleeping in my ancestral home--the Marienkastel," Gloria pursued, as the orderly withdrew. "It is a fine old place, and Karl forfeited it when my father failed to carry out his projects in 1904."

"That is the place you wish me to win back for you?"

"If you will be so kind?"

"And suppose I am killed in the process, will you think kindly of me?"

"Very."

The callousness of the affirmation horrified him.

"I believe you were right when you said you had no heart!" he cried indignantly.

"That is what I want you to believe," she returned calmly.

"And that if I am killed," he went on bitterly, "you will welcome the termination of an impossible situation."

Gloria gave an almost imperceptible shrug.

"You keep harping on death," she protested, "surely you are not afraid?"

He turned fiercely on her, but restrained his voice to a level tone.

"From what you know of me," he asked, "am I the sort of man who is likely to be afraid?"

"No," she admitted readily. "The night of the revolution you were heroism personified. Also I have heard of your exploit in Herr Krantz's wine-shop, and it--it sounded very typical of you."

"Thank you," he said, meeting her gaze; and an instant later, he added: "There is no such thing as fear in the world for me."

"Why?" she asked.

He answered her question with a reckless bang on the table.

"Because I have lived!" he cried. "If a bullet finds its way to my heart it will have warm lodging. I am a happy man, and my happiness stands high above the accidents of life and death. Eternity has no terrors but solitude, and for me there will never be such a thing as solitude again, because I have met my second self."

A hand was stretched out towards the bell, but Trafford intercepted it, and the bell was swept off the table on to the floor.

Gloria rose with flashing eyes.

"I asked you here in a spirit of camaraderie," she said haughtily. "Because I owe much to you and am conscious of the debt, I risked angering Bernhardt and smirching my own fair name. But you abuse my confidence. You know, as I know, that the present is no time for love-making. And yet----" She stopped abruptly, for Trafford had risen, and, picking up the bell, he put it on the table before her.

"Ring," he said.

"Can I not trust you?"

"No!" he retorted. "You gave me the right to love you, not by your promise to go through the ceremony of marriage with me, not by the fulfilment of that promise, but by a certain light that shone in your eyes for a few brief seconds in the chapel of the Neptunburg. I am exercising that right to-night."

She drew in her breath sharply.

"You said just now that I was heartless," she said.

"That is the usual lover's lie," he retorted; "the reproach that is only justified by its manifest untruth. But I am a gentleman, as you vaguely surmise, and I will not persist in an attention which is unwelcome to you. I came to make an appeal. You have but to command, and I will leave without another word."

"What is the appeal?"

"Do you wish me to make it?" he countered.

"You have said so much you had best go on."

Trafford drew back the curtain of the mullioned window and gazed at the shining pageantry of the frosty skies. For a full minute he stood gazing, and then he dropped the tapestry and faced his royal hostess.

"I said I was content with things as they are," he began, "and to a point that is so, for they are better than they might have been. But with the eye of faith I see something nobler than this struggle for a kingdom we have no right to possess. Something has made me wise these past few days: something has taught me that the love of excitement can be very cruel, and that the harrying of a brave man is not necessarily a more elevating sport than bull-baiting."

"You wish me to abandon this expedition against Karl?"

"Oh, it is an absurd, impossible demand, I know," he said, "and I don't ask you for a moment to consider it. There are a hundred reasons why we should go on, and there is only one reason why we should not; and that reason does not seem to weigh with you at all. But I am a madman, a visionary, and, like Bernhardt, I see things. And in my hallucinations I see a woman who is Queen, not of Grimland, but of an even more delectable country. And the woman I see has but one subject, and she is content with him alone, because her sway over him is so paramount."

Gloria stood very, very still. Only her fingers moved as they plucked the fur trimming of her dress.

"If I asked you to give up Grimland and fly with me to America, would you do it?" he cried passionately.

"No--but I should like to hear you ask it." A smile, the slowest smile that ever was, bent the extreme corners of the fascinating lips, and ultimately broke in a burst of sunshine illuminating the whole face. Its arrival found him by her side, his hand on her arm, and a look in his eyes that sought for something with an almost pathetic intensity.

"I do ask you to come to America with me," he said. "Will you come--come to New York, the great, bright city, where the people do not do the horrible things they do in Grimland and other out-of-the-way corners of Europe?" He waited a moment, and then added: "Of course, we shall always keep this beautiful country in our hearts--a land of rocky spires and splintered crags, a land of swelling snow-fields and amazingly blue skies; a land where the air is sweet and keen and pine-laden, and the face of Nature stands bold and true, crisp-cut from the chisel of the Master-mason."

There was no answer. His hand trembled on her arm like a vibrant note of interrogation; his eyes strained to catch the light he longed for, the light he had seen, or fancied he had seen, in the gloom of the Chapel Royal.

"Will you come?" he breathed; and for a pregnant second the world of things material rolled back from his consciousness, and left him standing alone in space with his fate. For the strange brain was playing tricks with him,--as big, uncontrolled brains do with impulsive, ill-balanced people. His five senses were in abeyance, or warped beyond all present usefulness. He saw a pair of eyes as points of light in a world of darkness, but all sense of reality had utterly deserted him. He was as he had been in the Chapel Royal when his bride had made her hesitating avowal of a half-passion. A sheet of flame seemed to be passing through his body, a roseate glow suffused his vision; he never realised that he was uttering a beloved name in a voice of thunder and grasping a beloved object with no little strength. But ecstatic entrancements, however subliminal, yield ultimately to rude physical shocks, and dimly and slowly the world of dreams vanished and he became conscious that someone was hitting him violently on the back. Turning round with half-dazed eyes, he found himself confronted with the stern lineaments of Father Bernhardt. The ex-priest, clad in a military overcoat and high leggings, and powdered with still unmelted snow, carried mingled wrath and astonishment in his countenance.

"_Sunde und Siechheit!_" he cried. "Are you, too, an _absintheur_, Captain Trafford?"

For the moment Trafford had not the vaguest idea what an _absintheur_ might be, but he replied vaguely in the negative.

Bernhardt uttered an oath.

"I called you three times by name," he said, "and I struck you three times on the back before you would condescend to pay me any attention."

"I apologise," said Trafford; "I was thinking of other things."

"You were in a delirium," retorted Bernhardt. "The fiend of Tobit----"

"Oh, hang the fiend of Tobit!" interrupted Trafford hotly. "I may be a lunatic, Bernhardt, but I'm a healthy-minded lunatic, if there is such a thing. I was making love, and we'll leave it at that, if you please, and drop all talk of delirium and fiends."

"I was finding an excuse for you."

"I don't need one, thank you." Trafford, as is the way with interrupted lovers, was in an irritable mood, and being so did not notice that Bernhardt was really angry.

"Indeed you do!" retorted the ex-priest. "I forbade you expressly to see the Queen, and I find you dining alone with her, and making violent love to her in addition."

"I received a command to dine."

"And a command to make love?" sneered Bernhardt.

"That is my affair."

Bernhardt turned from the irate American to the confused Gloria, and there was little deference in his regard.

"Your Majesty does not value your reputation too highly," he said. "As long as you play at being a maid it is as well to act like a maid."

"My reputation can look after itself," she retorted with dignity.

"We are five thousand feet above sea level," put in Trafford, "and at least two thousand above the level of perpetual convention. What was a wise precaution at Weidenbruck becomes sheer timidity at Wallen. But if you still think my presence is infectious to the Queen's honour, I will withdraw. The question I came to ask has been answered, and answered well."

Bernhardt turned a pair of piercing eyes on the intrepid American. Trafford met the look without flinching.

"You are a very strange person, Herr Trafford," said the ex-priest slowly; "you are not afraid of me. I believe you and Saunders are the only two men in Grimland who are capable of standing up to me in my wrath. But tell me before you go, what was this question you put and what was its answer."

"I asked her Majesty if she wished to continue this expedition against Karl, and she answered, 'No.'"

"She answered 'No!'" Bernhardt gasped.

"If you do not believe me, ask her yourself."

Again Bernhardt turned to the young Queen.

"Is it true?" he demanded.

Gloria passed her hand across her forehead, as if she was just recovering from a condition of unconsciousness. When she spoke it was in jerky, consequent sentences.

"Karl is a brave man; he is not a bad man. It is cruel to harry people--loyal, brave people. He is the lawful sovereign of Grimland. I don't wish to cause suffering. I----"

"There speaks a Schattenberg!" interrupted Bernhardt with a mocking laugh. "The man who killed your father is entrenched within two leagues of you. Your house, the historic Marienkastel, home of the Schattenbergs for centuries, is his appanage. You have six thousand men at your back to win you back your heritage; but the old, heroic fire is burning low, the fierce old blood is running thin--the Schattenbergs are bred out!"

The man's calculated scorn, his splendid insolence, filled Trafford with admiration; and it was plain that his caustic speech was not without its effect on the sensitive Gloria. She seemed to be emerging from a stupor which still drugged her senses.

"I would like the Marienkastel," she conceded; "it is the home of my childhood; its walls are very dear to me. It should be mine by right."

"Say rather by might," retorted Bernhardt. "You like the Marienkastel, but you do not like the withering fire that decimates the storming party. Its walls are dear to you, but the forlorn hope, the scaling ladders, and the petard are abhorrent to your soul. You wish to possess, but the strong man armed is too forbidding a person to be ousted."

"If the expedition were against the Marienkastel----"

"It is against the Marienkastel," interrupted Bernhardt. "The Marienkastel is the key to the whole town. If we can hold it for half an hour we can dictate what terms we like."

"Dictate what terms we like!" Gloria repeated the last words of his sentence with eyes aflame. She was a Schattenberg again, ardent, ambitious, reckless. All trace of weakness had left her.

"And can we take it--can we hold it?" she went on in tones of eager inquiry.

Bernhardt stretched out his hand towards Trafford.

"There is the answer to your question," he said.

"You will capture the Marienkastel for me?" she asked, turning to her silent lover.

Trafford looked at the girl before him long and searchingly before answering.

"The Marienkastel is the key to Weissheim," he said at length; "it is also, it appears, the key to your heart. I thought there was a nearer way,--a better way. Yes," he went on, "I will capture the Marienkastel, or do all that a man can do to capture it, and then I will claim my reward."

"You shall have it," said Bernhardt; "I swear it."

"And I promise..." breathed Gloria.

Trafford nodded to himself.

"I am content," he said.