CHAPTER SEVEN

"Gregor! Please, no more," pleaded Diana softly as she shook her curls. "My lips are worn out, and I shall never be able to kiss again!"

"A thousand times more--and me, only me--until we die."

He threw himself upon her and looked deep into her eyes.

"Brown, deep brown. Any red in them? The red of a deer? No, a falcon. Did your father know beforehand what you would grow up to be that he chose the name Diana?"

"If you will let me go, I will tell you all about it."

With the swift movement of a stripling, he sprang up from the wide bed, slipped into his dressing gown which he wrapped round him, tying the cord with the same care with which, as lieutenant, he had buttoned up his uniform tunic, pushed his fingers through his hair, and flung himself into the big arm-chair by the fire. Holding his hands out towards the blaze, he spoke softly to her over his shoulder, a playful note in his voice.

"Diana."

"Gregor."

"No, say it the way you did that first time when you were riding."

"Gregor."

He laughed.

"Go on, tell me all about it."

"Well, it happened over there in Macedonia," she began, bringing a footstool towards the hearth, and sitting down on it at his feet. "My father, you must know, is very wise; he can interpret dreams, understands about magnetic currents, has studied Swedenborg and Leonardo...."

"The portrait in that portfolio is...?"

"Yes, it is he. He told me he had believed my mother would die in giving birth to me, for he thought I was going to be a boy, and he knew that if she gave birth to a boy she would die. So firm was his conviction, that he was going to call me Tristan, because Tristan's mother, too, had died at his birth. When I turned out to be a girl, he said to himself: She will have many masculine elements in her make-up, so I'll call her Diana. Five years later my brother came into the world, and that same night my mother passed away."

She ceased. Gregor's hand lay lightly on her head. She seemed suddenly to have become agitated, her thoughts elsewhere as she prodded the wood in the fireplace. The logs fell apart, and he had to gather them together, very cautiously, so as not to disturb her as she rested her head on his knee.

"Are you cold?" she asked after a while. "Where had I got to?"

It was not her habit to be so absent-minded. Yet this night she had constantly been distrait. Could she have something on her mind? Was she frightened? He tried to shake off his thoughts. But he had come near the truth. Diana was filled with an anxiety which she would have hidden from him had she been able. Before his arrival, when she had received a tiny note from the major telling her what had taken place, she had thought: "The feeling of security is what makes the victor! If he is confident, I shall certainly do nothing to shake his courage." Yet when she saw him so self-reliant, in the mood of a man who has at last become master of some unpleasant perturbation, her own doubts had been laid to rest. Again she tried to rouse herself from her meditations. She turned her eyes towards him and said tenderly:

"Are you cold, Gregor?"

"Why should I be?--Well, your mother died. You told me something about her before. She was beautiful."

"Yes, but do you know what she was? Shall I tell Your Excellency a secret?"

She smiled as she addressed him thus formally, and looked up at him with the inscrutable air of the professional story-teller.

"I hear and obey," he said, smiling back at her.

They sat silent. An atmosphere of security seemed to envelop them, such as they had never experienced before, and had never thought it possible to achieve. Peace and contentment coupled with a slight feeling of lassitude pervaded their bodies and their minds, as they settled down in the comfortable warmth of the log fire. Had they not lain for long in the ardour of love's embraces?

"My great-grandmother, or, rather, her mother, held the crown of Poland concealed within her house. It was in the days following one of the partitions. The fugitive king--or maybe he was only the pretender--in any case he was the son of the old king--came to her estate in order, secretly, to kiss the royal crown. The lady was very beautiful, and she was a widow. Romantic as were the kings of those days, after kissing the crown he kissed its lovely guardian, and thus it was that she gave birth to my grandfather. My family has always tried to pooh-pooh the old legend, but I have positive proof of its veracity. We still have the medallion he gave her on the morning when he bade farewell. The features on the medallion are identical with those of the picture which hangs in the museum at Rapperswyl, where all the Polish monarchs hang in rows. Does the story please you?"

"And so you've got mighty ancestors too. I am overwhelmed with it all. What more can you have? Yours is youth, and beauty, and intelligence--and now you have added to all this, ancestors that wore the kingly crown." He looked down at her with paternal ecstasy.

"You are as gallant in your talk as the lovers were in the old romances," she laughed up at him.

"The style has stuck to me from my youth," he answered ironically. "My mother was not nearly such a grand lady as yours, but she, too, was a beautiful woman."

"Did she die young?" No sooner had she asked the question than she thought: "It is strange how my mind dwells on the idea of death, tonight."

"Haven't I told you? This was the manner of her dying:--I was about seven-and-twenty at the time. She had been ailing for a long time, and her home life was not happy. Well, one day I got a wire: 'Come at once, Mother very ill.' It so happened that on the day previous I had received my first order, the Danebrog cross--of course I had not deserved it, I just chanced to be at dinner with the Danish prime minister with whom we were negotiating at the time. There are few really pretty decorations in our country, so that a nicely enamelled cross, rather cheap to be sure, but with a quite charming blue-and-white ribbon, would naturally attract a good deal of comment. At home I found my mother in bed, very feeble. I had always been rather a handful, never made a success of anything--except music, and escapades, and, again, music. Father's best hope for me was a job in the orchestra at some spa or other. But Mother always stood up for me. She used to say: 'Do let the youngster be, he'll make good in the end, never fear.' So when I bent over her as she lay dying, I showed her the cross on my breast, my first decoration. She fingered it gently and said nothing. Then, suddenly, she pressed it to her lips, kissing it as if it were a crucifix. Tears rolled down her temples, wetting the pillow. She said: 'Thank you, Gregor, I have always had faith in you. Now you can prove to your father and the rest of the world that I was right.' She put her arm round my neck--and soon she had passed away, holding my cross in her hand."

Diana had risen to her feet as he spoke, and now he bowed his grey head, resting it on her hands. She, too, was profoundly stirred. A look of ageless compassion came over her face as she gazed down on this man whom nature had endowed with physical beauty, and an intellect bordering on genius. He who had made himself the master of the art of dissembling as well as of self-control, was nevertheless, although thirty years had now elapsed since the tragical event he was recalling, broken at its recollection. Was he really sobbing? She felt that at this moment the restraint he had exercised over himself during the last twenty-four hours was suddenly broken down, and that this overwhelming grief was a tardy and unexpected reaction from the shock of yesterday's discovery.

"Gregor," she whispered tenderly laying her head against his so that the brown and the grey locks mingled. "Gregor, I am here."

"Stay--by--me--Diana."

The words were a new revelation to her of the man's loneliness. Suddenly he sprang up, pushed his hair back, hastily wiped his eyes, and said with forced joviality:

"I'm sorry, what a fool I've been! Last time, ten, twelve years ago I said to myself that three duels were a good number, and it would be well to stop at that. Apparently there's to be a fourth. That's a handsome number, too. And even if there had to be ten," his voice rang out into the room, "I should fight them all to protect Olivia from slander."

The first time during all these months he had ever uttered Olivia's name in Diana's presence! Too late he realized what he had done. He rushed over to where she stood, seized her hands and covered them with kisses:

"Forgive me--my darling--beloved--Diana--forgive me."

"What have I to forgive?" she asked earnestly. "Is it not a fine thing that you wish to shield her for her own sake, and not merely because it happens to be the custom?"

"And Linnartz, what do you make of him?"

"He's been trying to do it for some time."

"To do what?"

"Bring about your fall, Gregor."

"There are other ways...."

"Did he not try them--in vain?"

"Was the baroness working with him do you think?"

"Undoubtedly."

"The brutes! But when all is over---- Next week I've got to go to court for the birthday celebrations; I shall be in Berlin and shall demand his removal--even if I have to make a cabinet question of it."

"That's precisely what I advised you to do three weeks ago."

"Yes, and if I had at that time brought a little more pressure to bear on the Austrian minister, he'd have sent that devil of a poet..." He pulled himself up. "Forgive me," he pleaded, drawing her to him on the sofa. "I'm sorry--he was your friend--well, there's nothing to be done now--he'll have to do penance for his sins--rather young, but he has always lived fast---- What do you think?"

He fancied her preoccupied with a woman's memories of Andreas while he was speaking. But her thoughts were quite differently engaged. She was coolly calculating the hazards of the impending duel, remembering Andreas's inaptitude with firearms. Had he not given her a demonstration of it that day in the shooting-range? Again she considered the risks an opponent must run when faced by an unskilled marksman....

"Twenty paces, did you say?"

She closed her left eye, raised her right arm, and aimed an imaginary weapon at the door.

"An exchange of three shots? Who's the umpire?"

"The prince."

"At six?"

"Six-thirty."

Diana got up, went towards the fireplace, pushed the logs together, and leaned on the marble mantelpiece, staring at the little clock.

"It is two," she said in a strangely cold voice.

The practical, everyday tone, which she had assumed as armour against the emotional strain under which she was labouring, was misconstrued by her lover to mean that she was deep in memories of Andreas. Jealousy, which Gregor had hitherto kept in leash for her sake, now flamed up with redoubled force against this young rival whom he hoped soon to put out of action. His voice was gloomy as he exclaimed:

"Diana."

"Gregor."

The two names, which so shortly before they had tossed towards one another like gaily coloured balls, now fell darkly through the night.

"Did you--love this poet?" he asked at length.

"At one time I loved him," she answered calmly, after a slight pause.

He thought:

"Will she speak as calmly of me, saying 'at one time,' when another than I asks her the same question? A chain in which I am no more than a link? In days gone by, the rôles were the other way about...."

His agitation increased.

"And he you?"

"He loves the countess."

"Not you, Diana, no longer you?"

His question was uttered in a tone of such urgent need, such poignant longing, that she turned towards him in a sudden impulse. Her heart was full of pity at the sight of this man whom jealous doubts had thus mastered after all that had happened between them and after he had surprised Andreas with Olivia; yet she realized that it was solely on her account that he was thus overwhelmed with anxiety and mistrust; had he not asked only about Andreas's feelings towards her, not the other way about?

He, for his part, as he now saw her standing before him, the contour of her body gleaming through her thin silken nightgown as she stood with her back to the fire, seemed transported to another sphere, and everything around him seemed like the memory of a dream. The fine room, built in the Arab style, the heavy curtains, the figure of the young woman by the hearth--all this on the night before a duel.... Had he not lived through it once already, long ago? As if under compulsion, unconscious of his movements, he got up, and went towards the apparition, which advanced a step to meet him. The vision stretched out hands, his hands reached out likewise. What was the matter? What was the burden of grief weighing upon this moment of time? Was she perhaps a spirit come to take him far away? She was close to him, and he saw that she had mighty pinions, and in her right hand a torch hanging down towards the ground....

Her hand pressed his in silence, and suddenly he knew that her life at that present moment was bound up in his. His gaze, which had been fixed and hard, softened, and she saw his eyes looking kindly down into her own.

"Where have you been, my dear?"

He sighed deeply, as if freed from a torpor.

"I seemed--to be--in a dense--fog. Is that you, Diana? Is it you?"

He sank into a chair, drew her down on to his knee, pressed his lips against her, wrapping her about in his arms as if he were hugging the very essence of life and youth to his heart.

"Stay with me!"

Very softly the words were spoken, and it seemed to her as if he were afraid of giving voice to a presentiment that he was about to be torn apart from her; it seemed as if he were melting away in her very arms, vanishing like a shadow, a thought.

But she shook off the terror, smiled up at him, and said:

"You stay with me!"

Never before had Gregor felt this steeled body nestling against him with such passionate self-surrender.