John Scott - The Princess Dehra

For the first time in a generation the Castle of Lotzen was entertaining its lord. He had come suddenly, a month before, and presently there had followed rumors of strange happenings in Dornlitz, in which the Duke had been too intimately concerned to please the King, and as punishment had been banished to his mountain estates. But Lotzenia was far from the Capital and isolated, and the people cared more for their crops and the amount of the tax levy than for the doings of the Court. And so it concerned them very little why the red banner with the golden cross floated from the highest turret of the old pile of stone, on the spur of the mountain overhanging the foaming Dreer. They knew it meant the Duke himself was in presence; but to them there was but one over-lord: the Dalberg, who reigned in Dornlitz; and in him they had all pride – for was not the Dalberg their hereditary chieftain centuries before he was the King!

True, the Duke of Lotzen had long been the Heir Presumptive, and so, in the prospective, entitled to their loyalty, but lately there had come from across the Sea a new Dalberg, of the blood of the great Henry, who, it was said, had displaced him in the line of Succession, and was to marry the Princess Dehra.

And at her name every woman of them curtsied and every man uncovered; blaming High Heaven the while, that she might not reign over them, when Frederick the King were gone; and well prepared to welcome the new heir if she were to be his queen.

At first the Duke had kept to the seclusion of his own domain, wide and wild enough to let him ride all day without crossing its boundary, but after a time he came at intervals, with a companion or two, into the low-lands, choosing the main highways, and dallying occasionally at some cross-road smithy for a word of gossip with those around the forge.

For Lotzen was not alone in his exile; he might be banished from the Capital, but that was no reason for denying himself all its pleasures; and the lights burned late at the Castle, and when the wind was from the North it strewed the valley with whisps of music and strands of laughter. And the country-side shook its head, and marveled at the turning of night into day, and at people who seemed never to sleep except when others worked; and not much even then, if the tales of such of the servants as belonged to the locality were to be believed.

And the revelry waxed louder and wilder as the days passed, and many times toward evening the whole company would come plunging down the mountain, and, with the great dogs baying before them, go racing through the valleys and back again to the Castle, as though some fiend were hot on their trail or they on his.

And ever beside the Duke, on a great, black horse, went the same woman, slender and sinuous, with raven hair and dead-white cheek; a feather touch on rein, a careless grace in saddle. And as they rode the Duke watched her with glowing eyes; and his cold face warmed with his thoughts, and he would speak to her earnestly and persuasively; and she, swaying toward him, would answer softly and with a tantalizing smile.

Then, one day, she had refused to ride.

“I am tired,” she said, when at the sounding of the horn he had sought her apartments; “let the others go.”

He went over and leaned on the back of her chair.

“Tired – of what?” he asked.

“Of everything – of myself most of all.”

“And of everybody?” smiling down at her.

“One usually tires of self last.”

“And you want to leave me?” he asked.

She shook her head. “No, not you, Ferdinand – the others.”

“Shall I send them away?” he said eagerly.

“And make this lonely place more lonely still!”

“I despise the miserable place,” he exclaimed.

“Then why not to Paris to-night?” she asked.

“Why not, indeed?” he answered, gravely, “for the others and – you.”

“And you, too?” glancing up at him and touching, for an instant, his hand.

He shrugged his shoulders. “You forget, there is a King in Dornlitz!”

“You would go incog. and old Frederick never be the wiser, nor care even if he were.”

He laughed shortly. “Think you so, ma belle , – well, believe me, I want not to be the one to try him.”

The horn rang out again from the court-yard; the Duke crossed to a window.

“Go on,” he called, “we will follow presently;” and with a clatter and a shout, they spurred across the bridge and away.

“Who leads?” she asked, going over and drawing herself up on the casement.

He put his arm around her. “What matters,” he laughed, “since we are here?” and bent his head to her cheek.

“Let us go to Paris, dear,” she whispered, caressingly; “to the boulevards and the music, the life, and the color.”

He shook his head. “You don’t know what you ask, little one – once I might have dared it, but not now – no, not now.”

She drew a bit nearer. “And would the penalty now be so very serious?” she asked.

He looked at her a while uncertainly; and she smiled back persuasively. She knew that he was in disfavor because of his plots against the Archduke Armand’s honor and life; and that he had been sent hither in disgrace; but all along what had puzzled her was his calm acquiescence; his remaining in this desolation, with never a word of anger toward the King, nor disposition to slip away surreptitiously to haunts beyond the border. Why should he be so careful not to transgress even the spirit of the royal order? – he who had not hesitated to play a false wife against the Archduke Armand, to try assassination, and to arrange deliberately to kill him in a duel. She remembered well that evening in her reception room, at the Hotel Metzen in Dornlitz, when Lotzen’s whole scheme had suddenly collapsed like a house of cards. She recalled the King’s very words of sentence when, at last, he had deigned to notice the Duke. “The Court has no present need of plotters and will be the better for your absence,” he had said. “It has been over long since you have visited your titular estates and they doubtless require your immediate attention. You are, therefore, permitted to depart to them forthwith – and to remain indefinitely.” Surely, it was very general and precluded only a return to Dornlitz.

That the question of the succession was behind it all, she was very well persuaded; the family laws of the Dalbergs were secret, undisclosed to any but the ranking members of the House, but the Crown had always descended by male primogeniture. The advent of Armand, the eldest male descendant of Hugo Dalberg (who had been banished by his father, the Great Henry, when he had gone to America and taken service under Washington) had tangled matters, for Armand was senior in line to Lotzen. It was known that Henry, shortly before his death, had revoked the former decree and restored Hugo and his children to their rank and estates; and Frederick had proclaimed this decree to the Nation and had executed it in favor of Armand, making him an Archduke and Colonel of the Red Huzzars. But what no one knew was whether Lotzen had hereby been displaced as Heir Presumptive. How far did the Great Henry’s decree of restoration extend? How far had Frederick made it effective? In short, would the next King be Ferdinand, Duke of Lotzen, or Armand, Archduke of Valeria?

And to Madeline Spencer the answer was of deep concern; and she had been manœuvering to draw it from the Duke ever since she had come to the Castle. But every time she had led up to it, he had led away, and with evident deliberation. Plainly there was something in the Laws that made it well for him to drive the King no further; and what could it be but the power to remove him as Heir Presumptive.