Anthony Hope

“ Bauer is my tool, I am not his. I lay Rischenheim by the heels, send Rupert howling off with a ball in his arm, and carry my precious burden in triumph to Mr. Rassendyll. By the time I have played the whole game I am indeed proud of myself. Yet in truth—in daylight truth—I fear that, unless Heaven sent me a fresh set of brains, I should be caught in much the same way again. Though not by that fellow Bauer, I swear! Well, there it was. They had made a fool of me. I lay on the road with a bloody head, and Rupert of Hentzau had the queen’s letter. ”

“ There was an instant—Rudolf saw it in his eyes and dwelt on it when he lightly painted the scene for me—when there dawned on Rupert of Hentzau the knowledge that he could not break down his enemy’s guard. Surprise, chagrin, amusement, or something like it, seemed blended in his look. He could not make out how he was caught and checked in every effort, meeting, it seemed, a barrier of iron impregnable in rest. His quick brain grasped the lesson in an instant. If his skill were not the greater, the victory would not be his, for his endurance was the less. ”

“ Yes, any business is a good enough excuse for leaving me! By Heaven, I wonder if a king was ever served so badly as I am! Why did you trouble to get me out of Zenda? Nobody wants me, nobody cares whether I live or die.”
To reason with such a mood was impossible. I could only assure him that I would hasten my return by all possible means.
“Yes, pray do,” said he. “I want somebody to look after me. Who knows what that villain Rupert may attempt against me? And I can’t defend myself can I? I’m not Rudolf Rassendyll, am I?” ”

“ If so, I’m ready to be the most faithful of your subjects.”
“You honor me, Count.”
“Provided, of course, that I’m one of the most favored and the richest. Come, come, the fool is dead now; he lived like a fool and he died like a fool. The place is empty. A dead man has no rights and suffers no wrongs. Damn it, that’s good law, isn’t it? Take his place and his wife. You can pay my price then. Or are you still so virtuous? Faith, how little some men learn from the world they live in! If I had your chance!”
“Come, Count, you’d be the last man to trust Rupert of Hentzau.” ”

“ Rudolf was with the queen, my wife was resting, Bernenstein had sat down to a meal for which I could find no appetite. By an effort I freed myself from my fancies and tried to concentrate my brain on the facts of our position. We were ringed round with difficulties. To solve them was beyond my power; but I knew where my wish and longing lay. I had no desire to find means by which Rudolf Rassendyll should escape unknown from Strelsau; the king, although dead, be again in death the king, and the queen be left desolate on her mournful and solitary throne. ”

“ We were indeed awake to the fact that even Rupert’s death would not make the secret safe. Rischenheim, although for the moment a prisoner and helpless, was alive and could not be mewed up for ever; Bauer was we knew not where, free to act and free to talk. Yet in our hearts we feared none but Rupert, and the doubt was not whether we could do the thing so much as whether we should. For in moments of excitement and intense feeling a man makes light of obstacles which look large enough as he turns reflective eyes on them in the quiet of after-days. ”

“ There, in the city, the drama must be played out. There was Rudolf, there Rischenheim, there in all likelihood Rupert of Hentzau, there now the queen. And of these Rupert alone, or perhaps Rischenheim also, knew that the king was dead, and how the issue of last night had shaped itself under the compelling hand of wayward fortune. The king lay in peace on his bed, his grave was dug; Sapt and James held the secret with solemn faith and ready lives. To Strelsau I must go to tell the queen that she was widowed, and to aim the stroke at young Rupert’s heart. ”

“ Rupert may have heard the step outside and stood motionless to listen. Rudolf opened the door and walked in. The girl darted breathlessly up the remaining steps, and, coming to the door, just as it swung back on the latch, crouched down by it, listening to what passed within, catching glimpses of forms and movements through the chinks of the crazy hinge and the crevices where the wood of the panel sprung and left a narrow eye hole for her absorbed gazing.
Rupert of Hentzau had no thought of ghosts; the men he killed lay still where they fell, and slept where they were buried. ”

“ There rises often before my mind the picture of young Rupert, standing where Rischenheim left him, awaiting the return of his messenger and watching for some sign that should declare to Strelsau the death of its king which his own hand had wrought. His image is one that memory holds clear and distinct, though time may blur the shape of greater and better men, and the position in which he was that morning gives play enough to the imagination. ”

“ His breathing was quick and distressed, gasp tumbling over gasp, but still his eye was alert and his hand unerring. He had but a few moments’ more effort left in him: it was enough if he could reach his goal and perpetrate the trick on which his mind, fertile in every base device, was set. For it was towards the mantelpiece that his retreat, seeming forced, in truth so deliberate, led him. There was the letter, there lay the revolvers. The time to think of risks was gone by; the time to boggle over what honor allowed or forbade had never come to Rupert of Hentzau. ”

“ I loved to see that she seemed to find comfort in Helga’s love. It is women to whom women turn, and women whom women fear.
“But Helga writes no letters,” said the queen.
“Why, no,” said I, and I smiled a grim smile. Well, Rudolf Rassendyll had never wooed my wife.
She rose, saying: “Come, let us go to the palace.”
As she rose, Rischenheim made a quick impulsive step towards her.
“Well, my lord,” said she, turning towards him, “will you also go with me?”
“Lieutenant von Bernenstein will take care—” I began. But I stopped. The slightest gesture of her hand silenced me. ”

“ Lovers count neither time nor danger; but Sapt counted both, and no more than a moment had passed before, with eager imperative gestures, he beckoned them to enter the room. The queen obeyed, and Rudolf followed her.
“Let nobody in, and don’t say a word to anybody,” whispered Sapt, as he entered, leaving Bernenstein outside. The young man was half-dazed still, but he had sense to read the expression in the constable’s eyes and to learn from it that he must give his life sooner than let the door be opened. So with drawn sword he stood on guard. ”

“ Well, Fritz, have you a better plan?”
I had no plan, and I was not in love with Sapt’s plan. Yet it offered us four and twenty hours. For that time, at least, it seemed as if the secret could be kept. Beyond that we could hardly hope for success; after that we must produce the king; dead or alive, the king must be seen. Yet it might be that before the respite ran out Rupert would be ours. In fine, what else could be chosen? For now a greater peril threatened than that against which we had at the first sought to guard. ”

“ For if a man once grows rusty, it is everything short of impossible to put the fine polish on his skill again. Mr. Rassendyll had strength, will, coolness, and, of course, courage. None would have availed had not his eye been in perfect familiarity with its work, and his hand obeyed it as readily as the bolt slips in a well-oiled groove. As the thing stood, the lithe agility and unmatched dash of young Rupert but just missed being too much for him. He was in deadly peril when the girl Rosa ran down to bring him aid. ”

“ Rassendyll came again to Zenda a fury of chance seemed to catch us all in a whirlwind, carrying us whither we would not, and ever driving us onwards to fresh enterprises, breathing into us a recklessness that stood at no obstacle, and a devotion to the queen and to the man she loved that swept away all other feeling. The ancients held there to be a fate which would have its fill, though women wept and men died, and none could tell whose was the guilt nor who fell innocent. ”

“ The time at which the king needed her was past, but the king had not come. How little the old woman knew for whom she listened! All her talk had been of Bauer—why Bauer did not come and what could have befallen him. It was grand to hold the king’s secret for him, and she would hold it with her life; for he had been kind and gracious to her, and he was her man of all the men in Strelsau. Bauer was a stumpy fellow; the Count of Hentzau was handsome, handsome as the devil; but the king was her man. And the king had trusted her; she would die before hurt should come to him. ”

“ Rudolf threw the paper across to Sapt; Bernenstein leant over the constable’s shoulder and read it eagerly.
“I doubt if it would bring me,” grinned old Sapt, throwing the paper down.
“It’ll bring Rupert to Hentzau. Why not? He’ll know that the king will wish to meet him unknown to the queen, and also unknown to you, Sapt, since you were my friend: what place more likely for the king to choose than his hunting-lodge, where he is accustomed to go when he wishes to be alone? The message will bring him, depend on it. Why, man, Rupert would come even if he suspected; and why should he suspect?” ”

“ To risk the peace of a palace for the sake of a lover’s greeting had never been wisdom to his mind, and he had been sorely impatient with “that fool Fritz’s” yearly pilgrimage. The letter of farewell had been an added folly, pregnant with chances of disaster. Now disaster, or the danger of it, had come. The curt, mysterious telegram from Wintenberg, which told him so little, at least told him that. It ordered him—and he did not know even whose the order was—to delay Rischenheim’s audience, or, if he could not, to get the king away from Zenda: why he was to act thus was not disclosed to him. ”

“ It seemed indeed as though some strange influence were dominating Sapt; he went about the work like a man who is hardly awake. They placed the bodies each where the living man would be by night—the king in the guest-room, the huntsman in the sort of cupboard where the honest fellow had been wont to lie. They dug up the buried dog, Sapt chuckling convulsively, James grave as the mute whose grim doings he seemed to travesty: they carried the shot-pierced, earth-grimed thing in, and laid it in the king’s room. ”

“ I’ve known her wake a villain’s conscience before now.”
“I’ve known her send a lover’s to sleep,” laughed young Bernenstein, rising from his table, stretching himself, and lighting a cigar.
“Ay, she’s apt to take a man out of what he is,” pursued old Sapt. “Set a quiet man near her, and he dreams of battle; an ambitious fellow, after ten minutes of her, will ask nothing better than to muse all his life away. I don’t trust her, Fritz; I wish the night were dark.”
“What will she do to Rudolf Rassendyll?” ”

“ Ay, you may show yourself, you may say they didn’t know you. Will they believe she didn’t? Was the king’s ring on your finger? Where is it? And how comes Mr. Rassendyll to be at Fritz von Tarlenheim’s for hours with the queen, when the king is at his hunting lodge? A king has died already, and two men besides, to save a word against her. And you—you’ll be the man to set every tongue in Strelsau talking, and every finger pointing in suspicion at her?”
Rudolf made no answer. When Sapt had first uttered the queen’s name, he had drawn near and let his hand fall over the back of her chair. ”

“ Yet Colonel Sapt did all as though he had given his assent, and watched the last hours in which his flight from Strelsau was possible go quickly by with more than equanimity. Why hurry Rudolf’s resolve? Every moment shut him closer in the trap of an inevitable choice. With every hour that he was called the king, it became more impossible for him to bear any other name all his days. Therefore Sapt let Mr. Rassendyll doubt and struggle, while he himself wrote his story and laid his long-headed plans. ”

“ I knew that it was in Bernenstein’s thoughts no less than in my own; for neither of us had been able to form any reasonable scheme by which the living king, whom half Strelsau now knew to be in the city, could be spirited away, and the dead king set in his place. The change could take place, as it seemed, only in one way and at one cost: the truth, or the better part of it, must be told, and every tongue set wagging with gossip and guesses concerning Rudolf Rassendyll and his relations with the queen. Who that knows what men and women are would not have shrunk from that alternative? ”

“ A man who has lived in the world, marking how every act, although in itself perhaps light and insignificant, may become the source of consequences that spread far and wide, and flow for years or centuries, could scarcely feel secure in reckoning that with the death of the Duke of Strelsau and the restoration of King Rudolf to liberty and his throne, there would end, for good and all, the troubles born of Black Michael’s daring conspiracy. ”

“ When a man looks back on the past, reviewing in his mind the chances Fortune has given and the calls she has made, he always torments himself by thinking that he could have done other and better than in fact he did. Even now I lie awake at night sometimes, making clever plans by which I could have thwarted Rupert’s schemes. In these musings I am very acute; Anton von Strofzin’s idle talk furnishes me with many a clue, and I draw inferences sure and swift as a detective in the story books. ”

“ CHAPTER XI. WHAT THE CHANCELLOR’S WIFE SAW
THE night, so precious in its silence, solitude, and darkness, was waning fast; soon the first dim approaches of day would be visible; soon the streets would become alive and people be about. Before then Rudolf Rassendyll, the man who bore a face that he dared not show in open day, must be under cover; else men would say that the king was in Strelsau, and the news would flash in a few hours through the kingdom and (so Rudolf feared) reach even those ears which we knew to be shut to all earthly sounds. ”