As it was prudent to receive no visitors and as he was in no mood for the fiction of other minds, he arrayed one of his tables with certain books presented to him by his father long since, and whose contents he must master before presenting himself before the Civil Service Commission: histories of Europe, Asia, and America covering the period between 1789 and 1880; Blackstone’s Commentaries, Ker’s edition, 1862; Hallam’s Constitutional History of England; Mill’s Political Economy; Smith’s Wealth of Nations. Before now, when ill or annoyed, he had taken refuge in this austere masonry, and had found its fascinations quite as powerful for the time as the jewelled streets of literature where the creative minds displayed their wares. Sometimes, too, he read them when mortified with the knowledge that he had not “played up,” “risen to the occasion,” as an older man still gambling with edged tools would have done; a manifestation of the quickness and assimilative qualities of his intellect salved his wounded vanity and induced a temporary scorn of youthful follies. But, truth to tell, it is not likely that he would have opened one of these books for ten years to come could he have passed his examinations without their aid.
During the six days of his convalescence he read steadily, and if the severe diet did not elevate his spirits, it diverted his mind. From the third day of his incarceration he wrote Frau von Wass a series of pleasant little notes to keep her quiet, and, receiving no answer, inferred that she was sulking. As she crossed her letters (she never wrote him notes), he was thankful for the additional respite until the eighth day of his seclusion; then he began to feel uneasy and to wonder if she really meditated an attack on the Legation. He was on the point of cutting his convalescence short and hastening to London, when he was astounded to receive the following note from Hungary:
“Dear Mr. Ordham: The most dreadful thing has happened to me! I am threatened with a goitre!! I spent a part of last summer in the Bavarian Alps—I remember certain villages where every other person had one—and the young men on Sundays with their arm round the waist of some hideous disfigured girl, as if that awful growth were a sort of heirloom! The sight made me quite ill; and now I—who am always so particular about water—I am in the wildest rage with myself for being so careless. The doctors say that it will yield to treatment, but meanwhile I prefer to keep out of sight. And you were to dine with me next week! Please don’t think me rude. One of these days you will visit Munich again and then I shall give a great dinner in your honour.
“Yours sincerely,
“Hélène v. Wass.”
Then for the first time did Ordham fairly appreciate the load that had weighed his spirits to earth, delaying his recovery, driving him to pound his brain into a state of stupefaction before night. In a moment he felt entirely well. Flinging his dressing-gown off and Blackstone into a corner, he began to dress hastily that he might go out of doors, take a drive, call on Countess Tann. He even felt an affectionate impulse toward Princess Nachmeister and other friends that had given much and asked little. He whistled, wondering that he had ever lost faith in his star; he felt young,—“but young!” as these foreigners would say, gay, insolent. His imagination took leaps and bounds: he saw himself an ambassador; Bridg long since retired from a world in which he had no place, leaving behind him an income which delivered his illustrious heir from the fatiguing obligation of marrying one; returning to Munich every year to hear Styr sing, and to sit for hours in that delightful gallery—no doubt in time she would let him lie on the divan while she sat in that odd American rocking-chair looking like a friendly goddess—
But his jubilance came to a violent halt. His mind had tossed up mechanically her avowed intention to save him. He had not given it a second thought, so manifest was her inability to play any part in this intensely personal crisis of his life. He recalled her eager insistence that he grant her a week, the strength that had pulled him toward her like a magnet, remembered that she had attempted greater things than foiling a silly woman and failed in none of them.
The blood mounted to his hair, he pressed his lips together until their soft boyish curves were obliterated. A wave of shame, anger, rebellion, rose and choked him.
In a few moments it receded, left him quite cold. He was a wise young man, in spite of follies. Whatever had been done—assuming that vivacious note from Hungary to have been written under coercion—had been carried to a finish. The episode was over. Frau von Wass announced that fact herself. If mystery were here, it were a mystery best unsolved. A water-tight compartment opened, closed. He refused even to harbour a natural curiosity.
He returned to the pleasant occupation of arraying himself, one in which he still took as much pleasure as any girl. Hines, his man, was ill, but he was too happy to resent the trifling exertion involved in a lonely toilet. It was a brilliant morning in late spring and he selected socks, necktie, and handkerchief of a delicate sage green, and a dull grey suit cut in a fashion that often tempted even the officers to turn and look at him. Much to his chagrin, no part of his morning was ever wasted at the barber’s. When he played tennis he exposed an arm with a proper filamentous surface, and on the top of his head his hair, a light burnished brown, grew as thickly as sprouting corn; but never a blade had appeared on his face. For this he should have been grateful, as his chief claim to regular beauty was the perfect oval of his face and the clean yet rounded outline of the long jaw; but he yearned for a beard to shave as a girl yearns for her first adorer to maltreat.
He finished his toilet in the course of time, sauntered out of the Legation, and, entering the cab that had awaited him forty minutes, concluded to drive for an hour, as it was too early to call. The kutscher, whose vast expanse looked as if about to burst through its rusty old livery, hunched down into himself after the fashion of his kind, and, with his high battered hat tilted on one side of his red face, his eyes half closed, and apparently in momentary danger of rolling from his perch, gave the Munich droschke that final touch of style which is the despair of Paris and Berlin.
But he drove his fare safely and slowly about a city, which after a week’s tormented seclusion seemed quite the most beautiful in the world. The stately Renaissance capital with its Gothic corners; its old palaces and modern public buildings, the former severe, the new ornate but dignified and magnificent: its churches representing the vagaries of all architectures; its oblongs and squares of green, set with statues of public men and gushing fountains—torrents of sparkling water as free and crystal as Alpine torrents; its classic K?nigplatz, as severe and beautiful as Rome in the days of the C?sars; its superb statues to the Bavarian rulers that had transformed a medi?val stronghold into the most artistic city in Europe; its innumerable terraces for beer drinking and coffee; its winding river of many branches and massive bridges, poetical name, and strange colour like melted ice reflecting pale green jewels; and then the fields and woods, the stately drives and winding ways, of the Englischergarten, where naught of Munich save its irregular but fine and soaring sky-line can be seen,—all go to the making of a city whose like is to be found nowhere on earth, and in which one can linger longest alone.
The Ludwigstrasse, one of the most imposing streets in Europe, lined from end to end with the high flat fa?ades of the Italian Renaissance, starts from the Feldherrnhalle, a copy of the famous Loggia in Florence, and terminates far down in the perspective with the Siegesthor, a triumphal arch in the fashion of Constantine’s, but surmounted by a colossal “Bavaria” driving her lions in the direction of Prussia!
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