"IF YOUTH BUT KNEW!"

"IF YOUTH BUT KNEW!"

BY

AGNES & EGERTON CASTLE

AUTHORS OF "ROSE OF THE WORLD," "FRENCH NAN," ETC., ETC.

"Si jeunesse savait... Si vieillesse pouvait!" (Old French Song)

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY LANCELOT SPEED

New York THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 1906

All rights reserved

COPYRIGHT, 1906, BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.

Set up and electrotyped. Published April, 1906.

Norwood Press J. S. Cushing & Co.—Berwick & Smith Co. Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER

The Vagabond

The Forest House

Green Adventure

Parting of the Ways

The Invitation of the Road

The Burg

Guests of Chance

Roses of Trianon

Home-Coming

The Burgrave's Welcome

Tangled Tales

The Burgrave's Farewell

The Oubliette

Love among the Ruins

Furens quid Femina Possit

'Twixt Cup and Lip

The Skirt of War

The Raid

The Melody in the Violets

The True Reading of a Letter

At the Mock Versailles

The Cabinet Noir

The King's Mail

Portents

The Perverseness of Words

The Ways of Little Courts

The Song of the Woods

A Treacherous Haven

The Homing Bird

Dawn Music

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Her child eyes were still upon him and seemed to ask for something yet. And, at this, he bent and kissed her gently, as he would have kissed a child . . . Frontispiece

"The something that lived on, the miserable carcass, the old man—call it myself, if you will"

But, as the oncomer drew nearer, the glimmer of hope died in the discontented gentleman's heart

As she bent, offering him the green goblet of wine, her heavy plait fell against his shoulder

Wellenshausen

"Look, look, do you see? ... There are two men coming up the road with a pack-horse!"

"The high-born, my mistress, had not expected you before to-morrow," said the butler with a deep bow

Meanwhile, up in his chamber, the Burgrave sat in sodden brooding

Steven almost called aloud, as he heard their heavy plunge into the ambushed waters

Sidonia stood, shaking and pruning herself like a bird, her hair glinting in the light

"Spread your dark wings, obscene birds! ... the scent of Death is in the air. In a little while you may gorge! ... caw—caw!"

"Hurl down the Guard, and the field is ours! ... Hurl down the Guard, aha!"

"She always loved violets. These have no scent, ... but hers—oh, they were sweet!"

They spread him beside the Jurist in the moonlight—with a certain effect of symmetry

... the great bag on his back, undiminished, save for two warrants and one private missive

What she was saying was sufficiently remarkable: "Your Majesty mistakes"

"Positively, a bird from the tyrant's aviary," he cried. "A foreign, French bird!"

His child-wife! ... The watchman was chanting the tale of the first morning hour

The End

TO "MARIE-LOUISE"

FOREWORD

"Is it not," remarks Fiddler Hans the wanderer, somewhere in these pages, "instructive to see how the ruler of Westphalia passes his time while the best manhood of his country is warring for the Empire—burnt in Spain, frozen in Russia?"

Few people have cared, it would seem, to study that little chapter of history, the rule of Jerome in Westphalia; yet it is curious enough—as a record of human folly, if for no other reason.

That incredible Westphalia of Napoleon's making! Harlequin's coat contrived out of Hesse, Brunswick, and a score of smaller principalities, hemmed with a shred or two of Prussian province; incongruous rag torn from the map of the old Germanic Empire and flung by the conqueror, between two victories, to his "little brother Jerome"!

A strangely pusillanimous character was the amiable Jerome. His annals include, in the days of his youth, flight from his ship, within sight of an English blockading squadron (not through cowardice, be it said: there was pluck enough in the little man, but because of his thirst for the pleasures of land), and, in more mature years, desertion from the Grand Army at a crucial moment, upon the mere impulse of wounded vanity. How so grotesque a potentate was allowed, for seven years, to lord over, to plunder and demoralize, some three millions of sturdy Germans, to discredit the name of Bonaparte and weaken the fabric of the new Empire, remains one of the enigmas of history.

But, then, the new Emperor must ever be a maker of kings; carve new kingdoms out of old. For his "Beau Sabreur," Murat, there is Naples and the Two Sicilies; for his infant son, nothing less than Rome; for his younger brothers, Holland, Spain, ... Westphalia! What is there to restrain great Cæsar? Hark to his mighty insolence:

"The Emperor of the French" (so M. Walckenaer, in his official work, La Géographic Moderne, brings to a conclusion the chapter on la France allemande), "possesses likewise in Germany the principality of Erfurth and the county of Katzenellenbogen: mais Sa Majesté n'a pas encore décidé sur leur sort."

His Majesty has not yet decided upon their fate!

About the fate of Westphalia there had been no indecision. From one day to another, "little brother Jerome" acknowledged failure in every other career, naval, civil, or military, found himself seated upon a German throne. And thus we have him, inconceivable fop, strutting and ogling, upon the scene.—A king whose life energies, when the cracking of his brother's empire may be heard on every side, are divided between the devising of new costumes, the planning of revels, and the discovery of fresh favourites. A scamp, fascinating enough, but incapable of a single strong or noble thought. A cynic and a libertine; withal a gull, in his way. A man who could repudiate without a pang of regret the fair young Virginian wife of his youth, to marry without love a "suitable German princess." A man who flaunted his debauchery and his barefaced improbity, yet could be scared to distraction by the imaginary threat of a little haunting tune; the tune which, with its twang of mockery and warning, was as ill an omen to his superstitious fancy as the shadow of "the little red man," or the date of Christmas, to his great Imperial brother.

And under him, that hasty patchwork of old German lands: his incongruous kingdom. His people, grave religious dwellers of the mountain and of the wood, unconvinced subjects of the godless Welsch, dumbly chafing under his insensate taxation. His new-fangled court, aping the vanished Versailles of Louis XV., yet combining with the reckless frivolity of the Old Order all the ill-breeding of revolutionary parvenus. Over all, a government so incompetent, so corrupt, as to stupefy or demoralize all that had dealings with it—friend or foe, high or low, French official or German landowner; the magistrates, the very students; the old rulers of the soil themselves, nervously awaiting the inevitable débâcle, stretching, the while, both hands towards the plunder.

In these topsy-turvy days no man rightly knows whether he belong to ancient Teutonic duchy or to French département; whether the accepted rule be code Napoléon or hoary feudal law. And thus, up in his ancestral Burg, an old lord of the land (such an one as the Burgrave of Wellenshausen) may well assume that he still holds the right of "high and low justice" on his own territory; whereas, down at Cassel, the mock Versailles, this same out-of-date character would naturally fall in with the new views of marriage and divorce, or "annulment by decree," brought so conclusively into fashion by the Bonapartes, royal or Imperial.

Above all this confusion, the cloud of war, gathering heavier and heavier. And from the mines of the Harz, from the deeps of the Thuringian forests, from the lanes of the old town, up into the very anterooms of the palace, conspiracy busy at work: conspiracy in the barracks, conspiracy in the universities, exploding on all sides, futile squibs as yet, but ominous. The King closes his eyes, seals his ears to all but sights and sounds of pleasure. So dancing, the harlequin kingdom goes to its death.

And it is through the mazes of this carnival, unique in the lenten gravity of nations, that wander the footsteps of the singer of youth, and of the lovers of this story.

O hear me sing:—If youth but knew The glory of his April day, Would he not cast the year away For one more dawn of dream and dew? Would he the fevered moons pursue, Not rather with the spring delay, Crowned with its leaf? If youth but knew The glory of his April day! For what shall unto age accrue, If youth from joyance turn and stray? Autumn is but the Spring grown grey, Its harvest roses mixed with rue.... If youth but knew—if youth but knew! (The Singer of Youth) ELINOR SWEETMAN

IF YOUTH BUT KNEW

CHAPTER I

THE VAGABOND

"Wealth I seek not, hope nor love, Nor a friend to know me; All I seek, the heaven above And the road below me." R. L. STEVENSON.

The traveller sat upon the milestone just where the road, skirting the brow of the hill, branched off into the forest. At his feet lay the detached wheel; further away, in pathetic attitude, the remainder of the chaise itself. A stout bay, seemingly unconscious of as handsome a pair of broken knees as ever horse displayed, was tethered to a stump of tree, browsing such tender grass or leafage as grew within his reach. The situation spoke for itself; and the young traveller's face spoke for the situation as eloquently as Nature (who had bestowed upon him a markedly disdainful and somewhat impassive set of features) would permit.

Behind him rose the cool gloom of the forest. Below lay the plain, gold-powdered by the level rays of a sinking sun. Between the edge of the road and the forest margin ran a stream. A robin sang to the glowing west from the topmost branch of a fir tree. But he on the milestone was blind to the gold of the valley, deaf to the gold of the song. "Now, here's a pretty kettle of fish!" was the burden of his thoughts.

To have been stuck a whole hour upon a stone, while a postilion ranged the country on horseback in one direction, and a valet a-foot in the other, and no help as yet forthcoming; not to have had himself within hail, all those weary minutes, one single human being—between intervals of drowsiness he cursed the peaceful valley land, with its fair fields and orchards, as the most God-forsaken of countries!

Presently his moody eye quickened. On the road below a moving object was approaching. Only a pedestrian, alas! Nevertheless, he might prove of use for succour or advice.

But, as the oncomer drew nearer and began to foot the ascent, the glimmer of hope died in the discontented gentleman's heart. Here was no sturdy native, likely guide to smithy or village inn. 'Twas a mere ambulant musician, as strange, doubtless, to the country as himself: the sun-rays were even now glinting back, roseate, from the varnish of a fiddle.—The traveller relapsed into moodiness.

At the steep curve of the hillside, man and fiddle vanished from view. Nevertheless, that he was still climbing, the advance (in interrupted measure) of a singular little tune, half sourdine, half pizzicato, soon proclaimed. It seemed at first so woven in with the babble of the brook, the deep choiring of the forest and the song of the robin, that the youth on the milestone hardly realized its separate existence. But, as it hovered ever closer, he was forced to listen and even to follow. It seemed the very song of the rover; of the rover on foot, humble and yet proud; without a penny, without a bond; glad of the free water to drink and the hunk of bread by the roadside—a song of the nodding grass and the bird in the hedge, of the dancing leaf, the darting swallow, the wide kindly skies. Oh, the road is full of gay things, and tender things, of sweetness and refreshment, of wholesome fatigue and glorious sleep, for those that know its secrets!

"Good evening to you, young sir."

The little tune had stopped. A man's figure, exaggeratedly thin, black against the sunset, had emerged over the knuckle of the hill and, with a wide sweep of the arm, was saluting.

The gesture of the black silhouette seemed so courtly, the voice that came from it so refined, that the young gentleman almost rose to return the salutation: but, in time, he caught sight of the violin curves.... Pooh, it was the fiddling vagabond! Ashamed of his impulse, he drew forth a florin and flung it.

The musician skipped nimbly on one side; the coin fell, flashing in the red sun-shafts. He looked from it to the imperious donor, whose face he scanned keenly for a moment, then smiled; and his teeth shone as white as a wolf's in the deep tan of his face. Then off went his battered hat again and out was stretched a sinewy leg in dusty blue stocking, to accompany a bow such as twenty years ago might have roused the envy of your finest Versailles marquis.

"I greet you! I salute you, my young lord!" The fiddler rose from his inclination and burst out laughing. "Oh, cease fondling those pistols in your pocket, worthy sir," cried he, "for by Calliope, daughter of Jove and Mnemosyne, 'tis not your money-bags I covet just now, but, oh! your golden youth!"

"The fellow has a wild eye," thought the gentleman. Now, it is a question whether even a highway robber were not more agreeable to encounter on a lonely road than a madman.

"If it be madness to honour in you such a gift of the gods," said the singular vagrant, reading the thought, "why then, yes, I am mad, sir—stark, staring."

He fell back on one foot and bent the advanced knee, tucked his instrument under his chin, where it settled like a bird to its nest, and drew his bow across the strings with a long plaint.

"O youth!" he intoned between two sighs of the catgut. "O spring! O wings of the soul! O virginity of the heart, expectation, unknown mysteries of life! O wealth of strength and yearning!—See, now, how you sit," he cried, dropping into speech again, "on the fringe of the forest, in a strange land, with the sunset valley at your feet, and the stream running you know not where beside you, and the bird over your head singing the desires of your soul. Why, by Apollo, young man, here are you in your youth, in the spring of your world, in the very middle of an adventure, and——"

Again limber fingers moved along the strings; and, with a sense of wonder, the traveller felt within his being some answering outcry. But he stiffened himself against it.

"Harkee, my man," said he, trying to frown, "I am in no mood for fooling. Take up your florin, and begone.—Or, stay, earn another by telling me, if you can, where I am, and how far lies the nearest village?"

"Sir," replied the other, urbanely, "fellow-travellers should assist each other without any sordid consideration. (Ah, had you offered me of your youth, now!) You are, an it please you, just between the border of that old, steady-going principality of Schwarzburg and the new-fangled, patchwork kingdom which appertaineth to his Majesty King Jerome—himself one of the crowning products of the Great Revolution!"

"Faugh!" said the gentleman.

The fiddler's restless eye lighted.

"My lord is an Englishman? In verity and beyond doubt, none but an Englishman could wear so lofty a front. I need scarce have asked."

The young man stared haughtily. The other considered him awhile in silence with a sort of grave mockery, and pursued then reflectively—

"This English aloofness, 'tis an excellent prescription for pride and disdain and such-like high essences. Only be careful, my brother-wayfarer, that you be not above your own fair youth, and contemn not its splendid opportunities.

'Singula de nobis annipraedantur euntes'

O young man! ...

'Eripuere jocos, Venerem, convivia, ludum'

think of it!"

So saying, he shouldered his instrument, and with a valedictory wave of his bow seemed about to take his departure; but, as if upon a second thought, stood still, and once again observed the young man.

Now it struck the stranded traveller that there was a dignity in the vagrant's gaze, a refinement about his person, which scarce accorded with the gipsy appearance, the shabby clothes; that it was not usual for beggars to quote Horace with delicate accents of culture; that his salutation had been a pattern of courtliness; above all, that he was not the least impressed by a young nobleman's most noble demeanour. And he, on his milestone, began to feel slightly foolish—an ingenuous blush, indeed, crept to his cheeks.

The player hitched round his fiddle till it lay across his breast, and pinched a couple of strings as a man might pinch the cheek of the wench he loved.

"Pardi," he said, speaking into its curved ear, "that flag of crimson would proclaim that there's hope for the youth yet.—Sir," proceeded he then, gaily, "I think I can be of use to you. I place myself at your service. May I crave to know whom I have the honour of addressing?"

"You address," responded the other, "Steven Lee, Graf zu Waldorff-Kielmansegg, an Austrian gentleman (if you must know) travelling towards his estate in the south." He had an irrepressible satisfaction in the recital.

"Austrian?" echoed the listener, with a cock of one of his expressive eyebrows. "'Tis a safer nationality to proclaim than the English, for travellers in great Cæsar's dominions nowadays. Oh, you are right, quite right! 'Twould be the height of rashness to proclaim even a drop of English blood, these days, where Monsieur Buonaparte rules!"

The taunt struck home. Red mantled again on the gentleman's smooth cheek.

"Despite an Austrian father, I have by my dead mother enough English blood in these veins," cried he, hotly, "to hate the usurper and despite his upstart brothers—if that is what you mean; and I care not who knows it!"

The fiddler's smile grew broader. "Youth," whispered he to his violin, "may pretend to abjure itself, but it will out. The stripling has spirit, though it be but the spirit of scorn.—But the ceremony is not complete," pursued he. "I have now to return your compliment. Above all things, let us be polite. Here, then, comrade, you see before you an individual known all over the country as the crazy musician, sometimes more tersely as Geiger-Hans—what in your English you might call Fiddle-John. Some call me the Scholar Vagabond, and some, the children (bless them), Onkel. Like your own, my nationality is a matter of indecision. Some say I am French, some German, some from over the Alps—take your choice; your choice, too, of my title: Geiger-Hans, Fiddle-John, or Geiger-Onkel. Or you may dub me, if you please, the Singer of Youth."

But by this time, Steven Lee, Count Kielmansegg, was disgusted with himself for having betrayed so much of his feelings to a beggar vagrant.

"Doubtless," remarked he, with infinite arrogance, "it may prove more convenient for you, at times, to hide your name, good fellow. Reassure yourself, I have no curiosity to learn it."

Whereupon Geiger-Hans gathered his brows into so deep a frown that the whole hillside seemed to grow black. He struck the strings of his instrument, and they called out as with anger.

"My name," he said under his breath, "my name, boy, is dead—as dead as my youth." Then he grew calm as suddenly as he had stormed. "Some happy ones there are who die and whose names live: I live, and my name is dead. Let that suffice to you. Why, see," he cried next, with another swift change of tone, while Count Steven stared at him, his slow Austrian blood, his deliberate English wits, unable to keep pace with such vivacity of mood, "it is getting dark ... the sun has dropped behind the valley line ... the forest is full of night already! Do not the lights of unknown shelter beckon you—the chimney-corner, the strange hospitality? Why, Heaven knows what sweet hostess may not greet your youthship to-night! And if your soul cries not out for fair adventure in forest depth, there, at least, is a poor dumb thing that craves stable and corn." As he spoke, he stepped nimbly to the injured horse and unhitched the reins from the tree. "Might you not have bathed those cut knees?" he exclaimed, shooting a look of rebuke over the animal's meek head. "And the kindly brook running charity at your elbow!"