PART III.

BARON TRENCK.

VIII.

THE PRINCESS AMELIA IS BIDDEN TO A BALL.

Now begins the third period of my eventful life. I was alone, I had no longer with me the brother who had been my companion ever since the day of my

first

appearance in the world. I cannot say that I felt much regret at his loss, for he was after all but a sorry dull dog. My experience of seven years' solitude with him in the book-case proved that. But still, as I had been so long in the habit of having him before my eyes, and of contemplating my sweet image in his own, I certainly did miss him at first a great deal. I was replaced on my own pedestal in the boudoir, and I was given for a companion a little insignificant Dresden lamb, which never ceased cropping the herbage night and day, and yet never could manage to swallow the little blue flower which hung from its mouth. However, in this case I was never made to suffer any of the torments of jealousy, for I became at once the object of all my mistress's favour and attention.

She loved me more than ever. She was grateful to me for having brought the tidings from Magdeburg, which had given her a new existence; something to live for, a motive for struggling against the despair which had assailed her, ere the news of Trenck had reached her, and she would sometimes tell the king that he had never given her so much pleasure as when he brought back the favourite toys of her childhood. The poor vain "philosopher" would believe every word, little dreaming that the real cause of her love for me was my having been instrumental in deceive

From the hour of my restoration to favour, I became initiated into all the woful secrets of her life. I even learnt with many a self-reproach for the eagerness with which I had longed for emancipation, all the utter nothingness of grandeur, all the misery which may be contained within the gilded saloons, the tapestried chambers of palaces, and which exceeds in bitterness the misery engendered by poverty and privation in the hut of the starving peasant. Here was a strong and loving heart sickening with hope deferred, a noble mind o’erthrown with disappointment, broken by tyranny; a mind which I had known so guileless and so true, now shattered by solitude, and yet trampled on even though it was already in the dust. I could not disguise the fact from my own sad conviction. My once stout-hearted, strong-minded Amelia was indeed, as she herself had said, “ die Närrinn,” the mad one and the fool!

For some time, however, after my return to her boudoir, she seemed to put a kind of control upon her feelings, at least before strangers, she struggled, and with success, to appear calm and composed, so long as there were witnesses present. I was the sole beholder of the fits of frenzy which would seize

upon her when none were nigh-in the silence of night-in the solitude and repose of noon.

She would sometimes call aloud with wailing accents on the name of Trenck, or remain for hours gazing on the stream which rolled beneath her window; for the king had kept his

ing him.

their graves."

promise, and now, instead of the court-yard and palace-gate, we looked out upon the marshy river and its islands, where the old king had loved to smoke and drink, and hold council when in his moods of merriment.

Often and often has the poor princess sat at this window the whole night inhaling the noxious fog, and sometimes, especially at the full moon, holding forth clamorous and incoherent discourse, then sinking exhausted into the melting mood, weeping as if her heart would break, until, worn out with excitement and fatigue, she would fall into slumber even as she sat at the open window, and the boatmen who passed along the palace walls would be startled at the sight of that pale, haggard face in the grim light of dawn, and ply his oar with redoubled vigour; and while muttering a prayer recall to mind the old curse of Brandenburg, that " living they shall rest not in their beds, and dead find no repose within

But mad as was my mistress, yet she still contrived to baffle one who gloried in excess of cunning and good sense. Twice did she find means through her own ingenuity, and the instrumentality of Heinrich, to give news of her existence to the poor captive at Spandau, and twice did she receive in her turn, once through some lines written on the inside of a glove left in her toilet in mistake ; once pricked with a pin upon the vine leaves which encircled some splendid peaches sent as a present from the king himself

. Verily, I knew not which to admire most, the ingenuity of the contriver of these missives, or the confidence and perseverance displayed in the discovery of them. It is but fair to

say,

that ever since the day when her own rash passion had led to the discovery of the paper contained among the mutilated remains of my brother, she suffered no article, however insignificant, to escape an unwearied search. This was considered a new symptom of her disease, and duly commented upon by the doctors, and combatted by remedies, which often made the poor patient smile, to think what fools the “mad doctors" must be.

The king was greatly pleased at this change from violence to apparent calm; he augured thence that Trenck would, after all, be forgotten, and congratulated himself

the firmness with which he had acted from the first, by incarcerating the offender so strictly, that it was impossible for him to hold communication with any living soul, and by forbidding his name to be pronounced, under pain of increasing his punishment. The change flattered the amour propre, of which he certainly possessed for a “philosopher,” a most inordinate share, as he considered it entirely his own work, the result of the combination of his own fortunate ideas. And during all this time any stranger who had witnessed his behaviour to the princess, would have deemed him the most devoted and affectionate of brothers. There was no end to the small attentions, the delicate presents, the neat, well-turned compliments which he lavished upon her. Flowers, of his own rearing, fruit plucked by his own hand (that hand which had signed Trenck's condemnation to imprisonment for life in one of the worst dungeons of the kingdom), verses, too, hexameters, addressed to his “loved Amelia," written in a fair hand (perhaps with the very pen which had traced the cruel sentence of eternal separation between the lovers) were daily brought on silver salvers as presents and little tokens of affection from the royal pedant, but never more was the name of Trenck alluded to between the brother and sister. The latter had discovered at last that her father's estimation of his son's character was right in every respect, and she was determined to trust to herself alone, and to turn all

geon is not the

grave-ten

her energies to one sole object, the release of Trenck from his noisome dungeon, ten fathoms deep below the earth at Spandau.

To all her plans—to all her hopes—I was a silent unheeded witness, and like herself, grew elated or depressed according as the message bore promise of exertion or dread of failure. The words upon the vine leaves, which I have mentioned, were few and short. I knew them well, for twenty times a day would she draw them from her bosom, spelling the words letter by letter. “Courage--hope-none strive in vain—there is a God above-a dun

years

of life is not eternity." And each time she read them in a whisper I shared the thrill of mingled terror and delight which made her start and tremble and look around with a frightened glance lest there should be spies and listeners near. Some time had elapsed since the arrival of this latter message,

and

every hour, every minute, did I observe my mistress grow more uneasy, her whole days, and sometimes her nights too were spent in walking

from the balcony window on the river, to the window looking on the garden, then after gazing from each with the most intense anxiety, she would return and listen at the door with such melancholy that it made my

heart faint within me.

Some time had passed amid this wearing emotion, when one evening an event occurred which changed the current of

my

fortunes. It was the month of June, the weather had been warm, and the princess was reclining fatigued and exhausted upon the ottoman of her boudoir. The day had been one of much excitement, and of new undreaded agony. The king had announced to her as abruptly and coarsely as her father would have done, the arrival at Potsdam of the reigning Duke of HesseHockelberg, a newly-made widower, in search of a second wife, accompanying the information with command to her to appear at the divers festivities which were to be given in honour of the visit of the prince, and also by another command, more fearful still than that of endeavouring to appear to the best advantage-as the alliance would be a good one-that it was time to think of an establishment; that nothing on earth was so inconvenient and ridiculous as a royal old maid ; in short, that the reigning Duke of Hesse-Hockelberg was fully disposed to greet the alliance with Prussia, and that, all things considered, Prussia had no right to disdain an alliance with Hesse-Hockelberg.

He saw not, or feigned not to see, the effect of his cruel words upon the poor heart-stricken princess, but ended his speech in his usual gallant and amiable manner, by requesting his beloved sister to allow him to be the bearer of the invitation for the ball which was to take place that evening in the palace, and which she had already refused to attend, when waited upon by the Lord Chamberlain. He did not exact her presence, he said, at the concert which was to precede the ball, as he knew she did not love music, and the fatigue might be too great, and he further added with a tenderness and affection truly fraternal, and worthy of so kind a brother, that he himself had chosen the costume which he begged of her to wear, that of a shepherdess of Lignon, with frizzed and powdered wig looped and banded with wreathes of roses, sky-blue skirt and velvet bodice, pink petticoat, and high-heeled shoes; the whole adorned with jewels in profusion, and lace and ribbons, too, wherever there was room to place them. And, moreover, out of consideration to her feelings, he had allowed the ladies to be masked, as he knew it would be more agreeable and comfortable to herself to escape the observations and comparisons which the remembrance of her beauty would occasion.

From this request there was no appeal. No plea which could be urged as excuse for non-attendance, neither sickness, nor fatigue, nor sorrow, nor disgust. And the poor girl bent her head without reply.

IX.

THE CAPTIVE FROM SPANDAU.

THE evening came, all radiance and joy; the illuminations of the palace lighted the horizon for many a mile. The strains of music, the sounds of mirth and revelling, were carried over the water at an early hour, and came up through the open window of the chamber where yet reposed in solitude and weariness the once fair and beauteous Princess of Prussia. The princess was attired for the ball, and lay, as usual, reclining on the ottoman in the state of listless apathy which ever followed the fits of excitement, like that she had experienced after the scene with her brother in the morning. The company was arriving fast, and the very walls shook with the rattle of the carriages. At every arrival Amelia would turn her head upon the cushions, and apply her smelling-bottle to her nostrils, as if by this means alone she kept herself from losing consciousness altogether. When all was quiet and the guests assembled in the concert-room, she raised her head languidly and gazed at the clock. “ Already nine!” she exclaimed ; “how short a time have I for peace! I'wo hours more and I must descend. Kosine will fetch me when the company are assembling in the ball-room.” She rang the little bell which stood on the table by her side, and when the maid answered the summons, she bade her shut the window which opened to the river, for her head could not bear the echo of the music that came up from the hall beneath the chamber. The casement was closed, and all then was silent. The room was dark too, for there was but one small shaded lamp upon the chimney. I hoped my dear mistress would be enabled thus to snatch a few moments' repose ere she ventured to surmount the fatigues of the ball. I gazed at her as she lay with something like the fond admiration I had felt for her in former years. Whether it was the change of costume, from the sombre garments which she adopted in ordinary, to the

gay and youthful one which she had been compelled to don upon this occasion, I know not, but she seemed to have grown as young as when I quitted her ten years before. Her features, softened by the light of the shaded lamp, her closed eyes and motionless attitude, gave her the look of dying. She lay thus, as I have described, still and motionless, and a careless observer would have deemed that she was sleeping, but I could perceive now and then a shiver which crept through her frame from head to foot, and which, as the weather was warm, and the windows all closed, could not proceed from cold. I knew it must arise from inward emotion. Every thing, by degrees, had subsided into silence about the palace, and nothing now disturbed the quiet of the hour save the murmur of the wind instruments of the band each time their aid was required in the execution of the concert, but the sound, muffled by the distance and the closed doors, came faint and soft like the wailing of the breeze, and added to the feeling of solitude in the chamber.

The princess remained seemingly near dead to all outward feeling, until the clock of the palace tolled the half-hour past eleven. It wanted now but half an hour to midnight, and she was then to re-appear in the world amid the crowd of revellers, and to wear the semblance of joy upon her brow even while her heart was breaking, and her soul tortured by despair. She raised herself slowly at the sound like one arising from the grave. 66 One half-hour more,'

,” she said, “ and I shall be summoned to grace the festival. It will, indeed, be a joyous sight. I who have not set foot in ball or revel for ten long years—but I am commanded to divert myself to-night, and must not fail. The last time I danced-let me see”-she leaned her head against the chimney and gazed down into the empty grate-"ay, I remember now, 'twas a Twelfth-night. Trenck drew the beau. How

my
heart beat when he named me to be queen in spite of

my brother's frown and the whispers of the Lord Chamberlain, who told him that by etiquette the choice should fall upon my eldest sister. How furious Trenck grew, and how the tears rushed to my eyes at this decision--children that we were ! How my father laughed, too, when Trenck swore, in his ungovernable rage, that it was not thus he understood the kingly privilege, and that sooner than forswear the right to choose his queen where it pleased him best, he would be no king at all!"

She took from her bosom the dried and withered yine leaves, which contained the last message from Trenck pricked upon their surface, and read them aloud for the millionth time

“ Courage-hope—there is a God above-eternal love-boundless gratitude-a dungeon is not the grave--ten years of life is not eternity!"

She folded them carefully and placed them once more in her bosom. “ How long--how wearisome, have seemed the days and nights since this message reached me !" she murmured in a faltering voice.

My heart bounded when I first perused the words ; I thought escape and liberty were nigh, but no ; all has been dark as ever since that time, and I have hoped in vain. But I am unjust. Alone-unaided—ten fathoms deep below the earth. How dared I hope—how dare I reproach him with inaction (for it is reproach, this unjust complaint), while I myself remain inert. Had I a heart and soul I should ere this have found means to aid him, and the dark hint thrown out to-day about the Duke of Hesse Hockelberg should hasten all my efforts--that is, if I were indeed worthy of him!”

She paused, and wrung her hands despairingly, and then resumed “But alas ! what could I do, helpless that I am, to assist him ? Am I not a prisoner as well as he ? Ay, and a more unhappy one still. He is not called upon to flatter and to lie. His soul is free at least, while mine"

She paused, and started, for a low mysterious cry caused her to turn; and, by a movement, she drew the mantle in which she was enveloped, ready to descend to the ball-room, close around her. She looked around the chamber-no one was there. The clock just then struck the three quarters ; she thought she had been deceived, that the noise she heard was but the warning tick, and she passed her hand across her forehead, and fanned herself vehemently.

“ How I start and tremble at the slightest sound !” she gasped ; "it was not always thus. Shame on those who fill me with such miserable fear !”

Again that sound! It came from the balcony. This time it absolutely