She shot a look of fury at her niece; then she nudged the Burgrave, who instantly reasseverated in his deep bass:
"The deed of annulment is drawn up, sire."
Jerome’s good humour returned. He rubbed his hands. In spite of all his royal assumption, much of the exuberant gesture of the Corsican had stuck to him, to the distaste of his stolid subjects.
"_Il faut aller vite, vite, alors_. We must make haste," he averred.
To make haste and enjoy was, indeed, the rule of his existence. Now, a Lent of unexampled rigour seemed inevitably drawing near him, and all the more vertiginous was his carnival. So vertiginous indeed, that, willingly blind though she was, the Queen, true German daughter of Würtemberg, had withdrawn from the whirl, giddy and panting, to take refuge at Napoleonshöhe till such time as her spouse would come to sober sense again.
Jerome considered the girl a moment longer in silence. That she should flush and pale beneath his glance, look anger at him from her deep eyes and then avert her head with an insulted turn of the neck, all added so much fuel to his easily kindled flame. He wished to go quick, quick; but if she gave him a bit of a chase, so much the better. And now he found a smile for Betty, and a gracious word, ere he passed on, taking the Burgrave by the arm. Betty might do very well for an idle hour, by-and-by, perhaps; but, heavens, how many Betties had he not known!
The Burgravine’s self-esteem was at once too profound and too sensitive not to realize the completeness of her failure. But vanity has its heroines. None could have guessed, as she paired off merrily with d’Albignac, the extent of her mortification. Yet it was something very little short of torture that she was enduring as she smiled and coquetted and fanned herself, and babbled her pretty babble.
"Das ist ein Klingen und Dröhnen Bon Pauken und Schalmei’n Dazwischen schluchzen und stöhnen Die guten Engelein." HEINE.
Sidonia slipped away alone to a shadowed window-recess. Under the insult of her aunt’s words, the insult of Jerome’s gaze, pain and anger had so burned within her as to exclude all other feelings. But in the "solitude of the crowd," her brain gradually cleared; and, as she reviewed the situation, a new feeling, a dread unnamed but overwhelming, began to take possession of her. With wits naturally alert, and to-night abnormally stimulated, she began to notice strange things about her. She was in danger—in danger of what, she knew not, but something horrible, unspeakable. The looks the King and d’Albignac had cast upon her, the glance of intelligence they had then exchanged, her uncle’s obsequious haste to disclaim her marriage, and her aunt’s public affront to her, were as many lightning flashes that showed the precipice yawning at her feet. Not a friend had she in the world to whom she could turn, save the man who did not love her, and a poor, wandering musician, now probably far away on some Thuringian road, playing gay tunes to the rhythm of his own incurable melancholy.