'Divine what is in that letter?' she said in a musing tone.

Suddenly a thought came to her. She remembered each word of that horrible letter. It was necessary his Highness should know she knew, yet imperative that her knowledge should appear to have been gained in his presence.

Wilhelmine had studied many books of magic and innumerable accounts of occult manifestations. She was half-dupe, half-charlatan, and indeed she possessed much magnetic power.

Now in Bavaria, some years before this scene at Ludwigsburg, there had been discovered an extraordinary peasant-girl gifted with rare faculties of clairvoyance, thought-reading, ecstatic trances, prophecies, and the rest. An account of her short twenty years of vision-tortured life had been published by the doctor of her village--a crank, and supposed wizard himself. This pamphlet Wilhelmine had read, as she read all books concerning mysterious manifestations. His Highness, however, would never look at anything treating of magic or witchcraft. He honestly disapproved of such things, and feared them; though, in contradiction, he was much attracted by his mistress's strange powers, which he affected to doubt, yet, in truth, he was terribly afraid at times.

It was certain that he knew nothing of the Seer of Altbach, and thus Wilhelmine felt a.s.sured she might risk the shamming of one of the peasant-girl's feats, palming it off as an original accomplishment.

She continued to implore the Duke to show her the letter, but he was obdurate; honour bound him, he said.

At length Wilhelmine's scheme had matured in her fertile brain, and she was ready to begin her daring comedy.

'I cannot rest while I am ignorant of the accusations in that letter.

There must be something terrible, some fearful wickedness against me, which you will not tell me, but which, like poison thrown into a well, will pollute each thought of me in your mind, till at length your love of me and your trust will die. Whereas, if I know of what I am accused, I can wrench out this poisonous root with the sword of Truth, for oh! love of mine, I am innocent, save for the sin of loving you.'

'And yet honour closes my lips! I swore to Forstner that his letters to me should never be divulged; and though he is doubtless a traitor to me, still I cannot absolve myself of my oath,' he answered sadly.

She stood up, and holding out both hands towards him, she said solemnly:

'Take both my hands in one of yours, look in my eyes, hold the letter on my brow, and I will tell you what he says. Thus your honour is cleared, for you have neither spoken nor given me the writing, but I shall have guessed.'

'What madness is this?' he cried angrily; 'your witch-working again! But if it calms you to play like this, I am ready to humour so ridiculous a whimsey.'

Half-laughing, half-annoyed, he took the letter from his pocket.

Wilhelmine laid her two hands in one of his and gazed into his eyes.

For a moment she stood as though hesitating, and the Duke felt her hands flutter like caught birds. Her eyes seemed to look into some far distance. Slowly she began in a low voice:

'Monseigneur, my Prince, and once my friend, you are being grossly abused, your n.o.ble trust and love is made mock of by a creature too vile for human words. A woman, who to her other lovers holds you up to scorn and ridicule--yes, ridicule of your pa.s.sion.' Her voice grew faint and faded into a whisper, and the hands which the Duke held trembled and twitched violently. Slowly, falteringly, she went on, sometimes reciting a whole sentence in the very words of the letter, sometimes only giving the gist; but always in the same low, monotonous voice, like the utterance of one who speaks in sleep.

The Duke stood rigid, fear and amazement written on his face. Once his hand, which held the letter to her brow, dropped to his side. Immediately the subtle comedian paused, moaning as though in physical pain. It was a magnificent bit of trickery; small marvel that his Highness was deceived.

When she had told him all the paper contained, she covered her face with her hands and fell to trembling as in an ague, moaning and sighing incessantly. In truth, she had worked herself into a fit of frantic emotion, and had her will been less strong, she must indeed have raved off into hysterics.

Now consider this thing. Here is a man who had lost a letter; who sought it; at length finding it safe in a locked bureau. The search takes place in the very presence of a being he had half accused of purloining the missing letter. This person, he is a.s.sured by a prince of the highest honour, has never left a crowded ballroom during the only hours when it would have been possible for her to have stolen the paper. Then he himself proposes, in jest, that she should guess the contents of a doc.u.ment, which he feels certain has been read by himself alone, and has merely been mislaid in a carefully locked bureau. This extraordinary feat she accomplishes in a seeming trance. Add to all this, that the woman is his beloved mistress, whom he ardently wishes to trust, and that often before she had told him she was gifted with occult powers. Is it matter of surprise that he implicitly believed Wilhelmine had accomplished a magic feat? White magic though; nothing evil here; on the contrary, almost a miracle, like some mediaeval ordeal through which her purity and innocence alone could have sustained her. Yet he questioned her.

Could she read any paper in that manner? She answered that she had never tried before. She spoke to him in gentle words, praying him to give good faith to her. She clung to him like a tired child. What man could resist her?

Then she talked of Forstner's conspiracy. She depicted the vileness of one who could write such a letter at the very hour when he was plotting to ruin the man to whom he penned words of pa.s.sionate exhortation and affection. She laid stress upon the treason against Eberhard Ludwig, and he in return flamed into anger concerning the design to murder this clinging, appealing woman. Chivalry, honour, duty, bound him to protect her. Very subtly she led him on: to protect in this case must be to revenge her.

Then she lashed him to a fury against the traitor who had plotted against so lenient a prince. Taking the letter from his Highness (he let her have it now without demur), she went through the list of accusations, refuting each statement, throwing the blame upon Forstner for the various monetary defections which he himself, in this letter, had proved to exist in the Ludwigsburg building accounts. She pointed out that Forstner should be punished heavily, both in just revenge and as a warning to others. At last Eberhard Ludwig yielded, and promised that she should dictate Forstner's sentence.

Forstner tarried at Stra.s.sburg. He believed his letter would awaken the Duke from his long, evil, delicious dream; but when days, weeks, months pa.s.sed without any change taking place at Ludwigsburg, and the Landhofmeisterin's triumph continued, Forstner's hopes waned. He dared not return to Wirtemberg, yet the care of his properties demanded his presence.

Meanwhile Eberhard Ludwig had permitted the Landhofmeisterin to work her will in the Forstner affair. Little guessed the poor fool, waiting at Stra.s.sburg, what a terrible net was being woven round him. Slowly, silently, with deadly patience, the Landhofmeisterin was collecting a thousand threads for this fabric. Doc.u.ments, statements, even the accounts of Forstner's private monies were bribed from his estate agents; each letter that he wrote, everything, was gathered by the Secret Service and brought to the Landhofmeisterin's office, where the long chain of evidence was being linked together by the Gravenitz and Schutz. She intended Forstner to be condemned, not only by the Duke's orders, but publicly, and on a charge so d.a.m.ning as to alienate all from him.

Incidentally, the d.u.c.h.ess Johanna Elizabetha would be deeply implicated.

In the January of 1712 Forstner at Stra.s.sburg received some warning, and fled to Paris. Here, at least, he believed himself safe from the machinations of the all-powerful Gravenitz. True, he was implicated in that feeble plot to murder her, which had failed because the young man he had hired to do the deed had unaccountably disappeared, his fellow-conspirators having never seen or heard of him since the night of the Ludwigsburg masquerade. Forstner often wondered whether the youth was imprisoned in one of Wirtemberg's grim fortresses--Hohenasperg, Hohen-Urach, or Hohen-Neuffen. He shuddered when he remembered how men vanished into the gloom of these strongholds, which are built into the rock of the steep hills, and are inaccessible as an eagle's eyrie.

Yet proof was wanting to convict him of contriving murder or political disturbance, and, at least, he was safe in Paris. Lulled into carelessness by the silence from Wirtemberg, he showed himself abroad, even attending the genial, informal receptions of the d.u.c.h.esse d'Orleans, that Princess of Bavaria who had succeeded, and by her st.u.r.dy, uncompromising treatment of the Duc d'Orleans, had revenged poor Henriette of England, his beautiful, brilliant, but little appreciated first wife.

Elizabeth Charlotte received Forstner with much condescension. Death had relieved her, in 1702, from her sickly, despicable spouse, and she was free to open her house to every German traveller, which, in his lifetime, Monsieur had always endeavoured to prevent.

One day when Forstner was journeying to visit the d.u.c.h.esse d'Orleans, he was arrested in the King's name and conveyed to the Bastille, where he was informed that he was accused of treason to the Duke of Wirtemberg, and of intent to murder several great personages of his Highness's court.

He was further informed that he would be sent to Stuttgart under escort as soon as the necessary arrangements could be completed.

In vain Forstner remonstrated that he could not be imprisoned in France for a political offence in Wirtemberg. In vain he protested and claimed the protection of Louis XIV. The King at Versailles was busied with the saving of his soul and with the doctoring of his gangrened knee. So the doors of the Bastille closed on Baron Forstner, and he was left to reflect upon the danger of casting aspersions on a woman's beauty.

After some months the rumour of Forstner's imprisonment reached the d.u.c.h.esse d'Orleans, who had believed her compatriot returned to Germany.

Now it was a ticklish thing for the d.u.c.h.ess to undertake intervention on behalf of a Protestant, for though she had joined the Church of Rome on her marriage to 'Monsieur,' still it was whispered in Paris that she had reprehensible leanings to the faith of her childhood.

Madame de Maintenon and the King were more than ever hostile towards heretics, and the Bavarian princess had received several sharp reproofs on the subject already.

Then came the news that Forstner had been condemned to death in Stuttgart, and that he was to be conveyed thither without delay.

The d.u.c.h.esse d'Orleans journeyed to Versailles, and demanded an audience of her august brother-in-law. The King was in an ungracious mood. He received his late brother's wife coldly. He regretted that she should espouse the cause of this foreigner. Really, he had no intention of interfering in the affairs of any petty German prince. This was merely a question of international law. If this 'Baron de Forstnere' were in the Bastille, let him stay there. Louis asked angrily if he were expected to interest himself in such unimportant details, when he was so profoundly troubled with affairs of State. Little wonder that the King was not in a favour-granting humour. The Congress of Utrecht was discussing peace, and Louis saw that though he had actually gained the day in the Spanish Succession War, still France had lost hugely in blood and gold, and was to lose still more in colonies.

But Elizabeth Charlotte was not to be put off thus easily. If it came to hard words, no one was more competent than she was to utter truth unshrinkingly. Petty German princes indeed! Louis had been anxious enough to share in the inheritance from a petty German prince, when, at the death of her father without male heirs, the Roi Soleil had seen a chance of grasping a portion of the Bavarian Palatinate! And so she told him in her loud voice and uncouth French. Madame de Maintenon interposed: Why did her Royal Highness take so deep an interest in this 'Forstnere?' she asked.

'Because he is a Bavarian, and his father and mine were friends,' she was told by the d.u.c.h.ess.

'Ah! a Bavarian--then a Catholique?' the saintly Marquise supposed.

'No indeed!'

Things looked very black for Forstner. But the d.u.c.h.esse d'Orleans played her trump card. Though a Protestant, Forstner was a virtuous man, and the reason of his disgrace in Wirtemberg was simply that he opposed the terrible licence of the Duke's mistress.

Now the Marquise de Maintenon was a little sensitive on the subject of mistresses, and when Elizabeth Charlotte invoked her aid against the machinations of a wanton, old Veuve Scarron changed her tone. Then in the midst of the discussion the King had a twinge in his gangrened knee, and signed Forstner's release, in order to be rid of this pertinacious princess.

Meanwhile there had been storms at Ludwigsburg. In December 1711 the new Emperor Charles VI., former pretender to the Spanish throne, was crowned Emperor at Frankfort. The reigning princes of the various allied German states attended the coronation of the German king, crowned Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire. Eberhard Ludwig of Wirtemberg repaired to Frankfort for the historic ceremony, and it was the right of the d.u.c.h.ess of Wirtemberg to attend, if she so desired; but Johanna Elizabetha remained in her dreary black-hung apartments, sewing coa.r.s.e linen garments for the poor, and weeping her desolation. Pageants were not for her obviously.

But the Landhofmeisterin demanded to go to Frankfort with her Duke.

Zollern and Madame de Ruth advised her to refrain from so preposterous a request; but she had set her mind upon it, and she importuned Serenissimus, who, poor man, was indeed all unable to grant her this whim.

There were pleadings, tears, angry words, finally a serious quarrel between the lovers. Friedrich Gravenitz, now a Privy Councillor and Minister of State, remonstrated pompously with his sister. He had gained nearly all he desired through her, and now affected to be the serious official, the hard-working minister and grave man of the world. She bade him return to his petty businesses of administration, and warned him that, did he interfere with her, she would cause him to be dismissed.

Friedrich aimed at being Premier of Wirtemberg, and thus he bowed down once more to the all-powerful lady. The Landhofmeisterin continued to pester the Duke to convey her to Frankfort. Then, in the midst of this quarrel, news came from Stetten that the d.u.c.h.ess-mother was sick unto death, and Serenissimus abruptly left Ludwigsburg to receive his mother's dying blessing.

He returned in a few days deeply saddened. He had arrived at his mother's deathbed too late; she had almost pa.s.sed away. True, her wan face had lit with love when Eberhard Ludwig stood beside her; bending over her, he had heard her murmur once more her favourite catchword, 'My absurd boy,' then a faint whisper of 'Johanna Elizabetha,' and the Duke knew that, with her last breath, the honest old lady had called him back to duty. But he returned to weep his mother's loss upon the breast of Wilhelmine von Gravenitz. In this softened mood, his Highness went near the granting his beloved's prayer, but Zollern stepped in and spoke privately with the Landhofmeisterin.

Directly after the d.u.c.h.ess-mother's obsequies the Duke rode northwards to Frankfort to attend the Emperor's coronation. He journeyed with his chief officers and guards, and his proud mistress was left behind in Wirtemberg. Yet she had gained another triumph. If the Duke could not grant her request concerning the coronation, what would he give her in compensation?

'Anything in the world you ask,' he had replied. And she had demanded Stetten, the d.u.c.h.ess-mother's dower-house! Zollern and Madame de Ruth were overwhelmed when they heard of it. Good heavens! what would the d.u.c.h.ess-mother have said? But on the day when Eberhard Ludwig rode to the coronation, the Landhofmeisterin's coach thundered through the fields to Stetten.