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CHAPTER XXXII

A CRUSADE

“SEE,” said Baldassare the Italian, “what comes of domestic secrets! Thus Destiny uses the follies of men; for she is immutable and passionless, and never forgives the least transgression.”

“See,” cried Miss Diana, “what comes of oppressing women! Had Dolores of Arisaig (Poor Thing!!) only enjoyed that Freedom of Action which should justly have been hers, she would never” (this with elaborate bangle accompaniment and much emphatic business with the eyebrows) "NEVER – have begun her career by a clandestine marriage!”

“See,” moaned my Lady herself, "how fatal a thing is this duality of sex, how hideous a calamity is woman’s love! In such a world, the one blunder of every human life must ever and unexceptionally be this – to have been born!”

“See,” mused Sir Godfrey Templar, “what comes of imprudence in love affairs, and of indulgence in jealous passion! Early discretion, temperance, and calm inquiry would avert all the deplorably mischievous events of which this is an example; events with which idle and unreasoning people charge the shoulders of a mythic Fate!”

“See,” said Adelheid Stern, “what comes of marrying and giving in marriage! Ne faut il pas changer tout ça? Meine Königinn, let us make a Crusade!”

“A Crusade, my darling!”

“And why not? No husband binds you over to keep the peace, – Dame Fortune holds no hostages of yours; you have freedom, health, beauty, youth, energy, wit, money, – what lack you yet, save to enter the Kingdom of Heaven? And as for me, henceforward I renounce the stage and its garish lights for ever! I will never sing again for such mean end and for the pleasure of such base ignoble souls as theirs who night after

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night of the past year have criticised and stared at me from box and stall and parterre – perfumed painted hags, with shrivelled cheeks and tarnished honour; mindless debauchees with insolent eyes and febrile tongues; old idiots of seventy; rakes of nineteen; women who have sold their virtue to disease and a coronet, or to old age and his money-bags; mothers and daughters and sons, whose faces sicken my heart as I gaze upon them and remember what false and shameful lives they lead from day to day and year to year. No, Hertzens Königinn, I will have no more of the theatre, for even the joy I find in my art can blind one no longer into patient tolerance of such loathly sights and meretricious triumphs as these! My engagement at the Opera terminated on that fatal night, and with it a career which shall never be renewed. A voice too powerful to be resisted calls to me evermore – my heart responds with throes of longing; – I will rise with the spirit of my Love through sphere after sphere. Ah, Meine Königinn, let us make a Crusade!”

And they made it.

But what that crusade was, it scope, its incidental objects, and its crowning ultimatum, together with the stirring adventures of these two virgin knights “sans peur et sans reproche;” all these and vastly more thereunto appertaining, must I reserve for the fruitful subject of a future Romaunt. For indeed, so fondly attached have I become to stately, plump, decisive Miss Di, and to her etherial friend the modern Queen of Faërie, that I vow I cannot find in my heart to dismiss them from these scanty pages with an eternal farewell. Nay, let us meet again, dear Amazon of the warlike bangles; and you, sweet Britomart, most fair and radiant Star of the Teutonic Fatherland – prithee whisper not so early a Lebensiewohl for evermore! Surely it is but a turn of the road that hides you both for a time, while I trudge on without you through the weary dust, and muse the while upon your pleasant discourses and honest indignation; – your tresses of floating sunlight and deep dramatic eyes!