Selected Stories of Bret Harte

“I WHAT?”

“You ARE, you know, and that’s good enough for me, but I don’t even know your name.”

She laughed again, and after a pause, said: “Elsbeth.”

“But I couldn’t call you by your first name on our first meeting, you know.”

“Then you Americans are really so very formal—eh?” she said slyly, looking at her imprisoned hand.

“Well, yes,” returned Hoffman, disengaging it. “I suppose we are respectful, or mean to be. But whom am I to inquire for? To write to?”

“You are neither to write nor inquire.”

“What?” She had moved in her seat so as to half-face him with eyes in which curiosity, mischief, and a certain seriousness alternated, but for the first time seemed conscious of his hand, and accented her words with a slight pressure.

“You are to return to your hotel presently, and say to your landlord: ‘Pack up my luggage. I have finished with this old town and my ancestors, and the Grand Duke, whom I do not care to see, and I shall leave Alstadt tomorrow!’”

“Thank you! I don’t catch on.”

“Of what necessity should you? I have said it. That should be enough for a chivalrous American like you.” She again significantly looked down at her hand.

“If you mean that you know the extent of the favor you ask of me, I can say no more,” he said seriously; “but give me some reason for it.”

“Ah so!” she said, with a slight shrug of her shoulders. “Then I must tell you. You say you do not know the Grand Duke and Duchess. Well! THEY KNOW YOU. The day before yesterday you were wandering in the park, as you admit. You say, also, you got through the hedge and interrupted some ceremony. That ceremony was not a Court function, Mr. Hoffman, but something equally sacred—the photographing of the Ducal family before the Schloss. You say that you instantly withdrew. But after the photograph was taken the plate revealed a stranger standing actually by the side of the Princess Alexandrine, and even taking the PAS of the Grand Duke himself. That stranger was you!”

“And the picture was spoiled,” said the American, with a quiet laugh.

“I should not say that,” returned the lady, with a demure glance at her companion’s handsome face, “and I do not believe that the Princess—who first saw the photograph—thought so either. But she is very young and willful, and has the reputation of being very indiscreet, and unfortunately she begged the photographer not to destroy the plate, but to give it to her, and to say nothing about it, except that the plate was defective, and to take another. Still it would have ended there if her curiosity had not led her to confide a description of the stranger to the Police Inspector, with the result you know.”

“Then I am expected to leave town because I accidentally stumbled into a family group that was being photographed?”

“Because a certain Princess was indiscreet enough to show her curiosity about you,” corrected the fair stranger.

“But look here! I’ll apologize to the Princess, and offer to pay for the plate.”

“Then you do want to see the Princess?” said the young girl smiling; “you are like the others.”

“Bother the Princess! I want to see YOU. And I don’t see how they can prevent it if I choose to remain.”

“Very easily. You will find that there is something wrong with your passport, and you will be sent on to Pumpernickel for examination. You will unwittingly transgress some of the laws of the town and be ordered to leave it. You will be shadowed by the police until you quarrel with them—like a free American—and you are conducted to the frontier. Perhaps you will strike an officer who has insulted you, and then you are finished on the spot.”

The American’s crest rose palpably until it cocked his straw hat over his curls.

“Suppose I am content to risk it—having first laid the whole matter and its trivial cause before the American Minister, so that he could make it hot for this whole caboodle of a country if they happened to ‘down me.’ By Jove! I shouldn’t mind being the martyr of an international episode if they’d spare me long enough to let me get the first ‘copy’ over to the other side.” His eyes sparkled.

“You could expose them, but they would then deny the whole story, and you have no evidence. They would demand to know your informant, and I should be disgraced, and the Princess, who is already talked about, made a subject of scandal. But no matter! It is right that an American’s independence shall not be interfered with.”

She raised the hem of her handkerchief to her blue eyes and slightly turned her head aside. Hoffman gently drew the handkerchief away, and in so doing possessed himself of her other hand.

“Look here, Miss—Miss—Elsbeth. You know I wouldn’t give you away, whatever happened. But couldn’t I get hold of that photographer—I saw him, he wanted me to sit to him—and make him tell me?”

“He wanted you to sit to him,” she said hurriedly, “and did you?”

“No,” he replied. “He was a little too fresh and previous, though I thought he fancied some resemblance in me to somebody else.”

“Ah!” She said something to herself in German which he did not understand, and then added aloud:

“You did well; he is a bad man, this photographer. Promise me you shall not sit for him.”

“How can I if I’m fired out of the place like this?” He added ruefully, “But I’d like to make him give himself away to me somehow.”

“He will not, and if he did he would deny it afterward. Do not go near him nor see him. Be careful that he does not photograph you with his instantaneous instrument when you are passing. Now you must go. I must see the Princess.”

“Let me go, too. I will explain it to her,” said Hoffman.

She stopped, looked at him keenly, and attempted to withdraw her hands. “Ah, then it IS so. It is the Princess you wish to see. You are curious—you, too; you wish to see this lady who is interested in you. I ought to have known it. You are all alike.”

He met her gaze with laughing frankness, accepting her outburst as a charming feminine weakness, half jealousy, half coquetry—but retained her hands.

“Nonsense,” he said. “I wish to see her that I may have the right to see you—that you shall not lose your place here through me; that I may come again.”

“You must never come here again.”

“Then you must come where I am. We will meet somewhere when you have an afternoon off. You shall show me the town—the houses of my ancestors—their tombs; possibly—if the Grand Duke rampages—the probable site of my own.”

She looked into his laughing eyes with her clear, stedfast, gravely questioning blue ones. “Do not you Americans know that it is not the fashion here, in Germany, for the young men and the young women to walk together—unless they are VERLOBT?”

“VER—which?”

“Engaged.” She nodded her head thrice: viciously, decidedly, mischievously.

“So much the better.”

“ACH GOTT!” She made a gesture of hopelessness at his incorrigibility, and again attempted to withdraw her hands.

“I must go now.”

“Well then, good-by.”

It was easy to draw her closer by simply lowering her still captive hands. Then he suddenly kissed her coldly startled lips, and instantly released her. She as instantly vanished.

“Elsbeth,” he called quickly. “Elsbeth!”

Her now really frightened face reappeared with a heightened color from the dense foliage—quite to his astonishment.

“Hush,” she said, with her finger on her lips. “Are you mad?”

“I only wanted to remind you to square me with the Princess,” he laughed as her head disappeared.