Conrad and Gretel beamed on Poopendyke. They thanked him so profoundly, that I couldn't help feeling a bit sorry for myself, a tyrant without a backbone.
"Jah, jah!" Conrad cried gladly. "To-morrow she will explain. Time enough, Herr Poopendyke. Time enough, eh?"
"Well," said I, somewhat feebly, "where do I come in?"
They caught the note of surrender in my voice and pounced upon their opportunity. Before they had finished with me, it was quite thoroughly established that I was not to come in at all until my neighbour was ready to admit me. They convinced me that I was a meek, futile suppliant and not the master of a feudal stronghold. Somehow I was made to feel that if I didn't behave myself I stood in considerable danger of being turned off the place. However, we forced something out of Schmick before his stalwart sons came tramping up the stairs to rescue him. The old man gave us a touch of inside history concerning Schloss Rothhoefen and its erstwhile powerful barons, not to minimise in the least sense the peculiar prowess of the present Amazon who held forth to-night in the east wing and who, I had some reason to suspect, was one of the family despite the unmistakable flavour of Fifth Avenue and Newport.
About the middle of the nineteenth century the last of the real barons—the powerful, land-owning, despotic barons, I mean—came to the end of his fourscore years and ten, and was laid away with great pomp and glee by the people of the town across the river. He was the last of the Rothhoefens, for he left no male heir. His two daughters had married Austrian noblemen, and neither of them produced a male descendant. The estate, already in a state of financial as well as physical disintegration, fell into the hands of women, and went from bad to worse so rapidly that long before the last quarter of the century was fairly begun the castle and the reduced holdings slipped away from the Rothhoefens altogether and into the control of the father of the Count from whom I purchased the property. The Count's father, it appears, was a distiller of great wealth in his day, and a man of action. Unfortunately he died before he had the chance to carry out his projects in connection with the rehabilitation of Schloss Rothhoefen, even then a deserted, ramshackle resort for paying tourists and a Mecca for antique and picture dealers.
The new Count—my immediate predecessor—was not long in dissipating the great fortune left by his father, the worthy distiller. He had run through with the bulk of his patrimony by the time he was twenty-five and was pretty much run down at the heel when he married in the hope of recouping his lost fortune.
The Schmicks did not like him. They did not approve of him as lord and master, nor was it possible for them to resign themselves to the fate that had put this young scapegrace into the shoes, so to speak, of the grim old barons Rothhoefen, who whatever else they may have been in a high-handed sort of way were men to the core. This pretender, this creature without brains or blood, this sponging reprobate, was not to their liking, if I am to quote Conrad, who became quite forceful in his harangue against the recent order of things.
He, his wife and his sons, he assured me, were full of rejoicing when they learned that the castle had passed from Count Hohendahl's hands into mine. I, at least, would pay them their wages and I might, in a pinch, be depended upon to pension them when they got too old to be of any use about the castle.
At any rate, it seems, I was a distinct improvement over the Count, who had been their master for a dozen very lean and unprofitable years. Things might be expected to look up a bit, with me at the head of the house. Was it not possible for a new and mighty race to rise and take the place of the glorious Rothhoefens? A long line of Baron Schmarts? With me as the prospective root of a thriving family tree! At least, that is what Conrad said, and I may be pardoned for quoting him.
I am truly sorry the old rascal put it into my head.
But the gist of the whole matter was this: There are no more Rothhoefens, and soon, God willing, there would be no more Hohendahls. Long live the Schmarts! Conrad invariably pronounced my name with the extra consonants and an umlaut.
All attempts on my part to connect the lady in the east wing with the history of the extinct Rothhoefens were futile. He would not commit himself.
"Well," said I, yawning in helpless collusion with the sleepy Gretel, "we'll let it go over till morning. Call me at seven, Britton."
Conrad made haste to assure me that the lady would not receive me before eleven o'clock. He begged me to sleep till nine, and to have pleasant dreams.
I went to bed but not to sleep. It was very clear to me that my neighbour was a disturber in every sense of the word. She wouldn't let me sleep. For two hours I tried to get rid of her, but she filtered into my brain and prodded my thoughts into the most violent activity. She wouldn't stay put.
My principal thoughts had to do with her identity. Somehow I got it into my head that she was one of the female Rothhoefens, pitiable nonentities if Conrad's estimate is to be accepted. A descendant of one of those girl-bearing daughters of the last baron! It sounded very agreeable to my fancy's ear, and I cuddled the hope that my surmise was not altogether preposterous.
My original contention that she was a poor relation of old Schmick and somewhat dependent upon him for charity—to say the least—had been set aside for more reliable convictions. Instead of being dependent upon the Schmicks, she seemed to be in an exalted position that gave her a great deal more power over them than even I possessed: they served her, not me. From time to time there occurred to me the thought that my own position in the household was rather an ignoble one, and that I was a very weak and incompetent successor to baronial privileges, to say nothing of rights. A real baron would have had her out of there before you could mention half of Jack Robinson, and there wouldn't have been any sleep lost over distracting puzzles. I deplored my lack of bad manners.
It was quite reasonable to assume that she was young, but the odds were rather against her being beautiful. Pretty women usually adjure such precautions as veils. Still, this was speculation, and my reasoning is not always sound, for which I sometimes thank heaven. She had a baby. At least, I suppose it was hers. If not, whose? This set me off on a new and apparently endless round of speculation, obviously silly and sentimental.
Now I have humbly tried to like babies. My adolescent friends and acquaintances have done their best to educate me along this particular line, with the result that I suppose I despise more babies than any man in the world. My friends, it would appear, are invariably married to each other and they all have babies for me to go into false ecstasies over. No doubt babies are very nice when they don't squawk or pull your nose or jab you in the eye, but through some strange and prevailing misfortune I have never encountered one when it was asleep. If they are asleep, the parents compel me to walk on tip-toe and speak in whispers at long range; the instant they awake and begin to yawp, I am ushered into the presence, or vice versa, and the whole world grows very small and congested and is carried about in swaddling clothes.
There is but one way for a bachelor to overcome his horror of babies, and he shouldn't wait too long.
I went to sleep about four o'clock, still oppressed by the dread of meeting a new baby.
My contact with the one hundred and sixty-nine sight-seers was brief but exceedingly convincing. They invaded the castle before I was out of bed, having—as I afterwards heard—the breweries, an art gallery and the Zoological gardens to visit before noon and therefore were required to make an early start. The cathedral, which is always open to visitors and never has any one sleeping in it, was reserved for the afternoon.
I was aroused from my belated sleep by the sound of mighty cataracts and the tread of countless elephants. Too late I realised that the tourists were upon me! Too late I remembered that the door to my room had been left unlocked! The hundred and
