While his late worshippers were trampling his memory in the mire, the Baron von Blitzenberg, deserted and dejected, his face still buried in his hands, endured the slow passage of the doleful afternoon. Unlike the prisoner at The Lash, who, by a coincidence that happily illustrates the dispensations of Providence, was undergoing at the same moment an identical ordeal, the Baron had no optimistic, whimsical philosophy to fall back upon. Instead, he had a most tender sense of personal dignity that had been egregiously outraged--and also a wife. Indeed, the thought of Alicia and of Alicia's parent was alone enough to keep his head bowed down.
“Ach, zey most not know,” he muttered. “I shall give moch money--hondreds of pound--not to let zem find out. Oh, what for fool have I been!”
So deeply was he plunged in these sorrowful meditations, and so constantly were they concerned with the two ladies whose feelings he wished to spare, that when a hum of voices reached his ear, one of them strangely--even ominously--familiar, he only thought at first that his imagination had grown morbidly vivid. To dispel the unpleasant fancies suggested by this imagined voice, he raised his head, and then the next instant bounded from his chair.
Too thunderstruck to move, he saw his prison door open, and there, behold! stood the Countess of Grillyer, a terrible look upon her high-born features, a Darius at either shoulder. In silence they surveyed one another, and it was Mr. Maddison who spoke first.
“Guess this is a friend of yours,” he observed.
One thought and one only filled the prisoner's mind--she must leave him, and immediately.
“You do not know me?” repeated the Countess in a voice rich in promise.
“She knows you all right,” said the millionaire.
“Says she does,” put in Ri in a lower voice; “but I wouldn't lay much money on her word either.”
“Rudolph! You pretend you do not know me?” cried the Countess between wrath and bewilderment.
“I never did ever see sochlike a voman before,” reiterated the Baron.
“What do you say to that, ma'am?” inquired Mr. Maddison.
“I say--I blush to say--that this wretched young man is my son-in-law,” declared the Countess.
As she had come to the house inquiring merely for Lord Tulliwuddle, and been conducted straight to the prisoner's cell, the stupefying effect of this announcement may readily be conceived.