Urgent Situation Arisen

At that, Herman burst out laughing. He had grown awfully free with his laughter of late.

It hardly seems worth a laugh that loud.

I gave him a strange look, and he wiped the corner of his eye and jerked his chin at the box.

“Open it. It’s beautiful enough that if there’s no room left on your neck, you’ll want to wear it on your head instead.”

He pressed me to hurry up and open it. By now he had given me no end of gifts, and not once had I let any real feeling show for a single one of them. Still, I could not hold out against that dogged gaze of his, so I opened the box, arranging my face into something like keen anticipation.

“…This is.”

I had meant to put on a reaction a shade larger than life, to live up to his expectations. But the moment I laid eyes on the jewel my mouth fell open of its own accord. It would have been only a small exaggeration to say the light was pouring out of it. Nestled carefully inside the box lay that diamond necklace, the very one the actress had worn at the opera that day.

“However did you come by this.”

Just as I had guessed at the time, the necklace had been impossible to get hold of from the very day after the performance. The tabloids splashed it across every page; not the richest man alive could buy one for any premium he cared to offer, and first-rate counterfeits flooded out to be traded under the counter.

“There’s nothing money can’t do.”

Herman said.

“They said even money couldn’t get one.”
“That’s because it isn’t only money that I have.”

I tilted my head, as though to ask what he could possibly mean by that, but he plainly had no intention of wasting his breath on an explanation.

The jewel blazed in the sunlight, and it looked nothing like a counterfeit, nothing like some inferior stone. Not that Herman Ernst would ever have spent money on a thing so shabby.

Even so, this is far too…

I was just thinking it a gift too fine for me by half.

“!”

Herman had dropped to one knee in front of me, all at once, looking up with a shameless sort of composure.

“Wh-what do you think you’re doing?”

I made to rise from my seat, but the hand that caught hold of me would not let go.

“Don’t do this — get up, quickly, Herman.”

He gave no answer. He only curved the corners of his mouth up, gently.

“Your hand.”
“Sorry?”
“Give me your hand.”

I was flustered for a moment, but I held out my hand as though bewitched.

He gazed at it a while, then drew it softly toward himself. From the inside pocket of his jacket he took a small box and opened it carefully for me to see.

“I couldn’t very well buy only the necklace.”

Inside was a silver ring set with a diamond.

“The necklace is more than enough — what do I want with a ring on top of it…”
“They come as a pair, so I’m told. The necklace and the ring.”
“Don’t give me excuses.”
“You’re right, it’s an excuse. I thought if I could get at least this much onto you, perhaps you wouldn’t run off anymore. So I bought it.”

Then he bit his lip, looking faintly abashed, and went on.

“And besides, that bare finger of yours has been nagging at me.”

Somehow he looked nervous, as though he wanted to slip the ring on that very instant and was holding himself back by main force. My heart pounded, thud, thud. Gratitude, guilt, perhaps fear. I could not have said which of them it was I felt.

Am I allowed to take that ring?

It was not that I felt any pang of conscience over having stolen what belonged to Gloria. What stopped me was that the happiness I felt could never, ever become real, and that being unreal, it could vanish at any moment.

It was a feeling like the price of a sin.

The ring shone as brilliantly as Herman’s love.

The moment that ring is slipped onto my finger.

I would go on living in fear and trembling, as though I had put on a counterfeit diamond ring.

“Herman, there’s something I have to say to you.”

I had not the courage to confess the truth. A sense of debt had simply seized me, as though I owed him some word or other, and so I blurted out whatever came, rambling, not knowing myself what I was saying.

“I won’t leave without a word, the way I did at the ball. That day, I…”
“I understand. You needn’t say any more.”

Herman cut me off all at once.

“We’ve already talked that one through quite enough.”

Instinctively I looked into his eyes. Something had struck deep roots in them and settled there, firm and immovable.

A will, utterly resolute, never to let me slip away.

“I love you, and you came back to me. Nothing beyond that concerns me. I mean it.”

Had anyone ever given me a love so absolute as this? No. Never.

I knew well enough that Herman’s love could never wholly be mine. And yet I wanted to gather even that half of a love into my arms.

Even a false moment like this makes me so happy.

I wanted to be greedy, and gladly. Never had I longed so desperately to be ‘Gloria.’ Not Gloria in name only, but the ‘real Gloria,’ the one who could stand proudly at Herman’s side.

Knock, knock. Just then someone rapped urgently at the door.

“Master. It’s urgent.”

Herman’s eyes went to the firmly shut door, and mine with them.

“It’s — word is an urgent telegram has come from the ducal lands.”

The butler’s voice was rigid with strain. Herman slipped the ring box back into his inside pocket and rose hurriedly from where he knelt.

I would not realize until long, long afterward that I had never taken the ring from his hand, and never had the portrait photograph taken with him.

Having sent the telegram off to the Ernst townhouse in the capital, the head housekeeper, on her way out of the telegraph office, was hard put to it to hide her badly trembling hands.

“Wh-what manner of thunderbolt out of a clear blue sky is this…”

Tess clasped her wrinkled hands together and tried to steady herself, but when she thought of what had befallen them she could do nothing of the kind. Had she not bitten her tongue and stammered over the very words as she dictated the message to the clerk? The man had gone so far as to push a glass of cold water at her and beg her to please calm herself.

Urgent situation arisen. Immediate return required. Husband and wife together without fail. On no account delay.

Never in her life had she sent so long a telegram, and a telegram was paid for by the letter. But she could not set the true reason down in writing, and there was no other way to convey how desperately urgent it was.

If word were to leak out wrongly among the telegraph clerks, even by chance…

The mere thought of it was dreadful. The survival of House Ernst hung upon this.

“Hoo. Hoo.”

Tess kept repeating the breathing exercise Hoillun had taught her, but her heart went on hammering fit to burst and showed not the slightest sign of settling.

“Tess!”

Hoillun had been waiting for her outside the telegraph office, and he came hurrying over faster than she had ever seen him move.

“H-Hoillun.”
“Did it go off all right? No mistakes?”
“Of course not. If I’d made so much as a single slip…”

She must have pictured what would have followed. Her face crumpled all at once, wretchedly.

“If it went off all right, that’s enough. Let’s get back to the castle first.”

He soothed her and opened the carriage door. Tess, adrift somewhere between fury and despair, let him take her hand and barely managed to climb in.

“Oh, our poor master. What is to become of him, truly.”

All the way from the town to the ducal lands, Tess wept without pause. And all the while she was afraid her fury would carry beyond the carriage. Whenever her temper broke, she glanced once out of the window, made certain there was no one about, and only then let herself cry out.

“What in the world can my lady be thinking!”

Hoillun sweated with the effort of calming her.

“Do settle down. This isn’t a situation anger will solve.”
“Settle down, indeed! How can you say such a thing at a time like this?”
“It isn’t a certain thing yet. My lady may well have—”
“No — don’t you go calling her ‘my lady’! I’ll not have that hopeless woman called ‘my lady’, not by me!”

He drew a handkerchief from his inside pocket and pressed it into her hand.

“Hasty anger only ruins everything. You’re not a small child anymore — you’re old enough to know better than this.”

At that, Tess’s weeping only rose the higher. Only then did he understand that he had misspoken, and he shut his mouth in a hurry.

“Not certain, is it! And what exactly is it that isn’t certain! When you saw with your own two eyes the things that grubby old woman brought us for proof!”

Even now, remembering that morning, her whole body shook. She could not go on, and sagged back against the seat as though she might faint.

Before she knew it the carriage had entered the ducal lands, with nothing ahead of it now but the drawbridge. It was about then that Tess, who had been dabbing at her tears the whole way, sat bolt upright.

“It won’t do.”
“What is it now, Tess.”
“I’ll just believe I’ve grown so old I’ve gone senile. Think as I may, there’s no other way to settle this.”

The carriage came to a screeching halt. Before Hoillun could stop her she flung herself out of it and made for the castle.

Please, let it be that I am seeing things, with my dying day so near at hand.

Tess begged for all she was worth, wringing her hands raw. But her desperate prayer plummeted to the ground before it had gone very far at all.

“…Master. It would be better if I simply died.”

Tess sank down where she stood, before the front gate of the ducal castle.

Behind the old woman who had come to the castle that morning, a scrawny, skin-and-bone child stood snivelling, pitiful to see.