Dido and Pa (19 page)

All this time Dido had not once laid eyes on the margrave; but now she noticed him walk in at the end of the room farthest from the platform; his face looked puffed and red, oddly so—from bad temper, because the king had not come to his party, or for some other reason?—he walked, too, with a slight limp, and sometimes pressed a hand against the small of his back as if he had a pain there. Snatching a glass of champagne from the tray held by Dido, who happened to be nearest to him, he gulped it down
without looking at her. He was as gorgeously dressed as any of his guests, in white velvet with gold trimmings, which had the effect of making his face appear even redder and puffier.

"
Dear
excellency!" said a lady in a diamond coronet and amber satin gown. "We are
so
much looking forward to your musical treat."

"I am happy to think, Lady Maria, that you will not be disappointed."

The margrave was obviously making a strong effort to collect himself and behave as if nothing were amiss.

"Do,
do
tell me, margrave, who is to be healed? I am so curious..."

"Why, you see that row of seats to the right of the platform ... Some ailing Chelsea pensioners, some afflicted children from the Foundling Hospital, are to be brought; indeed, there they are now...."

Half a dozen elderly men wearing pensioners' uniforms, and limping on crutches, were followed by children who were wheeled in basket chairs.

"What a dismal sight!" whispered one lady. But others said, "How touching! What quaint mites! How wonderful it will be if this evening's program can really help them."

Somebody clapped hands for silence, and the margrave walked to the front of the orchestra and said:

"My friends, I am happy to welcome you here. I need say no more. My personal physician and medical adviser, Professor Willibald Finster, will explain to you about the use of Herr Bredalbane's music."

Dr. Finster, looking neat and brisk in black with a gray cravat, gave a short talk on the healing power of music, and that of Bredalbane in particular, with allusions to natural harmonies, waves of magnetism, currents of power, and other things that Dido did not understand. Croopus, she thought, does Pa's music really do all that? Or is it a load of boffle?

"Some people do say that the margrave himself is only kept alive by the power of this fellow's music..."

"He is not much of a recommendation for it, then; he looks far from well."

"Ah, but think how much worse he might be!"

"He is a strange fellow! What is he really after?"

Dido edged closer, hoping to learn something useful.

"Oh, power, undoubtedly," said Lady Maria's companion. He inserted a quizzing-glass into his elderly eye, in order to study the margrave more closely—but at this moment the group of musicians began to play, and, as always when she heard her father's music, Dido was swept away into another world, and a far more beautiful one, where everything was orderly and perfect, where no explanations were needed at all, because nothing could vary or be in any way better than it was.

The Tea Suite, played first, turned out to have many of her old favorite tunes in it—Tapioca Pudding, Galloping Mokes, The Lost Slipper, The Day Before the Day Before May Day, and Pennylope's Peevy, the tune that always, for some reason, made Dido think of her sister in a bad temper. Wonder where old Penny has got to now, with that button
hook fellow of hers? Dido mused; and then the music carried her on, through flowery fields, past rushing rivers, into a place of total content.

Too bad I ain't got a broken leg; this music'd fix it for me, she thought, and forgot to watch the audience.

She had positioned herself among the other pages, who were lined up against the long wall opposite the row of huge arched windows that looked out onto the river. The guests, glittering and plumed, randomly grouped on their gilt chairs, occupied the middle of the room, with the margrave among them; the sick people and children, with their nurses or attendants, were assembled in a small crescent near the orchestra platform; and beyond the great row of arched windows the snow fell steadily, and the river lapped higher and higher, flowing westward; then, as the tide came to its peak, the river began to eddy, the water waited, swung to and fro, then turned at last to flow in the reverse direction.

Dido wholly lost track of time while her father's music was playing. It might have lasted an hour, two hours, or three; she could not have said.

"My: that was really, really prime," she sighed to her neighbor, the redheaded page, when the final piece was finished, the last encore played, and her father, pale, sweating, disheveled, his wig slightly askew, had taken his final bow.

"Wonderful! Truly wonderful!" fluted Lady Maria to the margrave. "Your chapel-master is a true genius, dear Eisengrim. May we not meet him—converse with him?"—as Mr. Twite, with a last hasty bow, vanished through a door backstage, in pursuit of his musicians.

"Ah, no, dear lady—in most ways he is a rough diamond. It must be said that, apart from his music—which is everything—he has a rude, untrained mind, no conversation, no parts; in discourse with your ladyship he would be quite at a loss, unable to put two sentences together."

Hearing this, Dido flushed with indignation; but a moment's thought obliged her to admit that what the margrave said was mainly true; furthermore, Mr. Twite, carried away by excitement and success, might easily have been capable of forgetting his false identity as Bredalbane and letting some terrible cat out of the bag.

The margrave, Dido noticed, seemed to have derived considerable benefit from the music. His face was now a much more natural color, less bloated and flushed; he moved more freely, smiled and spoke more easily. But what about the sick children and the pensioners? Dido craned on tiptoe; from where she stood she could not see them, since, now the music had come to an end, most of the noble guests had stood up and were moving about, strolling and conversing in groups that formed and reformed.

"What's happened to the sick folk?" Dido asked her redheaded neighbor, who was taller.

"Dr. Finster's looking at 'em and testing 'em," he said. "The little gal in the wheelchair got up and walked."

"Coo!" said Dido.

Murmurs of genteel wonder, polite oohs and ahs of amazement came from the elegant crowd.

"Can the music
really
have such sovereign virtue?" Lady Maria asked her elderly companion.

But suddenly—shocking and breaking the quiet, almost reverent atmosphere—a sharp little voice was heard distinctly demanding, "When does I get my orange?" and then, louder: "That Dr. Finster promised me an orange if I sat through the music and then walked six steps and said my legs was better. I want my blooming orange!"

There followed a moment's thunderstruck silence—then a ripple of amusement, polite but mocking laughter, which ran through the crowd from front to back.

"I fear his excellency has done for himself!" said the man with the quizzing-glass to Lady Maria. "Salting the mines, what?"

"My dear duke, what
can
you mean? What mines?"

Now the disillusioned audience began to drift away. Guests took their leave. With civil salutations, with courteous expressions of pleasure, they said their farewells to the margrave, admired his charming house, extended polished thanks for his delightful music, and walked away down the hall. And then, as soon as they were half a dozen paces from their furious host, the ridicule broke out: "My dear,
did
you see?
Did
you hear—? That absurd little creature gave the whole game away. Demanding payment! Depend upon it, they were all bribed to pretend that the music had cured them of desperate illnesses!"

"His poor excellency is wholly discredited."

"Oh, come now, Maria, how the deuce could he bribe a Chelsea pensioner?"

"I daresay they are all actors, you know, merely dressed up as pensioners."

In five minutes the saloon was empty, except for the pages, briskly collecting used plates and glasses; the small group of children and old men by the stage, who looked, most of them, utterly confused and bewildered; and the margrave, who, pale with passion, was delivering a low-toned but savage reprimand to Dr. Finster, furiously waving an empty champagne glass while he hissed his maledictions.

"Dolt! Idiot! Jackass! Dummkopf! Booby! Blockhead! What in creation's name made you stoop to such a stupidity? How could you betray me so? How could you betray yourself so?"

"Oh, your highness—your excellency. Forgive me! Forgive me! It was simply that—results are sometimes so unpredictable—I did so wish everybody to be certain—"

"And now you have ruined it all. No one will
ever
believe. What a fool you have made of me. I've a mind to dismiss you on the spot—send you packing back to Bad—"

"Oh, my lord—no! Think of your own health, I beg you—I beseech you—"

"Well, I won't do it at once; not yet. But you are in utter, utter disgrace. I do not wish to see your face—or only at consultation time—Well? What is it?" he snapped at Dido.

"Your glass, sir."

"Bring me another—a full one," he said, dropping the empty glass on her tray.

"Yessir."

I wonder if Pa will be in disgrace, too, Dido ruminated, filling a glass from one of the remaining bottles on the buffet.

"And have all those impostors locked up!" the margrave was ordering when she took him his drink. "In the cellars under the river! Immediately! I will not have it said that I let such an imposture go unpunished—"

"But, sir—but; my lord—Most of them—"

"Be quiet! Don't argue with me, or—" The margrave added something in the German tongue, which turned his physician ashen white with horror; then he spun on his heel and walked out of the saloon.

Poor devils, thought Dido, watching with anger and pity as the group of patients, or counterfeit patients, were swiftly hustled away by a dozen burly uniformed footmen. One of the children she recognized as a little creature who had been crying "Sweet lavender" the other day in Wapping High Street. Dido heard one of the old men, a Chelsea pensioner, muttering, in total perplexity, "But what did I do that was wrong? I
were
cured—sartin sure; no hocus-pocus—there's me crutch to prove it—" he looked back wistfully at his abandoned crutch leaning against the platform. "So what the pize is 'e going on about?"

I'd best find Pa posthaste and get outa here, thought Dido, with the margrave in this fratchety frame; there ain't a thing I can do for those poor souls on my own; I'd best tell somebody about them. But who?

"Where's Mr. Twi—Mr. Bredalbane?" she asked a page.

"Him? Oh, he went off ten minutes ago."

"Plague take Pa," muttered Dido, and made for the front entrance, passing though she did not know it, by the door of the room where Sophie sat helplessly gagged, with her
arms strapped together and her legs tethered to the legs of her chair.

"Hey, you," said the porter, grabbing Dido as she was about to run down the red-carpeted steps, "where d'you think you're off to, my cocksparrer? Pages ain't allowed out after ten—"

"I'm no page. I came with my pa—Mr. Bredalbane," said Dido. Would he remember? Otherwise she would be in a fine fix.

But luckily he did remember.

"Very well, run along and let me close up. Brrrr! It's cold enough to freeze the sails off a brass windmill."

It was. The snow had stopped falling, but a bitter wind blew, straight from the North Pole. The snow on the ground had frozen into a surface hard and slippery as marble. Dido shivered in her thin velvet, though she ran as fast as she could, hoping to overtake her father.

He had not hurried. In fact, when she caught up with him, he was drifting slowly along, veering from one side of the road to the other, hands in his pockets, head in the air, humming over the various themes from his suite and concertos.

"Pa, Pa! Wait for me!"

"Eh? Is that you, child? Why did you not meet me at the door?"

"How the blazes did I know when you was planning to leave?" Dido said crossly. "I thought as you'd stay for the healing."

"Pshaw! Mumbo jumbo! My music is the important
thing—not all that pesky mystical nonsense of Finster's," said Mr. Twite. "
Oh, mystical nonsense of Finster's,
" he sang, "
it may affect dotards and spinsters....
But was not my music magnificent, child? Was it not majestic, sublime, transcendent?"

"Oh, yes, Pa, it was all those things," Dido assured him sincerely. "It was—it was naffy!"

"Now do you see why
no
position is good enough for me save master of the king's music?"

"Ye-es—but Pa I
still
don't see—'specially now his nabs is in such a peck of trouble because of that clunch Finster going and rigging the cures—"

"
What?
" demanded Mr. Twite, who had wandered out of Cinnamon Court in dreamy, elevated spirits, quite unaware of the embarrassing scene that followed his concert.

When he heard about it, he was almost as angry as the margrave.

"That Finster is a complete clodpole!... Mind, his nabs ain't easy to manage, I'll hand you that; he has to be humored, he has to be wheedled; you need to pay heed to his whimsies:

"
Just a little heed'll
Save a deal of wheedle,
Skill and tact and speed'll
Often win a way,
"

sang Mr. Twite. "Well, now you see, my pippin, why there is such a need for you to marry the king—"

"
Marry the king?
" gasped Dido. "Are you off your rocker? Have you gone clean out of your finical
wits.
Pa?"

"Stop acting skittish and silly and hysterical, child. What else do you suppose I ever had in mind? All you have to do is sit tight and play your cards cannily, as you would say to our Netherlandish friend up yonder—"

Mr. Twite gestured with an airy hand toward the upper floors of Bart's Building, which they were now approaching.

"But, Pa—Princess Adelaide of Thuringia is being fetched over to marry the king—everyone knows that."