CHAPTER XVII.

IRIS.

From its beetling crags the Castle of Sagan looked out that night with
many luminous eyes over the crowding black pine woods and away across
the frost-bound, melancholy marshes of the frontier. The renewed
violence of the storm had not abated, and the wind moaned about the old
walls.

There was one in Sagan that night to whom the wind had an old yet new
story to tell. The Duke had heard it in his cradle even in the summer
palace where he was born; during later years his dulled senses paid
little heed to that wild singing, and, in truth, passing most of his
life as he now preferred to do in the low-lying sheltered palace at
Revonde, where the state apartments were well within the towering mass
of masonry, and protected on the river side by the Cloister of St.
Anthony, he seldom heard its voice. So that to-night, while the _tsa_
whimpered and clamoured about the exposed buttresses and towers of
Sagan, it sounded to his ears like the calling of some long-dead friend,
a wraith belonging to his lost youth. Sleeping memories awoke and
troubled him; he fancied he had read a vague menace in Count Simon's
bloodshot eyes, and every little incident that had taken place since
his arrival now assumed strange and malign meanings.

He looked around the great vaulted chamber oppressed by a presentiment
of danger, and tried to still his jangled nerves. For with the instinct
of failing mastership he resolved to think out some scheme of defence
and a spontaneous policy, by which he might not only defeat his enemies,
but outwit and overwhelm his rebellious servants.

Selpdorf--was he also false and self-seeking? For more years than he
cared to remember the Duke had forced this man to enact the part of
virtual ruler of the State, always believing in his loyalty--if not to
Gustave of Maasau, at least to Maasau the Free. Any dimmest doubt of
Selpdorf's patriotism had never during all that period entered into the
soddened brain of his master. But to-night, as the Duke recalled the
half-jesting proposal to disband the Guard, made by the Chancellor on
the day of the review, and added to that hint the pregnant significance
of Valerie's speech, he realised that evil days were overtaking him,
that his most trusted minister had been bid for and bought by his foes,
and that it now behoved him to strike out a personal policy, whereby he
should secure strong friends and supporters to aid him in the coming
struggle ag