The Wellfields (Complete‪)‬

It was half-past nine in the evening. The concert in the great Saal of the Kurhaus at Ems was just over, and the audience streamed out, with a clatter of conversation, and a sudden restoration of animation, into the fresher and yet deliciously warm air of the gardens. It was the end of July, the height of the season at Ems; and that small, enervating, fashionable watering-place was thronged with visitors of every age, nation, and rank, from the royal and imperial, as represented in the persons of Germany and Russia, down to the English family of Robinson, who had never felt so genteel before, or been in (whether of or not) such aristocratic company in their lives, and the German family of Braun, who were wealthy, and who revelled luxuriously each day at a different table d’hôte of a different hotel, and who sat in a row in the Kurgarten, morning and afternoon, listening devotedly to the music, and occasionally murmuring ‘Schön!’ if it pleased them. Or, oh joy! standing in rapt respect and attention, as an old white-headed, white-moustached man in a grey summer-suit came walking along, very erect, one hand behind his back, in friendly converse with, now one, now another, bare-headed gentleman who kept just a pace behind him.

‘There’s the emperor! dear old thing!’ whisper all the Miss Robinsons, standing up too, as the grey old gentleman comes past.

‘Unser Kaiser!’ murmur the Brauns with beaming smiles of satisfaction, and gazing at him with broad-faced loyalty.

This ‘watching for the emperors,’ and the thrills of emotion which ran through every loyal heart when they were visible, was the chief pastime of the day; and if one failed to see the emperors, there were always those who had lived near them—princesses, countesses, baronesses, and their consorts; highnesses of every degree of transparency and serenity, half the vons in the Almanach de Gotha; together with unpronounceable Russians, fascinating Poles, well-known diplomatists, representing both the suaviter in modo and the fortiter in re—to wit, the ‘blood and iron’ policies of their respective courts. All these were there, besides the shoals of nobodies who bought up the Kurlisten in order to read their own names in close proximity to those of somebodies, and who, it is to be hoped, felt rewarded by these and similar privileges for the crowding and pushing and swindling to which they were in other matters subjected.

On the night in question the concert-room had been thronged, for the two emperors and their suites had condescended to look in for a few moments, and the orchestra had performed the Russian national hymn with great spirit and much applause. The distinguished guests were felt to be still lingering somewhere about the gardens; and moreover the river was illuminated, and was dazzling with lines of fairy lights, from the bridge opposite the Darmstädter Hof to the other bridge at the extreme end of the Kurgarten—and of civilisation, of course, in Ems—and beyond the house called the Vier Thürme, at which the Russian monarch was lodging.

Two barges, brightly illuminated with the imperial crowns and lovingly-entwined initials of Russia and Germany, were floating about the river, while ‘the music’ on board alternately played Die Wacht am Rhein and the Russian national anthem—a spectacle most thrilling and edifying for all loyal souls; if somewhat less enchanting to the musicians and boatmen who perspired in the glare and smell and heat of the lamps, and industriously paddled up and down the little Lahn, below the walls of the broad walk of the Kurgarten.