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The latest report spoke of him as off to the General's Court for an audience of his official chief. General von Rudiger looked to his defences, and he had sufficient penetration to see that the weakest point of them might be a submissive daughter. A letter to Clotilde from the baroness was brought to the house by a messenger. The General thought over it.
The first time Eleanore visited Daniel it was along toward evening. She heard from a distance the piano and the shrill crowing of Daniel’s voice. Down in the hall she saw three white figures cuddled up close to each other like hens on a roost. It was the Rüdiger sisters trying to drink in the creative efforts of the artist.
But, as Rudiger was by four years his senior, and very expert, the upshot of these encounters was quite otherwise, and the young gentlemen were disabused of the notion that fighting came by nature, and found that, if they desired success in a serious conflict, they must practise diligently in the city tilt-yard, where young men were trained to arms.
Baron Rudiger was evidently very uneasy about her; Barbe reported how gloomy and miserable he was, and how he relieved his feelings by beating the unfortunate man who had been leading the horse, and in a wiser manner by seeking fish in the torrent and birds on the hills for her refreshment, and even helping Trudchen to gather the mountain strawberries for her.
At an early age Clotilde von Rudiger was dissatisfied with her conquests, though they were already numerous in her seventeenth year, for she began precociously, having at her dawn a lively fancy, a womanly person, and singular attractions of colour, eyes, and style. She belonged by birth to the small aristocracy of her native land.
'Plain-dealing; no subterfuge! Begin with foul falsehood? No. I would not have you burdened, madame, with the shadow of a conventional untruth on our account. And when it would be bad policy?... Oh, no, worse than the sin! as the honest cynic says. We will go down to Madame von Rudiger, and she shall make acquaintance with the man who claims her daughter's hand. Clotilde rocked in an agony.
The margravine conjures them by their troth to tell how they parted from her husband, saying that the lie must have an end. Then spake the fiddler, Swemmelin the messenger: Lady, we wished to deny to you that which we yet must say, since no man could conceal it; after this hour, ye see Margrave Rüdiger no more alive. The margravine, we are afterward told, dies of grief at the news, as does old Queen Ute at her abbey of Lors.
In the hallway they met the Rüdiger sisters as they were returning from their daily stroll through the garden. Benda greeted them with an antiquated politeness; Daniel just barely touched the rim of his hat. The sisters lined up as if ready for a cotillion, and returned the greetings with infinite grace.
She dealt out the letters, arranged the presents, made up the books, pamphlets, trinkets, amulet coins, lock of black hair, and worn post-marked paper addressed in his hand to Clotilde von Rudiger, carefully; and half as souvenir, half with the forlorn yearning of the look of lovers when they break asunder or of one of them she signed inside the packet not 'Clotilde, but the gentlest title he had bestowed on her, trusting to the pathos of the word 'child' to tell him that she was enforced and still true, if he should be interested in knowing it.
The Rüdiger sisters, all but bursting with curiosity to know what Eleanore had in mind, could draw nothing from her other than that she was going to take Meta away and that Meta was agreed. It was Eleanore’s intention to take the pregnant girl to Daniel’s mother at Eschenbach. She knew of the dissension between Daniel and his mother.
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