Page:Stevenson - Prince Otto. A Romance.djvu/84

 gentleman, opening a door behind Gotthold, received them fairly in the face. With his parrot’s beak for a nose, his pursed mouth, his little goggling eyes, he was the picture of formality; and in ordinary circumstances, strutting behind the drum of his corporation, he impressed the beholder with a certain air of frozen dignity and wisdom. But at the smallest contrariety, his trembling hands and disconnected gestures betrayed the weakness at the root. And now, when he was thus surprisingly received in that library of Mittwalden Palace, which was the customary haunt of silence, his hands went up into the air as if he had been shot, and he cried aloud with the scream of an old woman.

‘O!’ he gasped, recovering, ‘Your Highness! I beg ten thousand pardons. But your Highness at such an hour in the library!—a circumstance so unusual as your Highness’s presence was a thing I could not be expected to foresee.’

‘There is no harm done, Herr Cancellarius,’ said Otto.

‘I came upon the errand of a moment: some papers I left over night with the Herr Doctor,’ said the Chancellor of Grünewald. ‘Herr Doctor, if you will kindly give me them, I will intrude no longer.’