Countess Erika's Apprenticeship
by Ossip Schubin · English · Gutenberg #35531 · 638,983 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: Countess Erika's Apprenticeship
Author: Ossip Schubin
Translator: A. L. Wister
Release date: March 8, 2011 [eBook #35531]
Most recently updated: January 7, 2021
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/35531
Credits: Produced by Charles Bowen, from page scans provide by Google Books
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK COUNTESS ERIKA'S APPRENTICESHIP ***
Produced by Charles Bowen, from page scans provide by Google Books
Transcriber's Note:
1. Page scan source:
http://books.google.com/books?id=1hUtAAAAYAAJ
2. The diphthong oe is represented by [oe].
MRS. A. L. WISTER'S
Popular Translations from the German.
12mo. Attractively Bound in Cloth.
* * * * *
"O THOU, MY AUSTRIA!" By Ossip Schubin. $1.25
ERLACH COURT. By Ossip Schubin. 1.25
THE ALPINE FAY. By E. Werner. 1.25
THE OWL'S NEST. By E. Marlitt. 1.25
PICKED UP IN THE STREETS. By H. Schobert. 1.25
SAINT MICHAEL. By E. Werner. 1.25
VIOLETTA. By Ursula Zoege von Manteuffel. 1.25
THE LADY WITH THE RUBIES. By E. Marlitt. 1.25
VAIN FOREBODINGS. By E. Oswald. 1.25
A PENNILESS GIRL. By W. Heimburg. 1.25
QUICKSANDS. By Adolph Streckfuss. 1.50
BANNED AND BLESSED. By E. Werner. 1.50
A NOBLE NAME. By Claire von Gluemer 1.50
FROM HAND TO HAND. By Golo Raimund 1.50
SEVERA. By E. Hartner 1.50
THE EICHHOFS. By Moritz von Reichenbach. 1.50
A NEW RACE. By Golo Raimund. 1.25
CASTLE HOHENWALD. By Adolph Streckfuss. 1.50
MARGARETHE. By E. Juncker. 1.50
TOO RICH. By Adolph Streckfuss. 1.50
A FAMILY FEUD. By Ludwig Harder. 1.25
THE GREEN GATE. By Ernst Wichert. 1.50
ONLY A GIRL. By Wilhelmina von Hillern. 1.50
WHY DID HE NOT DIE? By Ad. von Volckhausen. 1.50
HULDA; or, The Deliverer. By F. Lewald. 1.50
THE BAILIFF'S MAID. By E. Marlitt 1.25
IN THE SCHILLINGSCOURT. By E. Marlitt. 1.50
AT THE COUNCILLOR'S. By E. Marlitt. 1.50
THE SECOND WIFE. By E. Marlitt. 1.50
THE OLD MAM'SELLE'S SECRET. By E. Marlitt. 1.50
GOLD ELSIE. By E. Marlitt. 1.50
COUNTESS GISELA. By E. Marlitt. 1.50
THE LITTLE MOORLAND PRINCESS. By E. Marlitt. 1.50
* * * * *
_J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY_,
_Publishers_,
_715 and 717 Market Street, Philadelphia, Pa_.
COUNTESS ERIKA'S
APPRENTICESHIP
TRANSLATED FROM THE GERMAN
OF
OSSIP SCHUBIN
AUTHOR OF "O THOU, MY AUSTRIA!" ETC.
BY
MRS. A. L. WISTER
PHILADELPHIA
J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY
1891
* * * * *
Copyright, 1891, by J. B. Lippincott Company
* * * * *
_All rights reserved_.
Printed By J. B. Lippincott Company, Philadelphia.
PREFACE BY THE AUTHOR.
A friend returning from a stroll round the globe brought back an odd
volume of my work picked up in San Francisco, translated without my
leave, but proving by its very existence that the American reading
world take a certain interest in my show and its puppets.
Though in a certain sense these unauthorized editions are a picking of
the author's pocket, yet I must confess that I felt rather flattered.
Every one possessing any feeling for modernism must highly prize what
American art and American literature have done and are doing for the
directness, vividness, and intensity of presentation to our eyes or our
imagination either of outward objects or the silent workings of
character and inner sensations.
The rapidity and intensity of picturing frequently remind us of an
electric shock.
We Old World folk take life, to a certain degree, more at our leisure,
but nevertheless every real artist follows the great direction that has
seized all our contemporary being.
Directness of truth, vividness and intensity of presentation, exact
rendering of impression, are the means by which we seek to produce
life; life itself is the object, but I am afraid that to the end the
life-giving spark will defy analysis.
Let me hope that the figures whose woes and weal my reader will follow
through these pages may be half as alive to him as they have been to
me; and let me hope, likewise, that when he closes the volume we may
have become fast friends.
I cannot let this opportunity pass without thanking Mrs. Wister most
heartily for her faithful and picturesque rendering of my story.
What a rare delight it is to an author to find himself so admirably
rendered and so perfectly understood only those can feel that have
undergone the acute misery of seeing their every thought mangled, their
every sentence massacred, as common translations will mangle and
massacre word and thought.
Therefore let every writer thank Providence, if he find an artist like
Mrs. Wister willing to put herself to the trouble of following his
intentions, and of clothing his ideas in so brilliant a garb.
It is only natural, therefore, that, having been lucky enough to find
so rare a translator, I should authorize the translation to the
absolute exclusion of any other.
So, hoping it may find favour in the eyes of my transatlantic readers,
I should like to shake hands with them at parting and say good-bye with
the Old World saw, "_Auf Wiedersehen_."
Ossip Schubin.
COUNTESS ERIKA'S
APPRENTICESHIP.
CHAPTER I.
Baron von Strachinsky reclined upon a lounge in his smoking-room,
recovering from the last pecuniary calamity which he had brought upon
himself. The fact was, he had built a sugar-factory in a tract of
country where the nearest approach to a sugar-beet that could be found
was a carrot on a manure-heap, and his enterprise had been followed by
the natural result.
He bore his misfortune with exemplary fortitude, and beguiled the time
with a sentimental novel upon the cover of which was portrayed a lady
wringing her hands in presence of a military man drinking champagne. At
times he wept over this fiction, at others he dozed over it and was at
peace.
This he called submitting with dignity to the mysterious decrees of
destiny, and he looked upon himself as a martyr.
His wife was not at home. Whilst he reposed thus in melancholy
self-admiration, she was devoting herself to the humiliating occupation
of visiting in turn one and another of her wealthy relatives, begging
of them the loan of funds necessary for the furtherance of her
husband's brilliant scheme.
"It is very sad, but 'tis the fault of circumstances," sighed the Baron
when his thoughts wandered from his book to his absent wife, and for a
moment he would cover his eyes with his hand.
It was near the end of August, and the asters were beginning to bloom.
Cheerful industry reigned throughout the village. The Baron indeed
complained of the failure of the harvest, but this he did of every
harvest the proceeds of which were insufficient to cover the interest
of his numerous debts: the peasantry, who by no means exacted so high a
rate of profit from their meadows and pasture-lands, were happy and
content, and the stubble-fields were already dotted with hayricks.
Outside in the garden a little girl in a worn and faded frock was
playing funeral: she was interring her canary, which she had found
dead in its cage. She was very sad: the bird had been her best friend.
No one paid her any attention. Her mother was away, and the
Englishwoman whose duty it was to superintend her education was just
now occupied in company with the bailiff, an ambitious young man
desirous of improving his knowledge of languages, in studying the
working of a new mowing-machine. From time to time the child glanced
through the open door of the principal entrance to the castle into a
rather bare hall, its floor paved with red tiles and its high vaulted
walls whitewashed and adorned with stags' horns of all sizes. The Baron
von Strachinsky had bought these last in one lot at an auction, but he
had long cherished the conviction that they all came from his forest.
He had a decided taste for fine, high-sounding expressions, always
designating his wood as his 'forest,' his estate as his 'domain,' and
his garden as his 'park.'
A charwoman with a flat, red, perspiring face, and a knot of thin
bristling hair at the back of her head, from which her yellow cotton
kerchief had slipped down upon her neck, was shuffling upon hands and
knees, her high kilted skirts leaving her red legs quite bare, over the
tiles of the hall, rubbing away at the dirt and footmarks with a wisp
of straw, while the steam of hot soapy water rose from the wooden
bucket beside her.
The little girl outside had just planted a row of pink asters upon the
grave, which she had dug with a pewter spoon, and had filled up duly,
when the scratching of the wisp of straw suddenly ceased.
A young fellow was standing in the hall,--very young, scarcely sixteen,
and with a portfolio under his arm. His garb was that of a journeyman
mechanic, but his bearing had in it something of distinction, and his
face was delicately modelled, very pale, with large dark eyes, almost
black, gleaming below the brown curls of his hair. The same class of
countenance is frequently seen among the Neapolitan boys who sell
Seville oranges in Rome; but such eyes as this lad had are seen at most
only two or three times in a lifetime.
The child in the garden looked with evident satisfaction at the young
fellow. Apparently he had come into the castle through the back
entrance,--the one used by servants and beggars.
The charwoman wiped her red hands upon her apron and knocked at one of
the doors opening into the hall. She was a new-comer, and did not know
that the Baron von Strachinsky was never disturbed upon any ordinary
pretext.
She knocked several times. At last a sleepy, ill-humoured voice said,
"What is it?"
"Your Grace, a young gentleman: he wants to speak to your Grace."
With eyes but half open, and the pattern of the embroidered cushion
upon which he had been sleeping stamped upon his cheek, the Baron von
Strachinsky came out into the hall.
He was of middle height; his face had once been handsome, but was now
red and bloated with excessive good living; he was slightly bald, and
wore thick brown side-whiskers. His dress was a combination of
slovenliness and foppery. He wore scarlet Turkish slippers, trodden
down at heel, gray trousers, and a soiled dark-blue smoking-jacket with
red facings and buttons.
"What do you want?" he roared, in a rage at being disturbed for so
slight a cause.
The young fellow shrank from him, murmuring in a hoarse, tremulous
voice, the voice of a very young man growing fast and but scantily
nourished, "I am on my way home."
"What's that to me?" Strachinsky thundered, not without some excuse for
his indignation.
The youth flushed scarlet. Shyly and awkwardly he held out his
portfolio to the sleepy Baron. Evidently it contained drawings, which
he would like to sell but had not the courage to show.
"Give him an alms!" Herr von Strachinsky shouted to the cook, who,
hearing the noise, had hurried into the hall; then, turning to the
scrubbing-woman, who was standing beside her steaming bucket, her
toothless jaws wide open in dismay, he went on: "If you ever again dare
for the sake of a wretched vagabond of a house-painter's apprentice to
deprive me of the few moments of repose which I contrive to snatch from
my wretched and tormented existence, I'll dismiss you on the spot!"
With which he retired to his room, banging to the door behind him.
The cook offered the lad two kreutzers. His hand--a long, slender,
boyish hand, almost transparent--shook, as he angrily threw the money
upon the floor and departed.
The little girl in the garden had been watching the scene attentively.
Her delicate frame trembled with indignation, as she rose, and, with
arms hanging at her sides and small fists clinched in a somewhat
dramatic attitude, fixed her eyes upon the door behind which the Baron
had disappeared. She had very bright eyes for a child of nine years,
and a very penetrating glance, a glance by no means friendly to the
Baron. Thus she stood for a minute gazing at the door, then put her
arms akimbo, frowned, and reflected. Before long she shrugged her
shoulders with an air of precocious intelligence, deserted the
newly-made grave, and hurried into the house, and to the pantry.
The door was open. She looked about her. By strict orders of the Baron,
in his wife's absence all remains of provisions were hoarded in the
pantry, although they were seldom of any use. As a consequence of this
sordid housekeeping the child found a great store of dishes and bowls
filled with scraps of meat and fish, stale cakes, and fermenting stewed
apricots. It took her some time to discover what satisfied her,--a cold
roast pheasant, and some pieces of tempting almond-cake left over from
the last meal. These she packed in a basket with a flask of wine that
had been opened, a tumbler, knife and fork, and a clean napkin. She
decorated the basket with pink asters, and hurried out of the back
door, intent upon playing the part of beneficent fairy.
Deep down in her heart there was a vein of romance which contrasted
oddly with the keen good sense already gleaming in her bright childish
eyes.
She ran until she was quite out of breath, searching vainly for her
handsome vagabond. Should she inquire of some one if a young man with a
portfolio under his arm had passed along the road? Her heart beat; she
felt a little shy. From a distance the warm summer breeze wafted
towards her the notes of a foreign air clearly whistled, and she
directed her steps towards the spot whence it seemed to proceed.
There! yes, there----
Beside the road rippled a little brook on its way to the rushing stream
beyond the village, a brook so narrow that a twelve-year-old school-boy
could easily have jumped across it. Nevertheless the Baron von
Strachinsky had thought best to span it with a magnificent three-arched
stone bridge. In the shade thrown by this monumental structure, for the
erection of which the Baron had vainly hoped to be decorated by his
sovereign, the lad was crouching. He was even paler than before, and
there were traces of tears on his cheeks, but all the same he whistled
on with forced gaiety, as one does whistle when one has nothing to eat
and hopes to forget his hunger.
The little girl felt like crying. He looked up and directly at her.
Overcome by sudden shyness, she stood for a moment as if rooted to the
spot; then, awkwardly offering her basket, she stammered, "Will you
have it?" When he did not answer she simply set the basket down before
him, and in her confusion would have avoided all explanations by
running away.
But a warm young hand detained her firmly and kindly. "Did you come
from there?" the lad asked, pointing to the castle. "Who sent you?"
His voice was agreeable, and his address that of a well-born youth.
"No one knows that I came," she answered, in confusion, and seeing that
he frowned discontentedly at this, she added hastily, by way of excuse,
"But if mamma had been at home she certainly would have sent me; she
never lets a beggar leave the house without giving him something to
eat."
At the word 'beggar' he turned away, whereupon she began to cry loudly,
so loudly that he had to laugh. "But what are you crying for?" he
asked; and she replied, in desperation, "I am crying because you will
not eat anything."
"Indeed! is that all you are crying for?"
"Yes. Oh, do eat something,--do!" she sobbed.
"Well, since it is to gratify you so hugely," he replied, in a
bantering tone; "but sit down beside me and help me." He looked full
into her eyes with his careless, merry smile, then took her tiny hand
in his and pressed his full, warm lips upon it twice.
She was greatly pleased by this courteous homage, and perhaps by the
caress, for it was seldom that anything of the kind fell to her share.
She had fully decided that the young fellow was no mechanic, but a
prince in disguise, and in this exhilarating conviction she sat down
upon the grass beside him and unpacked her basket. How he seemed to
enjoy its contents, and how white his teeth were! There were also
various indications of refinement and good breeding about his manner of
eating, which would have given a more experienced observer than the
little enthusiast beside him matter for reflection with regard to his
rank in life. His portfolio lay beside him. She thrust a slender
forefinger between its pasteboard covers tied together with green
cotton strings, and whispered, gravely, "May I look into it?"
"If you would like to," he replied.
With great precision, as if the matter in hand were the unveiling of a
sacred relic, she untied the strings and opened the portfolio. Her eyes
opened wide, and an "Oh!" of enthusiastic admiration escaped her lips.
A wiser critic than the little girl of nine would scarcely have
accorded the sketches so much approval. They were undoubtedly stiff and
unfinished. Nevertheless, no genuine lover of art would have passed
them by without notice, for they indicated a high degree of talent. The
hand was unskilled, but the lad had eyes to see.
The little girl gazed in rapt admiration. After a while she looked
gravely up at her new friend, her compassion converted into awe. "Now I
know what you are,--an artist!"
"Do you think so?" the lad rejoined, flattered by the reverential tone
in which the word was uttered: meanwhile, he had finished the pheasant,
and was considerably less pale than before.
"Can you paint everything you see?" she asked, after a short pause.
"I cannot paint anything," he answered, with a sort of merry discontent
which, now that his hunger was satisfied, characterized his every look
and movement. "I cannot paint anything," he repeated, with a little
nod, "but I try to paint everything that I like."
They looked in each other's eyes, he suppressing a laugh, she in some
distress. At last she blurted out, "Do you not like me at all, then?"
"Shall I paint you?"
She nodded.
"What will you give me for it?"
She put her hand in her pocket, and took out a very shabby
porte-monnaie, a superannuated possession of Herr von Strachinsky's
which he had given her in a moment of unwonted generosity, and in which
were five bright silver guilders. "Is that enough?" she asked.
"I will not take money," he replied.
She had been guilty of another stupidity. She was bitterly conscious of
it, and so, to justify herself, she put on an air of great wisdom. "You
are a very queer artist," she admonished him, "not to take money for
your pictures. No wonder you nearly starve."
He took the hand which held the five despised silver coins, and kissed
it three times.
"I do take money for my pictures," he declared, "but not from you: I
will draw your picture with all my heart."
"For nothing?"
"No: you must give me a kiss for it. Will you?" He watched her without
seeming to look at her. Again the insinuating, roguish smile hovered
upon his lips,--a charming smile, which he must have inherited from
some kind, light-hearted woman.
She was not quite sure of the rectitude of her conduct, her heart
throbbed almost as if she were on the verge of some compact with Satan,
but finally, "If you will not do it without," she said, with a sigh,
plucking at her hands,--very pretty hands, neglected though they were.
He nodded gaily. "All right."
Then he made her sit down on the grass opposite him, unpacked his tin
colour-case, fastened a piece of rough gray paper upon the cover of his
portfolio, and began.
She sat very still, very grave, her feet stretched out straight in
front of her, supporting herself upon both hands. Around them breathed
the soft August air, the glowing summer sunshine sparkled on the
translucent waters of the little brook above which the stone bridge
displayed its pompous proportions, while upon the banks grew hundreds
of blue forget-me-nots, and yellow water-lilies bloomed among the
trunks of the old willows, which here and there showed gaping wounds in
their bark, from which meadow daisies were sprouting and, with the
silvery willow leaves, showing softly gray against the green background
of the gentle ascent of the pasture-land. The brook murmured dreamily,
and from the distance came the rhythmic beat of the threshers' flails.
Steam threshing-machines were not then in general use.
Both were mute,--he in the warmth of his youthful artistic enthusiasm,
she with expectation.
Suddenly the shrill tinkle of a bell broke the quiet. "That is the
dinner-bell!" the little girl exclaimed, springing up with an impatient
shrug. She knew that there could be no more pleasure and liberty for
her; she would be missed, looked for, and found.
"I must go home," she cried. "Have you finished it?"
"Very nearly, yes."
She ran and looked over his shoulder, breathless with astonishment at
what she saw upon the gray paper,--a little girl in a very short, faded
gown, and long red stockings, also much faded, a very slender figure, a
little round face, a delicate little nose, two grave bright eyes that
looked out into the world with a startled expression, a short upper
lip, a round chin, a very fair skin, and shining reddish-brown hair
which waved long and silky about the narrow childish shoulders and was
tied at the back of the head with a blue ribbon.
He had unfastened the sketch from the portfolio, and she held it in her
hands, examining it narrowly. "Is it like?" she asked, and then,
looking down at herself, she added, "The gown is like, and the
stockings are like, but the face,--is that like?" She looked up at him
eagerly.
"I cannot do it any better," he replied, rather ambiguously.
"Oh, you must not be vexed," she made haste to say. "I only wanted to
know if--how can I tell--if--well, it looks too pretty to me, this
picture of yours."
He gave her a comical side-glance. "Every artist must flatter a little
if he wishes to please a lady," was his reply.
"And you give me the picture?" she asked, shyly, after a little pause.
"Why, you ordered it," he replied.
"I--I--thank you," she stammered, then turned away and would have run
off.
But he was by no means inclined to let her off so easily. "And my pay?"
he cried, catching her in his arms and clasping her so tightly that her
little feet were lifted off the daisy-sprinkled turf. "Traitress!" he
exclaimed, reproachfully.
She blushed scarlet, although she was but just nine years old; she put
her arm around his neck and kissed him directly upon the mouth; his
lips were still the lips of a girl. Then she walked away, but she could
not hasten from the spot; something seemed to stay her steps. She
paused and looked back.
The lad was busied with packing up his small belongings: all the gaiety
had vanished from his face, he looked pale and sad again. With her
heart swelling with pity, she ran back to him.
"You come for your basket," he said, good-naturedly, holding it out to
her.
"No, it isn't that," she replied, shaking her head, as she put down the
basket on a willow stump and came close up to him.
In some surprise he smiled down at her. "Something else to ask, my
little princess?"
"No,--that is----" She plucked him by the sleeve. "See here," she
began, confused and yet coaxingly, "do not be vexed,--only--I thought
just now how bad it would be if before you get home you should be
treated by somebody else as that man treated you,"--she pointed to the
castle,--"and then--and then--oh, I know so well how dreadful it is to
have no money. I--please take the guilders: when you are a great artist
you can give them back to me." And before he knew what she was doing
she had slipped the porte-monnaie into his coat-pocket.
The tears stood in his eyes; he put his arm around her, and looked at
her as if to learn her face by heart.
"It might be," he muttered; "perhaps you will bring me luck; I may
still come to be something; and if you then should be as dear and
pretty as you are now----" He kissed her upon both eyes.
"Rika!" a shrill voice called from a distance.
"Is that your name?" he asked.
"Yes."
"And what is your last name?"
"My step-father's is Strachinsky. I do not know mine."
"Rika!" the shrill tones sounded nearer.
"And what is your name?" she asked him.
Before he could reply, the fluttering skirts of the English governess
came in sight: suddenly aroused to a consciousness of her neglected
duties, she was looking along the road for her charge.
The little girl clasped her picture close and fled.
When she reached the house she ran up-stairs to put her precious
portrait safely away, and then she allowed a clean apron to be put on
over her faded frock by the agitated Englishwoman,--whose name was in
fact Sophy Lange, and who had been born in Hamburg of honest German
parents,--after which she presented herself in the dining-room with an
assured air as if unconscious of the slightest wrong-doing.
Her step-father received her with a stern reproof, and instantly
inquired where she had been. She replied, curtly, "To the village;"
upon which he read her a tremendous lecture upon the enormity of idly
wandering about the country, addressing at the same time a few
annihilating remarks to the Englishwoman from Hamburg. He had exchanged
his bright-blue morning coat for a light summer suit, in which he
presented a much better appearance. But he was no more pleasing to his
step-daughter in his light-brown costume than in the blue coat with red
facings. She paid very little attention to his discourse, but quietly
went on eating. Miss Sophy, however, shed tears. The Baron von
Strachinsky impressed her greatly; nay, more, she honoured him as a
being from a higher sphere. He was popular with women of all ranks,
from the lowest to the highest,--why, it would be difficult to tell. He
possessed a certain amount of personal magnetism, but it had no effect
upon his step-daughter.
They were extraordinarily antipathetic, Strachinsky and his clear-eyed
little step-daughter. What she took exception to in him was of so
complex and delicate a nature as to defy explanation in words. What
annoyed him in her was principally the fact that, in spite of her
tender age, she saw through him, was quite free of all illusions with
regard to him.
It always increases our regard for our neighbour if he will but view us
with flattering eyes. Some few illusions in our behalf we require from
those around us; they are absolutely necessary to the pleasure of daily
intercourse. But the demands of Herr von Strachinsky in this respect
were beyond all reason, while his step-daughter's capacity to comply
with them was unusually limited.
Dinner progressed as usual: the gentleman continued to admonish, Miss
Sophy to weep, and little Rika to maintain strict silence, until
dessert, when Herr von Strachinsky, for whom eating was one of the
most important occupations in life, inquired after an almond-cake of
which, as he assured the servant, five pieces had been left from
breakfast,--yes, five pieces and a little broken one: he had counted
them.
The servant repaired to the kitchen for information: the cook could
give none, save that she herself had put the cake away in the pantry,
whence it had vanished, without a trace, since the morning. Herr von
Strachinsky was indignant; he accused every servant in the
establishment of the theft, from the foremost of those employed in the
house to the lowest stable-boy, and talked of having bars put up at the
windows. Little Rika let him give full sweep to his anger; she fairly
gloated over his irritation; at last she remarked, indifferently, "What
would be the use of bars on the windows, when any one can walk in at
the door? It is never locked."
"Silence! what do you know about it?" thundered her step-father.
"Oh, I know all about it," the child quietly replied, "and I know what
became of the cake."
"What?"
"I took it. I carried it out to the painter whom you turned out of the
house."
Herr von Strachinsky's eyebrows were lifted to a startling extent at
this confession. "You--ran--after--that house-painter fellow down the
road?" he asked, with a gasp at each word.
"Yes," the child replied, composedly; "and he was not a house-painter
fellow, but a young artist, although I should have run after him all
the same if he had been a house-painter fellow."
"Indeed! And why?" he asked, with a sneer.
She looked him full in the face. "Why? Because you treated him so
badly, and I was sorry for him."
For a moment he was speechless; then he arose, seized the child by the
arm, and thrust her out of the door. Without making the least
resistance, carelessly humming to herself, she ran up the staircase,--a
staircase that turned an abrupt corner and the worn steps of which
exhaled an odour of damp decay,--whilst Strachinsky turned to the
Englishwoman from Hamburg and groaned, "My step-daughter is a positive
torment. I am firmly persuaded that she will end at the galleys."
The galleys were tolerably far removed from the sphere of the Austrian
penal code, but Herr von Strachinsky had a predilection for what was
foreign, and had recently read a novel in which the galleys played a
prominent part.
Meanwhile, little Erika had betaken herself to the drawing-room, a
spacious but by no means gorgeous apartment, the furniture of which
consisted principally of bookcases and a piano. She seated herself at
this piano, and instantly became absorbed in the study of one of
Mozart's sonatas, with which she intended to celebrate her mother's
return. She had a decided talent for music; her slender little fingers
moved with incredible ease over the keys, and her cheeks, usually
rather pale, flushed with enthusiasm. It was going very well; she
stretched out her foot to touch the pedal,--an act which in her opinion
lent the crowning glory to her musical performance,--when suddenly she
became aware of a kind of uproar that seemed to fill the house. Dogs
barked, servants hurried to and fro, a carriage drove up and stopped
before the castle door. Frau von Strachinsky had returned unexpectedly.
The child hurried down-stairs, just in time to see Strachinsky take his
wife from the carriage. They kissed each other like lovers,--which
seemed to produce a disagreeable impression upon the little girl;
moreover, it occurred to her that she did not know whether she might
venture forward under existing circumstances. Then she heard her mother
say, "And where is Rika?"
Without awaiting her step-father's reply, she rushed into her mother's
arms.
"You look finely, darling," the mother exclaimed, patting her little
daughter's cheeks. "Have you been a good girl?"
Rika made no reply. Frau von Strachinsky's face took on a sad, troubled
expression. Strachinsky frowned, and shrugged his shoulders. His wife
looked from him to the child, who had taken her hand and was about to
kiss it. "What has she been doing now?" she asked, turning to her
husband.
"Not to speak of her behaviour towards myself,--behaviour that
is perfectly unwarrantable,--I repeat, unwarrantable," said
Strachinsky,--"not to speak of that, the girl has again so far
forgotten herself as----well, I will tell you about it by and by."
"Tell now!" the child exclaimed. "I'd rather you would tell now!"
"Hush, Miss Impertinence!" Strachinsky ordered her; then, turning to
his wife, he asked, "Do you bring good news? Is your uncle willing?"
Fran von Strachinsky shook her head sadly. "Unfortunately, no,--not
quite," she murmured; "but he was very kind; he was enchanted with
Bobby." Bobby was Rika's step-brother, whom the poor mother had carried
with her upon her distressing journey, perhaps as some consolation for
herself, perhaps to soften the hearts of her relatives. He did, indeed,
seem admirably adapted to this latter purpose, for he was a charming
little fellow, with a lovely pink-and-white face crowned by brown
curls, and plump bare arms. His hands at present were filled with toys,
which he carried to his sister to console her, since he instantly
perceived that she was in disgrace.
"I cannot understand that," Strachinsky murmured. "I should have
credited Uncle Nick with a more generous spirit." And he looked sternly
at his wife, as if she were responsible for the ill success of her
mission.
She laid her hand gently on his arm and said, "You are an incorrigible
idealist, my poor Nello: you judge all men by yourself."
And Strachinsky passed his hand over his eyes, and sighed forth
sentimentally, "Yes, I am an idealist, an incorrigible idealist, a
perfect Don Quixote."
The rest of the afternoon was passed by the pair in the large
drawing-room, trying to obtain some clear understanding of the state of
Strachinsky's financial affairs,--a very difficult task.
She, pencil in hand, did the reckoning. He paced the room to and fro
with a tragic air, and smoked cigarettes. From time to time he uttered
some effective sentence, such as, "I am unfit for this world!" or, "Of
course a Marquis Posa like myself!"
She sat quietly contemplating the figures with which the sheet before
her was filled. Her face grow sad, while her husband's, on the
contrary, brightened. Since he was succeeding in casting all his cares
upon her shoulders, he felt quite cheerful.
"I never had the least idea of this ten thousand guilders which you
tell me you owe," the tortured woman exclaimed, in a sudden access of
anger.
"No?" her husband rejoined, with easy assurance. "I surely wrote you
about it; or could the trifle have slipped my memory? Yes, now I
remember you were with the children at Johannisbad. Loewy came and
pestered me with its being such a splendid chance,--told me I had no
right to hold back; and so I bought a hundred shares of Schoenfeld.'
Good heavens! what do I understand of business?--how is such knowledge
possible for a gentleman? In the army one never learns anything of the
kind, and what can one do save follow advice? I trust others far too
readily,--you have always told me so; it is the natural result of the
magnanimity of my nature. I blame myself for it. I am an Egmont,--a
perfect Egmont. Poor Egmont! There is nothing left for me but to sigh
with him, 'Ah, Orange! Orange!'"
Strachinsky imagined that this confession, uttered with an
indescribably tragic emphasis, would quite reconcile his wife to his
unfortunate speculation. But, to his great surprise, the anticipated
result did not ensue. Frau von Strachinsky pushed her thick dark hair
back from her temples, and exclaimed, "I cannot understand you; you
promised me so faithfully not to speculate in stocks again."
"But, my dear Emma, the opportunity seemed to me so brilliant a one,
that I should have thought myself a very scoundrel not to try at
least----"
"And you see the result."
"When a man acts conscientiously and with the best intentions, he
should not be reproached, even although his efforts result in failure,"
he said, pompously. "No, my dear Emma, not a word; do not speak now:
you will only be sorry for it by and by."
But Emma Strachinsky was not on this occasion to be thus silenced: she
was indignant, and almost in despair. "You have always acted with the
'best intentions'!" she exclaimed, hoarse with agitation, "and the
result of your good intentions will be to beggar my children. Can you
take it ill if I withhold from you my few farthings, that there may be
some provision for the children in the future?"
Jagello von Strachinsky looked her over from head to foot. "_Your_ few
farthings!" he said, with annihilating severity. "What indelicacy!
Well, I shall steer my course accordingly. Do as you choose in future.
I have nothing more to say." And, with head haughtily erect, cavalier
and martyr every inch of him, he stalked from the room.
She looked after him: she had gone too far; again her impulsiveness had
led her astray. Her heart throbbed; she felt sore with agitation,
shame, and remorse.
When Erika, towards evening, was playing hide-and-seek with her little
brother in the garden, she saw her mother and her step-father strolling
affectionately along the gravel path between the hawthorn bushes. He
was already rather bald; his limbs were loosely knit; he wore full
whiskers, and there was a languishing glance in his eyes, but he was
still handsome, in spite of a dissipated air; she was tall, slender,
and erect, with large dark eyes, and a pale, noble countenance, that
could never, however, have been beautiful. They walked close together,
and to a casual observer presented an ideal picture of happy wedded
life. And yet when one observed more narrowly--his arm was thrown
around her shoulder, and he leaned upon her instead of supporting her;
the swing of his heavy frame, the languishing, sentimental expression
of his face, everything about him, bespoke a self-satisfied, luxurious
temperament; while she----in her eyes there was restless anxiety, and
her figure looked as though it were slowly being bowed to the ground by
a burden which she was either unable or afraid to shake off.
She walked with a patiently regular step beneath her heavy load.
Suddenly she seemed uneasy: she shivered.
"What is it, darling?" Strachinsky asked her, clinging still closer to
her.
"Nothing," she murmured, "nothing," and walked on.
They were passing the spot where the little brother and sister were
playing, and in the gathering twilight Emma Strachinsky became aware of
a pair of clear dark-brown childish eyes that seemed to ask, "How can
she love that man?"
Those childish eyes were positively uncanny!
The child's dislike dated from far in the past; it was in fact the
first clearly formulated emotion of her little heart. During the first
years of her second marriage the mother, prompted by an exaggerated
tenderness, had concealed from her little daughter as long as possible
the fact that Strachinsky was not her own father: the child had learned
the truth by accident. When she rushed to her mother to have what she
had heard confirmed, she was received with the tenderest caresses, as
though she were to be consoled for a great grief, while she was
entreated not to be sad, and was told that "'papa' was far too good and
kind to make any difference between herself and his own children, that
he loved her dearly," etc.
The mother's caresses were highly prized by the child, all the more
that they were rather rare, but on this occasion she could not even
seem to enjoy them, since she could not endure to be pitied and soothed
for what brought her in reality intense relief.
Her mother perceived this, and it angered her, although at the same
time the child's evident though silent dislike made a deep impression
upon her. Perhaps the consciousness of its existence in so frank and
childish a mind first gave occasion to distrust of the terrible
infatuation to which the gifted woman's entire existence had fallen a
sacrifice.
Frau von Strachinsky was wont to go herself every evening to see that
all was as it should be in the large airy apartment where both the
children slept. She hovered noiselessly from one bed to the other,
signing the cross upon the brow of each,--an old-fashioned custom to
which she still clung although she had long since adopted very
philosophical views with regard to religion,--and giving each sleeping
child a tender good-night kiss.
The evening after her return she went to the nursery at the usual hour,
but lingered only by the crib of the sleeping boy, passing her
daughter's bed with averted face. Rika sat up and looked after her; her
mother had reached the door without once looking back. This the child
could not endure. She sprang out of bed, ran to her mother, and seized
her by her skirt. "Mother! mother!" she cried, in a frenzy, "you will
not go without bidding me good-night?"
"Let go of my gown," Frau von Strachinsky replied, in a cold voice,
which nevertheless trembled with emotion.
"But what have I done, mother?" the child cried, clinging to her
passionately.
"Can you ask?" her mother rejoined, sternly.
"Why should I not ask? How should I know what he has told you? I was
not by when he accused me."
"Erika! is that the way to speak of your father?" her mother said,
angrily.
The little girl frowned. "He is not my father," she declared,
defiantly.
Frau von Strachinsky sighed. "Your ingratitude is shocking," she
exclaimed, and then, controlling herself with an effort, she added,
"But that I cannot alter: you are an unnatural, hard-hearted, stubborn
child. I cannot soften your heart, but I can insist that you conduct
yourself with propriety, and I forbid you once for all to run after
vagabonds in the street. And now go to bed."
"I will not go to bed until you bid me good-night!" cried the child.
She stood there with naked little feet, in her white night-gown, over
which her long reddish-brown hair hung down. "And I was not so naughty
as you think. You ought not to condemn me without giving me time to
defend myself."
The child was so desperately reasonable, her mother could not think her
wrong, in spite of her momentary anger. She paused. An idea evidently
occurred to the little girl. "Only wait one minute!" she exclaimed, as
she flew across the room to a drawer where she kept her toys, and,
returning with her _protege's_ water-colour sketch, held it up
triumphantly before her mother's eyes. "Look at that!" she cried.
Involuntarily Emma looked. "Where did that come from?" she exclaimed,
forgetting her vexation in freshly-aroused interest.
"Do you know who it is?" asked Erika, stretching her slender neck out
of the embroidered ruffle of her night-gown.
"Of course; it is your picture. It is charming. Who did it?"
"The vagabond whom I ran after, the house-painter fellow," Erika
replied. "At least you can see he was not _that_, but a young artist."
Her mother was silent.
"Ah, if you had only been at home!" the child's bare feet were growing
colder, and her cheeks hotter with excitement, "you would have done
just as I did. If you had only seen him! He was very handsome, and so
pale and thin and weary with hunger,--why, _I_ could have knocked him
down,--and he never begged,--he was too proud,--only held out the
portfolio to papa, and his hand trembled----" Suddenly the excitable
temperament which the girl had inherited from her mother asserted
itself, and she began to sob, her whole childish frame quivering with
emotion. "And papa turned him out of doors, and told the cook--to
give--to give him two kreutzers. He threw them away--and then--then I
ran after him!"
Frau von Strachinsky had grown very pale; the child's agitated story
had evidently made an impression upon her, but she did her best to
preserve a severe demeanour. "But it is very improper to run after
strangers in the street; you are too old."
Erika hung her head, ashamed. "But I should not have done it if papa
had not abused him," she declared, by way of excuse. "I did it out of
pity for him."
"Pity is a very poor counsellor." Her mother said these words with an
emphasis which Erika never forgot, and which was to echo in her soul
years afterwards. Then she extricated herself from the child's embrace
and left the room, closing the door behind her.
A few minutes afterwards she reopened the door. Little Erika was still
standing where she had left her.
"Go to bed," said her mother, in a far more gentle tone, stooping down
to kiss her, "and be a better girl another time."
The child clasped her slender little arms tightly about her mother's
neck in a strangling embrace, crying, "Oh, mother, mother, you do love
me still?" The pale woman did not answer the question, save by a kiss;
she waited until the little girl had crept back to bed, and then tucked
in the coverlet about her shoulders, and once more left the room.
Erika, precocious child that she was, was a prey to emotions of
a very mingled character. She had won a great victory over her
step-father,--of this she was well aware,--but then she had grieved her
mother sorely. All at once she was seized with profound remorse in
recalling to-day's stroke of genius. Beneath her mother's severity she
had been sure of having right on her side; now a great uncertainty
possessed her. "It is very improper to run after strangers in the
street; you are too old," she repeated, meekly, and she grew hot. "What
would my mother think if she knew that I had kissed him?"
In the midst of her distress she was overpowered by intense fatigue:
her eyelids drooped above her eyes, and with her nightly prayer still
on her lips she fell asleep.
Emma von Strachinsky did not sleep; she sat in the bare room adjoining
the nursery, the room where she taught Erika her lessons. She wrote two
very difficult letters to her husband's creditors, and then proceeded
to sew upon a gown for her daughter. She was proud of the child's
beauty as only the mother can be who has all her life long been
conscious of being obliged to forego the gift of beauty for herself.
She loved her daughter idolatrously,--the daughter whom she often
treated with a severity verging upon injustice, and whom she sometimes
avoided for days because the glance of those clear eyes troubled her.
The windows of the room were open, and looked out upon the road. The
fragrance of ripened grain was wafted in from the earth outside,
resting from its summer fruitfulness and saturated with the August
sunshine. A song floated up through the silent night: the reapers were
working by moonlight. The low murmur of the brook accompanied the song,
and now and then could be heard the soft swish of the grain falling
beneath the scythe. A cricket chirped.
Emma dropped her hands in her lap and gazed into vacancy.
Suddenly she started; a step approached the door of the room, and
Strachinsky, smiling sentimentally, entered. "Emma," he said, tenderly,
"have you written to Franks and Ziegler?"
"Yes," she replied, and her voice sounded hoarse. "There lie the
letters. Read them, and see if they are what you wish."
"Not at all," her husband exclaimed, gaily. "I have implicit confidence
in your tact. H'm! the perusal of such letters is a sorry amusement."
"Do you suppose that it was a pleasure to write them?" Emma asked, with
some bitterness.
Strachinsky immediately assumed an injured air. "You are irritable
again. One cannot venture upon the slightest jest with you. Do you
suppose that I enjoy being forced to ask you to write the letters? Good
heavens! it is hard enough, but--circumstances will have it so." He
passed his hand over his eyes, and stroked his whiskers with an air of
great dignity.
She was silent. He watched her for a while, and then said, "That
eternal sewing is very bad for you. Come to bed."
"I cannot. I am not sleepy," she replied, plying her needle; "and,
moreover, I must finish this frock; let me go on with it." She bent
over her work with the air of one determined to complete a task.
Strachinsky stood beside her for a while longer, hesitating and
uncertain: he picked up each small article upon the table, looked at it
and laid it down again after the fashion of a man who does not know
what to do with himself, then he sighed profoundly, yawned, sighed
again, and without another word left the room with heavy, lagging
footsteps.
When he was gone she laid aside her sewing, and went to the open window
to breathe the fresh air. The bluish moonlight shone full upon the
whitewashed walls of the peasants' cots crowned with their dark clumsy
thatch; in the distance twinkled the little stream winding its plashing
way directly across the village towards the river, its banks bordered
with curiously-distorted willows that looked like crouching lurking
gnomes, and spanned by the huge useless bridge. Bridge, willows, and
cots all threw pitch-black shadows out into the glaring splendour of
the moonlit night, which was absolutely free from mist and damp. Beyond
the village stretched fields of grain and stubble in endless
perspective, a surface of tarnished dull gold.
The song was still informing the silence.
At last it ceased, and shortly afterwards heavy, regular steps were
heard passing along the road. The reapers were going home. They passed
by Emma's windows, a little dark gray crowd of men; the scythes over
their shoulders glimmered in the moonlight; then came a couple of
women, bowed and weary, almost dropping asleep as they walked; and last
of all the overseer, a young fellow whose hand clasped that of a girl
at his side. How he bent over her! A low tender whispering sound
reached Emma's ears through the dry August air which the night had
scarcely cooled. She turned away, frowning. "How happy they look! and
why?" she murmured to herself. Suddenly she smiled bitterly. Had she
any right to sneer thus at others?--she? Surely if ever a woman lived
who had believed in love and had married for love, she was that woman.
And whom had she loved? A poor weakling, who had never been worthy to
unloose the latchet of her shoe!
Not only little precocious Erika, every sensible human being who had
ever come in contact with the married pair had asked how such a union
had been possible. And yet it was so simple a story,--so simple and
commonplace,--the story of a woman lacking beauty, but gifted,
enthusiastic, prone to romantic exaggeration, whose longing for
affection had wrought her ruin.
Her parents belonged to the most ancient if not the most illustrious of
the native Bohemian nobility; he was of doubtful descent. She had
always been wealthy; he possessed nothing save a scheming brain and a
soaring self-conceit that bore him triumphantly aloft through all the
annoyances of life.
He was not entirely without talent, had had a good education, and was,
previous to his marriage with Emma Lenzdorff, neither idle nor
inactive, but possessed of a certain desire for culture, the secret
springs of which, however, were to be found in an eager social
ambition. At eighteen he entered the army: too poor to join the
cavalry, and too arrogant to content himself among the infantry, he
joined a Jaeger corps. He had risen to the rank of captain when he was
wounded in the Schleswig-Holstein campaign. He made his wife's
acquaintance in a private hospital in Berlin, which she had arranged in
her own house for the martyrs of the aforesaid campaign.
She was very young, very enthusiastic, and a widow,--widow of a cold,
unloved northern German whom in accordance with family arrangements she
had married while she was yet only a visionary child. The memory of her
formal marriage inspired her with horror.
Before meeting Strachinsky she had given scope to her romantic
tendencies by all sorts of exaggerated charitable schemes, and by a
fanatical devotion to art and poetry. She had long been convinced that
her thirst for affection could never be satisfied. No one had ever
shown her any passionate devotion, and, conscious of her lack of
beauty, she had sadly resigned herself to swell the ranks of those
women whom reason might prompt a suitor to woo, but who could never
hope to be wooed in defiance of reason.
The Pole had an easy task. That he was handsome even his enemies could
not deny. And he knew how to make the most of his personal advantages:
a century earlier he might have been taken for a Poniatowski, with a
direct claim to the throne of Poland. His uniform was very becoming,
and a wounded soldier is always interesting. As soon as he divined the
young widow's weakness he wooed her with verses,--with passionate
declarations of love.
Poor Emma! Her thirsty heart thrilled with the sudden bursting into
bloom of its spring so long delayed! Her parents, who might have warned
her of what she was bringing upon herself, were dead; she paid no heed
to her mother-in-law, who strenuously opposed her second marriage. When
Emma, with burning cheeks, and trembling to her finger-tips with
emotion, repeated to her the Pole's exaggerated expressions of
devotion, the elder woman rejoined, coldly, "And you believe the
coxcomb?"
The words were to Emma like the sting from a whip-lash. "And why should
I not believe him?" she asked, sharply. "Because, perhaps, you think me
incapable of inspiring a man with affection?"
"Nonsense!" replied the sensible mother-in-law. "You could inspire
affection in any honest man with a heart in his bosom, but not in that
shallow Pole, that second-rate dandy."
"Perhaps you think him an adventurer, who wooes me for the sake of my
money?" Emma exclaimed, indignantly.
"No, I think him a superficial man who, flattered by having made an
impression upon a woman of rank, is trying to better his condition.
Adventurer! Nonsense! He has not wit enough. An opportunity offers
itself, and he embraces it: _voila tout_. He is not to blame, but his
suit is unworthy of you, and a marriage with him would be a misfortune
for you, apart from the fact that you would disgrace your family by
it."
When a patient is to be persuaded to take a dose of medicine it ought
not to be offered him in an unattractive shape.
The old lady's representations were correct, but they were humiliating.
Emma turned away, stubborn and indignant, and a month afterwards
married Strachinsky and parted from her mother-in-law forever.
Eight years had passed since then. First came a few months during
which Emma revelled in the sensation of loving and being loved, and
then--well, the bliss was still there, but a slight shadow had fallen
upon it, dimming it, chilling it, a gnawing uneasiness, in the midst of
which memory would suddenly suggest the sensible mother-in-law's
unsparing predictions.
His marriage put an end to all exertion on Strachinsky's part: it had
at a single stroke, as it were, lifted him so far above all for which
his ambition had thirsted that he had nothing left to desire, save to
enjoy life in distinguished society as far as was possible. With his
wife's money he purchased an estate in Bohemia where the soil was the
poorest, so great in extent that it made a show in the map of the
country, and developed a brilliant talent for hospitality: all the
land-owners in the vicinity, all the cavalry-officers from the nearest
garrison, were habitues of Luzano, as the estate was called. With his
wife's unceasing attentions Strachinsky's self-importance increased,
and his regard for her declined. She existed simply to insure his
comfort,--for nothing else. The household was turned topsy-turvy when
the master's guests appeared, whether invited or unannounced.
Strachinsky entertained them with exquisite suppers, at which champagne
flowed freely, but at which his wife did not appear. After supper cards
were produced, and it was frequently four in the morning before the
gentlemen were heard driving away from the castle; sometimes they
remained until the next night.
But the day came when Luzano ceased to be a branch of the military
casino at K----. The life there suddenly became very quiet, and various
disagreeable facts came to light which had been disregarded in the
whirl of gaiety. Then first little Erika saw her mother, pencil in
hand, patiently adding up her husband's debts, while Strachinsky, his
hands clasped behind him, and a cigarette between his teeth, paced the
room, dictating amounts to her.
In addition to losses at play and in unfortunate speculations, he had
magnanimously put his name to various notes of his distinguished
friends.
Emma did not even frown, but exerted herself in every way,--sold her
trinkets and almost every valuable piece of furniture, that her husband
might meet his liabilities, treating him all the while with the
forbearance traditional in model wives, in order to save him from any
depressing consciousness of his position.
Was he conscious of it? If he were, he was entirely successful in
concealing any consequent depression. The morning after the first
painful revelation of his indebtedness, he skipped with the gayest air
imaginable into the dining-room, where the family were already
assembled at the breakfast-table, and exhorted all present to
economize, and especially not to put too much butter on their bread,
afterwards discoursing wittily upon 'poverty and magnanimity.'
To lighten his burden,--perhaps to disguise his insensibility from her
own heart,--Emma persuaded him that his course had been the result
solely of warm-hearted imprudence and an exaggerated nobility of
character.
This view of the case was eagerly adopted by his vanity. He paraded his
martyr's nimbus, and with a self-satisfied sigh styled himself a Don
Quixote.
Nothing could really be farther from Don Quixote's idealistic and
unselfish craze than his utter egotism, in its thin veil of
sentimentality. And as for his martyrdom, it was easily seen through.
None of the misfortunes brought upon himself by himself did he ever
allow to affect his existence. He possessed a kind of cunning
intelligence that never forsook him, and that enabled him in the midst
of ruin to insure his own personal ease.
But how could Emma have borne at that comparatively early period to see
him as he really was? She seized upon every excuse for him; she patched
up her damaged illusions; she would support, restrain him, develop all
that was really noble in him.
In her jealous ambition to make his home so delightful that he would
never look for entertainment elsewhere, she exerted herself to the
utmost, pandered to his love of eating, even cooked herself when they
were no longer able to bear the expense of such a cook as he had been
accustomed to, tried to conform her intellectual interests to his lack
of any such,--in short, did everything to strengthen the tie between
herself and him. She succeeded completely: she made the tie so strong
that no loosening of it was possible.
She tried to withdraw him from all outside influences, to win him
wholly to herself, and she succeeded; her presence, her tenderness,
became an absolute necessity of existence to him; he had never so
adored her even during their honeymoon.
Good heavens! now she would have given everything in the world for any
breach between them that could be widened beyond all possibility of
healing. It was too late; she must drag on the burden with which she
had laden herself; it was her duty; she could not sink beneath it; she
had no right to.
But in spite of all her efforts her nerves at length gave way. She
became irritable. At times she grieved over the change which she saw in
him; at other times the thought would suggest itself that this change
was merely superficial, that he had never really been any other than at
present. Then her blood would seem to run cold; she could have
screamed. No, no, she would not see!
There is nothing sadder in this world than the dutiful, tortured life
of a woman with a husband whom she has ceased to love.
CHAPTER II.
Full four years had passed by since Erika had kissed the young artist.
She recalled the little adventure, which had taken upon itself quite
magnificent dimensions in her lively imagination, with secret delight
and a vague sense of shame.
Emma was bearing her cross as best she might, but at every step she
well-nigh fell exhausted. Her wretchedness not unfrequently found vent
in angry words, for which she was sure to repent and apologize.
Her relation with her daughter, now a tall, slender, and unusually
clever girl of fourteen, suffered from her general wretchedness. She
still loved the child tenderly, but the girl's clear, observant gaze
pained her. It had grown much clearer and more penetrating with years.
A certain weight, an oppression, seemed to brood over Luzano like the
sense of an impending catastrophe.
The only ray of sunshine in the unhappy wife's gloomy lot was her
little son. Out of several children by her second marriage he alone had
survived. He was strong and healthy, the darling of all, his sister's
idol. Then--he had hardly passed his seventh birthday when he too died.
The little fellow had sickened in the midst of his play, had run to his
sister and had fallen asleep with his head in her lap. The girl sat
still, not to disturb him, and enjoined silence upon Miss Sophy, who
was in the room. The twilight stole gray and vague in upon the bare
apartment. The maid-servant--there were no longer any men-servants at
Luzano--brought in a lamp, and a plate of rosy-cheeked apples for the
children's supper. The boy opened his eyes, but closed them again with
a low moan and turned his head away from the light.
His mother appeared, saw at a glance how matters stood, and put the
little fellow to bed. She did not come down to supper, and when Erika
went, as was her wont, to say good-night to her brother, she was not
allowed to enter his room. The next morning the doctor was sent for.
Whilst he was in the sick-room Erika was taking her daily lesson in
English with Miss Sophy, with no thought of any trouble. She was
learning by heart her scene from Shakespeare, when her mother suddenly
put her head in at the door and said, "Diphtheria!" The tone of her
voice and the expression of her face were such as to terrify the girl.
But when Erika, trembling with dread, ran towards her, she waved her
off and vanished.
Miss Sophy was established in the sick-room, which Erika was not
allowed to enter. No one paid her any attention, and she spent hours
forlornly watching at the end of a long gloomy corridor the door behind
which so much that was terrible was going on. If she was seen she was
sent away; but before long the entire household was too anxious to pay
her the slightest heed.
It was about eleven in the forenoon of the fifth day since the first
symptoms of the disease had appeared. Erika stood listening eagerly
near the door, trembling with a sense of something vaguely terrible
going on behind it. Suddenly it opened, and her mother staggered out,
her dress disordered, her face distorted with agony, and supported by
the little boy's nurse. Behind her came Strachinsky, his handkerchief
at his eyes.
In absolute terror Erika looked after her mother, who passed her by,
even brushing her with her skirt, without seeing her. Then she entered
the room which the wretched woman had just left. The bed was covered
with a white sheet, which revealed the outline of the little form
beneath it. The girl's heart throbbed almost to bursting. She lifted a
corner of the sheet: there lay her little brother, dead, so white, and
with his sweet face unchanged by disease. The little hands lay half
open upon the coverlet, as though life had just slipped from them. A
grace born of death hovered above the entire form. His sister gazed in
tearless distress. She could not cry; she felt no definable pain, only
a terrible heaviness in her limbs, and a weight upon her heart that
almost choked her. She bent over the corpse to kiss it, when Miss Sophy
rushed into the room, seized her by the arm, and thrust her out of the
door.
Of course the first thing Erika did was to look for her mother. She
found her in the morning-room, seated in a large arm-chair, quivering
in every limb. Minna, the nurse, was moistening her forehead with
cologne, but she seemed entirely unconscious. Her hands were folded in
her lap, and her gaze was fixed on vacancy. Erika could not summon the
courage to approach her.
Meanwhile, Strachinsky was pacing the room in long strides: his tears
were already dried; every now and then he would pause and heave a
profound sigh. At first Emma seemed not to notice him, but on a sudden
she roused from her apathy, and, passing her hand over her brow, with a
feeble, wailing cry, she said, "For God's sake, stop, Nello!"
He paused, cleared his throat several times, took an English penknife
from his pocket, began to pare his nails, and then went to his wife and
stroked her cheek. She shrank from him involuntarily.
He groaned feelingly, left her, and went to the window: with one hand
he stroked his whiskers, with the other he jingled the keys in his
pocket.
After a while he began in an undertone, probably with the foolish
expectation of distracting the wretched mother's thoughts, to detail
what was going on outside, all in a melancholy, sentimental monotone,
that would have set healthy nerves on edge. "Ah, see that little
sparrow with a straw in its beak! it must be fitting up its winter
nest."
Poor Emma sat bolt upright, except that her head inclined somewhat
forward, and gazed at the man at the window.
Suddenly she uttered a short, shrill scream, and, pressing both hands
to her temples, rushed out of the room.
When she had gone Strachinsky shrugged his shoulders, sighed as if
gross injustice had been done him, and retired to his room to make a
list of the names of all those whom he wished notified of the death.
The funeral took place the third day afterwards.
On that day they assembled at the dinner-table as on other days. The
poor mother ate nothing, and Erika could scarce swallow a morsel. The
tears which had refused to come at first were falling fast upon her new
black gown.
Strachinsky ate, but after a while he too pushed his plate away. For
the first time in her life his stepdaughter was conscious of an emotion
of compassion for him. She thought that his grief had made eating
impossible, when he cleared his throat, and, "This is intolerable," he
whined; "at best I have no appetite, and here is tomato sauce! You know
I never eat tomato sauce."
His wife made no reply: she only looked at him with her strange new
gaze, with eyes from which the last veil had fallen, and which were
pained by the light. The look in those eyes would have made one
shudder.
The clock in the castle tower struck one quarter of an hour after
another, bringing ever nearer the time for the interment. The little
body was already laid in the coffin. The coffin-lid leaned up against
the wall. A fierce restlessness, the strained expectation of a certain
moment which was to be the culmination of an intolerable misery,
possessed Erika: she hurried from place to place, and at last ran after
her mother, who had gone into the garden.
It was cold and stormy. The autumn had come late and suddenly. Some
bushes had kept all their leaves, but they were blackened and
shrivelled; others had retained only a few red and yellow leaflets that
fluttered in the wind. The trees, on the other hand, were almost
entirely bare. The naked boughs showed dark gray or purplish brown
against the cloudy sky: the birches alone could still boast some
golden-coloured foliage. On the moist gravel paths and the sodden
autumn grass lay wet brown leaves mingled with those but lately fallen.
The asters and chrysanthemums, nipped by the first frost, hung their
heads, and among all the autumnal decay the poor mother wandered about,
seeking a few fresh flowers to lay in her dead child's coffin. With
faltering steps, tripping now and then over the skirt of her gown, she
tottered from one ruined flower-bed to another. The sharp autumn wind
fluttered her dress and outlined her emaciated limbs. From her lips
came a low moaning mingled with caressing words. She kissed the few
poor flowers, frost-touched, which she held in her hand. Erika walked
close behind her. Once or twice she stretched out her hand to grasp her
mother's skirt, but withdrew it hastily, as if fearing to hurt her by
even the gentlest touch.
Ten minutes afterwards the sharp strokes of a hammer resounded through
the castle, and the unhappy woman was crouching in the farthest corner
of her room, her hands held tightly to her ears.
In the night following the funeral Erika was waked from sleep by a low
moan. She started up. By the vague light of early dawn, in which the
windows were defined amid the darkness, she saw something dark lying
upon the floor beside her bed. She cried out in terror, and then it
stirred. It was her mother lying there upon the hard floor, where
she must have been for some time, for when Erika touched her she was
icy-cold. The girl took her in her arms and drew her into the soft warm
bed beside her. Neither spoke one word, but their hearts beat in
unison: all discord between them had vanished.
She had thrown off her burden; she breathed anew; she would stand erect
once more. Then she discovered that a heavier burden yet, a fresh tie,
bound her to the husband whom now, stripped of all illusion, she
detested. The consciousness of this misfortune crept over her slowly;
at first she would not believe it, and when she could no longer doubt,
it seemed to her that her reason must give way.
Erika soon perceived that her mother's misery was not due alone to the
loss of her child. No, that pain brought with it a tender and gentle
mood. Another burden oppressed her, something against which her entire
nature angrily rebelled, and under the weight of which she displayed a
gloomy severity from which her daughter alone never suffered. Towards
her since the boy's death Emma had shown inexpressible tenderness, and
the girl, thirsting for affection, was never weary of nestling close in
her mother's arms, receiving her caresses with profound gratitude,
almost with devout adoration. Sometimes the mother would smile in the
midst of her grief as she stroked the gold-gleaming hair back from her
child's pale face with its large dark eyes. "They do not see it," she
would murmur, "but I see how pretty you are growing. Poor little Erika!
you have had a sad youth; but life will atone to you for it when I am
no longer here."
"Do not say that!" cried the girl, clasping her mother in her arms. "As
if I could endure life without you! Mother! mother!"
"You do not dream of what can be endured," her mother said, bitterly.
"One submits. Learn to submit; learn it as soon as may be. Do not ask
too much from life; ask for no complete happiness: it is an illusion.
You, indeed, are justified in claiming more than your poor, ugly mother
had any right to, my beautiful, gifted child!" She uttered the words
almost with solemnity. Something of the romantic strain which had
characterized her through every stage of her prosaic, humiliating
existence came to light now in her worship of her daughter.
She strongly impressed Erika with the idea that she was an exceptional
creature, and, although she was always admonishing her to expect
nothing of life, she nevertheless gave her to understand that life was
sure to offer something extraordinary for her acceptance. On the whole,
in spite of the girl's grief at the loss of her little brother, she
would have been happier than ever before had it not been for a growing
anxiety with regard to her mother, whose health had entirely given way.
Whereas she had been wont from early morning until late at night to
make her presence felt throughout the household and on the estate,
grasping with a firm and skilled hand the reins which her husband had
idly dropped, now she took an interest in nothing.
Erika was tortured by anxiety, an anxiety all the more distressing from
the fact that she could not define her fears.
Towards her husband Emma displayed a daily increasing irritability. But
his easy content was not at all disturbed by it. Thanks to a fancy
which was ever ready to devise means for sparing and nourishing his
self-conceit, he discovered a hundred reasons other than the true one
for his wife's attitude towards him. Her irritability was all due, so
he informed Miss Sophy, to her situation. And in receiving Miss Sophy's
admiring and compassionate homage he found, and had found for some
time, his favourite occupation.
Emma now lived apart in a large room, which, besides her bed and
wash-stand, was furnished only with a couple of book-shelves, two
straight-backed chairs covered with horsehair, and a round tiled stove
decorated with a rude bas-relief of a train of mad Bacchantes and
bearing on its level top a large funeral urn. The boards of the floor
were bare, and in a deep window-recess there was an arm-chair. In this
chair the miserable woman would sit for hours, her elbows resting upon
its arms, her hands clasped, staring into vacancy.
In the garden upon which this window looked the snow lay several feet
deep; upon the meadow beyond, which sloped gently to the broad frozen
river, and upon its icy surface, it was so deep that meadow and river
were undistinguishable from each other; upon the dark pine forest
that bounded the horizon--upon everything--it lay cold and heavy. All
cold!--all white! Huge drifts of snow; no road definable; never a bird
that chirped, never a leaf that stirred; all cold and white, without
pulsation, without breath, dead,--the whole earth a lovely stark
corpse.
And the wretched woman's gaze could fall upon naught outside save this
white monotony.
Spring came. The dignified repose of death dissolved in feverish
activity, in the restless change of seasons, vibrating between fair and
foul, between purity and its opposite.
The earth absorbed the snow, except where in dark hollows it lingered
in patches, to disappear slowly in muddy pools.
Emma still sat for hours daily in her room with hands clasped in her
lap, but her eyes were no longer fixed on vacancy; they had found an
object upon which to rest. Among the tender green of the meadows so
lately stripped of their snowy covering, glided the river, dark and
swollen. How loudly it exulted in its liberation from its icy fetters!
"Freedom!" shouted its surging waves,--"Freedom!"
Upon this river her gaze was now riveted.
Days passed,--weeks; the air was warm and sweet; the window by which
she sat was open, and the voice of the river was clear and loud.
One afternoon at the end of April the ploughs were creaking over the
road, there was an odour of freshly-turned earth in the air, and the
fruit-trees were already enveloped in a white mist.
The sun had set, and in the west the crescent moon hung pale and
shadowy.
Erika was standing at the low garden wall, looking down across the
meadow. Her youthful spirit was oppressed by anxiety so vague that she
could neither define it nor struggle against it: she seemed to be
blindly dragged along to meet the inevitable.
Her mother had to-day been especially tender to her, but sadder than
ever before. She had talked as if her death were nigh at hand, and had
spent a long time in writing letters.
On a sudden the girl perceived a dark object moving rapidly along in
the warm damp evening air,--a tall figure in a black gown which
fluttered in the south wind. It was her mother.
How quickly she strode through the high rank grass! how strange was her
gait! Erika had never before seen any one hasten thus, with long
strides, and yet falteringly as though borne down by weariness, on--on
towards the dark-flowing river.
Suddenly the girl divined what her mother intended to do. She would
have screamed, but for an instant her voice failed her, and in the next
she was silent from presence of mind, the clear-sight of terror.
She clambered over the low wall and flew after her mother, her feet
scarcely touching the ground, her breath coming in painful gasps.
The dark figure had reached its goal, the river-bank; it leaned
forward,--when two nervous, girlish hands clutched the black folds of
her gown. "Mother!" shrieked Erika, in despair.
She turned round. "What do you want?" she said, harshly, almost
cruelly, to her daughter. Then she shuddered violently, and burst into
a convulsive sobbing which it seemed impossible to her to control.
Her daughter put her arm around her, nestled close to her, and kissed
the tears from her cheeks. "Mother," she cried, tenderly, "darling
mother!" and without another word she gently led the wretched woman
away from the water. The mother made no resistance; she was mortally
weary, and leaned heavily upon the slender girl of fourteen.
They slowly returned to the house. A white translucent mist was rising
from the fields, and flying through it with drooping wings, so low that
they almost stirred the grass, a flock of hoarsely-croaking ravens
passed them by.
In the night Erika suddenly aroused from sleep, without knowing what
had wakened her. She rubbed her eyes, and turned to sleep again, when
just outside of her door she heard a voice exclaim, "Ah, God of
heaven!" In an instant, barefooted and in her nightgown, she was in the
corridor, where she saw the cook hurrying in the direction of her
mother's room. "What is the matter?" the girl cried, in terror. The
cook looked round, shrugged her shoulders, and hurried on.
Erika would have followed her, but Strachinsky appeared at the turning
of the corridor where the cook had vanished. He looked as if just
roused from sleep; he had on a flowered dressing-gown, and carried a
lighted candle. Beside him Minna walked, pale as ashes.
Strachinsky set the candlestick down upon a long low table in the
passage. "Have the horses harnessed immediately," he ordered, "and send
the bailiff to K---- for the doctor."
"Will not the Herr Baron go himself? People are not always to be relied
upon," said Minna, with a significant glance at the master of the
house.
"Oh, no; the bailiff will attend to it perfectly, and then--you can
understand that I do not wish to be away at this time from my wife, who
will of course ask for me----" Minna's eyes still being fixed upon him
with a very strange expression in them, he added, snapping out his
words in childish irritation, "And then--then--it is no business of
yours, you stupid fool!" And, turning on his heel, he left her.
Minna shrugged her shoulders, and turned towards the staircase to give
the necessary orders.
Neither she nor Strachinsky had noticed Erika. The girl ran to the
nurse and plucked her by the sleeve. "Minna," she asked, in dread,
"what is the matter? Is my mother ill?"
"Yes."
"What is the matter with her? Tell me, Minna! oh, tell me!"
But the nurse shook off her clasping hands. "Let me alone, child. I am
in a hurry," she murmured.
Erika advanced a step, hesitated, and then returned to her room,
where she found Miss Sophy in great distress, her head crowned with
curl-papers, which she cut out of the _Modern Free Press_ every evening
and which made her look half like Medusa and half like a porcupine.
"Where are you going?" she asked, seeing that Erika began to dress
hurriedly. "To my mother; she is ill."
Miss Sophy gently detained her. "Do not go," she said, softly: "they
would not let you in; you would only be in the way, now. Wait a little.
Your mother does not want you there." And she wagged her porcupine head
with melancholy solemnity as she added, "I believe--I think you will
perhaps have a little brother, or sister."
Erika stared at her. This it was, then!
Among the many sad experiences that were to fall to Erika's lot there
were none to equal the dull restlessness, the mortal dread mingled with
a mysterious, inexpressible emotion, of these hours.
She went on dressing, striving only to be ready quickly, as one dresses
when the next house is on fire. Then she seated herself opposite Miss
Sophy, at a tottering round table upon which stood a guttering candle.
For a while all was silent; then there was a noise outside the door.
The girl sprang up and hurried out, to see a stout, elderly woman in a
tall black cap, with the phlegmatic flabby face of a monk, going
towards her mother's room. Erika recognized her as the needy widow of a
stone-mason; she was wont to doctor both men and cattle in the village.
Her name was Frau Jelinek. The scullery-maid who had brought her was
just behind her.
They passed Erika without heeding her, and the girl looked after them
in a fresh access of dread.
Two hours passed. Miss Sophy was asleep; Erika still waked and watched.
A light rain had begun to fall; the drops pattered against the
window-panes.
Once more Erika arose and crept out into the corridor. Trembling in
every limb, she stood at the door of the room through which her
mother's sleeping-apartment was reached. It was ajar, and light
streamed through the crack. She looked in. Strachinsky was seated at a
table, playing whist with three dummies. It had for some time past been
his favourite occupation. A maid stood in a corner, arranging a pile of
linen. Erika was about to address her, when Frau Jelinek, her black
leathern bag on her arm, came out of her mother's bedroom.
"May I not go to mamma,--just for a moment?" the girl asked, in an
agitated whisper.
The bedroom door opened again, and Minna appeared. "Is it you, child?"
"Yes, yes," Erika made answer.
"Do not disturb your mother. Stay in your room till you are called,"
Minna said, authoritatively.
And from the room came the poor mother's weary, gentle voice: "Go lie
down, my child; don't sit up any longer; go to bed, dear."
For a while Erika stood motionless; then she kissed the hard cold door
that would not open to her, and went back to her room. She lay down on
the bed, dressed as she was, and this time she fell asleep. On a sudden
she sat upright. The candle on the table was still burning, and by its
light she saw that Miss Sophy, who had been sleeping on the sofa, was
sitting up, awake, and listening, with a startled air.
Erika hurried out; Minna met her in the corridor, and at the same
moment a vehicle rattled into the courtyard.
"The doctor!" exclaimed Minna. "Thank God!"
The bailiff appeared on the staircase.
"Where is the doctor?"
"He was not at home," the man made answer.
"Did you not ask where he was and go after him?" Minna asked,
impatiently.
"No," replied the bailiff, twirling his straw hat in his hands. "But I
left word for him to come as soon as he got home."
"Fool!" Strachinsky, who had now come into the corridor, exclaimed,
shaking his fist at the man. "You are dismissed," he added,
grandiloquently. Then, turning to Minna, he said, "Good heavens, if I
had a horse I could ride to K----."
Without heeding him, Minna hurried down the staircase, and a few
moments later a carriage again left the court-yard.
Minna had herself gone for the doctor, before her departure beseeching
Erika to keep quiet: she should be summoned as soon as it would be
right for her to see her mother.
The girl obeyed, and sat in her room, rigid and motionless, at the
table where the candle was burning down into the socket. At first, to
shorten the time, she tried to knit, but the needles dropped from her
fingers.
Miss Sophy sat opposite her, with elbows upon the table, and her head
in her hands, listening.
In the distance there was a sound of wheels; it came nearer and nearer.
Thank God! It was Minna, and she brought the doctor. There was a
hurried running to and fro, and then all was still, still as death.
The dawn crept in at the window. The flame of the candle burned red and
dim. The rain had ceased, and through the misty window-panes could be
seen a glimmer of white blossoms, and behind them a pale-blue sky in
which the last stars were slowly fading.
Then the door opened, and Minna entered. "Come, Erika," she said, in a
low voice.
Erika arose hastily. "Have I really a little brother?" she asked,
anxiously.
Minna shook her head. "It is dead."
"And my mother?"
"Ah, come quickly."
She drew the girl along with her through the long whitewashed corridor.
In the room leading to the dying woman's chamber Strachinsky was
standing with the physician. The latter stood with bowed head;
Strachinsky was weeping.
Erika went directly to her mother's bedside. The dying woman's hair was
brushed back from her temples; her lips were blue. Erika kneeled down
and buried her face in the bedclothes. Her mother laid her hand upon
her head and stroked it--ah, how feebly! But how soothing was the
touch!
In one corner old Minna kneeled, praying.
Outside, the world was brightening; there was a golden splendour over
all the earth. The birds twittered, at first faintly, then loudly and
shrilly. The dying woman stirred among the pillows: Erika was to hear
the dear voice once more.
"My child, my poor, dear child, I have been a poor mother to you----"
"Oh, mother, darling----"
"My death will make it all right. Write to----"
At this moment Strachinsky knocked at the door. "Emma!" he whispered.
The dying woman's face expressed positive horror. "Do not let him come
in!" she exclaimed.
Erika flew to the door and turned the key; when she returned to the
bedside her mother was struggling for breath.
Evidently most anxious to impart some information to her daughter, she
had not the strength to do so. Once more she passed her hand over
Erika's head,--it was for the last time; then the hand grew heavier; it
no longer lavished a caress; it was a mere weight.
Erika moved, and looked at her mother. The tears stood in her eyes
unshed, so wondrous was her mother's face. The battle was won.
All the pain of life--the sweet pain of supreme rapture hinting to us
of that heaven which we cannot attain, and that other bitter pain
pointing to the grave at which we shudder--was for her extinct.
Erika threw herself upon the body and covered it with kisses. With
difficulty could she be induced to leave it; but when they led her from
the room, as soon as the door closed behind her she was docile and
gentle. She seemed bewildered, and walked slowly with bowed head beside
Minna. Once only she looked back when a thin, melancholy wail resounded
through the quiet morning air. It was the bell in the little tower of
the castle, tolling restlessly.
Years afterwards she could not bring herself to recall in memory the
terrible days that followed,--the dreary burden that she dragged about
with her from morning until night, the sleep born of utter exhaustion,
the slow pursuance of daily custom as in a dream, the awakening with
nerves refreshed by forgetfulness, and then the sudden consciousness of
misery, the sensation of soreness in every limb, a sensation
intensified by every motion, by a word spoken in her presence, the
restlessness which drove her hither and thither until in some dim
corner she would crouch down and cry,--cry until the very fount of
tears seemed dry and her burning eyes would close again in the leaden
sleep which still had to yield to the terrible awakening.
She felt the most earnest desire to do something, to perform some
office of love for her mother; but scarcely for one moment was she left
alone with the body.
Strangers prepared the loved one for the tomb, the coachman and the
gardener lifted her into the coffin. Shortly before it was closed,
Strachinsky remembered that his wife had once expressed a wish to be
buried in the dress and veil she had worn at her marriage with him. But
neither could be found. The cabinet where she was wont to hoard her
treasures was empty, except for a lock of hair of her dead boy, and
this they laid beneath her head.
Her husband bestowed but little thought upon the circumstance. He
honestly regretted the dead, and lost his appetite for two days; but as
the time for the funeral drew near, he worked himself into an exalted
frame of mind, which found vent in solemn pomposity.
He had ordered a hearse from the city. Erika was standing at a window
of the corridor when, with nodding plumes, it rattled into the castle
court-yard, and her misery reached the point of despair.
Until then she had not quite comprehended it all. She heard the men
stagger down the stairs beneath the weight of the coffin, heard it
knock against the wall at a sharp turn.
She followed it to the grave. All walked behind the hearse, the shabby
splendour of which suited so ill with the rural landscape.
Most of the gentry of the surrounding country, who had long since
ceased to visit at Luzano, assembled to pay the last honours to the
poor woman, but they were only a speck in the endless funeral train.
Behind the few black coats and high hats following close upon the
hearse came a swarming crowd. All the peasants, day-labourers, and
beggars from Luzano and the surrounding estates paid the last token of
respect to the martyr gone to her eternal rest: she had been good and
kind to all.
It was the first of May. The fields were clothed in a light green, and
the apple-trees showed pink with half-open blossoms. A reddish smoke
curled upward to the skies from the flames of the torches. And there
was a flutter of sighs among the blossoming boughs of the trees and
above the meadows,--the breath of the freshly-born spring.
Through the new life strode death.
Noiselessly the funeral train moved on. Erika walked almost
mechanically, looking neither to the right nor to the left, only moving
forward. On a sudden something attracted her gaze. On a little
elevation by the roadside, between two apple-trees, stood a young
peasant woman with a child in her arms,--a child who stared at the long
procession with large eyes of wonder.
CHAPTER III.
The day after the funeral Strachinsky, in melancholy mood, paced to and
fro in the room where his wife had died. From time to time he walked to
the window and looked out,--then he would turn again towards the
interior of the chamber. Suddenly his eyes fell upon a sheet of
blotting-paper left upon the writing-table.
His wife's handwriting had been remarkably large, and the words which
were of course imprinted backwards upon the sheet attracted his notice.
With very little trouble he deciphered them: "My last will."
He frowned. "So she has made a fresh will," he said to himself. In
spite of his enormous self-conceit, he did not doubt that it could
hardly be in his favour. The blood rushed to his head. Where was the
will? Probably in her writing-table. But where were the keys? The
shrewdness which, in spite of his intellectual deterioration, stood him
in stead whenever he feared personal inconvenience came to his aid. He
remembered that his wife had been wont to keep her keys in the drawer
of a small table at her bedside, and he reflected that, in the sad
confusion ensuing upon her death, it was hardly likely that they had as
yet been removed. In fact he found them there, and with them he opened
the middle drawer of her writing-table. It contained a large sealed
envelope inscribed "My last will." Strachinsky slipped the document
into his pocket, and returned the keys to their place.
At that moment the door opened, and Erika entered. She looked
wretchedly pale and wan, with dark rings around her weary eyes. She
wore a black gown which her mother had made hastily for her when her
little brother died, and which she had outgrown during the winter.
Although the day was warm and sunshiny, she looked cold, and in all her
movements there was something of the timorous hesitation that a dog
will display after losing his master, when he seems uncertain where to
creep away and hide himself. The resolute attitude she had been wont to
maintain when with her step-father was all gone; heart, mind, and soul
seemed alike crushed.
"What do you want here?" Strachinsky asked, suspiciously.
She looked at him in what was almost surprise, and a tremor of pain
passed through her. "What should I want?" she murmured, in a hoarse
whisper. "I want to go to my mother!" She said it to herself, not to
him; she seemed to have forgotten his presence. Her chin trembled, her
lips twitched, the tears rushed to her eyes.
No, that pitiable creature never could have come to look for a will.
Strachinsky, always ready to be sentimental, gave a sigh of relief, put
his hand over his eyes, and left the room. Scarcely had he gone when
Erika's sad eye fell upon the bed: it had been stripped of all its
coverings and looked like some couch in a lumber-room that had been
unused for years. With a shudder the girl turned away. Yes, what could
she want here? She asked herself the question now. But on a sudden she
perceived hanging on the wall a black skirt, the hem soiled with mud.
It was the gown her mother had worn when she hurried across the fields,
the day before her death. Erika clutched it as if it had been a living
thing, and with a low wail buried her face in its folds, about which
some aroma of her dead mother seemed to cling.
Meanwhile, Strachinsky had locked himself into his room, where he
walked to and fro, lost in reflection, the portentous will in his
pocket, with the seal as yet unbroken. The only legal document of the
kind, in his opinion, was the will made by his wife eleven years
previously, shortly after their marriage, by which she constituted him
her sole heir and the guardian of her daughter. Any later testamentary
disposition he could not possibly regard otherwise than as the result
of an aberration of mind, of which she had for some time shown
symptoms, and which had, shortly before her death, come to be
distinctly developed.
Poor Emma! There was no doubt that her intellect, once so clear and
strong, had been clouded of late years.
So soon as he had entirely convinced himself of this fact, he broke the
seal of the will.
Even in his rascality he was a thorough sentimentalist. He never could
have committed a crime without first skilfully contriving to exalt in
his own eyes both himself and his motives.
Whilst reading the document he changed colour several times. When he
had finished he sighed thrice consecutively: "Poor Emma!" Then, after
pacing the room thoughtfully, he said to himself, "She would be indeed
distressed if this paper--worthless legally in view of her mental
condition, and throwing so false a light upon our marriage--should ever
be made public; she--to whom the tie between us was so sacred!" A flood
of proofs of his wife's devotion to him, interrupted but temporarily,
overwhelmed Strachinsky's soul. He lit a candle and burned Emma's last
will.
And then, without the slightest pricking of conscience, he betook
himself to his beloved lounge. He had the sensation of having performed
an act of exalted devotion.
"No need, dearest Emma," he said, apostrophizing his wife's portrait
which hung above his couch, "to say that I never shall let your child
want. No legal document is necessary to insure that. Poor Emma!" And,
remembering the extract-books which he had devised at a former period
of his existence, he moaned, drearily, "Oh, what a noble mind was there
o'erthrown!"
When, a few hours afterwards, he encountered his step-daughter, he felt
it incumbent upon him to be especially kind to her. He patted her
shoulder, with the insinuating tenderness people are apt to show
towards those whom they have wronged, and said, solemnly, "Poor little
Rika! Your loss is great. Your mother is gone; but never forget that
you still have a father."
Weeks passed,--months; everything in the house went on as best it
could. Strachinsky lay on the sofa from morning until night, reading
novels most of the time. In the pauses of this edifying occupation he
roused himself to an unedifying activity; that is to say, he scolded
all the servants, without assigning any grounds for his displeasure. No
one minded it much: every one knew that after such an episode he would
betake himself to his sofa again and to his sentimental romances.
With regard to his step-daughter's education, he showed the same
tendency to vehement attacks of zeal. He would suddenly go to the
school-room, inspect her written exercises, question her as to some
historical date which he had quite forgotten himself, and conclude by
asking her to play something upon the piano.
During her performance he would pace the room with a face expressive of
the gravest anxiety.
At first she took pains to play for him, but when she discovered that
he had determined beforehand to find fault, she rattled away upon the
keys of her old instrument like a perfect imp of waywardness, whenever
required to show what progress she had made.
Almost before her fingers had left the key-board the scolding began. "I
see no improvement; no, not the slightest improvement do I perceive!
And to think of all that has been done for your education! I fairly
work my fingers to the bone to give you every advantage that a princess
could claim, while you--you do nothing!" And then would follow a long
dramatic summary of the sacrifices that had been made for her. He
always talked to her like the father addressing a worthless daughter in
some popular melodrama, ending upon every occasion with, "What is to
become of you? Tell me, what--what will become of you?" Then he would
bring down both fists upon the top of the piano, to emphasize the
horror inspired by the thought of her future, shake his head for the
last time, and leave the room with a heavy stride. Afterwards he was
sure to complain of the injury the agitation had caused him, and to
betake himself to his sofa.
The girl was left more and more to herself. About six months after her
mother's death Miss Sophy was dismissed. She was a thoroughly capable
woman, personally much attached to her pupil, trustworthy and practical
as a housekeeper, but prone to fall in love with every man, and to find
a rival and foe in every woman who refused to be the confidante of her
morbid and distorted sentimentality.
During Emma's lifetime she had been able to conceal most of her
eccentricities in this respect, but afterwards she became positively
intolerable,--perhaps because there was no one to restrain or
intimidate her. Without a single personal attraction, she was
inordinately vain, forever striving by her dress and conduct to invite
attention from the other sex. In the forenoons she gave Erika lessons,
in the afternoons she mended and made her clothes,--she was a skilled
needlewoman,--and the evenings she devoted to music.
She sang. Her repertoire was limited, consisting principally of the
soprano part of Mendelssohn's duet "I would that my love could silently
flow in a single word," which she shrieked out as a solo, and in
Schumann's "I'll not complain,"--which last always caused her to shed
copious tears.
At last her love of self-adornment as well as her musical enthusiasm
passed all bounds. She cut off her hair, dressed it in short curls, and
purchased two new silk gowns. She also bought an old zither, and every
evening, with her hair freshly curled, and in a rustling silk robe, she
betook herself to the drawing-room, where Strachinsky, in pursuance of
his boasted activity, was wont to finish the day by endless games of
patience.
Her manner, the languishing looks cast at him over her instrument, left
no doubt as to her sentiments towards him.
At first the master of the house took but little heed of these
demonstrations. Her performance upon the zither he found rather
agreeable: the whining drawl of the tones she evoked from it soothed
his melancholy. But one evening when he had requested her to play for
him "The Tyrolean and his Child," and also to repeat "May Breezes," she
was so carried away by triumphant vanity that she attempted to sing
with her instrument, accompanying her shrill notes with such
languishing glances that their object could no longer ignore their
meaning.
The next morning Strachinsky sent for his stepdaughter. Clad in his
dressing-gown, as he reclined upon his lounge, with all the romantic
drawling indifference in his air and voice which he had learned from
his favourite hero "Pelham," he asked her as she stood before him,--
"The Englishwoman's behaviour must have struck you as extraordinary?"
She nodded.
He passed his hand thoughtfully across his brow. She did not speak, and
he went on playing the English nobleman to his own entire satisfaction.
His left hand, in which he held a French novel, hanging negligently
over the arm of the lounge, he waved his right in the air, and said,
"Of course I pity the poor creature, but she bores me. Rid me of the
fool, I pray,--rid me of her!"
He then inclined his head towards the door, and buried himself in the
perusal of his novel.
From that time Erika ceased to spend the evenings with Miss Sophy in
the drawing-room; she withdrew after supper to the solitude of the old
school-room, which in fact she greatly preferred.
Of course Miss Sophy suspected some plot of Erika's in Strachinsky's
altered demeanour, and lost every remnant of sense still left in her
silly head. She employed all her leisure moments in writing to her hero
letters which she bribed the maid to lay upon the table in his
dressing-room.
This would all have been ridiculous, if the affair had not taken a
tragic turn.
One morning Miss Sophy did not appear at the breakfast-table, and when
Minna went to call her she found the wretched woman in bed, writhing in
agony. In despair at Strachinsky's insensibility she had poisoned
herself with the tips of some old lucifer matches. The physician,
summoned in haste, was barely able to save her life; and of course she
left Luzano as soon as she was able to travel.
Strachinsky was much flattered that the poor woman's love for him had
ended in madness, and he invested her memory with an ideal excellence,
recalling her as brilliantly gifted by nature and endowed with many
personal attractions.
Erika was now left without instruction. Her step-father decided that a
young girl of her age needed no further supervision, and that the
daughter of a poor farmer could lay no claim to any personal luxury.
When he spoke of himself only, it was always as an 'impoverished
cavalier;' when he alluded to himself as her father, he was always
degraded to simply 'a poor farmer.'
All through the summer she was alone, and during a long dreary winter,
followed by another summer and another winter, she was still alone.
Another girl in her place might have fallen into gossip with the
servants to pass the time; another, again, might have married the
bailiff out of sheer ennui: assuredly any one else would have grown
stupid and uncouth. She did nothing of the kind.
She had occupation enough. She learned long pages of Goethe and
Shakespeare by heart, and declaimed them, clad in improvised costumes,
before a tall dim mirror; she played on the piano for hours daily, and
made decided progress, despite certain bad habits unavoidable in the
lack of instruction. The rest of her time was spent in building
numberless castles in the air, and in taking long walks about the
neighboring country.
But when three years had gone by since her mother's death, without the
least alteration in her circumstances, the poor child began to be
impatient and to look eagerly about for some relief from so sordid an
existence. Why could she not be an artist?--an actress, a singer, or a
pianist?
On a cold spring morning towards the end of April she seated herself at
the big table in her former school-room and indited a letter to the
director of the Castle Theatre at Vienna,--a letter in which she
partially explained to him her position and requested him to make a
trial of her dramatic talent, with a view to an engagement at his
theatre. She declared herself ready to go to Vienna if he would promise
her an audience. She had finished the clearly-written document, but
when about to sign her name she hesitated. Erika Lenzdorff she signed
at last. "Lenzdorff," she repeated, thoughtfully,--"Lenzdorff." What
possessed her to write to the director of a theatre--an utter
stranger--explaining her circumstances? Would it not be much better to
turn to her father's relatives? To be sure, she knew nothing about
them,--not even their address; but that, she thought, might be
procured. Her mother had never spoken of them; she had always abruptly
changed the subject when Erika asked about her father and his
relatives. Why?
Strachinsky and his wife had often spoken of the parents of the latter,
but never of those of her first husband.
"Lenzdorff." She wrote the name again and again on a sheet of paper. It
looked distinguished. Perhaps they were wealthy people, who could do
something for her; but----
Emma had told her daughter that her name was Lenzdorff the day after
the adventure with the young painter, when the child, mortified at not
having been able to tell it, had asked what it was. But when she had
precociously repeated, in a questioning tone, "_Von_ Lenzdorff?" her
mother had replied, sternly, "What is that to you? It is of no
consequence whatever."
Erika began to ponder. Her mother's parents had died long since; must
not her father's parents be dead also? If they were still living, it
was difficult to see why Strachinsky had not cast upon them the burden
of her maintenance. Still, there were reasons why he should not have
done so.
If her father's relatives were people of integrity and refinement, any
business discussion or explanation with them would have been most
distressing; no wonder that he avoided it, especially since Erika's
maintenance cost him little or nothing.
Thus far she had arrived in her reflections, when Minna entered and
asked her to go immediately to the drawing-room, where a visitor
awaited her.
A visitor at Luzano? Such an event was unheard of.
In some distress Erika looked down at her shabby gown, made out of an
old dressing-gown of her mother's, black, with a Turkish border. There
was a hole in the elbow of the left sleeve.
"What sort of a gentleman is it, Minna?" she asked, irritably,
suspecting him to be some business acquaintance of Strachinsky's.
"A foreign gentleman."
"Old or young?"
"An elderly gentleman."
"Well, if he is elderly, and has no lady with him," she murmured, "I
can go just as I am." She knew from books, whence she derived all her
worldly wisdom, that ladies were much more critical than gentlemen.
"What in the world can he want of me?"
She went up to the mirror, smoothed her hair, drew together with a
black thread the hole in her sleeve, and hurried down to the
drawing-room. The apartment to which this name was still given was on
the ground-floor, as large as a riding-school, and almost as empty.
Besides the piano it still contained two huge bookcases, a shabby sofa
behind a rickety table, and a round piano-stool. The rest of the
furniture had disappeared. Some chairs had been banished as unsafe; the
other things had been sold piece by piece, under stress of various
pecuniary embarrassments, to the Jew broker of the village.
Strachinsky had several times attempted to dispose thus of the books
also, but Solomon Bondy had no market for them. Once the Pole had tried
to sell the piano. But Solomon had curtly refused to find a purchaser
for it, knowing that with the piano the last remnant of enjoyment would
be snatched from the poor lonely girl vegetating in the castle. The Jew
had shown more mercy than the Christian. And then her dead mother had
been dear to him, as she was to all around her.
She had been dear to Strachinsky also, but he never allowed his
affection to stand in the way of his ease.
In consequence of the total lack of furniture, Strachinsky, when Erika
entered the room, was sitting beside the stranger on the sofa,--which
looked comical.
The stranger, a man of middle age, tall, broad-shouldered, and erect in
bearing, rose to receive her.
"May I beg you to present me to the Countess?" he said, turning to
Strachinsky.
"Countess!" It thrilled her. Had she heard aright?
"Herr Doctor Herbegg--my daughter," with a wave of the hand.
"Your step-daughter," the stranger corrected him, with cool emphasis.
"I have never made any difference between her and my own children, dead
in their early youth," said the other; and he was right, for he had
taken very little interest in his own children. "You know that, my
child," he added, in a caressing tone that in his stepdaughter's ears
was like an echo of his old love-making to his wife, and which offended
her. He would have taken her hand, but she withdrew it hastily from his
flabby warm touch.
Since there was no other scat to be had, she turned to the piano to get
the piano-stool. Doctor Herbegg arose and took it from her.
Then Strachinsky started up with incredible activity, and a positive
struggle for the stool ensued, a mutual "Pray, pray, Herr Baron--Herr
Doctor!"
Erika calmly looked on at their strange behaviour. Had she suddenly
become of such importance that each was striving to show her courtesy?
Through her youthful soul the word 'Countess' echoed again with
thrilling fascination.
Strachinsky finally gained the day: he placed the piano-stool for his
step-daughter, panting as he did so, so unused was he to the slightest
physical exertion.
Erika seated herself upon the stool, although each gentleman offered
her a place on the sofa, assumed a dignified air, or what she supposed
to be such, and calmly surveyed the situation and the stranger.
Something told her that his visit was an important event for her and
hinted at a turning-point in her life. She was not mistaken. Doctor
Herbegg was her grandmother's legal adviser.
He began to converse upon indifferent topics, watching her narrowly the
while.
Her step-father, who had become utterly unaccustomed to the reception
of guests, wriggled about on the sofa as if stung by a tarantula. He
had always been restless in his demeanour when he was not awkwardly
stiff, but formerly his good looks had compensated for his defective
training. They no longer existed: the self-indulgent indolence to which
he had given himself over, so soon as all social contact with the world
was at an end for him, had done its part in effecting their decay.
"A bottle of wine! Bring a bottle of wine!" he ordered the young girl,
forgetting the suavity of speech he had just before adopted, and
falling into his usual tone.
"Pray do not trouble the Countess on my account," Doctor Herbegg
interposed. "I can take nothing. My time is limited, since I must catch
the next train for Berlin."
"Surely, Herr Doctor, you will take a glass of Tokay," Strachinsky
persisted, and, perceiving that his manner of addressing his
step-daughter had offended the lawyer, he was amiable enough to add,
"Do not trouble yourself, my dear Rika; I will attend to it." He arose,
and as he was leaving the room he went on, "The Herr Doctor will inform
you, meanwhile, as to the change in your prospects."
The lawyer made no attempt to detain him. He cared very little about
the glass of Tokay, but very much about an interview with the young
girl. When Strachinsky had left the room he approached Erika, and in a
short time had explained matters to her.
The title of Countess, which her mother had concealed from her,
apparently because in the circumstances in which she was forced to
educate her child it would have been more of a hinderance than a help,
was hers of right. Her mother's first marriage had been with the only
son by a second marriage of Count Lenzdorff: he had held office under
the Minister of Foreign Affairs, and two years after his marriage had
been killed in a railroad accident. By her second marriage Frau von
Strachinsky had alienated her mother-in-law. Meanwhile, the two sons of
Count Lenzdorff's first marriage had died, childless, and finally the
Count himself had died, at a very advanced age,--so old that he had
persuaded himself that he had outlived death, and had therefore never
taken the trouble to make a will; consequently his entire estate
devolved upon his grand-daughter.
The lawyer had just imparted this intelligence to the grand-daughter in
question, when Strachinsky re-entered the room, very much out of breath
and excited, and followed by Minna, tall, gaunt, with the bearing of a
grenadier and the gloomy air of an energetic old maid whom it behooves
to be upon the defensive with the entire male sex. She carried a
waiter, which she placed upon the table before the sofa.
"One little glass, Herr Doctor,--one little glass!" cried Strachinsky.
The Doctor bowed his thanks, and touched the glass distrustfully with
his lips.
"The Tokay is excellent," he remarked, in evident surprise at finding
anything of Strachinsky's genuine.
"Yes, yes," his host declared; "you can't get such a glass of wine as
that everywhere, Herr Doctor. I purchased it in Hungary by favour of an
intimate friend, Prince Liskat,--_les restes des grandeurs passees_, my
dear Doctor."
After a first glass Strachinsky became tenderly condescending: he
patted the lawyer on the shoulder. "Pray don't hurry, my dear Herbegg;
you'll not easily find another glass of such Tokay."
Erika observed that Doctor Herbegg bit his lip and did not touch his
second glass. He looked at his watch and said, "Unfortunately,
Countess, I have but little time left, but I should like to inform
myself upon several points, in accordance with your grandmother's wish.
Where and with whom have you been educated?"
"At home, and with my mother."
"Exclusively with your mother?"
"Yes; she even gave me lessons in French and upon the piano."
She was burning to rehabilitate her mother in his eyes.
"My wife was an admirable performer, an artist, a pupil of Liszt's,"
Strachinsky interposed.--"Play something to the Doctor; be quick!" he
ordered, grandiloquently, dropping again his _role_ of tender parent.
His imperious tone provoked Erika unutterably: she would have liked to
rush from the room and fling to the door behind her, but she conquered
herself for her mother's sake and--out of vanity.
She opened the piano, and played the last portion of Beethoven's
Moonlight Sonata,--the last thing that she had studied with her mother.
Her execution was still rude and unequal, like that of an ardent
youthful creature whose musical aspirations have never been toned down
by culture, but an unusual amount of talent was evident in her
performance.
"Magnificent, Countess!" exclaimed the lawyer, rising and going towards
her as she left the piano.
"Very well; but you missed that last chord once," Strachinsky said,
pompously.
Doctor Herbegg paid him not the least attention. "Now I am forced to
go," he said to the young girl; "and you must not smile, Countess, if I
tell you that I leave you with a much lighter heart than the one I
brought with me. Your grandmother sent me here to reconnoitre, as it
were: I find a gifted young lady, where I had feared to encounter an
untrained village girl."
Then suddenly Erika's overstrained nerves gave way. "My grandmother had
no right to allow of such a fear on your part; no one who had ever
known my mother could have supposed anything of the kind."
He looked her full in the face more steadily, more searchingly than
before, and his cold, clear eyes suddenly shone with a genial light.
"Forgive me," he said, kissing the hand she held out to him; then,
turning, he would have left the room with a brief bow to Strachinsky.
His host, however, made haste to disburden himself of a fine speech.
"You will have something to tell in Berlin, will you not? You have at
least seen how a Bohemian gentleman lives. No lounging-chairs in the
drawing-room, but Tokay in the cellar. Original, at all events, eh?"
"Extremely original," the lawyer assented.
On the threshold he paused. "One question more, Herr Baron," he began,
bending upon his condescending host a look of keenest scrutiny. "Did
the late Frau von Strachinsky leave no written document by which she
provided for her daughter's future?"
Strachinsky listened to this question with a scarcely perceptible
degree of embarrassment. "Not that I know of," he said, shifting
uneasily from one foot to the other.
Erika suddenly remembered that her mother had been busily engaged in
writing a few days before her death.
Meanwhile, her step-father, having gained entire control of his
features, continued, "Moreover, in this case any testamentary document
would have been entirely superfluous. My wife knew well that should she
die I should care for her daughter as for my own."
"H'm!" the Doctor ejaculated. "And did Frau von Strachinsky never speak
to you of her Berlin relatives, Countess?"
"No," Erika replied, thoughtfully. "She was very restless for some
weeks before her death, and often told me that as soon as we were quite
sure of being uninterrupted she had an important communication to make
to me. But she never did so: death closed her lips."
The Doctor reflected for a moment, and then said, "I am rather
surprised, Herr von Strachinsky, that you did not advise old Countess
Lenzdorff of your wife's death."
Strachinsky assumed an injured air. "Permit me to ask you, Herr
Doctor," he said, with lofty emphasis, "why I should have informed
Countess Lenzdorff of my adored wife's death? Countess Lenzdorff was my
bitterest enemy. She opposed my wife's union with me not only openly,
but with all sorts of underhand schemes, and when she could not succeed
in severing the tie that united our hearts, she dismissed my wife and
her daughter without one friendly word of farewell. Since she entirely
ignored my wife while she lived, how was I to suppose that she would
take any interest in the death of my idolized Emma?"
"But the announcement of her death would have seriously influenced your
step-daughter's destiny," Doctor Herbegg observed.
"My wife considered me the guardian of her child," Strachinsky
declared, with pathos. "Another man might have refused to accept a
burden entailing upon him sacrifice of every kind. But I am not like
other men. My wife evidently supposed that her child would be best
cared for under my protection; and I was not the man to betray her
confidence. You look surprised, Doctor. Yes, no doubt you think it
strange for a man nowadays to vindicate his chivalry and
disinterestedness, to his own ruin. But such a man am I,--a Marquis
Posa, a Don Quixote, an Egmont----"
"Pardon me, Herr Baron, I shall be late for the train," said the
Doctor, and, with a bow to Erika, he left the room.
Strachinsky ran after him with astonishing celerity, expatiating upon
his chivalrous disinterestedness. Shortly afterwards a carriage was
heard driving out of the courtyard; and Strachinsky returned to the
bare drawing-room, which his step-daughter had not yet left.
His face beamed with satisfaction; rubbing his hands, he cried out,
"Now we shall lack for nothing!" Then, turning to Erika, he continued,
"I shall see to it that your German relatives do not squander your
property. This lawyer-fellow seems to me a schemer, a sly dog. But I
shall do my best to watch over your interests. In fact, it is my duty
as your guardian to administer your affairs. Moreover, in three years
you will be of age, and then we can avail ourselves of your money to
free Luzano from its weight of debt."
This delightful scheme made him extremely cheerful. After pacing the
apartment for a while, lost in contemplation of its feasibility, he
went to the table, and, taking up the Doctor's untouched second glass
of Tokay, he poured its contents back into the bottle. This he called
economy. Then with the bottle in his hand, apparently with a view of
re-sealing it, he went towards the door, saying, "The affair has
greatly agitated me. I am so very sensitive. But when one has had to
wait upon fortune so long---!"
He had settled it with himself that he was the person principally
interested; his step-daughter was quite a secondary consideration, at
most the means to an end. But circumstances shaped themselves after
what was to him a most unexpected and undesirable fashion. Erika
received a brief and rather formal letter from Countess Lenzdorff, in
which the old lady requested her to repair as soon as possible to
Berlin, but upon no account to allow Strachinsky to accompany her; in
short, the old Countess refused to have any personal intercourse with
him whatever.
By the same post came a letter from Doctor Herbegg to Strachinsky,
formally advising him to resign his guardianship voluntarily. Should he
comply, the Countess would refrain from closer examination of his
administration of the property of her daughter-in-law and of her
grandchild. But if, on the other hand, he made the slightest attempt to
interfere in the management of his step-daughter's German estate, she
would, as the guardian appointed by the late Count, resort to legal
means for relieving herself of such interference.
Had Strachinsky's conscience been perfectly clear he would probably
have set himself in opposition, but as it was he contented himself with
gnashing his teeth and raging for two days, indulging freely in
vituperation of old Countess Lenzdorff. Then he made a final tender
attempt to work upon Erika's feelings and to induce her to espouse his
cause with her grandmother. When this failed, he wrapped himself in his
martyr's cloak and submitted with much grumbling. Dulled as his nature
was, he bore his disappointment with comparative ease. At first he
assumed an air of magnanimous renunciation towards his step-daughter,
but after a while he overwhelmed her with good advice, and groaned for
her whenever she lifted any weight or stooped in her packing. Erika
herself, meanwhile, was in a state of tremendous excitement.
On the morning of her departure, when her trunks were all packed she
took a walk. She first visited her mother's grave for the last time,
and then went into the garden, pausing in all her favourite haunts, and
avoiding with a shudder even a glance towards the spot by the low
garden wall whence she had seen her mother hurrying across the fields
towards the river.
Still, in whatever direction she turned she felt the presence of the
stream: she heard its voice loud and wailing as it rushed along swollen
by the winter's snows. A soft breeze swept above the earth, mingling
its sighs with the graver note of the water. Everything trembled and
quivered; every tree, every sprouting plant, throbbed; all nature
thrilled with delicious pain,--the fever of the spring. And on a sudden
she felt herself carried away by a like thrill of excitement; a
nameless yearning, ignorant of aim, possessed her, transporting her to
the skies, and yet binding her to the earth in the fetters of a languor
such as she had never before experienced.
Once more there arose in her memory the figure of the young artist who
had drawn her picture there beside the brook as it rippled dreamily on
its way to the river. She saw him distinctly before her: her heart
began to throb wildly.
She hurried on to the spot where he had sketched her. The swollen brook
murmured far more loudly over the pebbles than it had done on that hot
day in midsummer; the reddish boughs of the willows began to show
silver-gray buds, and on the bank there gleamed something blue,--the
first forget-me-nots. She stooped to pluck them.
At that moment she heard Minna's voice calling, "Rika! where are you?"
She started, and, tripping upon the wet slippery soil, all but fell
into the brook. With difficulty she regained her footing, and without
her flowers; they grew too far below her. She looked at them longingly
and went her way.
When she reached the house she found the carriage already in the
court-yard,--a huge, green, glass coach, that clattered and jingled
at the slightest movement. It was lined with dark-brown striped
awning-stuff,--the shabbiest vehicle that ever ran upon four wheels.
Beside the carriage stood a clumsy cart, in which the luggage was to be
piled. Herr von Strachinsky was ordering about the servants carrying
the trunks. Everything in the house was topsy-turvy. Breakfast had been
hurriedly prepared, and was waiting--a most uninviting repast--upon the
dining-room table. Erika could not eat. She ran to her room and put on
her bonnet.
"Hurry, hurry!" Minna called up from below.
She ran down and crossed the threshold. The air was warm and damp, and
a fine rain was falling. Strachinsky helped her into the carriage with
pompous formality. "I shall not accompany you to the station," he said.
"I do not like driving in a close carriage. Adieu!" He had nothing more
affectionate to say to her, as he shook her hand. The carriage door
clattered to; the horses started. Thus Erika rattled out of the
court-yard, with Minna beside her. The servant looked tired out; her
face was very red, and she had a hand-bag in her lap, and a bandbox and
two bundles of shawls on the seat opposite her. The carriage was very
stuffy, and smelled of old leather. Erika opened one of the windows.
They were driving along the same road by which she had followed her
mother's coffin; there beyond the meadow she could see the wall of the
church-yard. She leaned far out of the window. The driver whipped up
his horses; the church-yard vanished. The young girl suddenly felt as
if the very heart were being torn from her breast, and she burst into
tears, sobbing convulsively, uncontrollably.
CHAPTER IV.
On the evening of the same day an old lady was walking to and fro in a
large, tastefully-furnished apartment looking out upon a little front
garden in Bellevue Street, Berlin. Both furniture and hangings in the
room, in contrast with the prevailing fashion, were light and cheerful.
The old lady's forehead wore a slight frown, and her air was somewhat
impatient, as of one awaiting a verdict.
At the first glance it was plain that she was very old, very tall,
broad-shouldered, and straight as a fir. In her bearing there was the
personal dignity of one whose pride has never had to bow, who has never
paid society the tribute of the slightest hypocrisy, who has never had
to lower a glance before mankind or before a memory; but it was at the
same time characterized by the unconscious selfishness, disguised as
love of independence, of one who has never allowed aught to interfere
with personal ease. Upon the broad shoulders, so well fitted to support
with dignity and power the convictions of a lifetime, was set a head of
remarkable beauty,--the head, noble in every line, of an old woman who
has never made the slightest attempt to appear one day younger than her
age. Oddly enough, there looked forth from the face--the face of an
antique statue--a pair of large, modern eyes, philosophic eyes, whose
glance could penetrate to the secret core of a human soul,--eyes which
nothing escaped, in the sight of which there were few things sacred,
and nothing inexcusable, because they perceived human nature as it is,
without requiring from it the impossible.
Such was Erika's grandmother, Countess Anna Lenzdorff.
After she had paced the room to and fro for a long time, she seated
herself, with a short impatient sigh, in an arm-chair that stood
invitingly beside a table covered with books and provided with a
student-lamp. She took up a volume of Maupassant, but a degree of
mental restlessness to which she was entirely unaccustomed tormented
her, and she laid the book aside. Her bright eyes wandered from one
object to another in the room, and were finally arrested by a large
picture hanging on the opposite wall.
It represented an opening in a leafy forest, dewy fresh, and saturated
with depth of sunshine. In the midst of the golden glow was a strange
group,--two nymphs sporting with a shaggy brown faun. The picture was
by Boecklin, and the forest, the faun, and the white limbs of the nymphs
were painted with incomparable skill: nevertheless the picture could
not be pronounced free from the reproach of a certain meretriciousness.
It had never occurred to Countess Lenzdorff to ponder upon the picture;
she had bought it because she thought it beautiful, and certainly an
old woman has a right to hang anything that she chooses upon her walls,
so long as it is a work of art. To-night she suddenly began to attach
all sorts of considerations to the picture.
Meanwhile, an old footman, with a duly-shaven upper lip, and very bushy
whiskers, entered and announced, "Herr von Sydow."
"I am very glad," the old lady rejoined, evidently quite rejoiced,
whereupon there entered a very tall, almost gigantic officer of
dragoons, with short fair hair and a grave handsome face.
"You come just at the right time, Goswyn," she said, cordially,
extending her delicate old hand. He touched it with his lips, and then,
in obedience to her gesture, took a seat near her, within the circle of
light of the lamp.
"How can I serve you, Countess?" he asked.
"You are acquainted with my small gallery," she began, looking around
the large airy room with some pride.
"I have frequently enjoyed your works of art," the young officer
replied. The phrase was rather formal; in fact, he himself was rather
formal, but there was something so genial behind his stiff North-German
formality that one easily forgave him his purely superficial
priggishness,--nay, upon further acquaintance came to like it.
"Rather antiquated in expression, your reply," the old lady rejoined.
"My small collection thanks you for your kindly appreciation; but that
is not the question at present. You know my Boecklin?"
"Yes, Countess."
"What do you think of it?"
He fixed his eyes upon it. "What could I think of it? It is a
masterpiece."
"H'm! that all the world admits," the old lady murmured, impatiently,
as if vexed at the want of originality in his remark; "but is it a
picture that one would leave hanging on the wall of one's boudoir when
one was about to receive into one's house as an inmate a grand-daughter
of sixteen? Give me your opinion as to that, Goswyn."
Again Goswyn von Sydow fixed his eyes upon the picture. "That would
depend very much upon the kind of grand-daughter," he said, frowning
slightly. "If she were a young girl brought up in the world and
accustomed from childhood to works of art, I should say yes. If she
were a young girl educated in a convent or bred in the country, I
should say no."
The old lady sighed. "I knew it!" she said. "My Boecklin is doomed. Ah!"
she exclaimed, wringing her hands in mock despair. "Pray, Goswyn,"--she
treated the young officer with the affectionate familiarity an old lady
would use towards a young fellow whom she has known intimately from
early childhood,--"press that button beside you."
The dragoon, evidently perfectly at home in the house, stretched out a
very long arm and pressed the button.
The footman immediately appeared. "Luedecke, call Friedrich to help you
take down that picture."
"Friedrich has gone to the station, your Excellency," Luedecke permitted
himself to remark.
"Yes, of course everything is topsy-turvy; nothing is as it has been
used to be. 'Coming events cast their shadows before.' It will always
be so now," sighed the Countess.
"I will help you take down the picture, Luedecke," Herr von Sydow said,
quietly, and before the Countess could look around there was nothing
save a broad expanse of light cretonne and two hooks upon the wall
where the Boecklin had hung.
Luedecke's strength sufficed to carry the picture from the room.
"Bring in tea," the Countess called after him. "You will take a cup of
tea with me, Goswyn?"
"Are you not going to wait for the young Countess?" Sydow asked, rather
timidly.
"Oh, she will not be here before midnight. I don't know why Friedrich
has gone at this hour to the station; probably he is in love with the
young person at the railway restaurant; else I cannot understand his
hurry. However, I thank you for your admonition."
"But, my dear Countess----" exclaimed the young man.
"No need to excuse yourself," she cut short what he was about to say.
"I am not displeased: you have never displeased me, except by not
having arranged matters so as to come into the world as my son.
Moreover, I should seriously regret the loss of your good opinion. Pray
forgive me for not driving myself to the railway station to meet my
grand-daughter and to edify the officials with a touching and effective
scene. Consider, this is my last comfortable evening."
"Your last comfortable evening," Goswyn von Sydow repeated,
thoughtfully.
"Now you disapprove of me again," the old Countess complained,
ironically.
"Disapprove!" he repeated, with an ineffective attempt to laugh at the
word. "Really, Countess, if I did not know how kind-hearted you are, I
should be sorry for your grand-daughter."
Ho cleared his throat several times as he spoke; he always became a
little hoarse when speaking directly from his heart.
"Kind-hearted,--kind-hearted," the old lady murmured, provoked; "pray
don't put me off with compliments. What sort of word is 'kind-hearted'?
One has weak nerves just as one has an aching tooth, and one does all
that one can to spare them; all the little woes one perceives one
relieves, if possible,--of course it is very disagreeable not to
relieve them,--but the intense misery with which the world is filled
one simply forgets, and is none the worse for so doing. You know it is
not my fashion to deceive myself as to the beauty of my own character.
You are sorry for my grand-daughter."
He would have assured her that he spoke conditionally, but she would
not allow him to do so. "Yes, you are sorry for my grand-daughter," she
said, decidedly, "but are you not at all sorry for me?"
"Upon that point you must allow me to express myself when I have made
acquaintance with the young Countess."
"That has very little to do with it," rejoined the old lady. "Let us
take it for granted that she is charming. Doctor Herbegg says she is a
jewel of the purest water, lacking nothing but a little polish;
between ourselves, I do not altogether believe him. He exaggerated my
grand-daughter's attractions a little to make it easy for me to receive
her. He is a good man, but, like two-thirds of the men who are worth
anything,"--with a significant side-glance at Sydow,--"a little of a
prig. But let us take for granted that my grand-daughter is the
ph[oe]nix he describes, it is none the less true that on her account I
must, in my old age, alter my comfortable mode of life, and subject
myself to the thousand petty annoyances which the presence of a young
girl in my house is sure to bring with it. Do you know how I felt when
my indispensable old donkey"--the Countess Lenzdorff was wont
frequently to designate thus her old footman Luedecke--"carried out my
Boecklin?" She fixed her eyes sadly upon the bare place on the wall. "I
felt as if he were dragging out with it all the comforts of my daily
life! Ah, here is the tea."
"It has been here for some time," Sydow said, smiling. "I was just
about to call your attention to the kettle, which is boiling over."
She made the tea with extreme precision. It was delightful to see the
beautiful old lady presiding over the old-fashioned silver tray with
its contents. She wore on this evening a white tulle cap tied beneath
the chin, and over it an exquisite little black lace scarf. A refined
Epicurean nature revealed itself in her every movement,--in the
delicate grace with which she handled the transparent teacups and
measured the tea from its dainty caddy,--in the gusto with which she
inhaled the aroma of this very choice brand of tea.
"There!" she said, handing the young officer a cup, "you may not agree
with my views of life, but you must praise my tea, which is in fact
much too good for you, who follow the vile German custom of spoiling it
with sugar."
She herself had put in the sugar for him, taking care to give him just
as much as he liked; she handed him a plate, and offered him the
delicate wafers which she knew he preferred. She was excessively kind
to him, and he valued her; he was cordially attached to her; she had
been his mother's oldest friend; she had spoiled him from boyhood, and
had, as she said, "thought the world of him." This could not but please
any man. He appreciated so highly her kindness and thoughtfulness that
until to-night the selfishness of which she boasted, and by which she
had laid down the rules of her life, had seemed to him little more than
amusing eccentricity. But to-night her attitude towards her grandchild
grieved him. Not that he regarded this grandchild from a romantic point
of view. He was no unpractical dreamer, nor even what is usually called
an idealist, which means in German nothing except a muddled brain that
deems it quite improper to hold clear views upon any subject or to look
any reality boldly in the face. On the contrary, he had a very calm and
sensible way of regarding matters. Consequently he thought it probable
that the poor, neglected young girl, left for three years to the care
of a boorish step-father, awkward and tactless as she must be under the
circumstances, would be anything but a suitable addition to the
household of the Countess Lenzdorff; but, good heavens! the girl was
the old lady's flesh and blood, a poor thing who had lost her mother
three years previously and had had no one to speak a kind word to her
since. If the poor creature were ill-bred and neglected, whose fault
was it, in fact? It passed his power of comprehension that the old lady
should feel nothing save the inconvenience and annoyance of the
situation, that she should be stirred by no emotion of pity.
Perhaps she guessed his thoughts,--she was skilled in divining the
thoughts of others,--but she cared nothing about shocking people; on
the contrary, she rather liked to do so.
When he picked up one of the books on her table she said, "None of your
namby-pamby literature, Goswyn, but a bright, witty book. Tell me, do
you think that in my grand-daughter's honour I ought to lock up all my
entertaining books and subscribe to the 'Children's Friend'?"
"Let us take for granted that your grand-daughter has not contracted
the habit of dipping into every book she sees lying about," Goswyn
observed.
"Let us hope so," she said, with a laugh; "but who knows? For three
years she has been without any one to look after her, and probably she
has already devoured her precious step-father's entire library."
"Oh, Countess!"
"What would you have? Such cases do occur. Look at your sister-in-law
Dorothea: she told me, with an air of great satisfaction, that before
her marriage she had read all Belot."
"She avowed the same thing to me just after she came home from her
wedding journey, and she seemed to think it very clever," replied
Goswyn, slowly.
"H'm! the wicked fairy always asserts that you were in love with your
sister-in-law," the old lady said, archly menacing him with her
forefinger.
"Indeed? I should like to know upon what my aunt Brock founds her
assertion," the young man rejoined, coldly.
"Why, upon the intense dislike you always parade for your pretty
sister-in-law," the Countess said, with a laugh.
"I do not parade it at all."
"But you feel it."
Goswyn von Sydow had risen from his chair. "It is very late," he said,
picking up his cap.
"I have not driven you away with my poor jests?" the old lady inquired,
as she also rose.
"No," he replied,--"at least not for long: if you will permit me, my
dear Countess, I will call upon you in the autumn."
"And until then----?"
"I shall not have that pleasure, unfortunately; I leave with the
General to-morrow for Kiel, and came to-night only to bid you good-bye.
When I return I shall hardly find you still in Berlin."
"Indeed? I am sorry," she replied, "first because I really like to see
you from time to time, although you entertain antiquated views of life
and always disapprove of me, and secondly because I had hoped you would
help me a little in my grand-daughter's education. Of course if she has
already perused all Belot----"
"It would suit you precisely, Countess," he said, rallying her, "for
then you could--h'm--hang up your Boecklin in its old place."
"What an idea!" cried the Countess. "But you are quite mistaken: I
should be furious if my grand-daughter should be found to have read all
Belot's works."
"Indeed?"
"Of course; because then there would be absolutely no hope of your
taking the child off my hands."
He frowned.
"Do you understand me?" the old lady asked, gaily.
"Partly."
"Unfortunately, you seem to have very little desire for matrimony."
"I confess that for the present it is but faint."
"Let us hope that this mysterious Erika will be charming enough to----"
Suddenly she turned her head: a carriage was rolling along Bellevue
Street, already deserted at this hour because of the lateness of the
season. It stopped before the house. The old lady started, grew visibly
paler, and compressed her lips.
The hall door opened; the servants ran down the staircase.
"Good night, Countess!" Goswyn touched the delicate old hand with his
lips and hurried away.
On the staircase he encountered a tall slender girl in the most
unbecoming mourning attire that he had ever seen a human being wear,
and with gloves so much too short that they revealed a pair of
slightly-reddened wrists. He touched his cap, and bowed profoundly.
He carried into the street with him an impression in his heart of
something pale, slender, immature, pathetic, concealing the germ of
great beauty.
He could not forget the distress in the eyes that had looked out from
the pale oval face. He recalled the coldly-sneering old woman in the
room he had left, with her disdain of all emotion. He knew how she
would be repelled by the red wrists and the disfiguring gown. "Poor
thing!" he said to himself.
In thoughtful mood he walked along a path in the Thiergarten. All
around reigned silence. The sweet vigour of the spring-time was wafted
from the soil, from the trees, from every tender soft unfolding leaf.
In the gentle light of countless sparkling stars the feathery young
foliage gleamed with a ghostly pallor; here and there a lantern shone,
a spot of yellow light in the dimness, colouring the grass and leaves
about it arsenic-green.
No people were here who had anything to do; only here and there a pair
of lovers were strolling in the warm shade of the spring night.
The insistent rhythm of some popular dance interrupted the yearning
music of spring which was sighing through the half-open leaves and
blossoms. The noise annoyed him, reminding him unpleasantly of the
cynicism with which unsuccessful men are wont to vaunt the bitterness
of their existence.
He had walked far out of his way, into the midst of the Thiergarten.
More lovers; another pair,--and still another.
Except for them the place was deserted, silent: above were the
glimmering stars, and on the earth below them the tall trees full of
life, striving upward to the light; everywhere breathed the fragrance
of fresh young growth, mingled with the aroma of last year's decaying
leaves; the thrill of life around, with the echo in the distance of the
vulgar dance-music.
He could not have told how or why it was, but Sydow was more than ever
conscious to-night of the discord sounding through creation, vainly
seeking, as it has done for centuries, for its solution.
And in the midst of his discontent there arose within him the memory of
the haunting distress in the young girl's large eyes, and he was filled
with warm, eager compassion for the poor, forlorn creature for whom
there was no one to care. He would have liked to take the child in his
arms and soothe her distress as one would have petted a bird fallen
from the nest, or a truant, beaten dog.
CHAPTER V.
The Countess Lenzdorff had gone to meet her granddaughter as far as the
vestibule, which was hung with Japanese crape and lighted by red
Venetian lanterns in wrought-iron frames.
She had been convinced from the first that the brilliant description
which Doctor Herbegg had given of her grand-daughter was not to be
trusted, and she had consequently moderated her expectations, but yet
she was startled at what she encountered in the vestibule, the door of
which the ever-ready Luedecke had left open. At first she thought that
the tall spare girl in that gown was her grand-daughter's attendant;
but since behind the awkward creature whose clothes were all awry
stalked a broad-shouldered female grenadier with a woollen kerchief on
her head and a pasteboard bandbox in her hand, she doubted no longer
which was her grand-daughter: it was not necessary for Doctor Herbegg
to present the girl to her with, "Here is the young Countess, your
Excellency."
She advanced a step and touched the girl's forehead with her lips.
"Welcome to Berlin, dear child," she said, coldly. This, then, was her
grand-daughter,--this angular creature with red wrists and a servant
who wore a woollen kerchief on her head and carried in her hand an
archaic pasteboard bandbox. The Countess shuddered. "Will you have a
cup of tea, my dear Doctor?" she said, turning to her lawyer with the
hope of putting a little life into the situation. Then, seeing him look
at her with something of the dismay in his expression which Goswyn von
Sydow's features had shown when she had complained that this was to be
her last comfortable evening, she added, hastily, "You will not? Well,
you are right; it is late; another time, my dear Herbegg, you will do
me the pleasure; and I--I could hardly remain with you; I am too--too
desirous of making acquaintance with my grand-daughter."
The last words came with something of a stumble, as if the Countess had
been obliged to give them a push before they would leave her lips.
The Doctor took a ceremonious leave. Minna, with her bandbox, which she
refused to allow any one to take from her, was conducted by a footman
to the servants' hall, the Countess Lenzdorff having informed her
that her own maid would attend for this evening to her young
mistress's wants. Erika followed her grandmother through several
brilliantly-lighted apartments, the arrangement of which produced upon
her the impression of a fairy-tale, to an airy little room adjoining
the old Countess's sleeping-apartment.
"This is your room," said Countess Lenzdorff. "I had your bed put for
the present in my dressing-room; it is the best arrangement, and--and
I--I think I would rather have you close at hand. Of course it is all
provisionary: I do not even know yet what is to be done with you,
whether--whether you will stay with me, or go for a while to some
school. At any rate, for the present you must try to feel comfortable
with me."
Comfortable! It was asking much of the girl that she should feel
comfortable under the circumstances! She wanted to say something: it
annoyed her to have to play the part of a dunce,--her poor, youthful
pride rebelled against it,--but she said not a word; she had to summon
up all her resolution to keep back the tears that would well up to her
eyes. With the slow stony gaze of one who is determined not to cry, she
looked about her upon her new surroundings.
How airy and fragrant, how bright and fresh and inviting, it all was!
But in the midst of this Paradise she stood, trembling with fatigue,
sore in soul and body, timid and sad, with but one wish,--that she
might creep away somewhere into the dark.
a?c Her grandmother perceived something of the girl's suffering, but
still could not overcome her own distaste. "Will you dress first, or
have some supper immediately?" she asked, with an evident effort to be
kind. As she spoke, her bright eyes scanned the girl from head to foot.
Poor Erika! She understood only too clearly that her grandmother was
disappointed in her, that personally she was in no respect what the old
lady had hoped for.
"I should like to brush off some of this dust," she stammered, meekly.
Her voice was remarkably soft and sweet, and her accent brought a
reminiscence of the Austrian intonation, so much admired in Berlin.
For the first time the Countess's heart was moved in favour of the
young creature; some chord within her vibrated agreeably. "Well, my
child, do just as you like," she said, rather more warmly, as she made
an attempt to unfasten the top button of the ugly black garment that so
disfigured her grand-daughter. With a shy gesture Erika raised her
hands and held her poor gown together over her breast. There was
something in the gesture that touched the old lady. "You may go,"
she said to the maid, who had meanwhile been unpacking Erika's
travelling-bag. "I will ring for you when we want you." Then, turning
to Erika, she added, "I will help you myself to undress."
Erika's sensations can hardly be described. Apart from the fact that in
consequence of her intense shyness, the shyness of a very strong, pure
nature bred in solitude, it was terrible to her even to take off her
gown in the presence of a stranger, it suddenly seemed very hard to her
(she had not thought of it at first) to expose to her grandmother's
penetrating gaze the poverty of her wardrobe. She trembled from head to
foot as her grandmother drew down her gown from her shoulders. But,
strange to say, it almost seemed as if with the ugly dress some sort of
barrier of separation between herself and her grandmother were removed.
The old lady's bright eyes were dimmed by a certain emotion as she
noticed the coarse, ill-made, but daintily white linen shift that left
bare a small portion of the young, half-developed shoulders. "Poor
thing!" she murmured, the words coming for the first time warm from her
heart. Then, stroking the girl's long, slender, nobly-modelled arm, she
said, "How fair you are! I only begin now to see what you look like."
She lifted the heavy knot of shining hair from the back of Erika's
neck, and, in an access of that absence of mind for which she was noted
in the Berlin world of society, exclaimed, "_Mais elle est
magnifique!_--In three years she will be a beauty!--Turn your head a
little to the left."
Her grand-daughter's stare of dismay recalled her. "What would Goswyn
say if he heard me?" she thought, and smiled.
Erika had only bathed her face and hands, and slipped on a long white
dressing-gown of her grandmother's, when the maid brought in a waiter
with her supper. In spite of her continued sense of discomfort, youth
demanded its rights. She was decidedly hungry, and it was long since
she had seen anything so inviting as this dainty repast. She sat down
and began to eat.
The old Countess observed her narrowly, but saw nothing to displease
her. Her grandchild's manner of eating and drinking, of holding her
fork, her glass of water,--all was just as it should be.
The whole thing seemed odd to the Countess Lenzdorff: she delighted in
everything odd.
Not to disturb the girl at her repast, she looked away from her,
glancing at the contents of the shabby old travelling-bag which the
maid had unpacked. How poverty-stricken it all looked, in almost
ridiculous--no, in positively pathetic--contrast with the young
creature who in spite of her awkwardness had a regal air. "_Mais elle
est superbe!_ Where were my eyes?" the Countess thought, as she
casually picked up a book from among Erika's belongings. It was a
volume of Plutarch. "'Tis comical enough," she thought, "if I am to
have a little blue-stocking in the house."
As she turned over the leaves rather absently, she noticed that
passages here and there were encircled by thick pencil-marks: sometimes
an entire page would be thus marked, sometimes only a few lines.
"What does that mean?" she asked.
"My mother always used to mark so in my books the parts that I must not
read," Erika said, simply.
The Countess's eyes flashed. How sure a way to lead a child to taste
the forbidden fruit!--or was it possible that girls growing up in the
country under the exclusive influence of a mother might be differently
constituted from girls in cities and boarding-schools?
"And you really did not read those portions?" she asked, half smiling.
The girl's face grew dark. "How could I?" she exclaimed, almost
angrily.
"Brava!" cried her grandmother, patting her grandchild's shoulder. "You
are an honourable little lady,--a very great rarity. We shall get along
very well together."
But, far from the girl's expressing any pleasure at this frank
recognition of her excellence, her face did not relax one whit.
Erika had gone to bed. Countess Lenzdorff was still up and pacing her
chamber to and fro. She thoroughly understood the full significance of
her granddaughter's being with her; she was neither heartless nor
complaining, but, where emotion was concerned, a sensitive old woman
who studiously avoided everything that could agitate her nerves. But at
present she could not control her emotion; feeling awoke within her as
from a long sleep. At first she was conscious only of a vague
discomfort,--a strange sensation which she ascribed to nervousness that
must be controlled; but, far from being controlled, it increased,
growing stronger until it became a positive hunger of the heart.
The self-dissatisfaction which had begun to torment her when she
learned that Erika after her mother's death had been entirely uncared
for, left alone with her step-father, now increased tenfold. It was the
fault of the Pole, who had not notified her of his wife's death. But
this excuse did not content her. How could she blame him? What had he
done save follow her example in caring only for his own personal ease?
The unkindness with which she had treated her daughter-in-law now
troubled her more than her loveless neglect of her grandchild. Had she
any right to despise and cast her off because of her weakness? Good
heavens! she was a rare creature in spite of everything; she had shown
herself so in her child's education. What an influence she must have
exercised over the girl to preserve her from deterioration through
those terrible three years. Poor Emma! The old Countess's heart grew
heavy as she recalled her. Her injustice to the poor woman dated from
years back. She could not deny it.
She had never been fond of her daughter-in-law: each differed too
fundamentally from the other. On the one hand was Anna Lenzdorff, with
her keenly observant mind, self-interested even in her strict morality
which in her arrogance she regarded as the necessity of her nature for
moral purity and independence, something for which she claimed no
merit, since she practised it solely for her private satisfaction;
good-natured, but without enthusiasm, endlessly but lovelessly
indulgent to humanity, and rather of opinion that life is nothing but a
farce with a tragic conclusion, something out of which the most
advantage may be gained by observing it from a safe, comfortable
corner, without ever making an attempt to mingle in its activities,
firmly convinced that the best conduct of life consists in
acknowledging its glaring contradictions, its lack of harmony, in
making use of palliatives where they are of use, and in postponing for
as long as possible the facing of the huge deficit sure to appear
at the close of every human existence. And on the other hand was
Emma,--Emma, who had a positive horror of the philosophy of life,
which her mother-in-law with easy indifference denominated "my
laughing despair,"--Emma, who believed in everything, in God and in
humanity,--yes, even, as her mother-in-law maintained, in the cure
of leprosy and the disinterestedness of English politics,--Emma, for
whom an existence in which she could take no active part was devoid
of interest, and who looked upon a loveless life as worse than
death,--Emma, whose unselfishness bordered upon fanaticism, blinding
her conscience for a moment now and then, when she would have given to
one person what she had no right to take from others,--Emma, utterly
unable to appreciate proportion and moderation, and who, scorning all
the palliatives and make shifts with which one eases existence,
demanded from life absolute happiness, and consequently, dazzled by an
illusion, plunged blindly into an abyss.
Ah, if it had been only an abyss! but no, it was a slough, and Anna
Lenzdorff could not traverse it.
It certainly was strange that she, who found an excuse for every
criminal of whom she read in the papers, had never been able to forgive
her daughter-in-law when, thanks to her inborn thirst for the romantic,
she forgot herself so far as to adore that Polish nonentity. What in
the world could a woman of sense find in romance?
When Anna von Rhoedern, at twenty-two, had married Count Ernst
Lenzdorff, her views of life were in great measure the same that she
had since elaborated so perfectly. She was of Courland descent, and the
daughter of a prominent diplomat in the Russian service. Unlike her
daughter-in-law, she had been a courted beauty, but at two-and-twenty
she had turned her back upon all the sentimental possibilities to which
in virtue of her great charm she had a right, and had married Count
Lenzdorff, whose entire part in her existence she afterwards summed up
in declaring that he really had bored her very little. And that, she
maintained, was a great deal in a husband.
She had become acquainted with him in Paris, where he was secretary to
the Prussian legation, and she married him there; afterwards he took up
his abode in Berlin, where he held a distinguished position in the
Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In moments of insolent frankness she was
wont to describe him as an automaton whose key was in the possession of
whoever might be Minister of Foreign Affairs. Once wound up, he could
perform all the duties of his office during the few hours in which they
were required of him; when they were over he was a lifeless wooden
figure-head--nothing more. A wooden figure-head whom one is obliged to
drag after one in life conduces but little to one's comfort, especially
when the wooden figure-head is of the dimensions of Count Ernst
Lenzdorff, and of this his wife shortly became aware. With great
courtesy and skill she removed him from her life as soon as possible,
placing him somewhere in the background upon a suitable pedestal,--the
best place for wooden figureheads, and one where they can be made to
look very effective.
The Countess's only son was the very image of his father, and quite as
imposingly wooden.
If Emma, following her mother-in-law's example, could have courteously
and respectfully put him upon a pedestal in some corner where he would
not have been in her way, she might have led a very tolerable life with
him. The mistake was that she attempted to make him happy.
Poor Emma! As if one possibly could make a wooden figure-head happy!
Young Count Lenzdorff was extremely uncomfortable in view of his wife's
exertions to make him happy. What ensued was of a very unedifying
character: from being simply a state of contented indifference, the
marriage became a decidedly irksome bond. Nevertheless it was most
unfortunate for Emma when Edmund Lenzdorff, two years after their
marriage, lost his life in a railway accident. Had he lived, her
existence might at least have been a quiet one; in time she would have
relinquished her ill-judged attempts to make him happy, and have found
an object in life in the education of her child; while, as it was, he
was no sooner dead than her existence began to totter uncertainly, like
a ship from which the ballast has been removed.
At first she sickened, as her mother-in-law expressed it, with an
attack of acute philanthropy. She haunted the most disreputable corners
of Berlin in search of cases of misery to be relieved, never allowing a
servant to accompany her, because, as she explained, it might humiliate
the poor. Upon one of her excursions her watch was snatched from her,
and another time she caught spotted fever. This was very annoying to
the Countess Anna, but she forgave her, with--as she was wont to
declare--praiseworthy courage, in view of the terrible disease.
Six months afterwards Emma married Strachinsky; and this her
mother-in-law did not forgive her.
Since then fourteen years had passed, fourteen years during which she
had had nothing whatever to do with poor Emma. And now she was sorry.
Again and again did the Countess Anna revert to the education given to
the young girl asleep in the next room.
A woman who could so educate her child, and who could continue so to
influence her after her death, was no ordinary character.
Of course she had had fine material to work upon. And the old Countess
was conscious of an emotion never awakened within her by her son, yet
now aroused by her grand-daughter,--pride in her own flesh and blood.
"A splendid creature!" she murmured to herself once or twice, then
adding, with a sneer at her own lack of perception, "and I was fool
enough to think her ugly at first. Whom does she resemble? she is not
in the least like her mother,--nor like my son!" Still pondering, she
paused in her monotonous pacing to and fro, strangely thrilled. Going
to an antique buhl cabinet with a multitude of drawers, she opened one
of them,--a secret drawer, which had long been undisturbed,--and began
to look through its contents. At last she found what she sought, a
lithograph representing a young girl, _decolletee_, and with the huge
sleeves in fashion in 1830. A very charming young girl the picture
portrayed,--Countess Lenzdorff when she was still Anna von Rhoedern.
The little faded picture trembled in the old lady's hand: it worked
upon her like a spell, carrying her back to a time long forgotten,--a
time when life had been to her something different from a farce with a
tragic ending, by which one might be vastly entertained, but in which
one should scorn to play a part. She was suddenly deeply pained at
sight of the beautiful, grave, proud young face: it suggested to her
something that had begun very finely and ended in unutterable
bitterness, something through which the best and most genial part of
her had been destroyed, or at least paralyzed. Hark! What was that? A
low, suppressed sob! another! They came from the adjoining room. The
old Countess dropped the little picture, and, with a candle in her
hand, went to her grand-daughter's bedside. When she heard her
grandmother coming, Erika closed her eyes, feigning sleep, but she had
not time to wipe away the tears from her cheeks.
Her grandmother set the candle upon the table, and then, bending over
the girl, whispered, softly, "Erika!" Erika did not stir. How pathetic
she looked!--pale and thin, and yet so noble and charming in spite of
the traces of tears.
The Countess sat down upon the edge of the bed and stroked the girl's
wet cheeks. "Erika, my darling, what is the matter? Are you homesick?"
Then Erika opened her large eyes and looked gloomily at her
grandmother. She answered not a word, but compressed her lips. How
could her grandmother ask her if she was homesick, when all that she
had of home was a grave?
For one moment the old Countess hesitated; then, lifting the reluctant
girl from the pillows, she clasped her to her breast, pressing her lips
upon the golden head, and murmuring softly, "Forgive me, my child,
forgive me!" For one moment Erika's obstinate resistance was
maintained; then she began to sob convulsively; and then--then her
grandmother felt the slender form nestle close within her arms, while
the weary young head fell upon her shoulder and a sensation of sweet,
young warmth penetrated to the Countess's very heart, which suddenly
grew quite heavy with tenderness.
Erika was soon sound asleep, but her grandmother still felt no desire
to retire to rest. "I will write to Goswyn," she said to herself. "I
must tell him she is charming, and that I will make her happy."
CHAPTER VI.
Nine months had passed since Erika's arrival in Berlin. She had
travelled much with her grandmother, passing the time in Schlangenbad,
Gastein, and the Riviera. As soon as she had become further acquainted
with her, Countess Anna had relinquished all thoughts of sending her
grand-daughter to a boarding-school. "What could you gain from a
boarding-school?" she said. "H'm! Have your corners rubbed off? In my
opinion that would be matter of regret. And as for your education,
there's too much already in that head of yours for a girl of your age;
but that we can't alter, and must make allowance for." And she tapped
Erika on the cheek, and looked at her with eyes beaming with pride.
Erika had come to be the centre of her existence, her idol, the most
entertaining toy she had ever possessed, the most precious jewel she
had ever worn. Moreover, she was the late-awakened poetry of her life,
the transfigured resurrection of her own youth. That was all very
natural: she was not the first grand-mother in the world who had
thought her grand-daughter a phenomenon; and it would have mattered
little in any wise if she had not thought it necessary to impress her
grand-daughter with the high opinion she entertained of her. Everything
that she could do to turn the young girl's head she did, all out of
pure inconsequence and love of talking, because never in her life had
she been able to keep anything to herself. For in fact she was as
unwise as she was clever: her cleverness was an article of luxury,
something with which she entertained herself and others, with which she
theoretically arranged the most complex combination of circumstances,
but which never helped her over the simplest disturbance of her daily
life. She was thoroughly unpractical, and was aware of it, without
understanding why it was so. Since she could not alter it,--indeed, she
never tried to,--she evaded every difficult problem of existence, with
the Epicurean love of ease which was her only enduring rule of conduct.
Her affection for Erika was now part of her egotism. She was never
weary of exulting in the girl's beauty and brilliant qualities; she
felt every annoyance experienced by her grand-daughter as a personal
pang, every triumph as homage paid to herself; but she never thought of
the responsibility she had assumed towards this lovely blossom
unfolding in such luxuriance. She was convinced that Erika's life would
develop of itself just as her own had done, and in this conviction she
felt not the slightest compunction in spoiling the girl from morning
until night, and in absolutely forcing her to consider herself the
centre of the universe.
With almost equal impatience grandmother and grand-daughter awaited the
moment when Erika should enchant the world of Berlin society.
And now it was the beginning of February, and the first
Wednesday-afternoon reception of Countess Anna Lenzdorff after her
return from Italy. She, whose social indolence had long been
proverbial, had sent out numerous cards, many of them to people who had
long since supposed themselves forgotten by her. All this, too, without
any idea of as yet introducing her grand-daughter to society, but
simply that people "might have a glimpse of her."
As a result of the Countess Anna's suddenly developed amiability
towards Berlin society, this reception was largely attended. Erika
presided at the tea-table in a toilette of studied simplicity and with
a regal self-consciousness due to the enthusiasm which her grandmother
displayed for her various charms, but which the girl had the good taste
to conceal beneath an attractive air of modesty. She did not rattle her
teacups awkwardly, she upset no cream, she never pressed a guest to
take what had once been declined; in short, she committed none of the
blunders so frequently the consequence of shyness in young novices; and
she was, as her grandmother expressed it, simply "wonderful." Full
forty times the old lady had presented "my grand-daughter," with the
same proud intonation, observing narrowly the impression produced upon
each guest,--an impression almost sure to be one of pleased surprise;
whereupon Countess Lenzdorff--the same Countess Lenzdorff who had been
always ready to ridicule, and to ridicule nothing more unsparingly than
the mutual admiration characteristic of German families--would begin,
in a loud whisper of which not one word escaped Erika's ears, to
enumerate her grandchild's unusual attractions: "What do you think of
this child who has dropped from the skies into my house to brighten my
old age? 'Tis my usual luck, is it not? A charming creature; and what a
carriage! Just observe her profile,--now, when she turns her head,--and
the line of the cheek and throat. And to think that I was actually
reluctant to receive the child! Oh, I treated her shamefully; but I am
atoning to her for the past. I spoil her a little; but how can I help
it? I thought it would be such a bore to have a young girl in the
house, but, on the contrary, she makes me young again. No need to stoop
to her intellectually: she is interested in everything. At first I was
going to send her to school. H'm! there is more in that golden head of
hers than behind the blue spectacles of all the school-mistresses in
Germany. And that is not what interests me most: she has a certain
frank honesty of nature that enchants me. Oh, she certainly is
remarkable."
There the Countess Lenzdorff was right,--Erika was remarkable,--but she
was wrong in parading the child before her acquaintances: first because
it bored her acquaintances,--when are we ever entertained by listening
to the praises of somebody whom we hardly know?--and again because her
exaggerated laudation of her grandchild excited the antagonism of her
listeners. On this first reception-day she laid the foundation of the
unpopularity from which Erika was to suffer long afterwards.
The afternoon was nearing its close; the lamps were lit; three
or four ladies only, all in black,--the court was in mourning at the
time,--were still sitting in the cosiest corner of the drawing-room.
Close by the hearth sat a tiny old lady, Frau von Norbin, _nee_
Princess Nimbsch, with a delicately chiselled face framed in
silver-gray curls, a face the colour of a faded rose-leaf, and with a
thin clear voice that sounded like an antique musical clock and seemed
to come from far away. She was about ten years older than Countess
Anna, but had been one of her most intimate friends from childhood,
belonging also to an old Courland family, which had given the Vienna
Congress a good deal of trouble. She had known Talleyrand in her youth,
and had corresponded with Chateaubriand. Countess Lenzdorff had a
water-colour sketch of her as a young girl with a wreath of vine-leaves
on her head, her hair hanging about her shoulders in Bacchante fashion,
and with very bare arms holding aloft a tambourine. The rococo
sentiment of the faded sketch contrasted strangely with the old lady's
dignified decrepitude and poetically softened charm.
Opposite her, and evidently very desirous to stand well with her, sat a
certain Frau von Geroldstein, wife of a wealthy merchant who had
purchased a patent of nobility in one of the petty German states,
without, as he learned too late, acquiring any court privileges for his
wife. Indignant at the pettiness of the German sovereign in duodecimo,
he had established himself in Berlin, where his wife hoped to find a
suitable stage for her social efforts. She had been there three years
without finding any aristocratic coigne of vantage for her pretensions;
in despair she had fallen back upon celebrities, artists, professors,
politicians (even democrats), to lend a certain splendour to her
_salon_. After at last finding her aristocratic vantage-ground at a
watering-place in the shape of a General's widow, with debts, and a
daughter of forty whom she alleged to be twenty-four, she annoyed her
old acquaintances extremely. It was the business of her life to extort
forgiveness from society for having once invited Eugene Richter to her
house. Society never forgives, but it sometimes forgets if it be
convenient to do so. It began to find it convenient to forget all sorts
of things about Frau von Geroldstein, not only her political
acquaintances, but also that her husband had made his fortune by
furnishing army-supplies of doubtful quality.
Frau von Geroldstein was so available, and was besides so ready to make
any concessions required of her. She threw Eugene Richter overboard,
and developed a touching enthusiasm for the court chaplain Dryander.
She bombarded society with invitations to dinners which were excellent,
and at which one was sure to meet no undesirable individuals. She paid
endless visits, and possessed in fullest measure the article most
indispensable to the career of social aspirants,--a very thick skin.
She was about twenty-five years old, and was gifted by nature with a
very small waist, which she pinched in to the stifling-point, and with
a face which would have been pretty had it not given the impression, as
did everything else about her, of artificiality. Of course her court
mourning was trimmed with three times as much crape as that of any
other lady present; and today she had made it her special business to
win the favour of little Frau von Norbin. She had offered her three
things already,--her riding-horse for Frau von Norbin's daughter, her
lawn-tennis ground (she had a wonderful garden behind her house, which
no one used), and her opera-box; but Frau von Norbin's manner was still
coldly reserved. At last Frau von Geroldstein discovered from a remark
of Countess Lenzdorff's that the old lady's principal interest lay in a
children's hospital of which she was the chief patroness. Frau von
Geroldstein instantly declared that the improvement of the health of
the children of the poor was positively all that she cared for in life:
when might she visit the hospital? Countess Lenzdorff smiled somewhat
maliciously when Frau von Norbin, caught at last by this benevolent
birdlime, plunged into a conversation with Frau von Geroldstein upon
the most practical mode of nursing children.
Meanwhile, Countess Lenzdorff turned for amusement to a young maid of
honour, a charming person, whose delicate sense of humour had been
uninjured by the debilitating atmosphere of the court, and who was now
detailing the latest misfortunes of a certain Countess Ida von Brock.
This Countess Brock was a notorious figure in Berlin society. She was
usually called the twelfth fairy, since she was frequently omitted in
the invitations to some social 'high mass' (the word was of Countess
Lenzdorff's invention) and was then sure to appear uninvited and to do
all kinds of mischief by her malicious gossip. Every winter she looked
out for fresh lions for her menagerie, as her _salon_ was called in
familiar conversation,--for artists sufficiently well bred to consort
with men of fashion, and for men of fashion sufficiently intelligent to
appreciate artists. Since, thanks to her numberless eccentricities and
indiscretions, she had quarrelled with all sorts of people, she was
always obliged to entreat a few influential friends to procure for her
her anthropological curiosities. Some time ago she had applied to
Countess Lenzdorff to provide her with 'twelve witty Counts,'--an order
which Countess Lenzdorff had declined to fill, upon the plea that the
supply was just then exhausted.
During the previous winter the glory of her _salon_ had been a
hypnotizer, a young American for whom the Countess Ida had been wildly
enthusiastic.
Mr. Van Tromp was his name; he had a dome-like forehead, and he cost
nothing; he was quite ready to sacrifice his time without pay for the
pleasure of mingling in good society,--a pleasure more highly prized by
an American, as is well known, than by any European aspirant. At the
close of the season the Countess's footman had unfortunately put
aqua-fortis in the chambermaid's tea, and, as the Countess ascribed the
crime to the influence of Van Tromp, she straightway relinquished her
hypnotic pastime, the more willingly as most of her other guests
considered it a rather dangerous game.
Van Tromp was informed of this when he next visited the Countess. He
acquiesced in her decision, and amiably and unselfishly hoped that
without any further exercise of his peculiar talent she would allow him
to visit her 'as a friend.' Countess Brock, however, wrote him a note
thanking him for his great kindness, but at the same time insisting
that she could not possibly allow him to waste his time at her house;
the people frequenting it were in fact quite too insignificant to
associate with so great a man as himself.
This mode of turning out of doors people whom she could no longer make
use of she called treating them with delicacy and tact. What Mr. Van
Tromp thought of it is not known: he revenged himself, however, by
writing a book upon Berlin society, which, as it was full of scandalous
stories and appeared anonymously, lived through twenty-five editions.
With a view of making her Thursday evenings attractive this year,
Countess Brock had determined to have some one of her favourite modern
dramas read aloud at each of them, and had engaged the services of a
handsome young actor with a broad chest and a strong voice as reader.
The readings had begun the previous week with a German translation of
Dumas' "_Femme de Claude_."
The young maid of honour had been present, and she declared it "comical
beyond description."
There were several young girls among the audience, and scarcely had the
handsome young actor with the powerful voice reached the middle of the
second act when there was a rustling in the assembly, caused by a
mother's conducting her daughter from the room. This went on all
through the evening. Whilst the reader pursued his way with enthusiasm,
each scene frightened away some two or three delicate-minded
individuals, until the hostess found herself left almost entirely alone
with the handsome young actor and a few gentlemen. "I persisted in
remaining," the maid of honour continued, amid the laughter of her
audience, "but I assure you----"
At this moment the servant announced "Frau Countess Brock," and there
entered a woman of medium height, in a large high-shouldered seal-skin
coat, for which departure from the prescribed court mourning a long
crape veil atoned, a wonder of a veil, draped picturesquely over a Mary
Stuart bonnet and hanging down over a slightly-bent back. Her grizzled
hair was arranged above her forehead in curls, and her face, which must
once have been handsome, was disfigured by affected contortions,
sometimes grotesque, sometimes malicious, often both together.
Countess Lenzdorff immediately presented her niece to the new-comer,
but the 'wicked fairy' paid no heed, and Erika made her a graceful
courtesy which she did not see. She gave additional proof of
near-sightedness by almost sitting down upon Frau von Norbin, and by
mistaking Frau von Geroldstein for a distinguished authoress aged
seventy.
Frau von Norbin smiled good-naturedly, and Frau von Geroldstein
declared the blunder delicious. Privately she was furious, not at being
mistaken for an aged woman, but at being supposed to be an authoress.
However, she could endure it, since she had arranged a visit with Frau
von Norbin to the children's hospital for the next afternoon. That was
a triumph, at all events.
"H'm! h'm! what were you all laughing at when I came in?" asked the
'wicked fairy,' taking a seat beside Countess Lenzdorff.
Upon which a rather embarrassed silence ensued, and she went on with a
sigh: "At my disaster, of course. Yes, yes, I know, Clara,"--this to
the maid of honour,--"you will tell the _desastre_ to all Berlin. It
was terrible!--Oh, thanks, no,"--this with a polite grin to Erika, who
offered her a cup of tea. "That frightful actor!" she wailed, raising
her black-gloved hands, palms outward,--a gesture peculiarly her own
and used to express the climax of despair. "I have already denounced
him to our principal managers: he never will get any position in a
Berlin theatre. Think of his insolence in reading my guests out of my
drawing-room and showing me up as a lover of questionable literature."
"Was the drama one of his selection?" asked Countess Lenzdorff.
"No; I chose it myself. But, good heavens! the piece was of no
importance. The mode of delivery was everything. All he had to do was
to skip lightly over the questionable parts; instead of which he fairly
roared them in the faces of my guests."
"Evidently he liked them best," the maid of honour said, with a laugh.
"Of course," the 'wicked fairy' went on, indignantly; "these people
have neither tact nor sense of decency. Well, I have forbidden the man
my house for the future."
"Like Mr. Van Tromp," Countess Lenzdorff interposed.
"Oh, I am too easily imposed upon," Countess Brock sighed. "The worst
of it is that I have nothing now in prospect for my Thursdays."
"I saw in the newspaper that a couple of almehs on their way from Paris
to Petersburg are to appear at Kroll's," Countess Lenzdorff observed,
maliciously: "you might hire them for an evening."
"That would be against the law," remarked Frau von Geroldstein, who
knew about everything and had no sense of humour. Countess Brock, who
had declared that nothing should ever induce her to receive 'the
Archduchess,' as she called Frau von Geroldstein, pretended not to
hear; Frau von Norbin begged to be told what an _almeh_ was. Countess
Lenzdorff laughed, and was just enlightening her in a low tone, out of
regard for her grand-daughter, as to this Oriental specialty, when Herr
von Sydow was announced.
"Goswyn!" exclaimed Countess Anna, evidently delighted. "It is good of
you to come at last, but not good to have let us wait so long for you."
"I came as soon as I heard of your return," Sydow replied.
"And, as usual, you come as late as possible," his old friend remarked,
in an access of absence of mind, "in hopes of finding me alone."
"I call that a skilful method of turning people out of doors,"
exclaimed Frau von Norbin, laughing, and in spite of her hostess's
protestations she arose and took her leave, accompanied by the young
maid of honour.
Whilst Erika, with the modest grace which she had learned so quickly,
conducted the two ladies to the vestibule, where only two or three
remained of the crowd of footmen that had occupied it early in the
afternoon, Goswyn's eyes rested on the wall, where, to his great
surprise, hung the same Boecklin that had been removed upon his former
visit in view of the expected arrival of the Countess's grand-daughter.
"So you sent the young Countess to boarding-school?" he remarked.
"What?" exclaimed the Countess, indignant at such an idea. "You must
see that I am far too old to forego the pleasure of having the child
with me." Then, observing that the young man's eyes were directed
towards her favourite picture, she suddenly remembered the conversation
she had had with him in the spring. "Oh, yes; you are thinking of how
hard it seemed to me to receive the child. It makes me laugh to recall
it. As for the picture, there was no need to hide it from her: she knew
the entire Vatican by heart when she came to me, from photographs. She
looks at everything, and sees beyond it! I am longing to have you know
her: did you not notice her? though this February twilight, to be sure,
is very dim. She has just escorted Hedwig Norton from the room."
"Was that your grand-daughter?" Sydow asked, in surprise. "I thought it
was your niece Odette."
"Where were your eyes?" Countess Lenzdorff asked, in an aggrieved tone.
"Odette is pretty enough, but a grisette,--a mere grisette,--in
comparison with Erika. Erika is a head taller; and then, my dear, _un
port de reine_,--_absolument, un port de reine_. Ah, here she
comes.--Erika, Herr von Sydow wishes to be presented to you: you know
who he is,--a great favourite of mine, and the nicest young fellow in
all Berlin."
Erika inclined her head graciously, and, whilst the young man
blushed at the old lady's exaggerated praise, said, with perfect
self-possession, "Of course my grandmother has enlightened you as to my
perfections. I think we may both be quite content, Herr von Sydow."
He bowed low and took the offered chair beside his hostess. He
knew that Countess Lenzdorff expected him to say something to her
grand-daughter, but he could not; he was mute with astonishment. It was
true that the Countess had written him shortly after the young girl's
arrival that she was charming, but he had regarded this asseveration as
a piece of remorse on her part, knowing that remorse will incline
people to exaggerate, especially kind-hearted, selfish people, for whom
the memory of injustice done by them is among the greatest annoyances
of life.
He could not reconcile his memory of the distressed, pale, shy girl
whom he had seen for an instant with this extremely beautiful and
self-possessed young lady who seemed expressly devised to act as a
cordial for her grandmother's Epicurean selfishness. He did not know
why, but he was half vexed that Erika was so beautiful: the previous
tender compassion with which she had inspired him seemed ridiculous.
The words for which he sought in vain with which to begin a
conversation she soon found. "It is strange that you should not have
recognized me here in my grandmother's drawing-room, where you might
have expected me to be," she said, gaily. "I should have known you in
Africa."
"Where have you seen each other before?" the Countess asked, curiously.
"On the stairs, on the evening of my arrival," Erika explained.
"Evidently you do not recall it, Herr von Sydow: I ought not to have
confessed how perfectly I remember."
"Oh, I remember it very well," said Sydow, and then he paused suddenly
with a faint smile, a smile peculiarly his own, and behind which some
sensitive souls suspected a degree of malice, but which actually
concealed only a certain agitation and embarrassment, a momentary
non-comprehension of the situation. He was not very clever, except in
moments of great danger, when he developed unusual presence of mind.
"After all, 'tis no wonder that you made more impression upon me than I
did upon you," Erika went on, easily and simply. "In the first place,
you were the first Prussian officer I had ever met; I had never seen
anything in Austria so tall and broad: your epaulettes inspired me with
a degree of awe. And then you bowed so respectfully. You can't imagine
how much good it did me. I was half dead with terror: you looked as if
you pitied me."
"I did pity you, Countess," he confessed, frankly. The tone of her
voice, which had first won over her grandmother, was sweet in his ears.
Moreover, she seemed very much of a child, now that she was talking.
The impression of self-possession which she had at first given him was
quite obliterated.
"You knew that my grandmother was not glad to have me?" she asked.
"Yes, I told him so, and he scolded me for it," Countess Lenzdorff
declared, with a nod.
"But, my dear Countess!" Sydow remonstrated.
"Oh, I always speak the truth," the Countess exclaimed,--"always, that
is, if possible, and sometimes even oftener: it is the only virtue upon
which I pride myself. And you were right, Goswyn. But do you know how
you look now? As if you were ashamed of your pity. Aha! I have hit the
nail upon the head, and a very sensitive nail, too. It is human nature.
There is one extravagance which even the most magnanimous never forgive
themselves,--wasted compassion. In fact, you must perceive that the
child has no need of the article."
Goswyn was silent. If at first the Countess had hit the nail upon the
head, he was by no means convinced of the truth of her last remark.
Something in the old Countess's manner to her grand-daughter went
against the grain with him: once while she was talking to him, and
Erika, sitting beside her, nestled close to her with the innocent grace
of a young creature to whom a little tenderness is as necessary as is
sunshine to the opening flower, the grandmother suddenly, with a
significant glance at Sydow, put her finger beneath the girl's chin and
turned her face so that he might observe the particularly lovely
outline of her cheek.
Meanwhile, Countess Brock was defending herself with much ill humour
and many grimaces from the exaggerated amiability of the 'Archduchess,'
which found vent especially in the offer of a specific for the cure of
neuralgia, from which the 'wicked fairy' suffered constantly, and which
partly explained the peculiar twitching of her features. Extricating
herself at last with much bluntness from the snare thus spread to
entrap her favour, Countess Brock turned to the young officer, who,
strange to relate, was her nephew. Strange to relate; for there
certainly could be no greater contrast than that of his characteristic
grave simplicity with her restless affectation.
"My dear Goswyn!" she said, in a honeyed tone, taking a chair beside
him.
"Well, aunt?"
"You scarcely spoke to me when you came in," she continued,
reproachfully, in the same sweet tone.
"You seemed very much occupied."
"Occupied? yes, occupied indeed. For the last quarter of an hour I have
been struggling like a fly in a trap. You come just at the right
moment, dear boy." And she tapped his epaulette with a caressing
forefinger.
"Ah? Do you wish me to audit your accounts?" he asked, dryly: he had
but slight sympathy with her.
"God forbid!" exclaimed the 'wicked fairy,' raising her black-gloved
hands with her characteristic gesture. "Nothing so prosaic as that this
time. It was about----"
"About your Thursdays," her nephew interrupted her.
"Rightly guessed, dear boy. I want a new star; and you can help me a
little. Do you know G----?"
"The pianist?"
"Yes."
"I have practised with him once or twice." Goswyn played the violin in
moments of leisure, a weakness to which he did not like to hear
allusions made.
"There! I thought so. You must bring him to me."
"Pray excuse me," the young man said, decidedly. "I will have nothing
to do with introducing any artist to you. I know too well what will
ensue. You will squeeze him like a lemon, and then show him the door on
the pretence that he outrages your aesthetic sense,--that his manners
are not to your taste. You should inform yourself on that point before
making use of him. We all know that artists are not always well bred."
"Too true!" sighed Frau von Geroldstein, edging her chair nearer to the
speaker.
"All artists are ill-mannered," Countess Lenzdorff maintained, with her
good-humoured insolence.
"Even the greatest?" asked Erika, shyly. She was thinking of the young
painter whom she had met by the monster of a bridge, and she could not
decide whether to resent her grandmother's arrogance or to be ashamed
of the childish admiration in which she had indulged all these years
for the handsome vagabond of whom she had never heard since.
As Frau von Geroldstein was gently sighing, "Ah, yes, even the
greatest," Countess Anna interposed with a laugh, "They are the worst
of all. Artistic mediocrities acquire a certain drawing-room polish far
sooner than do the great geniuses who live in a world of their own.
And, after all, average good manners are only the dress-suit for
average men: they rarely sit well upon a genius. I care very little for
them: a little _naive_ awkwardness does not displease me at all; on the
contrary, to be quite to my mind an artist must always have something
of the bear about him: I take no interest whatever in those trim
dandies, 'gentlemen artists,' who think more of the polish of their
boots than of their art."
"Nor do I," sighed Frau von Geroldstein.
"H'm! your discourse is always very instructive," the 'wicked fairy'
declared, "but it does not help me in my trouble." She sighed
tragically and arose. As she did so, her fur boa slipped from her
shoulders to the ground. Erika picked it up and handed it to her. The
'wicked fairy' stared at the young girl through her eye-glass, surprise
slowly dawning in her distorted features. "You are the grand-daughter
from Bohemia?" she asked, still with her eye-glass at her eyes.
"Yes, Frau Countess."
"Ah, excuse me: I have been taking you all this time for my dear Anna's
companion. Now I remember she died last year: I sent some flowers to
her funeral. Poor thing! she was desperately tiresome, but an excellent
girl; you must remember her, my dear Goswyn. You used to call her the
Duke of Wellington, because she was a little deaf and used to go on
talking without hearing what was said to her. How could I make such a
mistake! But I am very near-sighted, and very absent-minded." She put
her finger beneath Erika's chin and smiled an indescribable smile. "And
you are very pretty, my dear. What is your name?"
"Erika."
"Erika!--Heather Blossom! And you come from Bohemia. How poetic!--how
poetic! She is positively charming, this grand-daughter of yours, Anna!
Do you not think so, Goswyn?"
Sydow flushed crimson, frowned, and was silent.
"I must go: I seem to be saying the wrong thing," Countess Brock ran
on; then, looking towards the window, "Good heavens!" she exclaimed,
"it is pouring! Pray let them call a droschky."
"Erika, ring the bell," said Countess Lenzdorff.
Before Erika could obey, Frau von Geroldstein extended a detaining arm.
"But, my dear Countess Erika, why send for a droschky, when my carriage
is waiting below, and it will give me the greatest pleasure to drive
Countess Brock home?--Surely you will permit me?"--this last addressed
to the 'wicked fairy.'
"I really cannot. I know you far too slightly to impose such a burden
upon you," Countess Brock replied, crossly.
"Why call it a burden? it is a pleasure," the other insisted.
"There is no pleasure in driving with me: I am forced to have all the
windows closed," said the Countess.
Meanwhile, Erika stood uncertain whether or not to ring the bell, when
suddenly affairs took a turn most favourable for Frau von Geroldstein.
Herr Reichert was announced, and without another word Countess Brock
vanished with Frau von Geroldstein, in whose coupe she was driven home.
She had private reasons for this hurried retreat. Reichert, a special
favourite of Anna Lenzdorff's, an animal painter with a lion face and
an inexhaustible fund of anecdote, was among the '_remords_' of the
'wicked fairy.' She called her '_remords_' the assemblage of men of
talent of whom she had made use only to throw them aside remorselessly
afterwards.
The animal painter's visit was a brief one, and none of the Countess
Lenzdorff's guests remained save Sydow, who stayed in obedience to the
Countess's whispered invitation.
"There! now I have had enough," she exclaimed, as the door closed
behind her beloved animal painter. "Stay and dine, Goswyn: we dine
early--at six--tonight, and then you can go with us to the Academy.
Joachim is to play, and I have a spare ticket for you."
CHAPTER VII.
It is later by four-and-twenty hours. Countess Lenzdorff, with her
grand-daughter, has just returned from a drive in a close carriage,--a
drive interrupted by a couple of calls, and by a little shopping in the
interest of the young girl's wardrobe.
She is now sitting near the fire, a teacup in her hand, and saying,
"You cannot go out very much this season, especially since you are not
to be presented until next winter, but you can divert yourself with a
few small entertainments. It was well to order your gown from Petrus in
time: people must open their eyes when they see you first."
Meanwhile, Erika has taken off her seal-skin jacket, and is sitting
beside her grandmother, thinking of the gown that has been ordered for
her to-day,--a white cachemire, so simple,--oh, so simple! "Nobody must
think of your dress when they see you," her grandmother had said:
nevertheless it was a triumph of art, this gown.
"Everything about you must be perfect in style upon your first
appearance in the world," her grandmother now says. "People must find
nothing to criticise about you at first: afterwards we may, perhaps,
allow ourselves a little eccentricity. I have a couple of gowns in my
head for you which Marianne can arrange admirably, but just at first we
must show that you can dress like everybody else,--with a slight
difference. You must produce a certain effect. Give me another cup of
tea, my child."
Erika hands her the cup. The old lady, pats her arm caressingly.
"Petrus is quite proud to assist at your debut: at first I thought of
sending to Paris for a dress for you," she adds, and then there is a
silence.
The old lady has lain back in her arm-chair and fallen asleep. She
never lies down to take a nap in the daytime, but she often dozes in
her chair at this hour.
Twilight sets in,--sets in unusually soon and quickly to-night, for the
winter which had seemed to have bidden farewell to Berlin has returned
with cruel intensity. The rain which on the previous day had forced
Countess Brock into Frau von Geroldstein's arms and coupe has to-day
turned to snow: it is lying a foot deep in the gardens in front of the
grand houses in Bellevue Street, and is falling so fast that it has no
chance to grow black: it lies on the trees in the Thiergarten, each
twig bearing its own special weight, and down one side of each trunk is
a broad bluish-white stripe; it lies on the roofs, on the palings of
the little city gardens, yes, even on the telegraph-wires which stretch
in countless lines against the purplish-gray sky above the white city.
For a while Erika gazes out at the noiselessly-falling flakes: the snow
still gleams white through the twilight.
The girl has ceased to think of her gown: her thoughts have carried her
far back,--back to Luzano. That last winter there,--how cold and long
it had been!--snow, snow everywhere; nothing to be seen but a vast
field of snow beneath a gloomy sky, the poor little village, the frozen
brook, the river, the trees, all buried beneath it. The roads were
obliterated; there was some difficulty in procuring the necessaries of
existence. The cold was so great that fuel cost "a fortune," as her
step-father expressed it. Erika was allowed none for the school-room,
where she was wont to sit, nor for the former drawing-room, where was
her piano. The greater part of the day she was forced to spend in the
room, blackened with tobacco-smoke, where Strachinsky had his meals,
played patience, and dozed on the sofa over his novels. What an
atmosphere! The room was never aired, and reeked of stale cigar-smoke,
coal gas, and the odour of ill-cooked food. Once Erika had privately
broken a windowpane to admit some fresh air. But what good had it done?
Since there was no glazier to be had immediately, the hole in the
window had been stuffed up with rags and straw.
Yet the worst of that last winter had been the constant association
with Strachinsky.
One day, in desperation, she had hurried out of doors as if driven by
fiends, and had gone deep into the forest. Around her reigned dead
silence. There was nothing but snow everywhere: she could not have
got through it but that she wore high boots. Here and there the black
bough of a dead fir would protrude against the sky. No life was to be
seen,--not even a bird. The only sounds
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