Arrived in Tornow only that morning, Oswald hardly finished his breakfast before he rode over to Kanitz, where, after his good-humoured despotic fashion he adjusted the whole affair with a smile, and soothed the anxious young tenant.
On the way back his horse lost a shoe, and his groom was well scolded by his impetuous young master for the carelessness resulting in such an accident. The riders had been forced to abate their speed and to take a roundabout way through Rautschin, that the nervous, high-bred animal might be relieved as soon as possible.
On the way they were overtaken by the storm. Perhaps Oswald would not have endured the very smoky atmosphere of the inn room so long, had he not been unconsciously interested in the talk of its three guests.
By no means indifferent to Doctor Swoboda's enthusiastic appreciation of his merits, he had enjoyed playing the part of the Emperor Joseph in the popular song and was meditating some pleasantly-devised way of surprising the old man with his thanks for his loyalty, when the vile insinuation made by the red-head drove everything else out of his mind.
The horse was shod; he flung himself into the saddle and galloped out of the town.
The rain had ceased, the clouds were broken. Steaming with moisture, its outlines glimmering in the light of the setting sun, Rautschin was left behind. Long streaks of violet cloud with golden edges, lay just above the horizon, and where the sun was setting, the sky glowed dully red. The storm had torn the bridal wreath from the head of spring; on the surface of the water lying in the ruts and hollows of the roads glinted snowy, fallen blossoms, and the apple-trees and pear-trees trembled softly in their tattered white array, like young people awakened from a dream. By the roadside stretched a sheet of water, its shores bristling with rushes, its surface bluish-gray and gloomy, like a large pool into which the sky had fallen and been drowned. A couple of ravens were flapping heavily above it.
The golden edges of the clouds grew narrower, the glow of the sunset was consumed in its own fire, the colours faded, and profound melancholy brooded over all the plain.
Oswald's blood was still in a ferment. "Rascally dog!" he muttered between his teeth ...."and to have to drop the matter for my mother's sake, not to be able to thrash him within an inch of his life, and drive him from the country! No human being is safe from such envious liars, they would drag down everything above them, even the Lord God Himself! Bah,cela ne devrait pas monter jusque à la hauteur de mon dèdain. But,"--he shook himself,--"it takes more than one's will to calm the blood."
Twilight had set in when he reached Tornow Castle.
It was a spacious, clumsy structure with several court-yards, one portion with pointed Gothic archways was ancient, irregular and picturesque, another part was of a later rococo style with conventional decoration. In front, fringed by tall alders lay a romantic little lake, the park stretched far to the rear of the castle. The iron gate with its quaint scroll work, above which was suspended the Lodrin escutcheon, between two time-stained sandstone urns, turned upon its rusty hinges, and Oswald rode up to the castle and dismounted. Two lackeys, who seemed to have little to do save to wear their blue liveries and striped waistcoats with due dignity, and self-complacency, were standing in the gateway, peering into the gathering darkness. The young Count ran hastily up the broad, flat hall-steps.
The last pale ray of daylight penetrated into the hall, through the tiny panes of the huge windows; here and there the metallic lustre of some old weapon on the wall gleamed among the dusky shadows.
"Ossi, is that you?" called a voice almost masculine in its deep tone, but musical withal and in evident anxiety, as a tall female figure advanced to meet him.
"Yes, mother," he replied gently.
"How late you are! We have been waiting dinner an hour for you."
"Forgive me, mother,"--he carried her hand with reverent affection to his lips,--"it really was not my fault."
"Fault--fault! I am not reproaching you, Ossi! No, but my child, I was half dead with anxiety. You are always so punctual, and one quarter of an hour after another passed and you did not come.--And then the storm. The lightning struck near here in several places, and your John Bull is skittish,--you do not think so,--but I know the beast well. If it had gone on for one more quarter of an hour .... but what detained you, my child?"
Oswald smiled tenderly and considerately, as tall chivalric sons are wont to smile at the exaggerated anxieties of their mothers. "Give me only five minutes to change my dress and I will tell you all," he said, and once more kissing her hand he hurried away.
Oswald's was one of those impetuous temperaments which are always stirred to the depths morally and physically by a violent outburst of anger; even when its cause is forgotten every pulse and vein will still thrill.
Although he joined his mother in the drawing-room some minutes later in a perfectly cheerful mood, she instantly saw from his face that something must have provoked him excessively.
"Anything disagreeable?" she asked drawing him down beside her upon a sofa, "did you have a distressing scene with Schmitt? did he reproach you? or ...."
"Heaven forbid, mamma!" broke in Oswald. "Schmitt and reproach?--he is the most devoted soul--humiliatingly devoted and faithful! Poor Schmitt! No, no, my horse cast a shoe. I was terribly vexed, I had to ride slowly, and take the roundabout way through Rautschin." He spoke quickly and with forced gayety.
"You are concealing something, lest it should annoy me," the countess said decidedly. "When will you learn that nothing in the world annoys me as much as your considerate reticence! I lie awake half the night when I see that you have some vexation to bear which you will not share with me. You ought to have no secrets from me."
"In a certain way every honourable man must have secrets from her whom he respects as I respect you," Oswald said half-annoyed, half-tenderly, while he puzzled his brains to discover a way of pacifying his mother without telling either a falsehood or the whole truth. A brilliant idea then occurred to him. "In fact the matter is a very stupid affair. In the inn where I stopped during the storm I suddenly heard one of three men who were in the room speak with contempt of the Lodrin generosity; the fellow asserted that on the Lodrin estates the labourers lived in pens like pigs, and,--er--my temperament is not exactly stoical, and I,--in short I got angry. It is hard to hear such things when one honestly tries to treat his people well! And there may be some truth in it; I will make inquiries to-morrow, no, I will find out for myself. I can learn nothing from my bailiffs, they only cajole me. Last year there was typhus fever in Morowitz, the people died like flies, and I knew nothing of it; when at last I did learn about it I went there immediately, but the epidemic was well nigh at an end.A propos, mamma, I cannot but forgive you if it be so, but was it not all concealed from me at your request? You knew that I should go over there at once, and you were afraid of contagion."
"No, my dear child," the countess said gravely, "foolishly anxious as I am about you upon trifling occasions,--and I have just shown how foolishly anxious I can be,--I never would lift a finger to seclude you from a peril if such peril lay in the path of duty. I would rather die of anxiety than hamper you or exert a detracting influence upon you in your line of conduct. I would be broken on the wheel to save your life, but----" she shuddered and moved closer to him,--"I would rather see you dead, than anything else save what you are--my pride, and a blessing to all around you!" She looked him full in the face, the mother's large, earnest eyes gleaming with exultant enthusiasm. "If you only knew how I suffered during that stupid storm! I am so glad to have you again, my boy, my fine, noble boy!" And drawing his head down to her she kissed him on the brow.
The rustle of a newspaper attracted Oswald's attention, and for the first time he observed Georges, who, buried in the depths of a luxurious arm-chair, had been watching from behind his newspaper the little scene between mother and son.
A servant appeared at the door--dinner was announced.
"Very remarkable!" Georges said a few hours later as, smoking a cigar, he entered his cousin's bedroom, where Oswald was already in bed.
"What is very remarkable?" Oswald asked drowsily as he lay on his back, his hands clasped under his head.
"The change in your mother," said Georges, sitting down on the edge of the bed, "I should hardly have known her again."
"I can't understand that," Oswald rejoined. "Her hair has grown gray--it grew gray when she was quite young,--but her features are the same. I think her very beautiful still."
"I think her more beautiful than ever," Georges said gravely, "but...." he thoughtfully blew the smoke from his cigar upwards to the ceiling--"how old is your mother?"
"Fifty-six."
"Only fifty-six--and yet she seems an old woman."
"An old woman....! What are you thinking of? My mother can do nearly as much as I can, she can ride for five hours at a time, and can take long walks and never...."
"My dear fellow," interrupted Georges impatiently. "I did not mean to say that your respected mamma seemed at all decrepit, but only that her features, her whole bearing, wear the stamp of that calm, kindly cheerfulness that belongs to those who have done with life. She asks nothing more--she bestows. And that, Ossi, is not a characteristic of youth--no, not of even, the most generous youth."
"There you are right," Oswald rejoined thoughtfully. "Many a woman of her age would still go into society and enjoy its distractions, she, since my father's death, has had no thought of anything except my education and the management of my property. It is wonderful, the knowledge she has of business. You would laugh if I should tell you of what large sums she saved up for me during my minority. Such strict economy was not to my taste, and I put a stop to it, but it must be forgiven in a mother."
"And the gentleness and kindness of her manner!" Georges continued, "her unreasoning maternal nervousness! I assure you it was no easy task, the hour spent in trying to allay her anxiety. Her feeling for you is positive idolatry."
"Try to be patient with this weakness of hers."
"My dear boy, he would be a worthless fellow who did not respect this weakness. It only surprises me in your mother; I had not expected anything of the kind. Before I left home she kept you at such a distance. I could not then understand why she always treated you so coldly and harshly, and, to tell the truth, I took such, lack of affection on her part, very ill."
Oswald leaned upon his elbow among the pillows. "That was while my father was alive," he said softly, "yes, I have often thought of that, and have thought also that I could explain her conduct. You see my father's foolish fondness for me irritated her, and she suppressed the manifestation of her own affection. Between ourselves, Georges, my mother was wretched in her marriage; her poor heart was always upon the rack, it could no more beat freely and naturally than a man with a rope tight about his neck can sing. I respected my father immensely, but ... well, Georges, look there...." he pointed to a large painting above his bed, the portrait of the countess in the proud splendour of her youthful beauty, "and then, look there...." and he pointed to a white plaster death-mask framed in black velvet hanging on the wall opposite. "As far back as I can remember, my father looked just like that; they were never congenial. And now let me go to sleep, old fellow, good-night!"
No, 'congenial' they never had been and never could have been.
Although the painting was far from portraying the charm of the Countess Lodrin's beauty in the bloom of youth, the repulsive death-mask opposite did full justice to the deceased count. The face that it represented was almost horse-like in its length; smoothly shaven as that of a monk, with a sharp-pointed nose, little round eyes, a mouth like the slit in a child's money-jug, and seamed with innumerable wrinkles, it resembled one of those bloodless aged heads which abound in pictures by Memmling or Van Eyck.
It would be an error to suppose that illness and the final agony had distorted the face before it had been perpetuated in the plaster cast. Count Lodrin had never looked otherwise, he had always looked like a corpse, and Pistasch Kamenz boldly maintained that 'the old gentleman looked his best in his coffin.'
Not only Count Pistasch, but everybody else ridiculed Count Lodrin; few men have ever lived who have been more ridiculed. One fact, however, no ridicule could affect--Count Lodrin was a gentleman through and through.
That he possessed a tender heart and a sense of duty, which, in spite of the vacillations of a timid temperament, always triumphed in important crises, no one had ever denied who had seen him in any grave emergency,--and that this sense of duty, with a mild admixture of pride of rank, belonged to him more as a gentleman than as a human being, did not detract from his merit.
Given over in his youth to the ghostly influence of priestly tutors, he had led a melancholy, misanthropic existence. His delicate constitution made impossible any participation in the manly sports of his equals in rank. Therefore there was developed in him, as in many another recluse, an intense devotion to art; he was indefatigable in sifting and enlarging his collections.
People of his rank usually marry young. It was not so with him. As with several historic characters, the timidity of his temperament culminated in an aversion to women, which rendered futile all the bold schemes of ambitious mammas. In his solitude he had come to be forty-five years old; it was an article of faith in Austrian society that he never would marry, when suddenly his betrothal to Wjera Zinsenburg was announced.
His brother's creditors made wry faces; society laughed. Two months afterwards the strange couple were united in the chapel of the palace of the Zinsenburgs. Among those present at the ceremony there were some who envied the bridegroom, many who ridiculed him, and a few who pitied him.
As the pair stood beside each other before the altar they presented a strange contrast.
The face of the bride, nobly chiselled, and with an indignant curve of the full, red lips, recalled to the minds of all who had been in Rome a beautiful but unpleasing memory,--the profile of the Medusa in the Villa Ludovisi, that wondrous relievo in which the pride of a demon seems contending with the suffering of an angel.
The bridegroom looked as he did fifteen years afterward on his bier, only more unhappy, for upon the bier his face wore the expression of a man who had just been relieved of an old burden; at the altar his expression was that of one who bends beneath the weight of a burden just assumed.
It was shortly manifest that no late-awakened passion had decided him to contract this alliance. A weaker will had been forced to bow before a stronger.
But what had induced the exquisitely-beautiful girl to choose such a husband as this, every one asked; and no one answered. The question had to be dismissed with a shrug, and, 'She is a riddle!'
The same thing had been said four years previously, when with an air of proud indifference, and with cold, 'level-fronting eyelids,' she had appeared in Vienna society. There was about her an exotic air always irresistible to the genuine Austrian temperament. Her father was a diplomatist, her mother a Russian. Wjera's Russian blood betrayed itself in everything about her, in her deep, almost harsh voice, which was, nevertheless, capable of exquisite modulations, in the hybrid combination of Oriental nonchalance and northern energy that characterized her whole bearing, her gestures, her figure.
When she reclined upon a divan or leaned back in an arm-chair there was a suggestion of the odalisque in her attitude; but in her walk there was a short, sharp rhythm; it was firm and despotic like that of a race-horse, and yet light as the fluttering of a bird. She was tall and not too slender--the beauty of her shoulders and bust was so great that it had become famous--her head was small and faultlessly poised upon her neck--her features were not perfectly regular, but how charming was her face! pale, with ripe red lips, and brown hair with a shimmer of gold about the temples and the back of the neck. The cheek-bones were rather too high, the face not quite oval enough; the brow was low; the profile haughty, and delicately modelled.
The most remarkable feature of Wjera's face was her eyes. Long in their openings, but usually half-closed and shaded by dark eyelashes, they were as changing in colour as in expression, and there was in them something uncanny--mysterious--no one dared to look full into their depths.
Of course she created a sensation in Vienna, and yet she had almost no suitors--they were afraid of her and--she had a history, neither disgraceful nor dishonourable, but yet a history.
In St. Petersburg, where she had been with her father, she had been distinguished by the homage of a prince of the blood, and was finally betrothed to him. For a year the betrothal was kept up, and then the tie was suddenly snapped. The world discovered the reason in the fact that Wjera could not consent to a morganatic marriage; her ambition had been defeated. The true significance of the breach the world at large did not divine. Only very few suspected that Wjera had loved the man--so much her inferior in all save rank and birth--with all the fervour and poetic purity that are found in Russian girls alone. She did not see him as he really was, handsome, with a superficial air of distinction, but mentally coarse--alternating between brutish excesses and superstitious penances--at once cynical as a roué and sentimental as a school-miss,--no, she endowed him nobly in her imagination.
Of all poets in the world the hearts of young girls are the most highly gifted. There are women whose illusions are so tough that they carry them to their graves undamaged; there are others who voluntarily patch up the rents, made by their understanding in their illusions, in order that an ideal--of which they would perhaps be ashamed if it stood unveiled before them, and to break with which they yet have neither the desire nor the force--may not be without a decent garment to cover it.
It was not so with Wjera; when doubt had once sown discord between her head and her heart, she fought out the battle unflinchingly, inexorably, in strict honesty, and when the conflict was over her dream had vanished. In this wondrously lovely illusion she had exhausted all the ideality of her nature. Her reason gained the upperhand at last, and ever after she analyzed her fellow-mortals with sharp precision; judging them with harsh justice, and speaking of the affections with an unaffected, contemptuous coolness very rare in a girl so young.
Time passed by. She came to be twenty-six years old. She was the eldest and the handsomest of five daughters, and her distaste for marriage increased the difficulty of providing for the other sisters, and excited unpleasant remark among her family circle. Chance introduced Count Lodrin to her acquaintance, and perhaps because he seemed to her a respectable nullity, she selected him for her husband.
No one could remember ever having seen so ill-matched a pair. She, aglow with life, delighting in physical exercises, a reckless and indefatigable horsewoman--to whom a steeple-chase was no more than is a waltz to other women,--and he, paying with an attack of illness for every unusual physical effort, not even daring to take a long drive without an extra cushion at his back.
Whilst his thoughts moved slowly in a traditional roundabout way, 'her woman's wit flew straight and did exactly hit,' before the Count had cleared his throat for his first 'consequently.'
Her quick wit bewildered him; her outspoken acuteness of discernment offended him. There was a world-wide dissimilarity between her views and his. The Count was a strict Catholic; the Countess was inclined to scepticism; although cast in a loftier mould, in her daring mockery and her graceful eccentricity she recalled the fine ladies of the eighteenth century--of that time when social and mental freedom, made fashionable by philosophers, had not yet been degraded to vulgarity by demagogues. His wife's wicked wit shocked poor Count Lodrin. Much ridicule was cast upon the couple, but every one was none the less glad to belong to the brilliant circle which the Countess drew around her, and daily the wonder grew that calumny could not touch the beautiful wife of this dead-and-alive dotard.
Three years passed; now and then women hinted innuendoes about Wjera Lodrin, but the other sex continued to speak of her with that mixture of admiration and irritation which bears the truest testimony to the blamelessness of a very beautiful woman. At last society was content to shrug its shoulders and to repeat, 'She is a riddle.'
The Countess was unutterably bored. The only occupation that she pursued with inexhaustible interest, though at the same time with reckless intrepidity, was riding.
"She has no sphere of activity; hers is the grand, fiery nature of a gifted man beating against the petty barriers of feminine existence. What is to come of it?" a sagacious student of human nature once said, in speaking of her.
All at once there was a decided change for the worse in Count Lodrin's health, and the physicians prescribed a sojourn in the South. Reluctantly enough the Countess consented to accompany her husband.
They set out, and the world maliciously compared Wjera to Juana of Castile, because she travelled with a corpse, and a father-confessor.
The Count found Nice quite too gay, and therefore took refuge in a secluded villa in the Riviera.
The Countess nearly died of ennui in the gray, sultry, sirocco-like monotony of an autumn heavy with the fragrance of roses, and in the tedium of an Italian winter. In spring the pair returned to Bohemia, the Count in somewhat better health, the Countess as cold and hard as ever, but irritable to a degree until now quite foreign to her.
In the August after their return Oswald was born. The old Count could not contain himself for joy; the Countess cared but very little for the child.
This was the woman whom Georges had known fifteen years before, and now,--he could hardly believe his senses!
Before he went to bed on the first night of his return to Tornow, he stood for a long while at the window of his room looking thoughtfully out into the night. The moon was high in the heavens; everything was still, save for a low rustle now and then in the huge lindens growing on the border of the pond in front of the castle. The ancient trees seemed to stir and stretch themselves in their sleep. His gaze wandered over the compact angular architecture of the high, black-gabled roofs, the rows of houses with tiny windows, in the little town,--all bathed in bluish moonlight. It was hardly changed since he had last seen it,--in the castle everything was changed. What had become of the social distractions in which the Countess Lodrin had been wont to delight?--Vanished, as by magic. The entire castle impressed him as having recovered from a restless fever.
Had the Countess's former cold, harsh demeanour been but the mask for the intense hunger of a strangely dowered nature that could find no fit nourishment? And had love for her child filled up at last the fearful rift made in her inmost life by an early disappointment?
Georges asked himself these questions. Once more his glance wandered to the pond in whose waters the moon was mirrored. "Strange!" he murmured,--"today it was but a dark pool, and now in the moonlight it gleams a silver disk! Hm! Extraordinary, how true maternal love will hallow every woman's heart! Strange exceedingly! what must she not have suffered in her life ...!"
The bright spring sunshine streamed through the open bow-window of the Countess's boudoir and stretched a broad band of light at her feet. She was sitting in an arm-chair knitting with very thick wooden needles and coarse brown worsted, something evidently destined for a charitable purpose.
The boudoir, an irregular square room and with a picturesque bow-window, was furnished with no regard to uniformity of style, and therefore had the charm which characterizes rooms which have been as it were gradually evolved from the habits and tastes of a cultured occupant, until they are the frame or setting of an individuality. A delightful confusion of comfort and feminine taste reigned here, and the two or three trifling articles that offended all artistic sense, struck the eye only as piquant beauty spots. The cabinets, filled with rare old porcelain, threw into strong relief the ugly inkstand and candlesticks of modern dark-blue Sèvres upon a writing-table. They were a memento,--a marriage gift from a Russian cousin and youthful playmate who fell in the Crimean war. Among some old pictures, an Andrea del Sarto, a Franz Hals, and two Wateaus, hung in triumphant self-complacency a portrait by Lawrence--a man's head and bust,--a crimson-lined cloak was thrown around the shoulders, the shirt collar was open, black hair fell low on the brow, the eyes were large and wild, the frankly smiling mouth was exquisitely chiselled. It hung just over the writing-table, lord of all, and was the portrait of Oswald Zinsenburg, an uncle of the Countess, a gifted fellow, who, when Secretary of Legation in England, had been intimate with Lord Byron, and in all the romantic ardour of a young aristocrat fighting for freedom, had died of brain fever at Missolonghi at the age of twenty-seven, shortly after Lord Byron's death.
This portrait the Countess Wjera loves, principally because it is so like her son, and upon it her gaze rested as she dropped the long wooden-needles in her lap, and fell into a revery.
The air of the room was penetrated with the delicious fragrance of the roses, and lilies of the valley that filled the various vases. Everything was quiet,--the birds were taking their siesta, the faint pattering of the horse-chestnut blossoms could be heard as they fell upon the gravel path, before the castle.
The drowsy midday stillness was suddenly broken by a softly whistled Russian gipsy melody and an elastic young footstep. The Countess turned her head. She knew the air well--how often she had sung it! The whistling came nearer, then ceased, and the door of the boudoir opened. "May we come in?" a cheery voice asked.
"Always welcome!" replied the Countess, and Oswald, followed by a large shaggy Newfoundland, entered, his curls wet and clinging to his forehead, a bunch of waterlilies in his hand, and looking more than ever like the portrait by Lawrence.
"Good morning, mamma; how are you? Make your bow, Darling--so, old fellow--so!" And as the Newfoundland gravely lowered his fine head, a performance for which he was duly caressed by his master, Oswald sank into a low seat beside his mother.
"You have been bathing," she observed, stroking back his wet hair.
"Yes, I have been swimming in the lake at Wolnitz, and I have brought you these waterlilies," he replied, laying the flowers in her lap, "they are the first I have seen this year, and they are your favourite flowers, are they not? How fair and melancholy they are! Strange that these pure white things should spring from such slimy mud! May I?" taking out his cigar-case.
"Of course, my child. What have you been about to-day? I have not seen you before."
"I went out very early. I had sent for the forester to come to me at seven, and I went with him to the new plantations. The young firs are as straight as soldiers. And then I dawdled about in the woods--it was so lovely there!--'tis the earth's honeymoon, and when I see everything blossoming out in the sunshine, I think of all that lies in the near future for me, and I feel like shouting for joy! Apropos, mamma, I have found a site for the Widow's Asylum that you want to found. I have been puzzling over the best situation for it, and I have decided to put the old Elizabeth monastery at the disposal of your benevolence. Is this what you would like?"
She held out her hand to him with a smile. "Have you found time to think of that too? I thought you had forgotten my scheme long ago."
"Ah yes, I am in the habit of forgetting your wishes!" he said gaily.
"No, Heaven knows you are not," the Countess murmured, "you have always been loving and considerate to me."
"And what else could I be, mamma?" he said affectionately. "Ah, on a glorious spring day like this, when the world is so beautiful, and my blood goes coursing in my veins with delight, I am tempted to kneel down before you and thank you for the dear life you have bestowed upon me--what is the matter, mamma, you have suddenly grown so pale?"
"It is nothing--only a slight pain in my heart--it has gone already," the Countess whispered, turning aside her head.
"Quite gone?--is it my cigar smoke?"
"Not at all, dear child!"--
In spite of this assertion he tossed his cigar out of the window. "You used to smoke yourself," he observed.
"Yes," she said, looking down at her knitting, "but since I have learned to employ my hands, I have given up smoking."
"You knit instead--It seems odd to me to seeyouknitting. Georges thinks you very much altered."
"I have grown old,voilà!"
"And he thinks too that you spoil me tremendously, that no mother in all Austria spoils her son as you do me."
"No other mother has such a son," the Countess said proudly.
"Oh, oh!" he laughed and took his seat beside her again.
"Nevertheless, I am not blind to your faults," she continued, "I know them all."
"And love every one of them."
"Because they are the faults of a noble nature--men of lower tendencies are obliged to show more self-control."
"Indeed! God bless your aristocratic prejudices! and now for a piece of news. The Truyns reach Rautschin to-morrow by the four o'clock train. Will you drive with me to meet them?"
"Certainly, if you wish me to."
"If I wish you to--if I wish you to!"--he softly snapped his fingers, "and you look all the while as if I had asked you to attend an execution with me. I cannot quite understand you, mamma, you used to take delight in every little pleasure that chance threw in my way, and now will you not rejoice in my great happiness? As soon as there is any allusion made to my betrothal, your whole manner changes; you grow so distant and reserved, that I hardly like to mention my betrothed."
"I really did not know, Ossi ..." began the Countess with constraint.
"Oh, yes, mother, I felt in Paris that you were not pleased with my betrothal, and I have racked my brain to discover what there can be about it that you do not like, and I can not imagine what it is. There can be no objection to make to Gabrielle." Then suddenly smiling in the midst of his irritation, and curbing the impetuous flow of his words, he asked in a lower tone and more calmly, "Ah,ça, mamma, perhaps you dislike the connection with my darling's stepmother? I assure you that ...."
"Nonsense!" replied the Countess, growing still more disturbed, "from what you and Georges both tell me of the young woman, she seems to adapt herself very well to her position. A residence abroad and foreign associations are much better means of training than ...."
"Yes, mamma," interrupted Oswald in some surprise, having followed out his own train of thought, "but if you are so kindly disposed towards Zinka, I cannot possibly conceive what exception you can take to my betrothal. There never was a purer, more noble creature than my little Gabrielle. Highly as I rank you, mother, she is every way worthy of you."
The Countess changed colour, "I do not understand what you wish," she exclaimed, "do not distress me, I have no objection to the girl!...."
"Well then,--you could not possibly expect me to remain unmarried."
The Countess cast down her eyes and was silent.
Oswald sprang up, called his dog and left the room, his face very pale, his eyes very dark.
Impetuous and hasty as he was with others, he had always controlled himself in his mother's presence. Leaving the room was the extreme point to which he allowed his displeasure to manifest itself when with her. If he wished to vent his anger, he did it in seclusion, he never had spoken an angry word--scarcely a loud one to her. And his disagreeable mood never lasted long.
"I am myself again, mamma!" with these words, in which he was wont to announce his return to a better frame of mind, he presented himself half an hour afterward in his mother's boudoir. She was sitting just as he had left her, the waterlilies in her lap, very pale, very erect, with the set features that veil distress of mind.
Pushing his chair close up to her he laid his hand upon her shoulder, and said with the winning tenderness of all impetuous men after bursts of anger: "Forgive me, mamma, I was very wrong again!" She smiled faintly and murmured some half inaudible words of affection--"I was odiously egotistical," he went on, "I had quite forgotten what a change my marriage will make in your life, what a trial it must be to you, you poor, foolish, jealous little mother! But whatever change there may be outwardly in our relations, we must always be the same in heart; and if I must deprive you of something," he added gaily, "my children shall requite you. It had to come sooner or later, mamma; or could you really wish me to renounce the fairest share of existence?"
She trembled in every limb, and suddenly taking his hand, before he could prevent it, she carried it to her lips, "No, you shall renounce no joy, my child, my noble child!" she exclaimed,--"but--leave me now for a while, for only a little while--I am tired!"
Truyn had insisted that the betrothal of his daughter to Oswald Lodrin should be celebrated in Bohemia. Zinka had yielded with great reluctance and sorrow, and had at last resolved to bid farewell to her dear foreign home.
"Why," she persisted in asking him, "cannot the ceremony take place, as in our own case, at the Austrian Embassy?"
But Truyn would not hear of it. "Dear heart," he replied, "it would go against the grain. The betrothals of all my sisters and of my aunts were celebrated at Rautschin, why should I depart from the traditions of my family?"
"As if you had not already departed from them, and in the most vital regard," said Zinka, with arch tenderness.
"That is a very different thing,--if there were any good reason, then--then--!"
"Ah, dear friend, you have grown insufferably conservative, you would have shouted on the first day of the creation of the world: 'Conserves le chaos, seigneur Dieu, conservez le chaos!'"
Whereupon Truyn, kissing her hand, made reply. "That comes of living in France, dear child."
And so the pretty house in the Avenue Labédoyère was deserted. The shutters were closed, the carpets rolled up, the bric-à-brac stowed away; only in some roundabout fashion did a bluish beam of light slip into the vault-like obscurity, and the restless motes pursue their fantastic dance among the shrouded shapes of the furniture.
The Truyn family were rapidly approaching their home. Nearly thirty hours had passed since Paris had faded from their eyes in the misty blue distance--since the last gigantic announcement of the 'Belle Jardinière,' and of the 'Pauvre diable' had flitted past them. The Bavarian boundary, with its stupid Custom House formalities lay behind them. Truyn was reading a Vienna newspaper with great interest, Gabrielle was gazing abstractedly at the crimson coupé cushions opposite, with the far-away look in her eyes of young lovers. Zinka was leaning back in her corner, her veil half drawn aside, her hands folded in her lap, the latest impressions of her Paris life hovering kaleidiscopically before her mental vision, her heart oppressed by a strange melancholy.
"Ah, this defamed, delightful Paris! how it captivates the heart with its good-for-nothing beauty, and its corrupt, sickly sentiment!"
She was still mentally rehearsing the last days before her departure, the going to and fro from shop to shop, the interesting consultations with Monsieur Worth, the affected face with which that eminent artist put his finger to his lip, while attending the ladies to their carriage, and continued to 'compose' Gabrielle's wedding dress, murmuring to himself with his English accent: "Oui, oui, une orginalité distahnguée c'est ce qu'il fant," while sleek young clerks, and young girls faultless in figure, displayed to the best advantage the richest costumes, trailing about silks and satins of fabulous elegance.
"Ce n'est pas cela, qui ferait votre affaire, Madame la Comtesse je le sais bien," said Mons. Worth pointing to certain monstrosities devised for American parvenus, "ah, Madame la Comtesse cannot imagine, how hard it is for an artist to have to work for people of no taste!Ah oui, une originalité distahnguée!"
The man-milliner's, monotonous refrain kept sounding on in Zinka's ears. Then she thought of the farewell visits, the daily heap of cards filling the great copper salver in the vestibule, the wearisome farewell entertainments, and of her husband's toast--the toast which he proposed at the magnificent banquet, given in his honour, by the Austrian Hungarians in Paris. Unutterably distasteful as it always is to men of his stamp, to be conspicuous, he at last made up his mind to propose this toast; he worked at it for an entire week, and subjected it to the criticism, not only of his wife and of his daughter, but of every one whose judgment he respected in Paris. It was a masterpiece of a toast, a toast designed to unite in brotherly affection all the Austrians in Paris, and which ultimately, with its well-meant, many-sided compliments gave occasion for dissatisfaction to every member of the Austrian-Hungarian colony, whether conservative or liberal. Zinka laughed to herself as she recalled that poor misunderstood toast. She laughed outright, started, and--awoke--rubbed her eyes and looked out.
Yes, Paris lay far behind her, very far. She was in Austria, beautiful, dreamingly-drowsy Austria, and, in spite of the reluctance with which she returned to her fatherland, it affected her.
A low blue chain of hills lay on the western horizon like a vanishing storm-cloud. The landscape around was level and extended. Large, quiet pools, surrounded by tall rushes, and covered with a network of fragrant waterlilies, gleamed here and there among the emerald meadows.
The sun was near its setting. The shadows of the telegraph poles stretched out indefinitely. Little towns contentedly sleeping away their dull lives among green lindens, showed their old-fashioned silhouettes, black against the sunlit evening clouds.
Truyn laid aside his newspaper, and his face grew eager and animated, every knotted gnarled willow, every half-ruinous garden wall here interested him.
A forest of firs, their trunks glowing red in the last rays of the sun, bordered the railway. "There, just by that stunted fir, I shot my first deer," Truyn exclaimed, and in his eyes sparkled the memory of a happy boyhood; then, drawing Zinka to him, he whispered tenderly: "You are at home, Zini; we are travelling upon our own soil."
"Ah," replied Zinka, nestling close to him, timid as a child afraid of ghosts.
"How nervous you are!" he said, gently stroking her cheek--"you silly little goose you!"
"It is not for myself," she whispered, "so long as you love me, you and Ella, I can bear anything. But I know you--it would grieve you to the very heart, if ...."
"Tickets, if you please!"
A breathless panting--a shrill whistle.
"Rautschin--five minutes stay!"
"Aunt Wjera!" Gabrielle exclaimed, joyously hurrying out of the coupé.
There was something like defiance in Zinka's heart, but when she saw the woman, who in all her exquisite beauty, all the distinguished grace of manner inspired by kindness and cordiality, advanced to meet them, her defiant mood vanished in admiration, and with a feeling of almost childlike reverence, she bowed to the superiority of the elder lady, who greeted her most cordially.
After the first excitement of meeting was over, Countess Wjera's attention was naturally concentrated upon her son's betrothed.
"I can but congratulate you from my heart, Ossi," she said earnestly, looking full into the young girl's eyes--eyes that shone like two blue violets under the clearest skies--violets that had suffered nothing from late frosts or too ardent sunshine. "You are a favourite of fortune, my child."
Gabrielle blushed, and buried her face in the bunch of white roses, which Oswald had brought her; and Oswald was touched, and smiled his thanks to his mother, as he whispered a tender word to his betrothed.
"Do you know who came in the same train with us?" Truyn suddenly asked, interrupting the happy moment.
"Capriani, father and son, I saw them," said Oswald, "look at him, mamma, there is my rival, the enterprising young spark, who sued for Gabrielle's hand. A mad idea, was it not? Gabrielle, and a son of Capriani!--we shouted with laughter, when the Melkweyser announced the proposal."
The flurry of the arrival had subsided, and the Countess leisurely inspected through her eyeglass the sallow young man who was talking with Georges Lodrin. Gabrielle said something about his dark blue travelling-suit, shot with gold; Zinka made inquiries, all in a breath, of her husband, and of the two lady's-maids, whether this or that article of luggage had not been left in Paris or in the railway coupé.
When at last all her anxieties on this point had been relieved, and they had passed through the station to the carriages, they observed a magnificent four-in-hand, the harness decorated with a coronet.
"By Jove!" Truyn exclaimed with delight, "superb, Ossi, superb! I have rarely seen four such beauties together!"
"Nor have I," said Oswald, examining the horses critically, "unfortunately they are not mine--they belong to Capriani."
"Impossible!" Truyn said disdainfully, "speculator that he is, he may bore through the isthmus of Panama, for all I care, but he cannot get together such a four-in-hand as that."
"Fritz Malzin selected and arranged it for him," Oswald explained. "Poor Fritz!"
"I cannot understand him," Truyn said in an undertone, and hastily changing the subject, he asked: "Have you come to terms with Capriani, about the Kanitz affair, Ossi? Could not the sale be revoked?"
"The matter would have been very difficult to adjust, I am told--of course I understand nothing of such things,--" replied Oswald, "but Capriani--what will you say to this, uncle?--yielded the point, 'out of special regard' for me, as his lawyer informed Dr. Schindler. Between ourselves, it was--what word shall I use?--audacious, for I have never spoken to him in my life, and yet I had to accept his uncalled-for courtesy, for Schmitt's sake."
"Remarkable, very!" said Truyn, "We usually have to pay dear for the courtesies of a Capriani and his kind!"
"Have you everything, Ella?" asked Zinka, "shall we start?"
"I should like to have my hand-bag, Hortense has left it with the large luggage."
Meanwhile, with an unpleasant smile and hat in hand, a sallow-faced, grey-haired, elderly man, with the look of a bird of prey, approached the Countess Wjera, and held out his right hand. "I am immensely gratified, your Excellency, after so long a time ....!"
The Countess, her eyes half closed, measured him haughtily. "With whom have I the pleasure ...?"
"Conte Capriani."
The Countess silently shrugged her shoulders, and turning half away, called in an irritated tone, "Are we ready to go at last, Ossi?...."
A whirling cloud of dust was soon the only trace left of the bustle of the arrival.
The short drive was spent by Truyn in reminiscences, by the betrothed pair in sentiment.
At the tea, which was awaiting the travellers, and of which the Lodrin's stayed to partake, there was much laughter over thechicof the Caprianis, over their wealth, and--their obtrusiveness. Oswald suddenly grew thoughtful.
"Did you ever before meet these people, mamma?" he asked.
"I never knew any Conte Capriani in my life,--who are these Caprianis?" asked the Countess.
"Nobody knows," said Oswald. "Some say he is a Greek, some that he comes from Marseilles, and others that he is a Turk."
"They are all wrong," Georges said drily, "he comes originally from Bohemia; he was formerly a physician, and his name was Stein."