No one can bear pain with such heroic equanimity as can a woman when her pride or her sense of dignity is aroused. Full twenty minutes have elapsed since the light has been darkened in Zdena's sky, her thought of the future embittered, and every joy blotted out of her existence. During these twenty minutes she has talked and laughed; has walked in the park with Paula and Harry; has pointed out to the betrothed couple the comically human physiognomy of a large pansy in a flower-bed; has looked on while Paula, plucking a marguerite, proceeds, with an arch look at Harry, to consult that old-fashioned oracle, picking off the petals one by one, with, "He loves me, he loves me not." Yes, when urged to partake of some refreshment, she has even delicately pared and cut up with a silver knife a large peach, although she could not swallow a mouthful of it. How could she, when she felt as if an iron hand were throttling her!
And now she is in the carriage again, driving towards home. As she drove off she had a last glimpse of Paula and Harry standing side by side in the picturesque court-yard before the castle, beside the fountain, that vies with the lindens in murmuring its old tales,--tales that no longer interest any one. They stood there together,--Paula waving her hand and calling parting words after the visitor; Harry stiff and mute, lifting his cap. Then Paula put her hand upon his arm to go back into the castle with him,--him, her lover, her property!
And Zdena is alone at last. The pain in her heart is becoming torture. Her breath comes short and quick. At the same time she has the restless, impatient sensation which is experienced by all who are unaccustomed to painful emotion, before they can bring themselves to believe in the new and terrible trouble in which they find themselves,--a sensation of being called upon to shake off some burden unjustly imposed. But the burden can neither be shifted nor shaken off.
Her consciousness is the burden, the burden of which she cannot be rid except with life itself. Life,--it has often seemed to her too short; and, in spite of all her transitory girlish discontent, she has sometimes railed at fate for according to mankind so few years in which to enjoy this lovely, sunny, laughing world. But now her brief earthly future stretches out endlessly before her,--an eternity in which joy is dead and everything black and gloomy.
"Good God! will this torture last forever?" she asks herself. No, it is not possible that such pain can last long: she will forget it, she must! It seems to her that she can at least be rid of some of it if she can only weep her fill in solitude. Yes, she must cry it out before she goes back to Zirkow, before she meets again the keen, kindly eyes that would fain pry into her very soul.
Meanwhile, she has told the coachman to drive to Komaritz. The carriage rolls through the long village. The air tastes of straw and hay; the rhythmic beat of the thrashers' flails resounds from the peasants' small barns. Zdena stops her ears; she cannot bear the noise,--the noise and the garish, cruel light. At last the village lies behind her. The sound of flails is still heard in the distance; to Zdena they seem to be beating the summer to death with clubs.
The carriage drives on, drives towards the forest. On the edge of the wood stands a red-and-white signpost, the two indexes of which point in opposite directions through the depths of the leafy thicket: one pathway is tolerably smooth, and leads to Komaritz; the other, starting from the same point, is rough, and leads to Zirkow.
She calls to the coachman. He stops the horses.
"Drive on to Komaritz and leave the plums there," she orders him, "and I will meanwhile take the short path and walk home." So saying, she descends from the vehicle.
He sees her walk off quickly and with energy; sees her tall, graceful figure gradually diminish in the perspective of the Zirkow woodland path. For a while he gazes after her, surprised, and then he obeys her directions.
If Krupitschka had been upon the box he would have opposed his young mistress's order as surely as he would have disobeyed it obstinately. He would have said, "The Baroness does not understand that so young a lady ought not to go alone through the forest--the Herr Baron would be very angry with me if I allowed it, and I will not allow it."
But Schmidt is a new coachman. He does as he is bidden, making no objection.
Zdena plunges into the wood, penetrates deeper and deeper into the thicket, aimlessly, heedlessly, except that she longs to find a spot where she can hide her despair from human eyes. She does not wish to see the heavens, nor the sun, nor the buzzing insects and wanton butterflies on the edge of the forest.
At last the shade is deep enough for her. The dark foliage shuts out the light; scarcely a hand's-breadth of blue sky can be seen among the branches overhead. She throws herself on the ground and sobs. After a while she raises her head, sits up, and stares into space.
"How is it possible? How could it have happened?" she thinks. "I cannot understand. From waywardness? from anger because I was a little silly? Oh, God! oh, God! Yes, I take pleasure in luxury, in fine clothes, in the world, in attention. I really thought for the moment that these were what I liked best,--but I was wrong. How little should I care for those things, without him! Oh, God! oh, God! How could he find it in his heart to do it!" she finally exclaims, while her tears flow afresh down her flushed cheeks.
Suddenly she hears a low crackling in the underbrush. She starts and looks up. Before her stands an elderly man of medium height, with a carefully-shaven, sharp-cut face, and a reddish-gray peruke. His tall stove-pipe hat is worn far back on his head, and his odd-looking costume is made up of a long green coat, the tails of which he carries under his left arm, a pair of wide, baggy, nankeen trousers, a long vest, with buttons much too large, and a pair of clumsy peasant shoes. The most remarkable thing about him is the sharp, suspicious expression of his round, projecting eyes.
"What do you want of me?" stammers Zdena, rising, not without secret terror.
"I should like to know what you are crying for. Perhaps because you have quarrelled with your cousin Henry," he says, with a sneer.
He addresses her familiarly: who can he be? Evidently some one of unsound mind; probably old Studnecka from X----, a former brewer, who writes poems, and who sometimes thinks himself the prophet Elisha, under which illusion he will stop people in the road and preach to them. This must be he. She has heard that so long as his fancies are humoured he is perfectly gentle and harmless, but that if irritated by contradiction he has attacks of maniacal fury, and has been known to lay violent hands upon those who thus provoke him.
Before she finds the courage to answer him, he comes a step nearer to her, and repeats his question with a scornful smile which discloses a double row of faultless teeth.
"How do you know that I have a cousin?" asks Zdena, still more alarmed, and recoiling a step or two.
"Oh, I know everything, just as the gypsies do."
"Of course this is the prophet," the girl thinks, trembling. She longs to run away, but tells herself that the prudent course will be to try to keep him in good humour until she has regained the path out of this thicket, where she has cut herself off from all human aid. "Do you know, then, who I am?" she asks, trying to smile.
"Oh, yes," replies this strange prophet, nodding his head. "I have long known you, although you do not know me. You are the foolish daughter of a foolish father."
"How should he have any knowledge of me or of my family?" she reflects. The explanation is at hand. She remembers distinctly that the prophet Studnecka was one of the eccentric crowd that Baron Franz Leskjewitsch was wont to assemble about him for his amusement during the three or four weeks each year when the old man made the country around unsafe by his stay here.
"You know my grandfather too, then?" she continues.
"Yes, a little," the old man muttered. "Have you any message to send him? I will take it to him for you."
"I have nothing to say to him!--I do not know him!" she replies. Her eyes flash angrily, and she holds her head erect.
"H'm I he does not choose to know you," the old man remarks, looking at her still more keenly.
"The unwillingness is mutual. I have not the least desire to know anything of him," she says, with emphasis.
"Ah!--indeed!" he says, with a lowering glance from beneath his shaggy eyebrows. "Shall I tell him so, from you?"
"If you choose!" she replies. Suddenly an idea strikes her; she observes him in her turn more keenly than hitherto, his face, his figure, his hands, tanned and neglected, but slender and shapely, with almond-shaped nails. There is something familiar in his features.
Is he really the brewer Studnecka, the fool? And if no fool, who can it be that ventures thus to address her? Something thrills her entire frame. A portrait recurs to her memory,--a portrait of the elder Leskjewitsch, which, since the family embroilment, has hung in the lumber-room at Zirkow. There is not a doubt that this crazy old creature is her grandfather.
He sees that she has recognized him.
Her bearing has suddenly become haughty and repellent. She adjusts her large straw hat, which has been hanging at the back of her neck.
"Then I am to tell him from you that you do not wish to have anything to do with him?" the old man asks again.
"Yes." Her voice is hard and dull.
"And besides," he asks, "have you nothing else to say to him?" He looks at her as if to read her soul.
She returns his look with eyes in whose brown depths the tears so lately shed are still glistening. She knows that she is putting the knife to her own throat, but what matters it? The gathered bitterness of years overflows her heart and rises to her lips.
"And besides,"--she speaks slowly and provokingly,--"besides, I should like to tell him that I consider his conduct cold-hearted, petty, and childish; that after he has tormented to death two people, my father and my mother, he might, in his old age, attempt by love and kindness to make some amends for his wickedness, instead of going on weaving fresh misery out of his wretched hatred and obstinacy, and--that never whilst I live will I make one advance towards him!" She bows slightly, turns, and leaves him. He looks after her graceful figure as it slowly makes its way among the underbrush and is finally lost to sight.
"A splendid creature! What a carriage! what a figure! and what a bewitching face! No wonder she has turned the brain of that silly lad at Komaritz. He knows what's what. The child shows race," he mutters; "she's a genuine Leskjewitsch. All Fritz.--Poor Fritz!"
The old man passes his hand across his forehead, and then gazes after her once more. Is that her blue dress glimmering among the trees? No, it is a bit of sky. She has vanished.
Zdena manages to slip up to her own room unobserved when she reaches Zirkow. She makes her first appearance at table, her hair charmingly arranged, dressed as carefully as usual, talkative, gay. The most acute observer would hardly suspect that a few hours previously she had all but cried her eyes out.
"And did you bring us the piece of news from Dobrotschau?" asks Frau Rosamunda during the soup, which Zdena leaves untasted.
"Oh, yes. And most extraordinary it is," she replies. "Paula Harfink is betrothed."
"To whom?"
"To Harry," says Zdena, without the quiver of an eyelash, calmly breaking her bread in two as she speaks.
"To Harry? Impossible!" shouts the major.
"Not at all," Zdena declares, with a smile. "I saw him with her. She already calls him by his first name."
"I do not understand the world nowadays," growls the old soldier, adding, under his breath, "That d--d driving about in the moonlight!"
Frau von Leskjewitsch and her cousin Wenkendorf content themselves during the remainder of the meal with discussing the annoying consequences for the family from such a connection, partaking, meanwhile, very comfortably of the excellent dinner. The major glances continually at his niece. It troubles him to see her smile so perpetually. Is it possible that she is not taking the matter more seriously to heart?
After dinner, when Frau von Leskjewitsch has carried her cousin off to the greenhouse to show him her now gloxinias, the major chances to go into the drawing-room, which he supposes empty. It is not so. In the embrasure of a window stands a figure, motionless as a statue,--quite unaware of the approach of any one. The major's heart suffers a sharp pang at sight of that lovely, tender profile, the features drawn and pinched with suppressed anguish. He would like to go up to his darling,--to take her in his arms. But he does not dare to do so. How can one bestow caresses upon a creature sore and crushed in every limb? He leaves the room on tiptoe, as one leaves the room of an invalid who must not be disturbed.
"God have mercy on the poor child!" he murmurs.
As was formerly remarked at the sale of the effects of Mademoiselle Pauline C----, "Very little body-linen and very many diamonds," so it may be said of the population of X----: very few inhabitants, but very many hussars.
The town consists of a barracks and a Casino; the post-office, church, and school-house, as well as all the big and little houses, new and tasteless, or old and ruinous, are merely a secondary affair.
The ugly square barracks, painted red, is situated upon what is called "The Ring," a spacious, uneven square, unpaved but trodden hard, and, besides, covered with dust, straw, remains of bundles of hay, and all kinds of dirt pertaining to a stable.
Opposite the barracks is the Casino, also called "Hostinee u bylé ruze," or "The White Rose Inn." The barracks stands alone, haughtily exclusive. Adjoining the Casino and the post-office, however, are various ugly or half-ruinous structures, and opposite the post-office there is a line of unedifying building, describing a spacious circle,--low huts, two-storied houses, houses with mansard roofs, houses painted yellow, light green, or light pink, with a saint in a blue niche over the front door, and houses with creaking weathercocks on the roof, all half ruinous, but clinging affectionately to one another, like drunken recruits bent upon mutual support.
It is noon. From the open windows of the most pretentious of these houses come the notes of a waltz, with a loud sound of shuffling and scraping, alternating with screaming and laughter. The story goes that the wife of the steward of the Casino, Frau Albina Schwanzara, formerprima ballerinaat Troppau, is teaching the cancan behind those same windows to one of the celebrities of the little town, the wife of a wealthy tallow-chandler, and that the lady in question, for the entertainment of the corps of officers now stationed at X----, is to dance the aforesaid beautiful dance at the next "sociable," dressed as a chimney-sweeper. "Fast at any price!" is the device of the celebrity. The lively music is the only animate circumstance in "The Ring;" the sultry August heat has stricken dead everything else. The kellner at the door of the Casino, the sentinel at the gate of the barracks, are nodding where they stand. In a corner of the square is the wagon of a troupe of strolling players,--a green-painted house on wheels,--to which is harnessed a one-eyed steed with very long legs and a tail like a rat's. The prima donna of the troupe, a slovenly woman in shabby dancing-slippers, is squatting on a bundle of hay, flirting with a cavalry sergeant. A lank youth with long, straight, fair hair is thrashing with his suspenders a pig tied at the back of the wagon, while he holds up his trousers over his stomach with his left hand. Several other children of Thespis lie stretched out snoring, among various drums and ropes, in the dust.
All the people who happen to be in the square stare at them.
The universal interest is shortly diverted, however, by the arrival of two equipages and a luggage-wagon, all three driving down a side street to rein up before the post-office. In the first of the two vehicles, a large convenient landau, two ladies are seated with a young man opposite them. The second carriage is occupied by a valet and two maids.
They have come from the nearest railway-station, and have merely stopped at the post-office for any letters and papers that may be awaiting them. While the servant is procuring these within the building, the young man alights from the landau and enters into conversation with the postmaster, eagerly inquiring what regiment is at present in garrison at X----.
The curiosity of an increasing public becomes almost morbid. All crowd around the post-office. The young actress has lost her admirer,--the sergeant has rushed up to the young man.
"Oh, Herr Lieutenant!" he calls out, eagerly; then, ashamed of his want of due respect, he straightens himself to the correct attitude and salutes with his hand at his cap. Two officers, each with a billiard-cue in his hand, come hastily out of the Casino, followed by a third,--Harry Leskjewitsch. The stranger receives the first two with due courtesy; Harry he scans eagerly.
"You here, Harry!" he exclaims, going up to him with outstretched hands.
The lady on the right in the landau lowers the red Bilk parasol with which she has hitherto shielded her face from public curiosity, and takes out her eye-glass; the other leans forward a little. Both ladies are in faultless travelling-dress. The one on the right is a beauty in her way, fair, with a good colour, a full figure, and regular features, although they may be a trifle sharp. Her companion is beautiful, too, but after an entirely different style,--a decided brunette, with a pale face and large eyes which, once gazed into, hold the gazer fast, as by the attraction one feels to solve a riddle.
"Treurenberg!" Harry exclaims, grasping the stranger's hands in both his own.
"I thought you were in Vienna," Treurenberg replies. "I cannot tell you how glad I am to see you! When did we meet last?"
"At your marriage," says Harry.
"True! It seems an eternity since then." Treurenberg sighs. "Only fancy, I had to shoot my 'Old Tom' last winter!"
At this moment a little cavalcade passes across the square to reach the barracks,--an Amazon in a tight, very short riding-dress, followed and accompanied by several gentlemen.
Treurenberg's attention is attracted by the horse-woman, who, although much powdered, rather faded, and with a feverish glow in her large, dark eyes, shows traces of very great beauty.
"Is not that Lori Trauenstein?" Lato asks his new-found friend.
"Yes,--now Countess Wodin, wife of the colonel of the regiment of hussars in garrison here."
"An old flame of mine," Lato murmurs. "Strange! I scarcely recognized her. This is the first time I have seen her since----" he laughs lightly--"since she gave me my walking-ticket! Is Wodin the same as ever?"
"How could he be anything else!"
"And is she very fast?"
"Very," Harry assents.
The ladies in the landau have both stretched their necks to look after the Amazon. But while the face of the blonde expresses merely critical curiosity, in her companion's dark eyes there is sad, even horrified, surprise.
The Amazon and her train disappear beneath the arched gate-way of the barracks.
"Lato!" the portly blonde calls to Treurenberg from the landau.
He does not hear her.
"Do you remember my 'Old Tom'?" he asks his friend, returning to his favourite theme.
"I should think so. A chestnut,--a magnificent creature!"
"Magnificent! A friend,--an actual friend. That fat Rhoden--a cousin of my wife's--broke his leg in riding him at a hunt. But, to speak of something pleasanter, how are they all at Komaritz? Your cousin must be very pretty by this time?" And Treurenberg looks askance at his friend.
"Very," Harry replies, and his manner suddenly grows cold and constrained. "But allow me to speak to your wife," he adds. "By the way, who is the young lady beside her?"
"H'm! a relative,--a cousin of my wife's."
"Present me, I pray," says Harry.
He then pays his respects to the Countess Treurenberg and to her companion, whose name he now learns is Olga Dangeri.
The Countess offers him her finger-tips with a gracious smile. Olga Dangeri, nodding slightly, raises her dark, mysterious eyes, looks him full in the face for a moment, and then turns away indifferent. The servant comes out of the post-office with a great bundle of letters, which the Countess receives from him, and with two or three packages, which he hands over to the maids.
"What are you waiting for, Lato? Get in," the Countess says.
"Drive on. I shall stay here with Leskjewitsch for a while," Treurenberg replies.
"Mamma is waiting breakfast for us."
"I shall breakfast in the Casino. My respects to your mother."
"As you please." The young Countess bows to Harry stiffly, with a discontented air, the horses start, a cloud of dust rises, and the landau rolls away. With his eyes half closed, Harry looks after the heavy brown carriage-horses.
"Lato, that off horse is spavined."
"For heaven's sake don't notice it! My mother-in-law bought the pair privately to surprise me. She paid five thousand guilders for them."
"H'm! Who persuaded her to buy them?"
"Pistasch Kamenz. I do not grudge him his bargain," murmurs Lato, adding, with a shake of the head, "'Tis odd, dogs and horses are the only things in which we have the advantage over the financiers."
With which he takes his friend's arm and crosses the square to the Casino.
They are sitting in the farthest corner of the smoky dining-hall of the Casino, Harry and his friend, by a window that looks out upon a little yard. Harry is smoking a cigar, and sits astride of a chair; Lato contrives to sprawl over three chairs, and smokes cigarettes, using about five matches to each cigarette. Two glasses, a siphon, and a bottle of cognac stand upon a rickety table close by.
The room is low, the ceiling is almost black, and the atmosphere suggests old cheese and stale cigar-smoke. Between the frames of their Imperial Majesties a fat spider squats in a large gray web. At a table not far from the two friends a cadet, too thin for his uniform, is writing a letter, while a lieutenant opposite him is occupied in cutting the initials of his latest flame, with his English penknife, on the green-painted table. Before a Bohemian glass mirror in a glass frame stands another lieutenant, with a thick beard and a bald pate, which last he is endeavouring artistically to conceal by brushing over it the long thick hair at the back of his neck. His name is Spreil; he has lately been transferred to the hussars from the infantry, and he is the butt for every poor jest in the regiment.
"I cannot tell you how glad I am to see you," Treurenberg repeats to his friend. As he speaks, his cigarette goes out; he scrapes his twenty-fourth match in the last quarter of an hour, and breaks off its head.
"The same old lack of fire!" Harry says, by way of a jest, handing him his lighted cigar.
"Yes, the same old lack of fire!" Treurenberg repeats.
Lack of fire! How often he has been reproached with it as a boy! Lack of fire; that means everything for which fire stands,--energy, steadfastness, manly force of will. There is no lack of passion, on the other hand; of dangerous inflammable material there is too much in his nature; but with him passion paralyzes effort instead of spurring to action. One need only look at him as he half reclines there, smiling dreamily to himself, scarcely moving his lips, to know him for what he is, indolent, impressionable, yet proud and morbidly refined withal; a thoroughly passive and very sensitive man. He is half a head taller than Harry, but carries himself so badly that he looks shorter; his face, framed in light brown hair and a soft pointed beard, is sallow; his large gray eyes are veiled beneath thick lids which he rarely opens wide. His hands are especially peculiar, long, slender, soft, incapable of a quick movement; hands formed to caress, but not to fight,--hardly even to clasp firmly.
It is said that the colonel of the regiment of Uhlans, in which Lato served before his marriage to Selina Harfink, once declared of him, "Treurenberg ought to have been a woman, and then, married to a good husband, something might perhaps have been made of him."
This criticism, which ought to have been uttered by a woman rather than by a logical, conventional man, went the round of Treurenberg's comrades. "The same old lack of fire," Lato repeats, smiling to himself. He has the mouth and the smile of a woman.
Harry knows the smile well, but it has changed since the last time he saw it. It used to be indolent, now it is sad.
"Have you any children?" Harry asks, after a while.
Treurenberg shivers. "I had a boy, I lost him when he was fifteen months old," he says, in a low, strained tone.
"My poor fellow! What did he die of?" Harry asks, sympathetically.
"Of croup. It was over in one night,--and he was so fresh and healthy a child! My God! when I think of the plump little arms he used to stretch out to me from his little bed every morning," Lato goes on, hoarsely, "and then, as I said, in a few hours--gone! The physician did all that he could for the poor little fellow,--in vain; nothing did any good. I knew from the first that there was no hope. How the poor little chap threw himself about in his bed! I sometimes dream that I hear him gasping for breath, and he clung to me as if I could help him!" Treurenberg's voice breaks; he passes his hand over his eyes. "He was very little; he could hardly say 'papa' distinctly, but it goes terribly near one's heart when one has nothing else in the world,--I--I mean, no other children," he corrects the involuntary confession.
"Well, all days have not yet ended in evening," Harry says, kindly, and then pauses suddenly, feeling--he cannot tell why--that he has made a mistake.
Meanwhile, the lieutenant at the table has finished his initials, and has, moreover, embellished them with the rather crude device of a heart. He rises and saunters aimlessly about the large, low room, apparently seeking some subject for chaff, for boyish play. He kills a couple of flies, performs gymnastic exercises upon two chairs, and finally approaches the cadet, who, ensconced in a corner, behind a table, is scribbling away diligently.
"Whom are you writing to?" he asks, sitting astride of a chair just opposite the lad.
The cadet is silent.
"To your sweetheart?"
The cadet is still silent.
"I seem to have guessed rightly," says the lieutenant, adding, "But tell me, does your present flame--here the sun called Wodin--tolerate a rival sun?"
"I am writing to my mother," the cadet says, angrily. At the mention of the name of Wodin he flushes to the roots of his hair.
"Indeed!--how touching!" the lieutenant goes on. "What are you writing to her? Are you asking her for money? or are you soothing her anxiety with an account of the solid character of your principles? Do show me your letter."
The cadet spreads his arms over the sheet before him, thereby blotting the well-formed characters that cover it. "I tell you what, Stein----!" he bursts forth at his tormentor, his voice quivering with anger.
Meanwhile, Lato turns towards him. "Toni!" he exclaims, recognizing a relative in the irate young fellow,--"Toni Flammingen!--can it be? The last time I saw you, you were in your public-school uniform. You've grown since then, my boy."
Stein turns away from this touching family scene, and, taking his place behind Lieutenant Spreil, who is still occupied in dressing his hair, observes, in a tone of great gravity,--
"Don't you think, Spreil, that you could make part of your thick beard useful in decorating that bald head of yours? Comb it up each side and confine it in place with a little sticking-plaster. It might do."
Spreil turns upon him in a fury. "It might do for me to send you a challenge!" he thunders.
"By all means: a little extra amusement would be welcome just now," Stein retorts, carelessly.
Spreil bows, and leaves the room with majesty.
"For heaven's sake, Stein, what are you about?" Harry, who has been observing the scene, asks the idle lieutenant.
"I have made a vow to rid our regiment of the fellow,--to chaff him out of it," Stein replies, with the sublime composure which results from the certainty of being in the right. "We do not want the infantry cad. If he is determined to mount on horseback, let him try a velocipede, or sit astride of Pegasus, for all I care; but in our regiment he shall not stay. You'll be my second, Les?"
"Of course, if you insist upon it," Harry replies; "but it goes against the grain. I detest this perpetual duelling for nothing at all. It is bad form."
"You need not talk; you used to be the readiest in the regiment to fight. I remember you when I was in the dragoons. But a betrothed man must, of course, change his views upon such subjects."
At the word "betrothed" Harry shrinks involuntarily. Treurenberg looks up.
"Betrothed!" he exclaims. "And to whom?"
"Guess," says the lieutenant, who is an old acquaintance of Treurenberg's.
"It is not hard to guess. To your charming little cousin Zdena."
The lieutenant puckers his lips as if about to whistle, and says, "Not exactly. Guess again."
Meanwhile, Harry stands like a man in the pillory who is waiting for a shower of stones, and says not a word.
"Then--then--" Treurenberg looks from the lieutenant to his friend, "I have no idea," he murmurs.
"To the Baroness Paula Harfink," says the lieutenant, his face devoid of all expression.
There is a pause. Treurenberg's eyes try in vain to meet those of his friend.
From without come the clatter of spurs and the drone of a hand-organ grinding out some popular air.
"Is it true?" asks Treurenberg, who cannot rid himself of the idea that the mischievous lieutenant is jesting. And Harry replies, as calmly as possible,--
"It is not yet announced. I am still awaiting my father's consent. He is abroad."
"Ah!"
The lieutenant pours out a thimbleful of brandy from the flask on the table, mixes it with seltzer-water and sugar, and, raising it to his lips, says, gravely, "To the health of your betrothed, Leskjewitsch,--of your sister-in-law, Treurenberg."
"This, then, was the news of which my mother-in-law made such mysterious mention in her last letters," Lato murmurs. "This is the surprise of which she spoke. I--I hope it will turn out well," he adds, with a sigh.
Harry tries to smile. From the adjoining billiard-room come the voices of two players in an eager dispute. The malicious lieutenant pricks up his ears, and departs for the scene of action with the evident intention of egging on the combatants.
"Lato," Harry asks, clearing his throat, "how do you mean to get home? I have my drag here, and I can drop you at Dobrotschau. Or will you drive to Komaritz with me?"
"With the greatest pleasure," Treurenberg assents. "How glad I shall be to see the old place again!"
He is just making ready for departure, when several officers drop in at the Casino, almost all of them old friends of his. They surround him, shake hands with him, and will not let him go.
"Can you wait a quarter of an hour for me?" he asks his friend.
Harry nods. He takes no part in the general conversation. He scarcely moves his eyes from the spider-web between the Imperial portraits. A fly is caught in it and is making desperate efforts to escape. The bloated spider goes on spinning its web, and pretends not to see it.
"Have a game of bézique? You used to be so passionately fond of bézique," Harry hears some one say. He looks around. It is Count Wodin, the husband of the pretty, coquettish horsewoman, who is speaking. Lato turns to Harry.
"Can you wait for me long enough?" he asks, and his voice sounds uncertain and confused. "One short game."
Harry shrugs his shoulders, as if to say, "As you please." Then, standing with one knee on a chair in the attitude of a man who is about to take leave and does not think it worth while to sit down again, he looks on at the game.
The first game ends, then another, and another, and Treurenberg makes no move to lay the cards aside. His face has changed: the languid smile has gone, his eyes are eager, watchful, and his face is a perfectly expressionless mask. His is the typical look of the well-bred gambler who knows how to conceal his agitation.
"Cent d'as--double bézique!" Thus it goes on to the accompaniment of the rustle of the cards, the rattle of the counters, and from the adjoining room the crack of the ivory balls against one another as they roll over the green cloth.
"Well, Lato, are you coming?" asks Harry, growing impatient.
"Only two games more. Can you not wait half an hour longer?" asks Treurenberg.
"To speak frankly, I am not much interested in listening to your 'Two hundred and fifty,'--'five hundred,'--and so on."
"Naturally," says Lato, with his embarrassed smile. He moves as if to rise. Wodin hands him the cards to cut. "Go without me. I will not keep you any longer. Some one here will lend me a horse by and by. Shall we see you to-morrow at Dobrotschau?" With which Treurenberg arranges his twelve cards, and Harry nods and departs.
"Tell me, did you ever see a more blissful lover?" asks the teasing lieutenant, who has just returned from the billiard-room. As the disputants, in spite of all his efforts to the contrary, have made up their quarrel, there is nothing more for him to do there. "He seems inspired indeed at the thought of his beloved." And he takes a seat on the table nearest the players.
"Every point in trumps," says Treurenberg, intent upon his game.
"It is my impression that he would like to drink her health in aconite," the lieutenant continues.
"That betrothal seems to me a most mysterious affair," mutters Wodin. "I do not understand Leskjewitsch: he was not even in debt."
The lieutenant bites his lip, makes a private sign to Wodin, and takes pains not to look at Treurenberg.
Lato flushes, and is absorbed in polishing his eyeglass, which has slipped out of his eye.
"I lose three thousand," he says, slowly, consulting his tablets. "Shall we have another game, Wodin?"
Paris, in the middle of August.
At about five in the afternoon, an old gentleman in a greenish-black overcoat that flutters about his thickset figure almost like a soutane, trousers that are too short, low shoes with steel buckles, and an old-fashioned high hat beneath which can be seen a rusty brown wig, issues from a quiet hotel much frequented by strangers of rank.
His features are marked and strong. His brown skin reminds one of walnut-shells or crumpled parchment. Beneath his bushy eyebrows his prominent eyes glance suspiciously about him. It would be difficult to guess at this man's social position from his exterior. To the superficial observer he might suggest the peasant class. The ease, however, with which he bears himself among the fashionably-dressed men in the street, the despotic abruptness of his manner, the irritability with which he disputes some petty item in his hotel bill, while he is not at all dismayed by the large sum total, give the kellner, who stands in the door-way looking after him, occasion for reflection.
"He's another of those miserly old aristocrats who suppress their title for fear of being plundered," he decides, with a shrug, as he turns back into the hotel, stopping on his way to inform theconciergethat, in his opinion, the old man is some half-barbaric Russian prince who has come to Europe to have a look at civilization.
The name in the strangers' book is simply Franz Leskjewitsch.
Meanwhile, the stranger has walked on through the Rue de Rivoli to the corner of the Rue Castiglione, where he pauses, beckons to a fiacre, and, as he puts his foot heavily and awkwardly upon its step, calls to the driver, "Cimetière Montmartre!"
The vehicle starts. The old man's eyes peer about sharply from the window. How changed it all is since he was last in this Babylon, twenty-two years ago, while the Imperial court was in its splendour, and Fritz was still alive!
"Yes, yes, it is all different,--radically different," he murmurs, angrily. "The noise is the same, but the splendour has vanished. Paris without the Empire is like Baden-Baden without the gaming-tables. Ah, how fine it was twenty-two years ago, when Fritz was living!"
Yes, he was not only living, but until then he had never been anything but a source of pleasure to his father; the same Fritz who had afterwards so embittered life for him that the same father had stricken him from his heart and had refused him even a place in his memory. But it is dangerous to try to rid ourselves of the remembrance of one whom we have once loved idolatrously. We may, for fear of succumbing to the old affection, close our hearts and lock them fast against all feeling of any kind. But if they do not actually die in our breasts, there will, sooner or later, come a day when memory will reach them in spite of our locks, and will demand for the dead that tribute of tears which we have refused to grant.
There are few things more ghastly in life than tears shed for the dead twenty years too late.
"Yes, a frivolous fellow, Fritz was,--frivolous and obstinate," the old man says to himself, staring at the brilliant shop-windows in the Rue de la Paix and at the gilded youths sauntering past them; "but when was there ever a man his equal? What a handsome, elegant, charming fellow, bubbling over with merriment and good humour and chivalric generosity! And the fellow insisted on marrying a shop-girl!" he mutters, between his teeth. The thought even now throws him into a fury. He had been so proud of the lad, and then--in one moment it was all over; no future to look to, the young diplomat's career cut short, the family pride levelled in the dust.
The old rage had well-nigh filled his soul, when a lovely, pallid face rises upon his memory. Could Manette Duval have really been as charming as that golden-haired girl he had met awhile ago in the woods? The little witch looked as like Fritz as a delicate girl can look like a bearded man, and she had, withal, a foreign grace, the like of which had never hitherto characterized any Leskjewitsch child, and which might perhaps be an inheritance from her Parisian mother.
And suddenly the father's conscience, silenced through all these long years, asserts itself. Yes, the marriage had been a folly, and Fritz had ruined his career by it. But suppose Fritz had, through his own fault, broken both his arms, or put out his eyes, or done anything else that would have destroyed his future, would it have been for his father to turn from him, reproaching him angrily for his folly, saying, "You have annihilated your happiness by your own fault; you have blasted the hopes I had for you; henceforth be as wretched as you deserve to be; I will have none of you, since I can no longer be proud of you!"
The old man bites his lip and hangs his head.
The carriage rolls on. The weather is excessively warm. In front of the shabby cafés on the Boulevard Clichy some people are sitting, brown and languid. Behind the dusty windows of the shops the shop-girls stand gazing drearily out upon their weary world, as if longing for somewhat of which they have read or dreamed,--something fresh and green; long shadows upon moist, fragrant lawns; gurgling brooks mirroring the sun.
An emotion of compassion stirs in the old man's breast at sight of these "prisoners," and if one by chance seems to him prettier, paler, sadder than the rest, he asks himself, "Did she perhaps look so? No wonder Fritz pitied the poor creature! he had such a warm, tender heart!"
The fiacre stops; the old man rubs his eyes. "How much?" he asks the driver.
The man scans his fare from head to foot with a knowing glance:
"Five francs."
Baron Leskjewitsch takes four francs from the left pocket of his waistcoat, and from the right pocket of his trousers, where he keeps his small change, one sou, as a gratuity. These he gives to the driver, and sternly dismisses him. The man drives off with a grin.
"The old miser thinks he has made a good bargain," he mutters.
The 'miser' meanwhile paces slowly along the broad, straight path of the cemetery, between the tall chestnuts planted on either side.
How dreary, how desolate a church-yard this is, upon which the noise and bustle of the swarming city outside its gates clamorously intrude!--a church-yard where the dead are thrust away as troublesome rubbish, only to put them where they can be forgotten. It is all so bare and prosaic; the flat stones lie upon the graves as if there was a fear lest, if not held down in such brutal fashion, the wretched dead would rise and return to a world where there is no longer any place for them, and where interests hold sway in which they have no part. Urns and other pagan decorations are abundant; there are but few crosses. The tops of the chestnut-trees are growing yellow, and here and there a pale leaf falls upon the baked earth.
A gardener with a harshly-creaking rake is rooting out the sprouting grass from the paths; some gossiping women are seated upon the stone seats, brown, ugly, in starched and crimped white muslin caps, the gaps made by missing teeth in their jaws repulsively apparent as they chatter. A labouring man passes with a nosegay half concealed in the breast of his coat, and in his whole bearing that dull shamefacedness which would fain bar all sympathy, and which is characteristic of masculine grief. The old Baron looks about him restlessly, and finally goes up to the raking gardener and addresses him, asking for the superintendent of the place. After much circumlocution, gesticulation, and shouting on both sides, the two at last understand each other.
"Monsieur cherche une tombe, la tombe d'un étranger décédé à Paris?When? Fifteen years ago. That is a very long time. And no one has ever asked after the grave before? Had the dead man no relatives, then? Ah, such a forgotten grave is very sad; it will be difficult to identify it. Maybe--who knows?--some other bodies have been buried there. Here is the guard."
"For what is Monsieur looking?"
"A grave."
"The name?"
"Baron Frédéric Leskjewitsch." The old man's voice trembles: perhaps it is too late; perhaps he has again delayed too long.
But no: the guard's face immediately takes on an intelligent expression.
"Tres bien, monsieur; par id, monsieur. I know the grave well. Some one from the Austrian embassy comes every year to look after it on the part of the relatives, and this year, not long ago,--oh, only a short time ago,--two ladies came and brought flowers; an elderly lady, and one quite young--oh, but very lovely, monsieur.Par ici, par ici."
Following the attendant, the old man turns aside from the broad, principal path into a labyrinth of narrow foot-ways winding irregularly in and out among the graves. Here the church-yard loses its formal aspect and becomes pathetic. All kinds of shrubbery overgrow the graves. Some flowers--crimson carnations, pale purple gillyflowers, and yellow asters--are blooming at the feet of strangely-gnarled old juniper-trees. The old man's breath comes short, a sort of greed possesses him, a wild burning longing for the bit of earth where lies buried the joy of his life.
The labouring man with hanging head has reached his goal the first. He is already kneeling beside a grave,--tiny little grave, hardly three feet long, and as yet unprovided with a stone. The man passes his hard hand over the rough earth tenderly, gently, as if he were touching something living. Then he cowers down as if he would fain creep into it himself, and lays his head beside the poor little nosegay on the fresh soil.
"Par ici, monsieur,--here is the grave," calls the attendant.
The old Baron shivers from head to foot.
"Where?"
"Here."
A narrow headstone at the end of another stone lying flat upon the ground and enclosed by an iron palisade fence,--this is all--all! A terrible despair takes possession of the father. He envies the labourer, who can at least stroke the earth that covers his treasure, while he cannot even throw himself upon the grave from which a rusty iron grating separates him.
Nothing which he can press to his heart,--nothing in which he can take a melancholy delight. All gone,--all! A cold tombstone enclosed in a rusty iron grating,--nothing more--nothing!