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GLORIA VICTIS!

A ROMANCE

BY

OSSIP SCHUBIN

Author of "Our Own Set."

"Alas! poor human nature!"

Chesterfield.

From the German by MARY MAXWELL

NEW YORK
WILLIAM S. GOTTSBERGER, PUBLISHER
11 MURRAY STREET
1886

Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1886
by William S. Gottsberger
in the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington

Press of
William E. Gottsberger
New York

GLORIA VICTIS!

CHAPTER I.

"There is no help for it, I must do it to-day," the Baroness Melkweyser murmured with a sigh breathed into the depths of the toilet-glass, before which, she was sitting while her maid dressed her hair. "It is now just a week," she went on to herself, after having uttered the above words aloud, "quite one week since Capriani entrusted the affair to me. I have met him three times, and each time was obliged to tell him that there had been no favourable opportunity as yet. He is beginning to take my delay ill. Come, then, courage!.... en avant!.... Truyn certainly ought to be glad to marry his daughter as soon as possible, and I cannot see why Gabrielle should make any objection to becoming the sister-in-law of the Duke of Larothiére. To be sure, most Austrians have such antediluvian ideas! Nons verrons! I will, as Capriani desires, see how the land lies."

She shrugged her shoulders as though shifting off all responsibility and turning to her maid exclaimed: "mais dépêchez vous donc, Euphrosine, will you never remember how much I always have to do!" Whereupon the impatient lady, snatched from her maid the head-dress which she was arranging, and, quite in the style of Napoleon I., crowned herself.

The scene lies in Paris. The short after-season which, like an echo of the carnival, is wont to follow Lent, that holy intermezzo crowded with charity-bazaars, musical soirées and other elegant penitential observances, is rather duller than usual this year. Easter came too late and although Figaro continues its daily record of balls and routs, Paris takes very little heed. All genuine enthusiasm for such entertainments is lacking. Paris thinks of nothing now save the races, the last auction at the Hôtel Drouôt, the latest change of ministry, and the newest thing in stocks.

It is the beginning of May. Two weeks ago, rather later than usual, spring made its appearance--like a young king full of eager benevolence, and generous promises, with green banner held aloft and crowned with sunshine--thus it swept above the earth which sullenly and reluctantly opened its weary eyes. "Awake, awake, I bring with me joy!" called spring in sweet siren tones sometimes low and wooing and anon loud and imperious. And a mysterious whisper thrilled and stirred the land, the trees stretched their black branches, the buds burst. Men felt a pleasant languor, while their hearts beat louder.

The spring advanced quickly, working its lovely miracles--loading the trees with blossoms and filling human hearts with joy--and upon those for whom its lavish hand had left nothing else, it bestowed a smile, or it granted them a dream.

There are, indeed, some unfortunates for whom its brilliant splendour never does aught save reveal the scars of old wounds, which in its careless gayety it formerly inflicted; and while others flock abroad to admire its beauty, these hide away their misery. But when daylight's haughty glare has faded, and spring has modestly shrouded its loveliness in a veil of grey, these wretches inhaling its fragrance in their seclusion come forth from their concealment, into the soothing twilight, among the dewy blossoms, and once more give utterance to the yearning that has so long been mute, rejoicing with tears in their old anguish, crying: "Oh Spring, oh youth--even thy falsehood was lovely--" thus doing it homage by their grief, for spring has no enemies.

Somewhat apart from the aggressive brilliancy of the Avenue l'Imperatrice wind a couple of quiet streets like detached fragments of the Faubourg St. Germain. Everything here breathes that charming and genuine elegance which is almost an instinct, and rules mankind despotically. It is not a grimace artificially assumed for show.

One of the prettiest of the small hotels standing between its court-yard and garden, in the Avenue ----, formerly it was called the Avenue Labédoyère, tomorrow it may perhaps be the Avenue Paul de Cassagnac, and the day after the Avenue Montmorency--was occupied by Count Truyn with his young wife and his daughter.

This evening the family had assembled in a pleasant drawing-room on the rez-de-chaussée, and one after another each expressed delight in the repose and relief of such an hour after the social exertions of the day. The husband and wife as they sat opposite each other near the fireplace--he with his Figaro, and she busy with the restoration of some antique embroidery--were evidently people who had attained the goal of existence and were content. It was plain that their thoughts did not range beyond the present.

Not so with Gabrielle. Twice during the last quarter of an hour she has changed her seat and three times she has consulted the clock upon the chimney-piece.

At last she goes to a mirror and arranges her breast-knot of violets.

"Our Ella is beginning to be pretty," said Truyn opening his eyes after a doze behind the Figaro.

"Have you just discovered that?" Zinka asked smiling.

"Do you think my gown is becoming, Zini?" Gabrielle asked as gravely as if the matter were the Eastern question.

"Very becoming," her step-mother kindly assured her.

"Oho!" said Truyn banteringly, "our Ella is beginning to be vain."

Whereupon Gabrielle blushed deeply and to hide her confusion went to the piano and began to strum "Annette and Lubin." She did not play well but her hands looked very pretty running over the keys.

"I am surprised that Ossi does not make his appearance," said Truyn, laying aside his Figaro. Like all Austrians residing in Paris he had a special preference for that frivolous journal. "I met him this afternoon on the Boulevard, and he asked me expressly whether we were to be at home this evening."

Gabrielle looked, as her father observed with surprise, rather embarrassed. He had spoken thoughtlessly, and in masculine ignorance of the state of affairs. He was just beginning to teaze the girl about her behaviour when the footman announced the Baroness Melkweyser.

Her head-dress of red feathers sat somewhat askew upon the old-fashioned puffs of hair that framed her sallow face. She wore a gown of flowered brocade, the surpassing ugliness of which showed it to have been purchased at a bargain at some great bazaar as a "fin de saison." She squinted slightly, winked constantly, was entirely out of breath, and sank exhausted into an arm-chair, before uttering a word of greeting.

"Ah, if you only knew all I have done this blessed day!" she exclaimed.

The Truyn trio looked at her in smiling silence.

"Confessed and received the sacrament very early," the baroness began the list of her achievements, "always on the second of every month--I never can manage it on the first--then at the Pierson sale I bought six things marked with Louis Philippe's cipher, then I went to see Ada de Thienne's trousseau,--then to a breakfast at the new minister's--too comical--his wife made herself perfectly ridiculous, in a bare neck at two o'clock in the daytime!"

"That is the inevitable consequence of a change of ministers," Zinka remarked. Her manner of speech, quiet, and rather inclined to irony, was that of those who, with rigid self-control have for years endured with dignity some great grief.

The baroness, meanwhile, rattled on, unheeding. "Then I went my round of charities, then looked for a wedding-present for my niece Stefanie...."

"Heavens, Zoë!" Truyn groaned.

"Yes, I lead a most fatiguing existence," the baroness wailed. "Just as I sat down to supper,--I missed my dinner--it occurred to me that it really would be better not to let to-day pass without making you a very important communication--that is--hm--discussing--a most important matter with you--and--here I am. Pray, Zinka, let me have a sandwich, for I am dying of hunger."

"Ring the bell, Erich," Zinka said with a smile.

"And now to business," said the baroness, "je tiens une occasion--it really is the most advantageous opportunity!"

"You shall have your sandwich, Zoë," said Truyn, quietly stretching out his hand to the bell handle, "but pray spare me your advantageous opportunities. If I had availed myself of all your boasted 'opportunities,' I should now be the proud possessor of fourteen rattle-trap Bühl pianos and at least twenty-five tumble-down country houses. As it is I have bought for love of you three holy-water pots of Mme. Maintenon's, an inkstand of the Pompadour's, and I can't tell how many nightcaps of Louis XVI., warranted genuine."

"And an excellent bargain you had of them," the baroness declared. "Louis Sixteenth's nightcaps have latterly been going up in price. But this time there is no question of purchase," she went on to say, "and that is the best of it."

"That certainly is very fine," muttered Truyn.

"The question is,--I suppose I ought to ask Gabrielle to leave the room, that used to be the way, girls never were allowed to be present while their parents disposed of their future, but I .... j'aime à attaquer les choses franchement. The question is, in fact, with regard to--Gabrielle's marriage."

Zinka with a smile took the hand of the young girl standing beside her in her own, and tenderly laid it against her cheek.

"Gabrielle's beauty produced a sensation at the last ball at the Spanish embassy's," the baroness continued.

"I must entreat you not to make such a fatal assault upon my daughter's modesty," exclaimed Zinka.

"Bah!" the baroness shrugged her shoulders, "stop up your ears, Gabrielle. Produced a sensation is the correct phrase. It is remarkable--the succés that the Austrian women always have in Paris. I have a suitor for Gabrielle--the most brilliant parti in Paris."

"Stop, stop, Zoë, I beg you," said Truyn, provoked, "you make me nervous! You always forget how your French way of arranging marriages goes against the grain with us and our old-fashioned Austrian ideas. You say I have a rich husband for your daughter in just the same tone in which you say I have a purchaser for your house! And I seriously entreat you to consider that a jewel like my dear comrade yonder, may be bestowed, upon one deemed worthy of such a possession, but can never be sold."

"Ah, here is my sandwich!" exclaimed the baroness, paying no attention to his words in her satisfaction over the tea-tray. Whilst Gabrielle was occupied with making tea the visitor applied herself to the refreshments, whispering meanwhile confidentially and mysteriously to Truyn. "I thought that your new domestic relations might make you desirous to have Gabrielle mar ...."

An angry flash in Truyn's blue eyes, usually so kindly, warned her that she was on the wrong track; she lost countenance and consequently proceeded rather too precipitately in her investigations as to 'how the land lay.'

"At least my proposition is worth being taken into serious consideration," she said hastily. "Count Capriani commissioned me to ask you whether there was any prospect of his obtaining Gabrielle's hand for his only--remember, his only son."

"Count Capriani, I do not know who he is," Truyn said coldly.

"Well then, Conte Capriani," Zoë explained impatiently.

"Ah, indeed, Conte Capriani," Truyn said significantly,--"the railroad Capriani!"

"Yes."

"And he dares to ask my daughter's hand for his son?"

Perfect silence reigned for a moment. Gabrielle's little nose expressed intense disdain.

"Zoë, you are insane," Truyn said at last, very contemptuously. "This is not, I believe, the first of April."

"I cannot understand your irritation," the baroness rejoined, with the bravado that is the result of great embarrassment. "You are always proclaiming yourself a Liberal with no prejudices!"

Truyn coloured slightly. He had grown more decided than he had been a few years before, and his shirt collars were perhaps a little higher and stiffer. His whole bearing expressed the dignified content that distinguishes the man of conservative views of life. He gently twitched his high collar as he began: "I am a Liberal--at least I fancy that I am. If my daughter had set her heart upon marrying a man her inferior as regards birth and family, I should certainly consent to her doing so, provided the man were one whose character and attainments atoned for his low origin."

Zinka smiled sceptically with a scarcely perceptible shrug. Truyn's colour deepened. "I do not deny," he admitted, "that it would be very hard for me, but all the same I should consent and should do all that I could to assist such a son-in-law to attain a position worthy of my daughter--that is suitable to her mode of life."

"Do not be afraid, papa. I have not the slightest desire to fall in love with a deputy on the extreme Left," Gabrielle observed.

"In young Capriani's case there would be no need for you to trouble yourself about your son-in-law's position," said the baroness loftily. "Sa position est toute faite. All Paris was at the ball the night before last in the Capriani Hôtel--all the rois en exil appeared there, and even some Siberian magnates, and all--that is very many--of the Austrians at present in Paris."

"You know just as well as I do why all these magnates appeared at Capriani's," Truyn rejoined angrily. "But indeed I care nothing for this speculator's position--the man himself is odious--a common parvenu with a boor of a son."

"Have it your own way," said the baroness. "Perhaps you know that a daughter of Capriani's is married to the Duke of Larothière?"

"Yes, I know it."

"And that the Conte's property is estimated at a hundred million?"

"It may be a hundred billion for all I care."

"He is incontestably one of the most influential financiers in Europe."

"Unfortunately, and one of the most corrupt and corrupting," Truyn rejoined with emphasis.

"You have not, however, asked Gabrielle's opinion," persisted the baroness.

Gabrielle tossed her head, but her answer was unuttered, for just at this moment the servant flung open the door, and the interesting conversation was interrupted by the announcement of fresh visitors.

CHAPTER II.

Two young men entered--two Counts Lodrin. They bore the same name; they were the sons of brothers--and as unlike each other as possible.

With regard to Oswald--the "Ossi" of whom Truyn made mention a while before.--Gabrielle was convinced that no sculptured classic god, none of Raphael's cherubim could compare with him in beauty and distinction. She was perhaps alone in this view, although it must be confessed that few mortal men surpassed him in these two respects. About six and twenty, tall, slender--very dark--a gay, good-humoured smile on his handsome, aristocratic face--with an eager, ardent manner--and with what might be called the gypsy-like distinction that characterizes an entire class of the Austrian aristocracy he was the embodiment of chivalric youth. With all the attractiveness of his face, his eyes struck you at once--it would be hard to say what was wrong about them, whether they were too large, or too dark.

They certainly were very beautiful, but they produced the impression of not suiting the face--of having been placed there by accident. But the incongruous impression made by those large, dark eyes upon almost every one who saw the young man for the first time was extremely fleeting, and passed away as soon as Oswald began to talk--as soon as his look became animated.

His cousin Georges was at least a dozen years his elder, and nearly a head shorter than he. Many persons declared that he looked like a jockey; they were wrong. He looked like what he was, a prodigal son, very well-born. Spare in figure, his face smoothly shaven, except for a long sandy moustache, his hair quite gray, and brushed up from the temples after a vanished fashion, his features keen and mobile, his eyes round as a bird's, his carriage rather stooping and with motions characterized by a certain negligence, he produced the impression of a man who had seen a great deal of the world, and who now took a philosophic view of his life and of his position.

Oswald is the heir, Georges is the next to inherit.

Scarcely were the usual formal greetings over when Oswald made an attempt to join his pretty cousin Gabrielle, with the laudable purpose of helping her to pour out tea. His design was cruelly frustrated, however, by Count Truyn, who instantly engaged him in a brisk discussion of the latest anti-Catholic measures on the part of the Republic. Oswald sat beside his uncle restlessly drumming on the brim of his opera-hat, the image of politely-concealed youthful impatience, now and then adding an "abominable!" or a "disgusting," to the indignant expressions of the elder man, and all the while glancing towards Gabrielle. Certain personal matters interested him far more just now than the deplorable excesses of the French government. He had not read the article in the Temps to which his uncle alluded, he did not take the French Republic at all in earnest, he considered it in fact no Republic at all, but only a monarchy gone mad; French politics interested him from an ethnographical point of view only, all which he calmly confessed to his uncle, by whom he was scolded as "unpardonably indifferent," and "culpably blind." The elder man's conservative philippics grew more eager, and the younger one's courteous admissions more vague, until at last Zinka succeeded in releasing the latter by asking Gabrielle to sing something. Gabrielle, of course, declared that she was hoarse, but Oswald who was, by the way, about as much interested in her singing from a musical point of view as in the trumpet-solos of the emperor of Russia, smiled away her objections and rising, with a sigh of relief, went to open the grand piano.

No one seemed to have any idea of according a strict silence to the young girl's music, and whilst Gabrielle warbled in a sweet, but rather thin voice, some majestic air of Handel's, and Oswald leaning against the cover of the instrument looked down at her with ardent intentness, Georges, his hands upon his knees, his body inclined towards the Baroness Melkweyser who, still busied with her refreshments, was disposing of sandwich after sandwich, said: "You are wearing yourself out in the service of mankind. Have you allowed yourself one half-hour's repose to-day?--No, not one--as any one may see who looks at you. A propos, who was the Japanese woman dressed in yellow at whose side I saw you to-day sitting in a fainting condition in a landau--in front of Gouache's was it?--on the Boulevard de la Madeleine?"

"Adeline Capriani."

"Ah tiens! That was why I seemed to have seen her before."

"A very queer figure was she not?"

"She is not ugly," said Georges. "It is a pity that she dresses so ridiculously."

"Her dress costs her a fortune every year--the first artists in Paris design her gowns," Madame Zoë declared.

"Indeed----? Now I understand why she always looks as if she had been stolen from a bric-a-brac shop," said Georges. "Explain to me, however, why this wealthy young lady is still unmarried. Perhaps the Conte thinks another son-in-law too expensive an article ... Did you know that Larothière lost 300,000 francs again yesterday at baccarat at the Jockey Club?"

"That is of no consequence," Zoë said loftily. "Gaston loves his wife--it is all that Capriani requires of his sons-in-law."

"Sapperment!" Georges exclaimed, "that's the right kind of a father-in-law; what if you should negotiate a marriage, Baroness, between me and Mademoiselle Capriani?"

"Do not indulge in such sorry jests," Truyn interposed disapprovingly.

"I am in solemn earnest; the financial ground beneath my feet is very shaky at present, and having one's debts paid by such a good fellow as Ossi palls upon one in time. I am undecided whether to turn Hospitaller or to marry an heiress."

"Ah, if Oswald heard you!" Zinka said with her quiet smile.

"Ossi at this moment, if I am not greatly mistaken, is listening to the songs of angels in Heaven, and takes precious little heed of us ordinary mortals," replied Georges, glancing with a certain dreaminess in his eyes towards the youthful pair who had left the piano and were standing in the deep recess of an open balconied window.

"Happy youth," murmured Georges.

Yes, happy youth! They were standing there, he very pale, she blushing slightly, mute, confused, the sparkling eyes of each seeking, avoiding the other's. He has led her to the recess to show her the moon, to lay his heart at her feet, but he has forgotten the moon, and he has not yet dared to pour out his heart to her.

The fragrant breath of the spring night was wafted towards them, fanning their youthful faces caressingly.

All nature was thrilling beneath the first gentle May shower. The large white panicles of the elder in the little garden in front of the house gleamed brightly through the gray twilight. The small fountain murmured monotonously, its slender jet of water sparkling in the light from the drawing-room windows. They were dancing in the house opposite; like colourless phantoms the different couples glided across the lowered shades of the windows. The "Ecstasy" waltz played by a piano and a violin mingled its frivolous sobs and laughter with the modest song of the fountain and the whispers of the elder-bushes. All else was quiet in the Avenue-Labédoyère, but from the distance the restless roar of the huge city invaded the silence of night--mysterious, confused, as the demoniac restlessness of Hell may sometimes invade the divine peace of Heaven.

"Gabrielle!" Oswald began at last with hesitation and very gently, "I have come very often of late to the Avenue-Labédoyère. Can you guess why?"

"Why?" The blush on Gabrielle's cheek deepens. "Why?--since you were in Paris for three weeks without coming near your relatives you ought to make up for lost time," she murmured.

"True, Gabrielle--but--do you really not know for whose sake I have come so often, so very often?"

She was silent.

His breath came more quickly, the colour rose to his cheek. Surely he must have divined Gabrielle's innocent secret from the young girl's tell-tale shyness, but yet at this decisive moment the words died in his throat as they must for every genuine, honest lover who would fain ask the momentous question of her whom he loves.

"Gabrielle," he murmured hastily and somewhat indistinctly, "will you take the full heart I offer you--can you accept it, or...." he hesitated and looked inquiringly into her lovely face. "Ella, all my happiness lies in your hands!"

Her heart beat loudly, the lace ruffles on her bosom trembled, as she slowly lifted her eyes to his.--How handsome he was, how well the tender humility in his face became him! His happiness lies in her hands! Her eyes filled with tears. "I do not know ... I ... Oswald ... Ossi!" she murmured disconnectedly, and then she placed her slender hand in the strong one held out to her.

Truyn with his back to the window, noticed nothing, but the baroness who had been observing this romantic intermezzo through her eyeglass with cold-blooded curiosity, said drily to herself: "J'en suis pour mes frais;" then turning for the last time to Truyn, she said, "I have communicated to you Capriani's proposal."

"And you are at liberty to tell him how I received it," Truyn replied stiffly.

"J'arrangerai un peu," the baroness said as she rose, "do not disturb the young people, I will slip out on tiptoe. Adieu." And with a courteous glance around, she hurried away.

"Well, what do you think?" exclaimed Truyn, as he returned to the drawing-room, after escorting her to the hall. "What do you think, Georges?" and sitting down beside the young man he tapped him on the knee. "Capriani sends that goose Zoë in all seriousness to ask for my daughter's hand for his son. What do you say to that?"

"Audacious enough," said Georges shrugging his shoulders, "but what would you have--'tis a sign of the times!"

This dry way of judging of the matter did not please Truyn at all. "Ossi!" he called.

"What, uncle?" The young people advanced together into the room.

"I have an interesting piece of news for you. A secret agent of the Maison Foy has made a proposal to-day for Ella's hand for Capriani, jr! What do you say to that?"

"Ella's hand for the son of that railway Capriani!" exclaimed Oswald angrily. "Impossible! The secret agent deserves .... and he made an expressive motion with his hand. His indignation became him extremely well, and Truyn's glance rested with evident admiration upon the young fellow's athletic figure as he stood with head slightly thrown back, and eyes flashing scornfully.

"Unfortunately it was a lady--Zoë Melkweyser," the elder man explained.

"Then she deserves at least six months of Charenton," said Oswald, "'tis incredible!" and he clinched his hand. "Your daughter, uncle, and the son of the Conte--I suppose he is a Conte--or a Marchese perhaps--Capriani! You know that little orang-outang, Georges?"

"Of course, one meets him everywhere. He addressed me by my first name yesterday," Georges replied calmly. "Ah, my dear friends, you entirely misconceive this extraordinary proposal. For my part, I see in it no personal insult to the Countess Gabrielle, but simply a symptom of an approaching social earthquake. The triumph of the tradesman is manifest everywhere. Zola in his most prominent work has celebrated the apotheosis of the bag-man and the shop-girl; Chapu has designed the façade of the latest millinery establishment; Paris will yet see the Bourse hold its sessions in La Madeleine, and the Bon Marché will set up a branch of its trade in Notre Dame."

"Likely enough," said Truyn with a troubled sigh, "I am only surprised that Capriani has not tried to be President of the French Republic."

"He has not thought the position at present a favourable one for his speculations," said Georges, "but what is not, may be."

"Ah, I am proud of my Austria," said Truyn, suddenly becoming stiff and wooden of aspect. "Such adventurers have at least no position there."

"Do not be too proud of your Austria," rejoined Georges, "I heard something at the embassy to-day that will hardly please you. Id est, Capriani has bought Schneeburg and will be your nearest neighbour in Bohemia."

Truyn started to his feet. "Capriani .... Schneeburg .... impossible! How could Malzin bring himself to such a sacrifice!"

"It must have gone hard with the poor fellow, God rest his soul! The night after the contract had been signed he died of apoplexy."

"Good Heavens!" murmured Truyn, pacing restlessly to and fro. "Good Heavens!"

"And there is another interesting piece of news," Georges went on.

"Well?"

"Fritz--do you remember him?"

"Certainly. The only Malzin now left, a very amiable lad who unfortunately made an impossible marriage."

"Yes, he married an actress, and just at the time when every one else was tired of ...."

"Georges!" exclaimed Oswald frowning and glancing towards Gabrielle. He was evidently of the opinion that such things should not be mentioned in the presence of young girls.

"Hm--hm," muttered Georges, "and he has accepted the post of Capriani's private secretary."

"Frightful!" exclaimed Oswald.

"He must have become morally corrupt to some degree, before he could make up his mind to submit to such a humiliation," interposed Truyn indignantly.

"Poor devil!" said Oswald.

"What would you have?" the philosophic Georges remarked and hummed ironically the air of 'Garde la reine.' "Ce n'est pas toujours les mêmes qui ont l'assiette au beurre. I tell you it is all up with us."

All preserved a melancholy silence for a while, then Truyn favoured the party with a few grand political aphorisms, and Oswald at last said to himself perfectly calmly, and as if impromptu, "Gabrielle and Capriani's son!"

The melancholy mood vanished and they talked and laughed so that there was a sound as of merry bells through the silence of the night.

CHAPTER III.

Zoë Melkweyser was an Austrian and a distant relative of Truyn's. Very well-born, but in very narrow pecuniary circumstances, she had grown up on her widowed father's heavily-mortgaged estate, condemned through want of means to a continued residence there, restless as was the temperament with which nature had endowed her. As a school-girl she had no greater pleasure than imaginary journeys from place to place upon the map, and one day she confided to her governess, Mrs. Sidney, under the seal of secrecy, that she would consent to marry any man, even were he a negro, who would promise to indulge her restlessness and allow her to travel to her heart's content.

It was no negro, however, but a banker from Brussels, who finally fulfilled her requirements. She met him at a watering-place, whither she had gone under the chaperonage of a wealthy and compassionate relative. In spite of her thirst for travel she could hardly have made up her mind to marry an Austrian banker, but a Belgian Crœ sus was quite a different affair in her opinion.

All the objections and remonstrances of her aristocratic connections in Austria upon her return thither betrothed, she cut short with, "What would you have? Of course I never should have met him here, but he was received at court in Brussels."

And in fact Baron Alfred Melkweyser was not only received at court in Brussels, but what was still more extraordinary, by the Princess L----, being admitted to the most exclusive Belgian circles, 'among the people whom everyone knows.'

It would have been difficult to find any fault with him except for his brand-new patent of nobility, and Zoë never had any cause to repent her marriage. His manners were perfectly correct, he rode well, had a laudable passion for antiquities, ordered his clothes at Poole's, always used vous in talking with his wife, paid all her bills without even a wry face, patiently travelled with her all over the world, and at her desire removed with her to Paris.

After ten years of childless marriage he died suddenly, of his first and unfortunately unsuccessful attempt to drive four-in-hand. As this, his first ambitious folly, was also his last, society forbore to ridicule it, and even after his death he enjoyed the reputation of an 'homme parfaitement bien.'

His widow bewailed his loss sincerely, and purchased all her mourning of Cyprès at reduced prices. Bargains had always been a passion with her, and scarcely had her year of mourning passed, before, thanks to her expensive taste for cheap, useless articles, she had disposed of half the source of her income. Among other things she purchased at low prices various stocks which turned out badly. She owed her familiarity with financial affairs entirely to her speculative vein, and not at all, as her aristocratic relatives and country-folk erroneously imagined, to her deceased husband, who had, in fact, held himself persistently aloof from former financial acquaintances.

It was not acquisitiveness that spurred Zoë on to her various undertakings, but the restlessness of her temperament. She delighted in everything novel and fatiguing, whether it were a pilgrimage to Lourdes, a bargain day at the Bon Marché, or a first representation at the Français, to which, by persistent wire-pulling and constant appeals to one and another person of influence, she was able to obtain tickets of admission not only for herself but for all her most intimate friends. She had one means, however, far more entertaining than all others, of procuring the excitement needed by her temperament, and this was the introduction to 'the world,' of American or European financial magnates. She extorted for them invitations to the most distinguished routs, she designed the balls which these wealthy people were to give to dazzle Paris withal, and she expended an incredible amount of cunning and energy in inducing the aristocratic world to appear at these entertainments. Her tactics were those of genius; instead of contenting herself after the fashion of less skilful mortals with inviting the poorer and more modest members of Paris society, she bent all her efforts to securing the presence of some legitimist duchess at the ball, if only for an hour. She succeeded in doing this in most cases by placing at the duchess' disposal a large sum of money for charitable purposes. When she had gained over two or three of these fixed stars, the planets of Parisian society began to appear at these balls.

Planets, in their social relations, are notably much more fastidious than fixed stars, as is but natural; they are forced to reflect a light not their own.

The entire scheme was usually most successful; the balls were beautiful and everything went excellently well. Sometimes, indeed, not one of the assembled guests had the civility to invite the mistress of the mansion to dance, and many of those present affected to mistake the host for a footman, but none the less was everyone content and pleased when the ball was over. Zoë Melkweyser was glad that she had enjoyed so brilliant an opportunity of getting out of breath; the givers of the ball were pleased to read the long list of their distinguished guests in Figaro; and le monde rejoiced in having something to laugh at, and spent three days in ridiculing the extravagance of the Cotillon favours.

The latest and most brilliant of Zoë's protégés was Conte Capriani.

Who was he? What was he? 'A poisonous fungus that the sultry storm-laden atmosphere had bred upon heaven only knows what muck-heap.'

A clever statesman had made use of this phrase not long before to define the innate characteristics of this Crœ sus. The phrase had been laughingly caught up and repeated, and no one had troubled themselves further about Capriani's antecedents. In a smaller city they would soon have been investigated, but Paris never busies itself long with the solution of such commonplace mysteries; on the contrary it takes care not to pry into the past of an adventurer whom it finds of very great use. Thus the antecedents of this financial Jove remained, like those of most deities, shrouded in myth.

Among the many legends that had at first been circulated concerning him, was one that he had formerly been a lady's physician and that he had been most successful with his aristocratic patients.

Whether this were or were not true, certain it was that his air and manner suggested that adulatory, fawning servility which characterizes those physicians whose professional efforts are, for lack of other occupation, chiefly directed to soothing the nerves of hysteric women. His exterior was that of a man who has once been handsome, cidevant-beau, spoiled only by the piercing glance of his large black eyes, and the cynical droop of his loose under-lip. He carried his head well forward, as if listening, and around his mouth and eyes there were strange lines and wrinkles in the yellow skin which had of late grown flabby,--lines suggesting that some of the figures with which he played the despot had flown angrily into his face and embedded themselves there.

That he had begun life with nothing he himself was wont to declare, whenever he gave way to the fit of rage that seized him upon any offence offered to his vanity; but how he had gained his immense fortune he never told. He made profit out of every thing that afforded gain, most of all out of the credulity of indolent inexperienced avarice. His success as a 'bear' was famous, and notorious; it sometimes seemed as if ill-luck existed only for his advantage, and it was well known that he had emerged from great financial crises which ruined thousands, not only unharmed, but with an increase of wealth.

There were various whispers afloat concerning his speculations, but no one had been able to attach any direct blame to him. Once only, in connection with his construction of a Spanish railway he had laid himself open to a couple of disgraceful charges. The times were unpropitious; the public, exasperated by various huge swindles, demanded a victim; but whilst several lesser individuals, were brought to trial and subjected to a public investigation, all legal proceedings against Capriani were suddenly quashed. Why?.... No one knew or at least no one told aloud what was known.

He was a 'personnage tare,' but the stain upon his name was of so peculiar a nature that prudence required of many well-known and eminent men that they should not see it. Poor devils who stood outside the demoniac spell of his financial magic art called him an unprincipled swindler: people who had penetrated within the conjuror's circle called him a financial genius, flattered him almost servilely in their longing to share in his colossal enterprises, and if they did so procured for him in return a slight social recognition. And it was curious to observe how much at heart the magnate had this same social recognition, how he sued for the favour of every lofty dignitary, of every capital letter in the social alphabet. He persisted unweariedly in hurling his golden bomb-shells into the stronghold of Parisian society, and at last the fortress capitulated. He was received, as an enemy to be sure, with closed shutters and in silence, but he was received everywhere, at all the embassies, throughout the entire official representative world, and even in some drawing-rooms of the Faubourg. Everywhere he met those who, while he smiled at them in the most friendly way, looked over his shoulder without seeing him, but this he endured serenely. The hour for revenge will come, he said to himself, and almost always it did come!

Thanks to an ostentatious benevolence backed by millions, he had of late contrived to improve perceptibly his social standing; at his last ball, several crowned heads had been present. Zoë was right; he was undoubtedly one of the most influential financiers in Europe; she might almost have described him as one of the most influential men.

In Paris he was one of the celebrities that are shown to strangers. When he walked past, or rather drove past, for he was physically indolent and avoided all bodily exertion, he was pointed out as Monsieur Grévy or Mdlle. Bernhardt is pointed out. He occupied a vast hotel that he had built after the model of the castle of Chenonceau, but two stories higher, in the neighbourhood of the Park Monceau; in a quarter of an hour after leaving the Avenue Labédoyère the Baroness Zoë's fiacre drew up before this mimicry of vanished feudalism erected by a modern Crœ sus.

"Gabrielle's betrothal will make everything smooth," she said to herself. "I am glad to be well rid of the affair!"

A Maître d'Hôtel, who, it was said, had formerly been chamberlain to the Duc de Morny, and one of whose duties it was to instruct his present master in the laws of aristocratic etiquette, conducted the baroness with dignified solemnity to the 'small drawing-room' where the Contessa Capriani was wont to receive on quiet evenings.

The 'small drawing-room' was a very large, and very brilliantly-furnished apartment, which, in spite of landscapes by Corot, in spite of gold-woven Japanese hangings, old inlaid cabinets and a thousand articles of value, produced a dreary in-harmonious impression. It was evident that nothing here was devised for the pleasure and comfort of the inmates of the house, but that everything was arranged with a view of impressing visitors. It almost seemed as if millions run mad had tossed all these splendours together aimlessly, insanely shouting, "something more costly, something more costly still!"

Here sat the Contessa busied with some fancy work. She appeared well-bred, but shy, and embarrassed by her wealth, as she advanced a few steps to welcome the baroness, made a few conventional remarks, and then begged with a sigh to be excused for going on with her work, which work consisted in cutting all sorts of flowers and birds out of a piece of cretonne in order to sew them on a piece of satin. She devoted several hours a day to this occupation, and since her own rooms, as well as those of her acquaintances, were far too splendidly furnished to have any place in them for this sort of work, the result of her diligence was bestowed every year upon some charity-bazaar.

Zoë Melkweyser thought the Contessa unusually depressed. Excited voices were heard in the next room, and every time that there was a particularly loud explosion the mistress of the mansion winced.

"Can the 300,000 francs which the Duke of Larothière lost last night be a bitter pill for even King Midas?" Zoë asked herself.

This supposition proved, however to be erroneous. Madame Capriani moved her chair rather nearer to Zoë, and whispered, "My husband is terribly agitated,--my poor son--that article in Figaro,--you saw it of course ...."

"I? I have not seen Figaro to-day," Zoë reassured her. It was true, she had not seen Figaro but she had heard of the article to which the countess alluded; the excitement in the casa Capriani was quite intelligible to her now. No, Capriani never even pulled a wry face at the sums lost at play by his son-in-law; he enjoyed smiling away such losses; everything was allowable in the duke. For the comparatively petty extravagances of his own son he had much less forbearance, in fact he showed very little tenderness for this scion of his, whose name was Arthur, and who was far from satisfactory to his father. The Croesus could forgive his son's noble scorn of everything relating to business, for positively refusing to have a desk in his father's counting-room and for devoting his entire existence to sport,--but it drove him frantic to have Arthur held up to ridicule by the sporting world.

Hitherto Arthur's grandest achievements in the sporting world had culminated in a couple of broken collar-bones and a quantity of lost wagers,--today their number had been increased by a trifling fiasco.

A very trifling fiasco, but of a highly delicate nature. Two Austrians, an attaché and one of his friends at present in Paris, both belonging to extremely aristocratic families, had lately out of wild caprice, and amid much laughter, undertaken to run a foot-race backwards.

Several French journals had taken immediate occasion to write articles on this eccentric wager, describing backward races as a traditional and very favourite sport among the youthful aristocrats of Austria. These journalistic rhapsodies had incited Arthur Capriani to arrange a similar race with brilliant accessories, music, torchlight, and a large assemblage of young dandies, and ladies of every description. He lost the race, got a severe contusion on his head, and the next day appeared the article in Figaro which so exasperated the Conte.

"If you were only capable of something in the world beside making yourself ridiculous!" Zoë distinctly heard the father's excited voice say, "but you can do nothing else, nothing! And to think of my toiling for you,--making money for you!"

"Mon Dieu! you make money because you delight in nothing else," retorted young Capriani.

"And for you--for you, I am contemplating one of the most brilliant matches in Austria," the Conte fairly shouted, "'tis ridiculous!"

"I fancy that Count Truyn agrees with you there," was Arthur's repartee.

"Ah, you would, would you?--you dare to sneer at your father?" Capriani burst forth, after the illogical fashion of angry men, "the father to whom you owe everything! I should like to see you begin life as I did, bare-footed, with only one gulden in your pocket!"

"What's the use of these recriminations?" drawled the son, "your antecedents mortify me enough without them, and ...."

There was a incoherent cry, a savage word ....!

The Contessa, very pale, put down her scissors; she trembled violently.

"I think it would be better to separate them," Zoë remarked very calmly.

"I will try to," gasped Madame Capriani, and opening the door into the next room, she called, "Mon-ami, the Baroness Melkweyser is here--I believe she brings you some news ...."

"Il s'agit de votre fameuse affaire, mon cher comte," Zoë called coaxingly.

Her words produced a magical effect; both men made their appearance, the father with a honeyed smile, the son, a short thick-set fellow with handsome features but a rude ill-tempered air, frowning and sullen.

"Bon soir baronne."

"Bon soir."

"Eh bien?" and settling himself in an arm-chair, his legs outstretched, and toying with his double eyeglass in the triumphant attitude with which he was wont to contemplate the favourable development of some particularly clever business transaction, Capriani began, "So you have at last found a favourable opportunity."

"No,--no, not at all!" said Zoë, "but I thought best not to leave you in uncertainty any longer, and so I came to you this evening."

"You know I gave you no authority to make a direct proposal," said the Conte.

"How can you suppose me capable of such want of tact!" Zoë rejoined hypocritically, "unfortunately I have not been able even to find out how the land lies. If you had commissioned me a little sooner--just a little sooner,--but there is nothing to be done now, for Gabrielle Truyn is already betrothed!"

"Nom d'un chien!" muttered Arthur; he had been no less impressed by Gabrielle's beauty than by her lofty descent--"nom d'un chien!"

"Indeed, already betrothed," his father said coldly, slowly putting his eyeglass upon his nose and scanning the baroness mistrustfully as he asked, "betrothed to whom?"

"To her cousin, Oswald Lodrin."

"To Oswald Lodrin," he repeated quickly. "You cannot, indeed, enter the lists against him, my poor Arthur!"

"Perhaps not as far as arrogance is concerned," growled the Vicomte, "he is the haughtiest human being I ever came across."

"That may be, but--" the Conte smiled oddly, "he is also one of the handsomest and most distinguished of Austrians, and he is renowned as such."

Whilst Arthur continued to mutter unintelligibly, but in evident ill-humor, Capriani senior left his arm-chair and taking a low seat beside Zoë, said, "To-morrow the X---- railway stock is to be issued. The shares will be in great demand; shall I save you a couple of hundred?"

CHAPTER IV.

The fragrance of the elder blossoms floated sweet and strong upon the air in the dim warm stillness of the Avenue Labédoyère. The poetry that breathes in the odour of flowers no words can reproduce, music alone can sometimes translate it; it ascended from the full white panicles in the little garden before the Hôtel Truyn and breathed through the open window into Gabrielle's chamber like an exultant yearning, like a song filled with love's delicious pain.

Zinka sat on the edge of the little white bed where the young girl was lying, her golden hair rippling about her brow and temples, while upon her pale face lay the melancholy of illimitable joy; her eyes were moist.

"And you are not surprised, Zini ... not at all?" she whispered.

"No, my child," replied Zinka tenderly, "not in the least; I knew you were destined for each other from the first moment that I saw you together."

"Ah," Gabrielle sighed, "I cannot comprehend it yet. It all seems to me like a delicious dream from which I must waken, but even if I must, even if the dear God takes from me all that He has given me, I shall thank Him on my knees as long as I live for this one lovely dream."

"Calm yourself, my darling," Zinka whispered, lovingly stroking the young girl's cheeks, "how your cheeks burn!" And she poured a few drops of essence of orange flowers into a glass of water, "drink this, you little enthusiast."

"It will do no good, dear little mother," said Gabrielle, obediently lifting the composing draught to her burning lips. "Ah, you cannot imagine how I feel, it seems as if--as if my heart would break with happiness!"

Zinka kissed her, made the sign of the cross upon her forehead, drew the coverlet over her shoulders, once more admonished her to be calm, and left her.

Thunder rumbled without; Zinka started and as a second clap resounded she turned back. "Are you afraid of the storm, Ella, shall I stay with you?" she asked gently.

"Ah no, dear little mother," Gabrielle replied in the intoxication of her happiness, "I hardly hear the thunder."

And Zinka departed. "I do not know why I cannot rejoice in this as I ought," she said to herself, "it seems to me as if we had forgotten to invite some one of the twelve fairies to this betrothal."

And whilst the thunder crashed above the Champs Elysées she suddenly recalled an old fairy story that a fever-stricken peasant from the Trastevere had once told her in Rome.

It was a gloomy story, one of those legends in which the popular imagination, boldly overleaping all chronological and historical obstacles, bestows upon Pagan gods the wings of Christian angels, and arms God the Father with the lightnings of angry Jove. It ran somewhat thus:

"There was once a beautiful maiden who was good as an angel, so good that it gave her unutterable pain to see any one sad and not to be able to help; and once when she had cried herself to sleep over the woes of mankind she had a wonderful vision. A dark form with a veiled face approached her and said, 'If you have the courage to cut your heart out of your breast and plant it deep in the earth, there will spring from it a flower so glorious, so wonderful, that whoever inhales its fragrance will feel a bliss so intense that he would gladly purchase it with all the torture of our mortal existence.'

"And the maiden cut her heart out of her breast and planted it deep in the brown earth, and watered it with her tears, and there sprang from it a magically-beautiful flower, with luxuriant green leaves, and large white blossoms with blood-red calyxes, and whoever inhaled the breath of these blossoms felt an intoxicating delight course through his veins, so that in his wild ecstasy he forgot all earthly care and trouble. The flowers unfolded to more and more enchanting loveliness, and through the thick foliage sighed the sweetest music.

"Now when the angels in Heaven heard of this strange plant they entreated the Almighty Father to allow them to go get it and to plant it in Paradise.

"The Lord granted their request. Then they fluttered down from Heaven, but when they approached the wondrous plant a voice spoke from it, saying, 'Let me alone, I blossom for the consolation of the earth, I could not live in Paradise; the soil in which I flourish must be watered with heart's blood and tears!'

"But the angels did not heed these words, and, beguiled by the delicious fragrance, they tried to tear away the roots from the lap of earth; their efforts were vain, they had to return with their purpose unfulfilled.

"When mankind saw this it exulted in its blissful possession. Happy mortals laughed at the angels' futile envy. Then the angels prostrated themselves anew at the feet of the Almighty, and implored Him to revenge them upon the blasphemers. And the Almighty gave ear to their prayer; He hurled a thunderbolt at the plant, and it was swept from off the face of the earth.

"But its roots still slumber underground, and sometimes when in mild spring nights a mysterious fragrance steals upon the air, a fragrance wafted from no visible blossom, these roots are stirring to life, and green leaves shoot upward into the spring. But the sweet perfume still moves the angels to anger, and it scarcely rises aloft before the thunder rolls over the earth and the lightning blasts the green leaves. The flower will never blossom again."

CHAPTER V.

Oswald and his cousin Georges were sitting at breakfast in their pleasant room in the Hotel Bristol by a window that looked out upon the Place Vendôme, and down the brilliant Rue de la Paix, the perspective of which was lost in a hurly-burly of omnibuses, orange carts, flower wagons, advertising vehicles painted fiery red, fiacres, sun-illumined dust, and human beings rushing madly hither and thither. Whilst Georges was drinking his tea in sober comfort with a brief remark as to the incomparable excellence of the Paris butter, Oswald, who although endowed by nature with an excellent appetite had paid but scant attention to his meals of late, recounted for the tenth time to his cousin the extraordinary combination of circumstances which had brought together Gabrielle and himself. He was a victim of the lovers' delusion that sees in the most ordinary occurrences the finger of the Deity, and that regards their happiness as a special marvel wrought by Providence for their benefit.

It was, so Oswald narrated, in April, on the second day of the Auteuil races, the first faint tinge of green was perceptible on the landscape. He was on horseback, riding a magnificent Arabian steed which one of his friends had lent him, and which he was handling with the excessive care which an Austrian always bestows upon a horse that is not his own. Suddenly he saw walking across the race-course a young lady in a dark green dress; a ray of sunlight that turned her hair to gold attracted his attention to her. She walked quickly past with an elderly gentleman and Oswald turned to look after her. His horse was a little restless, his rider's spurs were rather too sharp; with the sudden movement he scratched the animal's silken skin, and instantly exclaimed, "Ah, pardon!" a piece of courtesy for which his companions ridiculed him loudly. In the meantime the young lady with the gray-haired gentleman had vanished.

"Who is that exquisitely beautiful girl?" he asked, and Wips Siegburg, secretary of the Austrian Legation, replied laughing, "Do you not know her, she is your cousin!"

"Gabrielle Truyn!" exclaimed Oswald; and Siegburg said sagely, "this comes of enjoying one's self too busily in Paris, and consequently finding no time to visit one's nearest relatives."

Oswald peered in every direction but he could not discover her again. After the race, under the leafless trees of the Champs Elysées rolled crowds of carriages, victorias, all sorts of coaches, four-in-hands, lumbering roomy omnibuses,--all veiled in the whirling, sunlit dust as in golden gauze, while everywhere, alike in the omnibuses and in the more elegant vehicles, reigned a uniform air of dull fatigue.

Paris had lost another battle with ennui.

In the motley throng Oswald was almost forced to walk his horse, pondering as he went upon the best way of excusing his discourtesy to his uncle. He had now been four entire weeks in Paris, and had not yet presented himself in the Avenue Labédoyère. Fortunately he had gone so little into society that he had not yet met the Truyns; Paris is so huge, perhaps they had not yet heard that he was there. Yes, Paris is huge, but 'society' everywhere is small. No, he could hardly venture to appear at his uncle's yet.

He was growing quite melancholy over these reflections, when he suddenly observed that his horse had coolly poked his nose over the hood, which had been thrown back, of a low carriage in front, and was nibbling at a bouquet of white roses that he found there. Oswald shortened his bridle, and just then a lady sitting in the carriage turned round; it was Gabrielle Truyn. With no attempt to conceal her displeasure she observed what had been done, and when Oswald, hat in hand, humbly stammered his excuses, she bestowed upon him the haughty stare which an insolent intruder would have merited, and turned away. She knew perfectly well who he was, as he afterwards learned, and that he had been four weeks in Paris. The gentleman beside her now turned round, his eyes met Oswald's; he smiled, and said with good-humoured sarcasm ... "Ossi!--what an unexpected pleasure!"

"Uncle--I--I have long been intending to pay you my respects...." Oswald stammered.

"Apparently your resolutions require time to ripen," said Truyn drily.

"Ah uncle!--I--may I come to see you now?"

"You do us too much honour," said Truyn provokingly, "we will kill the fatted calf and celebrate the Prodigal's return." Then taking pity upon his nephew's embarrassment he added. "Don't be afraid, we shall not turn you out of doors, we have some consideration for young gentlemen who are in Paris for the first time; we know that they have other things to do besides looking up tiresome relatives, what say you, Ella?"

"My cousin has forgotten me," the young man murmured, "have the kindness to present me to her."

"It is your cousin, Oswald Lodrin, an old playmate of yours."

At her father's words Gabrielle merely turned her exquisite profile towards her cousin and acknowledged his low bow by a slight inclination of her head. Then she stretched out her hand for her bouquet, murmuring, "My poor roses! they are entirely ruined." And she suddenly tossed them away into the road. There was an opening in the blockade of carriages before them; Gabrielle's golden hair gleamed before Oswald's eyes for a flash, then all around grew gray; the twilight had absorbed the last glimmer of sunshine.

That same evening Oswald ordered at a large flower shop, on the Madeleine Boulevard, the most exquisite bouquet of gardenias, orchids and white roses that Paris could produce and sent it to his cousin to replace her ruined roses.

All this he retailed. His first visit, too, in the Avenue Labédoyère, the visit when he did not find Truyn at home, and when Gabrielle did not make her appearance, but Zinka, whom he had not known before, received him. There had been much discussion in Austria over this second marriage of his uncle, and Oswald had brought to Paris a violent antipathy to Zinka. But it soon vanished, or rather was transformed into a very affectionate esteem.

And then the first little dinner, a very little dinner (just to make them acquainted, Truyn said) strictly en famille--no strangers, only Oswald and Siegburg. The brightly-lit table with its flowers, glass, and sparkling silver, in the middle of the dim brown dining-room, the delicate fair heads of the two ladies in their light dresses standing out so charmingly against the background of the old leather hangings, Truyn's paternal cordiality, and Zinka's kindly raillery,--he thought he had never had so delightful a dinner.

Gabrielle, to be sure, held herself rather aloof. She evidently resented his tardy appearance in the Avenue Labédoyère; she hardly noticed his beautiful flowers. She talked exclusively to Siegburg who was odiously entertaining, and who glanced across the table now and then, his eyes sparkling with merry malice, at Oswald. Then as they were serving the asparagus, he took it into his head to ask Gabrielle, "Do you know who is the most courteous man in Paris, Countess Gabrielle?"

"No, how should I?"

"Your charming cousin there," rejoined the young diplomat.

"Indeed!" Gabrielle said with incredulous emphasis, bending her head a little on one side as is the fashion with pretty women when they undertake the inconvenient task of eating asparagus.

"Yes, verily, he says 'pardon' even to his horse, when he scratches it with his spurs."

"Ah! Apparently he lavishes all his courtesy upon horses," Gabrielle said pointedly.

"In the case to which I allude, he really did owe some consideration to his horse, for the poor animal could not possibly know why he was made to feel the spur. The fact was that at the races the other day Lodrin saw a lady the sight of whom so electrified him that he turned positively all round on his horse, and in doing so scratched the poor beast with his spur."

"Ah, and who, if one may ask, was this remarkable lady?" asked Gabrielle.

"Ella, since when have you become conscience keeper for young gentlemen?" asked Truyn.

She blushed to the roots of her hair, but Oswald said with perfect composure, looking her directly in the face: "Certainly--it was Countess Gabrielle Truyn."

She bit her lip angrily.

"It serves you right," said Truyn smiling, "why do you ask about matters that do not concern you? The jest, however, is a little stale, Ossi."'

"I should not venture to jest; I simply told the truth," rejoined Oswald. In view of the young girl's evident agitation he had regained entire calm.

"One is not always justified in telling the truth," Gabrielle observed with the pettish frankness in which even the best-bred young ladies will indulge, when irritated by the accelerated beating of their hearts.

"Indeed? Not even in reply to a question?" Oswald said very quietly, and Truyn frowned after the fashion of affectionate papas, whose daughters' behaviour does not exactly gratify their paternal ambition. Zinka interrupted the fencing of the young people by an inquiry as to the new vaudeville which Gabrielle wished to see, but of which Zinka was not quite sure she should approve.

Oswald took no further notice of Gabrielle that evening, but devoted himself to Zinka. He sat beside her for nearly an hour, and enjoyed it extremely; she had a charming way of listening, assenting to his observations by a silent smile, and inciting him to all kinds of small confidences, without asking any direct questions.

When he afterwards reflected upon what had been the interesting subject of their conversation, he discovered that she had led him to speak only of himself, that he had told her everything about his life that a young man can tell to a young woman whom he has seen but twice.

She listened attentively, and when he took his leave she had grown almost cordial.

"Now that you have broken the ice, I hope we shall see you frequently. A propos, to-morrrow is our night at the opera; if you have nothing more agreeable in prospect and have not heard 'La Juive' too often...."

And then the charming, uncertain, hoping, exulting, despairing time that ensued! Gabrielle's pique slowly vanished; then without any reasonable cause returned; her behaviour towards her cousin vacillated strangely between naive cordiality and proud reserve; some days she seemed to misconstrue everything that was said, and then all at once a single cordial word would mollify her.

And the dances, the cotillon at the Countess Crecy's ball in the pretty little Hôtel, Rue St. Dominique,--the cotillon in which all had paid homage to Gabrielle as to a young queen, and in which when, of all the favours that she had to bestow only one remained, she suddenly became confused, looking from the favour to her cousin, and seeming more and more undecided until at last he advanced a step towards her and whispered, "Well, Gabrielle, am I to have the Golden Fleece or not?"

That was two days before the betrothal. To the day of his death he should wear that favour and no other on his heart. It should be buried with him!

Although not given to writing much he had kept a diary in Paris. Long since he had torn out the first pages; its contents now extended exactly from the first meeting to the first kiss. After his marriage the book was to be sealed up, to be given to his eldest son upon his twenty-first birthday.

Whilst Oswald, borne upon a lover's wings that knew no boundary line between heaven and earth, between the future and the past, at one time eulogized his betrothed, and at another made arrangements for his own burial, and his eldest son's twenty-first birthday, Georges, who had gradually finished his breakfast, leaned back in his chair watching the fantastic wreaths of smoke ascending from the bowl of his tschibouk. When at last Oswald paused and fell into a reverie he took occasion to utter the following profundity. "Living is very dear in Paris!" Twice was he obliged to repeat this brilliant aphorism, before Oswald seemed to hear it. Then glancing at his cousin reproachfully, the young fellow put his hand in his pocket, "would you like the key, Georges?" he said offering it to him.

"No," replied Georges, taking Oswald's hand, key and all in his own, and pressing it down upon the table. "No, my dear fellow, many thanks. Do you remember what Montaigne says about le désir qui s'accroist par la malaysance."

"Montaigne?--I am not very intimate with the old gentleman," Oswald replied with a laugh, "how came you pray to make his acquaintance?"

"Why you see, Oswald, there have been times when my means were not sufficient to provide me with amusements befitting my station in life, and I was obliged to have recourse, faute de mieux, to reading. But to recur to plaisirs de la malaysance, Montaigne proves as clearly as that two and two make four that if there were no locks there would be no thieves! Now,--hm--one thing is certain; since your strong box has been open to me I no longer have the smallest desire to possess myself of its contents. Do you know, Ossi, that I have grown very fond of you in these few weeks? Do not overturn the pepper cruet," he admonished his cousin, who suddenly extended his hand to him with somewhat awkward shyness. "Yes, very fond, you have effected a radical change in me; I should really like to go back with you to Bohemia, perhaps you could find me something to do there. Will you take me with you to Bohemia?"

"With the greatest pleasure, Georges."

"Reflect a little. What would your mother say to your introducing an unbidden guest into her household?"

"My dear Georges, my mother, if I were to take home Karl Marx--or--" he did not conclude for at that moment his servant brought in a small salver upon which lay his newspapers and letters.

CHAPTER VI.

A couple of cards of invitation were after a fleeting examination stuck into the frame of the mirror, then came two Austrian newspapers, then three letters from Austria; one addressed in a firm, bold hand he opened instantly with a smile of pleasure and the exclamation "from my mother! at last! I am very curious to know what she says to my betrothal--I began to be anxious--she has taken so long to write."

But the light in his eyes faded, he frowned, angrily crushed the letter together, and propping his elbows on the table leaned his head upon his hands. "I could not have thought this possible," he murmured.

"Is not your mother satisfied?" Georges asked.

"Satisfied--?" growled Oswald, "satisfied--? she couldn't be dissatisfied if she tried ever so hard, but she does not rejoice with me. There, read that. 'Dear child, I agree to everything that will make you happy, and pray for every blessing upon yourself and your betrothed, whom, moreover, I remember as a charming little girl ....'"

"Well, what more can you ask?" said Georges, elevating his eyebrows.

"What more can I ask?" Oswald very nearly shouted, "what more can I ask? why, I am not used to having such conventional phrases served up to me by my mother!"

"Do you and your mother live upon perfectly good terms with each other?" asked Georges, mechanically brushing away a few crumbs on the table-cloth, and without looking at his cousin.

Oswald opened his eyes wide. "My mother and I? Why, yes, what can you be thinking of?"

Georges made no reply, he remembered perfectly well that years previously, before he had left home the Countess Lodrin had been anything but tender to her charming little son, nay, that she had been the downright fine-lady mother who figures in romances, but who fortunately is found but seldom in real life.

He thought it unnecessary, however, to remind his cousin of this.

In the meanwhile Oswald had somewhat cooled down. "My poor unreasonable mother!" he said half-aloud to himself, "it is so hard for her to give me up, in all her life she has had me only. Well, I shall soon bring her round. Ah, Georges, Georges, it seems but a poor arrangement in this life that we must so often take from one person to give to another! I only hope that my mother's letter to my betrothed is more cordial. Ah, here are two more epistles," and in no cheerful mood he opened one after the other of the two very business-like envelopes, read their contents, compared them with each other, threw both upon the table and, quite pale, with very red lips and flashing eyes, began to pace to and fro, from time to time passing his hand angrily across his forehead. "Everything disagreeable is sure to happen all at once!" he exclaimed.

Georges knowing his cousin's impetuousity watched his excitement with smiling composure. "Is Vesuvius again in a state of eruption," he said kindly, "or what is the matter, man alive?"

"Siegl is an ass!"

"Ah?--and your man of business besides?"

"Yes."

"Then this present affair is a matter of business?"

"No!" Oswald said gloomily, "an affair of honour. The matter is that I am forced to break my word--voilà tont! But I cannot understand Siegl, he ought to know ...." Suddenly he went to his secretary, opened it, rummaged nervously among a chaos of letters, at last finding a closely-written sheet, which he read through carefully, then grew very quiet, and seating himself opposite Georges at the uncleared breakfast-table, said "I am wrong, it is my fault."

"Pray explain yourself," said Georges, "my counsel, and my experience are at your service."

"The matter is simple enough. Before I came away from home I gave Siegl a power of attorney to conclude an unfinished sale, the sale of a couple of insignificant building lots in W----. In practical business matters I can thoroughly rely upon him. Well, the other day I had this letter from him asking whether I would agree to the winding up of the affair under certain conditions, and at the end of the letter he asked me in this case to telegraph him. His handwriting is execrable and his style most tedious,--and--and I hurried off to the Avenue Labédoyère. I was going to ride in the Bois with Gabrielle,--in short I skimmed over the letter, never noticing that he asked about another far more important sale, and telegraphed, 'I agree to everything; do as you think best.'"

"Eh bien!"

Oswald cleared his throat. "You remember Dr. Schmitt? He was our family physician, a true man if ever there was one, my father valued him highly. Well, he leased an estate from us, Kanitz, it lies in one corner of the Schneeburg grounds; after the old man's death his son held the lease, he is a very good fellow, we served together in the same regiment in our volunteer year. He married, and set great store by the lease, which would run out in three years. Before his marriage he came to me to know whether he might depend upon an extension of the lease; of course I promised it to him, thereby relieving him of immense anxiety. And now Siegl has sold the property at a high price to Capriani, and is very proud of the transaction, and it is all because of my thoughtlessness, because I thought it too tedious to read through his roundabout epistle and .... and young Schmitt, poor devil, is quite beside himself, and writes me this letter! I cannot understand Siegl, he might have asked me again, he knows me perfectly well, he ought to have known that I could never have contemplated anything of the kind ....! But it's just the way with all my people! If they can make a few gulden for me, no matter how, they pride themselves upon it hugely; no one seems to understand that I care precious little for the augmentation of my income; what I want is, to alleviate as far as lies in my power the existence of as many men as possible!"

"How old are you, Ossi?" Georges asked with an oddly-scrutinizing glance at his cousin.

"Twenty-six. What makes you ask?"

"Your transcendental views of life, my child. Men and ants are born with wings, but both rub them off in the struggle for existence,--men usually do so before they are twenty-four."

"That goal is passed," rejoined Oswald, "and the winged ants do not lose their wings, they only die young," and he became again absorbed in study of the two letters. "I cannot blame Siegl this time, try as hard as I can, it is my fault; 'tis enough to drive one mad!"

"I can understand how it goes against the grain, but--well, you must indemnify Schmitt with another property."

"That of course, but it does not help the matter," Oswald grumbled, "he has a special love for Kanitz--he was born there, his parents are buried there in a pretty little churchyard on the edge of the woods by the Holtitzer brook. He takes care of their graves himself--they are perfect beds of flowers. And his wife!--I paid her a visit last Autumn,--she is a dear little shy thing, and she looked at me out of her large eyes as if I were Omnipotence itself. There is such an old-fashioned loyalty, so poetic a content about those people; upon whom shall we depend if we heedlessly destroy the devotion of such as they? Schmitt must keep Kanitz, even although I buy it back at double the price paid for it!"

"My dear fellow you can do nothing with money where Capriani is concerned," Georges observed calmly, "but I am convinced that he is very desirous of standing well with all of you. If you make a personal request of him he certainly will not object to annul his purchase. If the matter is really important to you go and call upon Capriani, and...."

Oswald tossed his head angrily. "What? ask me to have any personal intercourse with that man--no--in an extreme case indeed----but there must be some legal way out of the difficulty, it is a matter for our agents--Ça! A quarter of twelve and I breakfast at Truyn's."

"You must make haste. Can I do anything for you?"

Oswald went to the writing-table and in large bold characters wrote a couple of lines on a sheet of paper. "Pray see that this telegraph to Schmitt goes off immediately, and then one thing more--if it does not bore you too much--please leave a card for me at the places on this list. Do not take any trouble, but if you should be passing.... Good-bye old fellow--remember we are to go home together."

"Hotspur!" murmured Georges as the door closed after his cousin. "Well, after all, I do not grudge him his position; he becomes it well."

CHAPTER VII.

If Oswald Lodrin might be regarded as the chivalric embodiment of the old-time 'noblesse oblige,' his cousin Georges was on the contrary the personification of the modern axiom 'noblesse permet.'

He had made use of the credit of the Lodrins, the accumulation of centuries, to screen his maddest pranks. True, he had never overdrawn this credit, he had never by any of his numberless eccentricities raised any barrier between himself and his equals in rank. He had grown to manhood discontentedly convinced that Count Hugo Lodrin, his father's elder brother, had done him great wrong, and this wrong was his marriage late in life with the beautiful Princess Wjera Zinsenburg.

Georges was barely eight years old at the time, but he remembered as long as he lived how angrily his father, after a life of careless extravagance led in the certainty of inheriting the Lodrin estates, had received the announcement of the betrothal, and how hardly he had spoken of Wjera Zinsenburg.

The boy grew up, his heart filled with a hatred none the less vehement because it was childish, first for his aunt, and afterward for his cousin.

His hatred for his aunt grew with his growth, but as for his hatred for his cousin?... It was difficult to cherish resentment against his loving, helpless little cousin with his big black eyes and pretty rosy mouth. And in the summer holidays, which he spent every year in Tornow with his father, he struck up a friendship with the little fellow.

It was a lasting friendship. One day after his father's death when he had for several years been an officer of hussars, and always in pecuniary difficulties, Georges received a letter, which upon very slanting lines evidently ruled in pencil by Ossi, himself, and in very sprawling clumsy characters, ran thus:

"Dear Georges,

"Papa says you need money, I don't need any, so I send you my pocket money, and when I'm big you shall have more. The donkeys are given away. Papa got angry with Jack because he bit me. Now, for a punishment, he has to carry sand for the gardeners. I have a pair of ponies now; they are very pretty and I ride every day. I can ride quite well and I am not afraid, but I stroke Jack whenever I see him, and I think he is ashamed of himself.

"Your Ossi."

Yes, he needed money--a great deal of money; his father had left him next to nothing, and the small allowance which his uncle made him, always seasoning it with good advice, did not nearly suffice him.

His uncle paid his debts upon condition that he should exchange from the hussars into the dragoons, then held in rather high estimation as heavy cavalry. Georges needed money quite as much as a dragoon, however, as when a hussar. Then came feminine influences--a quarrel with his colonel--a duel. He resigned his commission with honour and to the regret of the entire staff. Once more, and, as he was solemnly informed, for the last time, his uncle paid his debts, and wishing to have no further concern in his nephew's money matters he also paid out a handsome sum as a release from all further demands.

Georges manifested his repentance after this settlement by an immediate excursion to Paris with a pert little French concert-saloon singer. This was the finishing stroke in the eyes of his strictly moral, nay, even bigotted uncle. From that time onward the young man's letters to the old count were returned to him unopened. Georges vanished from the scene. The rumour ran that after he had tried his luck and failed in the California gold diggings, he had been a rider in a circus; there was also a report that he had served mahogany-coloured Spaniards and jet-black negroes as waiter at Rio Janeiro, that he had been an omnibus driver in New York--this last fact was vouched for. Still, he contrived to impress the stamp of spontaneous eccentricity upon every one of the expedients to which he resorted in his pecuniary embarrassments.

One day after Oswald had attained his majority he received a letter in which his cousin, after appealing to the old boyish friendship, described his present condition. Oswald, who was kindheartedness itself, and, moreover, enthusiastically eager to discharge his duties as head of the family, did not delay an hour in arranging his cousin's affairs and in settling upon him an income suitable to his rank.

Thus Georges returned to his old sphere of life and to his former habits, smiling calmly, but testifying no special delight, and not the slightest surprise at the change in his circumstances. The honest friendship which he felt for the cousin whom as a child he had petted, quite destroyed his old grudge against his fate.

CHAPTER VIII.

Picture a sleepy little market-town lying, at a respectful distance, near a very large castle, where the clock in the tower has not gone for twenty years; a ruggedly uneven market-place, thickly paved with sharp stones and no sidewalk, queer old-fashioned houses with high-gabled roofs and small windows, and here and there a faded-out image of the Virgin above an arched gateway, a tradesman's shop serving as post-office as well as for the sale of tobacco, and adorned over the doorway with a wreath of wooden lemons and pomegranates, and the imperial double-eagle, a corner where stands a piled-up carrier's van covered with black oilskin, a smithy sending forth from its dark interior a shower of crimson sparks, while from the low passage-way of the opposite inn, 'The Golden Lion,' a waiter with a dirty apron, and bare feet thrust into old red slippers, is gazing over at the smithy where a crowd of dripping street boys are collected about two thoroughbreds and a groom liveried in the English fashion--picture all this and you see Rautschin,--Rautschin on a dark afternoon in May in a pouring rain with an accompaniment of thunder and lightning.

Somewhat apart from the gaping urchins a young man is walking to and fro in front of the row of houses; his quick impatient step testifies to his having been detained by some untoward mishap and also to his being quite unused to such delay.

The rain descends from heaven in fine, regular, grey sheets. The young man's cigar has gone out, he is cold, and thoroughly annoyed he passes the unattractive waiter and enters the inn.

The room in which he takes refuge is low and spacious with bright blue walls, and a well-smoked ceiling. Limp, soiled muslin curtains reminding one of the train of an old ball-dress, hang before the windows where are glass hanging-lamps, and flower-pots of painted porcelain filled with mignonette, cactuses, and catnip. The furniture consists of two chromos representing the Emperor and his consort, of a number of yellow chairs, of several green tables, and of an array of spittoons.

At one of the tables sit three guests evidently much at home; one of them is tuning a zither, while the other two are smoking very malodorous cigars, and drinking beer out of tankards of greenish glass. Engaged in eager conversation none of them observed the entrance of the stranger who, to avoid attracting attention, seated himself in a dark corner with his back to the group.

"A couple more truck-loads of all sorts of fine furniture have arrived at Schneeburg," remarked one of the trio, a young man with red hair, and unusual length of limb. He is a surveyor's clerk, his name is Wenzl Wostraschil, but he is familiarly known as 'the Daily News' from the amount of sensational intelligence which he disperses. "Count Capriani ...."

"I know of no Count Capriani," interrupted an old gentleman with white hair and a red face; he is Doctor Swoboda, by profession district physician, in politics just as strictly conservative as Count Truyn became as soon as he had proclaimed his socialism by taking to himself a bourgeoise bride--"I know of no Count Capriani, you probably mean Conte!"

"It is the same thing," observed the zither player, Herr Cibulka.

"In the dictionary, perhaps," the old doctor rejoined sarcastically.

"The two titles are synonymous in my opinion," said Herr Cibulka as he laid aside his tuning-key and began to play 'The Tyrolean and his child,' while with closed lips he half-hummed, half-murmured the air to himself, his big fat hands groping to and fro on the instrument as if trying to aid his memory.

Herr Cibulka--this sonorous Slavonic name signifies onion in Bohemian--Eugène Alexander Cibulka--he is wont to sign his name with a very tiny Cibulka at the end of a very big Eugene Alexander--assistant district-attorney, transcendentalist, and Lovelace, is the pioneer of culture in the sleepy droning little town. He is a tall young fellow inclining to corpulence, with an uncommonly luxuriant growth of hair on both his head and face, and with the flabby oily skin of a man who has all his life long been fed upon dainties.

Evidently much occupied with his outer man he dresses himself as he says, 'simply but tastefully;' he pulls his cuffs well over his knuckles, and delights in a snuff-coloured velvet coat with metal buttons. He fancies that he looks like the Flying Dutchman, or at least like the brigand, Jaromir. In reality he looks like an advertisement for 'the only genuine onion ointment for the beard.' He is considered by the Rautschin ladies as quite irresistible and fabulously cultured. He criticises everything--music, literature and politics, being especially great in the domain of politics, and he discourses at length whenever an opportunity presents itself, combating with admirable energy perils that have long ceased to terrify any one. It is not clear as to what party he belongs, but since he berates the clergy, hates the nobility, and despises the lower-classes, consequently pursuing the straight and narrow path of his subjective vanities and social aspirations, he probably considers himself a Liberal. His uncle is in the ministerial department and he dreams of a portfolio.

Meanwhile the red-haired man with an air of indifference has taken up his tankard. "Count or Conte, as you please," he said, giving the disputed point the go-by, and continuing as he put his beer glass down on an uninviting little brown table, "at all events he must be accustomed to live in fine style, for he declared that it was impossible for a man used to modern conveniences to live in Schneeburg in the condition in which Count Malzin had occupied it. So the house has been entirely newly furnished. Immense! the doings of these money-giants--the world belongs to them!"

"Unfortunately, and our poor nobles must go to the wall," sighed the old doctor, whose platonic love for the nobility keeps pace with the red-haired man's equally platonic affection for money. "Except a couple of owners of entailed estates here and there none of them will be able to compete with these great financiers."

"The law of entail cannot be allowed to exist much longer, it is a stumbling block in the path of national progress .... My uncle in the ministerial department ...." Eugene Alexander began in a deep bass voice, which suggested a sentimentally guttural rendering of 'The Evening Star' at æsthetic tea-parties.

"Spare me the remarks of your uncle in the ministerial department," interrupted Dr. Swoboda angrily.

"The law of entail must be abolished," Herr Cibulka said, as another man might say, "that new street must be opened."

"Have you got your liberal seven-league boots on again?" Swoboda rejoined. "How you stride off into the future! You evidently suppose that if the law of entail were abolished to-day or to-morrow, this 'stumbling-block in the path of national progress' being removed, various districts of Tornow and Rautschin would find their way into the pockets of yourself and of your hypothetical children? You are mistaken, my dear fellow, hugely mistaken. Heaven forbid! Trade would monopolize the real estate, and that is all you would get by it, nothing more. The supremacy of money would be confirmed."

"I should prefer, it is true, the supremacy of mind!" Eugène Alexander said didactically.

"Ah! you think you would come in for a share there," growled the old doctor under his breath.

Without noticing the irony, Eugene Alexander went on, "The supremacy of money, of individual merit, is certainly more to be desired than the supremacy of fossilized prejudice."

"Indeed?... now tell us honestly," said the doctor, "do you really believe that the masses, whose sufferings are real and not imaginary, would gain anything thereby?"

"There certainly would be a fresh impetus given to culture,--a freer circulation of capital," began Cibulka.

"Listen to me a moment," broke in the doctor. "Circulation of capital? A financier's capital circulates inside his pockets, not outside of them except on certain occasions on 'Change. The art of spending money does not go hand-in-hand with the art of making it,--few things in this world delight me more than the spectacle of a millionaire who, having ostentatiously retired from business, contemplates his money-bags in positive despair, not knowing what to do with them and bored to death because the only occupation in which he takes any delight, money-getting, is debarred him by his position."

"No one can say of Conte Capriani that he does not know how to spend his money," the red-headed 'Daily News' affirmed, "everything is being arranged in the most expensive style, the rooms hung with silk shot with silver, the carpets as thick as your fist, and the paintings and artistic objects,--why they are coming by car-loads. I am intimate with the castellan, and he shows me everything; the outlay is princely."

The doctor shrugged his shoulders. "The extravagance of a financier is always for show, it is never a natural expenditure. There's no free swing to it, and I am not at all impressed by your Conte; one day he may take it into his head to paper his room with thousand-gulden bank-notes, and the next he will haggle like the veriest skinflint; just ask the Malzin servants; he discharged them at a moment's notice without a penny."

"They were a worthless old lot," Eugène Alexander rejoined, "and besides it was Count Malzin's duty to provide for his people."

"Poor Count Malzin!" exclaimed the doctor, "he pleaded for his servants, as I know positively; but provide for them--how could he provide for them when he could not provide for his own son! When I think of our poor Count Fritz! A handsomer, sweeter-tempered, kindlier gentleman never lived in the world! And when I reflect that Schneeburg is now in the hands of strangers, that Count Fritz cannot live there....!"

"Oh, I beg your pardon," the red-head insisted, wriggling on his chair like an eel, "he is going to live there, in the little Swiss cottage in the park where the young people used to be with their tutor and drawing-master in the hunting season, away from the bustle in the castle."

"Frightful!" murmured the doctor. "This whole Schneeburg business is too--too sad. The old bailiff is ill of typhus fever brought on by sheer grief and anxiety, and his whole family would go to destruction were it not for the generous support of the Countess Lodrin."

"Don't tell us of the generosity of the Countess Lodrin," sneered Cibulka, or of the generosity of any of the Lodrins. "You need only look at their estates; the peasants are huddled there in pens like swine."

The stranger, who had until now remained motionless in his dim corner, apparently paying no heed to the talk, here turned his head to listen.

"That seems very improbable," Dr. Swoboda replied to the last assertion, "The young count treats all his dependants with a kindly consideration that it would be difficult to match. If his people suffer from any injustice it certainly is without his knowledge; Count Oswald is one of the old school. Hats off to so true a gentleman!"

"You are, and always will be a truckler to princes," said Eugène Alexander, offended. "I must say that a man like Capriani who has won for himself a position in society among the greatest by his personal merit, by the work of his hands, seems to me more worthy of consideration than a petty Count, who has had everything showered upon him from his cradle."

"What trash you are talking about personal merit," thundered the doctor. "Capriani has grown rich on swindling--swindling, on 'Change--swindling in women's boudoirs. He was formerly a physician, and as such insinuated himself into distinguished houses, and wormed out political secrets which he made use of in his speculations. Finally he married a rich banker's daughter; they say his wife is a good woman. I never saw him but once, but I cannot understand how a woman with a modicum of taste could ever consent...."

"Oh they say that in his time he has enjoyed the favour of all kinds of ladies, very great ladies...." the red-head interposed with an air of importance. "I know from the widow of the late Count Lodrin's valet--there was a game carried on down there in Italy between the Countess Wjera...."

He had no time to conclude. The stranger sprang up and like a flash of lightning struck the speaker twice across the face with his riding-whip; then without a word he left the room.

"Who was that?" asked Cibulka pale with terror, while the red-headed man, bewildered, rubbed his cheek.

"Count Oswald Lodrin," said the doctor. "It serves you right for your insolence!"

"I shall not submit to such brutality--I will appeal to the courts," snarled red-head.

"And what can you say?" said the old doctor. "'I have wantonly repeated low, scandalous gossip--I have slandered a lady who is blessed and worshipped by all the country round, I have spit in the face of a saint'--this is what you can say. Let me advise you not to stir, my worthy Wostraschil."

This 'my worthy Wostraschil' was uttered by the simple old doctor in a tone which he must have caught unconsciously and involuntarily from some aristocratic patient.

He arose and stood at the window, looking with a smile of satisfaction after Oswald, who with head held haughtily erect, face pale, and eyes flashing angrily, was striding directly across the square to the smithy.

"A splendid fellow--a true gentleman," the old man murmured. He was proud of this Austrian, product, and would gladly have paid a tax for the maintenance of this national article of luxury.

CHAPTER IX.

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.

CHAPTER X.

"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!"

CHAPTER XI.

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.

CHAPTER XII.

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 ...!"

CHAPTER XIII.

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 see you knitting. 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!"

CHAPTER XIV.

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 the chic of 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."

BOOK SECOND.

CHAPTER I.

Rautschin, still Rautschin!--the tiny town lying at the feet of the huge castle on the tower of which the clock has stopped for twenty years--but no longer in pouring rain with thunder and lightning, but Rautschin beneath skies of sapphire blue, upon a hot July afternoon.

The sun was still high in the heavens. The crooked little row of houses on one side of the Market Square, cast short, black shadows, the national red kerchiefs, with broad borders of gay flowers hanging at the door of the principal shop, fluttered gently in the summer breeze. A melancholy hubbub of discords, struggling in vain for a solution, was heard through the open window of one of the newest and ugliest houses. Eugéne Alexander Cibulka, and the wife of the district commissioner, were playing Wagner's 'Walküre,' arranged for four hands, and each had again 'lost the place.' They regularly lose the place every time a leaf is turned, and so the one who gets first to the bottom of the page, very kindly waits for the other.

Rautschin Castle stands proudly superior to every structure about it, ensconced behind all kinds of farm-buildings and additions, at the extreme end of the Market Square, to which it turns its shoulder, as it were. Except for its imposing dimensions, it is in no wise remarkable.

Standing at the entrance of a very extensive park, it dates from the time of Maria Theresa, when the present clumsy edifice, its prim façade defaced by grass-green shutters, was built upon the remains of a feudal fortress. The court-yard is not perfectly square, and the arches of the arcade rest upon granite pillars. Its interior is quite in accordance with its exterior; it is anything but splendid, and has an air of empty, dignified distinction.

Before the western side of the Castle, Count Truyn with his young wife was sitting beneath the shade of a red and gray striped marquee; behind them in a garden-room, the glass doors of which were wide open, Oswald, standing on a step-ladder, was busy hanging on the wall a piece of gold-embroidered Oriental stuff, and Gabrielle was handing him the nails.

"Well Zini, are you beginning to like our home?" said Truyn, propping his elbows upon the white garden table, between himself and his wife. He looked so contented, so proud of his possessions, so triumphant, that Zinka could not refrain from teasing him a little.

"Taken all in all, yes," she said indifferently, "but then taken all in all, I should like Siberia, with you and Ella."

"Zinka! I must confess,"--Truyn's face assumed a disturbed and almost offended expression, "I must say that I cannot understand how any one can compare Rautschin to a place of exile!"

"I did not mean to do so, rest assured," Zinka said, "I think your Rautschin very delightful, I should only like to alter a few details."

"I cannot abide improvements," growled Truyn, "it is only the Caprianis and Company, who must always be beautifying everything old--that is destroying it. I think an old place should be left as it is, with all its characteristic defects--to try to improve them, seems to me like trying to correct the drawing of a Giotto or a Cimabue."

"I can understand a respect for the old mis-drawings," Zinka rejoined quietly, "but does one owe the same respect to modern retouching, to the vandalism that has made clumsy additions to an old picture?"

"Hm!" Truyn gazed thoughtfully around him--"no, in fact. It is remarkable that you are always right, you little witch. Now be frank Zini; what exactly would you like to have different? So far as my veneration and my finances permit, you shall have your will."

Zinka pointed to the lawn that lay before them, terribly disfigured by bright red and yellow arabesques. "I think that confectioner's ornamentation there almost as ugly as the carpet-gardening at the Villa Albani," she said, "don't you?"

Truyn ran his hands through his hair, "Well, yes,"--he meekly admitted after a pause, "but I cannot possibly alter that. Old Kraus, to surprise me, has taken infinite pains to portray our crest on the lawn--I had to praise him for his brilliant idea, however hideous I thought the thing, don't you see, Zini?"

"That alters the case entirely," Zinka admitted. "I would not hurt faithful old Kraus for the world. But"--she pointed to the basin of a fountain, the shape of which was particularly ugly--"old Kraus could not have designed that basin--that might be cleared away!"

Truyn looked thoroughly discomfited. "The basin is a horror," he confessed, "but I cannot help saying a good word for it. It is endeared to me by youthful associations--if only because when I was a boy of twelve, I was very nearly drowned in it."

"Oh then indeed ...." Zinka shrugged her shoulders, with a humourous air of resignation. "I now hardly dare to object to the green shutters," she went on, "for if, as in view of their colour is highly probable, they gave you opthalmia, some thirty years ago--it would ...."

"No, no, no, I give up the shutters," exclaimed Truyn laughing, "let them go. And now I have something to tell you that you will not relish--no need to change colour, the matter is an inconvenience, not a trial. While I have been away--for the last ten years in fact--the park has been open to the public. The little town has no other public garden. I have, indeed, in view of this, placed an extensive tract of land at the disposal of the town Council, but it is not yet laid out, and until it is, I should not like entirely to deprive the public of the freedom of the Park. Therefore I should like to have you point out as soon as possible what part you would prefer to have reserved entirely for yourself, that it may be portioned off. Indeed I cannot help it, Zini."

"You will be as condescending at last as a crowned head," Zinka said laughing. "You have already relinquished a corner of the park, because the new road, laid out for the convenience of the public, must run directly beneath your windows--and ..."

"I know--I know," Truyn interrupted her impatiently, "but one owes something to the people. Of course you think 'my husband is a perfect simpleton, he'll put up with anything'--but ...."

"Have you really no better idea of what I think of my husband, than that?" Zinka asked in a low tone, looking at him with tender raillery in her eyes.

"Oh you sweet-natured little woman!" he said, attempting to chuck her under the chin.

"What are you about?" she exclaimed, thrusting his hand away, "this wall here on the street is so low, that every little ragamuffin can see us. And let me tell you that this wall has seemed more odious than anything else to-day. Between ourselves--move your chair a little nearer, Erich--I have been all this while tormented by a desire to throw myself into your arms--you dear, good, whimsical fellow--but the wall!"

"Confound the wall!" Truyn exclaimed, angrily clinching his fist.

"Tell me," Zinka asked caressingly, "is the lowness of the wall also a question of humanity? Do you find it impossible to deny the townsfolk the satisfaction of conveniently observing the castle-folk?"

"Pshaw! I was vexed about the height of the wall ten years ago--that is when the road was laid out, but--well, I cannot myself say why it is--but unless we have a rage for building, nothing is done. We complain for ten years about the same evil, and ..."

"And to part with an evil about which one has complained for ten long years," interrupted Zinka laughing, "would be almost as distressing as to clear away the basin of a fountain, in which one had been nearly drowned, thirty years before, eh, Erich?"

The broad July sunshine lay upon the red and yellow splendour of the Truyn escutcheon, shimmered brilliantly about the foremost of the mighty trees, whose dark foliage contrasted with the emerald of the lawn where they stood, beyond the open, flower-decked portion of the park, and penetrated boldly into their thick shades, limning fanciful arabesques of light upon the darker green.

From the garden-room floated Gabrielle's sweet, childlike voice, "Io so una giardiniera," she sang. Oswald had finished his upholstering, and was bending over the piano. He combined a sincere enjoyment of music with a deplorable preference for sentimental popular ballads.

The creaking of wheels intruded upon the dreamy monotony of the hour. Truyn leaned forward and started to his feet. "Ah, old Swoboda, the doctor who attended Ella with the measles," he exclaimed joyfully, recognising Dr. Swoboda, in his comical little vehicle drawn by a white horse spotted with brown. "Is he still alive? I must call him in. Holla! Doctor, how are you?"

The doctor started, looked round, and took off his hat with a smile of delight, "your servant, Count Truyn."

"Come in and have a chat," said Truyn, "it was hardly fair not to have been to see us before."

"But, my dear Count, how could I suppose ..."

A few minutes later, the old doctor was seated opposite to Truyn, underneath the marquee, imparting to the Count exact information as to the weal and woe of a multitude of people belonging to the town, and to the country round, whom the proprietor of Rautschin remembered with wonderful distinctness.

Some had died, one or two were insane--a couple were bankrupt.

"Infernal swindling speculations! is my dear old Rautschin beginning to be carried away by them?" said Truyn, "certain epidemics cannot be arrested. Sad--very sad! And now the phylloxera has taken up its abode in Schneeburg."

"Is there much illness about here?" Zinka asked the doctor, in hopes perhaps of staving off a conservative outburst from her husband.

"None of any consequence. My business is at a low ebb, your Excellency."

"Where have you just been, doctor?" Truyn asked.

"I have just come from Schneeburg."

"Ah? anything seriously amiss in the Capriani household?--I could not shed a tear for King Midas."

"The Herr Count cannot suppose that those magnificoes would call in a poor country doctor, like myself."

"My dear Swoboda, we all have the greatest confidence in you!" Truyn said kindly.

"I thank you heartily, Herr Count, but this confidence is an old custom, and the Caprianis consider old customs as mere prejudices, and propose to do away with them. I have just come from our poor Count Fritz."

"Indeed? are the children ill?"

"No, not ill, but ailing; there is something or other the matter with them all the time--they are city children;--however, I am not really anxious about them, they'll come all right. But I am sick at heart for poor Count Fritz, he is far from well."

"Ah, indeed? what is the matter with him?" Truyn asked in a tone of evident irritation.

"His unfortunate circumstances are killing him," the doctor replied gloomily.

"Ah--hm,--I must confess to you--er--my dear doctor, that--er--I take it very ill of Fritz, that he, er--accepted a position,--er--with--that,--er--adventurer."

The old doctor looked the irritated gentleman full in the eyes. "When one is homesick and sees his children, who cannot bear the city air, hungering for bread, one will do many things, which could not be contemplated for an instant, under even slightly improved circumstances."

"Ossi always told you ...." began Zinka.

"Oh pshaw! Ossi is an enthusiast, whose heart is always drowning out his head."

The old doctor sighed. "Well, I will intrude no longer," he said. He had often enough seen his noble patients yawn, as the door was closing upon him after a prolonged visit.

"Not at all,--not at all--wait a moment; I must call the children; Gabrielle! Ossi!"

The young people appeared from the garden-room.

"Ah--it is the friend who saved my life," Gabrielle exclaimed, cordially extending her hand.

Oswald too greeted him kindly, but suddenly he, as well as the old physician became slightly embarrassed--each remembered the unpleasant scene in the inn.--The conversation did not flow very freely.

"Now, I really must go," the doctor insisted in some confusion.

"Come soon again," said Truyn, shaking hands with him, "give my remembrance to Fritz, and--er--tell him to come and see me soon." He walked towards the court-yard with the old man, and when he returned he observed that Oswald, as he was silently rolling up a cigarette, was frowning furiously, evidently angry.

"Where does the shoe pinch, Ossi?" he asked.

"I cannot understand, uncle, how you can be so hard upon Fritz!" exclaimed Oswald throwing away his cigarette. "You are wont to be the softest-hearted of men, but to that poor devil ...."

"Don't excite yourself so terribly," Truyn said kindly, but in some surprise at the young man's violence. How could he divine the disturbance of mind that was at the root of his indignation? "You are so irritable ...."

"I am perfectly calm," Oswald boldly asserted, "only .... how could you send messages to Fritz by the doctor, and ask him to come to you? Have you no idea of his miserably sore state of mind?--and physically too he is so wretched that he cannot last six months longer; I have begged you to go and see him."

"Papa! If Ossi begs you!" Gabrielle whispered, looking up at her father with the large pleading eyes of a child.

"Ah, you can't understand how any one can possibly refuse Ossi anything," Truyn said, smiling in the midst of his annoyance.

She blushed and cast down her eyes.

"What can you find to like in this fellow, Ella?" her father rallied her. "A man ready to take fire, and clinch his fist upon the smallest provocation. What would you say if I should put my veto upon this foolish betrothal with a young savage who is only half-responsible?"

Gabrielle's blush grew deeper, she looked alternately at her father and at her lover, and finally deciding in favour of the latter gently laid her hand upon his arm.

"You see, uncle!.... completely routed," exclaimed Oswald, his anger entirely dispelled by this little intermezzo. His voice rang with exultant happiness as he added, "nothing can part us now, Ella--not even a father's veto!"

And Ella clung silently to his arm and looked blissfully content.

"Poor little comrade!" said Truyn tenderly. Mingled with his emotion there was something of the pity which men of ripe years and experience always feel at the sight of the perfect happiness of young lovers.

"Poor little comrade!--well, to win back some share of your favour I will e'en put a good face upon it and comply with the wishes of your tyrant."

CHAPTER II.

"How can a respectable household put up with such a servant!" thought Truyn, as he waited in the hall of the little Swiss cottage which stood between the park at Schneeburg and the vegetable garden, and had been appropriated to the son of the late owner of the soil. A slatternly woman with a loose linen wrapper hanging about her stout figure had come towards him, and after an affirmative reply to his inquiry if the Count were at home, screamed shrilly: "Malzin! Some one to see you!" and vanished in the interior of the house.

An unpleasant suspicion assailed Truyn. "Can that be...." The next moment all else was forgotten in distress at the changed appearance of a fair, pale young man who rushed up to him exclaiming: "Erich!--you here!"

"Fritz, Fritz!" said Truyn in a broken voice, fairly clasping his unfortunate cousin in his arms.

Of all mortals he who has voluntarily resigned the position in which he was born is the most embarrassing to deal with. He has by degrees broken with his fellows, and, almost like an outcast, seems scarcely to know how to comport himself when accident throws him among his former associates; when he meets one of 'his people' he usually alternates between intrusive familiarity and embittered reserve.

There was nothing of all this, however, about Fritz. He was so simple and cordial, that Truyn felt ashamed of having avoided a meeting.

Fair, with delicate, slightly pinched features, and large melancholy gray eyes, exquisitely neat and exact in his apparel, he looked from head to foot like a cavalry officer in citizen's dress, and in poor circumstances, that is like a man who knew how to invest with a certain distinction even the shabbiness to which fate condemned him.

"You cannot imagine what pleasure your visit gives me! When I see one of you it really seems almost as if one of my dear ones had descended from heaven to press my hand," he said with emotion and Truyn replied:

"I should have come before, but I expected certainly that you .... that ...."

"That I ...." Fritz smiled significantly, "no, Erich, you could hardly ...."

"Well, well, and how are you? How are you?" said Truyn quickly.

"I still live," Fritz replied, and looked away.

Just then a voice was heard outside inquiring for "Count Malzin."

"I am not at home, Lotti, do you hear, not at home to any body," Malzin called into the next room. "Come, Erich!" and he conducted his guest out of what answered as a drawing-room into a very shabbily-furnished apartment which he called his 'den,' and where Truyn at once felt quite at home.

"That was young Capriani," Fritz explained hurriedly, "he probably came to talk with me about the burial vault. Perhaps you know that my late father had the vault reserved for us in the contract for the sale of Schneeburg. Capriani, whom usually nothing escapes, oddly enough overlooked the fact that the vault is in the park, and now he wants me to sell it to him. Let him try it--the vault he shall not have--it is the last spot of home that is left to me. I choose at least to lie in the grave with my people! But let us talk of something pleasanter. You are all well, are you not?--but there is no need to ask, I can see it by looking at you. And I know all about your domestic affairs from Ossi."

"He comes to see you often?"

"Yes," said Fritz, "and every time with a fresh scheme for my complete relief from all difficulties, which he always unfolds with the same fervid enthusiasm. The schemes are impracticable, but never mind! Existence always seems more tolerable to me while I am talking with him, and when he has gone, it is as if a soft spring shower had just passed over, purifying and freshening the air. There really is something very remarkable about the fellow. With all his fiery energy, he is so unutterably tender; ordinarily when a man situated as I am comes in contact with such a favorite of fortune, he inevitably feels annoyed--it is like a glare of light for weak eyes. But there is nothing of the kind with him--he warms without dazzling,--he understands how to stoop to misery, without condescending to it."

"Yes, yes, he has his good qualities," Truyn grumbled, "very good qualities. But he has stolen from me my little comrade's heart, and I cannot say I am greatly pleased."

"You do not expect me to pity you on the score of your future son-in-law?" said Fritz, laughing.

"Not exactly--if I must have one, then ...."

"Then thank God that just these young people have come together," Fritz said in that tone of admonition, which even young men, when forsaken of fortune, sometimes adopt towards their happier seniors. "Do you know what he has done for me--among other things--just a trifle?"

"How should I? He certainly would never tell me."

"Of course not! We had not seen each other for years, but he came to see me as soon as he knew that I was at Schneeburg, and asked me if he could do anything for me. I thought it kind, but did not take his words seriously and so thanked him and assured him he could do nothing. He came again, bringing presents for the children with kind messages from his mother, and asked me to dinner. When we retired to the smoking-room after that dinner he said to me with the embarrassed manner of a generous man, about to confer a benefit: 'Fritz, tell me frankly; does no old debt annoy you?' Of course, at first I did not want to confess, but at last I admitted that a couple of unliquidated accounts did trouble me. An unstained name is a luxury that is the hardest of all to forego. He arranged everything, and now I am perfectly free from debt. He has such a charming way of giving, as if it were the merest pastime. I once asked him how a man as happy as he, found so much time to think for others? He answered that happiness was like a rose-bush, the more blossoms one gives away, the more it flourishes!"

"Yes, yes, he certainly is a fine fellow.--We quarrel sometimes, but he is a very fine fellow!" said Truyn, "he suits the child--you must know her. And what about your children? Ossi says they are very pretty--you have three, have you not?"

"No, only two," Fritz replied, and his voice trembled as he took a little photograph from the wall--"only two; my eldest died. Look at him--" handing the picture to Truyn, "he was a pretty child, was he not?--my poor little Siegi--but too lovely, too good for the life that had fallen to his lot. He is better dead--better!" he uttered in the hard tone in which the reason asserts what the heart denies.

From the park the vague, dreamy fragrance of the fading white rocket was wafted into the room. The light flickered dimly through the leafy screen of the apricot tree before the open window that looked out upon the vegetable garden. On Fritz's writing-table the old Empire clock, wheezing in its struggle for breath, struck five times. Truyn knew the old timepiece well, but formerly it used to swing its pendulum as merrily on into eternity as if it expected a fresh delight every hour. It seemed as if by this time it had almost lost its voice from grief, so asthmatic was the sob with which it counted the seconds. And not only with the clock, with everything around him Truyn was familiar. The entire shabby apartment betrayed a fanatical worship of the past. The chairs were the same monstrosities with lyre-shaped backs and crooked legs, which had been wont to endure the angry kicks of the little Malzins, when their tutor kept them too long at their lessons. Even the pattern of the wall-paper, with its apocryphal birds and butterflies among impossible wreaths of flowers, was the same which a travelling house-painter had pasted up there thirty years before.

But what most struck Truyn, was the decoration on one of the low doors in the thick wall--it was marked all over with lines in pencil and scribbled names. Upon that door the young Malzins used to record their growth from year to year.

"Pipsi, 14," he read, "and something over," "Erich,"--he smiled involuntarily, and read on,--"Oscar 12," and then far below in uncertain characters looking as if an elder sister had guided the hand of a very little child, "Fritzl."

And through Truyn's memory there sounded the crumpling of copy-book leaves--of childrens' voices, of Cramer's Exercises, and of sleepily recited Latin verbs. Yes, even the peculiar fragrance of lavender and fresh linen, formerly exhaled from the light chintz gown of his pretty cousin, came wafting to him over the past.

"This is your old school-room!" he exclaimed.

"Of course it is," said Fritz, "can you guess whom I have to thank for keeping it intact?"

"The avarice of your principal?"

"No, the delicacy of his wife. Before I moved in here she said to me, 'my husband wished to have the house put in order for you, Herr Count, but I thought that perhaps you liked old associations, and I therefore beg you to make only what changes you think best.'"

"A good woman!" Truyn murmured.

Just then an extraordinary figure entered the room,--the same female that Truyn had encountered in the hall, but splendidly transformed, tightly laced, with cheeks covered thick with pink powder--Fritz Malzin's wife!

"Very good of you," she began after Fritz had presented Truyn to her. Her voice had the forced sweetness of stage training. "Very good to honour our humble dwelling with a visit. May I take the liberty of offering you a cup of coffee, that is, Herr Count," as Truyn evidently hesitated, "if you can put up with our simple fare; in the country, you know, when one is not prepared ...."

Fritz pulled his moustache nervously.

Although he had reached the age of gastronomic fastidiousness, and especially abhorred spoiling the appetite between meals, Truyn good-naturedly accepted this pretentiously humble invitation.

CHAPTER III.

The dining-room, a long narrow apartment with three windows, smelled of fresh varnish and fly-poison; the walls were decorated with dusty laurel wreaths wound about with ribbons covered with gilt inscriptions, and with several photographs of the hostess in tights. The long table was loaded with viands. Malzin's children, a girl and a boy, respectively five and three years old, shared the meal. They were pale, and sickly, but extremely pretty with a wonderfully sympathetic expression about the mouth and eyes, reminding one of their father. It was easy to see from the shy gentleness of their demeanour that Fritz had taken great pains with their training. He exchanged little tender jests with his small daughter, but he evidently made a special pet of the boy who sat beside him in a high chair, and to whose wants he himself ministered.

There was nothing about Fritz of the amusing awkwardness of aristocratic fathers, who now and then in an amiable dilettante fashion interest themselves in the care of their offspring. On the contrary it was easy to see from the way in which he set the child straight at the table, tied on the bib, and put the mug of milk into the little hand, that the care of the child was a real occupation of his life.

Truyn sat beside his hostess murmuring threadbare compliments, touching his lips to his coffee-cup, and crumbling a piece of biscuit on his plate.

"You do our fare but little honour," the actress said more than once, "try a piece of this cake, Herr Count. Count Capriani who has a French cook, and is accustomed to the very best, always commends it."

Fritz blushed. "Try this cherry cake," he said hastily. "Lotti makes it herself. She used always to feast me upon it when we were betrothed--eh, Lotti?"

This cheery reference to her housewifely skill, offended the actress, and before Truyn could make some courteous rejoinder she exclaimed, flushed with anger, "You know, Herr Count, that where the means are so limited the mistress of the house must lend a hand."

Truyn stammered something and Fritz smiled patiently as he stroked his little son's fair curls.

It was a painfully uncomfortable hour.

Truyn looked from the photographs to the glass fly-traps beneath which innumerable flies were lying on their backs, convulsively twitching out their lives, and his glance finally rested upon his hostess. She was strongly perfumed with musk, and was painted around the eyes. Her stout arms were squeezed into sleeves far too tight, and her bust almost met her chin. After this keen scrutiny, however, Truyn discovered that she was certainly handsome, that her face although disfigured by too full lips, was strikingly like that of the capitoline Venus.

The intrusive humility of her manner, seasoned as it was with vulgar raillery, was insufferable.

"For this woman!" he repeated to himself again and again. "For this woman!" His eye fell upon a photograph portraying the Countess as 'la belle Héléne,' in a costume that displayed her magnificent physique to great advantage, and he suddenly remembered that he had seen her in that rôle; that her acting was bad; but that she produced a dazzling impression on the stage.

"Did you recognize that picture, Herr Count?" she asked suddenly.

"Instantly," he assured her.

"Did you ever see me play?"

"I once had that pleasure."

"Ah!" A remarkable transformation was immediately manifest, her languid air grew animated, thirst for the triumphs of the past glittered in her eyes. She moved her chair a little closer to Truyn and coquettishly leaning her head upon her hand whispered, "Were you one of my adorers?"

Fritz frowned and glanced angrily towards her, twisting his napkin nervously.

His attention was suddenly distracted however, by the noise of the blows of an axe resounding slowly and monotonously through the heavy summer air. Fritz changed colour, sprang up and hurried to the window.

"What is the matter?" the actress asked him negligently.

"They are cutting down the old beech," he said slowly, turning not to her, but to Truyn.--"The Friedrichs-beech; planted by one of our ancestors, Joachim Malzin, with his own hands after the liberation of Vienna; we children all cut our names upon it. Don't you remember how Madame Lenoir scolded us for it, and declared that it was not comme il faut, but a pastime befitting prentice boys only? Good Heavens--how long ago that is!--and now they are cutting it down. Capriani insists that it interferes with his view."

CHAPTER IV.

"If one could only help him!--but there is nothing to be done--absolutely nothing!"

Thus Truyn reflected, as distressed and compassionate, he rode home on his sleek cob, followed by his trim English groom.

There are many varieties of compassion not at all painful, which, when well-seasoned with a charming consciousness of virtue, may serve sensitive souls as a tolerable amusement. There is, for example, an artistically contemplative compassion that, with hands thrust comfortably in pockets, looks on at some melancholy affair as at the fifth act of a tragedy, without experiencing the faintest call to recognize its existence except by heaving sundry sentimental sighs. Then there is a self-contemplative compassion which, quite as inactive as the artistically contemplative, culminates in the satisfactory consciousness of the comparative comfort of one's own condition; then a decorative compassion, which is displayed merely as a mental adornment upon solemn occasions when the man marches forth clad in full-dress moral uniform.

But there is one compassion which is among the most painful sensations that can assail a delicate-minded human being--a compassion, always united to the most earnest desire to aid, to console, and yet which knows itself powerless in presence of the suffering; that longs for nothing in the world more ardently than to aid that which it cannot aid! And this it was that oppressed Truyn, as he rode home from Schneeburg,--this vain compassion lying like a cold, hard stone upon his warm, kind heart!

"If one could only help him, could but make life at least tolerable for him,--poor Fritz, poor fellow!" he muttered again and again.

The tall poplars, standing like a long row of gigantic exclamation points on the side of the road, cast strips of dark shade upon the light, dusty soil. The crickets were chirping in the hedges; in the wheat-fields to the right and left the ears nodded gently and gravely; red poppies and blue cornflowers--useless, picturesque gipsy-folk, amidst the ripening harvest--laughed at their feet. The clover-fields had passed their prime,--they were brown and a faint odour of faded flowers floated aloft from them. The transparent veil of early twilight obscured the light and dimmed the shadows.

How thoroughly Truyn knew the road! The inmates of Schneeburg and Rautschin had formerly been good neighbours.

A throng of laughing, beckoning phantoms glided through his mind. Out of the blue mist of the morning of his life, now so far behind him, there emerged a slender, girlish figure with long, black braids, and a downy, peach-like face--dark-eyed Pipsi, for whom Erich, then an enthusiast of sixteen, copied poems--and a second phantom came with her, merry-hearted Tilda, who with the pert insolence of her thirteen years used to laugh so mercilessly at the sentimental pair of lovers; and Hugo, a rather awkward boy, always at odds with his tutor and his Greek grammar.

Where were they all? Hugo went into the army, and was killed in a duel; dark-eyed Pepsi married in Hungary, and died at the birth of her first child; Tilda married a Spanish diplomatist--Truyn had heard nothing of her for years;--not one of the Malzins was left in their native land, save Fritz, who at the time of Truyn's lyric enthusiasm was a curly-headed, babbling baby, before whose dimples the entire family were on their knees, and who of his bounty dispensed kisses among them.

Truyn's thoughts wandered on--he recalled Fritz as an dashing officer of Hussars. He was one of the handsomest men in the army, fair, with a sunny smile and the proverbial Malzin conscientiousness in his earnest eyes, very fastidious in his pleasures, almost dandified in his dress; spoiled by women of fashion.

"Who would have thought it!" Truyn repeated to himself, as he gazed reflectively between his horse's ears. Suddenly he became aware of a cloud of dust,--and of a delightful sensation warming his heart. He perceived Zinka and Gabrielle sitting in a low pony-wagon, and behind them in the footman's seat was Oswald. Zinka was driving, being the butt of much laughing criticism from the other two. How pleased Truyn was with the picture, and how often was he destined to recall it, the fair, lovely heads of the two women, the dark, handsome young fellow, who understood so well how to combine a merry familiarity with the most delicate courtesy! How happy they all looked!

"You are late, papa!" Gabrielle called out.

"Have I offended you again, comrade?"

"But papa--!"

"I was beginning to be a little anxious," said Zinka, "Ossi laughed at me, and said I was like his mother, who if he is half an hour late in returning home from a ride always imagines that he has been thrown and killed on the road, and that the only reason the groom does not make his appearance, is because he has not the courage to tell the sad tidings."

Oswald laughed. "Yes, my mother's fancy runs riot in such images, sometimes," he admitted, stretching out his hand for the reins, that he might help Zinka to turn round. "And how is poor Fritz?"

"Wretched--such misery is enough to break one's heart--and no getting rid of it."

"And you are no longer angry with him?" Oswald asked with a touch of good-humoured triumph.

"Heaven forbid! but--," Truyn rubbed his forehead--"Oh, that stock-jobber--that phylloxera!"

Just then there appeared in the road an aged man, spare of habit and somewhat bent, but walking briskly; his features were sharp but not unpleasant, his arms were long, and his old-fashioned coat fluttered about his legs.

"Good-day, Herr Stern," Oswald called out to him in response to his bow.

Truyn doffed his hat and bowed low on his horse's neck.

"Who is it whom you hold worthy of so profound a bow, papa?" Gabrielle asked.

"Rabbi von Selz," Truyn made answer, "in times like these such people should be treated with special respect, if only for the sake of the lower classes who always regulate their conduct somewhat by ours."

"Oho, uncle, your bow was a political demonstration, then," Oswald remarked.

"To a certain degree," Truyn replied, "but Stern is, moreover, a very distinguished man."

"He is indeed," Oswald affirmed, "he is a particular friend of mine--if any one among the people about here maltreats him, he always applies to me. Poor devil! The Jews are a very strange folk. I always divide them into two families, one related directly to Christ, the other to Judas Iscariot. Poesy, the Seer, has produced two immortal types of these families, Nathan and Shylock."

"Aha, Ella, I hope you are duly impressed by your lover, he really talks like a book," Truyn rallied his daughter who, her fair head slightly bent backward, was looking over her shoulder at Oswald, with rapt admiration in her large eyes. "I invited Fritz to dine with you, comrade, the day after to-morrow. He is almost as madly enthusiastic about your betrothed as you are yourself, and you can sing your Laudamus together."

CHAPTER V.

"There is nothing to be done with the fellow.--I never encountered such weakness of mind," exclaimed Capriani to his wife.

The hour was three, and just before dinner; in accordance with Austrian custom, or rather with the national bad habit, they dined at Schneeburg at half-past three, although the whole family, especially those of the second generation, accustomed to late foreign hours, found this earlier hour very inconvenient.

"Of whom are you talking?" Madame Capriani asked in her depressed tone; she was sitting erect upon a small gilt chair, she wore a gray, silk-muslin gown, rather over-trimmed, gants de Suéde, and an air of constraint.

"Of whom are you talking?" she asked a second time, smoothing her gloves.

"Of whom?--of that blockhead, Malzin," growled Capriani.

"I told you from the first that he would never be able to fill that position," his wife rejoined.

"Fill--!" Capriani shrugged his shoulders contemptuously, "fill--! it takes him two hours to write a business-letter. But I was prepared for that. His office is a sinecure; the salary that I pay him is an alms,--but Alfred Capriani can do as he pleases there,--and at least the fellow understands something about horses. What outrages me is to see how he squanders my money, the money that I give him. He ransacks the country round to buy back from the peasants relics of his parents. First an old clock, that struck twelve just as he was born, then an old piano, upon which his sisters used to strum the scales. 'Tis enough to drive one mad!"

Frau von Capriani looked distressed. "That is a matter of sentiment," she suggested.

"A matter of sentiment--a matter of sentiment," Capriani repeated sarcastically. "It would be a matter of sentiment and conscience to think of saving up something for his children."

"You are right, you are right," the Countess rejoined, in her emphatic yet not unmelodious Russian-German, "but this time you are in some measure to blame for his folly. I begged you a hundred times to ask him what he would like to keep for himself of the furniture which was entirely useless to us. Instead, you had it all put up at auction."

"And the proceeds of the sale are to be devoted to the building of a new school, to be entirely independent of ecclesiastical influence," said Capriani, "the old rubbish shall aid, willy-nilly, in the spread of modern liberal ideas. It is my aim to root out prejudices not to foster them. Would you have me minister directly to Malzin's folly? It would be nonsense. It makes me shudder to see this man, who owns nothing, positively nothing, except what I give him out of sheer kindness, and who ought to look ahead, keeping his eyes fixed upon the past, and sentimentally collecting empty bon-bon boxes, the contents of which his forefathers have devoured to the last crumb. He is the personification of the invincible narrowness of his class."

"He is a good honest man," the Contessa said gently.

"Honest,--honest!" Capriani repeated impatiently, "a man whose desires have been anticipated from his childhood, upon whose plate the pheasants have always fallen ready trussed and roasted, would naturally not contemplate picking pockets. To be sure, he might be tempted to try it, but he can't do it--he is too unpractical to be dishonest. There is nothing praiseworthy in that, for all the honesty that you ascribe to him he is a thorough selfish egotist; without the smallest scruple he robs his own children of thousands."

"Malzin!" Frau von Capriani exclaimed, "why he would let his ears be cut off for his children, and if he refused to lose his hands too, it would only be because he needed them to work for his family."

"To work!" rejoined Capriani ironically. "If he would only sacrifice for their sakes his miserable pride of rank he could do far more for them than by his work! He--and work! Do you know what reply he made to my splendid offer for his family vault? 'The vault is not for sale, it is the only spot of home that is left me. I will at least lie among my people when I am dead!' Can you conceive of greater insolence?"

"Insolence--poor Malzin--he is as modest....!"

"Modest!" sneered Capriani, interrupting her, "he is fairly bristling with arrogance. A starving pauper, living on my bounty, and all the while thinking himself superior to all of us. Intercourse with us is not at all to his taste."

"He is always exquisitely courteous to me. I like him very much," Frau von Capriani declared. Her husband's constant attacks upon Malzin were beyond measure painful to her.

"Men of his stamp are always gracious to ladies," snarled Capriani.

Meanwhile his two children had entered the room, Arthur and Ad'lin, both in faultless toilettes, and both out of humour. The self-same weariness weighs upon both, the weariness of idlers who do not know how to squander time gracefully. Perhaps Georges Lodrin is not far wrong when he maintains that to idle away life gracefully is an art most difficult to acquire, and rarely learned in a single generation.

Both asked fretfully whether the post had come, and then each sank into an arm-chair and fumed. One by one the various guests then staying in the castle appeared. Paul Angelico Orchis, a conceited little versifier, (lauded in the Blanktown Gazette as 'the first lyric poet of modern times') and the possessor of a dyspepsia acquired at the expense of others. A farce by him had been produced in Blanktown, and for ten years he had been promising the public a tragedy. Meanwhile his latest effort was the invention of a picturesque waterproof cloak. Frank, the famous tailor carried out his idea in dark brown tweed, in which the poet draped himself upon every conceivable occasion. After him followed two men of the kind which Georges Lodrin describes as 'gentlemen at reduced prices,' stunted specimens of the aristocracy, who played a very insignificant part in their own circles, and from time to time fled to their inferiors in rank to enjoy a little admiration. One, Baron Kilary, is a sportsman, insolent in bearing, lewd in talk; the other, Count Fermor, is a dilettante composer and pianist, affected and sentimental.

Malzin and his wife also entered; while he bowed silently, and then respectfully kissed the hand of the hostess, Charlotte congratulated the two ladies upon the splendour of their attire, and lavished exaggerated admiration upon a couple of costly pieces of furniture which she had often seen before.

Last of all appeared our old acquaintance, the Baroness Melkweyser, who had been at Schneeburg for a week. What was she doing there? The Caprianis looked to her for their admission into Austrian society, she looked to King Midas for the augmentation of her diminished income,--and something too might be gained from country air and regular meals for her worn and weary digestion.

CHAPTER VI.

It is really melancholy for people who have been accustomed in Paris to entertain crowned heads, to be obliged in Austria to put up with a few sickly sprigs of nobility.

The Menu was very elaborate; the clumsy table service came from Froment-Munice and the china was Sèvres of the latest pattern, white, with a coronet and cipher in gilt; the butler looked like a cabinet minister, and the silk stockings of the flunkies were faultless. Nevertheless the entire dinner produced a sham, masquerading effect, reminding one more or less of a stage banquet when all the viands are of papier-maché.

The hostess, with Baron Kilary on her right, and Fritz Malzin on her left, devoted herself almost exclusively to the latter, asking him kindly questions about his children.

The host, seated between the Baroness Melkweyser, and the Countess Malzin, contented himself with seeing that the actress's plate was kept well supplied, and with exchanging jests with her which were merely silly during soup, but which grew more objectionable at dessert.

The Baroness Melkweyser studied the Menu, Paul Angelico Orchis complained of his dyspepsia and asked advice of his neighbour, Ad'lin Capriani, as to his diet. Moreover he testified his gratitude for Capriani's hospitality by praising everything enthusiastically. He remarked that he had visited Schneeburg formerly, but that he should hardly have recognised the castle again, absolutely hardly have recognised it, it was so wonderfully improved, he could not see how Count Capriani could have effected so much in so short a time.

Whereupon the master of the mansion replied with aristocratic nonchalance: "The place had to be made habitable, but there's not much that can be done with it, it is nothing but an old barracks, an inconvenient old barracks." He then held forth at length upon the improvements which he still contemplated, concluding with, "But I have no room--the Schneeburg domain is so contracted, so insignificant! Unfortunately all the estates which would serve my purpose are owned by people unwilling to sell."

Madame Capriani tried several times unsuccessfully to check her husband, and Fritz looked gloomily down into his empty plate.

He had always been so proud of his Schneeburg, and that it should not be good enough for this swindler, forsooth!----

Fermor looked discontented, and talked to Adeline about his compositions, betraying at every word the sentimental arrogance of a narrow-minded, lackadaisical, provincial aristocrat, greedy for adulation, and salving his conscience for his new associations, by making himself as disagreeable as possible to the people whose bread he eats.

Malzin, albeit in a subordinate position, manifested from habit the instinctive reserve of a true gentleman, fearful of wounding the susceptibilities of his inferiors. The conduct of his fellows was in striking contrast to his own. Fermor ignored him. Kilary on the contrary continually tried to draw him into familiar talk upon subjects of which none of the others knew anything, a course evidently irritating to the host.

Malzin was, moreover, the only one at table towards whom Kilary conducted himself courteously. To the poet he was especially insolent. At dessert he read aloud with sentimental emphasis a couple of bonbon-mottoes, and then asked, "My dear Orchis, are these immortal lines your own?" at which the poet vainly tried to smile. The rumour ran that when his finances were at a low ebb he did sometimes place his genius at the disposal of a Vienna confectioner.

After dinner the gentlemen retired to the smoking-room to smoke, the ladies to the drawing-room to yawn.

"I cannot cease looking at you, this evening, Comtesse," Charlotte Malzin exclaimed, seating herself on a sofa beside the daughter of the house, "your gown is enchanting."

"Very much too picturesque for this part of the world, they can't appreciate these contrasts of colour in this barbarous country," Ad'lin said crossly, as she was wont to receive the actress's advances. "They are far behind the age in Austria! Dieu, qui l'Autriche m'ennuie!"

The actress fell silent, in some confusion.

"What had the poet to say to you, Ad'lin?" asked the Baroness Melkweyser, after she had inspected through her eye-glass each piece of furniture in turn in the drawing-room.

"That he could not digest truffles, and that he means to dedicate his next work to me."

"Ah! the first item is highly interesting, and the last uncommonly flattering," the Melkweyser rejoined.

"Yes, it means that I must order at least fifty copies of the interesting effusion," Ad'lin said fretfully, adding with a half smile, "People in our position have to encourage literature--noblesse oblige!"

The Baroness bit her lip and resumed her voyage of discovery, turning to a cabinet filled with antique porcelain.

"You really cannot think," Ad'lin began, leaving her sofa to join her friend, "how I have longed for you! You are the only link here in Austria between ourselves and civilization. I depend upon your forming an agreeable circle for us here."

It was noteworthy that since Zoë's return to her native land, Adeline's familiarity had seemed far less acceptable to her than it had been in Paris. "An agreeable circle!" she exclaimed, "that is easily said, but you make it very hard for me. You do not want to know our financiers ...."

"The Austrian financiers have no position; even the Rothschilds are not received at Court."

"And the Austrian aristocracy is excessively exclusive on its own soil--!" said Zoë.

"Ah that exclusiveness is a fable convenue," Ad'lin insisted, "I am convinced that if Austrian society knew us ...."

Instead of replying, the Melkweyser directed her eye-glass towards the porcelain on the shelves of the cabinet. "That is the Malzin old-Vienna tea-service."

"Yes, but it cannot be used--it is not complete."

"I know it, Wjera Zinsenburg has the other half."

"If it would give the Countess the slightest pleasure to complete the set, I should be perfectly ready to place this half at her disposal!" Capriani's voice was heard to say.

The gentlemen had left their cigars and had come to the drawing-room for their coffee. Fermor who was too nervous to allow himself the indulgence of a cup of Mocha, sat down at the piano, and began to prelude in an affected manner.

Leaning in a languishing attitude against the raised cover of the piano, Ad'lin murmured, "No one but you invents such modulations. You ought to indulge me with a grand composition, Count; have you never completed one?"

"I am busy now with a work of some scope for a grand orchestra," Fermor lisped, dabbing his limp, bloodless hands upon the keyboard like a nervous kangaroo.

"Ah! A sonata?--An opera?"

"No, a requiem; that is a kind of requiem--more correctly a morning impromptu, the last thoughts of a dying poacher."

"Oh how interesting! Pray let me hear it."

"It is a rather complicated piece of music, Fräulein Capriani," Fermor always ignores the Capriani patent of nobility--"if you are not especially fond of our German classic masters ...."

"I adore Wagner and Beethoven."

"Then, indeed, I will .... but the harmony is very complicated!"

Whereupon he began, with closed eyes, after the fashion of pretentious dilettanti, to deliver himself of a piece of music, the beginning of which reminded one of a piano-tuner, and the intermediate portion of the triumphal march of an operetta, and which, after it had lasted half an hour, and the audience had given up all hope of relief, suddenly, and without any apparent reason stopped short, a common termination where there has been no reason for beginning.

"C'est divin!" Ad'lin exclaimed. "Your composition, Count, reminds me of the intermezzo of the Fifth symphony."

"You are mistaken, Fräulein Capriani, my composition recalls no other music!" Fermor said, greatly irritated.

With his eyes glowing, his full red underlip trembling, and his manner insolently obtrusive, Capriani threw himself down beside Charlotte Malzin upon the sofa and stretched his arm along the back of it behind her shoulders.

"Come and help me with my work, Count Malzin," Frau von Capriani called kindly from her pile of cretonne. "You have so steady a hand."

And while Fritz took his place beside her, and began to cut a bird of Paradise out of the stuff with great precision, Kilary took Arthur by the buttonhole and said, "You ought to know all about it young man, how must one begin who wants to grow rich?"

"You must ask my father," Arthur replied insolently. "All that I understand of financial matters is, how to make debts."

A servant brought in the letters and papers upon a silver salver.

Whilst Arthur opened a dozen begging letters, and tossed them aside, ironically remarking, "Three impoverished Countesses--two Barons--a captain ..." and whilst Ad'lin hailed with enthusiasm two letters from a couple of French duchesses whom she counted among her friends, the Conte hurriedly ran his eye over an unpretending epistle which he had instantly opened. His hands trembled, a strange greed shone in his eyes, and quivered about his lips. Quite pale, as one is apt to be in a moment of victory he paced the room to and fro once or twice and then stepping directly up to Malzin he exclaimed, "What do you think--coal--! Schneeburg is a coal-bed. Extraordinary! Your father tried after madder, and I--have found coal!"

Malzin shuddered slightly, but merely said, "I congratulate you!"

"Malzin would never have forgiven himself if your bargain had turned out a poor one," sneered Kilary.

There was something in his irony that irritated Capriani, a rebellion of caste against the autocracy of money, which he chose to punish. As he was powerless with Kilary he turned to Malzin and said in a tone of insolent authority, "Malzin, get me the map of Bohemia that lies on my writing-table." At a moment like this the thin varnish of refinement which contact with the world had imparted was rubbed off entirely, he showed himself in all his coarseness, and this not through any recklessness, but intentionally, in the consciousness that he, Alfred Capriani might do as he chose. At a moment like this he delighted in treading beneath his feet all who did not prostrate themselves before his millions.

Malzin had attained a height where such insults did not reach him. But the blood mounted to the cheek of the mistress of the mansion. "Arthur, go and get the map!" she said gently.

Fritz languidly prevented him. "You do not know where the thing is," he said good-humouredly and left the room.

Capriani went on pacing the spacious apartment in long strides. "They are all alike, these blockheads," he muttered, "when they take it into their heads to work they are more stupid than ever. Old Malzin tried everything; he ruined himself in artificial madder-red, in lager beer, in sugar and in stocks,--and it never occurred to him that millions were lying in the ground beneath his feet."

Malzin returned with the map and as every table was overcrowded with bibelots and jardinières, it was spread out upon the piano. Capriani eagerly travelled over it with his pudgy forefinger. "The track of the new railway must go here, between the iron works and Schneeburg."

"Then it must go a very long round," Arthur remarked, "can you obtain the permit?"

Capriani stuck a thumb in an arm-hole of his waistcoat and smiled.

"Malzin, you know the estates around here; to whom does that belong?" pointing to a spot upon the map.

"That belongs to Kamenz," said Malzin bending forward, and fitting his eye-glass in his eye.

"And that?"

"To Lodrin."

"Then it comes to whether the interests of these gentlemen jump with your own," Arthur observed. "If they should work against you, you never can obtain the permit."

"Pshaw! I understand tolerably well how to deal with these gentlemen."

"Kamenz will give you no trouble, he is up to his neck in embarrassments, and would be glad to dispose advantageously of a piece of his land," drawled Kilary, looking at the map and giving his opinion with lazy assurance.

"Lodrin's affairs cannot be in a very brilliant condition," Arthur remarked; "ever since his majority he has been making no end of improvements, and he is hard up financially."

"With such an enormous property as the Lodrin estate there can be none save temporary embarrassments," Kilary said drily, "and in no case would Lodrin allow himself to be influenced by personal considerations. If you cannot demonstrate to him that the new railway will conduce to the universal benefit of the whole country he never will agree to it, and unless he does you can do nothing with the present ministry. A comical fellow Lodrin--a perfect pedant in some ways."

"No," said Malzin, "not the least of a pedant, but a hot head with a heart of gold, and when duty is concerned, he is just like his father."

"The old idiot," Capriani muttered below his breath, slowly as, with an air that was almost tender he stroked his long whiskers, while an odd smile played about his lips. "In fact you are right, Malzin,--a charming fellow, Ossi--a superb creature; not one of your Austrian nobility can hold a candle to him. But I--you'll see, Malzin,--I'll twist Ossi Lodrin around my thumb."

Half an hour afterwards the guests separated. Frau von Capriani, more depressed than usual, retired to her room.

The gentlemen went to the garden, and shot at a target; Conte Capriani, who never could bring down a pheasant on the wing, proved more successful than any of the others in hitting the bull's-eye.

When the Melkweyser, who had been indulging in a short nap, entered the library half an hour afterwards to look for a 'sanitary novel' she found Ad'lin deep in the study of a small thick volume.

Zoë looked over her shoulder; the book was the 'Gotha Almanach,' the Bradshaw of the Austrian aristocracy.

"What are you looking for?" the Baroness asked.

"For the Fermors--I want to know who the Count's mother was. She is not in this year's list. She was a Princess Brack, was she not?"

"No, his mother was a Fräulein Schmitt, the daughter of a rich tavern-keeper."

"Ah!"

CHAPTER VII.

The Malzins walked home through the park. Fritz looked perturbed. His wife held her head high, and in no agreeable mood chewed at the stalk of a rose which the Conte had cut for her.

"Lotti," Fritz began after a while, "I know that you act without reflection; you were a little imprudent to-day; it would be of no consequence with a man of breeding, but from a man like Capriani a lady must not allow the least familiarity."

"You always find something to lecture me about," she replied sharply. "I have long known that I am not good enough for you. But I must confess that I have never observed that the ladies of your circle are more reserved than those of mine."

"You know none of them," Fritz rejoined with incautious haste.

"You certainly have afforded me no opportunity of knowing them," Charlotte retorted, reddening with anger, "although you probably would have done so, had you not been ashamed of me from the first. Count Truyn has managed to give his wife a position,--but you--you would rather have died than have stirred a finger for me."

This was not literally true, for Fritz had once knocked off the hat of an acquaintance who had forgotten to remove it in Charlotte's presence; on one occasion he had fought a duel on her account, and on another had horsewhipped a slandering editor, but it was substantially true that he had made not the smallest effort to introduce her to his world. He made no reply now to her reproaches, hung his head, and pulled at his moustache. She went on with angry volubility. "You were ashamed to walk in the street with me, and when you took me to the theatre you always hid yourself in the back of the box, and every day you had some fault to find with my ways. I have watched your aristocratic ladies at the races, at the theatre, and at artist's festivals--and their manners are as free--and it must out--as ill-bred ...."

"The ill-breeding of a lady of rank," Fritz interrupted her impatiently "extends usually only as far as the good-breeding of the man with whom she chances to be."

"I don't know what you mean," the opera-bouffe singer replied.

"Our ladies know that the men whom they honour with their gay talk recognise their little whims, and merry extravagances as tokens of confidence which they would never dream of abusing. We never allow ourselves to step beyond the line which the lady herself draws. Familiarities like those which Capriani allowed himself toward you to-day are impossible among people of refinement. Of course from him nothing better can be expected; low fellow that he is!"

"And you are his hired servant," said Charlotte.

"Yes!" he replied, "I am his servant; it is my duty to select his horses and to write his letters, but I am not obliged to dine with him; that is not in the contract. And from this time I shall accept no more of his invitations. I will not expose myself a second time to the annoyance to which you and he subjected me to-day."

Charlotte began to cry. "You are cruel to me--and rough," she sobbed. "I have put up with poverty for your sake, sacrificed a brilliant career to my love for you----"

"Yes--yes, I know--I know--I am very sorry for you--but what can I do?" said Fritz.

"The only pleasure I can enjoy, you want to deprive me of, when I look forward to it from Sunday to Sunday."

"You enjoy it?--What, for Heaven's sake do you enjoy about it?" asked Fritz, to whom everything at these Sunday dinners was an offence, except the gentle eyes and soft voice of the hostess.

"I enjoy mingling at last in fine society," she said stubbornly, and as he only stared at her in silence, she went on, "I know that you despise modern fine folk. But my views are broader and freer, and I have no feeling for aristocratic chimeras!"

She had indeed no feeling for chimeras with or without the adjective, no feeling for moral and social subtleties, no feeling for honourable traditional superstitions, for fine inherited weaknesses and illusions, no feeling for all that constitute the moral supports of a caste, although they cannot be expressed in words or grasped with the hand. How could this woman comprehend Fritz, Fritz who had grown up with chimeras, who had made playmates of them in the nursery?

He shrugged his shoulders and was silent. Just then the wailing of a weak childish voice fell upon the warm evening air. Fritz hurried forward; in front of the small arbour, with his little son in her lap, sat an old woman; it was old Miller, his nurse in childhood, who had at last found an asylum in a corner of his house. "The little fellow is crying for his father," she said while the boy smiling through his tears stretched out his tiny arms. "The Herr Count ought not to spoil him so."

"Never mind that, Miller," Fritz said taking the child in his arms. "Oh, my pale darling, what should we do without each other, hey?"

Fifteen minutes afterwards Fritz was sitting on the edge of a small bed on which his boy was kneeling with folded hands, looking in his snowy night-gown, that fell in straight folds about him, like a veritable Luca della Robbia.

"Come, Franzi, have you forgotten your prayer?"

"In my small bed I lay me here,
I pray Thee dearest Lord be near,
About me clasp Thy loving arm,
And shelter me and keep me warm."

the child murmured sleepily, then offered his lips to his father and lay down.

It was a childish prayer--but Fritz learned it at his mother's knee from her dear lips--reason enough for teaching it to his son.

And until the little man fell asleep, his hand under his cheek, Fritz still sat on the edge of the bed and dreamed.

CHAPTER VIII.

Yes, of a truth, Fritz had grown up with chimeras; they had been his playmates, born and bred and domesticated in Schneeburg.

To them it was due that Fritz had married a second-rate actress; that Fritz, under all the most distressing circumstances, had still suffered from homesickness, and had taken refuge 'at home;' that he had always possessed a character not merely respectable, but thoroughly noble; never forfeiting the esteem of his equals although stricken from their visiting lists; and that, when in fulness of time he should make ready for the final journey, he might boldly face these very chimeras and say: "Often have I sinned against myself, and my own best happiness, but never, never against you; come therefore and help me to die."

His father was a gentleman, a philosopher, a freethinker,--a visionary, if you will. He raved about the new gospel of 1789, as one raves about an exotic flower, because of its unparalleled oddity, and from the conviction that it never can endure our climate. He had all kinds of bourgeois intimates and the "Contrat social" was his favourite book. But when his son, not from blind passion, but to satisfy conscientious scruples, married an actress, he was beside himself. When Fritz, not without a hint as to the circumstances that had led him to the fatal step, announced his marriage, his letter was sent by the old Count to his lawyer to answer. He himself refused any further intercourse with his son.

Had Fritz's mother been living, all might perhaps have been different. His wife would have been personally more distasteful to her than to his father, the fact of the connection would have seemed to her more miserable than to the old Count; but compassion for her child would have triumphed finally over every other consideration, her heart might have bled, but she would have taken home the distasteful daughter-in-law, and have tried to educate her for her position. At all events she would have known that when a man has trifled away 'the world,' his own home is his true place of refuge.

To all this the old Count gave never a thought, although he was kind-hearted, and Fritz had always been avowedly his favourite. He saw nothing but the misery and degradation of it all; his heart was benumbed by anger. All that was bestowed upon Fritz when he married, was his father's curse, the property which he inherited from his mother, and his share of what had belonged to an elder brother who had died. Although he had from the outset belonged among the "forçats du mariage," he did not for some time feel the burden of his chain and of the enforced companionship. Of an intensely sanguine temperament he had a positive genius for looking on the bright side of life. What annoyed him most at first was being obliged, on account of his marriage, to quit the service. He was terribly bored by having to spend the entire day without his comrades or his horses. His yearly income at this time amounted to the modest sum of six thousand gulden. After he had made out a list of necessary expenses,--that is, added up certain figures upon a visiting card with a gold pencil, he came to the conclusion, with a shrug, that a married man could not possibly live upon six thousand gulden a year, and that therefore, under the circumstances, he might allow himself the privilege of contracting debts.

Of course he would have thought it niggardly to save up anything while in the army; yet he had never been extravagant, he had always at the end of the month had something left over with which to help out a comrade.

He hoped to be able to curtail his household expenses; but there were so many things that no respectable man 'could go without,' and still more, which his wife could not deny herself.--

When Fritz was quite a little boy, his father had often admonished him as to the serious nature of life, and had impressed him as a younger son with the necessity of restricting his needs as much as possible, and even of earning his own living. His narrow circumstances in the future, had occupied the boy's mind, and one day he opened his heart to his sister's governess, at that time his confidante. He said to her, "Madame! Papa yesterday told of a contractor who employed people for fifty kreutzers a day.--Is that fair?"

"Certainly, mon bijou. Why do you ask?"

The boy looked very important, and began to reckon on his small fingers, "Fifty kreutzers a day--hm--that makes five gulden for ten persons--if I marry, and my wife keeps a maid, and I a man--and if we have six children beside--five gulden a day--I can afford that at least."

At twenty-six years of age Fritz's ideas with regard to economy were not much more practical. A household with neither man-servant nor maid-servant did not come within his range of possibilities.

He spent a couple of weeks with his young wife at the Hotel Munsch; a hostelry now out of fashion, but having for generations enjoyed the patronage of the Malzin family, and after that he hired a pretty suite of second-story rooms in a retired street, and arranged it according to his taste, and as he honestly believed, as moderately as possible. He had none of the snobbishness of an impoverished parvenu, who is ashamed of being obliged suddenly to retrench, and hides his economies as a crime. On the contrary, he exulted boyishly when he had succeeded in procuring at a moderate price some pretty piece of furniture, an old oriental rug, or a carved chest, nor did he ever hesitate to lend a hand himself; he hammered and tacked with his slender fingers, as if he had been bred to such work all his life.

And it must be admitted that, with the exception of the drawing-room, which his wife in spite of his remonstrances persisted in disfiguring with green damask hangings, purchased at an auction with her savings, his little home was a masterpiece of tasteful comfort. His former comrades liked to drop in often for a game of cards with him. There was no high play, and the drinking was very moderate, but the supper, the style of the company, and the company itself, were always alike exquisite.

The only disturbing element at these unostentatious gatherings was the mistress of the household, who sat opposite her husband at supper, affected and peevish in manner, and really bored by the high-bred and respectful courtesy with which she was treated.

At first Fritz had indulged in ideal schemes of educating his wife, but they all came to grief. There was no trace in the wife of the docile devotion of the betrothed. A woman whose whole heart is her husband's never feels humiliated by his superiority. Her whole being aspires to him, her perceptions become all the more acute, and in a very short while she learns to divine, to avoid, whatever may offend him.

This was, however, by no means the case with Charlotte. Her love for Fritz was of a very humdrum kind, and comprehension of him she had none. She did not acknowledge his superiority. All his good-humoured little preachments upon manners, she listened to with stubborn irritability. She was characterized to an extreme degree by the obdurate narrow-mindedness which sneers conceitedly at everything unlike itself, and absolutely refuses to learn. Fine clothes and pedantic affectations awed her, but she had no appreciation for the simple good-breeding of a man whose manners are the natural outgrowth of the habits of his class. Genuine good-breeding is like a mother-tongue which is spoken from childhood unconsciously as to its source, and correctly, without a thought of conjugations and declensions.

This she neither knew nor understood; she was far better pleased with the artificial manners which are acquired when one is grown up, like a foreign tongue from the grammar, and which are continually seasoned with pretentious quotations, from modern dictionaries of etiquette. The difference between Count Fritz and a smugly-dressed bagman, lay in her eyes solely in the title.

Before long Fritz grew tired of trying to educate her, and confined himself merely to the most necessary admonitions.

Time passed--and there was a cradle hung with green silk in the Countess's room, and within it lay a boy of rare beauty. Charlotte petted and caressed her child with the instinct of tenderness shown by the lower animals towards their young, an instinct which fades out gradually, as soon as the offspring can forego its mother's physical care. Fritz rejoiced over the little fellow and had him christened Siegfried after the old Count his father, to whom he announced the birth of his grandson, hoping that it might help to bring about a reconciliation with the angry parent.

But the Count took no notice of the announcement.

At first Fritz's paternal sentiments were by no means enthusiastic, and if at times he caressed the little man, it was more out of kindness towards the mother than out of real interest in the child.

On one occasion, however, he happened to enter the nursery just before going out, his hat on his head. The little one was in his bath, an expression of absolute physical comfort in his half-closed eyes, and on his plump little body, every dimple of which could be seen distinctly beneath the clear water.

Fritz stopped, and playfully sprinkled a few drops of water upon the pretty baby-face. The child opened wide his eyes, and when his father repeated the play, the little one chuckled so merrily that it sounded like the cooing of doves, while throwing back his head and clinching his rosy fists upon his breast.

A few days afterward Fritz went again to the nursery; this time the boy was just out of his bath and was being dried in the nurse's lap. He recognised his father and stretched out his plump arms to him. Fritz could not help tickling him a little, touching his dimples with a forefinger, and catching hold of the wee hands; a strange sensation crept over him at the touch of the pure warm baby-flesh.

From that time he went into the nursery every day, if only for a moment. The child grew more and more lovely. His little pearly teeth appeared, and soft, golden hair hung over his forehead. He soon began in his short frocks to creep on all-fours over the carpet, and even to rise to his feet, holding by some article of furniture; and once, as Fritz was watching him with a languid smile, the boy suddenly left the chair against which he was leaning, and proudly and laboriously putting one foot before the other, advanced four steps towards his father, upon whose knee he was placed triumphantly quite out of breath with the mighty effort.

When a little girl appeared as a claimant for the green-draped cradle, a pretty diminutive bedstead was placed in Fritz Malzin's room.

What good comrades they were, Papa, and Siegi! Fritz talked to the little fellow of all sorts of things that he never mentioned to any one else, of his loved ones, of his home! And Siegi would look at him out of his large eyes, as earnestly as if he understood every word. Long before he could put words together, the boy learned to say "grandpapa," and when his father, pointing to the photograph of an old castle, that hung framed in the smoking-room, asked "Siegi, what is that?" the little fellow would reply "Neeburg."

The child was his father's friend, his companion, and was loved with an idolatry such as only those fathers can know who are estranged from their wives, and have no other interest in life.

Of course the child had a French bonne, but her post was almost a sinecure. Fritz scarcely lost sight of the child for a moment.

Shortly after his removal to Wiplinger street he had become convinced by certain calculations, that, in view of the high price demanded by hack-drivers, it was a great economy to keep horses.

The result of these calculations was attained after the fashion of the clever man who demonstrated clearly that it is far cheaper to live in a first-class Hotel than in one of the second class.

When Siegi was barely three years old, Fritz used to put him on the seat beside him in his dog-cart, and drive with him in the Prater. For greater security the child was tied fast to the back of the seat with a broad, silken scarf.

Count Malzin's dog-cart was soon one of the best-known turn-outs in the Prater; the picturesque, lovely child beside the handsome, distinguished man could not fail to attract notice. Siegi was always dressed in good taste, and his soft curls lay like gold upon his shoulders. From time to time his little face was turned up eagerly to his father with some childish question. Then Fritz would bend over him with a smile, and sometimes put his arm around him.

It was a positive delight to see them thus together. Many a lady who since Fritz's marriage had returned his bow but coldly, now nodded to him kindly as they gazed after the child.

Once on a lovely day in April, Fritz alighted from his dog-cart with his little son and took him to walk, as was customary in Vienna, in the Prater. He was surrounded in a few minutes by a group of ladies with whom he had formerly been acquainted. Siegi had a triumphant success, every one wanted a kiss or a pat from his little hand.

"Exquisite!" exclaimed one after another. "What a little angel! Malzin, you must bring the child to see us."

"Fritz, do bring him to see me to-morrow at five, my children take their dancing-lesson then. You will come, won't you? You know the way."

And Fritz, flattered, smiled and bowed.

Since his marriage he had not gone into society; but for his boy's sake he accepted these invitations; the little fellow must learn to associate with his equals. Fritz resolved that he himself should alone endure the consequences of his folly, his son should not suffer from it.

Although well-bred people of rank in their normal condition usually train their children to a conventional modesty of demeanour, Fritz, on the contrary, took pleasure in making his son almost haughty, he, whose own lack of all pretention had been a by-word!

When pride stands on the defensive, it always deteriorates somewhat.

In spite of the modest scale of his household expenses, Fritz found to his surprise that during the first year he had spent just double his income. "It is always so the first year," he consoled himself by thinking, but when the second year was no better but much worse, the matter began to annoy him.

At his card-parties, which were still kept up, although Charlotte but seldom appeared at them, (a relief usually purchased by Fritz with a box for her at the theatre,) one of the guests was a certain Baron Schneller, a good-natured, well-to-do fellow, who had no taste for earning money, and was in consequence rather in disgrace with his family, who showed great diligence in that direction. He squandered his income among antiquities and ballet-girls. His volunteer year he had served in Fritz's squadron.

In his embarrassment Fritz applied to Schneller, and asked whether he knew of any more profitable investment for money than Austrian government bonds? Whereupon the banker's indolent son replied that he himself always invested upon principle in mortgages, but if Fritz wanted to know, he would ask his brother, who was at the head of his father's banking-firm.

The next day he came, in his good-natured way, to see Fritz, bringing a list of 'safe stocks,' which were just then paying enormous dividends, and saying "My brother sends his regards, and begs you to consider him entirely at your service in any financial operation."

With characteristic carelessness, Fritz delivered over his property to the banker, and the banker protested that it was an honour to oblige the young gentleman.

After this Fritz felt free to spend three times as much as before. His property swelled and swelled without his comprehending the mysterious reasons for its increase. At last it began to assume the most unexpected dimensions. This lasted for some time.

One day the banker informed the young Count that he was a millionaire, and asked him at the same time if he did not wish to realize.

"Where is the use?" said Fritz, "there is no hurry,--er--I'll have a talk with you about it one of these days. I have no time just now."

He had promised the children to take them to the circus; of course he had no time for business.

He was dining with Schneller, when he suddenly heard a young government official, who did not belong exactly to financial circles, say. "A sorry prospect--the evening papers say that the Sternfeld-Lonsbergs are shaky."

Fritz was startled. Little as he troubled himself about business affairs, he knew that the greatest part of his property was invested in Sternfeld-Lonsbergs. He looked fixedly at his host, who, however, only shrugged his shoulders, and remarking, "merely an insignificant depression," scraped a piece of turbot from the half-denuded vertebrae of the fish which the servant was handing him.

Fritz continued to talk to his fair neighbour with the self-possession of a thoroughly well-bred man, while the Japanese dinner-service, with the cut glass, and flowers on the table danced wildly before his eyes.

After dinner, his eye-glass in his eye, and a pleasant smile on his lips, he took occasion to glance furtively at a paper, lying on a little table. His blood fairly ran cold; suddenly Baron Schneller stood beside him. "You are entirely wrong to be worried," he asserted, and Fritz laughed and shrugged his shoulders as if the affair in question were a mere bagatelle. But the next day he wrote a note to the banker begging him to dispose of his stock for him. The banker dissuaded him from selling, the market was unfavourable; for the present he insisted the only thing to do was to wait.

Fritz complied; shortly afterwards the banker advised him to take part in a complicated transaction which Fritz took no pains to understand, but which Schneller assured him positively would result in enormous profits.

It was simply a reckless piece of stock-gambling.

Fritz agreed to everything--what did he know about it? His financial affairs began to inconvenience him more and more. He wanted to be rich.

Just at this time he had to pay a couple of large bills, which had not been presented for three years. He thought of his father. Good Heavens! The old Count could not be angry still. But, after years of alienation he could not in a financial difficulty make up his mind to appeal to him without further preface.

"No, no, that will not do," he said to his small confidant, Siegi. "We must first see whether grandpapa cares for us, and if he does then we will make our confession; if not--vogue la galère."

He never guessed the terrible misery that menaced him. Poverty was a phantom of which he had heard, without believing in it--it was as incomprehensible to him as death to a perfectly healthy man.

And so Siegi's bonne had to dress the boy in his newest sailor suit, and his father took him to be photographed.

The picture was excellent. Fritz took a boyish delight in it, and showed it to all his acquaintances. He thought it impossible that the grandfather could resist that cherub face. He wrote the old Count a letter, every word of which came warm from his heart, telling him how he longed to see him, and then he guided Siegi's hand--the boy had just begun to write the alphabet large between pencilled lines--to write upon the back of the photograph: "Dear grandpapa, love me a little--I send you a kiss and I am your little grandson. Siegi."

He awaited an answer in feverish but almost unwavering hope. The fourth day brought a letter from Schneeburg. Fritz recognised his father's handwriting and hurriedly tore open the envelope. It contained nothing save Siegi's photograph, which the old Count had returned without a word.

Fritz clinched his fist and stamped his foot. Then he lifted his little son in his arms, kissing and caressing him as if to atone to the boy for the insult cast on him.

It was impossible to ask any favour of one who could act thus, even were he his father.

This was at the end of September, and shortly afterwards came ruin, utter inevitable ruin! Not modest poverty which privately plucks our sleeve and whispers, "retrench--economize!" no, but downright brutal poverty, that seizes us by the collar with a dirty hand and wrenching us out of the warm soft nest of our daily habits, casts us out into the cold barren street with "Starve! vagabond! freeze!"

The million had disappeared, and when the banker, Schneller, announced to Fritz his ruin, he added, "of course you cannot be forced to meet your obligations, Herr Count. The matter lies partly in your own hands."

Fritz stared at him! The worst of it all was that his property was not sufficient to cover his indebtedness!

A multitude of petty creditors suddenly flocked around, saddlers, tailors, shoemakers, upholsterers, whose bills mounted to thousands. Fritz was beside himself. Small tradesmen must not lose by him. He broke up his entire household, and disposed of everything, from the oriental rugs in his smoking-room, to Siegi's black velvet suit and Venetian lace collar.

But with all that he could do he could not pay every one. Some of the lesser creditors were coarse and pressing, but most of them only meekly twirled their caps about in their hands, murmuring, "We can wait, Herr Count; we rely entirely upon the Herr Count."

He lived through each day dully, almost apathetically. The dreariness and emptiness of his house made no impression upon him. When the time came for him to part with his horses--a member of the jeunesse dorée of Vienna bought them at a high price--he took Siegi and went down into the stable, where he fed the beautiful creatures with bread and sugar, and stroked their heads and patted their necks; and when he turned and left them neighing and snorting with delight--it seemed to him that a piece of his heart were being torn from out his breast!....

Every day his wife asked him when he was going to appeal to his father, but he made no reply. After the insult that the old Count had offered to his darling, nothing should ever induce him to make another appeal. Nothing? So he thought then. "My father must have heard of my unfortunate circumstances," he said to himself, "and if it does not occur to him to help me, there is nothing that I can do."

He determined to find a situation,--of course one befitting his name and station. If every ancient noble name to-day in Austria cannot lay claim, as in France in Louis the Fourteenth's time, to an office at court, or to a salary, there are at least a hundred kinds of sinecures that can afford the means of living suitably for their rank, to young scions of the nobility who have not sinned against the prejudices of their caste.

His fatal marriage aggravated the difficulties of Malzin's position. The horizon of his existence contracted and darkened more and more.

The dogged determination which, closing accounts with the past, resolutely clears away the débris of a ruined life from the path which is to lead to a new existence, Fritz did not possess. His was the passive endurance of pride, which calmly bows beneath the burden, and drags on with it to the end, simply because it scorns to complain or to appeal to compassion.

One feeling only was stronger within him than pride, and that was love for his children.

Were he alone concerned, he would rather have starved than prefer a second request after the first had been refused, but he could not bring himself to see his children slowly starve.

He applied to several individuals who had always been on terms of great intimacy with his family, but after some had refused to receive him, and others had ignored his request with a forced smile, he felt paralysed, and resigned himself for a while to melancholy, brooding inactivity. There must come a change sooner or later, he thought. In the meanwhile he lived upon--debt, and could not comprehend why professional usurers should need so much urging to induce them to lend him, the probable heir of Schneeburg, a paltry couple of hundred gulden.

Had he been more exactly informed of his father's circumstances, this would not have surprised him so much. But he had heard nothing of the old Count for years. A strange repugnance had prevented his speaking of him to strangers,--it would only expose his own unfortunate estrangement from his father to their indiscreet curiosity. Every day he had a secret hope, although he hardly admitted it to himself, that the old Count would take pity upon him, and suddenly appear providentially.

But his father did not appear, and thus it was that finally he, Fritz Malzin, with his wife and children occupied two dingy third-story rooms in Leopold street, rented from his mother-in-law, who kept a lodging-house for gentlemen.

Charlotte from morning until night bewailed her husband's unconscionable heedlessness, but in reality she was much happier than in Wipling street. To lounge about all the morning in a slatternly dishabille, to help prepare the breakfast for the lodgers, to gossip a little and flirt a little, and then in the evenings to array herself in the finery which she had contrived to smuggle into her present quarters, and to go to Ronacher's or some other beer-garden, where half a dozen second and third-rate coxcombs addressed her as 'Frau Countess,' and paid court to her,--such a life was bliss after the tedium of her former existence. She went out every evening, leaving Fritz at home with the children, revolving all kinds of improbable possibilities which might suddenly improve his condition, and devising schemes dependant upon lucky accidents that never happened.

Sometimes a little warm hand was thrust into his; and a soft voice whispered to him: "Papa, tell me a story!"

Then rousing himself from his sad reveries, he would try to make up some merry tale, but Siegi would shake his head, and nestling close to his father with his arms clinging about his neck and his head leaning against his father's cheek would beg, "Tell me about Schneeburg, Papa."

The winter with its long nights wore on in close rooms poisoned by coal-gas, and pervaded by the cramping sensation of wretched confinement. Spring came; Siegi had lost his rosy cheeks, and his merry laugh. Every afternoon towards sunset his father took him out to walk. The child coughed a little.

One warm day in April the clouds were hanging low, while ever and anon in the narrow street a swallow skimmed anxiously to and fro. Siegi was weary, and his little feet dragged one after the other, when suddenly he pulled his father's hand, joyously shouting: "Papa, papa--look--don't you see?--there is our Miesa!"

Fritz looked. It did not take an old 'cavalry man' an instant to recognize in an animal harnessed to a fiacre, one of his handsome horses of aforetime.

"Miesa! how are you, old girl?" he said caressingly.

The creature recognised him instantly, and whinnied her delight. Fritz patted her neck and lifted Siegi up that he might kiss the white star on the animal's forehead, as he used to do.

Then they resumed their walk. Without saying a word Fritz stroked his little son's cheek;--it was wet with tears. The poor little fellow was crying silently, for fear of grieving his father!

Fritz felt a strange, choking sensation. He took the boy to a confectioner's, but the child could eat nothing.

That night Siegi was taken ill. The physician pronounced it inflammation of the lungs. Lying in his father's arms for three days and nights, the boy suffered fearfully, and then the crisis was over. At the end of three weeks the little fellow could leave his bed, but he was paler and weaker than ever.

During Siegi's illness Fritz borrowed a hundred gulden from a former friend. Shortly afterwards he saw this friend in the street and was advancing to meet him when he saw him cross over the way with the evident intention of avoiding him. Fritz's blood was stirred at this, and blind, reckless rage seized him. The paltry hundred should be repaid at any cost. He sold his winter overcoat, and the golden chronometer which his father had given to him on his sixteenth birthday, and which was to have been an heirloom for Siegi.

He paid the hundred gulden--but ah, how often he repented it!

CHAPTER IX.

Among the lodgers at the widow Schmitt's, as Charlotte's mother was called, was a sallow-faced old woman, whose room was a small, dark, comfortless hole, and who wore the same shabby, green gown, summer and winter, year in and year out. She was known as Frau Pick, and she was a professional beggar.

One day, on returning from some humiliating errand, Fritz heard one of his sisters-in-law call to his wife: "Pick is waiting."--"I am ready," was the reply, and Charlotte came out into the passage with a letter in her hand. Fritz sprang to meet her, snatched the letter from her, forced her back into the room and, entering, closed the door behind them.

The letter was addressed to the archbishop of Vienna.

"What does this letter contain?" he asked angrily, seizing her so rudely by the wrist, that she screamed and fell upon her knees before him; she did not answer his question, however.

"Is it a begging-letter?"

"Yes."

He thrust her from him indignantly. "Shame upon you!" he exclaimed.

"It is all your fault!" she replied scornfully, "if you won't work, I must beg."

"Ah!"--he staggered as if from a blow full in the face, snatched up his hat and went out.

Before night he had a situation in the office of a tramway company, at a hundred gulden a month.

The summer was more sultry than usual. The air in Vienna seemed fever-laden. The trees in Ring street no longer rustled dreamily as in Spring, there was a sound among their parched leaves as of a low cough. If a rose bloomed out in the public gardens in early morning, before evening it looked dry and withered, like a reveller returning from a masked ball; the blue Danube was as tawny as a canal, and Vienna reminded one more than ever of Manzanares.

The theatres were deserted, the tramways overcrowded, all who could went out into the country. Pedestrians hugged the wall on the shady side of the street; the skies were one monotone of blue. The glare of the house-fronts made the eyes ache.

The pestilent summer atmosphere of cities hung over Vienna, saturated with decay, and reeking with filth. A deadly epidemic broke out; in almost every block one met a sad litter, borne by silent sanitary officials.

Siegi grew weaker and more weary day by day; he coughed a little but never complained. Fritz consulted his old family physician who merely prescribed nourishing food and country air.

Fritz insisted upon knowing whether any danger was to be apprehended--the old man remained silent, and of a sudden the father felt that freezing thrill that comes of touching a corpse. For the first time he recognized the possibility of the child's death.

All his pride broke down at the thought; he wrote immediately to his father, unfolding to him his own need and the child's condition, and imploring permission to bring the boy to Schneeburg.

Days passed into weeks; his letter was unanswered. He lived on mechanically with sufficient mental force to fulfil his duties at the office. He performed them slowly and with difficulty, but he was treated with consideration. Even had there been a way close at hand out of the misery he could hardly have found it now.

Every morning Siegi's weak little voice sounded weaker, as he said, when his father left him, "Come back soon!"

Why had he repaid that hundred gulden? There was no conceivable humiliation to which he would not gladly now have submitted could he but procure for Siegi the comforts that were needed! But to have to haggle over the price of an orange or of an ice!

There were moments, when he ground his teeth, and in his heart avowed that he was ready and willing to beg, to steal for Siegi. But not every one who will, can be a rogue. Once or twice he met a 'friend' who still lingered in Vienna. He advanced towards him--with words of begging on his lips--only to be seized with a fit of trembling--no, he could not--he could not--it was impossible!

And scarcely had his 'friend 'passed by before he cursed himself for his--cowardice. Weaker and weaker grew the child. Once Fritz took it to the Prater to amuse it. The gay music of the band, the carriages, all that the summer had left, in which the boy had once found such delight, now cut him to his little heart.

They sat together upon a bench, beneath the dusty trees. The child looked at the throng of vehicles with eyes wide and fixed--the father looked at his son. "Does it amuse you? Do you like it, Siegi?" he asked, bending tenderly over him; the boy smiled faintly and said, "Yes, Papa!" But, in a few moments he leaned his tired little head against the father's breast and lisped, "Let us go home."

Only a little while longer and Siegi could not leave his bed--and Fritz heard the dread word 'consumption!'

He knew that it could be only a question of weeks, and sometimes said to himself that it would be better for the child if death would come quickly. But he thrust the thought from him. No, no, he yearned to hear as long as possible the little voice, and to stroke the thin cheek. The rosy childish face was wan and pinched, the arms looked like little brown sticks, the delicate tracery of the blue veins about the temples grew daily more distinct, the brow grew more like marble....

Then came mornings when Fritz, going early to his office, feared that he should not find the child living upon his return in the evening. As he mounted the stairs when he came home his heart would seem to stand still--he would enter the room very softly. The little head would move on the pillow, a hoarse little voice would gasp: "Papa!" and the father's heart would leap for joy!

It came towards the end of August--in a heavy, stifling, sultry night. He was alone with his child.

Charlotte had retired; she could not look upon death. The heat was intolerable. The windows were wide open, but they looked out upon a court where the air was no cooler than in the sick-room. The fragrance of the roses and mignonette, which Fritz had brought home with him to perfume the air a little, floated sadly through the small room. It seemed as if the death struggle of the flowers mingled with the death struggle of the child. Siegi lay in his little bed, propped up with pillows. His breathing was so short and quick that it could hardly be counted. "Papa!" he gasped from time to time.

"What, my darling? Do you want anything?"

"No,--only--when are we going to Schneeburg?"

"Soon, my pet--very soon!"

The child became half unconscious, tossed from side to side, and plucked vehemently at the sheet with his emaciated little hands. Delirium set in, he laughed aloud, chirrupped to imaginary horses, and then with a thin, quavering little voice, began to sing an old French nursery song that his bonne had taught him:

"Il était un petit navire...."

Poor Fritz's blood ran cold, he took the child in his arms, and clasped him close. The cooler air of dawn breathed through the room--the light of the poor candle flickered strangely. Gray shadows danced on the wall like phantoms--the low chirp of a bird was heard in the distance.

Suddenly the flame of the candle leaped up and died out. Fritz started and gazed at the child--it was dead!

CHAPTER X.

The next morning Fritz received a letter from his father enclosing a draft for a thousand-gulden note, coupled with the old Count's cordial and anxious words. His son's last letter had reached him in the most complicated roundabout way; he had just returned from a voyage to Australia, and had known nothing of Fritz's unfortunate circumstances.

In reply Fritz merely wrote, "The child is dead."

It was the afternoon after the funeral, and Fritz was all alone in the house. Charlotte had taken the children for a little walk; there was a sharp ring at his door. He rose and opened it. A white-haired old gentleman of distinguished mien, asked, "Is Count Malzin----"

"Father!" stammered Fritz.

The old man advanced a step, eagerly scanned the face that had grown wan and haggard almost past recognition, then opened wide his arms and clasped his son to his heart. All anger, all bitterness on both sides was forgotten.

They sat down in the dim, sordid room in which Siegi had died, and Fritz laid bare his heart.

They sat close enough to read the deep sympathy in each other's eyes, and to hear each other's low tones, and in the midst of his inconsolable grief, Fritz rejoiced in being once more with some one who understood him, some one to whose loving compassion he could confide the wretchedness of his life.

He told his father everything; of his marriage, of his imprudence--of his misery. He soon perceived that the old Count had believed Charlotte to be worse than she was, and therefore had refused to acknowledge Siegi as his grandson.

But that was all past and gone! He made his son bring out all the likenesses of the dead boy, and was absorbed in every detail concerning him; he asked endless questions, and seemed as if he would thereby fain have assumed a share of his son's overwhelming grief, relieving Fritz of it to that extent at least.

At last steps were heard outside, and Charlotte entered with the children. Fritz winced.

"Father, this is my wife."

The grand old Count advanced to meet her as if she were a princess, called her "daughter" and kissed her forehead. He could not sufficiently caress and pet the children.

The next morning Fritz with the children paid him a visit at the Hotel Munsch, and they took leave of each other with affectionate cordiality.

"Of course you will come to Schneeburg with your family as soon as possible," the old Count said anxiously, as they parted. "You need your home, my poor boy."

And Fritz rejoiced--in the midst of all his grief,--at the thought of home.

They had already begun to get ready to leave Vienna, when a letter arrived from Schneeburg.

"Dear Fritz,

Hard as it is to write it, I must ask you not to give up your situation in Vienna for the present. My poor, dear boy, I can do nothing for you until my affairs are arranged. Only have patience and all will soon be well, etc...."

When the hoped-for arrangement was completed it was discovered that the old Count was penniless. In his costly expedients to raise money he had begun frittering away his property and then--it seemed incredible--he became infected with the general mania for finding millions on the highway, and had entangled himself in a colossal speculation in Australian gold mines. Conte Capriani, with whom he had become acquainted in Vichy, had convinced him of the certainty of gain in the affair. Capriani's name alone was sufficient warrant for the value of the stock. The old Count was made president of the company; his name was used to inspire the public with confidence,--his noble old name which he had borne so honourably for sixty-five years! The first year the company paid enormous dividends--out of their capital. In the second year matters began to look suspicious. The Conte slowly withdrew from the scheme--he found that certain things were different from what he had supposed; he had been falsely informed.... He advised the Count, who went to Paris to consult him, to dispose of his stock slowly without exciting suspicion. But the Count would not listen to anything of the kind. He had pledged himself to the public, his easy confidence had induced hundreds of men to buy the stock, he had urged many of them to do so thinking it was for their advantage. Among them were poor people, impoverished relatives, nay even old servants, his children's former tutors who had invested all their savings in this unfortunate scheme, upon his recommendation. He was beside himself, bought up as much of the stock as he could, and went himself to Australia to investigate matters. He, who in his whole life from his school-days up had never known anything of figures beyond what enabled him to keep the reckoning at whist, now ciphered and calculated, bringing all his powers of mind to bear upon the possibilities of profit.

He found matters by no means as desperate as had been represented in Europe--the affair might have been made a success with prompt energetic management; what was needed was more capital. But the confidence of the stockholders was shaken; the Count upon his return to Europe tried in vain to issue fresh stock, he applied fruitlessly to the Conte Capriani, representing to him that as the originator of the entire speculation he was bound to help. The Conte maintained that he was powerless.

The stock fell lower and lower, fell with bewildering rapidity.

One day Fritz received a letter: "Schneeburg must be sold."

The poor fellow felt as if his sore heart had been struck with a hammer. His sad yearning for his home was turned to a burning thirst--a consuming desire. He was as homesick as a peasant, nay--as a Slav.

Men who live in cities and change their dwelling-place three or four times, never strike root anywhere, and consequently can have no conception of the homesickness that attacks a man who is separated from the soil upon which he and his ancestors for generations have been born and bred. A man thus bred has become acclimated like a plant, to this special air, this special soil, and however long the years of absence, wherever he may have lived meanwhile, he will always yearn for 'home.'

Fritz had caught a cold upon leaving Wipling street, at the same time that Siegi had been taken with the illness that ended in his death. Fritz recovered, but his health was shattered, his voice was husky, and h» had feverish nights which in spite of weariness were wakeful. For hours he would pace the wretched room where stood Siegi's empty little bed, which he had not brought himself to have removed, and would conjure up visions of Schneeburg.

Sell Schneeburg! In his pain at this fresh blow he forgot for a moment his grief for his child. Memories of 'home' thronged about him with a vividness that savoured of mental hallucination. He saw the morning sun glitter in the dewy moss that lay green on the thatched roofs of the village, he saw the very puddles before the houses wherein the swine wallowed, and a flock of fowls scratching on a muck-heap, and a group of shivering children cowering beneath the cross before the smithy.

He saw the pond in the middle of the village; the little dusky waves swelled and rippled beneath the nipping wind of autumn and a single rugged elm cast its long reflection across the broken surface. He saw the soft black soil on the edge of the pond stamped with countless impressions of webbed feet. He saw the geese themselves, hissing and flapping their wings while the sunlight played upon the rough pink surface of their plucked breasts. Thatched roofs, swine, and geese had certainly never interested him much--these detailed impressions had been made upon his mind all unconsciously--they belonged to the whole.

He saw long transparent wreaths of mist like ghostly shrouds, floating above the freshly-ploughed fields, and the crows flapping above the brown leafless trees, in gloomy processions, mourners for the dead summer,--a dun-coloured cow was standing between two gnarled apple-trees by the way-side, looking inquisitively out of her dark-blue glazed eyes.

The pictures grew confused, and again distinct. He saw the park with its broad emerald meadows where the venerable trees grew in large dense clumps. He knew the voice of every single tree, the rustle of the oak differed from the murmur of the copper-beech; he knew the very tree which would turn orange-coloured in autumn, which one only yellow, edged with black, and which one dark crimson. They stirred their grand old heads and broke into a chant; it sounded like a magnificent choral through the still autumn air, while single leaves, frosted with dew, as with delicate molten silver, loosed their hold and sank slowly fluttering down upon the grass.

And the kitchen garden, that Paradise of childhood, with its hoary apricot-trees, whose mellow fruit always dropped on the old-fashioned sage beds. Ah, what fruit it was, so big, and so yellow, and so juicy!

Then he laughed softly at something that had happened twenty years before, and--waking from his visions, and his reverie, passed his hand across his brow. Where was he? Sitting in the room of a miserable lodging-house, beside the empty little bed of his dead child.

He lay down very weary. The last thing that he saw distinctly before falling asleep was a large circle of red gravel in front of Schneeburg Castle, furrowed with delicate ruts. These ruts formed the figure of eight--the first figure of eight which he, a boy of fifteen, had drawn in the gravel with his father's four-in-hand--the delicate fragrance, not perceptible to every one, of wild strawberries floated past him, and then all faded. Sleep compassionately laid her hand upon his heart and brain. He slept the sleep of the dead for a couple of hours, and the next morning his torture began afresh.

He could have wandered barefoot like a beggar to Schneeburg, only to be able to fling himself down on that dear earth, and kiss the very soil of his home.

The sale was long in concluding,--purchasers chaffered as usual, when in treaty for an impoverished estate. There were fears that it would be brought to the hammer. But in the spring Capriani appeared and offered a price for Schneeburg which was at least sufficient to cover the Count's indebtedness. His lawyer urged the old man not to delay accepting this offer, but Siegfried Malzin still hesitated. For three days he wandered about Schneeburg like one distraught, then he began to yield conditionally, but all conditions vanished before Capriani's energy. Malzin lost his head, and made many injudicious concessions. He sold with the estate very many valuable articles that he ought to have kept for himself. He forgot everything--and as a man at a fire will finally rescue in triumph an old umbrella, and a child's toy, so he rescued from his property, in addition to the family vault, which from the first he insisted upon keeping, nothing, save--the stuffed charger which stood in the hall, and which a Malzin had bestridden on the occasion of the liberation of Vienna by Sobiesky.

The morning after the deed of sale had been signed, the former possessor of Schneeburg was found dead in his bed--heart-disease had delivered him from misery.