Erlach Court Part 3

"Your opera-gla.s.s--be quick!" And, while Rohritz reluctantly rises to go for the desired optical aid, Stasy lisps, "Not at all over-polite; quite like a brother: just what I enjoy."

"It is they," Katrine exclaims. "The carriage is just turning into the avenue. Let me have it for a moment,"--taking from his hand the gla.s.s which Rohritz has just brought. "Yes, now I see them quite distinctly."

A few minutes later the rattle of approaching wheels is heard. The two ladies and the general hasten down to receive the guests. Rohritz discreetly withdraws to his apartment, and from behind his half-drawn curtains watches the arrival. The carriage stops, the captain springs out to aid two ladies to alight. At first Rohritz hears nothing but a hubbub of glad voices, sees nothing but a confused group, the general standing on one side with a polite grin on his face, and Freddy giving vent to his joyous excitement by performing a war-dance around the party.

When the situation at last becomes clear, he perceives a very handsome old lady in a close black travelling-hat, a pair of blue spectacles s.h.i.+elding her eyes from the dust, and wearing a dust-cloak which may once have been black, while beside her--he adjusts his eye-gla.s.s in his eye--a.s.suredly Stella does not remind him of the 'hysterical tree-frog'

of frightful memory, but of some one else, for the life of him he cannot remember whom. He looks and looks, sees two serious dark eyes in a gentle childlike face beneath the broad brim of a Kate-Greenaway hat, a half-wayward, half-shy smile, charming dimples appearing by turns in the cheeks and at the corners of the mouth, a delicately-chiselled nose, a very short and rather haughty upper lip, beneath which gleam rows of pearly teeth, and for the rest, the figure of a sylph, rather tall, still a little too thin, and with a foot peeping from beneath her skirt that Taglioni might covet.

He looks and looks. No, Stella certainly does not remind him of the 'hysterical tree-frog,' but as certainly she recalls to his mind something, some one--who is it? who can it be?

An unpleasant surmise occurs to him, but before it can take actual shape in his brain the impetuous entrance of the captain has banished it.

"Come to the drawing-room, Rohritz, and be presented to the ladies," he calls out. "By the way, what means this wretched idea of which Stasy informs me? She says that you are going back to Gratz immediately."

"The fact is, my lawyer has summoned me," Rohritz replies; "but--hm!--I fancy the matter can be settled by letter. At any rate, I will try to have it so disposed of."

"Bravo!"

CHAPTER IV.

STELLA.

Freddy has been terribly disappointed; instead of the bonbonniere, the snap-pistol, or the storybook, among which three articles he has allowed his expectant imagination to rove, his aunt has brought him Sanders's German Dictionary.

"I hope you will like it," Stella remarks, with emphasis, depositing the voluminous gift upon the school-room table. "We had to pay for at least five pounds of extra weight of luggage in the monster's behalf, and moreover it has crushed flat my only new summer hat. 'Tis a great pity."

Freddy, who, although hitherto rather puny and delicate in body, is mentally, thanks to clever qualities inherited from both his parents, far in advance of his age, and already thinks Voss's translation of the Odyssey entertaining, turns over the leaves of the three volumes of the Dictionary without finding them attractive.

"I put in a good word for the child," Stella says, with a laugh, to the captain, who with his friend Rohritz happens to be in Freddy's school-room, "but mamma insists that it is of no consequence; if it does not please him now, it will be very useful to him in future. Never mind, my darling," she adds, turning to her little cousin, who, with a sigh and not without much physical effort, is putting the colossal Sanders on his bookshelves; "it certainly presents an imposing spectacle, and I have a foolish thing for your birthday, the very finest my limited means could afford." As she speaks she strokes the little fellow's brown curls affectionately.

"Stella, Stella, where are you loitering?" a deep voice calls at this moment, and the girl replies,--

"In a moment, mamma, I am coming!--I have to write a letter to a Berlin publisher," she says by way of explanation to the two men, as she leaves the room.

The evening has come. Dinner is over. All are sitting in more or less comfortable garden-chairs on the terrace before the castle, beneath the spreading boughs of a linden, now laden with fragrant blossoms.

The stars are not yet awake, but the moon has risen full, though giving but little light, and looking in its reddish l.u.s.tre like a candle lighted by day; the heavens are of a pale, greenish blue, with opalescent gleams on the horizon. The sun has set, twilight has mingled lights and shadows, the colours of the flowers are dull and faded.

Around the castle reigns a sweet, peaceful silence, that most precious of all the luxuries of a residence in the country. The evening wind murmurs a dreamy duo with the ripple of the stream running at the foot of the garden, and now and then is heard the heavy foot-fall of a peasant returning from his work to the village.

Baroness Meineck is holding forth to her hostess, who listens patiently, or at least silently, upon the subject of the cholera-bacilli and the latest discoveries of Pasteur. To Rohritz, who, will he nill he, has had to place his hands at the disposal of the arch Stasy as a reel for her crewel, the Baroness's voice partly recalls a sentinel and partly a tragic actress; she always talks in fine rounded periods, as if she suspected a stenographer concealed near. While the quondam beauty, with a thousand superfluous little arts, winds an endless length of red worsted upon a folded playing-card, he glances towards the spot where Stella is telling stories to Freddy, and involuntarily listens.

Since the Baroness, perhaps because she has reached some rather delicate details in her medical treatise, sees fit to lower slightly her powerful voice, he can hear almost every word spoken by Stella. If he is especially susceptible in any regard, it is in that of a beautiful mode of speech. What Stella says he is quite indifferent to, but the delightful tone of her soft, clear, bird-like voice touches his soul with an indescribably soothing charm.

"Now that's enough. I do not know any more stories," he hears her say at last in reply to an entreaty from her little cousin for "just one more."

"No more at all?" Freddy asks, in dismay, and with all the earnestness of his age.

"No more to-day," Stella says, consolingly. "I shall know another to-morrow." She kisses him on the forehead. "You look tired, my darling! Is it your bedtime?"

"No," the captain answers for him, "but he could not sleep last night for delight in the coming of our guests, and he is paying for it now.

Shall I carry you up-stairs--hey, Freddy?"

But Freddy considers it quite beneath his dignity to go to bed with the chickens, and prefers to clamber upon his father's knee.

"You are growing too big a fellow for this," the captain says, rather reprovingly: nevertheless he puts his arm tenderly about the boy, saying to Stella, by way of excuse, "We spoil him terribly: he was not very strong in the spring, and he still enjoys all the privileges of a convalescent,--hey, my boy?" By way of reply the little fellow nestles close to his father with some indistinct words expressive of great content, and while the captain's moustache is pressed upon the child's soft hair, Stella takes a small scarlet wrap from her shoulders and folds it about his bare legs.

"'Tis good to sleep so, Freddy, is it not? Ah, where are the times gone when I could climb up on my father's knees and fall asleep on his shoulder?--they were the happiest hours of my life!" the girl says, with a sigh.

"But, Baron Rohritz, pray hold your hands a little quieter," the wool-winding Stasy calls out to her victim. "You twitch them all the time."

"If you only knew how glad I am to see you all again, and to spend a few days in the country," Stella begins afresh after a while.

"Why, do you not come directly from the country?" the captain asks, surprised.

"From the country?--we come from Zalow," Stella replies: "the difference is heaven-wide. Yes, when mamma thirty years ago bought the mill where we live now,--without the miller and his wife, 'tis true,--because it was so picturesque, it really was in the country, or at least in a village, where besides ourselves there were only a few peasants, and one other person, a misanthropic widow who lived at the very end of the hamlet in a one-story house concealed behind a screen of chestnut-trees. I have no objection to peasant huts, particularly when their thatched roofs are overgrown with green moss, and misanthropic widows are seldom in one's way. But ten years ago a railway was built directly through Zalow, and villas shot up out of the ground in every direction like mushrooms. And such villas, and such proprietors! All _nouveaux riches_ and pus.h.i.+ng tradesfolk from Prague.

A stocking-weaver built two villas close beside us,--one for his own family, and the other to rent; he christened the pair Girofle-Girofla, and declares that the name alone is worth ten thousand guilders. He also maintains that the architecture of his villas is the purest cla.s.sic: each has a Greek peristyle and a square belvedere. It would be deliciously ridiculous if one were not forced to have the monsters directly before one's eyes all the time. The worst of it is that one really gets used to them! Dear papa's former tailor has built himself a hunting-lodge in the style of Francis the First directly on the road, behind a gilded iron fence and without a tree near it for fear of obscuring its splendour. Like all retired tradesfolk, the tailor is sentimental. Only lately he complained to me of the difficulty experienced by cultivated people in finding a fitting social circle."

"Do you know him personally, then?" the captain asks, with an air of annoyance.

"Oh, yes, we know every one to bow to," says Stella. "In a little while we shall exchange calls: I am looking forward to that with great pleasure."

"What do you think of such talk, Baron?" Stasy asks under her breath.

Baron Rohritz makes no reply: perhaps such talk is to his taste.

Meanwhile, Stella goes on in the same satirical tone: "As soon as some one of these aesthetic proprietors has come to a decision as to where the piano is to stand, we shall certainly be invited to admire the new furniture. Then mamma will look up from her books and say, 'I have no time; but if you want to go, pray do as you please.' Mamma never cares what I do or where I go." Stella's soft voice trembles; she shakes her head, pa.s.ses her hand over her eyes, and runs on: "Even the walks are spoiled; one is never sure of not encountering a picnic-party. They are always singing by turns 'Dear to my heart, thou forest fair,' and 'Gaudeamus,' and when they leave it the 'forest fair' is always littered with cold victuals, greasy brown paper, and tin cans. It is horrible! I detest that railway. It s.n.a.t.c.hed from us the prettiest part of our garden; there is scarcely room enough left for 'p.u.s.s.y wants a corner,' and now mamma has rented half of it and the ground-floor of the mill to a family from Prague for a summer residence."

"I do not understand Lina," the captain says, with irritation. "You surely are not reduced to the necessity of renting part of your small house for lodgings."

"Mamma wanted just two hundred guilders to buy Littre's Dictionary,--the fine complete edition. Moreover, I think you are under a mistake with regard to our resources. I detest the railway, but if it had not bought of us, two years ago, a piece of land on which to build a shop, I hardly know what we should be living upon now. Ah, if poor papa could see how we live! He could not imagine a household without a butler or a lady's-maid. Mamma dismissed the butler at first upon strictly moral grounds----"

Anastasia von Gurlichingen casts down her eyes. "Did you ever hear anything like that, Baron Rohritz," she asks, "from a young girl?"

Rohritz shrugs his shoulders impatiently, and Stella goes on quite at her ease:

"He was always making love to the cook, and the lady's-maid was jealous and complained of it. Then the lady's-maid was dismissed, for pecuniary reasons; then the cook, for sanitary considerations: one fine day she nearly poisoned us all with verdigris, her copper kettles were so badly scoured. Her place was never filled, for in the interim, that is, while we were looking for a new _cordon bleu_, mamma discovered that a cook was a very costly article and that we could get along without one. Our last maid-of-all work was a dwarf not quite four feet tall, who had to mount on a stool to set the table. Mamma engaged her because she thought that her ugliness would put a stop to love-making----" Stella breaks the thread of her discourse to laugh gently; her laugh is like the ripple of a brook. "But real talent defies all obstacles. Mamma's experiment made her richer by one sad experience: she knows now that not even a large hump can make its possessor impervious to Cupid's arrows."

The captain laughs. Stasy's disapprobation has reached its climax; she twitches impatiently at the worsted she is winding from Rohritz's hands.

"What would papa say if he could see it all?" Stella says, in a changed voice.

"Do you still grieve so for your poor father, mouse?" the captain asks, kindly, perceiving that the girl with difficulty restrains her tears at the mention of her dead father.