O Thou, My Austria! Part 10

"Come just as you are. 'Tis only Harry; it is not as if it were a stranger. Come!" called my aunt.

But I was not to be persuaded. Not for worlds would I have had Harry suspect that--that--well, that I was in any great hurry to see him.

I dressed my hair with the most scrupulous care. Not before twenty minutes had pa.s.sed did I go into the next room.

How plainly I see it all before me now,--the room, half drawing-room, half dressing-room; a trunk in one corner, in another an old piano, the key of which we were obliged to procure from the kellner; in an arm-chair a bundle of shawls, over the back of a sofa our travelling-wraps, our well-polished boots in front of the porcelain stove, great patches of misty suns.h.i.+ne lying everywhere, the breakfast-table temptingly spread near the window, and there, opposite my aunt, his sabre between his knees, tall, slender, very brown, very handsome, an officer of hussars,--Harry.

I like him, and am a little afraid of him. He suddenly springs up and advances a step or two towards me. His eyes--the same eyes that had glanced at me as I appeared in my wrapper--open wide in amazement; his gaze is riveted upon my face. All my fear has gone; yes, I confess it to this paper,--I am possessed by an exultant consciousness of power.

He is only my cousin, 'tis true, but he is the first man upon whom I have been able to prove my powers of conquest.

I put my hands in his, so cordially extended, but when he stooped as if to kiss me, I shook my head, laughing, and said, "I am too old for that."

He yielded without a word, only touching my hand respectfully with his lips and then releasing me; whereupon I went directly to the breakfast-table. But, as he still continued to gaze at me, I asked, easily,----

"What is it, Harry? Is my hair coming down?"

He shook his head, and said, in some confusion, "Not at all. I was only wondering what you had done with all your magnificent hair!"

I made no reply, but applied myself to my breakfast.

It was really delightful, our short stay in Vienna. Harry was with us all the while. He went about with us from morning till night; patiently dragged with us to shops, picture-galleries, and cathedrals, and to the dusty, sunny Prater, where the vegetation along the drive seemed to have grown shabby. We drove together to Schnbrunn, the huge, dreamy, imperial summer residence, and wandered about the leafy avenues there.

We fed the swans; we fed the monkeys and the bears, while my aunt rested near by, Baedeker in hand, upon any bench she could find. She rested a great deal, and grew more tired with every day of our stay in Vienna, and with very good reason; she can hardly endure the pavement in walking, and she refuses, from fastidiousness, to take advantage of the tramway, and, from economy, to hire a carriage.

The sunset has kindled flames in all the windows of the castle, and we are still wandering in the green avenues, talking of all sorts of things, music, and literature. Harry's taste is cla.s.sic; mine is somewhat revolutionary. I talk more than he; he listens. Sometimes he throws in a word in the midst of my nonsense; at other times he laughs heartily at my paradoxes, and then again he suddenly looks askance at me and says nothing. Then I become aware that he understands far more than I of the matter in hand, and I fall silent.

The sun has set; the rosy reflection on the gra.s.s and at the foot of the old trees has faded; there is only a pale, gray gleam on the castle windows. All nature seems to sigh relieved. A cool mist rises from the basins of the fountains, like the caress of a water-nymph; the roses, petunias, and mignonette exhale delicious fragrance, which rises as incense to heaven; the lisp of the leaves and the plash of the fountain interpose a dreamy veil of sound, as it were, between us and some aggressive military music in the distance.

The twilight falls; the nurses are all taking their charges home. Here and there on the benches a soldier and a nursemaid are sitting together. It is too dark to see to read Baedeker any longer. My aunt calls to us: "Do come, children; the carriage has been waiting ever so long, and I am very hungry."

And the time had seemed so short to me. My aunt is so easily fatigued, and her aversion to tramways is so insurmountable, that she stays at home half the time in the hotel, and I make many a little expedition with Harry alone. Then I take his arm. We stroll through the old part of the city, with its sculptured monuments, its beautiful gray palaces standing side by side with the commonest lodging-houses; about us people are thronging and pus.h.i.+ng; we are in no hurry; we should like to have time stand still,--Harry and I; we walk very slowly. I am so content, so filled with a sense of protection, when I am with him thus.

It is delightful to cling to him in the crowd.

It seems to me that I should like to spend my life in slowly wandering thus in the cool of the evening through the streets, where the lights are just beginning to be lighted, where a pair of large, kindly eyes rest upon my face, and the sound of distant military music is in my ears.

The last evening before our departure arrived. We were sitting in our small drawing-room, and Harry and I were drinking iced coffee. My aunt had left hers untouched; the fever of travelling was upon her; she wandered from one room to another, opening trunks, drawers, and wardrobes, and casting suspicious glances under the piano and the sofas, sure that something would be left behind.

The kellner brought in two cards,--Countess Zriny and Frulein Tschaky,--a cousin of Uncle Paul's, with her companion.

We had called upon the Countess the day before, and had rejoiced to find her not at home. My aunt now elevated her eyebrows, and murmured, plaintively, "It can't be helped!"

Then she hurriedly carried two bundles of shawls and a hand-bag into the next room, and the ladies were shown in.

Countess Zriny is a very stout, awkward old maid, with the figure of a meal-sack and the face of a portly abbot. Harry maintains that she has holy water instead of blood in her veins, and that she has for ten years lived exclusively upon Eau de Lourdes and Count Mattei's miraculous pills. It is odd that she should have grown so stout upon such a diet.

There is nothing to say of Frulein Tschaky.

Aunt Rosamunda received the ladies with a majestic affability peculiarly her own, and presented me as "Our child,--Fritz's daughter!"

The Countess gave me her hand, a round, fat little hand that felt as if her Swedish glove were stuffed with wadding, then put up her eyegla.s.s and gazed at me, lifting her eyebrows the while.

"All her father!" she murmured,--"especially her profile." Then she dropped her eyegla.s.s, sighed, "Poor Fritz! poor Fritz!" seated herself on the sofa with my aunt, and began to whisper to her, looking steadily at me all the while.

The sensitive irritability of my nature was at once aflame. If she had pitied my father only for being s.n.a.t.c.hed away so early in his fair young life, for being torn so suddenly from those whom he loved! But this was not the case. She pitied him solely because he had married my mother. Oh, I knew it perfectly well; and she was whispering about it to my aunt before me,--she could not even wait until I should be away.

I could hear almost every word.

My heart suddenly grew heavy,--so heavy with the old grief that I would fain forget, that I could hardly bear it. But even in the midst of my pain I observed that Harry was aware of my suffering and shared it.

Of course my cousin Zriny--for she is my cousin, after all--was otherwise extremely amiable to me. She turned from her mysterious conversation with Aunt Rosamunda, and addressed a couple of questions to me. She asked whether I liked country life, and when I replied, curtly, "I know no other," she laughed good-humouredly, just as some contented old monk might laugh,--a laugh that seemed to shake her fat sides and double chin, as she said, "_Elle a de l'esprit, la pet.i.te; elle n'est pas du tout ba.n.a.le_."

How she arrived at that conclusion from my brief reply, I am unable to say.

After a quarter of an hour she rose, took both my hands in hers by way of farewell, put her head on one side, sighed, "Poor Fritz!" and then kissed me.

When the door had closed behind her, my aunt betook herself to the next room to make ready for a projected evening walk.

I was left alone with Harry. As I could not restrain my tears, and did not know how else to conceal them, I turned my back to him and pretended to arrange my hair at the pier-gla.s.s, before which stood a vase filled with the La France roses that he had brought me the day before.

It was a silly thing to do. He looked over my shoulder and saw in the mirror the tears on my cheeks, and then--he put his arm around my waist and whispered, "You poor little goose! You sensitive little thing! Why should you grieve because a kindhearted, weak-minded old woman was silly?"

Then I could not help sobbing outright, crying, "Ah, it is always the same,--I know it! I am not like the other girls in your world. People despise me, and my poor mother too."

"But this is childish," he said, gravely,--"childish and foolish. No one despises you. And--don't scratch my eyes out, Zdena--it is not your heart, merely, that is wounded at present, but your vanity, the vanity of an inexperienced little girl who knows nothing of the world or of the people in it. If you had knocked about in it somewhat, you would know how little it signifies if people in general wink and nod, and that the only thing really to care for is, to be understood and loved by those to whom we cling with affection."

He said this more gently and kindly than I can write it. He suddenly seemed very far above me in his earnest kindness of heart and his sweet reasonableness. I was instantly possessed with a feeling akin to remorse and shame, to think how I had teased him and tyrannized over him all through those last few days. And I cannot tell how it happened, but he clasped me close in his arms and bent down and kissed me on the lips,--and I let him do it! Ah, such a thrill pa.s.sed through me! And I felt sheltered and cared for as I had not done since my mother's clasping arms had been about me. I was for the moment above all petty annoyances,--borne aloft by a power I could not withstand.

It lasted but a moment, for we were startled by the silken rustle of my aunt's gown, and did he release me? did I leave him? I do not know; but when Aunt Rosamunda appeared I was adjusting a rose in my breast, and Harry was--looking for his sabre!----. (When the major reached this point, he stamped on the floor with delight.)

"Aha, Rosel, which of us was right?" he exclaimed aloud. He would have liked to summon his wife from where he could see her walking in the garden, to impart to her his glorious discovery. On reflection, however, he decided not to do so, chiefly because there was a good deal of ma.n.u.script still unread, and he was in a hurry to continue the perusal of what interested him so intensely.)

----I avoided being alone with Harry all the rest of the evening, but the next morning at the railway-station, while my aunt was nervously counting over the pieces of luggage for the ninety-ninth time, I could not prevent his leaning towards me and saying, "Zdena, we were so unfortunately interrupted last evening. You have not yet told me--that----"

I felt myself grow scarlet. "Wait for a while!" I murmured, turning my head away from him, but I think that perhaps--I pressed his hand----

I must have done so, for happier eyes than those which looked after our train as it sped away I have never seen. Ah, how silly I had been! I carried with me for the rest of the journey a decided regret.----

(The major frowned darkly. "Why, this looks as if she would like to withdraw her promise! But let me see, there really has no promise pa.s.sed between them."

He glanced hurriedly over the following leaves. "Descriptions of travel--compositions," he muttered to himself. "Paris--variations upon Baedeker--the little goose begins to be tiresome----Ah, here is something about her parents' grave--poor thing! And here----" He began to read again.)

----A few hours after our arrival we drove to the graveyard at Montmartre, an ugly, gloomy graveyard, bordering directly upon a business-street, so that the noise and bustle of the city sound deafeningly where the dead are reposing. The paths are as straight as if drawn by a ruler, and upon the graves lie wreaths of straw flowers or stiff immortelles. These durable decorations seem to me heartless,--as if the poor dead were to be provided for once for all, since it might be tiresome to visit them often.

My parents' grave lies a little apart from the broad centre path, under a knotty old juniper-tree.

I heaped it with flowers, and amid the fresh blossoms I laid the roses, now faded, which Harry gave me yesterday when we parted.

I was enchanted with Paris. My aunt was delighted with the shops. She spent all her time in them, and thought everything very reasonable. At the end of four days she had bought so many reasonable articles that she had to purchase a huge trunk in which to take them home, and she had scarcely any money left.