O Thou, My Austria! Part 13

CHAPTER IV.

A QUARREL.

Meanwhile, Harry has rushed out into the garden. He is very restless, very warm, very much agitated. It never occurs to him that his uncle has been chaffing him a little; he cannot suspect that the major has any knowledge of his sentiments.

"She cannot be so worthless!" he consoles himself by reflecting, while his eyes search for her in the distance.

With this thought filling his mind, the young officer hurries on. He does not find her at first; she is not in the honeysuckle arbour.

The sultriness of the August afternoon weighs upon the dusty vegetation of the late summer. The leaves of the trees and shrubs droop wearily; the varied luxuriance of bloom is past; the first crop of roses has faded, the next has not yet arrived at maturity. Only a few red verbenas and zinnias gleam forth from the dull green monotony.

At a turn of the path Harry suddenly starts, and pauses,--he has found what he is looking for.

Directly in the centre of the hawthorn-bordered garden-path there is an easel weighted with an enormous canvas, at which, working away diligently, stands a gentleman, of whom Harry can see nothing but a slightly round-shouldered back, the fluttering ribbons of a Scotch cap set on the back of a head covered with short gray hair, and a gigantic palette projecting beyond the left elbow; while at some distance from the easel, clearly defined against the green background, stands a tall, graceful, maidenly figure draped in a loose, fantastic robe, her arms full of wild poppies, a large hat wreathed with vine-leaves on her small head, her golden-brown hair loose upon her shoulders,--Zdena! Her eyes meet Harry's: she flushes crimson,--the poppies slip from her arms and fall to the ground.

"You here!" she murmurs, confusedly, staring at him. She can find no more kindly words of welcome, and her face expresses terror rather than joyful surprise, as a far less sharp-sighted lover than Harry Leskjewitsch could not fail to observe.

He makes no reply to her words, but says, bluntly, pointing to the artist at the easel, "Be kind enough to introduce me."

With a choking sensation in her throat, and trembling lips, Zdena stammers the names of her two adorers, the old one and the young one.

The gentlemen bow,--Harry with angry formality, Baron Wenkendorf with formal amiability.

"Aunt Rosa tells me to ask you to come to the drawing-room," Harry says, dryly.

"Have any guests arrived?" asks Zdena.

"Only my sister and Aunt Zriny."

"Oh, then I must dress myself immediately!" she exclaims, and before Harry is aware of it she has slipped past him and into the house.

Baron Wenkendorf pushes his Scotch cap a little farther back from his forehead, which gives his face a particularly amazed expression, and gazes with the same condescending benevolence, first at the vanis.h.i.+ng maidenly figure, and then at the picture on the easel; after which he begins to put up his painting-materials. Harry a.s.sists him to do so, but leaves the making of polite remarks entirely to the "elderly gentleman." He is not in the mood for anything of the kind. He sees everything at present as through dark, crimson gla.s.s.

Although Zdena's distress arises from a very different cause from her cousin's, it is none the less serious.

"Oh, heavens!" she thinks to herself, as she hurries to her room to arrange her dishevelled hair, "why must he come before I have an answer ready? He surely will not insist upon an immediate decision! It would be terrible! Anything but a forced decision; that is the worst thing in the world."

Such, however, does not seem to be the opinion of her hot-blooded cousin. When, a quarter of an hour afterwards, she goes out into the corridor and towards the drawing-room door, she observes a dark figure standing in the embrasure of a window. The figure turns towards her, then approaches her.

"Harry! ah!" she exclaims, with a start; "what are you doing here? Are you waiting for anybody?"

"Yes," he replies, with some harshness, "for you!"

"Ah!" And, without looking at him, she hurries on to the door of the drawing-room.

"There is no one there," he informs her; "they have all gone to the summer-house in the garden. Wenkendorf proposes to read aloud the libretto of 'Parzifal.'" He pauses.

"And did you stay here to tell me this?" she stammers, trying to pa.s.s him, on her way to the steps leading into the garden. "It was very kind of you; you seem destined to play the part of sheep-dog to-day, to drive the company together."

They go into the garden, and the buzz of voices reaches their ears from the summer-house. They have turned into a shady path, above which arches the foliage of the shrubs on either side. Suddenly Harry pauses, and seizing his cousin's slender hands in both his own, he gazes steadily and angrily into her eyes, saying, in a suppressed voice,--

"Zdena, how can you hurt me so?"

Her youthful blood pulsates almost as fiercely as does his own; now, when the moment for an explanation has come, and can no longer be avoided, now, one kind word from him, and all the barriers which with the help of pure reason she has erected to s.h.i.+eld her from the insidious sweetness of her dreams will crumble to dust. But Harry does not speak this word: he is far too agitated to speak it. Instead of touching her heart, his harshness irritates her pride. Throwing back her head, she darts an angry glance at him from her large eyes.

"I do not know what you mean."

"I mean that you are letting that old c.o.xcomb make love to you," he murmurs, angrily.

She lifts her eyebrows, and replies, calmly, "Yes!"

The young officer continues to gaze searchingly into her face.

"You are thoughtless," he says, slowly, with emphasis. "In your eyes Wenkendorf is an old man; but he does not think himself so old as you think him, and--and----" Suddenly, his forced composure giving way, he bursts forth: "At the least it is ridiculous! it is silly to behave as you are doing!"

In the entire dictionary Harry could have found no word with which to describe Zdena's conduct that would have irritated her more than "silly." If he had called her unprincipled, devilish, odious, cruel, she could have forgiven him; but "silly!"--that word she never can forgive; it makes her heart burn and smart as salt irritates an open wound.

"I should like to know by what right you call me thus to account!" she exclaims, indignantly.

"By what right?" he repeats, beside himself. "Can you ask that?"

She taps the gravel of the pathway defiantly with her foot and is obstinately silent.

"What did you mean by your treatment of me in Vienna? what did you mean by all your loving looks and kind words? what did you mean when you--on the evening before you left----"

Zdena's face is crimson, her cheeks and ears burn with mortification.

"We grew up together like brother and sister," she murmurs. "I have always considered you as a brother----"

"Ah, indeed! a brother!" His pulses throb wildly; his anger well-nigh makes him forget himself. Suddenly an ugly idea occurs to him,--an odious suspicion. "Perhaps you were not aware there in Vienna that by a marriage with you I should resign my brilliant prospects?"

They confront each other, stiff, unbending, both angry, each more ready to offend than to conciliate.

Around them the August heat broods over the garden; the bushes, the flowers, the shrubbery, all cast black shadows upon the smooth-shaven, yellowing gra.s.s, where here and there cracks in the soil are visible.

Everything is quiet, but in the distance can be heard the gardener filling his large watering-can at the pump, and the jolting along the road outside the garden of the heavy harvest-wagons laden with grain.

"Did you know it then?" he asks again, more harshly, more contemptuously.

Of course she knew it, quite as well as she knows it now; but what use is there in her telling him so, when he asks her about it in such a tone?

Instead of replying, she frowns haughtily and shrugs her shoulders.

For one moment more he stands gazing into her face; then, with a bitter laugh, he turns from her and strides towards the summer-house.

"Harry!" she calls after him, in a trembling undertone, but his blood is coursing too hotly in his veins--he does not hear her. Although he is one of the softest-hearted of men, he is none the less one of the most quick-tempered and obstinate.

We leave it to the reader to judge whether the major would have been very well satisfied with this result of his cunning diplomacy.

Whilst the two young people have been thus occupied in playing at hide-and-seek with their emotions and sentiments, the little summer-house, where the reading was to be held, has been the scene of a lively dispute. Countess Zriny and Baron Wenkendorf have made mutual confession of their sentiment with regard to Wagner.