O Thou, My Austria! Part 20

"How could he be anything else!"

"And is she very fast?"

"Very," Harry a.s.sents.

The ladies in the landau have both stretched their necks to look after the Amazon. But while the face of the blonde expresses merely critical curiosity, in her companion's dark eyes there is sad, even horrified, surprise.

The Amazon and her train disappear beneath the arched gate-way of the barracks.

"Lato!" the portly blonde calls to Treurenberg from the landau.

He does not hear her.

"Do you remember my 'Old Tom'?" he asks his friend, returning to his favourite theme.

"I should think so. A chestnut,--a magnificent creature!"

"Magnificent! A friend,--an actual friend. That fat Rhoden--a cousin of my wife's--broke his leg in riding him at a hunt. But, to speak of something pleasanter, how are they all at Komaritz? Your cousin must be very pretty by this time?" And Treurenberg looks askance at his friend.

"Very," Harry replies, and his manner suddenly grows cold and constrained. "But allow me to speak to your wife," he adds. "By the way, who is the young lady beside her?"

"H'm! a relative,--a cousin of my wife's."

"Present me, I pray," says Harry.

He then pays his respects to the Countess Treurenberg and to her companion, whose name he now learns is Olga Dangeri.

The Countess offers him her finger-tips with a gracious smile. Olga Dangeri, nodding slightly, raises her dark, mysterious eyes, looks him full in the face for a moment, and then turns away indifferent. The servant comes out of the post-office with a great bundle of letters, which the Countess receives from him, and with two or three packages, which he hands over to the maids.

"What are you waiting for, Lato? Get in," the Countess says.

"Drive on. I shall stay here with Leskjewitsch for a while,"

Treurenberg replies.

"Mamma is waiting breakfast for us."

"I shall breakfast in the Casino. My respects to your mother."

"As you please." The young Countess bows to Harry stiffly, with a discontented air, the horses start, a cloud of dust rises, and the landau rolls away. With his eyes half closed, Harry looks after the heavy brown carriage-horses.

"Lato, that off horse is spavined."

"For heaven's sake don't notice it! My mother-in-law bought the pair privately to surprise me. She paid five thousand guilders for them."

"H'm! Who persuaded her to buy them?"

"Pistasch Kamenz. I do not grudge him his bargain," murmurs Lato, adding, with a shake of the head, "'Tis odd, dogs and horses are the only things in which we have the advantage over the financiers."

With which he takes his friend's arm and crosses the square to the Casino.

CHAPTER XI.

AN OLD FRIEND.

They are sitting in the farthest corner of the smoky dining-hall of the Casino, Harry and his friend, by a window that looks out upon a little yard. Harry is smoking a cigar, and sits astride of a chair; Lato contrives to sprawl over three chairs, and smokes cigarettes, using about five matches to each cigarette. Two gla.s.ses, a siphon, and a bottle of cognac stand upon a rickety table close by.

The room is low, the ceiling is almost black, and the atmosphere suggests old cheese and stale cigar-smoke. Between the frames of their Imperial Majesties a fat spider squats in a large gray web. At a table not far from the two friends a cadet, too thin for his uniform, is writing a letter, while a lieutenant opposite him is occupied in cutting the initials of his latest flame, with his English penknife, on the green-painted table. Before a Bohemian gla.s.s mirror in a gla.s.s frame stands another lieutenant, with a thick beard and a bald pate, which last he is endeavouring artistically to conceal by brus.h.i.+ng over it the long thick hair at the back of his neck. His name is Spreil; he has lately been transferred to the hussars from the infantry, and he is the b.u.t.t for every poor jest in the regiment.

"I cannot tell you how glad I am to see you," Treurenberg repeats to his friend. As he speaks, his cigarette goes out; he sc.r.a.pes his twenty-fourth match in the last quarter of an hour, and breaks off its head.

"The same old lack of fire!" Harry says, by way of a jest, handing him his lighted cigar.

"Yes, the same old lack of fire!" Treurenberg repeats.

Lack of fire! How often he has been reproached with it as a boy! Lack of fire; that means everything for which fire stands,--energy, steadfastness, manly force of will. There is no lack of pa.s.sion, on the other hand; of dangerous inflammable material there is too much in his nature; but with him pa.s.sion paralyzes effort instead of spurring to action. One need only look at him as he half reclines there, smiling dreamily to himself, scarcely moving his lips, to know him for what he is, indolent, impressionable, yet proud and morbidly refined withal; a thoroughly pa.s.sive and very sensitive man. He is half a head taller than Harry, but carries himself so badly that he looks shorter; his face, framed in light brown hair and a soft pointed beard, is sallow; his large gray eyes are veiled beneath thick lids which he rarely opens wide. His hands are especially peculiar, long, slender, soft, incapable of a quick movement; hands formed to caress, but not to fight,--hardly even to clasp firmly.

It is said that the colonel of the regiment of Uhlans, in which Lato served before his marriage to Selina Harfink, once declared of him, "Treurenberg ought to have been a woman, and then, married to a good husband, something might perhaps have been made of him."

This criticism, which ought to have been uttered by a woman rather than by a logical, conventional man, went the round of Treurenberg's comrades. "The same old lack of fire," Lato repeats, smiling to himself. He has the mouth and the smile of a woman.

Harry knows the smile well, but it has changed since the last time he saw it. It used to be indolent, now it is sad.

"Have you any children?" Harry asks, after a while.

Treurenberg s.h.i.+vers. "I had a boy, I lost him when he was fifteen months old," he says, in a low, strained tone.

"My poor fellow! What did he die of?" Harry asks, sympathetically.

"Of croup. It was over in one night,--and he was so fresh and healthy a child! My G.o.d! when I think of the plump little arms he used to stretch out to me from his little bed every morning," Lato goes on, hoa.r.s.ely, "and then, as I said, in a few hours--gone! The physician did all that he could for the poor little fellow,--in vain; nothing did any good. I knew from the first that there was no hope. How the poor little chap threw himself about in his bed! I sometimes dream that I hear him gasping for breath, and he clung to me as if I could help him!"

Treurenberg's voice breaks; he pa.s.ses his hand over his eyes. "He was very little; he could hardly say 'papa' distinctly, but it goes terribly near one's heart when one has nothing else in the world,--I--I mean, no other children," he corrects the involuntary confession.

"Well, all days have not yet ended in evening," Harry says, kindly, and then pauses suddenly, feeling--he cannot tell why--that he has made a mistake.

Meanwhile, the lieutenant at the table has finished his initials, and has, moreover, embellished them with the rather crude device of a heart. He rises and saunters aimlessly about the large, low room, apparently seeking some subject for chaff, for boyish play. He kills a couple of flies, performs gymnastic exercises upon two chairs, and finally approaches the cadet, who, ensconced in a corner, behind a table, is scribbling away diligently.

"Whom are you writing to?" he asks, sitting astride of a chair just opposite the lad.

The cadet is silent.

"To your sweetheart?"

The cadet is still silent.

"I seem to have guessed rightly," says the lieutenant, adding, "But tell me, does your present flame--here the sun called Wodin--tolerate a rival sun?"