O Thou, My Austria! Part 27

his friend replies. "You must devise some other, and--forgive my frankness--some more honest and straightforward means for attaining your end."

Harry puffs furiously at his cigarette, sending a cloud of smoke over the flower-bed. "Lato, you are rough upon me, but not rougher than I am upon myself. If you knew how degraded I feel by my false position, if you knew how the whole matter weighs upon me, you would do something more for me than only hold up a candle by the light of which I perceive more clearly the misery of my position. You would----"

"What?" Lato asks, disturbed.

"Help me!"

Lato looks at him in dismay for a moment, and then stammers, "No, Harry, do not ask it of me,--not of me. I could do you no good. They never would let me speak, any more than my mother-in-law would allow you to speak. And even if I finally prevailed upon them to listen, they would blame me for the whole affair, would believe that I had excited your mind against the family."

"How could they possibly imagine that you could conduct yourself so towards a friend?" Harry asks, with a grim smile.

Lato turns his head aside.

"Then you will not do me this service?"

"I cannot!" Treurenberg murmurs, faintly.

"I might have known it!" Harry breaks forth, his eyes flas.h.i.+ng with indignant scorn. "You are the same old fellow, the very same,--a good fellow enough, yes, sympathetic, compa.s.sionate, and, as long as you are allowed to remain perfectly pa.s.sive, the n.o.blest of men. But as soon as anything is required of you,--if any active interference is called for at your hands, there's an end of it. You simply cannot, you would rather die than rouse yourself to any energetic action!"

"Perhaps so," Lato murmurs, with a far-away look in his eyes, and a smile that makes Harry's blood run cold.

A pause ensues, the longest of the many pauses that have occurred in this _tte--tte_.

The bees seem to buzz louder than ever. A dry, thirsty wind sighs in the boughs of the apple-tree; two or three hard green apples drop to the ground. At last Treurenberg gathers himself up.

"You must take me as I am," he says, wearily; "there is no cutting with a dull knife. I cannot possibly enlighten my mother-in-law as to the true state of your feelings. It would do no good, and it would make an infernal row. But I will give you one piece of good advice----"

Before he is able to finish his sentence his attention is arrested by a perfect babel of sounds from the dining-room. The piano music is hushed, its discord merged into the angry wail of a shrieking feminine voice and the rough, broken, changing tones of a lad,--the rebellious pupil, Vladimir Leskjewitsch. The hurly-burly is so outrageous that every one is roused to investigate it. Countess Zriny rushes in, with short, waddling steps, the paint-brush with which she has been mending St. John's robe still in her hand; Hedwig rushes in; Harry and Lato rush in.

"What is the matter? What is the matter?"

"You poured that water on the keys intentionally, to prevent your playing," the teacher angrily declares to her pupil.

"I do not deny it," Vladimir rejoins, loftily.

The spectators suppress a smile, and are all, as is, alas! so frequently the case, on the side of the culprit, a tall, overgrown lad of about fourteen, with a handsome dark face, large black eyes, a short, impertinent nose, and full, well-formed lips. With hands thrust deep into the pockets of his blue jacket, he gravely surveys the circle, and tosses his head defiantly.

"You hear him! you hear him!" Frulein Laut screams, turning to the by-standers. Then, approaching Vladimir, she asks, angrily, "And how can you justify such conduct?"

Vladimir scans her with majestic disdain. "How can you justify your having ruined all my pleasure in music?" he asks, in a tragic tone, and with a bombastic flourish of his hand. "That piano has been my dear friend from childhood!"--he points feelingly to the instrument, which is yellow with age, has thin, square legs, and six pedals, the use of which no one has ever yet fathomed,--"yes, my friend! And today I hate it so that I have well-nigh destroyed it! Frulein Laut, justify that."

"Must I be subjected to this insolence?" groans the teacher.

"Vladimir, go to your room!" Harry orders, with hardly maintained gravity.

Vladimir departs with lofty self-possession. The teacher turns contemptuously from those present, especially from Harry, who tries to appease her with a few courteous phrases. With a skilful hand she takes the piano apart, dismembers the key-board, and spreads the hammers upon sheets of tin brought for her from the kitchen by Blasius, the old servant, that the wet, swollen wood may be dried before the fire.

"Take care lest there be an _auto-da-f_," Harry calls after her.

Without deigning to reply, she vanishes with the bowels of the piano.

Blasius, meanwhile, with imperturbable composure, has spread the table for the evening meal at one end of the s.p.a.cious room, in which there is now diffused an agreeable odour of fresh biscuits. A mountain of reddish-yellow almond cakes is flanked on one side by a plate of appetizing rye bread, on the other by b.u.t.ter garnished with ice and cresses. There is a fruit-basket at either end of the table, filled with peaches, early grapes, and all kinds of ripe green and purple plums, while a bowl of cut gla.s.s holds whipped cream cooled in ice.

Finally, old Blasius brings in a tray fairly bending beneath the burden of various pitchers and flagons, the bewildering number of which is due to the fact that at Komaritz the whims of all are consulted, and consequently each one orders something different, be it only a different kind of cream.

"As of old, no one is in danger at Komaritz of death from starvation,"

Lato remarks, smiling.

"Help us to be rid of the provision," Harry says.

Hedwig repeats the invitation rather affectedly, but Lato, looking at his watch, discovers that he has already overstayed his time by an hour.

All express regret, and bid him farewell.

"And the good advice you were about to give me?" Harry says, interrogatively, as he takes leave of his friend, having accompanied him to the gate of the court-yard.

"Cut short your leave of absence; go away," Lato replies. "You will at least be relieved for the time from any necessity for dissimulation, and such affairs are better adjusted by letter."

Harry gazes gloomily into s.p.a.ce; Lato springs into the saddle. "Adieu!"

he calls out, and is gone.

CHAPTER XVI.

LATO TREURENBERG.

Ding-dong--ding-dong! the Angelus bells are ringing through the evening air with their message of rest for weary mortals.

The long shadows of the trees grow paler, and vanish, taking with them all the glory of the world and leaving only a dull, borrowed twilight to hover above the earth.

The sun has set. Ding-dong! rings the bell of Komaritz, near at hand, as Lato rides past; the bells of the other villages echo the sound dreamily, to have their notes tossed back by the bells of the lonely chapels on the mountain-sides across the steel-gray stream, whose waters glide silently on ward. Ding-dong! each answers to all, and the tired labourer rejoices in unison.

The hour of rest has come, the hour when families rea.s.semble after the pursuits and labours of the day have ceased to claim and separate them,--when mortals feel more warmly and sensibly the reality of family ties. Thin blue smoke is curling from the chimneys; here and there a woman can be seen standing at the door of a cottage, shading her eyes with her hand as she looks expectantly down the road. Upon the doorstep of a poor hut sits a brown, worn labourer, dirty and ragged, about to eat his evening meal with a leaden spoon from an earthen bowl; a young woman crouches beside him, with her back against the door-post, content and silent, while a chubby child, with bare legs somewhat bowed, and a curly head, leans against his knee and, with its mouth open in expectation, peeps into the earthen bowl. The father smiles, and from time to time thrusts a morsel between the fresh, rosy lips. Then he puts aside the bowl and takes the little fellow upon his knee. It is a pretty child,--and perhaps in honour of the father's return home--wonderfully clean, but even were this not the case---- Most of the children tumbling about before the huts on this sultry August evening are neither pretty nor clean; they are dirty, ragged, dishevelled; many are sickly, and some are crippled; but there is hardly one among them to whom this hour does not bring a caress.

An atmosphere of mutual human sympathy seems to brood in silence above the resting earth, while the bells ring on,--ding-dong, ding-dong.

Lato has left the village behind him, and is trotting along the road beneath the tall walnuts. The noise of wagons, heavily laden with the harvest, and the tramp of men upon the road fall upon his ear,--everything is going home.

There is a languor in the aromatic summer air, somewhat that begets in every human being a desire for companions.h.i.+p, a longing to share the burden of existence with another. Even the flowers seem to bend their heads nearer to one another.

Now the bells are hushed, the road is deserted; Lato alone is still pursuing his way home. Home? Is it possible that he has accustomed himself to call his mother-in-law's castle home? In many a hotel--at "The Lamb," for example, in Vienna he has felt much more at home.

Where, then, is his home? He vainly asks himself this question. Has he ever had a home?

The question is still unanswered. His thoughts wander far back into the past, and find nothing, not even a few tender memories. Poor Lato! He recalls his earliest years, his childhood. His parents were considered the handsomest couple in Austria. The Count was fair, tall, slender, with an apparent delicacy of frame that concealed an amount of physical strength for which he was famous, and with n.o.bly-chiselled features.

His duels and his love-affairs were numerous. He was rashly brave, and irresistible; so poor an accountant that he always allowed his opponents to reckon up his gains at play, but when his turn came to pay a debt of honour he was never known to make an error in a figure. It is scarcely necessary to mention that his gambling debts were the only ones the payment of which he considered at all important. He was immensely beloved by his subordinates,--his servants, his horses, and his dogs; he addressed them all with the German "thou," and treated them all with the same good-humoured familiarity. He was thought most urbane, and was never guilty of any definite intentional annoyance; but he suffered from a certain near-sightedness. He recognized as fellow-mortals only those fellow-mortals who occupied the same social plane with himself; all others were in his eyes simply population,--the ma.s.ses.

There is little to tell of his wife, save that she was a brilliant brunette beauty, with very loud manners and a boundless greed of enjoyment. She petted little Lato like a lapdog; but one evening, just as she was dressed for a ball, she was informed that the child had been taken violently ill with croup, whereupon she flew into a rage with those who had been so thoughtless and unfeeling as to tell her such a thing at so inopportune a moment. Her carriage was announced; she let it wait while she ran up-stairs to the nursery, kissed the gasping little patient, exclaimed, with a lifted forefinger, "Be a good boy, my darling; don't die while mamma is at the ball!" and vanished.