O Thou, My Austria! Part 29

"Settled down--upon his wife's money!" Lato muttered, without looking at his father.

"Is there anything new in that?" exclaimed the Count, with unruffled composure. "A man of honour can take nothing from a woman whom he loves, but everything from his wife. 'Tis an old rule, and it is comical,"--Count Hans laughed softly,--"how here in Austria we require that a rich wife should always belong to the same sphere with her husband; he is forgiven for a _msalliance_ only if he marries a beggar. It is pure folly! We shall never amount to anything unless we toss aside the entire burden of prejudice which we drag about with us.

It weighs us down; we cannot keep step with the rest; how can a man run sheathed in mail? With the exception of a few magnates among us who are able to enjoy their prestige, we are wretchedly off. We spend our lives sacrificing ourselves for a position which we cannot maintain respectably; we pamper a chimera to be devoured by it in the end. Most of all do I admire the _bourgeoisie_, whom we impress, and whose servility keeps bright the nimbus about our heads. Bah! we can do nothing more with the old folly! We must mingle in the fresh life of the present."

"Yes," Lato muttered again, but more indistinctly than at first, "we ought to work, to achieve somewhat."

Count Hans did not, perhaps, hear this remark; at all events he did not heed it.

"All the huge new fortunes in England marry into the aristocracy," he said.

Outside, the same strange alluring murmur breathed above the thirsty flowers; the breeze of the coming storm streamed into the room.

"To marry a woman for the sake of her money is detestable," Count Hans began afresh, and his voice was almost as soft and wooing as that of the summer night outside; "but, good heavens! why should one refuse to marry a girl whom he loves just because she is rich?"

He paused. Lato had closed his eyes.

"Are you asleep?" his father murmured.

Lato shook his head, without speaking. The old Count arose, extinguished the candle on the table, and softly withdrew.

CHAPTER XVII.

MISMATED.

About four months afterwards Lato stood with Selina Harfink before the altar, in a large splendidly-decorated church filled with a crowd of people, among whom Lato, as he walked towards the altar, mechanically sought some familiar face,--at first in vain. At last he found some one,--his old English teacher; then a horse-dealer with whom he had had transactions; and then there in the background--how could they have escaped him?--about a dozen ladies of his own circle. Some of them held their eye-gla.s.ses to their eyes, then crowded together and whispered among themselves. He turned away his head.

How dared they whisper about him! He had not sold himself; he was marrying a girl whom he loved, who was accidentally rich!

The long train moved slowly up to the altar. Lato felt as if he were dragging after him a burden that grew heavier with every step. He was glad to be able to kneel down before the priest. He looked at his bride. She knelt beside him, brilliantly beautiful, glowing with pa.s.sion, supremely content. In vain did he look for the s.h.i.+mmer of tears in her eyes, for a trace of virginal shyness in her features, for aught that could arouse sympathy and tenderness. No; about her full red lips there was the tremor of gratified vanity and of triumphant--love!

Love?

From her face Lato's gaze wandered among the wedding-guests.

Strangers,--all strangers. His family was represented by his father and the Countess Zriny, a distant cousin of Count Hans, who had once been in love with him. Lato s.h.i.+vered. Solemn music resounded through the church. Tears rose to his eyes. Suddenly a strange wailing sound mingled with the strains of the chant. He looked up. Behind the tall church windows fluttered something black, formless, like a mourning banner. It was the broken top of a young tree, not quite torn from the parent stem, waving to and fro in the wind.

And then the priest uttered the words that decided his future fate.

Before the departure of the young couple, and whilst Selina was making ready for their journey, Count Hans had an opportunity for emotion. He paced restlessly to and fro in the room where with Lato he was awaiting the bride, trying vainly to say something cheering to the bridegroom, something to arouse in him a consciousness of the great good fortune in which he himself was a sharer. At last the voices of the bride and her friends were heard approaching. The old n.o.bleman went up to his son, laid his hands tenderly upon his shoulders, and exclaimed, "Hold up your head, old fellow: your life is before you, your life is before you!"

And Lato repeated, "My life is before me----" The next instant the door opened.

"The carriage is waiting!"

The last words that Selina said to her friends out of the window of the carriage just before driving off were, "Do not forget to send me the newspapers, if there is anything in them about our marriage."

The horses started, the carriage rolled on. How swiftly the wheels flew over the stones! In the twilight, illumined only by the glare of the carriage lamps, Lato could see the outline of Selina's figure as she sat beside him, and the pure red and white of her face, only partially concealed by her veil. He put his arm around her, and she nestled close to him and raised her lips to his. His ardour was chilled by an annoying sensation which he could not at first trace to its source. It was produced by the strong perfume which Selina used. It was the same perfume that had been a favourite with the actress who had been Lato's first love, a handsome, fair woman, with an incomparable complexion. He was suddenly reminded that Selina looked like her, and it vexed him.

Selina had long since forgotten it,--women almost always forget such things,--but in the early times of her marriage it would not have pleased her to think it a "distinguished one." She was desperately in love with Lato, served him like a slave, racked what brain she had to prepare surprises for him in the way of costly gifts, and left entirely to him the disposal of her property. Not a penny would she call her own. It all belonged to him,--all. It was quite touching to see her penitent air when she applied to him, whispering, "I am a terrible spendthrift, Lato. Do not be angry; but I want some more money. Will you not pay my milliner's bill for me? And then, if I am very good, you'll give me something to put in my portomonnaie,--a hundred guilders,--only a hundred guilders, Lato darling?"

At first such scenes annoyed him terribly, and he tried hard to prevent them. Then--well, he got used to them, even felt flattered, touched; almost forgot whence came the money that was now so abundant with him,--believed, at all events, that others had forgotten it,--and played the lavish husband with his wife, bestowed costly gifts upon her, and was pleased with her admiration of them.

All this time he lived in a kind of whirl. He had accustomed himself to his young wife's endearments, as he had accustomed himself to travel with a train of servants, to occupy the best rooms in the best hotels, to drink the best wines, to smoke the best cigars, to have enormous bills at the tailor's, to gratify all his expensive tastes, to spend time in devising costly plans for the future, and, half involuntarily, to do it all as if he no longer remembered a time when he had been obliged to consider well every outlay.

In after-years his cheeks burned when he recalled this part of his life,--but there was no denying the fact--he had for a time been ostentatiously extravagant, and with his wife's money. Poor Lato!

Two years the whirl lasted; no longer.

At first he had tried to continue in the service, but the hards.h.i.+ps of a military life became burdensome to him as he yielded to the new sense of luxury, and Selina, for her part, had no taste for the annoyances that fell to her share in the nomadic life of a soldier's wife. He resigned. They planned to purchase an estate, but could not agree upon where to purchase; and they zigzagged about, travelling from Nice to Rome, and from Rome to Paris, everywhere courteously received and fted.

Then came their child. Selina, of course, pa.s.sed the time of her confinement in Vienna, to be under her mother's protection, and nearly paid for her child's life with her own. When she recovered, her entire nature seemed changed; she was always tired. Her charm had fled. Her nose grew sharp, there were hard lines about her mouth, her face became thin, while her figure broadened.

And her feeling for Lato underwent a fundamental alteration. Hers was one of those sensual, cold-hearted natures which, when the first tempest of pa.s.sion has subsided, are incapable of any deeper sentiment, and her tenderness towards her husband decreased with astonis.h.i.+ng celerity. Henceforth, vanity became her sole pa.s.sion, and in Vienna she was best able to satisfy it. The greatest enjoyment she derived from her foreign travel and from her intercourse with distinguished people lay in being able to discourse of them to her Vienna circle. She went into the world more than ever,--the world which she had known from childhood,--and dragged Lato with her. She was never weary of displaying in financial society her new t.i.tle, her distinguished husband, her eccentric Parisian toilets.

Her world sufficed her. She never dreamed of asking admission to his world. He made several melancholy attempts to introduce his wife among his relatives; they failed lamentably. No one had any particular objection to Selina. Had she been a poor girl all would have vied with one another in doing something for her "for dear Lato's sake." But to receive all that loud, vulgar, ostentatious Harfink tribe, no one could require of them, not even the spirit of the age. Why did not Lato take his wife to the country, and separate her from her family and their influence? Then after some years, perhaps---- It was such an unfortunate idea to settle in Vienna with his wife!

Yes, an unfortunate idea!

Wherever he showed himself with his wife, at the theatre, on the Prater, everywhere, his acquaintances greeted him cordially from a distance, and avoided him as if he had been stricken with a contagious disease. On the occasion of the death of one of his aunts, he received kind letters of condolence from relatives who lived in the next street!

Selina was not in the slightest degree annoyed by all this. It always had been so in Austria, and probably always would be so. She had expected nothing else. And Lato,--what had he expected? he who understood such matters better than she did? A miracle, perhaps; at least an exception in his favour.

His life in Vienna was torture to him. He made front against his former world, defied it, even vilified it, and was possessed by a hungry desire for what he had lost, for what he had prized so little when it was naturally his own. If he could but have found something to replace what he had resigned! Sincerity, earnestness, a deeper grasp of life, elevation of thought,--all of which he might have found among the best of the _bourgeoisie_,--he had sufficient intellect and refinement to have enjoyed. Perhaps under such influences there was stuff in him of a kind to be remodelled, and he might have become a useful, capable man.

But the circle in which he was forced to live was not that of the true _bourgeoisie_. It was an inorganic ma.s.s of rich people and idlers tossed together, all with t.i.tles of yesterday, who cared for nothing in the world save money-getting and display,--a world in which the men played at languid dulness and the women at frivolity, because they thought it '_chic_,' in which all wanted to be 'fast,' to make a sensation, to be talked of in the newspapers,--a world which, with ridiculous exclusiveness, boasted of its anti-Semitic prejudices, and in which the money acquired with such unnatural celerity had no room for free play, so that the golden calf, confined within so limited an arena, cut the most extraordinary capers. These people spent their time in perfecting themselves in aristocratic demeanour and in talking alternately of good manners, elegant toilets, and refined _menus_. The genuine patrician world of trade held itself aloof from this tinsel society, or only accidentally came into contact with it.

Lato's was a very unpleasant experience. The few people of solid worth whom he met at his mother-in-law's avoided him. His sole pleasure in life was his little son, who daily grew plumper, prettier, merrier. He would stretch out his arms to his father when the merest baby, and crow with delight. What a joy it was for Lato to clasp the little creature in his arms!

The boy was just fifteen months old when the first real quarrel took place between Lato and his wife, and estranged them for life.

Hitherto Lato had had the management and right of disposal of his wife's property, and although more than one disagreeable remark anent his extravagance had fallen from her lips he had taken pains not to heed them. But one day he bought a pair of horses for which he had been longing, paying an amateur price for them.

He was so delighted with his purchase that he immediately drove the horses in the Prater to try them. On his return home he was received by Selina with a very cross face. She had heard of his purchase, and asked about the horses.

He praised them with enthusiasm. Forgetting for the moment all the annoyances of his position, he cried, "Come and look at them!"

"No need," she made answer. "You did not ask my opinion before buying them; it is of no consequence now whether I like them or not."

He bit his lip.

"What did you pay for them?" she asked. He told her the price; she shrugged her shoulders and laughed contemptuously. "So they told me,"

she said. "I would not believe it!"

"When you have seen the horses you will not think the price too high,"

Lato said, controlling himself with difficulty.