O Thou, My Austria! Part 48

"Where is the Count?" Frau von Harfink asks a servant, at lunch, where Treurenberg's place is vacant.

"The Herr Count had his horse saddled some time ago," the man replies, "and left word that he should not be here at lunch, since he had urgent business in X----."

"Indeed!" the hostess says, indifferently, without expending another thought upon her son-in-law. She never suspects that within the last few hours, beneath her roof, the ruin has been completed of a human existence long since undermined.

Lunch goes on,--a hurried meal, at which it is evident that the household is in a state of preparation for coming festivities; a meal at which cold dishes are served, because the entire culinary force is absorbed in elaborating the grand dinner for the evening; a lunch at which no one talks, because each is too much occupied with his or her own thoughts to desire to inquire into those of the others.

Frau von Harfink mentally recapitulates the evening's _menu_, wondering if nothing can be added to it to reflect splendour upon the Harfink establishment.

Paula's reveries are of her coming bliss; her usually robust appet.i.te is scarcely up to the mark. In short, the only one who seems to eat with the customary relish is the Pole, who, very temperate in drinking and smoking, is always ready for a banquet. He is also the only one who notices the want of appet.i.te in the rest. He does not waste his interest, however, upon the Baroness or Paula, but devotes his attention exclusively to Selina and Olga.

The Countess is evidently in a very agitated state of mind, and, strange to relate of so self-satisfied a person, she is clearly discontented with herself and her surroundings. When her mother asks her whether two soups had better be served at dinner, or, since it is but a small family affair, only one, she replies that it is a matter of supreme indifference to her, and will certainly be the same to the guests, adding,--

"The people who are coming will probably have some appet.i.te; mine was spoiled some days ago by the mere _menu_, which I have been obliged to swallow every day for the last fortnight." These are the only words spoken by her during the entire meal.

The Pole finds her mood tolerably comprehensible. She has had a scene with Treurenberg, and has gone too far,--that is what is annoying her at present. But Olga's mood puzzles him completely. The depression she has manifested of late has entirely vanished, she holds her head erect, her movements are easy, and there is a gleam in her eyes of transfiguring happiness, something like holy exultation.

CHAPTER x.x.xVII.

A VISIT.

Meanwhile, Treurenberg is riding along the road to X----.

The landscape is dreary. Autumn is creeping over the fields, vainly seeking the summer, seeking luxuriant life to kill, or exquisite beauty to destroy. In vain; the same withering drought rests upon everything like a curse, and in the midst of the brown monotony bloom succory and field-poppies.

Treurenberg gazes to the right and left without really seeing anything.

His eyes have a gla.s.sy, fixed look, and about his mouth there is a hard expression, almost wicked, and quite foreign to him. He is not the same man who an hour ago sought his wife to entreat her to begin a new life with him; not the same man who at dawn was so restless in devising schemes for a better future.

His restlessness has vanished with his last gleam of hope; sensation is benumbed, the burning pain has gone. Something has died within him. He no longer reflects upon his life,--it is ended; he has drawn a black line through it. All that he is conscious of is intense, paralyzing weariness, the same that had overcome him in the early morning, only more crus.h.i.+ng. After the scene with his wife he had been a.s.sailed by a terrible languor, an almost irresistible desire to lie down and close his eyes, but he could not yield to it, he had something to do. That poor lad must be rescued; the suffering the boy was enduring was wholesome, but he must be saved.

Fainacky's a.s.sertion that Treurenberg was in the habit of borrowing from his friends had been a pure fabrication; he had borrowed money of no one save of Harry, with whom he had been upon the footing of a brother from early boyhood, and of Abraham Goldstein, upon whose secrecy he had supposed he could rely. It would have wounded him to speak to any stranger of the painful circ.u.mstances of his married life.

Now all this was past; Selina could thank herself that it was so. He could not let the boy go to ruin, and, since Selina would not take pity upon him, he must turn to some one else; there was no help for it.

For a moment he thought of Harry; but he reflected that Harry could hardly have so large a sum of ready money by him, and, as time was an important item in the affair, there was nothing for it but to apply for aid to Wodin, the husband of his cousin and former flame.

The trees grow scantier, their foliage rustier, and the number of ragged children on the highway greater. Now and then some young women are to be seen walking along the road, usually in couples, rather oddly dressed, evidently after the plates in the journals of fas.h.i.+on, and with an air of affectation. Then come a couple of low houses with blackened roofs reaching almost to the ground, manure-heaps, grunting swine wallowing in slimy green pools, hedges where pieces of linen are drying, gnarled fruit-trees smothered in dust, an inn, a carters'

tavern, with a red crab painted above the door-way, whence issues the noise of drunken quarrelling, then a white wall with some trees showing above it, the town-park of X----. Lato has reached his goal. On the square before the barracks he halts. A corporal takes charge of his horse, and he hurries up the broad, dirty steps, along the still dirtier and ill-smelling corridor, where he encounters dragoons in spurs and clattering sabres, where the officers' overworked servants are brus.h.i.+ng their masters' coats and their mistresses' habits, to the colonel's quarters, quarters the luxurious arrangement of which is in striking contrast to the pa.s.sages by which they are reached. Count Wodin is not at home, but is expected shortly; the Countess, through a servant, begs Lato to await him. He resolves to do so, and pays his respects meanwhile to his cousin, whom he finds in a s.p.a.cious, rather low-ceilinged apartment, half smoking-room, half drawing-room, furnished with divans covered with Oriental stuff's, pretty buhl chairs and tables, and j.a.panese cabinets crowded to excess with all sorts of rare porcelain. An upright piano stands against the wall between two windows; above it hangs a miniature gondola, and beside it, on the floor, is a palm in a huge copper jar evidently procured from some Venetian water-carrier. Two china pugs, the size of life, looking like degenerate chimeras, gnash their teeth at all intruders in life-like hideousness. The door-ways are draped with Eastern rugs; the walls are covered with a dark paper, and two or three English engravings representing hunting-scenes hang upon them. In the midst of these studies in black and white hangs a small copy of t.i.tian's Venus.

The entire arrangement of the room betrays a mingling of vulgarity and refinement, of artistic taste and utter lack of it; and in the midst of it all the Countess reclines on a lounge, dressed in a very long and very rumpled morning-gown, much trimmed with yellowish Valenciennes lace. Her hair is knotted up carelessly; she looks out of humour, and is busy rummaging among a quant.i.ty of photographs. She is alone, but from the adjoining room come the sound of voices, as Treurenberg enters, and the rattle of bzique-counters.

The Countess gives him her hand, presses his very cordially, and says, in a weary, drawling tone, "How are you after yesterday, Lato?"

"After what?"

"Why, our little orgie. It gave me a headache." She pa.s.ses her hand across her forehead. "How badly the air tastes! Could you not open another window, Lato?"

"They are all open," he says, looking round the room.

"Ah! You have poisoned the atmosphere with your wine, your cigars, your gambling excitement. I taste the day after a debauch, in the air."

He nods absently.

"I admire people who never suffer the day after," she sighs, and waves her hand towards the door of the next room, through which comes a cheerful murmur of voices. Lato moves his head a little, and can see through the same door a curious couple,--the major's wife, stout, red-cheeked, her hair parted boldly on one side, and dressed in an old gown, enlarged at every seam, of the Countess's, while opposite her sits a young man in civilian's clothes, pale, coughing from time to time, his face long and far from handsome, but aristocratic in type, his chest narrow, and his waistcoat b.u.t.toned to the throat.

"Your brother," Lato remarks, turning to the Countess.

"Yes," she rejoins, "my brother, and my certificate of respectability, which is well, for there is need of it. _ propos_, do you know that in the matter of feminine companions.h.i.+p I am reduced to that stout Liese?"

The Countess laughs unpleasantly. "I have tried every day to bring myself to the point of returning your wife's call. I do not know why I have not done so. But the ladies at Dobrotschau are really very amiable,--uncommonly amiable,--they have invited me to the betrothal _fte_ in spite of my incivility. _ propos_, Lato, will any one be there,--any one whom one knows?"

"I have had nothing to do with the list of guests," he murmurs, listening for Wodin's step outside.

"I should like to know. It would be unpleasant to meet any of my acquaintances,--they treat me so strangely. You know how it is." Again she laughs in the same unpleasant way. "But if I could be sure of meeting no one I would go to your _fte_, I have a new gown from Worth: I should like to display it somewhere; dragging my trains through these smoky rooms becomes monotonous after a while. I think I will come."

The voices in the next room sound louder, and there is a burst of hearty laughter. Lato can see the major's wife slap her forehead in mock despair.

"Easily entertained," the Countess says, crossly. "They are playing bzique for raisins. It makes a change for my brother; his physician has sent him to the country for the benefit of the air and a regular mode of life. He has come to the right place, eh?" Again she laughs; her breath fails her; she closes her eyes and leans back, white as a corpse.

Lato shudders at the sight, he could hardly have told why. His youth rises up before him. There was a time when he loved that woman with enthusiasm, with self-devotion. That woman! He scans her now with a kind of curiosity. She is still beautiful, but the wan face has fallen away, the complexion all that can be seen of it beneath its coating of violet powder--is faded, the delicate nose is too thick at the tip, the nostrils are slightly reddened, the small mouth is constantly distorted in an affected smile, the arms from which the wide sleeves of the morning-gown have fallen back are thin, and the nails upon the long, slender hands remind one of claws. Even the white gown looks faded, crushed, as by the constant nervous movement of a restless, discontented wearer. Her entire personality is constrained, feverish.

Involuntarily Lato compares this woman with Olga. He sees with his mind's eye the young girl, tall and slender as a lily, her white gowns always so pure and fresh, sees the delicately-rounded oval of her girlish face, her clear, large eyes, the innocent tenderness of her smile. And Selina could malign that same Olga! His blood boils. As if Olga were to blame for the wretched, guilty pa.s.sion in his breast! His thoughts are far away from his present surroundings.

"Seven thousand five hundred," the triumphant voice of the major's wife calls out in the next room. "If this goes on, Count Franz, I shall soon stop playing for raisins! Ah!" as, turning her head, she perceives Treurenberg; "you have a visitor, Lori."

"Yes," Countess Lori replies, "but do not disturb yourselves, nor us."

The rattle of the counters continues.

"I must speak with your husband," Lato says presently; "if you know where he is----"

"He will be here in ten minutes; you need have no fear, he is never late," Lori says. "_ propos_, do you know what I was doing when you came in? Sorting my old photographs." She hands him a picture from the pile beside her. "That is how I looked when you fell in love with me."

He gazes, not without interest, at the pale little picture, which represents a tall, slender, and yet well-developed young girl with delicate, exquisitely lovely features, and with eyes, full of gentle kindliness, looking out curiously, as it were, into the world from beneath their arched eyebrows. An old dream floats through the wretched man's mind.

"It was very like," he says.

"Was it not? I was a comical-looking thing then, and how badly dressed!

Look at those big sleeves and the odd skirt. It was a gown of my elder sister's made over. Good heavens! that gown had a part in my resolve to throw you over. Do you remember?"

"Yes, Lori."

"Only faintly, I think," she laughs. "And yet you seemed to take it sadly to heart then. I was greatly agitated myself. But what else was to be done? I was tired of wearing my sister's old gowns. Youth longs for splendour; it is one of its diseases, and when it has it--pshaw!

you need not look so, Lato: I have no intention of throwing myself at your head. I know that old tale is told for both of us. And we never were suited for each other. It was well that I did not marry you, but, good heavens, I might have waited for some one else! It need not have been just that one--that----" with a hasty gesture of disgust she tosses aside a photograph of Count Wodin which she has just drawn from the heap. "What would you have? If a tolerably presentable man appears, and one knows that he can buy one as many gowns, diamonds, and horses as one wants, why, one forgets everything else and accepts him. What ideas of marriage one has at seventeen! And our parents take good care not to enlighten us. 'She will get used to it,' say father and mother, and the mother believes it because she wants to, and both rejoice that their daughter is provided for; and before one is aware the trap has fallen. I bore you, Lato."

"No," he replies; "you grieve me."