Countess Erika's Apprenticeship Part 18

"Yes, that is an extenuating circ.u.mstance," Countess Anna admitted.

"And he did not make love to me," Erika a.s.sured them.

"Indeed? That I take ill of him," Countess Lenzdorff said, with a laugh, while Erika went on with sincere cordiality. "I suddenly felt so lonely and sad, and he was very, very kind to me!" She raised her eyes gratefully to his.

"Ah, well----but come now, child; we are going home. I have had quite enough of this.--Adieu, Goswyn."

"Perhaps you will permit me to take you home," said Goswyn.

"You had much better go in there and put a stop to the mischief which, if I am not mistaken, is being largely added to to-night." This with a significant glance towards the music-room.

"I am powerless," Goswyn observed, dryly. He conducted the ladies to the anteroom, where a regiment of lackeys were in waiting. After attending to the old ladies, he had the pleasure of helping Erika to put on her cloak. He had a strange sensation as he wrapped it about the girl's slender figure. The white fur with which it was trimmed was wonderfully becoming to her.

"A heather blossom in the snow," the vain grandmother remarked, with a glance in his direction, whereby she discovered that there was no necessity for calling his attention to her grand-daughter's charms.

This discovery rejoiced her. She bade him good-night with unusual cordiality, smiling to herself as she descended the brilliantly-lighted staircase.

Meanwhile, Goswyn had returned to the music-room. His sister-in-law was still standing by the piano, singing. G---- was accompanying her, good-humouredly ready to burden his soul with any musical misdeed that could give pleasure to his audience, a readiness arising partly from the prosaic view which he took of his "trade," as he was wont to call his music. Quite a little throng of ladies had already rustled out of the room.

Countess Brock was beginning to be uneasy. The effect of the Princess's performance vividly reminded her of the effect which the young actor's reading had had upon her guests.

Goswyn glanced at his brother. Otto von Sydow was a picture of distress: he looked as if threatened with an apoplectic stroke; he alternately clinched and opened his gloved hands, looked uneasily at the men whom he saw laughing, and at the women whom he saw leaving the room; he stood first on one foot and then on the other; but he allowed his wife to go on singing.

The first verses of the music-hall song she had now selected were simply coa.r.s.e. Goswyn comforted himself with thinking that perhaps she would not sing the last. He had underrated his sister-in-law's temerity. She went on. Sight and hearing seemed to fail him.

Suddenly there came a loud burst of applause. A few of the men present, in pity for the unhappy husband, had thus drowned the improprieties of the last verse.

Princess Dorothea looked round,--saw men laughing significantly and women hurriedly leaving the room. She grew pale, and there came into her Spanish face a look of indescribable hardness. She was about to continue, when her hostess approached her.

"Charming!" exclaimed the 'fairy,'--"charming, my dear Thea, but you must not exert yourself further: you are a little hoa.r.s.e."

It was too unequivocal. Princess Dorothea understood. Her a.s.sumed gaiety took another turn. "I have a sudden longing for a dance!" she exclaimed. "G----, play us a waltz: we will extemporize a ball."

G---- began to play with immense spirit one of Strauss's waltzes, when a gray-haired old General raised his voice,--a clear, sharp voice,--and said, "It would be a little difficult to extemporize a ball, for, with the exception of the hostess, your Excellency is the only lady present."

Dorothea grew paler still, held herself rather more erect than usual, threw back her head, and smiled. Just thus, deadly pale, hard, erect and smiling, Goswyn was to see her once again in his life, a couple of years later, when all her world was pointing at her the finger of scorn.

"You will let me drive Helmy home, will you not, Otto?" Dorothea asked in the hall, where she was holding a kind of little court amid her admirers, a yellow lace scarf wound around her head, and a black velvet wrap about her shoulders. "Helmy has such a cold, and there is no finding a droschky at this hour."

Involuntarily Goswyn, who was just buckling on his sabre, paused to listen to this little speech of his fascinating sister-in-law's, uttered in the tenderest tone.

He had no idea that his brother had anything to fear from Prince Helmy: this was only Dorothea's way of escaping any admonition from her husband. If Otto did not scold on the spot he never scolded at all.

There really was nothing objectionable in her driving home alone with her cousin, but then---- She laid her little hand on her husband's breast as she spoke: the gentlemen around her looked on. Without waiting to hear his brother's reply, Goswyn left the house. He had gone but two or three steps in the street when some one joined him: it was Otto.

"Have you a light?" he asked, in a rather uncertain voice. Goswyn struck a match for him, and paused in silence while his brother lighted his cigar with unnecessary effort.

"I am really very glad to walk," said Otto, keeping pace with his brother. "Thea cannot bear to have me smoke in the coupe."

Goswyn was silent.

"I know Thea through and through," Otto continued: "she is as innocent as a child, but a little imprudent; and then all those starched, stiff-necked Berlin women cannot forgive her for being more fascinating and original than the whole of them together. And, after all, what harm was there in her singing those songs? It was easy enough to see that she did not understand what she was singing, or at least did not think.

The purest women are always the most imprudent. These people do not understand her. They admire her,--no one can help that,--but they do not appreciate her. When she saw that she was shocking those Philistines she sang on out of sheer bravado. It was perhaps not wise to brave public opinion."

Each time that Otto von Sydow had broken the thread of his discourse in hopes that Goswyn would a.s.sent to his view of the situation, he had been disappointed. His brother was persistently mute.

Otto's footsteps sounded louder, his breath came more heavily; Goswyn, who knew him thoroughly, saw that he was struggling against an access of rage. For a while he maintained a silence like his brother's; then, pausing, he addressed Goswyn directly: "Do you find anything to blame in my allowing my wife to drive home alone with a cousin who is not well, and who may thereby be saved a fit of illness,--a cousin, too, with whom her relations have always been those of a sister?"

Goswyn shrugged his shoulders. "Since you ask me, I must speak the truth," he replied. "On this particular evening I think it would have been wiser for you to drive home _tete-a-tete_ with your wife than to let her go with young Nimbsch."

Otto's breathing became still more audible; he stamped his foot, and, before Goswyn could look round, had turned off into a side-street with a sullen "good-night."

He was greatly to be pitied: he had hoped that Goswyn would comfort him, but Goswyn had not comforted him.

"He never understood her, and therefore never liked her," he muttered between his teeth. "He is the worst Philistine of all."

And then he recalled Goswyn's persistent opposition to his marriage with the Princess Dorothea, how pa.s.sionately--for Goswyn, calm as he seemed, could be pa.s.sionate--he had entreated his brother not to propose to her. "A blind man could see how unfitted you are for each other: you will be each other's ruin!" he had said. The words rang in his ears now with vivid distinctness.

It was about two o'clock in the morning: the streets were dim, deserted. At intervals of a hundred steps the reddish lights of the street-lamps were reflected from the brown muddy surface of the asphalt. From time to time a carriage casting two bluish rays of light before it shot past Otto with an unnaturally loud rattle in the dull silence. The windows of the houses were all dark and quiet, except where from one open building came the m.u.f.fled notes of some light popular airs: it was a cheap kind of music-hall. Involuntarily Sydow listened: something in the faint melody commanded his attention. They were playing the music of the very song his wife had sung but now.

His wretchedness was intolerable; his limbs seemed weighed down with fatigue. "Pshaw! it is this confounded thaw," he said to himself. In his ears rang the words, "You are utterly unfitted for each other."

What if Goswyn had been right, after all?

Good G.o.d! No one could have resisted her.

They had met first in Florence. The two brothers had made a tour through Italy just after Otto's attaining his majority. They travelled together so far as that means having the same starting-point and the same goal, but each followed his own devices, stopping where he liked, so that sometimes they did not meet for a long while. While Goswyn underwent all kinds of inconveniences for the sake of visiting many interesting little towns in Northern Italy, Otto, whose first requirement was a good hotel, went directly from Venice to Florence. He had been there for five days, and was terribly bored; he missed Goswyn.

Although Otto was the elder of the two, he had always been in the habit of letting Goswyn think for him. Old Countess Lenzdorff maintained that when they were children she had often heard him ask, "Goswyn, am I cold?" "Goswyn, am I hungry?"

He had carried with him through life a certain sense of dependence upon his younger brother, looking to him for help in every difficulty, for support in every sorrow.

He had no acquaintances in Florence, the food was not to his taste, the wine was poor, the beds, in which so many had slept before him, disgusted him, the theatres did not edify him. He took no pleasure in the opera; he was thoroughly--and for a German remarkably--devoid of a taste for music; and the Italian drama he did not understand.

Consequently he found his evenings intolerably long: he spoke no Italian, and very little French. Since there were no Germans in the hotel save those with whom, in spite of his homesickness, he did not choose to consort, he led a very lonely life. And, as he took not the slightest interest in art, it was no wonder that on the fifth day of his sojourn in Florence he declared such an "Italian course of culture"

the "veriest mockery of pleasure in which a Prussian country n.o.bleman could indulge."

The queerest thing was that Goswyn seemed to be enjoying himself so much. He received delighted post-cards from him from all kinds of little out-of-the-way places of which Otto had never before even heard the names, not even when he studied geography at school, and he seemed entirely independent of discomfort as to his lodgings in his enjoyment of all that "art-stuff," as Otto expressed it to himself.

One afternoon in the cathedral, in an access of most depressing ennui, he was sauntering from one shrine to another, when he suddenly heard a sigh. He looked round. A young girl in a large Vand.y.k.e hat and a dark cloth dress trimmed with silver braid had just seated herself in one of the chairs, and was opening a yellow-covered novel. Everything about her, her hat, her dress, as well as her own striking figure, gave an impression of distinction, although of distinction somewhat down in the world.

She was very young, and yet did not seem at all affected by her loneliness. Before long she noticed that Otto was observing her, and she bestowed a scornful glance upon him over the pages of her book.

He instantly flushed crimson, and turned away, feeling very uncomfortable. Then in the twilight silence of the s.p.a.cious church, always deserted at this hour of the day, he heard a delicate insinuating voice call, "Feistmantel, dear!"

Involuntarily he looked round: it was the slender girl in the chair who had called.

He then observed hurrying towards her a short, stout individual in a striped gray-and-black water-proof with an opera-gla.s.s in a strap,--a wonderful creature, whom he had noticed before strolling about the church, but without an idea that she had anything to do with the attractive occupant of the chair.

"Feistmantel, dear."

"Princess!"