Erlach Court Part 5

"Your F. Meineck."

She clasped her hands before her face and sobbed bitterly. And she, who all her life long had jeered at such sentimentality, cut off one of her curls, enclosed it in a small golden locket, and sent it to him with the following words:

"Dear Lad,--

"You burden me with a great responsibility. There was no need for you to plunge neck and heels into this campaign to prove to me that you were worth something. I send you herewith the trifle for which you ask: may it carry a blessing with it! G.o.d bring you safe home, is the earnest prayer of your faithful friend,

"Karoline Leskjewitsch."

June pa.s.sed. The earth languished beneath the burning sun. Pale, feverish, and sleepless, Karoline Leskjewitsch dragged through the endless summer days, sc.r.a.ping lint,--she felt unfit for any other occupation,--and reading with hot, dry eyes the lists of the dead and wounded.

One day she found his name in the list of the dead. She was crushed, utterly annihilated. A few hours afterwards, however, she received a letter from her brother, stating that the report of Meineck's death was a mistake; he was in Venice, severely wounded. She could not tell how it was, but on the same evening, almost without luggage, without telling any one of her plans, she started off with her old maid, and two days later arrived in Venice and was conducted by her brother to the room where the wounded man lay.

Pale, wasted, with dishevelled hair and sunken features, he lay back among the pillows. Too weak to stir, he could only greet her with a blissful smile.

She wore a black Spanish hat with large nodding feathers. As she entered she took it off, and, going to his bedside, she said, "I did not come merely to see you, but as a Sister of Charity, and I shall stay with you until you are well again."

He replied, in a voice so weak as to be scarce audible, "To make me well a single word will suffice: say it!"

She hesitated for a moment, and then, stooping over him, she pressed her lips to his.

Who that saw them together ten years later could have believed it? No marriage was ever more romantic than theirs at first. His case was considered hopeless. The two physicians whom she questioned as to his condition declared his recovery impossible. Resolutely setting aside all opposition, she was married to him immediately, that she might nurse him devotedly and be enabled to support him in the dark hour of the death-struggle.

At the end of ten weeks the physicians acknowledged that they had been mistaken. Not only was he out of danger, but he had well-nigh recovered his former strength and vigour. Early in October the pair took their wedding-trip to Bohemia. In matters of sentiment Franz was a poet to his fingertips, and he scorned the idea of the usual journey with his bride from one hotel to another. They spent their honeymoon in the old mill at Zalow.

On many a fresh, dewy, autumnal morning the peasants saw the two tall figures strolling through the forest where the leaves were rapidly falling. She who had hitherto carried herself so erect now walked with bent head and with shoulders slightly bowed, as if scarcely able to bear the weight of her great happiness.

They would wander unweariedly about the country for hours: they ransacked all the old peasant dwellings for antiquities, and they chose the spot for their graves in a picturesque, romantic churchyard. And when the light faded and they returned home, they would sit beside each other in the twilight in the s.p.a.cious room where he had wooed her, and where now all the literary and scientific apparatus had given place to huge bouquets of autumn flowers filling the vases in every corner. The bouquets slowly changed colour, the cornflowers paled and the poppies grew black, in the darkening night; and something like profound melancholy would possess the lovers,--the sacred melancholy of happiness. With her hand in his, the wife would tell her husband of the mild March night in which the joyous sobbing of the brook had wakened her, calling to her that spring had come.

"Believe it or not, as you please," Meineck was wont to say, often with a very bitter smile, in after-years, "I am really that fabulous individual, hitherto sought for in vain, the man who never, during the entire period of his honeymoon, w as bored for a single quarter of an hour."

He took up his profession again; she would not hear of his resigning from the army for her sake. When he proposed it she clasped her arm tenderly about his neck and said, "Inactivity would ill become you, and I want to be proud indeed of my husband. I have but one duty now in life, to make you happy," she gently added.

He was fairly dizzy with bliss. Was it possible, he sometimes asked himself, that an angel had actually descended from heaven to nestle in his heart and to conjure up for him a Paradise on earth? Her caresses gained in value from the fact that she was not so softly docile as other women, that now and then he had to overcome in her a certain acerbity and harshness.

"A woman and a horse must both be possessed of amiable possibilities of obstinacy, or we take no pleasure in them," he declared.

She bloomed afresh after her marriage. Her features, which were rather marked, grew softer, and had the freshness of those of a girl of eighteen. Her hair, which at his request she allowed to grow, curled in soft rings about her brow. Every one noticed how very beautiful she had grown; and he too, they said, had gained much since his marriage. His moral and intellectual stand-point was loftier. She refused to have an interest which he did not share; she expended an immense amount of acuteness in discovering what would arrest his attention in whatever she was reading, and either repeated it to him or read it aloud.

The idea of playing the love-sick girl at her age was odious to her,--ridiculous; she wished to be his friend, his trusty comrade; but withal she spoiled him by a thousand delicate attentions far more than the youngest wife would have done. She exhausted her ingenuity in rendering his life delightful. She was not fond of going much into society; therefore she made his home attractive to his comrades. The entire regiment adored her, from the colonel to the youngest ensign.

The women alone hated her. It was intolerable, they thought, that a blue-stocking should presume to eclipse them with the other s.e.x.

What became of all this bliss? It vanished little by little, as the snow slowly subsides, filtering into the ground.

"I know myself," she had said to him when he wooed her; "I know myself: my paralyzing weakness will pa.s.s away, as will your intoxication."

But his intoxication, after all, lasted longer than her weakness.

After they had been married about five years, their second daughter, Estella, was born. The mother's health was terribly undermined for a while. Franz surrounded her with the most loving care, but she no longer took any pleasure in it. The fitful, unnatural glow kindled so late in her heart slowly died away; her illusions faded, her pa.s.sion cooled. Nothing was left of the young spring deity of her imagination who had roused her heart from its cold wintry sleep, save a good-humoured, ordinary man whose society offered her no attraction and whose tenderness wearied her.

Then came the campaign of '66. When he left her she contrived to shed a couple of tears, and during the fray in Bohemia her conscience p.r.i.c.ked her terribly, but when the truce was proclaimed she was quite indifferent as to the length of his absence; it might have been prolonged _ad infinitum_, for all she cared. When he came home at the end of half a year his conscience was laden with a first infidelity.

She had written an essay upon Don John of Austria.

From this moment the downward course was rapid.

If he could but have had a comfortable attractive home, he might perhaps have clung to it; he might have felt that he had something to live for, something to prevent, as he afterwards expressed it, his 'going to the devil.'

But he daily felt more and more of a stranger beneath his own roof, and his wife did nothing now to induce him to stay there; on the contrary, his presence bored her,--a fact which she did not always conceal.

For a little while he restrained himself, and then----

All the brutal instincts of his nature a.s.serted themselves, and he took no pains to subdue them.

One joy, however, was his all through this dreadful time, his youngest daughter. He never took much pleasure in the elder of the two: she had inherited all her mother's caprice, without any of her talent.

But little Stella was indeed a darling.

When she was between one and two years old, at a time when his comrades, although but rarely, still met at his house at gay little suppers, he would go up to the nursery, where the child lay in bed, and if she happened to be awake and laughing at his approach he would take her in his arms just as she was in her little white night-gown and cap and carry her down-stairs to display her. She would obediently give her hand to every guest, but was not to be induced to unclasp the other arm from her father's neck. He petted and caressed her while his friends praised his pretty little daughter.

When she had grown larger, she was always the first to run to meet him on his return home from parade. Often in winter when his cloak was covered with snow she would shrink away with a laugh, exclaiming, "Oh, papa, how cold! I cannot touch you."

"Come here," he would say to her, and, opening his cloak, he would gather her up in his arms. "'Tis warm enough here, mouse, is it not?"

And as she clung to him he would close the cloak about her, and she would thrust her hands through the opening in front and peep out, supremely happy.

She often remembered in after-years how delicious it had been to nestle against her father's broad chest, protected in the darkness, and look out into the world through a narrow crack.

He it was who gave her her first alphabet-blocks, more as a toy than by way of instruction. She ran after him continually to show him the words she had spelled out with them, taking especial delight in long learned expressions of which she did not understand a syllable. One of the first words she put together upon his writing-table as she sat upon his knee was 'phosph.o.r.escence.'

He laughed, and told the officers of it at the riding-school. Poor fellow! He was secretly ashamed of his wretched home and his matrimonial failure, as well as of the miserable part he played in his household. As he could not speak of anything else, he talked of his child.

His wife's article upon Don John of Austria appeared meanwhile in 'The Globe,' and, unfortunately, attracted considerable attention. One critic compared the author's brilliant style to that of Macaulay. From that moment she lost the last remnant of interest in her house and family.

The praise which her article received went to her head; she recalled how when a young girl she had been called a genius, and how it had been said that if she only chose to take the slightest pains she could excel George Sand as an author, Clara Schumann as a pianiste, and Rachel as an actress. Yes, if she only chose! Now she did choose. She tried her hand in every department of literature, devised plots for tragedies and romances, and wrote essays upon every imaginable social problem, without achieving any really finished or useful result. She herself was quite dissatisfied with her efforts, but she never ascribed their imperfection to any want of capacity, but always to the fact that the free flight of her fancy was cramped by her domestic cares. Possessed by the demon of ambition, she turned aside from everything that could absorb her time or hinder her in the mad pursuit of her chimera. Social enjoyment did not exist for her: she secluded herself entirely from, society. If her husband wished to see his comrades he could find them at the club.

Her household went to ruin. It was long before Meineck ventured to remonstrate with his highly-gifted wife; but at last scarcely a day pa.s.sed without crimination and recrimination between the pair. In spite of his faults and aberrations from the right path, he was exquisitely fastidious in his personal requirements and a martinet in his love of order; his wife's slovenly habits and the disorder of her household disgusted him.

"Good heavens! who," he sometimes asked, angrily, "could put up with such untidy rooms?--all the doors ajar, the drawers half open and their contents tossed in like hay; the servants dirty and ill trained, and the meals served in a way to destroy the finest appet.i.te! Even the children are neglected."

There came at last to be terrible scenes, in which Meineck would shout and swear and now and then shatter to pieces some chair or ottoman that stood in his way, while his wife sat motionless at her writing-table, now and then uttering some cold, cutting phrase, her pen suspended over her paper, longing for the moment when she should be left alone 'to work.'