True, and Other Stories

by George Parsons Lathrop

II.

As I left the steamer at Southampton, and went up to London for a few days, I parted with Steavens before the voyage was completed. It was nearly a week later that I met Fearloe again, in Paris. We went together to dine at a neat little two-franc place in the Rue St. Honoré, which we had formerly haunted, and during dinner he suddenly asked, with a roguish look, "Who do you think I saw yesterday?—Steavens!" And Fearloe here bent his head, bathing his beard in laughter. "Do you know, he has been in Paris three days and hasn't gone near the Exposition?"

"Well, that shows a healthy independence," said I. "Is he studying the Louvre?"

"No," was the answer; "he has discovered something far more important than the Louvre or the Exposition—something which seems to reward him for the whole trip."

"What can that be?" I queried, rather blankly.

"He has discovered," said Fearloe, "that Paris is the place to buy shirts in!"

This, it appeared, was the topic which had engrossed Steavens's mind when Fearloe met him. The erratic man, after reaching Bremen, had abruptly decided to come over to the French capital, which he might have done much more easily and cheaply from Southampton; and the result of this expensive détour had been a kind of shirt-intoxication. "You've no idea," added Fearloe, "how neatly he has gotten himself up. He really is making progress. And the magnificence of the fellow! Why, he says he shall merely take a single run through the Exposition, and leave all the rest of Paris till after he has been to Pfeiffers."

"Fearloe," I said, with a measure of solemnity, "don't scoff at a man like that. I never before have met an American with quite so much originality in his treatment of Europe. He must be a genius."

Nevertheless, we continued to laugh at him, with that superiority of being less naïf and independent than he which so oddly seems to us a desirable thing nowadays. And if any one at that time had hinted that Steven Steavens, with his want of reserve and complete indifference to what is known as culture, possessed qualities of character more to be admired than our own, we should not have taken the trouble even to smile at the critic.

I did not happen to meet Steavens while in Paris; but in August I finally acted on Fearloe's chance hint aboard ship, and went to Pfeiffers myself, where I found not only our enthusiast in shirts, but also Scharlach and Miss Raslaff, together with that young lady's uncle, a shrivelled little old man, who had the air of being put away to keep in his thick white hair and whiskers, like a dried beetle in cotton-wool. To the rest of us indeed, the old gentleman was of no more account than a beetle, and appeared to have as little influence on the lives around him as an insect might. But, as a matter of fact, though he was so nearly dead, and scarcely stirred a limb, he clutched three lives in his faded fingers, and held them fast there—his niece's life, Scharlach's life, and Steavens's life. For I was not long in discovering that my rheumatic pilgrim had fallen in love with Fräulein Raslaff almost at first sight. He himself took good care that I should not remain blind to the fact. He drew me aside, and poured his tale into my ear, though with somewhat more reserve than he had shown on the steamer in discussing his plans of travel.

"How long has this been going on?" I inquired, as we walked together up and down the hotel terrace overlooking the wild and picturesque valley.

"Three weeks and a half," he answered. "It's a short time, and it seems like a short time. I've read in the story papers that when a man's in love, a few days seem to him like years, and so forth. But I don't believe it. I know exactly how long I've been here, and yet there's no doubt about it, I'm in love with that young lady, and am going to make her my wife if I can. The story papers are wrong, and I'm right."

I couldn't help reflecting that this was the same independence I had praised to Fearloe. "The man has the faculty of knowing exactly what he's about," thought I, "and that goes a good way toward securing success." Yet it seemed preposterous that he should have the least chance with a woman so far removed from him by tastes and traditions as Fräulein Raslaff. I said to him merely, "Have you spoken to her?"

"I've tried to feel my way," was his reply. "But that uncle of hers—he's an old potato-bug, sir. He's worse than a potato-bug. I don't know what to call him. He won't let any one come near her, and yet he don't seem to take any pleasure in her himself. He looks just about dead, but I tell you it's only shamming; the minute another man talks to Miss Raslaff, he wakes up; it puts life into him, and he flies around sharp. This is a good country to operate in, though; he can't take the walks we do with parties sometimes—up to Solitude, and the Belvedere, and around. I'd just like to see him in the gorge once; that would finish him."

The gorge was a very peculiar and rather perilous cavern, higher up in the valley through which the Tamina runs.

"Then it's only the uncle that troubles you?" I queried. "You don't feel afraid of Scharlach?"

Steavens paused, looking anxious for an instant. Then the child-like expression which I had marked on my first glimpse of him came out strongly again. "Do you think he'd be mean enough to stand in my way?" he asked.

"But suppose you are standing in his?" I returned.

Steavens apparently considered this an unnatural view to take. "Scharlach can get along by himself all right," he asserted. "He might be disappointed, and it wouldn't ruin him. But me—why, take me, and what am I without her?" I must admit that this humbleness touched me with its pathos, and I began to range myself on Steavens's side. Then he concluded, without any pathos at all, "Well, I've got as good a right to try as he has, any way, and I'm bound to win in the end."

At length, wishing to soften a possible disappointment, I thought I ought to toll him how long Scharlach had been hoping to gain Miss Raslaff's heart. The information startled him considerably; but after a few moments' silence he struck me on the shoulder, and exclaimed, "Well, here we are! He's rich and I'm rich; let her choose between us for something else. If he hadn't made any money out there, I'd say to him, 'Here, my man, I've got the best of you, so I'll stand by, and you can just walk in and try your chances first.' But seeing we're neck and neck on that, I don't know that there's anything to do but go ahead."

And go ahead he assuredly did from that hour. He astounded the old uncle by remonstrating with him directly against his supervision of Miss Raslaff. "It ain't fair," he said. "You don't know how to manage things in this country. I don't say a woman ought to vote; but anyway she ought to have a right to listen to a man when he wants to tell her what he thinks of her. Do you suppose I could tell you?" (With a glance by no means politic in its contempt at the desiccated little figure before him.) "And how am I to talk to her about it when you are around?"

The result of this attack, which he made in my presence, was a violent outbreak from the old man; and the next day Steavens was asked to meet Miss Raslaff and her uncle in their salon, to receive from the young woman herself a confirmation of her uncle's objection to receiving any attentions from him. The girl was pale, but composed and very beautiful. I could not make out whether or not she had taken any fancy to my brusque compatriot, but she acted her part firmly. When at last she said, in pure English, "My uncle is right; you must not seek my acquaintance any more—more ardently; let us be quite as we were before," I declare so sweet a suspicion of a blush came over her checks, and her voice died away so delicately, like a soft echo heard among the very hills around us, that I almost fell in love with her myself. A great change instantly came over Steavens. All his jauntiness, his unreserve, his child-like confidence, were extinguished at a blow. After a moment he collected his voice, and said, with great gentleness, "Miss Raslaff, I will never do anything you ask me not to, so far as speaking is concerned; but that won't prevent my thinking about you just as much as ever, and I shall keep just as near the place where you stay as I can."

This was the end of the interview, and I thought my countryman had the best of it. He was very melancholy, though, while I remained at the baths; and the savage beauty of the place—the rough stream roaring out of the cavern against whose walls of black calcareous rock, glittering here and there with feldspar, the faint Alpine rose bloomed pensively, the shaggy heights above the hotel, and the glimpses of snowy peaks in the distance—was not suited to restore his cheer. One day we went into the gorge, with its rocky walls rising two or three hundred feet, and gradually closing together above, where a bridge of planks cornered into the solid stone runs for a distance of six thousand paces to the springs, slippery all the way from the flying river-foam. It was gloomy and depressing as a scene from the Inferno, and bad for a rheumatic patient, as I reminded Steavens; but he shook his head mournfully, and said he didn't care. What was worse was the danger of missing a foothold on the wet and mossy planks, and so being precipitated into the wild stream beneath; and I breathed more easily when we came out safely again. But it struck me that this would be a fearful place for two angry rivals, such as Steavens and Scharlach now were, to meet in.

It so happened that Scharlach that very day came to me with his tale of despair. Thinking the field was his own, after Steavens's discomfiture, he had formally proposed for Miss Raslaff's hand, and had been rejected. He could not understand it. He had addressed the young lady with her uncle's permission, and she had refused him. I gathered from what he said that he had pressed his claim as a matter of right, that he considered himself to have bought her love by long patience and the accumulation of a competence, and had put forward this theory with undue bluntness; for he confessed that she had dismissed him with a cold anger and disdain that left no hope. We were sitting on the great stone steps hewn in the height above the hotel as he told me this. "No," he cried, springing to his feet, at the end, in a sort of fury. "If she had shown heat of temper, I might have kept up hope. But she petrified me with her contempt. I am no better than these rocks." He ground his teeth as he spoke, looking down at the hostelry, sunk at a fearful depth below us. Then he seized a heavy stone from the earth, and flung it down the steep, madly crying, "Yes, I am stone now, and there goes my heart rolling down to crush you!" It stopped before it had gone far; but the frenzied action was enough to show that the man had lost his balance. The pent-up force of years, so well controlled till now, had broken forth at a bound, and was carrying him away. "And it was that fool from America, that friend of yours," he added, fiercely, turning upon me all at once, as if I were an enemy—"it was he that did this. It is because he is a novelty, and because her uncle opposes it, that she has taken a fancy to him, and thrown aside the man who was a slave to her for eight years. That's it, I am sure. Take him away! Take your American away!"

I need not say that I did not obey this command; but I did take myself away. The truth is, the situation was getting altogether too serious for my liking. Yet, after I had gone, I felt an incessant curiosity to know how the affair had resulted. I heard nothing more for some time, until I came across an acquaintance during the winter, who had met Steavens in Paris again. This gentleman was telling me how Steavens had been to Rome early in the winter, and now went about complaining that it was a very dirty, one-horse town, which couldn't compare with Philadelphia. He also reported Steavens as gaining some notoriety for his romantic attachment to a young German lady, whom I had no difficulty in recognizing as Fräulein Raslaff. It appeared, therefore, that he had as yet made no headway; but I indulged in a sense of approval when I learned that he was studying hard, to enlarge his education and his knowledge of European things. Still, my acquaintance described him as a man who could never become anything but an American. He had taken the baths under the necessity of improving his health; he was trying to take European manners, in the same way, for the sake of improving his chances with Fräulein Raslaff. Yet he remained immutably hostile to everything foreign, and to prolong his stay abroad was, therefore, the strongest sort of devotion he could have shown.