CHAPTER XVI.
A few days afterwards the Lenzdorffs left Berlin, to spend the winter in Rome, where Erika, incited thereto by her grandmother, went into society perpetually, without taking the least pleasure in it. And she made no secret of her indifference, her discontent. The bark of her existence, once so safe and sure in its course, seemed to have lost its bearings: she saw no aim in life worthy the effort to pursue it.
She indulged in fits of causeless melancholy; yet all the while her beauty bloomed out into fuller perfection, and all unconsciously to herself life throbbed within her and demanded its right. The old Countess, who did not understand her condition, looked upon it as a morbid crisis in the girl's life; but she never dreamed how fraught with danger the crisis was.
Thus she utterly failed to appreciate or to sympathize with her grand-daughter; and, whether because of her exaggerated admiration for her, or because her age was beginning to tell upon her powers of perception, she did not suspect the slow approach of the fever which had begun to undermine the young creature's existence.
Towards the end of February, just at the close of the Carnival, Erika told her grandmother that she was heartily tired of Rome, and wished to see Italy from some other point of view.
After much deliberation, Venice was chosen for their next abode; and here the old Countess refused to follow the usual custom of foreigners and rent a palazzo: she declared that in Venice true comfort was to be found only in a hotel. So a suite of rooms was hired in the Hotel Britannia,--four airy apartments, in which their predecessor had been a crowned head, and two of which looked out upon the church of Santa Maria della Salute, whilst the other two had a view of the small garden of the hotel, and, across its low wall, of the Grand Canal.
Of course they had a gondola for their own private use; but Erika was not fond of availing herself of it. The rocking motion, the monotonous plash of the water, excited still further her irritated nerves; she preferred taking long walks,--at first, out of deference to her grandmother's wishes, accompanied by the maid Marianne. She soon tired, however, of such uncongenial companionship, and induced her grandmother to allow her to pursue alone her investigations of the corners and by-ways of Venice. She explored the curiosity-shops, spent whole days in the galleries, and made wonderful discoveries in the way of bargains in old stuffs and artistic antiquities, until her little salon became a museum of such treasures. In one corner stood a grand piano, seated at which at times she poured out her soul in all that is most beautiful and most tragic in music.
The old Countess left her to pursue her own path, and occupied herself very differently.
In spite of her original and independent view of life, and her readiness to criticise frankly all that was artificial and conventional, she loved les chemins battus. She went the way of the multitude,--saw nothing of Venetian by-ways, but devoted her time to museums and works of art, being indefatigable in her daily round of sight-seeing. And yet, although her health seemed as robust as ever, and she could apparently endure far more fatigue than her grand-daughter, she was no longer what she had been.
Her extraordinary memory began to fail, and the interest which formerly had been excited only by affairs of some moment was now ready to be aroused in petty concerns. She took pleasure in gossip, allowed Marianne to detail to her scraps of the Venetian chronique scandaleuse picked up from the couriers in the hotel, and, worst of all, the fine edge of her moral sentiment seemed in a degree blunted.
She would repeat to Erika, without the slightest idea of the pain she was inflicting, stories and reports of a nature to offend the girl's sense of morality and delicacy.
Nothing any longer shocked her: love and hatred of her kind seemed blunted under the influence of a low estimate of human nature which she called a philosophic view of life.
She simply never observed how Erika's cheeks burned when she suddenly disclosed to her the lapse from virtue, hidden from the superficial world, of some woman whom they had met in society; she never perceived the girl's feverish agitation upon hearing her grandmother calmly advance all sorts of excuses for the so-called indiscretion. She did not suppose her revelations could affect Erika disagreeably; although Erika did not always allow her to talk on without interruption; she would sometimes bluntly declare that she could not believe what her grandmother thus told her.
Then the old Countess would reply, "I really cannot see what reason you have to disbelieve it. You cannot alter human nature by shutting your eyes to its defects."
Whereupon Erika would say, with annihilating emphasis, "If human nature really is what you describe it, I cannot understand your pleasure in frequenting society, since you must despise unutterably those who compose it."
"Despise!" her grandmother repeated, shaking her head. "I despise no one. Knowing, as I do, how mankind struggles under the burden of animal instincts, I wonder to see it ever rise above them, and I am forced to esteem men in spite of everything."
Erika only repeated, angrily, "Esteem! esteem!" Her grandmother's mode of esteeming mankind was certainly extraordinary.