CHAPTER IX.
[FOUND.]
A sleepy afternoon quiet broods over Erlach Court. Anastasia is sitting in the shade of an arbour, embroidering a strip of fine canvas with yellow sunflowers and red chrysanthemums. At a little distance the Baroness Meineck, who has volunteered to superintend Freddy's education during her stay at Erlach Court, is giving the boy a lesson in mathematics, making such stupendous demands upon his seven-year-old capacity that, ambitious and intelligent though the young student be, he is beginning to grow confused with his ineffectual attempts to follow the lofty flight of his teacher's intellect. Stella, with whom mental excitement is always combined with musical thirst, is all alone in the drawing-room, playing from the 'Kreisleriana.' Her fingers glide languidly over the keys. "A love-affair! What is the real meaning of a love-affair?" The question presents itself repeatedly to her mind, and her veins thrill with a mixture of curiosity, desire, and dread. Lacking all intimacy with girls of her own age or older than herself, who might have enlightened her on such points, she has the vaguest ideas as to much that goes on in the world. A love-affair is for her something connected with rope ladders and peril to life, like the interviews of Romeo and Juliet, something that she cannot fancy to herself without moonlight and a balcony. Her innocent curiosity flutters to and fro, spellbound, about the Baden-Baden episode in Rohritz's youth, as a butterfly flutters above a dull pool the pitiful muddiness of which is disguised by brilliant sunshine, the blue reflection of the skies, and a net-work of pale water-lilies.
She could not tear her thoughts from Baden-Baden, which she knew partly from Tourganief's 'Smoke,' partly in its present shorn condition from her own experience,--Baden-Baden, which when the Föhren and Rohritz were together there might have been described as a bit of Paradise rented to the devil.
"I wonder if she called him Edgar when they were alone?" the girl asked herself.
Her heart beat fast. It was as if she had by chance read a page of some forbidden book negligently left lying open. Not for the world would she have turned the leaf to read on, for, in common with every pure, young girl, when she approached the great mystery of love she was possessed by a sacred timidity almost amounting to awe.
"I wonder if he was very unhappy?" she asks herself. "Yes, he must have been;" Katrine had told her that he grew gray with suffering. A great wave of sympathy and pity wells up in her innocent heart. "Yes, she was very beautiful!" she says to herself.
She perfectly remembers her at the Giovanelli ball, leaning rather heavily on her partner's arm, her eyes half closed, her head inclined towards his shoulder, and again in a solitary little anteroom before a marble chimney-piece, below which a fire glowed and sparkled, lifting both hands to her head, an attitude that brought into strong relief the magnificent outline of her shoulders and bust. While thus busied with arranging her hair, she smiled over her shoulder at a young man who was leaning back in an arm-chair near, his legs crossed, holding his crush-hat in both hands, regarding her with languid looks of admiration.
This was Stella's friend, black-eyed Prince Zino Capito. All Venice was then talking of the Prince's adoration of the beautiful Livonian.
"What is it about her that makes every man fall in love with her?" Stella asks herself. And a sudden pang of something like envy assails her innocent heart. Ah, she would like just one taste of the wondrous poison of which all the poets sing. "Will any one ever be in love with me?" she asks herself. "Ah, it must be delicious,--delicious as music and the fragrance of flowers in spring; and I should so like to be happy for once in my life, even were it for only a single hour. But----" Her eyes fill with tears: what has she to do with happiness? it is not for her; of that she has been convinced from the moment when on that last melancholy journey with her father she found she had lost her little amulet. Poor papa! he would gladly have bestowed happiness upon her from heaven, and instead he had taken her happiness down with him into the grave. Poor, dear papa!
The breath of the roses outside steals in through the closed blinds, sweet and oppressive. Among the flowers below awakened to fresh beauty, the bees hum loudly, plunging into the honeysuckles, and gently as if with reverence touching the pale refined beauty of the Malmaison roses, while above the acacias and lindens they are swarming.
Rohritz has been occupied in writing his usual quarterly duty-letter to his married brother. As with all men of his stamp, a letter is for him a great undertaking, accomplished wearily from a strict sense of duty.
Seated at the writing-desk of carved rosewood bestowed upon him long since by an aunt and provided with many secret drawers and with all kinds of silver-gilt and ivory utensils of mysterious uselessness, he covers four pages of English writing-paper with his formal, regular handwriting, and then looks for his seal wherewith to seal his epistle. Rummaging in the various drawers and receptacles of the desk, he comes across a small bracelet,--a delicate circlet to which is suspended a crystal locket containing a four-leaved clover.
For a moment he cannot recall how he became possessed of the trifle. Could it have been the gift of some sentimental female friend? In vain he taxes his memory: no, it certainly is no memento of the kind. He swings it to and fro upon his finger, letting the sunshine play upon it, and then first perceives a cipher graven on the crystal, a Roman S, surmounting a star. Involuntarily he murmurs below his breath, "Stella!" and suddenly remembers where he found the bracelet,--on the red velvet seat of a first-class coupé, three years before, towards the end of April.
He had advertised it in the Viennese and Grätz newspapers, doing his best to restore the porte-bonheur to its owner, but in vain.
"In fact----" In an instant he recalls what Leskjewitsch had told him of Stella's sad journey with her father. He smiles, leaves his letter unsealed, goes to the window, looks down, into the garden, sees Stasy busy with her chrysanthemums, hears, proceeding from a garden-tent at a little distance, decorated with red tassels, the contralto tones of the Baroness Meineck and the depressed and weeping replies of her pupil.
Through the languid summer air glide the harsh, forced modulations of the 'Kreisleriana.'
"Ah!" He wends his way to the drawing-room. There, in the romantic half-light that prevails, all the blinds and shades being closed to shut out the hot July sun, he sees a light figure seated at the piano. At his entrance she turns her golden head.
"Are you looking for any one?" she asks, in the midst of No. 6 of the 'Kreisleriana,' rather confused by his entrance, and trying furtively to brush away the tears that still show upon her cheeks.
"Yes; I was looking for you, Baroness Stella."
"For me?" she asks, in surprise.
"Yes; I wanted to ask you something."
"Well?" She takes her hand from the keys and turns round towards him, without rising.
"Three years ago I found a bracelet in a railway-coupé. Coming across it by chance to-day, I perceive that it is marked with your cipher. Does it belong----"
But Stella does not allow him to finish; deadly pale, and trembling in every limb, she has sprung up and taken the bracelet from his hand.
"Oh, you cannot tell all you restore to me with this bracelet!" she exclaims, and in her inexpressible delight she holds out to him both her hands.
Are they so absorbed in each other as not to observe the apparition which presents itself for an instant at the drawing-room door, only to glide away immediately?
Meanwhile, in the garden a thrilling drama is being enacted. So thoroughly bewildered at last by the Baroness's system of instruction that his brain refuses to respond to even the small demands which her growing contempt for his capacity permits her to make upon it, poor Freddy feels so thoroughly ashamed of his inability that he lifts up his voice and weeps aloud. When his mother hastens to him to learn what has so distressed her son, he throws his arms around her waist and cries out, in a tone of heart-breaking despair, "Mamma, mamma, what will become of me? I am so stupid,--so very stupid!"
Katrine finds this beyond a jest. "I must entreat you not to trouble yourself further with my boy's education, if this is the only result you achieve, Lina," she says, provoked, whereupon the Baroness replies, angrily,--
"I certainly shall not insist upon continuing my lessons, especially as never in my life have I found any one so obtuse of comprehension in the simplest matters as your son."
"Ah, you insinuate that my boy is a blockhead. Let me assure you, however----"
In what mutual amenities the conversation of the sisters-in-law would have culminated must remain a subject of conjecture; for at this moment Stasy comes tripping along, saying, with an affected smile,--
"How wonderfully one can be mistaken as to character in others! Yes, yes, still waters--still waters. Ha! ha!"
"What do you mean with your still waters?" Katrine asks, contemptuously.
"Hush!" And Stasy archly lays her finger on her lip with a significant glance towards the boy, who with his arms still about his mother's waist is drying his tears upon her sleeve.
"Run into the house, Freddy, and bathe your eyes, and then we will take a walk," Katrine says to her little son. "What is the matter?" she then asks, coldly, turning to Stasy.
"Rohritz--aha!--we all thought him an extinct volcano. I, notoriously reserved as I am, permitted myself to tease him slightly now and then, thinking him entirely harmless. And now, now I find him in the yellow drawing-room, tête-à-tête with Stella, both her hands in his, gazing into her lifted eyes, deep in a flirtation,--a flirtation à l'Américaine,--quite beyond what is permissible. Really perilous!"
"If you thought the situation perilous for Stella, I really do not understand why you did not interrupt the tête-à-tête," says Katrine, severely.
"It was no affair of mine," Stasy replies. "How was I to know that so sentimental an interview would not end in an offer of marriage? Improbable, to be sure, for Rohritz is too cautious for that,--even although he allows himself on a summer afternoon to be so far carried away as to kiss the hand of a pretty girl in a tête-à-tête with her."
Her eyes sparkling with anger, the Baroness hurries into the castle and up-stairs to the drawing-room.
"Stella, what are you about here? Have you nothing to do? Come with me!"
In terror Stella follows her mother as she strides on to their apartments. There the Baroness closes the door behind her, and, seizing her daughter by the arm, says,--
"Must I endure the disgrace of having my child conduct herself so shamelessly in a strange house that strangers inform me that she is flirting à l'Américaine with young men?"
"I, mother! I----" exclaims Stella, her eyes riveted upon her mother's angry face. "But I assure you---- Mother, mother, how can you say such dreadful things to me?" And the girl bursts out sobbing. "It is Stasy that has accused me. How can you attach any importance to what she says?"
"No matter what Stasy says. Your conduct is extraordinary."
"But, mother, mother----"
"What have you to do with tête-à-têtes with young men?" the Baroness asks, with dramatic effect, the same Baroness who sent her child to a singing-teacher three times a week without an escort. "It is improper,--very improper. What must Rohritz think of you? You will come to be like your aunt Eugenie!"