XI.
"I could not resolve to dress; to appear at dinner in a peignoir is a fault which is pardoned in convalescents, and after twenty-four hours of railway travel, I feel at least like a convalescent. Ah, how pretty it is here!"
So cried Linda, entering the drawing-room where Felix and Elsa awaited her, a half hour later.
What she called a peignoir was a confusion of yellowish lace and India muslin with elbow sleeves and the unavoidable Watteau plait in the back.
Her soft hair hung loose over her shoulders.
"I have a headache, and cannot bear a comb, and as we are entre nous----" she excused herself smilingly at Elsa's astonished glance, as she pushed back the heavy waves from temples and neck. Her gestures were full of seductive grace, and her whole form was pervaded with a moist, sweet perfume which reminded one of a summer morning after a storm, and which exhales from a woman who has just taken a perfumed bath. In her whole appearance lay something which excited Elsa's nerves without her being able to explain it--which wounded her feelings of delicacy.
Linda suspected nothing of the impression which she made. "It is pretty here," she repeated, with a lazy glance of satisfaction around the room--"I thank you so much, Elsa! One sees everywhere that a woman's tact has superintended the furnishing--a workman never produces such an impression. Everything looks so cosey, so irregular. How happy I am to be home at last!" and Linda took her sister-in-law's slender, sallow hand in her white, rosy-tipped one, and kissed it with childish exaggeration.
"Who is already here besides the Deys?" she asked then. "Before next week I must really think of paying calls."
Elsa was spared an answer by the quick rolling of a carriage. Springing up she cried--whether her emotion betrayed merely a severe feeling of propriety, and did not also display an unconscious premonition of jealousy I cannot say--"Linda, it is Erwin who has come for me. Put up your hair; it would be unpleasant for you to meet a strange man so!"
With a peculiar expression in glance and smile, Linda fulfilled her sister-in-law's wish. Elsa quickly helped her to twist up her hair, and thereby breathed the peculiar perfume which Baroness Lanzberg used.
She will think of this perfume in many terrible hours which fate has in store for her.
With both hands at her neck, her beautiful figure clearly outlined, her white arms exposed to the elbow by the falling back sleeves, Linda is just fastening a pin in her improvised coiffure, when Erwin enters the drawing-room.
"I did not think that you would take the trouble to come over here," stammers Linda, childishly, shyly offering him her hand, "or else you should have found me in more correct toilet."
Elsa starts. Instead of answering, Erwin has kissed the warm white hand of his sister-in-law.
The Garzins remained to dinner in Traunberg. Linda would not hear of their return to Steinbach, she was so happy at last to have an opportunity of learning to know her relations better. She asked advice and indulgence so childishly, was so gay, so amusing, so charming, that Elsa's antipathy to her increased and Erwin's rapidly lessened. Soon he fell into the tone of indifferent gallantry with her which in society almost every man takes with every woman who does not inspire a direct repugnance in him.
But Elsa, inexperienced as she was, did not know this tone, did not know that one can listen with an expression of the most intense interest to a woman without having the slightest idea half an hour later of what she had said; that one pays her the little flatteries for which she hungers as one picks up her handkerchief--from polite habit; that for the time which one devotes to her, one is obliged, if not absolutely to forget the charms of all other women, still in no case to remind her of them.
Linda behaved very cleverly with her brother-in-law, displayed a naïve wish to please him--no forward coquetry. She knew that naturalness, lack of reserve in a really pretty woman is always the most dangerous charm--she was refinedly natural. She told the drollest Parisian stories, made the drollest faces without the slightest regard for her symmetrical features; she made use of a momentary absence of the servants to throw a bread-ball in Felix's face with all the skill of a full-blooded street-boy, and as Felix frowned and Erwin could not conceal a slight astonishment, she excused herself so penitently, told with so much emphasis of how Marie Antoinette in her time had bombarded Louis XVI. with bread balls in Trianon, that Erwin was the first to console her, while there was something in his conventional courtesy of the encouraging consideration which a mature man shows to a spoiled child.
After dinner Linda offered to sing something. "She had to be sure no voice, not even so much as a raven or Mlle. X----" she remarked smilingly, "but she relied upon her dramatic accent and----" as she remorsefully admitted--"she had taken such expensive lessons. Would not Elsa accompany her?"
Elsa refused gently, almost with embarrassment. She could scarcely read the notes, and Erwin? He could read notes and could play enough to strum his favorite operatic airs by ear in weak moments. He would try to accompany Linda if she would promise to be very patient.
"The worse you play, so much the more excuse will there be for my faulty singing," cried Linda gayly, and opened that charming, foolish cuckoo song from "Marbolaine."
A pretty confusion followed, a laughing, correcting, her little hands playing between his. "Can we begin?" she cried finally, and still half leaning over him with one finger pointing to the notes, she began to sing "Cuckoo!"
Her voice, in truth, did not remind one in the least of the gloomy organ of a raven, or the passionate hoarseness of the X----, rather of a child's laugh, it was so clear and boldly gay, even if somewhat thin and shrill.
Felix, who had meanwhile been telling Elsa of Gery's scarlet fever with most interesting explicitness, grew silent, not, perhaps, because the cuckoo song was even half as interesting to him as Gery's parched lips and little hands--no! But because he noticed that the usually so patient and sympathetic Elsa no longer listened to him. Her eyes were fixed on Linda; that thin, flippant voice pained her, could it please Erwin?
Then the last note ceased. "I am so sorry that I have hindered you by my miserable playing," he excused himself. "You sing so very charmingly! Another one, I beg you."
For the first time in her life Elsa was vexed that she was not musical.