XXI.
At this time life was for poor Felix only a heavy, oppressing burden.
He knew that Juanita was staying in Marienbad; knew that she had married his father-in-law. He felt neither horror nor astonishment at this step; nothing which she did would have astonished him, but he felt oppressed by the sense of her nearness; a true superstitious fear of the magic charm which her beauty had for him weighed upon him. His recollections, his imagination, had been busy with the picture of her which he still possessed--had invested it with the most refined charms. For Felix, the only excuse for his inexcusable conduct, by which he had ruined his life, lay in the demoniac fascination of the dancer.
Linda had written her father, before his marriage, an annihilating letter, to which she had received no answer. She believed her father angry, and therefore expected nothing less than a visit from him. Felix, who thought her opinion sensible, nevertheless showed from time to time a certain fear, and thereby excited the spirit of contradiction in Linda.
"One can be glad that papa has done nothing worse," she remarked once, indifferently. "It is not to be supposed that they will have children--et pour le reste, such a marriage with a dancer has a certain cachet. I shall make no advances to her, but if she comes I must receive her!"
Felix shuddered and was silent.
Bitterly ashamed of himself, for a time he had tried to restrain his thirst for liquor. But he could control himself no longer. When the old remembrance began to burn in his heart like eating poison, he at first tried hard to occupy himself. He read, but, unaccustomed to all mental activity, a book scarcely chained his attention. He took long walks, he was too uneasy to become tired; he rode, he was too good a horseman to have any trouble with his horse.
His heart grew more and more heavy, and he drank--drank privately in his room so as not to be surprised in an unreliable condition. He was always temperate at table. No one saw him now with flabby lips and tottering knees, and his friends did not notice that he was really never quite sober now. His hands shook perpetually, there was a watery look in his staring, hollow eyes. A slight bluish flush colored his nostrils, and his voice was quavering.
Meanwhile Linda, careless and indifferent, fluttered around him, bitterness in her heart, on her lips a charming smile and malicious jests. A butterfly with a wasp's sting, Scirocco had called her, and Pistasch repeated it to her. It had greatly pleased her.
At this time Pistasch came to Traunberg almost daily. Linda coquetted with him, but her coquetry was vague and cold, and was neither challenging nor encouraging. He made no progress, as he expressed himself to Scirocco. "She has no temperament and no heart," he grumbled, and once he added, "Perhaps I am not the right one----"
"What do you mean?" replied Scirocco, impatiently, remembering the suspicion which had been cast upon him. But Pistasch only answered crossly, "Garzin!"
"Impossible!" replied Scirocco, unwillingly. Pistasch only shrugged his shoulders, and when Sempaly began to consider the matter, he must admit that Garzin went oftener than was necessary to Traunberg, that Linda had quite a different glance and voice when she was with him from what she had for others, that she made concessions to him which she granted no one else, never wore again the most becoming toilets if he had once condemned them, and did not sing the most piquant couplets if he shrugged his shoulders over them, and, once on the slippery path of distrust, Scirocco told himself also that the charming sisterly confidence which Linda permitted herself with her brother-in-law was scarcely in place in such a beautiful woman with such a young man.
He was angry with Garzin.
"He really does not think of wrong, but he should be careful--for----"
Like all people of his stamp, Scirocco, in affairs of passion, did not believe in free will, but so much the more in the compelling influence of opportunity.
"You have a new bracelet, Linda," said Felix one day, after dinner, to his wife as she smoked a cigarette with him in the drawing-room.
"Do you like it?" said she, and held out her white arm to him. The bracelet consisted of a thick gold chain to which a little coin was fastened.
"Charming!" answered Felix, apparently indifferently. "Did you buy it in Marienbad?"
"No; Kamenz gave it to me to-day--he owed me a philopena," replied Linda.
"Hm!" Felix looked gloomy, but did not know exactly how to put his vexation into words. He asked himself, "Have I the right to reprove my wife?"
"Ah, the bracelet seems to please you less since you know where it comes from," said Linda, smiling maliciously. "Poor Felix! Are you, perhaps, jealous of this handsome, silly Pistasch? He is about as dangerous to me as that dandy there," and she pointed to a dainty Meissner figure in knee breeches and flowered vest, who with cocked hat under his arm, smiled down from a bracket.
"Well, I certainly do not wish to disturb your little amusement," stammered Felix, "but you do not know how much gossip arises from intercourse between a woman like you and a man like Pistasch, and if he is really so indifferent to you--why--then--perhaps you might receive him somewhat less frequently."
"Hm!" said Linda, thoughtfully. "However indifferent that porcelain dandy yonder is to me, I have not the slightest inclination to throw him out of the window." She blew a few whiffs of smoke up to the ceiling.
"But there is no question of that," replied Felix, "only see him less often----"
Linda would not let him finish.
"But do you not see, my dear Felix," said she, knocking the ashes from her cigarette, "to the house of a woman like me, who--let us speak plainly--really does not belong to his set, a man like Pistasch either comes not at all or every day. I am of a sociable nature--I must associate with some one, or else I should die of ennui. If no ladies will come, then I will receive men."
"I cannot understand why you do not get on better with Elsa," remarked Felix, uneasily.
"I was there recently; she has not returned my visit," said Linda. "I cannot force her to come. I believe she is vexed with me because Erwin amuses himself with me. Heaven knows our intercourse is of wholly an innocent nature!"
The young woman rocked softly back and forth in her chair and laughed to herself, striking the finger-tips of her loosely clasped hands together.
"I do not doubt that for a moment, but you should have some consideration for Elsa--she is nervous and sensitive."
"Ah! and I am to suit my behavior to her interesting nervous condition," laughed Linda. "That is to say, I am to be intolerable to Erwin. Eh bien, non merci! He is the only man of my present acquaintance of whom I think anything."
Felix was silent. Then without was heard a rustling and puffing as of a heavy silk gown and an asthmatic person. A foreboding distressed Felix. Linda half rose. "That is surely not----?" she murmured, but already the servant had opened the door. "Baron and Baroness Harfink!" he announced.
Very red-faced, even fatter than formerly, with confident bearing, shining with happiness and perspiration, and with the air of a youthful dandy, Linda's father approached his daughter.
Although she had thought that she remembered him very well, she is still somewhat abashed at his astonishing appearance. Nevertheless she makes the best of a bad game, and condescendingly offers him her cheek to kiss. He kisses her loudly on the mouth.
"Ah, you look splendidly--no matter, you wrote me a foolish letter, but the past shall be forgotten. Here I bring your new mamma to you. She was good-hearted enough to pay you the first visit. You have certainly heard of the Marchesa Carini."
"Also of Juanita," says Linda, giving the tips of her fingers to her step-mother. "I am indescribably pleased to make the acquaintance of such a great coryphée. I have never yet had the pleasure of seeing a dancer except on the stage." The colossal insolence of her words is lost upon Juanita, owing to her stupidity and deficient knowledge of German, but the depreciation in tone and glance is perceptible to the dancer. She feels helpless and irritated.
"Does Marienbad please you?" continues Linda, with the insolent condescension which she has studied from the best examples.
"Very pretty," murmurs the Spaniard, twisting her handkerchief between her hands. She speaks poor German. Linda is delighted with her pronunciation, and does not take the trouble to speak French, for which cosmopolitan language the dancer had forgotten her mother-tongue.
"If I remember rightly, I once had the pleasure of seeing you dance--it was in '67, in Vienna--my first theatre evening."
"In Vienna?" said the dancer. "Oh! that was a small performance--that was at first--later, when I travelled with my husband, the Marchese Carini, je n'ai jamais travaillé except in St. Petersburg, Paris, London and Baden-Baden."
"Ah!" says Linda; the conversation pauses.
Papa Harfink, leaning somewhat forward, his heels under his chair, rests in a low arm-chair, and monotonously strokes his leg from the knee upwards and back again.
And Felix? Pressed tightly into a dark corner, where the hope of being forgotten and overlooked chains him, he stands motionless. As light perspiration which does not cool, but rather burns, moistens his whole body, the blood sings in his ears, his tongue cleaves to his teeth. He has not self-possession enough to hear her, he has not the courage to look at her; she floats before his mind, the most seductive siren, the most bewitching woman that ever, trifling and playing with a man, ruined his honor. He still dreads the disturbing might of her beauty. Curiosity compels him to gaze at her; he looks and does not trust his eyes. Where is the Juanita? Near his wife he sees a yellow, bloated woman, prematurely old, tastelessly dressed, squeezed into a black moiré antique gown, with folds under her round eyes, little fan-shaped wrinkles on her temples, and black down about the corners of her mouth. Common, fat, awkward, she sits there, a double chin resting on her fat bosom, her hands clasped over a lace-edged handkerchief in her lap! Felix cannot believe his eyes. That must be a mistake--that cannot be Juanita! Then, beneath the hem of her gown, he sees a tiny foot in a black satin shoe, and now he knows that this is Juanita!
He notices a light brown mole on her neck--it disgusts him, but then he remembers how this mole had once pleased him, how often he had jokingly kissed it! His cheeks burn--he has lost his last illusion--the whole vulgarity of the temptress to whom he had yielded is pitilessly exposed to him. Involuntarily he makes a movement. Papa Harfink discovers him. "Ah, Felix," he cries, already somewhat out of temper, "are you hiding from me? I should think," he adds, relying upon the power of his millions, "that such a father-in-law as I is not to be despised."
Slowly Felix advances.
"My husband," says Linda to the dancer. But the latter's face has taken on a prepossessing smile, and with the confidential expression which appeals to old times, she says, "I know him already, tout à fait un ami from my débutante period; is it not so?"
She gives him her hand.
The hand, only covered by a lace mitt, is flabby, and as Juanita, half rising, presses this hand against the lips of Felix, who is bowing to her, his face changes, plainly expresses disgust, and he lets the hand fall unkissed.
Juanita trembles with rage. "Let us go," screams she--"let us go! Oh, Sir Baron, you think that I am only a dancer--and--and----"
Speech fails her, she gasps for breath. "Let us go, let us go!" she pants.
"My Chuchu! My beloved wife!" cries Mr. von Harfink, and not honoring Felix and Linda with a word, he leads the Spaniard out of the room.
The carriage rolls away with the wedded pair. Scarcely has the door closed behind the Harfinks when Linda bursts into loud, happy laughter. Her husband's stiff manner, his way of ignoring her father, which, under other circumstances, would another time have irritated her from pure capriciousness, have this time chanced to delight her. "You are unique, Felix, wholly unique!" she cries to him. "You were so deliciously arrogant! But what is the matter with you? Are you ill? Tiens! Juanita is your great secret! Poor boy!" She taps him on the shoulder, she laughs yet. "What a disappointment, eh! But what is the matter? No, listen; it is humiliating for me that the meeting with this comedian has so robbed you of your self-control, Felix!"
His secret still has a charm for her, surrounds his poor bent form with a romantic light. Something startling, shockingly horrible, she seeks behind this, but not something dishonorable! With a teasing tenderness, which she has never shown him since their honeymoon, she strokes his cheeks, and begs, "Tell me what distresses you."
Then Felix's conscience torments him; he feels as if he would rather die than keep his secret longer. For a moment he almost counts upon mercy from this soft childish creature who has seated herself beside him on the arm of his old-fashioned chair.
"Linda," he begins, "when I married you I did not know--that you--suspected nothing of--of this matter. Your mother assured me that she had told you of my past----" he hesitates.
"Oh, my mother spared my youth, and only made the vaguest allusions!"
He draws a deep breath. "A terrible story is connected with this Spaniard,"--he hesitates--she looks closely and curiously at him; a sudden idea occurs to her: "You shot a friend in a duel on her account?" she cries, and then, as she sees him start but shake his head, she says softly, with indistinct articulation and hollow voice, "Or--or not in a duel--from jealousy?"
He lowers his head--he cannot speak--then slowly rising he totters out of the room. She remains alone--staring before her--her heart beats loudly--then she was right! All his enigmatical behavior is explained; she now even understands her fellow men, and strangely enough, she almost pardons him.
Felix, beside himself with jealousy, thirsting for revenge, plunging a knife into the breast of his friend--the scene has something dazzling, something which compels her sympathy. She pictures the scene to herself; the luxurious apartment of the dancer--the two men, both deathly pale--she has seen something similar in the Porte St. Martin theatre. A peculiar excitement overpowers her corrupted nature, thirsting for strong stimulants. She loves Felix!
Two minutes later she knocks at his locked door. "Let me in, me, your wife, who wishes to console you!"
Felix does not open the door.