CHAPTER VII.
If Oswald Lodrin might be regarded as the chivalric embodiment of the old-time 'noblesse oblige,' his cousin Georges was on the contrary the personification of the modern axiom 'noblesse permet.'
He had made use of the credit of the Lodrins, the accumulation of centuries, to screen his maddest pranks. True, he had never overdrawn this credit, he had never by any of his numberless eccentricities raised any barrier between himself and his equals in rank. He had grown to manhood discontentedly convinced that Count Hugo Lodrin, his father's elder brother, had done him great wrong, and this wrong was his marriage late in life with the beautiful Princess Wjera Zinsenburg.
Georges was barely eight years old at the time, but he remembered as long as he lived how angrily his father, after a life of careless extravagance led in the certainty of inheriting the Lodrin estates, had received the announcement of the betrothal, and how hardly he had spoken of Wjera Zinsenburg.
The boy grew up, his heart filled with a hatred none the less vehement because it was childish, first for his aunt, and afterward for his cousin.
His hatred for his aunt grew with his growth, but as for his hatred for his cousin?... It was difficult to cherish resentment against his loving, helpless little cousin with his big black eyes and pretty rosy mouth. And in the summer holidays, which he spent every year in Tornow with his father, he struck up a friendship with the little fellow.
It was a lasting friendship. One day after his father's death when he had for several years been an officer of hussars, and always in pecuniary difficulties, Georges received a letter, which upon very slanting lines evidently ruled in pencil by Ossi, himself, and in very sprawling clumsy characters, ran thus:
"Dear Georges,
"Papa says you need money, I don't need any, so I send you my pocket money, and when I'm big you shall have more. The donkeys are given away. Papa got angry with Jack because he bit me. Now, for a punishment, he has to carry sand for the gardeners. I have a pair of ponies now; they are very pretty and I ride every day. I can ride quite well and I am not afraid, but I stroke Jack whenever I see him, and I think he is ashamed of himself.
"Your Ossi."
Yes, he needed money--a great deal of money; his father had left him next to nothing, and the small allowance which his uncle made him, always seasoning it with good advice, did not nearly suffice him.
His uncle paid his debts upon condition that he should exchange from the hussars into the dragoons, then held in rather high estimation as heavy cavalry. Georges needed money quite as much as a dragoon, however, as when a hussar. Then came feminine influences--a quarrel with his colonel--a duel. He resigned his commission with honour and to the regret of the entire staff. Once more, and, as he was solemnly informed, for the last time, his uncle paid his debts, and wishing to have no further concern in his nephew's money matters he also paid out a handsome sum as a release from all further demands.
Georges manifested his repentance after this settlement by an immediate excursion to Paris with a pert little French concert-saloon singer. This was the finishing stroke in the eyes of his strictly moral, nay, even bigotted uncle. From that time onward the young man's letters to the old count were returned to him unopened. Georges vanished from the scene. The rumour ran that after he had tried his luck and failed in the California gold diggings, he had been a rider in a circus; there was also a report that he had served mahogany-coloured Spaniards and jet-black negroes as waiter at Rio Janeiro, that he had been an omnibus driver in New York--this last fact was vouched for. Still, he contrived to impress the stamp of spontaneous eccentricity upon every one of the expedients to which he resorted in his pecuniary embarrassments.
One day after Oswald had attained his majority he received a letter in which his cousin, after appealing to the old boyish friendship, described his present condition. Oswald, who was kindheartedness itself, and, moreover, enthusiastically eager to discharge his duties as head of the family, did not delay an hour in arranging his cousin's affairs and in settling upon him an income suitable to his rank.
Thus Georges returned to his old sphere of life and to his former habits, smiling calmly, but testifying no special delight, and not the slightest surprise at the change in his circumstances. The honest friendship which he felt for the cousin whom as a child he had petted, quite destroyed his old grudge against his fate.