Egon stood a long while at the window, gazing after the carriage as it disappeared. What had he just heard? Had Bertha made that innocent child her messenger, her tool, in the idle flirtation with which she would fain employ her empty hours? Yes, she was indeed false and shallow; and good, kindly Wangen deserved a better fate. What had become of the magical charm which Bertha von Massenburg's beauty had exercised over the Egon of former days? He thought of her almost with aversion. Nevertheless, he must return the visit that had been paid him; kindly relations with Linau must be preserved.
CHAPTER XXVIII.
[CLARA TO THE RESCUE].
The afternoon was delightful, the setting sun glorious in the crimson splendour of the west, but the elder members of the party driving home to Linau through the warm summer air were scarcely in the mood to enjoy it. Wangen was annoyed at what he declared to himself were groundless suspicions of his beautiful wife; he tried to atone for them by redoubled tenderness in his manner when he addressed her, and this very tenderness irritated Bertha, in her consciousness of failure in her first attempt to vary the monotony of her existence by what she assured herself should be but an innocent flirtation,--merely a piece of feminine vengeance upon the man who had so insulted her vanity in years gone by. Clara, indeed, rattled away about the various delights of Plagnitz, winding up her eulogium of its lord, however, with a heavy sigh.
"If my darling Elise could but have been with us!" she exclaimed. "And now she may never see it! Oh, Bertha, how could you be so unkind to her? I know that it is all because of your bitter speeches that she is going to leave us on Sunday. Why do you not love her? Why can we not all be happy together?"
To this question Bertha deigned no reply, and Hugo said, rather sadly,--
"I too, dearest Bertha, should have been glad to have kept Fräulein Elise with us. But perhaps she is right. You two are like fire and water, and since she has so advantageous an offer, and can be so near her poor mother, I have nothing to say, only I am greatly mistaken if you do not wish for her many a time after she has left us."
"You know, Hugo, I cannot agree with you in your estimate of Elise. She has always disliked me, and of course I see her from my point of view. Before she came, everything that I did was right in your eyes; her presence irritates me, and leads you to criticise and object to what I do and say; in short, I cannot be sorry that she leaves us on Sunday."
The sun was just disappearing as Linau was reached. Hugo and Bertha betook themselves to the balcony, and Clara went in search of her dear Elise, guessing correctly where she should find her. At the farthest end of the extensive garden at the back of the old manor-house of Linau, just where it was separated from the road that divided it from the meadows beyond by an old-fashioned picket-fence, there stood, concealed among the luxuriant shrubbery, a shady arbour, which was reached by a narrow pathway among the tall bushes bounding the garden on one side. This arbour had formerly been a favourite retreat of old Herr von Wangen; from it he could see far over his meadows and fields; here he was wont to sit with his pipe and book through the long summer hours, overlooking his people at work; and hence it had come to be called 'the master's arbour.' After his death the shrubs and bushes about it were allowed to grow more rankly, so as almost entirely to conceal it, for his son did not like to sit here; he preferred to ride out over his estate, to visit his labourers; and his young wife would have thought it excessively tiresome to spend any time on a wooden bench in this lonely spot, when she might be lounging in a luxurious chair on her favourite balcony.
But for Elise this arbour was a delightful retreat,--she liked to teach Clara here, sure of freedom from all interruption,--and here Clara found her after the wonderful visit to Plagnitz. She was in the midst of writing a long letter, and the child's presence might have been more welcome at another time, but she responded affectionately to her pupil's enthusiastic caress; not for the world would she have grieved, by any show of a desire to be alone, the girl whom she had grown to love dearly.