SEVERAL summers had passed since that dramatic meeting on the Schiller, and these swiftly flying, monotonous years, had left their mark upon Les Plans and its belongings. One fine spring morning Mordi, the queen of cows, had been driven from the orchard by a strange man,—a butcher from Lucerne. In his company, Mordi took her first and last trip upon the familiar lake, and her comrades knew her no more. Karo, the farm’s brown and white guardian, had recently died, suddenly and mysteriously. He was found at his post, the entrance door, stiff and stark. Jan Jost was more bent and rheumatic than formerly; his wife more wrinkled and shrewish; but naturally the most remarkable change was to be seen in the two young people, Fritz and Mitli. Fritz at twenty-three was well educated, and well thought of,—especially by farmers with daughters, on account of his prospects; by the daughters, because of his celebrated prowess in sports, his handsome face, and lithe activity.
Since his course at Zurich was finished, Fritz had lived at home, helping somewhat fitfully to work Les Plans. His mother seemed a little grimmer and more taciturn,—indeed, her manner was occasionally forbidding,—always working—or always knitting, with unceasing fury, and always keeping her thoughts to herself;—these, were chiefly occupied by her son, and Mitli.
Mitli, in her seventeenth year, was tall and fully developed; she looked older than her age, and beyond a flawless complexion, ropes of yellow hair, and a pair of gay blue eyes, was not endowed with the usual attributes of ‘sweet seventeen.’ She took after the Blagdons in figure and character, and was of a determined, masterful, and restless disposition. Her intellectual faculties were dull; she evinced no taste for literature or reading, beyond the daily paper, Le Monde Amusant, and sundry and various French novels. As for her mother’s pursuits, needlework, music, and gardening, she hated them impartially; sewing tried her eyes, gardening gave her a backache, music was a bore. Tennis, dancing, skating were more to her taste. She rowed on the lake, and climbed the hills with Fritz, and accepted his love, his homage, and his gifts, with radiant complacency. Such was Cara!
Of late, she had spent most of the year in Lucerne, not merely in winter with her mother in the Weggisgasse, but in summer too. There was such difficulty about coming and going from Les Plans; the hours of the steamers, did not suit; the child’s education must not be neglected, and after considerable demur, and pressure, it had been arranged for Cara to board with the family of one of her friends, and attend the convent as an externe, returning home for week-ends, and all holidays. Her godmother had insisted on paying for her education, and her mother reluctantly submitted; for in spite of good prices for lace, the work was tedious, and Cara’s expenses for dress and amusement had become surprisingly heavy. She displayed an extravagant fancy for expensive hats and frocks and shoes,—and when she wanted money—an overpowering seductiveness, that her mother was totally unable to resist. Cara’s sweet kisses, caresses, and endearing epithets, were as balm to a heart that was starving for love, and she plied her needle bravely in order that the child should look nice, and—as a natural sequence—be happy.
The ‘child’ ran accounts in her mother’s name at Schweizer’s and other shops, and when the bills presented themselves in the shape of so many shocks, Cara would excuse herself by saying, in an airy way:
“Well, darling Mum, it’s all your own fault! Ever since I was a baby you have made a fuss about dressing me, and don’t I do you credit?”
She did; there was no denying the fact. In a beautifully cut embroidered linen, and a simple French hat, Cara might be remarked at Hurlingham or Ranelagh, but she was a little out of keeping with her background in a farm kitchen—where, being in a hurry to catch the boat, she gobbled her hasty déjeuner of rice and stewed veal.
Cara’s independence and air of breezy emancipation, had come by degrees, ever since she had gone to live with her friend Berthe Baer on the slopes of the Drei Linden. This change of abode and surroundings had given her an air of freedom and self-sufficiency, and she now ruled her mother with an absolute sway. Grown up, her own mistress, and on the threshold of life, she was resolved to make the best of her youth and have a really good time; since hers was a hard, shrewd, and absolutely pleasure-loving character. Cara was fond in a way of her pretty girlish Mum,—who was so often and so annoyingly mistaken for her sister—but the Mum was so tame, unenterprising, and easily contented; her books and work and walks, were all she asked for; but Cara, notwithstanding her sharp sight, was mistaken. Her mother was far from being contented. As she rambled alone, or sat at her lace cushion, her thoughts, though inarticulate, were many and rebellious; they spoke a plain language, and put many crucial questions to her heart, and brain. In her life of thirty-five years, she humbly confessed to many fatal errors. Her first mistake, was in marrying Hugo Blagdon—that was an act of sheer cowardice. The second, her muddled runaway; the third, in refusing Lancelot Lumley’s appeal made six years previously.
Cara, she now realised, was capable of standing alone, and successfully fighting her own battles. Her determination to live in Lucerne, had proved this most decisively; and now she and her girl were no longer so much to one another. Cara demanded a separate bedroom. “Two in a room was so stuffy,” and there were no nightly talks and confidences, and any hold she ever had on her child, was imperceptibly slipping away; the girl had her own friends, Luisa Maas, Hilda Vorgen, and the Baers, with whom she boarded.
She and Berthe were inseparable, and Berthe, a simple-minded, giggling, good-tempered girl of eighteen, could do her darling no harm. One question repeatedly thrust itself forward with irrepressible pertinacity: