My father, who had been pacing up and down the room with great strides as he spoke thus, had become as red as fire, and his voice trembled with excitement. I also was moved to my heart’s core. The set of the phrases, the contemptuous words in which the attack on the man of my heart was clothed annoyed me. But I did not care to make any rejoinder. I quite felt that my defence could not remove the unfounded injustice here done to Tilling. That my father considered the views expressed yesterday as so completely false depended merely on a total failure to understand them. My father was utterly blind to the point of view which Tilling had reached. I could not make him see. I could not teach him to apply a different ethical standard than the military (which indeed was, in General Althaus’s eyes, the highest standard) to the thoughts which Tilling cherished as a man and as a philosopher. But while I remained so completely dumb in presence of the outbreak that I had had to listen to, that my father might well believe he had made me ashamed of myself, and stifled my project in the bud, I felt myself drawn with redoubled longing towards the man so misunderstood, and strengthened in my resolve to be his. By good luck, I was really free. My father’s disapproval might, to be sure, trouble me; but, as to restraining me from following my heart’s impulse, that it could not do. And, besides, there was no room in my soul for any great trouble. The wonderful, the mighty happiness which had opened before me in the last quarter of an hour was too lively to allow any vexation to mingle with it.
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Next morning I woke with a feeling like the one I always had as a child on Christmas Eve, and once on the morning of my marriage with Arno—the same inexpressible expectation, the same excited anxiousness, that to day something joyful, something great was at hand. The remembrance of the words which my father spoke the day before did, to be sure, cause a little trouble, but I quickly chased this thought away again.
It had not struck nine when I left my carriage at the entry to the Prater Promenade and mounted my horse which had been sent forward with the groom. The weather was spring-like and mild—sunless, indeed, but only the milder for that; and, besides, I carried the sunshine in my heart. It had rained in the night; the leaves were adorned in their freshest green, and a smell of moist earth rose up out of the soil.
I had hardly ridden a hundred paces down the promenade when I was aware of the tread behind me of a horse coming on at a round trot.
“Ah, how are you, Martha? I am pleased to meet you here.”
It was Conrad—the inevitable. I was not at all pleased at this meeting. However, the Prater was certainly not my private park, and on such a beautiful spring morning the ride is always full. How could I have been so foolish as to reckon on an undisturbed rendezvous here? Althaus had made his horse follow the pace of mine, and settled himself evidently to be my faithful attendant in my ride. At this time I perceived Frederick v. Tilling at a distance, who was galloping down the ride in our direction.
“Cousin! you are my good ally, are you not? You know that I take all possible trouble to dispose Lilly in your favour?”
“Yes, my noblest of cousins.”