VIII
EMILY’S baby had had his morning bath, and after a long wrestle had at last fallen asleep, his little lips sucking automatically in his dreams, while her father, after a struggle almost as wearing, had been induced to go for a morning walk before the heat of what promised to be a sultry day should rise with the mounting sun. She had carried a tray with Jerome’s breakfast up to him, and when he had eaten it he had rolled over and resumed his snoring, made more gross by the dissipations of his campaigning the night before; and now she drew a long sigh as she sank into her chair on the veranda to think that a few moments of rest might be hers at last. She rocked vigorously, as though the mere physical exercise might rest her fatigued limbs; the slow motion with which she lifted a stray lock from her brow and fastened it back in her hair told how weary she was. In her lap lay a letter which the postman had just handed her. It was a large, square envelope, of gray paper, the texture and tone of which would have told that it was foreign, even if the German stamp had not already put that fact in evidence. Emily had recognized the anglicized writing in which it was addressed as that of Dade; and the post-mark told that the travels of the Emersons had led them once more [Pg 248]to Wiesbaden. Emily allowed the letter to lie a moment unopened in her lap, partly from inertia, more, perhaps, from a love of anticipating the pleasure its reading would give her. The breaks in the vast monotony of her life were so few that she disliked to have them too quickly over.
And then, she found a charm in the romantic spell anything that comes out of the Old World still weaves for us of the New. She loved to picture Dade, in some smart Parisian gown—the very thought of which brought back to her Dade’s way of calling things, especially her own dresses, “chic”—escaping from her hypochondriacal mother, now with petulant disrespect, now with gushes of affection, to wander with some young man down wide avenues, shaded with lindens. Sometimes she pictured the young man in civilian dress, but this morning he wore the uniform of the German army. She could see Dade, trailing her brilliant parasol over her shoulder, looking up into his face, and speaking to him in her melodious French—no, she corrected her little drama, it would be this time in her rich German which she had affected to prefer to French. Some day, she was sure, these light and transient affairs would end seriously for Dade, so seriously that she would find herself enthroned over the stately household of some old German castle with a titled military husband. How many years would then elapse before Dade would be back in Grand Prairie, with the air of the grande dame, lifting her lorgnette in the foreign way that would come so naturally to her? Would she grow matronly and have some yellow-haired, outlandish son with her? Would—
She heard a noise upstairs, and turned her head slightly, growing rigid as she listened for the warning cry of the baby. She waited, but no further sound came, and she lay back to resume her dream. But it had been broken, the thought of the baby had brought her back across all the intervening seas, back to Grand Prairie and her daily duties there. She sighed, and languidly tore open the letter.
When Emily had read the first of the many pages that made up the letter she laid it down in her lap to grasp to the uttermost the striking import of its tidings and there spread over her tired face a new smile, born of the pleasure women find in that clairvoyance with which they like to think themselves gifted in affairs of the heart—Dade was engaged! Her morning dream of the moment before had been prophetic; it was coming true!
Dade wrote of him in her highest vein of ecstasy. He was not an officer, though he had been, but he was noble, and Emily gathered that he was in politics, though Dade did not put it that way. A Prussian he was, with the sounding name of Baron Wolf von Waldenburg. He was not rich, though he had some means, but what he lacked in the aristocracy of his money he made up by the aristocracy of his lineage—an old family, with a seat near Spandau, and a house in Berlin, where Dade and he would live. They would have to economize, Dade wrote, and try to get along somehow with few servants, not more than six. Their “ménage” would be humble, but Berlin was the dearest place to live. The baron was in the government there, and of course they would have the entrée to the court circle. Dear mamma would live with them. Dade appealed to Emily to know if it was not altogether too lovely, and as for the baron she was sure that Emily could not help loving him, he was the dearest little man that ever lived; so proud, so haughty, but with such distinguished manners.
“And isn’t it funny,” Dade raged on, “to think that we both should marry public men? I know Mr. Garwood would like him—they would admire each other’s brains anyway. And you must come and visit us when we are at home in Berlin—doesn’t it sound fine? Just think! While you are enjoying the gay life of your capital I shall be enjoying the gay life of mine! Don’t you remember how we always used to say—”
The words somehow struck Emily’s heart cold. “While you are enjoying the gay life of your capital—” It was not the expatriation which Dade so frankly confessed that struck her at first, though a sense of that came after her own personal pang had been absorbed in the habitual resignation with which she accepted the life that was so far from all her girlish dreams.
The letter became somewhat more coherent as it progressed. Dade explained that they had come to Wiesbaden, not this time for her mother’s health so much as for her own. Her physicians had advised it; she was run down, and as she was to be married in the fall, the baron wished her to be in good health. They might run over to America before the wedding; she wasn’t sure; it would all depend. And they had not decided yet where they would be married, certainly, however, not in Grand Prairie—there would be no place there for the baron to stay.