Having thus spoken, she picked up her train and turned hastily towards the house, as if to bar all reply,—a needless precaution, for Kitty's pale lips were firmly closed. Youth and innocence had no reply for such a heaped-up measure of arrogance, waywardness, and deceit.
[CHAPTER XVIII.]
It was May. The trees had shaken off their snowy blossoms, and the huge beds of hyacinths and crocuses, which had been so admired on the lawn before the villa, had quite done blooming. The lilacs and syringas were in flower, the tender green buds were just peeping forth upon the rose-bushes, and the shade in the shrubbery and in the linden avenue was growing deeper and darker. The river ran once more clear through the garland of green that bordered it on either side, and over the dear old house upon its bank there clambered a web of greenery that, day by day, concealed more and more of the white walls. The healthy grape-vines drooped their tendrils even above the overhanging eaves.
The guest-chamber stood untenanted once more. Henriette had been removed some time since to the villa, apparently quite recovered; indeed, her disease seemed to be checked: its progress was not perceptible; and this beneficial change the dean's widow ascribed to Kitty's nursing. The two sisters in their third story led a pleasant, isolated existence that was full of fresh charm since the new piano had been placed in Kitty's room. Not to Kitty's care alone was Henriette's improvement due: her intimate intercourse with the doctor's aunt had proved of great advantage to her. Her views of life and of its duties and pleasures had undergone a change in the quiet of the house by the river. She no longer recoiled from the thought of a retired life,—the whirl of fashion and society aroused in her now no eager longings.
And, in truth, the councillor's home had never been so gay in a worldly sense as at present, since the elevation of its master to the aristocracy. There were many occasions, and very welcome ones, for festivities of various kinds, and the Frau President's invention and the councillor's purse seemed alike inexhaustible. The man's good fortune was wondrous indeed. Disturbed by no loss, no failure, whatever was touched by the enchanted wand of his business genius seemed to turn to gold,—his wealth was estimated by millions. And he thoroughly understood how to wear the glory of his new distinction, how to make it interesting, an inexhaustible theme of wonder and admiration for rich and poor. The road past Villa Baumgarten became a fashionable promenade; strangers were shown the magnificent estate which was always being added to and improved. They told of costly pictures and statuary, of rare collections gathered together within those marble walls of a plate-room not to be equalled in the royal palace. The crowd halted and gaped when one of his equipages waited before the gates, and wondered whether the light cloud of sand, stirred by the wind upon the gravel-walks, were not gold-dust.
Large additions were building, making long stretches of road through the park almost impassable, heaped up as they were with blocks of granite and marble to be used in these additions and in the new stables, the old ones, although spacious and convenient, having long been too small for the councillor's passion for fine horses. The ground selected for the artificial lake proved rather unsuitable for such an adornment, and this, with the new tropical conservatory, absorbed enormous sums of money. And one day a multitude of workmen arrived to undertake the repair of an extensive and very elegant pavilion, which had been hitherto locked up and in disuse. It was situated in the forest, at a considerable distance from the villa, but from its upper windows there was a good view of the road and the town. A graceful wing was added to the original building, the windows were all provided with plate-glass, and from time to time the councillor would produce from his pocket patterns of stuffs for covering furniture, or drawings for parquet floorings, and beg the aid of the Frau President's taste in their selection. On such occasions she was wont to be very curt and ungracious, while Flora smiled behind her pocket-handkerchief; but the old lady was forced to choose, in spite of her declaration that she was not at all interested in the renovation of the old "barracks," and had quite enough of work to last her lifetime in the arrangement and ordering of the villa, without troubling herself about a lodging-house for business friends of the councillor's, a place where she certainly never should set her foot. Therefore she steadily ignored the new building, in spite of the incessant noise and hammering that resounded thence, much as the ambitious spouse of a reigning sovereign ignores her future dower-house.
In all this bustle, this hurry of beginnings and endings, the councillor came and went like a bird of passage. He made many business excursions, but these were shortly all to have an end, he said, and then he should purchase a large estate in the country and become really one of the landed aristocracy. Whenever he had two or three holidays, he spent much time in the third story; he drank coffee there regularly in the afternoon, to the great vexation of the Frau President, who thereby lost her favourite hour in her conservatory; for she was naturally far too attentive to leave "dear Moritz" to the society of a peevish invalid and an unformed school-girl, and almost always made her appearance with him.
This was a great relief to Kitty, who had conceived an unconquerable, shy dislike of her guardian since he had grown so strangely affable and even tender in his demeanour towards herself, and so false, so deceitful in his external politeness towards the Frau President. Involuntarily she adopted, in her intercourse with him, the dignified reserve of a woman, where she had formerly shown the confidence of a child. And this very change seemed to please and encourage him in his new, strange rôle. He divined her wishes and fulfilled them; he had long since consented that the unused portion of the mill-garden should be sold to the workmen. He placed no obstacles in the way of any of her benevolent schemes, and, when her purse was empty, filled it without a word of remonstrance. "Deny yourself the fulfilment of no whim, Kitty; I shall soon have to buy you another iron safe," he said, in allusion to the astounding increase of her capital. She listened in gloomy silence. With all his finesse and diplomatic replies to her grave inquiries, he had never yet disproved the complaint made by the people, that her wealth had been gained by pitiless usury,—a complaint to which the Frau President never lost an opportunity of alluding. The naïve childish delight Kitty had formerly taken in being so rich had been converted into a kind of dread of the money which was so swiftly, so strangely accumulating, only, it might be, to fall upon and crush her at some future day in just retribution.
She had grown notably graver. The sunny smile that her lively temperament had so often called up upon her face was now rare. She was never unreservedly gay, except in the house by the river, and there only at certain times. The dean's widow had been for some time charitably teaching a number of poor children to knit and to sew, every Wednesday and Saturday afternoon. In this little scheme Kitty, with the joyful consent of the old lady, had taken part. Intercourse with children was something entirely novel in her experience, stirring chords in her nature the existence of which she had never suspected. She took heartfelt delight in the little creatures, and admitted to herself that the care and instruction of them was an occupation beyond all others to her in interest.
She clothed them when they needed it,—there was always an apron or little dress in her work-basket,—and she provided (which the dean's widow could not have afforded) fruit and biscuit for their refreshment when the hour of industry was over. In the summer the lessons were given in the garden, and when they were over the children, for the most part living in the closest and darkest alleys of the town could enjoy a romp on the grass in the shade of the fruit-trees. Kitty had provided portable benches for seats, and balls and hoops for the hour of recreation that followed work.