"Such an idea never occurred to me. You need not smile so compassionately and contemptuously, Moritz. Such 'exaggerated sentimentality' would disgrace me, truly, in the Villa Baumgarten. And, indeed, the people do not ask a gift or an alms, as Doctor Bruck says——"
"Ah, 'as Doctor Bruck says'? Is he your oracle already?" cried Flora, sitting upright on the lounge and fixing her eyes with a strange, changeful expression upon her young sister's face.
Kitty's colour deepened for a moment, but she returned the gaze with cool gravity, and continued, without paying any heed to Flora's words: "I know, besides, how valuable is the fruit of one's own exertions. I prize what I earn myself more highly than the richest gift, and upon this ground the people should pay,—pay exactly what they offer for your land."
"You show a fine capacity for business, Kitty," laughed the councillor. "My barren strip of shore would be cheap enough at the price they offer; and that piece of fine arable land near the mill! ... No, child; glad as I should be to please you, my conscience as your guardian cannot allow you to lay aside your minority for a single hour."
"Well, then, your enterprising 'hands' must content themselves for the present," she rejoined, neither surprised nor irritated. "I know that at the end of three years I shall think just as I do at present, and maybe then I shall even be rash enough to lend the people the money for their building, without interest."
She bade a smiling farewell, and left.
[CHAPTER VII.]
Slowly she descended the winding staircase, so narrow in the upper half of the tower that there would have been no room for anything more substantial by her side than the ghost of some ancestral dame. Poor ancestral dame! There was no place for her here now, even although the new-made nobleman above-stairs should desire that as an appendage to his greatness he should own a ghostly white lady to look after the fortunes of his house, could he but buy one by as heavy a drain upon his money-bags as his patent of nobility had already cost him! There upon the walls hung the armour of her knightly race,—the weapons with which the old giants had striven for honour and shame, for lands and blood. The heavier the dints upon the old breastplates, the more frequent the blood-stains upon them, the more precious would they have been held, the more caressing would have been the nightly touch of her ghostly fingers. Now they glittered without a stain upon the walls, and the weapons of the new inmate of the tower were his money-bags.
Yes, the strange foreign element that vibrated through all the social intercourse of the family at the villa, the money-fever, the spirit of speculation, had intruded here also in this mimicry of the old chivalric life. It infected the air, it glided up and down the stairs, and the mighty tankards on the sideboards in the hall were not more of a mockery in the soft hands whose only labour was to cut coupons than were the giant locks and bolts, but lately burnished afresh, upon the iron cellar-door that kept guard over the councillor's champagne, while money by thousands of thousands was locked up in the safe above, with its small decorated key-hole. The historic powder from the Thirty Years' War was still in the cellar,—tolerated there by the councillor, only, as Henriette averred, that the inquisitive visitor might have an opportunity of seeing the costly wines arranged beside it in well-ordered rows. It was this that made Kitty a stranger in the home of her childhood; this display, this estimate of effect, for which no outlay of money was too great; this feverish effort to proclaim to the world that the basis of everything here was of gold,—-all this was in direct contradiction to the spirit of the old Mangold firm, which had never thus asserted its undeniable wealth and credit. Nor during her father's lifetime had money as power intruded upon his home; strict as he was in all his business relations in his counting-room, not one word with regard to them ever escaped him in the home circle. And now! even the Frau President speculated. She had thrown her small property of a few thousands into the huge lottery,—that is, invested it in stock,—and it was strange to see her face, usually so calm and impassive, work nervously, and flush with colour to the temples, when the subject of conversation was the money-market.
Kitty left the tower and crossed the bridge. She leaned for a moment over the railing and looked down into the water, as if she half expected to see in its depths her old friends the dwarf fruit-trees and strawberry-vines,—but she saw only her own head, with its crown of thick brown braids. This girl, oddly enough, was the heiress of the family; she was reminded daily that as such she was distinguished and flattered, and she was repeatedly taught that she never should arrange these same brown braids herself, that a lady's maid was indispensably necessary; but she opposed an energetic will to the Frau President's admonitions; nothing should induce her to resign her head to the hands of an artiste, to sit solemn as some heathen idol for hours in her dressing-gown. Oh, yes, it was delightful indeed to be rich, but her wealth should not make a slave of her, should not fetter her warm, active, shapely hands.