Edmund examined with attention the riding-whip he held in his hand.
'Oh, ah! You are alluding to that tiresome Dornau suit.'
'Tiresome? Wearisome, endless, you mean, for endless it would appear to be. You are as well acquainted with the pleadings, I suppose, as I am.'
'I know nothing at all about them,' confessed Edmund, with great ingenuousness. 'I only know that there is a dispute about my uncle's will which assigns Dornau to me, but the validity of which you contest. Pleadings? I have had copies of all the documents, certainly, whole volumes of them, but I never looked over their contents.'
'But, Count, it is you who are carrying on this lawsuit!' cried Rüstow, to whom this placid indifference was something beyond belief.
'Pardon me, my lawyer is carrying it on,' corrected Edmund. 'He is of opinion that it is incumbent on me to uphold my uncle's will at any cost. I do not attach any such particular value to the possession of Dornau myself.'
'Do you suppose I do?' asked Rüstow sharply. 'My Brunneck is worth half a dozen such places, and my daughter has really no need to trouble herself about any inheritance from her grandfather.'
'Well, what are we fighting for, then? If the matter stands so, some compromise might surely be arrived at, some arrangement which would satisfy both parties----'
'I will hear of no compromise,' exclaimed the Councillor. 'To me it is not a question of money, but of principle, and I will fight it out to the last. If my father-in-law had chosen to disinherit us in so many words, well and good. We set him at defiance; he had the right to retaliate. I don't deny it. It is the fact of his ignoring our marriage in that insulting manner, as though it had not been legally and duly celebrated--the fact of his passing over the child of the marriage, and declining to recognise her as his granddaughter--this is what I cannot forgive him, even in his grave, and this is what makes me determined to assert my right. The marriage shall be established, in the face of those who wish to repudiate it; my daughter shall be acknowledged as her grandfather's sole and legitimate heiress. Then, when the verdict of the court has once placed this beyond all doubt, Dornau and all belonging to it may go to the family estates, or to the devil, for what I care.'
'Ah, now we are getting rude,' thought Count Edmund, who had long been expecting some such outbreak, and who was highly amused by the whole affair.