Success and How He Won It

by E. Werner

They told her there was really nothing to be uneasy about, the difficulty was not of a serious nature, and an arrangement might be looked for any day. Yet Eugénie had a distinct perception of the danger which was thus denied, and a perception as keen of the change which had come over her husband since the elder Berkow's death, though his behaviour to her was just the one point which remained unaltered.

The young wife was of too fearless and too proud a nature not to feel as a sort of offence the being thus shut out, and so obviously spared all unpleasant knowledge. True, she had no right to exact a frank and open statement, no right to share the anxieties and, perhaps, perils, which might assail her husband. That privilege, to which other women could assert a claim, lay immeasurably removed from her.

When once the decisive word of separation has been spoken, when people are only bearing with one another for a few months "for appearances' sake," and in order to give the world as little matter for gossip as possible, there can hardly be any interests in common. She understood this, and, had she not understood it, Arthur's conduct would have made her sensible of the fact. For, as he every day roused himself more and more from his former indolence, and applied himself to the most strenuous exertion, so in proportion did he become colder and more distant in his manner to her. She was grateful to him, really, that by thus treating her already as a perfect stranger, he should seek to render the step they proposed taking easier and less painful to her.

Eugénie did not conceal from herself that Berkow's death had cleared away a great obstacle to the fulfilment of her wishes. He would hardly have consented to the dissolution of a marriage for which he, in his ambition, had so long striven, and which he had bought so dearly. His son viewed the matter in another light. To him the marriage was as indifferent as the wife, whom he, in his former easy passivity, had suffered to be forced upon him.

He had voluntarily offered her the separation before she had made any attempt to obtain his consent to it, and the step, which almost invariably costs so many a struggle, such tears and bitterness of feeling, which, not unfrequently, rouses from their depths all the passions of the human heart, would, in this case, be taken quietly and temperately, with perfect mutual accord, and in so thoroughly cold, polite and heartless a manner, it was really worthy of all admiration.

All at once Afra reared high in the air. She was not accustomed to the touch of the whip, much less to so very smart a cut as she had just received. Her mistress's impatience tried her greatly this morning, and if Eugénie had not been perfectly at home in the saddle, the fiery excitable animal would have given her trouble enough. As it was, she bridled in her horse with some little effort, but her delicate eyebrows were knitted and her lips firmly set, as if in anger. Whether this anger were aroused by Afra's opposition, or by the failure of opposition in another quarter, must remain undecided.

Meanwhile she had reached the farm, distant a mile or two from the works, and lying farther up the valley. Now she must begin to climb, not indeed by the steep footpath by which she and Arthur had made their descent, and which would have been impracticable on horseback, but by a carriage-road leading not far from thence up, by long but easy windings, to the not very elevated summit. Her horse, unused to mountain-climbing, chafed at the exertion required, and on reaching the top of the hill, she was obliged to halt to give it time to recover itself.

The veil of mist, which had hovered over the country when last she was there, had vanished now, and the clear sunshine flowed down brightly warm upon the earth, as though there had never been a time when the rain and the wind had here striven for the mastery, and when the whole landscape around had been shrouded in one grey shapeless mantle of fog.

The valleys lay once more blue and vaporous in the cool morning shade, and the mountains stood out in bolder relief by the contrast, their countless crests rising one above the other, seeming to press each other into the background; nothing but one great sea of forest, stretching right away to the range of blue peaks in the horizon. The dark pines had dressed themselves in a tender light green. Blossoms of a thousand hues and forms bloomed, not only in the fruitful soil within the woods, but in the rocky ground without, in every nook and cranny where a reed could find room for itself or a tiny plant take root, and the air was full of their sweet fragrance.

Then the brooks ran foaming down into the valleys below, the springs rippled gently, and overhead was spread a cloudless azure canopy of sky. All around was so golden clear, so grand and free, it seemed as though the newly awakened life of Nature must have power to heal every wound, to break every fetter, as though here nothing could draw breath that was not allied to freedom and to happiness.