"Don't stay away too long," said the baroness, "we shall have a little supper.--Que voulais-je dire? Ah oui! Du chocolat, mais pas si énormément sucré que la dernière fois et prenez garde, ..."
The evening had come, and with it Mrs. Jager, in the one-horse chaise. Primula wore the same dress of raw silk in which she had appeared to Oswald last Sunday, and, fatigued as she was by the great heat of the day, she looked more than ever like a sick canary-bird. Her husband had taken the first opportunity, after the long-winded greeting between her and the baroness was finished, to whisper to her, that it would be better not to appear too enthusiastic about her new friend. He told her that the young man seemed by no means to enjoy the favor of the baron and the baroness in a very high degree--a piece of news which so astounded the "dweller in higher regions," that she was hardly able to return Oswald's salutation when he appeared in the parlor, shortly before supper was announced.
Oswald's good-humor would have probably been excited by this strange conduct of his enthusiastic hostess of the Sunday before, if he had only become aware of it. But unfortunately he was in that state of mind in which, as Oldenburg said, we have eyes and ears wide open without seeing or hearing anything. The shadow of the events of the last day and last night were still lying on his soul and on his brow. His usual vivacity had given way to melancholy calmness; he looked pale and thoughtful, but so very handsome and distinguished, that Primula's delicate soul began once more to feel the charm which the young stranger had exercised on his first meeting with her. She forgot, thus, the warning of her husband all the more completely, as she noticed the particular courtesy with which the baroness and her husband treated the man who had just now been denounced to her as a fallen greatness. She was in her heart preparing a sermon which she was to deliver to Mr. Jager on their return journey, because he had, as usually, not seen "the forest amid so many trees." The worthy minister was himself, at first, not a little disconcerted by the contrast between the words and the actions of the baroness. But he knew better than anybody else that men do not always appear such as they really are, and that they are not always what they seem to be; he thought it best, therefore, faithfully to imitate the manner of his patroness, an effort which was not difficult for such a master in the noble art of hypocrisy.
Nevertheless, the conversation at the supper-table would probably have been very far from lively, in spite of the apparent concord and harmony of the company, if Mr. Timm had possessed the happy gift of assuming the color of the company in which he found himself; this was, however, not at all the fact.
Mr. Timm had fully come up to his promise to appear at table in good-humor and with a better appetite. He found the chocolate, which was by no means énormément sucré excellent, the bread excellent, the butter excellent, everything excellent; and what a delightful idea to have the table set just on that part of the terrace from which one had such a charming view of the garden! How wonderfully fine those lights and shades were on the tall trees beyond the lawn! Really, a genuine Claude Lorraine! "Really, baron, if I were not Diogenes I should like to be Alexander! But then we cannot all dwell in marble palaces; there must be dwellers in tubs also, and happy the man whose tub is to him a castle! You ought to immortalize that thought in an epigram, Mrs. Jager! You have such a decided talent for that branch of poetry; even in your best lyric poems I have often found an epigrammatic turn. Thus in the charming little poem on the May Bug. How was the last line, 'The false image of May?' or like that? That is in itself already an epigram. Do you know that in Grunwald they have never yet got over your desertion? Only quite lately Professor Shylight, whom I met at Dean Black's, said: It is unwarrantable that a certain great scholar, whom I will not name, should bury the great wealth of his erudition in the solitude of a village. I replied that it was still more unwarrantable in the author of the 'Cornflowers' to live forever among cornflowers."
Thus he rattled on with great alacrity, and yet all that Timm said seemed to drop accidentally from his lips, as if he had not the slightest idea of being clever or witty. One listened to him as to a merry canary-bird, too loud perhaps in his merriment, but who sees the sun come into his cage, and takes it into its little head to pour out all its songs and melodies for once. Oswald, however, could not help thinking at times that Timm's humor was, after all, not always quite as natural as it seemed to be. He fancied Timm was playing his well-studied and well-calculated part in a perfectly natural manner, to be sure, but so as to ridicule and chaff the whole company, while he seemed to be a good-natured bon vivant and an ingenuous child of nature. He was confirmed in his suspicions by the fact that Timm always assumed an entirely different tone whenever he spoke to him, as if he meant: I must not venture upon such tricks with you; but they do not find me out so easily.
None of the others, however, seemed to share this suspicion, which suggested itself all the more naturally to Oswald, as he himself frequently amused himself thus at the expense of the company, for whom he felt such thorough contempt. Perhaps Bruno might have thought something like it. He was sitting by his side, more sombre and reserved than usual, and never moving a muscle to smile, even when everybody around him--Oswald included--was laughing aloud, especially towards the end of the supper, when Mr. Albert Timm began a conversation with his neighbor, Mademoiselle Marguerite, in which he mingled French and German in the most ludicrous manner. The pretty bashful Genevese girl had taken great pains to follow Mr. Timm in all his odd sayings during the conversation, turning continually with a sudden: Que veut dire cela? to her neighbor on the other side; but Malte answered these questions but rarely, as he himself did not understand more than half of what the inexhaustible talker had said till the latter commenced the amusing jargon with her, breaking off, however, with great tact as soon as he saw that the pretty girl was embarrassed by the laughter of the others.
It had become quite dark, when the baroness rose and invited Mr. and Mrs. Jager, who were thanking her in many words for the delightful evening they had spent, before taking formal leave, to stay and play an old-fashioned game of whist with the baron and herself, "such a staid old game, you know, Mr. Jager, as suits staid old people like ourselves."
Malte had gone to bed. Oswald and Bruno, Albert and Mademoiselle Marguerite were walking in pairs around the lawn and in the nearest garden-walks.
"You never told me yet, Oswald," said Bruno--he now called his friend, when they were alone, always Oswald simply--"whether you saw Aunt Berkow yesterday?"