Marianna was enraged because her well-planned intentions with regard to her husband and Deb had miscarried. Yet more enraged, because they had not quite miscarried. Moreover, Sigismund happened to be the unknown rival whom Felix suspected in the background. If this does not accord with his care in providing an adequate chaperone for the little English rebel who so indiscreetly accepted an invitation to his rooms, let it be remembered that there is no element with whom the true rake deals more circumspectly than with girlhood ... until he reaches the age when chastity becomes desirable instead of formidable.
Marianna was further enraged because Felix had said he could not afford visitors and fur cloaks. The von Rellings had ceased to call. And now Deb was drinking tea with her mother-in-law—and not even bothering to lie about it.
And yet, when Richard proposed abruptly, at supper, that they ought to be thinking of departure, both his host and hostess were unable to stem themselves in mechanical utterance of their habitual code of protest and renewed hospitality: “But certainly you must not dream of leaving us yet—we shall not allow it—you have been with us so little time—it is such a pleasure. No, no, indeed you must not go....”
II
The next day, most of the workmen in the factories went on strike. Those who refused were attacked as blacklegs. The quaint, sunshiny streets were hideous with brawling. And Deb could no longer with safety be allowed to take her solitary walks, which were the only relief from the strain of Marianna’s perpetual smiling hatred.
By degrees, her feverish mood of excitement evaporated entirely. She began to dread stumbling over the traces of her own joyous misdemeanour. Was there no careless youth in this tight, compressed little city of envious wranglings and complicated feuds and bitter snobbery? It struck her with a shock that Dorzheim seemed to contain no element between subdued childhood and ambitious or self-satisfied matrimony.
Something ominous was afoot; she was no longer the centre of interest; men came and went on short journeys; men held whispered conferences, excluding their womenfolk. Deb felt ever more urgently the need for departure. But she was waiting for a letter from her family to say when they intended leaving Switzerland; and if she and Richard were to rejoin them at Montreux, or at home in England. The letter was delayed; morning after morning she expected it, and it did not come. It ought to have contained money for the journey....
Dorzheim was no longer a funny little German town, inhabited mainly by caricatures. It was a place of horror.... She was wakeful at nights; and musing at her window, she saw, or thought she saw, long phantom trains glide without shriek or rumble over the railway-lines some half-mile distant. Black shapes of trains, no single window lit ... all night they were creeping past in the darkness ... and the next night ... and the next ... every time she rose from her bed to look again....
III
“Deb, you know Austria declared war on Servia the other day?”