“I have been looking for you, Mademoiselle,” he said coldly. “I wanted so much to thank you for the delight you have given me to-night—this addition to past delight,” he added, holding out his hand.
“Ah! my little Austrian page!” Photini cried, laughing into his solemn grieved face. “I got your card to-day. You must come and see me again. The ‘Mélodiés Hongroises’ you know. I’ve promised you that. A pretty fellow is your nephew, Baron, and quite as charming as he is pretty. But too grave, too grave, and too—sans reproche,” she added cynically.
All the men looked at Rudolph curiously, and laughed. The boy flushed scarlet, bowed and walked away. The rooms were rapidly thinning, and recognising him as a member of the Hohenfels family, several guests stopped to shake hands with him as they passed him. He received their advances mechanically, hardly heard a word addressed to him, and was still in a dream when his aunt and her husband returned to join him in the empty chambers.
CHAPTER II. THE BARON VON HOHENFELS EXPRESSES AN OPINION.
That night Rudolph did not go to bed. He spent some hours walking up and down his room in a nervous agitation he could by no means account for. It seemed to him that he had been dropped into a disagreeably topsy-turvy world, and the thought made him wretched and unhappy: dissatisfied and perplexed by his own state, fierce in a vague kind of resentment against Agiropoulos, and filled with an immeasurable grief for Photini. With such soul in her fingers she appeared to him through an ugly cloud like a battered and draggled angel, and he sat disconsolately gazing at the blue and golden flames from the beautiful star-fire above, and asked himself how had it happened, and was there for her henceforth no struggling back into the paths of sweet womanhood from which she had strangely and openly strayed?
Yet why should he grieve so passionately for Photini? No affair of his if she courted slander and irreverent familiarity; nor yet if she indulged in inadmissible tastes in public, and wounded and insulted all who came near her. His own birth and its responsibilities surely excluded him from such preoccupations, and his natural fastidiousness made relations, however slight and flexible, with a woman like Photini impossible. This he knew well, and despite the knowledge felt miserably sad and unquiet. He wanted so much that she should not degrade his high ideal of the artist who has received nature’s patent of nobility, and a lonely impressionable boy like Rudolph could not afford to stand by tamely and watch the dethroning of his idol. For Photini had been his idol long before they had met. Her name had been borne into his retreat from many quarters, and no one had hinted to him her unlovableness—her disreputableness. Liszt had only spoken to him of her genius with enthusiasm. Had his small circle deliberately conspired to keep him in ignorance of this cruel reality, while he was wandering and losing himself in a forest of delicate and poetic illusions?—building hope upon hope of an unanalysable nature until his whole happiness grew to bind itself round the thought of this unknown woman crowned by art with a glory greater than her womanhood? Photini Natzelhuber! His mother had often told him of the time she first came to Vienna, a slip of a girl, with a curly boyish head and the strangest topaz eyes. Mossy dark hair and topaz eyes with divine fingers—what more did it require to set aflame a dreamy imaginative lad? And when strangers visited the Castle at Rapolden Kirchen and spoke of her, he never seemed to understand that years had flown and left her less girlish, but pictured her like Art, like a goddess ever young. And when he read of knightly reverence and allegiance, he told himself that one day he should go abroad and seek Photini. He dreamed of no conditions or reward, not of marriage or of love in the ordinary sense. To wear her colours, serve her in true devotion, honour her above all women, and humbly sue the privilege to obey her commands and caprices with some considerable recreative pauses for music—this was Rudolph’s innocent dream. Remember he was brought up by a high-bred mother, all grace and gentle benignity, a woman who wore her widowhood like a sovereign lady to whom man’s homage was a sweet claim. And her pretty and impracticable theories but helped to feed the fires of a fatally romantic temperament, while his complete and unboylike isolation left him an easy prey to the riotous play of fancy. Then is it any wonder that reality at the outset should both crush and bewilder him?
He opened the window, and leant far out with his head against his hand, that the cold night air might blow upon him. Through the confusion of his mind he could gather no dim or possible conclusion upon which to shape immediate action. He dreaded meeting Photini again, for he felt he could never forgive her for the havoc she had made of all his bright hopes. Then softly through the silence of the night waved in echoing dimness the lovely strains of the “Barcarolle,” with its ever recurrent note of passionate melancholy, its very voluptousness of exquisite pain and the musical rhythm of the oars breaking through the water murmur. The memoried sounds flushed his cheek with trembling delight, and he rushed to his violin and tried to pick out the dominant melody. But who could ever hope to play it as she did? And, happily, he became mindful of the possible objections of others to this faint nocturnal music, and generously put up his instrument.
“Ah!” he sighed, “if Photini be hardly a woman, what an artist, good heavens!” Must much not be forgiven undeniable genius? And was all the ideal love irrevocably vanished? If only he could know. For this uncertainty disturbed him and made him unhappy, and unhappiness is not exactly the condition that enables a young man to see clearly into his own mind or into anybody else’s. He would try to sleep, and then this tempest of emotion and harassing conflict would blow over and leave his eyes clearer to see what he ought to do and leave undone.