Paul nodded. “All right,” he said. “Yes, I see; though I confess I sometimes forget what the deuce I am supposed to be.”
Steinmetz laughed pleasantly as he folded the letter. He rose and went to the door.
“I will send it off,” he said. He paused on the threshold and looked back gravely. “Do not forget,” he added, “that Catrina Lanovitch loves you.”
CHAPTER XII — AT THORS
Below the windows of a long, low, stone house, in its architecture remarkably like a fortified farm—below these deep-embrasured windows the river Oster mumbled softly. One of the windows was wide open, and with the voice of the water a wonderful music rolled out to mingle and lose itself in the hum of the pine-woods.
The room was a small one; beneath the artistic wall-paper one detected the outline of square-hewn stones. There were women’s things lying about; there were flowers in a bowl on a low, strong table. There were a few good engravings on the wall; deep-curtained windows, low chairs, a sofa, a fan. But it was not a womanly room. The music filling it, vibrating back from the grim stone walls, was not womanly music. It was more than manly. It was not earthly, but almost divine. It happened to be Grieg, with the halting beat of a disabled, perhaps a broken, heart in it, as that master’s music usually has.
The girl was alone in the room. The presence of any one would have silenced something that was throbbing at the back of the chords. Quite suddenly she stopped. She knew how to play the quaint last notes. She knew something that no master had ever taught her.
She swung round on the stool and faced the light. It was afternoon—an autumn afternoon in Russia—and the pink light made the very best of a face which was not beautiful at all, never could be beautiful—a face about which even the owner, a woman, could have no possible illusion. It was broad and powerful, with eyes too far apart, forehead too broad and low, jaw too heavy, mouth too determined. The eyes were almond-shaped, and slightly sloping downward and inward—deep, passionate blue eyes set in a Mongolian head. It was the face of a woman who could, morally speaking, make mincemeat of nine young men out of ten. But she could not have made one out of the number love her. For it has been decreed that women shall win love—except in some happy exceptions—by beauty only. The same unwritten law has it that a man’s appearance does not matter—a law much appreciated by some of us, and duly canonized by not a few.