Our illusions.
Fly in, golden butterfly.
CHAPTER XII
Sad, indeed, had been the previous life of the countess. During her father's life she had sat whole days in a chamber which was lonely and almost poor, listening to the twittering of sparrows outside the windows, or the quarrels of girls in the kitchen.
The old count came home every evening wearied and broken with ceaseless pouring from the empty into the void, as he called his affairs. Nothing succeeded with him. In his time he had been active and industrious; he had wished to give the aristocracy an example of how men with escutcheons should apply themselves to labor and industry, and as a result, he lost his property. There remained to him in return experience which he would have been glad to sell for a few thousand, and still one other thing which he would not have sold, that is, his reminiscences and his family pride.
In him the cement of that experience and that pride was his hatred of life, of men, of the whole world. This was natural. His own people did not receive him, and those who did receive the man, received him in such fashion that the fable of the dying lion and the asses' hoofs came to one's memory. If he had only had a son! The young eagle might fly from the nest with new strength, seeking light and the sun—but a daughter! The old man did not deceive himself: a daughter must become either an old maid, or marry after his death the first man who met her. For this reason the count did not love his daughter as much as he should have loved. In spite of that the daughter loved him sincerely. She loved him because he had white hair, because he was unfortunate, finally, because she had no one else to love. Moreover, he was for her the last volume of the story which she was weaving on in her mind.
Frequently in the evening her father told her in his plaintive voice of the ancient deeds of their family, full of glitter and glory, old histories pleasant for counts and countesses; and she while listening to them fixed her whole soul in that past.
Often it seemed to her that from the golden web of the legend some winged figure tore itself free, half a hussar knight with a crooked sabre in his grasp, an eagle-like son of the steppe and of battle. He waved his hand, and the steppes were cleared of Tartars. One might say, "I can see the Crimea and the blue waves beyond." Hei! the usual dreams of a maiden! As wide as the steppes are, so many are the songs of his actions; and then he is so covered with glory, though youthful; so bloody, though so beloved. He bent his forehead before some female figure. The usual dream of a magnate's daughter! That female figure is she; he a Herburt or a Koretski.
And as she was reared, so did she imagine; and these imaginings had no use, nay, they were perhaps harmful, though attractive. So, when the old man finished the stories, and remembering the present, added with bitterness, "My fault, my fault!" she wound her arms around his neck, then, saying usually, "Not thy fault, papa; those times will return again."
But those times did not return. The old man died, and no knight appeared as a guardian, no knight cut from the blackened background of a picture. The form which appeared had nothing in common with knighthood. That head with severe face and broad forehead, the cold face of a modern thinker, in no manner, even in the dreams of a maiden, did it fit to a bronze helmet with ostrich plumes. Other powers must have pulsated in the forehead of a man leading winged regiments against Tartars.