Oh! those were mornings worth living!
After the early stroll round the estate came breakfast, at which she arrived so brimming over with happiness and affection that it didn't matter whether she threw her arms first round the colonel's neck or Anna's; for now in confidential moments she was permitted to call her by her Christian name, and felt more drawn to her, though still full of fear of her displeasure and harsh judgment. For indeed she found in her a severe schoolmistress. No word, gesture, or movement of Lilly's escaped observation, or if necessary, reproof. There was a right and a wrong way of sitting at table, or in an arm-chair, pouring out tea, of asking someone to sit down, of beginning a conversation, and making visitors known to each other. Lilly learnt to glide over the difficulty of forgotten names and to show each one the proper degree of friendship. These and a hundred other little matters Lilly was enlightened upon. There seemed no end to them.
This was only practising in the small compass of the castle and on its occasional guests. The real thing was to come later, in the autumn, when Lilly was to call on the wives of the proprietors of the neighbouring estates. Till then the colonel desired to live quietly at home with as little outward social intercourse as possible. It was easy for him to find an excuse, as, after his many years of bachelorhood, it was not unnatural that he should wish to prolong his honeymoon. By the autumn Lilly's education would be complete, and she would emerge into society a grande dame capable of holding her own at the functions of the landed nobility and in the casino with a tact that would not disgrace her husband's name and rank; and Fräulein von Schwertfeger kept this ideal, as the highest attainable, before Lilly's eyes every hour of the day. It was like preparing for an examination in the Selecta, Lilly thought, as she anxiously modelled herself after the prescribed pattern, and dreamed day and night of her début.
In reality, she was only at ease when wandering about out of doors or shut up in her boudoir. "Boudoir!" No, she mustn't call it that. Fräulein von Schwertfeger said that it was a sitting-room, and only very rich butchers' and bankers' wives--according to Fräulein von Schwertfeger they were the same--owned boudoirs.
Thus Lilly stumbled at every step. Sometimes, as if to put her social development to the test, the colonel permitted Lilly, under Fräulein von Schwertfeger's wing, to do the honours of his table when he chanced to entertain fellow-officers who turned up from neighbouring barracks. On these occasions the same thing always happened. At first she would be as stiff as a wound-up doll, incapable of making a spontaneous remark to the military guests in their resplendent uniforms; but in a few glasses of wine she found courage and became by degrees more lively, not to say merry, till at last she simply bubbled over with innocent little jokes--how they came into her head she didn't know--and so charmed these men, who had mostly passed their prime, that they paid her court in every word they said, and kept their gaze fixed on her face in delight and desire. The colonel would become uneasy, and Fräulein von Schwertfeger, who generally stared at her plate with a scoffing little smile, received a sign from him; whereupon the ladies instantly rose and retired, deaf to all the loudly expressed regrets at their going on the part of the men.
The ecstasy, however, that she had awakened in her husband's guests recoiled on herself: made her exultant and sorry together, and compelled her to sit till past midnight, with wet cheeks, beating heart, and strained nerves staring out into the blue twilight of the park.
Foreshadowings of undisciplined madness and uncontrolled self-abandon swept like lightning flashes through her brain. A consuming fever within her relaxed her limbs. It made the dress she wore, the room she was in, the park, the world seem too small for her, and filled her soul with a crowd of dancing fiery shapes, a whirl of reflected masculine passions.
On such nights as these the colonel would come to her, in a more or less intoxicated condition, when the guests were gone, and reproach her mildly for not being "ladylike" enough; then, when she tried to defend herself, he would kiss her tears away and throw himself beside her on the bed. Shivering with disgust at his drunkenness, her conscience a prey to groundless pangs, yet for all that happy and relieved to feel herself released from a torturing anxiety, she fell asleep in his arms.
There were other nights when she felt restless and lonely and would have been glad of his company, when she longed in soul as well as body to cling humbly to him; but he did not come, and locked his door. On the whole, he treated her kindly. To him she was a light fragile toy, not to be played with too often in case of damage, but to be put away carefully after use till next time--and this suited her well enough. At least she personally was spared the terror of his outbursts of fury, which two or three times a day threatened to shiver the walls of the castle to atoms. Even Fräulein Von Schwertfeger hardly knew how to meet them, and bowed her head and bit her lips as to an inevitable fate when the storms burst.
Lilly could never quite make up her mind as to what were the relations between these two. Generally, it seemed as if, during long years, mutual sympathy and understanding had bound them together by indissoluble ties, though at other times they appeared to have nothing in common and to avoid each other, he with frigid hauteur, she with scorn in her squinting sidelong glances. It had often occurred to Lilly, too, that when Fräulein von Schwertfeger was young and fair to look upon, she and the colonel might have had a love affair. But gradually she abandoned this idea, for if anything of the kind had ever existed, Fräulein von Schwertfeger would have been far too proud to endure their present companionship, and he was too domineering to tolerate the presence of any such uncomfortable reminder of a dead amour. All Lilly could gather of the aristocratic spinster's past was that as the orphan of a poor officer she had been forced to earn her own living almost since her confirmation. She had presided over the colonel's house for nearly twenty years. That she, like herself, was without resources and dependent on the whims of the same old man seemed to Lilly to form a bond of sympathy between herself and Fräulein von Schwertfeger, yet she never could get rid of the undefinable dread she had been inspired with at the outset. She really was indebted to her for many things. Without the spinster's untiring surveillance she must have fallen innumerable times from the straight road, which was to lead to her apotheosis as noblewoman and Lady Bountiful. When she was disposed to err on the side of over-humility, there would have been scoffers to take base advantage of it; and her easy-going manner with those who were not her equals might, if uncorrected, have got her into serious trouble. As it was, she was popular with everyone. In the kitchens and the stables, the villages and the agents' offices, everywhere she was greeted respectfully with beaming smiles. But it was in the Polish quarters, where the women dried their washing behind great fires of brushwood, that she was simply idolised. It may have been that they had got wind of her Slavonic name and her Catholicism. Anyhow, by all those poor despised foreign folk, who drifted about among the proud stolid Germans, with humility in their downcast childlike eyes and snatches of their native song on their lips, Lilly was regarded in the light of a saviour and patron saint. She loved to visit and busy herself with these gentle grateful people. She tended the sick and took compassion on the forsaken. The girls were to her like her own sisters, who needed a watchful eye over them; and as for the boys, they were a sacred trust whose welfare she would always have at heart.