“Let us go, then,” Ruth said to the girl.
The naked dog trotted between them on the wet pavement.
XVII
Crammon had written as follows to the Countess Brainitz: “Since I have pledged my word, of course I shall come. But I beg you to have the kindness to prepare Letitia in some appropriate way. As the fatal moment approaches I feel more and more uncomfortable. It is a very difficult act of expiation that you demand of me. I would rather make a pilgrimage to Mount Ararat and become a hermit there for a few years and seek for the remains of Noah’s ark. I grant you that I have always enjoyed the delights that came to me without scruple; but it does not seem to me that I have deserved this. It is too much.”
The countess replied that she would do her utmost to mitigate the painfulness of the meeting. She had no objection to the dear child’s weeping on her bosom, before facing a father who admitted his fatherhood with so many hesitations and fears. “And so, Herr von Crammon,” she wrote at the end of her letter, “we are expecting you. Letitia has returned from Paris more enchanting than ever. All the world is at her feet. I trust you will not be an exception.”
“The devil take her!” Crammon growled, as he packed his bags.
When he arrived at the countess’s country-house, which was called the Villa Ophelia, he was told that the ladies had gone to the theatre. He was taken to the room that had been prepared for him. He washed, dressed for dinner, strolled back to the drawing-room, stuck his hands deep into his pockets like a shivering tramp, and dropped morosely into an easy chair. He heard the rain plash, and from another room the crying of an infant. “Aha,” he thought, in his vexation, “that is my grandchild, one of the twins. How do I know that some misguided creature won’t put it on my knee, and ask me to admire and pet and even kiss it? Who, I say, will protect me from a bourgeois idyl of that sort? You might expect anything of a woman like the countess. These sentimental actresses who refuse to grow old are capable of anything. Is there anything more annoying in the world than a baby? It is neither a human being nor an animal; it smells of cow-udders and scented powder, and makes an insufferable and repulsive noise. It pokes its limbs into the faces of older persons; and if there are two of them, and all these horrors assail one doubly, one is apt to be quite defenceless, and may fairly inquire: ‘What have you, Bernard Crammon, whose interest in the propagation of the race has always been strictly negative—what have you to do with such things?’”
Crammon ended his reflections with a smile of self-mockery. At that moment he heard cheerful voices, and Letitia and the countess entered.
He arose with exquisite chivalry. He was most friendly and most polished.