I was silent. I knew his portrait must have been removed because he was considered to be living in dishonor—a stain to the house, who was perhaps the most chivalrous of the whole race; but this I could not tell Sigmund. It was beginning already, the trial, the “test” of which he had spoken to me, and it was harder in reality than in anticipation.
“I don’t want to be stuck up there where he has no place,” Sigmund went on, sullenly. “And I should like to cut the hateful picture to pieces when it comes.”
With this he ushered me into Gräfin Hildegarde’s boudoir again. She was still there, and a tall, stately, stern-looking man of some fifty years was with her.
His appearance gave me a strange shock. He was Eugen, older and without any of his artist brightness; Eugen’s grace turned into pride and stony hauteur. He looked as if he could be savage upon occasion; a nature born to power and nurtured in it. Ruggedly upright, but narrow. I learned him by heart afterward, and found that every act of his was the direct, unsoftened outcome of his nature.
This was Graf Bruno; this was the proud, intensely feeling man who had never forgiven the stain which he supposed his brother had brought upon their house; this was he who had proposed such hard, bald, pitiless terms concerning the parting of father and son—who forbade the child to speak of the loved one.
“Ha!” said he, “you have found Sigmund, mein Fräulein? Where did you meet, then?”
His keen eyes swept me from head to foot. In that, at least, Eugen resembled him; my lover’s glance was as hawk-like as this, and as impenetrable.
“In the music-room,” said Sigmund; and the uncle’s glance left me and fell upon the boy.
I soon read that story. The child was at once the light of his eyes and the bitterness of his life. As for Countess Hildegarde, she gazed at her nephew with all a mother’s soul in her pathetic eyes, and was silent.