“Wait till you have heard all, my poor child. Everyone loved him. How proud I was of him. Sometimes I think it is a chastisement, but had you been in my place you would have been proud too; so gallant, so handsome, such grace, and such a charm. He was the joy of my life,” she said in a passionate under-tone. “He went by the name of a worthy descendant of all essential things: honor and loyalty and bravery, and so on. They used to call him Prinz Eugen, der edle Ritter, after the old song. He was wild and impatient of control, but who is not? I hate your young men whose veins run milk, not blood. He was one of a fiery passionate line. At the universities he was extravagant; we heard all sorts of follies.”
“Did you ever hear of anything base—anything underhand or dishonorable?”
“Never—oh, never. High play. He was very intimate with a set of young Englishmen, and the play was dreadful, it is true; he betted too. That is a curse. Play and horses, and general recklessness and extravagance, but no wine and no women. I never heard that he had the least affinity for either of these dissipations. There were debts—I suppose all young men in his position make debts,” said the countess, placidly. “My husband made debts at college, and I am sure my brothers did. Then he left college and lived at home awhile, and that was the happiest time of my life. But it is over.
“Then he entered the army—of course. His family interest procured him promotion. He was captain in a fine Uhlan regiment. He was with his regiment at Berlin and Munich, and ——. And always we heard the same tales—play, and wild, fast living. Music always had a hold upon him.
“In the midst of his extravagance he was sometimes so simple. I remember we were dreadfully frightened at a rumor that he had got entangled with Fräulein ——, a singer of great beauty at the Hofoper at ——. I got my husband to let me write about it. I soon had an answer from Eugen. How he laughed at me! He had paid a lot of debts for the girl, which had been pressing heavily upon her since her career began; now he said he trusted she would get along swimmingly; he was going to her benefit that night.
“But when he was at ——, and when he was about six-and-twenty, he really did get engaged to be married. He wrote and told us about it. That was the first bitter blow: she was an Italian girl of respectable but by no means noble family—he was always a dreadful radical in such matters. She was a governess in the house of one of his friends in ——.
“We did everything we could think of to divert him from it. It was useless. He married her, but he did not become less extravagant. She did not help him to become steady, I must say. She liked gayety and admiration, and he liked her to be worshiped. He indulged her frightfully. He played—he would play so dreadfully.
“We had his wife over to see us, and he came with her. We were agreeably surprised. She quite won our hearts. She was very beautiful and very charming—had rather a pretty voice, though nothing much. We forgave all his misconduct, and my husband talked to him and implored him to amend. He said he would. Mere promises! It was so easy to him to make promises.
“That poor young wife! Instead of pitying him for having made a mésalliance, we know now that it was she who was to be pitied for having fallen into the hands of such a black-hearted, false man.”
The lady paused. The recital evidently cost her some pain and some emotion. She went on: