Graf Bruno that year had temporarily abdicated his throne, and Eugen had been constituted host for the season. The guests were his and his wife’s; the arrangements were his, and the entertainment fell to his share.
Gräfin Hildegarde looked a little amazed at such of her guests, for instance, as Karl Linders. She had got over the first shock of seeing me a regular visitor in the house, and was pleased to draw me aside on this occasion, and inform me that really that young man, Herr Linders, was presentable—quite presentable—and never forgot himself; he had handed her into her carriage yesterday really quite creditably. No doubt it was long friendship with Eugen which had given him that extra polish.
“Indeed, Frau Gräfin, he was always like that. It is natural.”
“He is very presentable, really—very. But as a friend of Eugen’s,” and she smiled condescendingly upon me, “he would naturally be so.”
In truth, Karl was Karl. “Time had not thinned his flowing locks;” he was as handsome, as impulsive, and as true as ever; had added two babies to his responsibilities, who, with his beloved Frau Gemahlin, had likewise been bidden to this festivity, but had declined to quit the stove and private Christmas-tree of home life. He wore no more short jackets now; his sister Gretchen was engaged to a young doctor, and Karl’s head was growing higher—as it deserved—for it had no mean or shady deeds to bow it.
The company then consisted in toto of Graf and Gräfin von Rothenfels, who, I must record it, both looked full ten years younger and better since their prodigal was returned to them, of Stella Wedderburn, Frau von Francius, Karl Linders, and Friedhelm Helfen. May, as I said, looked lovelier than ever. It was easy to see that she was the darling of the elder brother and his wife. She was a radiant, bright creature, yet her deepest affections were given to sad people—to her husband, to her sister Adelaide, to Countess Hildegarde.
She and Eugen are well mated. It is true he is not a very cheerful man—his face is melancholy. In his eyes is a shadow which never wholly disappears—lines upon his broad and tranquil brow which are indelible. He has honor and titles, and a name clean and high before men, but it was not always so. That terrible bringing to reason—that six years’ grinding lesson of suffering, self-suppression—ay, self-effacement—have left their marks, a “shadow plain to see,” and will never leave him. He is a different man from the outcast who stepped forth into the night with a weird upon him, nor ever looked back till it was dreed out in darkness to its utmost term.
He has tasted of the sorrows—the self-brought sorrows which make merry men into sober ones, the sorrows which test a man and prove his character to be of gold or of dross, and therefore he is grave. Grave too is the son who is more worshiped by both him and his wife than any of their other children. Sigmund von Rothenfels is what outsiders call “a strange, incomprehensible child;” seldom smiles, and has no child friends. His friends are his father and “Mother May”—Mütterchen he calls her; and it is quaint sometimes to see how on an equality the three meet and associate. His notions of what is fit for a man to be and do he takes from his father; his ideal woman—I am sure he has one—would, I believe, turn out to be a subtle and impossible compound of May and his aunt Hildegarde.
We sometimes speculate as to what he will turn out. Perhaps the musical genius which his father will not bring before the world in himself may one day astonish that world in Sigmund. It is certain that his very life seems bound up in the art, and in that house and that circle it must be a very Caliban, or something yet lower, which could resist the influence.
One day May, Eugen, Karl, and I, repaired to the music-room and played together the Fourth Symphonie and some of Schumann’s “Kinderscenen,” but May began to cry before it was over, and the rest of us had thoughts that did lie too deep for tears—thoughts of that far-back afternoon of Carnival Monday, and how we “made a sunshine in a shady place”—of all that came before—and after.