THE RUSSIAN OFFICER
With Carlo’s death, Natalie had lost her last friend; with the stolen money and diamonds, Marianne was robbed of her last pecuniary means. But Natalie paid no attention to Marianne’s lamentations. What cared she for poverty and destitution—what knew she of these outward treasures, of this wealth consisting in gold and jewels? Natalie knew only that she had been robbed of a noble, spiritual possession—that they had murdered the friend who had consecrated himself to her with such true and devoted love, and, weeping over his body, she dedicated to him the tribute of a tear of the purest gratitude, of saddest lamentation.
But so imperfect is the world that it often leaves no time for mourning—that in the midst of our sorrow it causes us to hear the prosaic voices of reality and necessity, compelling us to dry our eyes and turning our thoughts from painfully-sweet remembrances of a lost happiness to the realities of practical life.
Natalie’s delicately-sensitive soul was to experience this rough contact of reality, and, with an internal shudder, must she bend under the rough hand of the present.
Pale, breathless, trembling, rushed Marianne into the room where Natalie, in solitary mourning, was weeping for her lost friend.
“We are ruined, hopelessly ruined!” screamed Marianne. “They will drive us from our last possession, they will turn us out of our house! All the misfortunes of the whole world break over and crush us!”
The young maiden looked at her with a calm, clear glance.
“Then let them crush us,” she quietly said. “It is better to be crushed at once than to be slowly and lingeringly wasted!”
“But you hear me not, princess,” shrieked Marianne, wringing her hands. “They will drive us from here, I tell you; they will expel you from your house!”