“This was his threat often while he took her north to the capital, remembering her talent, and telling himself that she should make money of it.
“‘Corpo di Baccho, Christine,’ he would say, ‘your face will be bread to us in Vienna, and you shall scrape your fiddle, carina, while fools dance, and there are guldens in my pocket. Did I not promise, when I came to you at Zlarin, and you would have starved but for my bread, to take you to the city? Did I not tell you always that you did well to dream, for no dreams were like the wonders across the mountains? Wait a little while, and you shall see. Thirty hours in the train take us from Serajevo. We will go to Serajevo, and the money for the diamonds which your lover gave you shall help you on the road. That was a lucky day which took you to Jézero, my wife! Oh, we shall be rich yet.’
“It was thus, excellency, that they came to Vienna—the man that he might profit of the woman’s talent; the woman that she might save her one friend and benefactor. Although the wonders of the new life would, under other circumstances, have dazzled her eyes and made her brain reel, they were now powerless to impress her. She saw a railway for the first time, and no exclamation escaped her. She sat in a stinking carriage, provided by the State for paupers and cattle, and as the wheels droned the song of their ceaseless rolling she said—but this in accompaniment to the rhythm of their song—I love, I love! The boundless plains of Hungary, wearying the eye with their unmarked horizon, told her the more that she was utterly alone. The great city of Pesth, with its clatter of horses and its hum of men, dinned always in her ears a word of new foreboding. ‘For ever, for ever,’ she heard this alone of all the whirl of the city’s life. The very magnificence of building and of street terrified her. She cried in her heart for the woods of Zlarin and the desolation of her childish life. She answered nothing to the questions of the man—ready, perhaps, to forget his anger that his pride might be gratified in shewing her these wonders.
“‘Managgia,’ he would say, ‘that you should look upon all these things, and yet keep your lips shut! Body of my soul! but you must have dreamt well—that all this is nothing to you! Look yonder; that is the great opera house. Some day you shall hear the music there, and it shall set your brain on fire. Such music is not to be heard in sleep; it rises up like a great wave of the sea, my Christine; it makes your blood boil; and then it tickles you so that you would run and jump. And when it falls away, little one—oh, there is nothing but an echo in your ears, and you think that you could lie down and dream upon a bank of flowers. What! you do not listen to me?’
“He spoke well, excellency, for his words were wasted upon her. Nor was it otherwise when at last they came to the capital, and she followed him to the dreary lodging he had taken in the garret of a house whose back windows looked out upon the cathedral church of St. Stephen. The blaze of light did but blind her; the ringing of church bells was like a dirge in her heart; the great throngs passing told her that here was the beginning of her punishment. One gentle word—one whisper of love—would have brought her sobbing upon her knees; but there was none to speak it. Wearied with the travel, sick for want of bread, she climbed with the man to the dark of the attic, and the door closed upon her as upon a prisoner.
“And so the dreamer awoke at last from the dreams of long ago.”
CHAPTER XIX
ANDREA GOES AN ERRAND
“Christine had left Jézero exactly eighteen months before it was given to me to see her again, excellency. Think not that I had put her from my mind. Far from it. She was to me then, as ever, a daughter to be beloved. Could my hand have helped her, it had been raised to her assistance every hour of my life. But God had willed it otherwise. I knew not even in what city she had made her home. I was welcome no longer at the house of Count Paul. The priest did not answer my letter when I reminded him of the services I had rendered. Strange tales came to me upon the lips of gossipers. I heard that the château at Jézero was now like a tomb of the living. They told me that the Lord Count himself went to Vienna no more. They spoke of decay and desolation, of solitude and silence; of a master who shewed his trouble to none, and yet was troubled that he must hide it. They said that the shadow of a great solitude had come upon the house—and all for lack of a child’s pretty face.
“I heard these things, but it was many months before I saw them for myself. Two summers had passed when the message came—a letter from Father Mark bidding me go to Jézero. So quick was I to answer that I rode up to the great house three days after the summons reached me, and found myself immediately in the presence of the priest. He told me that the Count had been called to the autumn manœuvres at Brod; and the opportunity being welcome to him, he had sent for me at once to discuss a matter of much moment to us both.
“‘Few things have happened here, Signor Andrea,’ he said, ‘since the day you left us. I wish it were otherwise. You see for yourself what a state we are in—the rooms half-painted, as they were on the day the child left us; the gardens running to weed; half the servants sent about their business. He will do nothing and have nothing done. He sees no one. He is never out of his study except when his work calls him——’