When Erika, towards evening, was playing hide-and-seek with her little brother in the garden, she saw her mother and her step-father strolling affectionately along the gravel path between the hawthorn bushes. He was already rather bald; his limbs were loosely knit; he wore full whiskers, and there was a languishing glance in his eyes, but he was still handsome, in spite of a dissipated air; she was tall, slender, and erect, with large dark eyes, and a pale, noble countenance, that could never, however, have been beautiful. They walked close together, and to a casual observer presented an ideal picture of happy wedded life. And yet when one observed more narrowly--his arm was thrown around her shoulder, and he leaned upon her instead of supporting her; the swing of his heavy frame, the languishing, sentimental expression of his face, everything about him, bespoke a self-satisfied, luxurious temperament; while she----in her eyes there was restless anxiety, and her figure looked as though it were slowly being bowed to the ground by a burden which she was either unable or afraid to shake off.
She walked with a patiently regular step beneath her heavy load. Suddenly she seemed uneasy: she shivered.
"What is it, darling?" Strachinsky asked her, clinging still closer to her.
"Nothing," she murmured, "nothing," and walked on.
They were passing the spot where the little brother and sister were playing, and in the gathering twilight Emma Strachinsky became aware of a pair of clear dark-brown childish eyes that seemed to ask, "How can she love that man?"
Those childish eyes were positively uncanny!
The child's dislike dated from far in the past; it was in fact the first clearly formulated emotion of her little heart. During the first years of her second marriage the mother, prompted by an exaggerated tenderness, had concealed from her little daughter as long as possible the fact that Strachinsky was not her own father: the child had learned the truth by accident. When she rushed to her mother to have what she had heard confirmed, she was received with the tenderest caresses, as though she were to be consoled for a great grief, while she was entreated not to be sad, and was told that "'papa' was far too good and kind to make any difference between herself and his own children, that he loved her dearly," etc.
The mother's caresses were highly prized by the child, all the more that they were rather rare, but on this occasion she could not even seem to enjoy them, since she could not endure to be pitied and soothed for what brought her in reality intense relief.
Her mother perceived this, and it angered her, although at the same time the child's evident though silent dislike made a deep impression upon her. Perhaps the consciousness of its existence in so frank and childish a mind first gave occasion to distrust of the terrible infatuation to which the gifted woman's entire existence had fallen a sacrifice.
Frau von Strachinsky was wont to go herself every evening to see that all was as it should be in the large airy apartment where both the children slept. She hovered noiselessly from one bed to the other, signing the cross upon the brow of each,--an old-fashioned custom to which she still clung although she had long since adopted very philosophical views with regard to religion,--and giving each sleeping child a tender good-night kiss.