Besides the piano it still contained two huge bookcases, a shabby sofa behind a rickety table, and a round piano-stool. The rest of the furniture had disappeared. Some chairs had been banished as unsafe; the other things had been sold piece by piece, under stress of various pecuniary embarrassments, to the Jew broker of the village.
Strachinsky had several times attempted to dispose thus of the books also, but Solomon Bondy had no market for them. Once the Pole had tried to sell the piano. But Solomon had curtly refused to find a purchaser for it, knowing that with the piano the last remnant of enjoyment would be snatched from the poor lonely girl vegetating in the castle. The Jew had shown more mercy than the Christian. And then her dead mother had been dear to him, as she was to all around her.
She had been dear to Strachinsky also, but he never allowed his affection to stand in the way of his ease.
In consequence of the total lack of furniture, Strachinsky, when Erika entered the room, was sitting beside the stranger on the sofa,--which looked comical.
The stranger, a man of middle age, tall, broad-shouldered, and erect in bearing, rose to receive her.
"May I beg you to present me to the Countess?" he said, turning to Strachinsky.
"Countess!" It thrilled her. Had she heard aright?
"Herr Doctor Herbegg--my daughter," with a wave of the hand.
"Your step-daughter," the stranger corrected him, with cool emphasis.
"I have never made any difference between her and my own children, dead in their early youth," said the other; and he was right, for he had taken very little interest in his own children. "You know that, my child," he added, in a caressing tone that in his stepdaughter's ears was like an echo of his old love-making to his wife, and which offended her. He would have taken her hand, but she withdrew it hastily from his flabby warm touch.