If Emma, following her mother-in-law's example, could have courteously and respectfully put him upon a pedestal in some corner where he would not have been in her way, she might have led a very tolerable life with him. The mistake was that she attempted to make him happy.
Poor Emma! As if one possibly could make a wooden figure-head happy! Young Count Lenzdorff was extremely uncomfortable in view of his wife's exertions to make him happy. What ensued was of a very unedifying character: from being simply a state of contented indifference, the marriage became a decidedly irksome bond. Nevertheless it was most unfortunate for Emma when Edmund Lenzdorff, two years after their marriage, lost his life in a railway accident. Had he lived, her existence might at least have been a quiet one; in time she would have relinquished her ill-judged attempts to make him happy, and have found an object in life in the education of her child; while, as it was, he was no sooner dead than her existence began to totter uncertainly, like a ship from which the ballast has been removed.
At first she sickened, as her mother-in-law expressed it, with an attack of acute philanthropy. She haunted the most disreputable corners of Berlin in search of cases of misery to be relieved, never allowing a servant to accompany her, because, as she explained, it might humiliate the poor. Upon one of her excursions her watch was snatched from her, and another time she caught spotted fever. This was very annoying to the Countess Anna, but she forgave her, with--as she was wont to declare--praiseworthy courage, in view of the terrible disease.
Six months afterwards Emma married Strachinsky; and this her mother-in-law did not forgive her.
Since then fourteen years had passed, fourteen years during which she had had nothing whatever to do with poor Emma. And now she was sorry.
Again and again did the Countess Anna revert to the education given to the young girl asleep in the next room.
A woman who could so educate her child, and who could continue so to influence her after her death, was no ordinary character.
Of course she had had fine material to work upon. And the old Countess was conscious of an emotion never awakened within her by her son, yet now aroused by her grand-daughter,--pride in her own flesh and blood. "A splendid creature!" she murmured to herself once or twice, then adding, with a sneer at her own lack of perception, "and I was fool enough to think her ugly at first. Whom does she resemble? she is not in the least like her mother,--nor like my son!" Still pondering, she paused in her monotonous pacing to and fro, strangely thrilled. Going to an antique buhl cabinet with a multitude of drawers, she opened one of them,--a secret drawer, which had long been undisturbed,--and began to look through its contents. At last she found what she sought, a lithograph representing a young girl, décolletée, and with the huge sleeves in fashion in 1830. A very charming young girl the picture portrayed,--Countess Lenzdorff when she was still Anna von Rhödern.
The little faded picture trembled in the old lady's hand: it worked upon her like a spell, carrying her back to a time long forgotten,--a time when life had been to her something different from a farce with a tragic ending, by which one might be vastly entertained, but in which one should scorn to play a part. She was suddenly deeply pained at sight of the beautiful, grave, proud young face: it suggested to her something that had begun very finely and ended in unutterable bitterness, something through which the best and most genial part of her had been destroyed, or at least paralyzed. Hark! What was that? A low, suppressed sob! another! They came from the adjoining room. The old Countess dropped the little picture, and, with a candle in her hand, went to her grand-daughter's bedside. When she heard her grandmother coming, Erika closed her eyes, feigning sleep, but she had not time to wipe away the tears from her cheeks.
Her grandmother set the candle upon the table, and then, bending over the girl, whispered, softly, "Erika!" Erika did not stir. How pathetic she looked!--pale and thin, and yet so noble and charming in spite of the traces of tears.