Then came the campaign of '66. When he left her she contrived to shed a couple of tears, and during the fray in Bohemia her conscience pricked her terribly, but when the truce was proclaimed she was quite indifferent as to the length of his absence; it might have been prolonged ad infinitum, for all she cared. When he came home at the end of half a year his conscience was laden with a first infidelity. She had written an essay upon Don John of Austria.
From this moment the downward course was rapid.
If he could but have had a comfortable attractive home, he might perhaps have clung to it; he might have felt that he had something to live for, something to prevent, as he afterwards expressed it, his 'going to the devil.'
But he daily felt more and more of a stranger beneath his own roof, and his wife did nothing now to induce him to stay there; on the contrary, his presence bored her,--a fact which she did not always conceal.
For a little while he restrained himself, and then----
All the brutal instincts of his nature asserted themselves, and he took no pains to subdue them.
One joy, however, was his all through this dreadful time, his youngest daughter. He never took much pleasure in the elder of the two: she had inherited all her mother's caprice, without any of her talent.
But little Stella was indeed a darling.
When she was between one and two years old, at a time when his comrades, although but rarely, still met at his house at gay little suppers, he would go up to the nursery, where the child lay in bed, and if she happened to be awake and laughing at his approach he would take her in his arms just as she was in her little white night-gown and cap and carry her down-stairs to display her. She would obediently give her hand to every guest, but was not to be induced to unclasp the other arm from her father's neck. He petted and caressed her while his friends praised his pretty little daughter.