He was very ill. Unaccustomed to spare himself, and without any real pleasure in life, he had increased his malady by months of entire want of care and nursing, until his physicians had insisted that a summer should be spent at a sanitarium in Gleichenberg. Partially restored, he had immediately, in direct opposition to all advice, re-entered the service. The autumn manœuvres had brought on an inflammation of the lungs. How very ill he was never entered his mind, in spite of his speech to Stella. He thought he should live a couple of years longer, and his great dread was lest he should be pensioned off before the time because of his invalid condition. The pains that he took to maintain an upright military bearing aggravated all the evils of his case.
There were a number of distinguished Austrians in the Hotel Britannia, some few of them invalids, most of them gay and pleasure-loving and well pleased to spend a few weeks amid picturesque surroundings and in pleasant society. The colonel was beloved by all, and they eagerly welcomed his pretty daughter,--even the ladies, whom the colonel consulted as to the necessary reform in the girl's wardrobe. She sat with her father in the midst of them all at the upper end of the table, the lower end, where the other inmates of the hotel were crowded together, being the subject of much merry scorn and stigmatized as 'the menagerie.' Compassion for the daughter of the dying man deepened the sympathy called forth by the young girl's grace and charm. Old gentlemen rallied her upon her conquests, and the young men paid her devoted attention. She had a special friend in the handsome black-eyed prince Zino Capito, who had an unusual share of time to bestow upon her since the latest mistress of his affections, the famous Princess Oblonsky, had just departed for Petersburg to take possession of the effects of her husband, suddenly deceased. He daily sent Stella magnificent flowers with which to adorn the hotel apartments for her father. "Invalids are so fond of flowers," he would say, with a smile that displayed his brilliant white teeth. And when the weather was fine and the colonel felt well enough, he would invite them to take a sail in his cutter upon the blue Adriatic.
The colonel often spoke of his wife, longing to see her. The last liaison--that which had been the cause of a definite separation between himself and his wife, had robbed him of his self-respect, had disgraced him in his children's eyes, and had snatched from him every vestige of peace of mind--had dissolved itself more than two years before. The recollection of it disgusted him, but, like all men who have no future, he gladly allowed his thoughts to stray into the distant past. The wife from whom he had parted, elderly, learned, with her slovenliness and irritability, he had forgotten; his memory preserved the bride, in her light dress, bending above his couch of pain; he saw her on his marriage-day in the flood of sunlight which streaming through the tall window of his sick-room invested with a glorious halo the golden cross upon the improvised altar.
One sunny day, as he was sailing in the Grand Canal in a gondola with Stella, he pointed to a beautiful old palazzo.
"There is where I lay wounded in '59, when your mother came to nurse me. Those windows there were mine."
In the evening of the same day, while Stella was writing to her mother and he lay half dozing on a lounge, he suddenly said, "Stella, do you think your mother could make up her mind to come to Venice with Franzi for a few weeks? She need not be in the same house with us, if that would bore her, but---- Tell her how much it would please me to see her; and," he added, with an embarrassed smile, "tell her I am really very ill: perhaps that may induce her to come."
He awaited the reply to this letter with feverish eagerness. In a week there arrived a package of rather insignificant notices of a work of his wife's, just published at her own expense; two weeks later the answer to the letter appeared.
"Well, what does your mother say?" asked the colonel, as he observed Stella deciphering the almost illegible document. "Read it aloud to me," he insisted: "you know everything that goes on at home interests me. Is she coming?"
But Stella, with tears in her eyes, and a burning blush, stammered, "A letter must have been lost. This one never even mentions our plan!"