Two minutes later she knocks at his locked door. "Let me in, me, your wife, who wishes to console you!"
Felix does not open the door.
XXII.
It is already twilight. Eugene von Rhoeden sits with his cousin Raimund in the Harfinks' drawing-room. As Pistasch had ridden to Traunberg, where Rhoeden seldom accompanied him, the Countess Dey was in bed with a headache, and Scirocco had one of those fits of desperate melancholy which so often tormented him, and was wandering about the woods, Eugene had nothing to do in Iwanow. For a change he had ridden over to Marienbad. At the forest spring, where the guests were assembled around the music-stand, he had met Raimund, and had heard from him that "the old man" had driven over with his wife to see the arrogant Linda; he, Raimund, had spared them his society.
Eugene resolved to await the return of the pair; it interested him to learn something about the result of the visit.
The two cousins soon came to the conclusion that the music and the crowd around the pavilion were intolerable as well as the heat, and betook themselves to the Mühl strasse, where Papa Harfink, more conservative than superstitious, and besides wholly secure in his new happiness from indiscreet visits of Susanna's ghost, occupied the same apartments in which for long years he had "suffered" every summer with the deceased.
With a tinge of bitterness Eugene looked about him as he entered the bright room in which he had passed so many sweet hours with Linda. There stood the old-fashioned arm-chair yet, with the same covering, now, to be sure, worn at all the corners, the chair in which she used to lean back in the sultry summer afternoons, teasingly pulling to pieces his last gift of flowers with her delicate fingers, while Papa Harfink snored in the adjoining room; Mamma Harfink, in her maid's room, discussed the cut of her new toilet with the latter, but he, Eugene, crouching at the feet of the young girl, told her gay, trifling little stories, many times half-jokingly interspersing a tender word. Then she threw a flower in his face; her hand remained imprisoned in his, and he kissed it for punishment. Thus it went on for hours, until Papa Harfink entered the room with scarcely opened eyes and hair tumbled by sleep, and asked, "Are we going to have coffee at home to-day?"
Eugene had never seen the room since he had rushed into it, now more than five years ago, the bunch of white gardenias in his hand, and had found his cousin Lanzberg's fiancée. At that time he had not changed his expression, had not by one word betrayed his passion, knowing well that a man like him who wishes to rise in the world is condemned to perpetual agreeableness.
How he had felt at that time!
His was no sentimental nature, but he had a faithful memory, and remembered distinctly how he had murmured the most polite phrases of congratulation; had drawn a comparison between himself and the man of old family, and beside, Felix had seemed to himself like a handsome dry-goods clerk.