The balance of his accounts was correct; as soon as his attention was excited he decided correctly, never made a mistake in a reckoning, and made no disconnected remarks. Only, exhausted as he was, everything concerning present affairs irritated him indescribably. The train of his thought flowed always backward. His mind rested continually upon that spot in the past where his happiness lay buried with his honor.
He passed almost the whole of his time in living over again his life from the first meeting with Juanita to the signing of the fatal note. His memory, strangely faithful, and sharpened by practice, revived again and again new particulars of the Juanita period, with the distinctness of hallucinations.
On a mild, sunny April day Elsa appeared in Traunberg, restored to health, more beautiful than ever, and with eyes radiant with happiness. She was shocked when she perceived her brother; what she saw was so much worse than what Erwin had considerately prepared her for. But Felix's misery only increased the tenderness of her sympathy. She spoke of the tender, intimate intercourse which should now exist between the two families, and said that Baby was now large enough for a playmate for her cousin; and Baby who, chubby-cheeked and gay, with great laughing eyes and tiny mouth with a drolly serious expression, sat on her mamma's knee, stretched out her fat little arms and said, "Where Gery?"
Then the nurse--Gery's French bonne had not been able to endure the winter solitude of Traunberg, and had long since left--brought the child. She had smoothed down his curly hair with a horrible, strong-smelling pomade, and had hidden his pretty little form in a heavy cloth costume, suitable for much older children. He looked pale, was awkward, and clung anxiously to his father. When he gradually lost his shyness through Elsa's soft voice and caressing manner, and approached her and answered her questions, she noticed that he had adopted the common broad accent of the nurse.
It did not escape Felix's morbidly sharpened glance, that behind the pleasant smile with which Elsa met the child, surprise and compassion were hidden.
"You probably find that he has changed for the worse?" he asked suddenly, gazing sharply at her. "What will you? Everything about me goes to ruin."
When Elsa, after urgently and most tenderly begging Felix and his boy to come soon to Steinbach, had driven away, Felix took his boy on his knees, and kissed him passionately, murmuring again and again, "Poor child, poor branded child!"
An unpleasant habit, common to most human beings living very much alone, he had adopted of late, that of talking to himself. The words which most frequently escaped him, which he probably repeated a dozen times, were, "The certain Lanzberg," and while he said that, his voice and his face expressed all the shades of bitterness, mockery and despair.
And one evening, three or four days after Elsa's visit, Gery crept shyly up to him, and laying his little hand anxiously upon his father's arm, he asked in his gentle, somewhat sad little voice, "What is that, 'the certain Lanzberg'?"
Felix started; he gave a long-piercing gaze into the innocent eyes of the child, then he pushed him violently away and hurried out of the room.