The Kaiserburg, surrounded by haughty palaces with an unfinished gothic cathedral, looks down from the summit of the Hradschin, upon its image mirrored in the water in waving lines, and columns tinged with green. The morning sun glows on the five red glass stars before the green St. John on the Karlsbridge, and far away on the left and right, far into the receding distance, until all objects are mellowed and blent, stretch the banks of the river like a long drawn symphony of colour dying away in palest violet.
"After all, it is a fine, a magnificent city!" exclaimed Truyn with enthusiasm.
"Pistasch said yesterday that Prague was a dismal hole," was Oswald's reply, "you may both be right--it all depends upon how you look at it."
The phrase falls keen and chilling upon Truyn's enthusiasm, like ice into boiling water. Surprised, and well nigh irritated, he turned to his future son-in-law. As, however, he is far less sensitive than good-natured, a glance at Oswald converts irritation into eager compassion: "I wonder where you can have caught it?" he sighed, shaking his head.
"Good Heavens, what?" asked Oswald.
"I wish I knew," said Truyn, "either intermittent fever or a slight touch of jaundice,--for a man of your age and with your constitution there's no cause for alarm, but your mother will reproach me with your looking so ill!" Then Truyn leaned out of the window of the hack to admire the Hradschin once more, before subsiding into a corner with a sigh of content, and lighting a cigar.
Oswald's nature is certainly as poetic as Truyn's, and never before had he driven over the suspension bridge, on a summer's morning, without revelling in the beauty of the Bohemian capital. But to-day everything is metamorphosed, beauty is ugliness. For him the world within two days had undergone a transformation.
The human mind is like a mirror, upon the quality whereof depends the character of the reflection in its depths; in one mirror all things are reflected yellow, in another green, in a third every line is vague, shadowy and undecided; one shows objects lengthened, another broadened, and should the mirror be cracked, everything that it reflects will be distorted.
CHAPTER VII.
Zinka and Gabrielle were at the railway station to meet Truyn, both gay, cordial and surpassingly lovely. The sight of them, and their merry talk at first brightened Oswald's mood. But suddenly at tea, which on the travellers' account was a substantial meal, a wretched sense of discomfort attacked him anew.