He did not speak, but leaned a little forward and pressed the hem of her gown to his lips.
"You goose!" she remonstrated; but when he raised his head she perceived that his eyes were filled with tears. "What is the matter?"
"A momentary weakness, as you see," he said with forced gaiety; adding earnestly,--"I am not ashamed of it before you. Of the evil that is in us, we are more ashamed before those whom we love than before all the rest of the world; but of our weaknesses we are ashamed only before those to whom we are indifferent!"
Paler and paler grow the blossoms of the sweet rocket, sweeter and sweeter their fragrance rises aloft, like a mute prayer,--twilight hovers over the meadows and the leafy summits of the lindens grow black. The quiet air is stirred by the village bells ringing the Angelus. The Countess folded her hands,--of late years she has grown devout. Oswald is overcome by intense lassitude, the lassitude that follows the sudden relaxation of nervous tension in men upon whom severe physical exertion has no effect.--He lays his head upon his mother's knee, and recalls the time when, only twenty years old, and smarting under a severe disappointment, he had taken refuge there. Then he had lain his head upon her lap, and sleep, wooed in vain through feverish nights, had fallen on him.--He remembers how, regardless of her own discomfort, she had let him sleep there for hours, never moving, lest he should be disturbed. And how many other instances of her love and self-sacrifice fill his memory! She strokes his hair, and for a moment he wishes he might die, thus, now, and here,--yes, it would be far better, a hundredfold better to die thus at her feet, his heart filled with filial adoration, than to have to live down again the anguish of the last three days.
BOOK FOURTH.
CHAPTER I.
After all, what had induced Conte Capriani to spend his summer in Austria? His wife and his children were unutterably bored in their exile, and he--he was consumed with secret chagrin. He had intended to astound the earth whereon he had once run barefoot, but nothing had fulfilled his expectations, absolutely nothing. The Austrian climate did not agree with him, decidedly not. Instead of the intoxicating consciousness of triumph wherein he had hoped to revel, he was tormented, from morning until night, by a sensation of rasping humiliation. His arrogance sickened, shrivelled up; even his possessions suddenly seemed to him insignificant. His wealth was, to be sure, more easily convertible into cash, more available than that of the Austrian aristocrats. But what availed his airy, fleeting millions compared with these well-nigh indestructible possessions, rooted for centuries in native soil?
Many, many years before, on a muddy road the sides of which were spotted with patches of dirty snow fast melting in the early spring, little Alfred Stein had run behind a high old-fashioned green coach hung on spiral springs, and had tried to steal a ride on the hind axle. The bearded coachman--a stout, patriarchal coachman with a broad fur collar--looked back, saw him, and snapped his whip at him, so sharply that the boy, frightened, let go the axle, and fell off into a puddle. A chubby child, at the carriage window, leaned far out to see him, and laughed, without any malice, loud and heartily, as all healthy children laugh at anything comical. But rage seized young Alfred, and when he could do it unobserved, he clenched his fist, and shook it at the carriage.
At that time his envy did not reach higher than to a green coach, with a stately fur-clad coachman who could cut at all barefoot boys who were clinging on behind. How many miles his envy had travelled since then, how many ragamuffins his coachman had since then whipped off from his carriages, and yet at times it seemed to him that in reality he had not gained a step since that warm damp day in spring, when he had fallen into the puddle, and had been laughed at by the saucy little boy.