"Let us rather say as irritable as a crowned head," said Georges laughing, "Les extrèmes se touchent."
"I really believe it is the reappearance of your old family spectre which must have affected your nerves lately, Ossi," Pistasch said innocently.
"Which family spectre are you talking of?" asked Oswald hoarsely.
"Have you several of them then?" asked Pistasch. "I know only of the blind one that laughs--my man told me to-day while I was dressing that it has been heard laughing again. The butler had told him so."
"The gardener was talking to me of it to-day too," said Georges, "but I told him that there have been no ghosts since '48; ghosts as an institution were quite done away with by the March revolution, whereupon, as he is an aspiring person addicted to free thinking he replied that he had arrived at that same conclusion himself."
"Stupid superstition!" muttered Oswald; then controlling himself by an effort he said very quietly, but pale as ashes. "Shall we not have another rubber?"
CHAPTER VI.
The world of spirits is a favourite topic with your aristocratic dilettanti, and every Austrian family qui se respecte has its spectre.
The Zinsenburgs have their White Lady, the Truyns their magnificent four-in-hand, which, as the fore-runner of any terrible domestic calamity, rattles past the windows of the Truynburg in the Bohemian forest--no one knows whither or whence.--The Kamenz family have only a black hand that inscribes weird characters of fire on the walls; the Lodrins have their blind woman who is heard laughing when disgrace or misfortune threatens the family. Of all the family spectres in Bohemia this laughing, blind woman is the most grisly. Her origin dates from dim antiquity. The legend runs that in the eleventh or twelfth century a knight, Wolf von Lodrin, married in accordance with a family arrangement, but with no love on the bride's part, a beautiful and noble maiden. Inflamed with passion for her, and finding it impossible to win her affection, in an evil hour, and in a fit of devilish rage, he struck her across the face with his riding-whip, and blindness followed the blow. Overcome by horror at what he had done the knight fell into a brooding melancholy, and at last killed himself. When his blind widow was told of it, she laughed; she herself lived to be a hundred years old, but after the knight's suicide she never spoke a single word,--only every time that any calamity befell the family, or one of its sons suffered disgrace she could be heard laughing. It was this blind spectre that still haunted Tornow. Formerly she had been seen frequently, it was said, a tall figure in grey, with a black bandage over her eyes, and an uncanny smile upon her pale lips, and the apparition always preceded some dire family misfortune. Her laugh had last been heard the day before Oswald's birth, wherefore it was feared that either the mother or the child would die, or that the Countess would give birth to some monster. But when a beautiful boy was born, and the mother recovered after her confinement much sooner than had been predicted, the blind Cassandra rather fell into disrepute, especially as both the Count and Countess set their faces against any belief in her existence, the Count because of his devout religious faith, and the Countess because she was too enlightened to encourage any such superstition.
Oswald had never bestowed much thought upon the spectre, merely smiling in a superior way when it was mentioned, but in the present excited, irritated state of his nerves even the superstitious gossip of his old servants made an impression upon him. During the rest of the evening, however, he put forth all his force to obliterate the impression that his irritability at the whist-table had made upon Truyn and Pistasch. And he succeeded; but when, after all the guests had departed, he retired to his room for the night his strength was exhausted. The old torture assailed him, only it was even keener and more agonizing than that which he had brought with him from Prague. He tossed his head from side to side on his pillow in feverish sleeplessness. Endowed from boyhood with that faultless courage which is rather a matter of temperament than of education, to-night for the first time in his life he was thrilled with a vague dread. Every noise, however slight, made him catch his breath with a suffocating sense of oppression.