Three years passed; now and then women hinted innuendoes about Wjera Lodrin, but the other sex continued to speak of her with that mixture of admiration and irritation which bears the truest testimony to the blamelessness of a very beautiful woman. At last society was content to shrug its shoulders and to repeat, 'She is a riddle.'
The Countess was unutterably bored. The only occupation that she pursued with inexhaustible interest, though at the same time with reckless intrepidity, was riding.
"She has no sphere of activity; hers is the grand, fiery nature of a gifted man beating against the petty barriers of feminine existence. What is to come of it?" a sagacious student of human nature once said, in speaking of her.
All at once there was a decided change for the worse in Count Lodrin's health, and the physicians prescribed a sojourn in the South. Reluctantly enough the Countess consented to accompany her husband.
They set out, and the world maliciously compared Wjera to Juana of Castile, because she travelled with a corpse, and a father-confessor.
The Count found Nice quite too gay, and therefore took refuge in a secluded villa in the Riviera.
The Countess nearly died of ennui in the gray, sultry, sirocco-like monotony of an autumn heavy with the fragrance of roses, and in the tedium of an Italian winter. In spring the pair returned to Bohemia, the Count in somewhat better health, the Countess as cold and hard as ever, but irritable to a degree until now quite foreign to her.
In the August after their return Oswald was born. The old Count could not contain himself for joy; the Countess cared but very little for the child.
This was the woman whom Georges had known fifteen years before, and now,--he could hardly believe his senses!
Before he went to bed on the first night of his return to Tornow, he stood for a long while at the window of his room looking thoughtfully out into the night. The moon was high in the heavens; everything was still, save for a low rustle now and then in the huge lindens growing on the border of the pond in front of the castle. The ancient trees seemed to stir and stretch themselves in their sleep. His gaze wandered over the compact angular architecture of the high, black-gabled roofs, the rows of houses with tiny windows, in the little town,--all bathed in bluish moonlight. It was hardly changed since he had last seen it,--in the castle everything was changed. What had become of the social distractions in which the Countess Lodrin had been wont to delight?--Vanished, as by magic. The entire castle impressed him as having recovered from a restless fever.