His attention was suddenly distracted however, by the noise of the blows of an axe resounding slowly and monotonously through the heavy summer air. Fritz changed colour, sprang up and hurried to the window.
"What is the matter?" the actress asked him negligently.
"They are cutting down the old beech," he said slowly, turning not to her, but to Truyn.--"The Friedrichs-beech; planted by one of our ancestors, Joachim Malzin, with his own hands after the liberation of Vienna; we children all cut our names upon it. Don't you remember how Madame Lenoir scolded us for it, and declared that it was not comme il faut, but a pastime befitting prentice boys only? Good Heavens--how long ago that is!--and now they are cutting it down. Capriani insists that it interferes with his view."
CHAPTER IV.
"If one could only help him!--but there is nothing to be done--absolutely nothing!"
Thus Truyn reflected, as distressed and compassionate, he rode home on his sleek cob, followed by his trim English groom.
There are many varieties of compassion not at all painful, which, when well-seasoned with a charming consciousness of virtue, may serve sensitive souls as a tolerable amusement. There is, for example, an artistically contemplative compassion that, with hands thrust comfortably in pockets, looks on at some melancholy affair as at the fifth act of a tragedy, without experiencing the faintest call to recognize its existence except by heaving sundry sentimental sighs. Then there is a self-contemplative compassion which, quite as inactive as the artistically contemplative, culminates in the satisfactory consciousness of the comparative comfort of one's own condition; then a decorative compassion, which is displayed merely as a mental adornment upon solemn occasions when the man marches forth clad in full-dress moral uniform.
But there is one compassion which is among the most painful sensations that can assail a delicate-minded human being--a compassion, always united to the most earnest desire to aid, to console, and yet which knows itself powerless in presence of the suffering; that longs for nothing in the world more ardently than to aid that which it cannot aid! And this it was that oppressed Truyn, as he rode home from Schneeburg,--this vain compassion lying like a cold, hard stone upon his warm, kind heart!
"If one could only help him, could but make life at least tolerable for him,--poor Fritz, poor fellow!" he muttered again and again.
The tall poplars, standing like a long row of gigantic exclamation points on the side of the road, cast strips of dark shade upon the light, dusty soil. The crickets were chirping in the hedges; in the wheat-fields to the right and left the ears nodded gently and gravely; red poppies and blue cornflowers--useless, picturesque gipsy-folk, amidst the ripening harvest--laughed at their feet. The clover-fields had passed their prime,--they were brown and a faint odour of faded flowers floated aloft from them. The transparent veil of early twilight obscured the light and dimmed the shadows.