But with all that he could do he could not pay every one. Some of the lesser creditors were coarse and pressing, but most of them only meekly twirled their caps about in their hands, murmuring, "We can wait, Herr Count; we rely entirely upon the Herr Count."
He lived through each day dully, almost apathetically. The dreariness and emptiness of his house made no impression upon him. When the time came for him to part with his horses--a member of the jeunesse dorée of Vienna bought them at a high price--he took Siegi and went down into the stable, where he fed the beautiful creatures with bread and sugar, and stroked their heads and patted their necks; and when he turned and left them neighing and snorting with delight--it seemed to him that a piece of his heart were being torn from out his breast!....
Every day his wife asked him when he was going to appeal to his father, but he made no reply. After the insult that the old Count had offered to his darling, nothing should ever induce him to make another appeal. Nothing? So he thought then. "My father must have heard of my unfortunate circumstances," he said to himself, "and if it does not occur to him to help me, there is nothing that I can do."
He determined to find a situation,--of course one befitting his name and station. If every ancient noble name to-day in Austria cannot lay claim, as in France in Louis the Fourteenth's time, to an office at court, or to a salary, there are at least a hundred kinds of sinecures that can afford the means of living suitably for their rank, to young scions of the nobility who have not sinned against the prejudices of their caste.
His fatal marriage aggravated the difficulties of Malzin's position. The horizon of his existence contracted and darkened more and more.
The dogged determination which, closing accounts with the past, resolutely clears away the débris of a ruined life from the path which is to lead to a new existence, Fritz did not possess. His was the passive endurance of pride, which calmly bows beneath the burden, and drags on with it to the end, simply because it scorns to complain or to appeal to compassion.
One feeling only was stronger within him than pride, and that was love for his children.
Were he alone concerned, he would rather have starved than prefer a second request after the first had been refused, but he could not bring himself to see his children slowly starve.
He applied to several individuals who had always been on terms of great intimacy with his family, but after some had refused to receive him, and others had ignored his request with a forced smile, he felt paralysed, and resigned himself for a while to melancholy, brooding inactivity. There must come a change sooner or later, he thought. In the meanwhile he lived upon--debt, and could not comprehend why professional usurers should need so much urging to induce them to lend him, the probable heir of Schneeburg, a paltry couple of hundred gulden.