"The same old lack of fire!" Harry says, by way of a jest, handing him his lighted cigar.
"Yes, the same old lack of fire!" Treurenberg repeats.
Lack of fire! How often he has been reproached with it as a boy! Lack of fire; that means everything for which fire stands,--energy, steadfastness, manly force of will. There is no lack of passion, on the other hand; of dangerous inflammable material there is too much in his nature; but with him passion paralyzes effort instead of spurring to action. One need only look at him as he half reclines there, smiling dreamily to himself, scarcely moving his lips, to know him for what he is, indolent, impressionable, yet proud and morbidly refined withal; a thoroughly passive and very sensitive man. He is half a head taller than Harry, but carries himself so badly that he looks shorter; his face, framed in light brown hair and a soft pointed beard, is sallow; his large gray eyes are veiled beneath thick lids which he rarely opens wide. His hands are especially peculiar, long, slender, soft, incapable of a quick movement; hands formed to caress, but not to fight,--hardly even to clasp firmly.
It is said that the colonel of the regiment of Uhlans, in which Lato served before his marriage to Selina Harfink, once declared of him, "Treurenberg ought to have been a woman, and then, married to a good husband, something might perhaps have been made of him."
This criticism, which ought to have been uttered by a woman rather than by a logical, conventional man, went the round of Treurenberg's comrades. "The same old lack of fire," Lato repeats, smiling to himself. He has the mouth and the smile of a woman.
Harry knows the smile well, but it has changed since the last time he saw it. It used to be indolent, now it is sad.
"Have you any children?" Harry asks, after a while.
Treurenberg shivers. "I had a boy, I lost him when he was fifteen months old," he says, in a low, strained tone.
"My poor fellow! What did he die of?" Harry asks, sympathetically.
"Of croup. It was over in one night,--and he was so fresh and healthy a child! My God! when I think of the plump little arms he used to stretch out to me from his little bed every morning," Lato goes on, hoarsely, "and then, as I said, in a few hours--gone! The physician did all that he could for the poor little fellow,--in vain; nothing did any good. I knew from the first that there was no hope. How the poor little chap threw himself about in his bed! I sometimes dream that I hear him gasping for breath, and he clung to me as if I could help him!" Treurenberg's voice breaks; he passes his hand over his eyes. "He was very little; he could hardly say 'papa' distinctly, but it goes terribly near one's heart when one has nothing else in the world,--I--I mean, no other children," he corrects the involuntary confession.