"O Thou, My Austria!"

by Ossip Schubin

The long shadows of the trees grow paler, and vanish, taking with them all the glory of the world and leaving only a dull, borrowed twilight to hover above the earth.

The sun has set. Ding-dong! rings the bell of Komaritz, near at hand, as Lato rides past; the bells of the other villages echo the sound dreamily, to have their notes tossed back by the bells of the lonely chapels on the mountain-sides across the steel-gray stream, whose waters glide silently on ward. Ding-dong! each answers to all, and the tired labourer rejoices in unison.

The hour of rest has come, the hour when families reassemble after the pursuits and labours of the day have ceased to claim and separate them,--when mortals feel more warmly and sensibly the reality of family ties. Thin blue smoke is curling from the chimneys; here and there a woman can be seen standing at the door of a cottage, shading her eyes with her hand as she looks expectantly down the road. Upon the doorstep of a poor hut sits a brown, worn labourer, dirty and ragged, about to eat his evening meal with a leaden spoon from an earthen bowl; a young woman crouches beside him, with her back against the door-post, content and silent, while a chubby child, with bare legs somewhat bowed, and a curly head, leans against his knee and, with its mouth open in expectation, peeps into the earthen bowl. The father smiles, and from time to time thrusts a morsel between the fresh, rosy lips. Then he puts aside the bowl and takes the little fellow upon his knee. It is a pretty child,--and perhaps in honour of the father's return home--wonderfully clean, but even were this not the case---- Most of the children tumbling about before the huts on this sultry August evening are neither pretty nor clean; they are dirty, ragged, dishevelled; many are sickly, and some are crippled; but there is hardly one among them to whom this hour does not bring a caress.

An atmosphere of mutual human sympathy seems to brood in silence above the resting earth, while the bells ring on,--ding-dong, ding-dong.

Lato has left the village behind him, and is trotting along the road beneath the tall walnuts. The noise of wagons, heavily laden with the harvest, and the tramp of men upon the road fall upon his ear,--everything is going home.

There is a languor in the aromatic summer air, somewhat that begets in every human being a desire for companionship, a longing to share the burden of existence with another. Even the flowers seem to bend their heads nearer to one another.

Now the bells are hushed, the road is deserted; Lato alone is still pursuing his way home. Home? Is it possible that he has accustomed himself to call his mother-in-law's castle home? In many a hotel--at "The Lamb," for example, in Vienna he has felt much more at home. Where, then, is his home? He vainly asks himself this question. Has he ever had a home?

The question is still unanswered. His thoughts wander far back into the past, and find nothing, not even a few tender memories. Poor Lato! He recalls his earliest years, his childhood. His parents were considered the handsomest couple in Austria. The Count was fair, tall, slender, with an apparent delicacy of frame that concealed an amount of physical strength for which he was famous, and with nobly-chiselled features. His duels and his love-affairs were numerous. He was rashly brave, and irresistible; so poor an accountant that he always allowed his opponents to reckon up his gains at play, but when his turn came to pay a debt of honour he was never known to make an error in a figure. It is scarcely necessary to mention that his gambling debts were the only ones the payment of which he considered at all important. He was immensely beloved by his subordinates,--his servants, his horses, and his dogs; he addressed them all with the German "thou," and treated them all with the same good-humoured familiarity. He was thought most urbane, and was never guilty of any definite intentional annoyance; but he suffered from a certain near-sightedness. He recognized as fellow-mortals only those fellow-mortals who occupied the same social plane with himself; all others were in his eyes simply population,--the masses.

There is little to tell of his wife, save that she was a brilliant brunette beauty, with very loud manners and a boundless greed of enjoyment. She petted little Lato like a lapdog; but one evening, just as she was dressed for a ball, she was informed that the child had been taken violently ill with croup, whereupon she flew into a rage with those who had been so thoughtless and unfeeling as to tell her such a thing at so inopportune a moment. Her carriage was announced; she let it wait while she ran up-stairs to the nursery, kissed the gasping little patient, exclaimed, with a lifted forefinger, "Be a good boy, my darling; don't die while mamma is at the ball!" and vanished.

The little fellow was good and did not die. As a reward, his mother gave him the largest and handsomest rocking-horse that was to be found in Vienna. Such was the Countess Treurenberg as a mother; and as a wife--well, Hans Treurenberg was satisfied with her, and her behaviour was no one else's affair. The couple certainly got along together admirably. They never were seen together except when they received guests.