Peace to her ashes! The Countess paid a heavy price for her short-lived joys. When scarcely twenty-six years old, she was attacked by a mortal disease. Her condition was all the more painful because she persisted in concealing her malady from the world, even denying its existence. Up to the last she went into society, and she died in full dress, diamonds and all, in a glare of light, on a lounge in her dressing-room.
The widower at first took her death so terribly to heart that his associates remarked upon it.
"Treurenberg is really a very good fellow!" they said, and so he was.
For a time he kept little Lato with him constantly. Even on the evenings when gambling was going on, and they played long and high at Hans Treurenberg's, the boy was present. When hardly twelve years old he was fully initiated into the mysteries of all games of chance. He would sit silent and quiet until far into the night, watching the course of the game, trembling with excitement at any sudden turn of luck. And how proud he was when he was allowed to take a hand! He played extremely well for his age, and his luck was constant. His father's friends made merry over his gambling ability. His father would pat his cheeks, stroke his hair off his forehead, take his face between his hands, and kiss him. Then, with his fingers beneath the lad's chin, he would turn his face this way and that, calling his guests' attention to the boy's beauty, to his eyes sparkling with eagerness, to his flushed cheeks. Then he would kiss the boy again, make him drink a glass of champagne, and send him to bed.
Then was sown the seed of the evil passion which was in after-years to cause Lato so many an hour of bitter suffering. Calm, almost phlegmatic, with regard to all else, as soon as he touched a card his excitement was intense, however he might manage to conceal it.
When Count Hans grew tired of the constant companionship of his son, he freed himself from it after a perfectly respectable fashion. He sent him to Prague, a city renowned for the stolidity of its institutions, committing him to the care of relatives, and of a professor who undertook to supply the defects of the boy's neglected education. When Lato was eighteen he entered a regiment of hussars.
Hereafter, if the father took but little pains about his son, he certainly showed him every kindness,--paid his debts, and laughed while he admired the young man's mad pranks. Moreover, he really loved him, which did not, however, hinder him from contriving to have Lato declared of age at twenty, that the young fellow might have possession of his maternal inheritance, since he himself needed money.
It was at this time that the elder Treurenberg's view of life and the world underwent a remarkable change. He became a Liberal, and this not only in a political sense, but socially, a much rarer transformation. He appeared frequently at the tables of wealthy men of business, where he was valued not merely as an effective aristocratic decoration, but as a really charming companion. His liberal views took on more magnificent dimensions: he announced himself a heretic with regard to the exclusiveness of the Austrian aristocracy, smiled at the folly of Austrian court etiquette, and then, one fine day he made friends with the wealthy parvenu, Conte Capriani, and, throwing overboard as useless ballast impeding free action the 'noblesse oblige' principle, he devoted himself blindly and with enthusiasm to stock-gambling. The result was hardly encouraging. When Lato applied to his father one day for a considerable sum of money, it was not to be had. Melancholy times for the Treurenbergs ensued; thanks, however, to the friendship of Conte Capriani, who sometimes helped him to a really profitable transaction, Count Hans was able to keep his head above water. And he continued to hold it as high as ever, to preserve the same air of distinction, to smile with the same amiable cordiality in which there was a spice of hauteur; in a word, he preserved the indefinable prestige of his personality, which made it impossible that Conte Capriani's demeanour towards him should ever partake of the nature of condescension. The only thing required of Count Hans by Capriani was that he should spend a couple of weeks with him every year in the hunting-season. This the Count seemed quite willing to do, and he therefore appeared every year, in August or October, at Heinrichsdorf, an estate in West Hungary, where Capriani had preferred to live since his affair with young Count Lodrin had made his castle of Schneeburg impossible for him as a place of residence.
One year the Count asked his son to accompany him to Heinrichsdorf.
Will Lato ever forget the weeks he spent there, the turning-point as they were of his existence? How foreign and tiresome, how hard and bald, it all was! how uncomfortable, how uncongenial!--the furniture, among which here and there, as was the fashion, some costly antique was displayed; the guests, among whom were various representatives of historic Austrian nobility; the Conte's secretary, a choleric Hungarian, who concealed the remnant of a pride of rank which ill became his present position beneath an aggressive cynicism, and who was wont to carry in his pocket, when he went to walk, a little revolver, with which he shot at sparrows or at the flies creeping upon some wall, by way perhaps of working off the bitterness of his soul. There, too, was the master of the house, showing the same frowning brow to all whom he met, contradicting all with the same rudeness, hunting to earth any stray poetic sentiment, and then, after a violent explosion of pure reason, withdrawing gloomily to his cabinet, where he could give himself over to his two passions,--that for money-making, and that for setting the world at naught.