"I have surprised you, have I not?" Karl Leskjewitsch exclaimed, embracing his son. "But what's the matter with you? What ails you? I never saw you look so sallow,--you rogue!" And he shook his forefinger at the young fellow.
"Oh, nothing,--nothing, sir: we will talk of it by and by. Now come and take some rest."
[CHAPTER XXV.]
THE CONFESSION.
Baron Leskjewitsch was in an admirable humour. He brightened up the entire household. The Countess Zriny, to be sure, lamented to Fräulein Laut his tireless loquacity, but perhaps that was because his loquacity displayed itself principally in the utterance of anti-Catholic views.
At breakfast, on the first morning after his arrival, he cut the old canoness to the heart. When he rallied her upon the indigestible nature of her favourite delicacy, raspberry jam with whipped cream, she replied that she could eat it with perfect impunity, since she always mixed a teaspoonful of eau de Lourdes with the jam before adding the cream.
Whereupon the Baron called this preservative "Catholic quackery," and was annoyed that she made no reply to his attack. Like a former emperor of Russia, he longed for opposition. He did what he could to rouse Countess Zriny's. After a while he asserted that she was a heathen. Catholicism in its modern form, with its picturesque ritual and its superstitious worship of the saints, was nothing more than cowled Paganism.
The Countess, to whom this rather antiquated wisdom was new, shuddered with horror, and regarded the Baron as antichrist, but nevertheless held her peace.
Then he played his last trump. He informed her that he regarded the Darwinian theory as much less irreligious than her, Countess Zriny's, paltry conception of the Deity. Then the Countess arose and left the room, to write immediately to her father confessor, expressing her anxieties with regard to her cousin's soul, and asking the priest to say a mass for his conversion.
"Poor Kathi! have I frightened her away? I didn't mean to do that," said the Baron, looking after her.