Left alone, as the door closed on him, she buried her face on the sofa cushions and cried and laughed hysterically, for the strain on her nerves had been very great. Then she threw her tear-wet handkerchief into the air and played ball with it. What fools men were! Oh, what fools! Taking their passions and affections so seriously and tragically, and letting a love and its loss spoil all the gains of the world to them. Then pride in her own genius and success danced like a band of elves before her eyes. Sarah Bernhardt herself could not have played that part with more exquisite art.
She touched the electric bell, bade them telephone for a coupé and a box at the Gymnase, and then had herself put in visiting trim, and when the coupé pulled up by the peristyle went out to see some friends of the Faubourg St. Germain whose day for afternoon reception it happened to be.
In the circles of the old aristocracy she was sure not to meet the republican minister, Gaulois. She did not wish to see him. She felt as if he would read in her eyes that she had triumphed in her interview with Vanderlin. She was a little ashamed of what she had done; not much, for success and shame are not sisters, but a little.
CHAPTER XLIV.
Two days later Olga zu Lynar was seated by her fireside in the home of her choice in the Swabian Alb, where the March day had none of the sunlight and fragrance of Monte Carlo. Snow was still deep in the passes of the hills, and blocks of ice were breaking up on all the rivers. The great oak and pine-woods were black against heavy storm clouds, and enclosed the landscape on all sides save one, where they were cleft abruptly by a narrow gorge, which alone gave access to the world beyond.
The news of her father’s end at Monte Carlo had intensified the melancholy of her thoughts. She had always hoped whilst he lived that some revelation, some atonement, might come from him.
He was dead; and death carries with it its own depression, its own hopelessness. Death in her father’s case seemed to her intensified in horror, because it was the end of a base, valueless, miserable life. It filled her with the same sort of despair which Hurstmanceaux had felt on hearing that Cocky was dying at Staghurst.
Nothing could be undone; nothing could be atoned for; nothing could be explained: he was dead in a gambling place; and had left no message for her. The German consul had telegraphed to her that there had been no papers found anywhere except the official declarations of his birth and rank.
She had never expected anything, and yet now that he was dead, in unforgiving and unconfessing silence, she felt as if some added hopelessness settled down on her. She was still young in years, she had the kind of beauty which never wholly passes away, she had wealth, and she could have found many who would have willingly aided her to forget and make her life anew. But she had no wish to do so. She was proud, and she would not have returned to the world on sufferance, to be pointed out and whispered about. She preferred the sombre, mediæval loneliness of her Swabian solitude, where the household honored and the peasantry loved her. To them she was the Countess Olga zu Lynar, whom they had served and cherished and admired ever since she had been a young child riding through the forests and climbing up the braes. For them she was the daughter of their dear and revered lady; of Prince Khris they had known little. Their affection and respect were feudal; and if any stranger had said an injurious word of her in the woods round Schloss Lynar, he would have found a deep and a sure grave in the rushing waters of their mountain streams.
Here, if she did not find peace, she found what most resemble it: security, repose, and uninterrupted thought.