Two gentlemen started forward to greet the ladies; the first gallantly offered his arm to the mother, the other approached the young girl. She thanked him proudly, scarcely touching his arm with her finger-tips. Then suddenly this figure from which he could not take his eyes, vanished like a beautiful vision.
The encounter had left him in a mood of intense excitement. He bestowed a dollar on a poor woman who stood beside him with a miserable child in her arms, and he ordered out so big a glass of hot wine for old Summerfeld, his coachman, that the old man was alarmed and hoped "they should get home all right."
"What folly it is," said Linden to himself. And when a moment later his carriage drove up, and at the same moment the notes of a Strauss waltz struck his ear, he began to hum the air of "The Rose of the South." Then the carriage rattled over the market-place out on the dark country road, and sooner than usual he was at home in his quiet little room, taking a thousand pleasant thoughts with him.
In the manor-house at Niendorf there was one room in which roses bloomed in masses; not only in the boxes between the double windows or in the pots on the sill according to the season, but in the room itself, thousands of earth's fairest flowers were wreathed about the pictures and furniture. It had a strange effect, especially when instead of the sleeping beauty one might have expected to find here, one perceived a very old woman in an arm chair by the window, unweariedly engaged in cutting leaves and petals out of colored silk paper, shaping and putting them together so that at length a rose trembled on its wire stem, looking as natural from a little distance as if it had just been cut from the bush. Aunt Rosalie could not live without making roses; she lavished half her modest income on silk paper, and every one whom she wished well, received a wreath of roses as a present, red, pink, white and yellow blossoms tastefully intermixed. All the village beauties wore roses of Aunt Rosalie's manufacture in their well-oiled hair at the village dances. The graves in the church-yard displayed masses of white and crimson roses from the same store, torn and faded by wind and sun. The little church was lavishly decked every year by Aunt Rosalie, with these witnesses to her skill.
She was known therefore throughout the village to young and old as "Aunt Rose" or "Miss Rose," and not seldom was she followed in her walks by a crowd of children, especially little girls, with the petition "a rose for me too!" And "Aunt Rose" was always prepared for them; the less successful specimens were kept entirely for this purpose and were distributed from her capacious reticule with a lavish hand.
Frank Linden had long been accustomed to spend an occasional hour in the old lady's society. At the sight of her something of the atmosphere of peace which surrounded her seemed to descend upon him and calmed and soothed him. She would sit calm and still at her little table, her small withered hands busied in forming the "symbols of a well-rounded life." By degrees she had related to him in a quaintly solemn tone, stories of the lives which had passed under the pointed gables of this roof. There was little light and much shade among them, much guilt, and error, a dark bit of life-history. A married pair who did not agree, an only child idolized by both, and this only son covered himself and his parents with disgrace and fled to America, where he died. The parents were left behind without hope or comfort in the world, each reproaching the other for the failure in their son's training. Then the wife died of grief, and now began an endless term of loneliness for the elderly man under a ban of misanthropy and scorn of his kind; loving no one but his dog, associating with no one except with Wolff, who brought the news and gossip of the town, and treating even him with a disdain bordering on insult.
"But you see, my dear nephew," the old aunt had added, "there are men who are more like hounds than the hounds themselves,--dogs will cry out when they are trodden upon, but the sort to which he belongs will smile humbly at the hardest kick--and William found such a man necessary to him."
It was snowing; the mountains were all white, the garden lay shrouded under a shining white coverlid, and white snow-flakes were dancing in the air. Frank Linden had come back from hunting with the steward, and after dinner he went into Aunt Rosalie's room. She rose as he entered and came towards him.
"There you see, my dear nephew, what happens when you go out for a day. You have had a visit, such a splendid fashionable visitor in a magnificent sleigh. I was just taking my walk in the corridor as he came up the stairs and here is his card,"--she searched in her reticule--"which he left for you."
Frank took the card and read. "Arthur Fredericks." "Oh, I am sorry," he said, really regretting his loss. "When was he here?"