Читать книгу Lay Down Your Arms: The Autobiography of Martha von Tilling - Bertha von Suttner - Страница 9

First years of widowhood.—Solitude, study, enlarged views.—I return into society.—Renewed enjoyment of life.—Thoughts of second marriage.—I chaperon my younger sisters.—I am introduced to Baron Tilling.—He brings me an account of the manner of Arno’s death.

“NOW, Martha, it is all over. Solferino was decisive—we are beaten.”

My father came hastily one morning on to the terrace, with these words, where I was sitting under the shadow of a clump of lime trees.

I had gone back home, to the house of my girlhood, with my little Ruru. A week after the great battle, which had struck me down, my family moved to Grumitz, our country house in Lower Austria, and I with them. I should have been in despair alone. Now all were again around me, just as before my marriage—papa, Aunt Mary, my little brother, and my two growing sisters. All of them did what they possibly could to mitigate my grief, and treated me with a certain consideration which did me good. Evidently they found in my sad fate a sort of consecration, a something which raised me above those around me, even a kind of merit. Next to the blood which soldiers pour out on the altar of their country, the tears which the bereaved mothers, wives, and sweethearts of the soldiers pour on the same altar become a libation hardly less sacred. And thus it was a slight feeling of pride, a consciousness that to have lost a beloved husband on the field of honour conferred a kind of military merit, which helped me most to bear my pain; and I was far from being the only one. How many, ah! how many women in the whole of the country were then mourning over their loved ones sleeping in Italian earth!

At that time no further particulars were known to me of Arno’s end. He had been found dead, recognised, and buried. That was all I knew. His last thought doubtless had flown towards me and our little darling, and his consolation in the last moment must have been: “I have done my duty, and more than my duty”.

“We are beaten,” repeated my father gloomily, as he sat down by me on the garden seat.

“So those who have been sacrificed were sacrificed in vain.” I sighed.

“Those who have been sacrificed are to be envied, for they know nothing of the shame which has befallen us. But we will soon pick up again for all that, even if at present peace, as they say, must be concluded.”

“Ah, God grant it,” I interrupted. “Too late, indeed, for my poor Arno, but still thousands of others will be spared.”

“You are always thinking of yourself and of individuals. But in this matter it is Austria which is in question.”

“Well, but does not she consist entirely of individuals?”

“My dear, a kingdom, a state, lives a longer and more important life than individuals do. They disappear, generation after generation, while the state expands still farther, grows into glory, greatness and power, or sinks and crumples up and disappears, if it allows itself to be overcome by other kingdoms. Therefore the most important and the highest aim for which any individual has to struggle, and for which he ought to be glad to die, is the existence, the greatness and the well-being of the kingdom.”

I impressed these words on my mind in order to put them down the same day in the red volume. They seemed to me to express so clearly and strongly the feeling which I had derived in my student days from the books of history, a feeling which in these last times, after Arno’s departure, had been driven out of my mind by fear and pity. I wanted to cleave to it again as close as possible, in order to find consolation and support in the idea that my darling had fallen in a great cause, and that my misfortune itself was only one element in this great cause.

Aunt Mary had, on the other hand, a different source of consolation ready.

“Do not weep, dear child,” she used to say, when I was sunk in profound grief. “Do not be so selfish as to bewail him who is now so happy. He is among the blessed, and is looking down on you with blessing. After a few quickly passing years on earth you will find him again in the fulness of his glory. For those who have fallen on the field of battle Heaven reserves its fairest dwellings. Happy those who were called away just at the moment when they were fulfilling a holy duty. The dying soldier stands next in merit to the dying martyr.”

“Then I am to be glad that Arno——”

“No, not to be glad, that would be asking too much, but to bear your lot with humble resignation. It is a probation that Heaven sends you, and from which you should emerge purified and strengthened in faith.”

“So, in order that I might be tried and purified, Arno had to——”

“No, not on that account. But who dare seek to sound the hidden ways of Providence? Not I at least.”

Although such objections always would rise in me against Aunt Mary’s consolations, yet in the depths of my heart I readily fell in with the mystical assumption that my glorified one was now enjoying in Heaven the reward of his death of sacrifice, and that his memory on earth was adorned with the eternal glory of sainthood.

How exalting, though painful at the same time, was the effect on me of the great mourning celebration at which I was present in the cathedral of St. Stephen’s on the day of our departure! It was the De Profundis for our warriors who had fallen on foreign soil and were buried there. In the centre of the church a high catafalque had been erected, surrounded by a hundred lighted candles and decorated with military emblems, flags and arms. From the choir came down the moving strains of the requiem, and those present, chiefly women in mourning, were almost all weeping aloud. And each one was weeping not only for him whom she had lost, but for the rest who had met with the same death, for all of them together, all the poor brave brothers-in-arms, who had given their young lives for us all—that is, for the country, the honour of the nation. And the living soldiers who attended this ceremony—all the generals and officers who had remained behind in Vienna were there, and several companies of soldiers filled the background—all were waiting and ready to follow their fallen comrades without delay, without murmur, without fear. Yes, with the clouds of incense, with the pealing bells, and the voice of the organ, with the tears poured out in a common woe, there must surely have risen a well-pleasing sacrifice to Heaven, and the Lord of armies must shower His blessing down on those to whom this catafalque was erected.

So I thought at that time. At least these were the words with which the red book describes this mourning ceremony.

About fourteen days later than the news of the defeat of Solferino came the news of the signing of the preliminaries of peace at Villafranca. My father took all the pains possible to explain to me that for political reasons it was a matter of pressing necessity to conclude this peace, on which I assured him that it seemed to me joyful news anyhow that this fighting and dying should come to an end. But my good papa would not be hindered from setting forth at length all his exculpatory statements.

“You must not think that we are afraid. Even if it has a look as if we had made concessions, yet we forego nothing of our dignity, and know perfectly what we are about. If it concerned ourselves only we should never have given up the game on account of this little check at Solferino. Oh, no! far from it. We should only have had to send down another corps d’armée, and the enemy would have been obliged to evacuate Milan again in quick time. But you know, Martha, that other things are concerned—general interests and principles. We renounced the further prosecution of the war for this reason: in order to secure the other principalities in Italy which are menaced—those that the captain of the Sardinian robbers, with his French hangman-ally, would be glad to fall upon also. They want to advance against Modena, Tuscany—where, as you know, dynasties are in power related to our own imperial family—nay, even against Rome, against the Pope, the Vandals. If we do provisionally give up Lombardy, yet we keep Venetia all the time, and are able to assure the south Italian states and the Holy See of our support. So you perceive that it is merely for political reasons, and in the interest of the balance of power in Europe——”

“Oh, yes, father,” I broke in; “I perceive it. But oh that these reasons had prevailed before Magenta!” I continued, sighing bitterly. Then, to change the subject, I pointed to a parcel of books that had come in that day from Vienna.

“See here! the bookseller has sent us several things on approval. Amongst them there is the work of an English natural philosopher—one Darwin—The Origin of Species, and he calls our attention to it as being of special interest, and likely to be of epoch-making importance.”

“My worthy friend must excuse me. Who, in such a momentous time as this, could take an interest in these tomfooleries? What can a book about the kinds of beasts and plants contain of epoch-making importance for us men? The confederation of the Italian states, the hegemony of Austria in the German Bund—these are matters of far-stretching influence; these will long keep their place in history, when no living man shall any longer know anything about that English book there. Mark my words.”

I did mark them.

… … … … … … … … … … . … .

Four years later, my two sisters, now seventeen and eighteen years old, were to be presented at court. On this occasion I determined that I would also again “go into society”.

The time which had elapsed had done its work, and gradually mitigated my pain. Despair changed into mourning, mourning into sorrow, sorrow into indifference, and even this at last into renewed pleasure in life. I woke one fine morning to the conviction that I really was in an enviable condition, and one that promised happiness. Twenty-three years old, beautiful, rich, high-born, free, the mother of a darling child, a member of an affectionate family—was not all this enough to make my life pleasant?

The short year of my married life lay behind me like a dream. No doubt I had been desperately in love with my handsome hussar—no doubt my loving husband had made me very happy—no doubt the parting had caused me grievous pain and his loss wild agony! but that was all over—over! My love had assuredly never grown so closely into the whole existence of my soul that I could never have survived its uprooting, never have lost the pain of it; our life together had been too short for that. We had adored each other like a pair of ardent lovers; but to have entered into each other, heart to heart, soul to soul, to be fast bound to each other in mutual reverence and friendship, to have shared for long years our joys and our sorrows—this, which is the lot of some married people, had not been given to us two. Even I was assuredly not his highest object, not something indispensable, otherwise he could not so cheerfully and with no compulsion of duty (for his own regiment was never ordered out) have left me. Besides, in these four years I had gradually become another creature, my spiritual horizon had enlarged in many respects, I had come into possession of acquirements and views of which I had no notion when I married, and of which Arno also—as I could now perceive—had no idea either, and so—if he could have risen again—he would have stood in the position of a stranger towards many parts of my present spiritual life. How had this change come about with me? This is how it happened.

One year of my widowhood had passed. The first phase—despair—had given place to mourning. But it was very deep mourning, and my heart was bleeding. Of any renewal of the intercourse of society I would not hear. I thought that from this time my life must be occupied only with the education of my son Rudolf. I called the child no longer Ruru, or corporal. The baby-jokes of the pair of married lovers were over. The little one turned into “my son Rudolf”—the sacred centre of all my effort, hope, and love. In order to be one day a good teacher for him, or rather in order to follow his studies, and be able to become his intellectual companion, I wanted to acquire myself all the knowledge that I could, and with this view reading was the only amusement I allowed myself; and so I plunged anew into the treasures of the library of our château. I was especially impelled to take up again the study which was my peculiar favourite—history. Latterly, when the war had demanded such heavy sacrifices from my contemporaries and myself, my former enthusiasm had become much cooled, and I now wished to light it up again by appropriate reading. And, in fact, it brought me sometimes a kind of consolation, if I had been reading a few pages of accounts of battles with the praises of the heroes which are the natural continuation of those accounts, to think that the death of my poor husband and my own widowed grief were comprised as items in a similar grand historical process. I say “sometimes”—not always. I could not get myself back entirely and absolutely into the feelings of my girlhood, when I wanted to rival the Maid of Orleans. Much, very much, in the over-wrought tirades of glory, which accompanied the accounts of the battles, sounded to me false and hollow, if at the same time I set before me the terrors of the fight—as false and hollow as a sham coin paid as the price for a genuine pearl. The pearl, life—can it be fairly paid for with the tinsel phrases of historical glory?

I had soon exhausted the provision of historical works to be found in our library. I begged our bookseller to send me some new historical work to look at. He sent Thomas Buckle’s History of Civilisation in England. “The work is not finished,” wrote the bookseller, “but the accompanying two volumes, which form the introduction, compose by themselves a complete whole, and their appearance has excited, not only in England, but in the rest of the educated world, the greatest attention. The author, it is said, has in this work laid the foundation for a new conception of history.”

Yes, indeed, quite a new one. When I had read these two volumes, and then read them again, I felt like a man who had dwelt all his life in the bottom of a narrow valley, and then, for the first time, had been taken up to one of the mountain tops around, from which a long stretch of country was to be seen, covered with buildings and gardens and ending in the boundless ocean. I will not assert that I—only twenty years old and who had received only the well-known superficial “young lady’s” education—understood the book in all the extent of its bearings, or, to keep to the former metaphor, that I appreciated the loftiness of the monumental buildings and the immensity of the ocean which lay before my astonished gaze; but I was dazzled, overcome; I saw that beyond the narrow valley in which I was born there lay a wide, wide world, of which, up to this time, I had never heard. It is not till now that, after fifteen or twenty years I have read the book again and have studied other works conceived in the same spirit, I may, perhaps, take it on myself to say that I understand it. One thing, however, was clear to me even then: that the history of mankind was not decided by, as the old theory taught, kings and statesmen, nor by the wars and treaties that were created by the greed of the former or the cunning of the latter, but by the gradual development of the intellect. The chronicles of courts and battles which are strung together in the history books represent isolated phenomena of the condition of culture at those epochs, not the causes which produce those conditions. Of the old-fashioned admiration with which other historical writers are accustomed to relate the lives of mighty conquerors and devastators of countries I could find absolutely nothing in Buckle. On the contrary, he brings proof that the estimation in which the warrior class is held is in inverse ratio to the height of culture which the nation has reached; the lower you go in the barbaric past, the more frequent are the wars of the time, the narrower the limits of peace, province against province, city against city, family against family. He lays stress on the fact that, as society progresses, not only war itself, but the love of war will be found to diminish. That word spoke to my innermost heart. Even in my short spiritual experience this diminution had been going on, and though I had often repressed this movement as something cowardly or unworthy, believing that I alone was the cause of such a fault within me, now, on the contrary, I perceived that this feeling in me was only the faint echo of the spirit of the age, that learned men and thinkers, like this English historian, and innumerable men along with him, had lost the old idolatry for war, which, just as it had been a phase of my childhood, was represented in this book as being also a phase of the childhood of society.

And so in Buckle’s History of Civilisation I had found just the opposite of what I sought. And yet I counted what I found as all pure gain. I felt myself elevated by it, enlightened, pacified. Once I tried to talk with my father about this point of view that I had just attained, but in vain. He would not follow me up the mountain, i.e., he would not read the book, and so it was to no purpose to talk with him of things which one could only see from the top of it.

Now followed the year—my second phase—in which mourning turned into melancholy. I now read and studied with even greater assiduity. This first work of Buckle had given me an appetite for reflection, and given me an inkling of an enlarged view of the world. I wanted now to enjoy this yet more and more; and therefore I followed this book up with a great many more conceived in the same spirit. And the interest, the enjoyment, which I found in these studies helped me to pass into the third phase, i.e., to cause the disappearance of my melancholy. But when the last change was wrought in me, i.e., when my joy in life awoke again, then all at once books contented me no longer, then I saw all at once that ethnography and anthropology, comparative mythology, and all the other ’ologies and ’graphies were insufficient to set my longings at rest, that for a young woman in my position, life had other flowers of bliss all ready, and for which I had only to stretch my hand out. And so it came about that in the winter of 1863 I offered myself to introduce my younger sisters into the world and opened my saloons to Vienna society.

… … … … … … … … … … . … .

“Martha, Countess Dotzky, a rich young widow.” It was under this promising title that I had to play my part in the comedy of the “great world”. And I must say that the character suited me. It is no slight pleasure to get greetings from all sides, to be fêted, spoiled, on all hands, and overwhelmed with distinctions. It is no slight enjoyment, after nearly four years’ separation from the world, to come all at once into a whirlpool of all sorts of pleasures, to make the acquaintance of interesting and influential persons, to be present at some splendid entertainment almost every day, and when there to feel yourself the centre of universal attention.

We three sisters had got the nickname of the “three goddesses of Mount Ida”; and the “Apples of Discord,” which the several young Parises distributed amongst us, were innumerable. I, of course, in the dignity of my description in the list of dramatis personæ as “rich young widow,” was the one generally preferred. Besides it was taken as a settled thing in our family, and even ever so little in my own inward consciousness, that I was to marry again. Aunt Mary was no longer in the habit in her homilies of dwelling on the blessed one who “was waiting for me above,” for if I, in my few short years on earth that separated me from the grave, united myself to a second husband, an event desired by Aunt Mary herself, the pleasantness of the meeting again in Heaven would be a good deal spoiled thereby.

Every one around me seemed to have forgotten Arno’s existence. I was the only one who did not. Though time had relieved my pain about him, his image had not been extinguished. One may cease to mourn for one’s dead; mourning does not depend quite on the will, but one ought not to forget them. I looked on this dead silence about the dead, which was preserved by my entourage, as a second and additional slaughter, and shrank from killing the poor fellow in my thoughts. I had made it my duty to speak every day to little Rudolf of his father, and the child had always to say in his prayers at night: “God make me good and brave as my dear father Arno would have me!”

My sisters and I “amused” ourselves extremely, and certainly I not less than they. It was, so to speak, my début also in society. The first time I was introduced as an engaged girl, and a newly-married woman; and so all admirers had of course held aloof from me; and what is a higher enjoyment in society than the admirers? But, strange to say, however much I was pleased to be surrounded by a crowd of worshippers, none of them made any deep impression on me. There was a bar between them and me which was quite impassable. And this bar was what I had been erecting during my three years of lonely study and thought. All these brilliant young gentlemen, whose interests in life culminated in sport, the ballet, the chatter of the court, or (with those who soared highest) in professional ambition (for most were soldiers), had not the faintest idea of the things which I had looked at from afar in my books, and on which my soul’s life depended. That language, of which I grant I had only as yet learned the elements—but as to which I was assured that it was in it that men of science would debate and ultimately decide the highest questions—that language was to them not Greek merely, but Patagonian.

From this category of young folks I was not going to select a husband; that was quite settled. Besides, I was in no hurry to give up once more my freedom, which was very pleasant to me. I managed to keep my would-be suitors sufficiently at a distance to prevent any from making an offer, and at the same time to prevent anybody in society from putting about concerning me the compromising rumour that I was laying myself out for lovers. My son Rudolf should hereafter be able to feel proud of his mother, no breath of suspicion should sully the pure mirror of her reputation. But if the case should occur that my heart should glow once more with love—and that could only be for one worthy of it—then I was fully disposed to realise the claim which my youth still had to happiness in this world, and enter into a second marriage.

Meanwhile, apart from love or happiness, I thoroughly enjoyed myself. The dance, the theatre, dress—I found the liveliest pleasure in all of them. But I did not for them neglect either my little Rudolf or my own education. It was not that I plunged into special studies, but I always kept au courant with the movement of the intellectual world, by procuring all the most prominent new productions in the literature of the age, and regularly reading attentively all the articles, even the most scientific, in the Revue des deux Mondes and similar magazines. These occupations had indeed the result that the bar I have just spoken of, which cut off my inward life from the surrounding world of young men of fashion, became constantly higher—but it was right that it should be so. I would gladly have drawn into my saloons a few persons from the world of literature and scholarship, but that could hardly be done in the society in which I moved. Bourgeois elements could not be mixed with what was called “the circles” of Vienna. Especially at that period—since then this exclusive spirit has somewhat changed, and it has become the fashion to open one’s saloons to individual representatives of art and science. At the time of which I speak this was not the case yet; any one not “Hof-fähig,” i.e., who could not count sixteen ancestors, was excluded thence. Our ordinary society would have been most unpleasantly surprised to have met at my house people not ennobled, and could not have hit on the right tone to converse with them. And these persons themselves would certainly have found my drawing-room, full of countesses and sportsmen, old generals and old canonesses, intolerably dull. What part could men of intellect and science, writers and artists, take in the eternally same conversation—who had given a dance yesterday and who would give one to-morrow—whether Schwarzenberg, or Pallavicini, or the Court—what love affairs Baroness Pacher was causing—which party Countess Palffy was opposing—how many estates Prince Croy possessed—what right the young Lady Almasy possessed to the title of a lady of rank, whether as a Festetics or a Wentheim, and if a Wentheim whether by that Wentheim whose mother became a Khevenhüller, etc.? That was indeed the matter of most of the conversations that went on around me. Even the intellectual and educated people, some of whom were really to be found in our circle, statesmen and so forth, thought themselves bound when they associated with us, the young folks who danced, to adopt the same frivolous and meaningless tone. How gladly would I often have gone to some dinner in a quiet corner at which one or two of our travelled diplomatists or eloquent parliamentarians, or other men of mark might express their opinions on weighty questions!—but that was not feasible. I had to keep along with the other young ladies, and talk of the toilettes that we were getting ready for the next great ball. And even if I had squeezed into such a company the conversations that might have been just begun about the economy of nations, about Byron’s poetry, about the theories of Strauss and Renan, would have been hushed, and the talk would have been: “Ah, Countess Dotzky, how charming you looked yesterday at the ladies’ pic-nic; and are you going to-morrow to the reception at the Russian embassy?”

“Allow me, dear Martha,” said my cousin Conrad Althaus, “to introduce to you Lieutenant-Colonel Baron Tilling.”

I bowed. The introducer went away, and the one introduced did not speak. I took this for an invitation to dance, and rose from my seat with my left arm raised and bent, ready to lay it on Baron Tilling’s shoulder.

“Forgive me, countess,” he said, with a slight smile, which showed his dazzlingly white teeth, “I do not dance.”

“Indeed! so much the better,” I answered, sitting down again. “I had just retreated here to get a little repose.”

“And I had requested the honour of being introduced to you, countess, as I had a communication to make to you.”

I looked up in amazement. The baron put on a very serious face. He was altogether a man who looked very serious, no longer young, somewhere about forty, with a few streaks of grey on the temples—on the whole, a prepossessing sympathetic look. I had accustomed myself to look sharply on each new introduction with the question: “Are you a suitor? and should I take you?” Both questions I answered in this case with a prompt negative. The person before me had not that expression of intimate adoration which all those are in the habit of assuming who approach ladies with “views,” as the saying is, and the other question was resolved in the negative at once by his uniform. I would give my hand to no soldier a second time, that I had absolutely fixed with myself, not alone because I would not be again exposed to the horrible pain of seeing my husband depart to the campaign, but because since that time I had arrived at views about war in which it would be impossible for me to agree with a soldier.

Lieutenant-Colonel v. Tilling did not avail himself of my invitation to sit beside me.

“I will not intrude on you long, countess. What I have to communicate to you is not suited for a ballroom. I only wanted to ask you for permission to present myself in your house; could you be so very kind as to fix a day and hour in which I may speak to you?”

“I receive on Saturdays between two and four.”

“Then your house between two and four on Saturday most likely resembles a bee-hive, where the honey bees are flying in and out.”

“And I sit in the middle as queen you would say, a very pretty compliment.”

“I never make compliments, no more than I make honey, so the hour of swarming on Saturday does not suit me at all. I must speak to you alone.”

“You awaken my curiosity. Let us say then to-morrow, Tuesday, at the same hour. I will be at home to you and no one else.”

He thanked me, bowed, and went away. A little later my cousin Conrad came by. I called him to me, got him to sit by my side, and asked for information about Baron Tilling.

“Does he please you? Has he made a deep impression on you that you ask after him so eagerly? He is to be had, i.e., he is not yet married. Still he may not be free for all that. It is whispered that a very great lady (Althaus named a princess of the royal family) holds him to herself by tender bonds, and therefore he does not marry. His regiment has only recently been moved hither, and so he has not been much seen in society as yet; and he is also it seems an enemy of balls and things of that sort. I made his acquaintance in the Nobles’ Club, where he passes an hour or two every day, but generally over the papers in the reading-room, or absorbed in a game of chess with some of our best players. I was astonished to meet him here; however, as the lady of the house is his cousin, that explains his short appearance at the ball; he is off again already. As soon as he had taken leave of you, I saw him go out.”

“Have you introduced him to many other ladies besides?”

“No, only to you. But you must not imagine from that that you have brought him down at a long shot, and that therefore he is anxious to know you. He asked me: ‘Could you tell me whether a certain Countess Dotzky, née Althaus, probably a relation of yours, is here at present? I want to speak to her.’ ‘Yes,’ I answered, pointing to you, ‘sitting in that corner on the sofa, in a blue dress.’ ‘Oh, that is she! Will you be so kind as to introduce me?’ That I did with much pleasure, without any idea that I might be ruining your peace of mind thereby.”

“Don’t talk such nonsense, Conrad. My peace is not so easily disturbed. Tilling? Of what family is he? I have never heard the name before.”

“Aha! you will not confess! Perhaps he is the favoured one! I have tried by the exercise of all my power of witchery to penetrate into your heart for the last three months, but in vain! And now this cold lieutenant-colonel—for, let me tell you, he is cold and without feeling—came, saw, and conquered. Of what family is Tilling, do you say? I believe of Hanoverian origin. But his father before him was in the Austrian service. His mother is a Prussian. You must surely have noticed his North German accent.”

“Yes, he speaks most beautiful German.”

“Of course. Everything about him is most beautiful.” Althaus got up. “Well, I have had quite enough now. Permit me to leave you to your dreams. I will try to entertain myself with ladies who——”

“May appear most beautiful in your eyes. There are plenty such.”

I left the ball early. My sisters could remain behind under Aunt Mary’s guard, and there was nothing to detain me. The desire for dancing had left me. I felt tired, and longed for solitude. Why? Surely not to have the opportunity for thinking about Tilling without interruption? Still it seemed so. For it was about midnight that I enriched the red book by transferring into it the conversation above set down, and added the following observations: “An interesting man this Tilling. The great lady who is in love with him is thinking probably about him now, or perhaps at this moment he is kneeling at her feet, and she is not so lonely—so lonely as I am. Ah, to love any one so entirely and inwardly! Not Tilling, of course—I do not know him even. I envy the princess, not on account of Tilling, but on account of her being beloved. And the more passionately, the more warmly she is attached to him, so much the more I envy her.”

My first thought on waking was once more—Tilling. And naturally, for he had made an appointment with me for to-day, on account of some important communication. Not for a long time had I felt so excited as I was about this visit.

At the appointed hour I gave orders that no one should be admitted except the gentleman expected. My sisters were not at home. Aunt Mary, that indefatigable chaperon, had gone with them to the skating rink.

I placed myself in my little drawing-room, in a pretty house dress of violet velvet (violet, it is allowed, suits blonde complexions), took a book in my hand and waited. I had not to wait long. At ten minutes past two Freiherr v. Tilling entered.

“You see, countess, I have punctually availed myself of your permission,” he said, kissing my hand.[3]

“Luckily so,” I answered laughingly, as I showed him a chair, “otherwise I should have died of impatience; for really you have thrown me into a state of great suspense.”

“Then I will say what I have got to say at once, without any long introduction. The reason I did not do so yesterday was in order not to disturb your serenity.”

“You frighten me.”

“In one word, I was present at the battle of Magenta.”

“And you saw Arno die?” I shrieked.

“Yes. I am in a position to give you information about his last moments.”

“Speak,” I said shuddering.

“Do not tremble, countess. If those last moments had been as horrible as those of so many other of my comrades, I would assuredly have said nothing about it to you; for there is nothing sadder than to hear of a dear one dead that he died in agony: but that is not the case here.”

“You take a weight off my heart. Go on with your narrative.”

“I will not repeat to you the empty phrase with which the survivors of soldiers are usually comforted, ‘He died like a hero,’ for I do not quite know what that means. But I can offer you the substantial consolation that he died without thinking about death. He was convinced from the beginning that nothing would happen to him. We were much together, and he often told me of his domestic happiness, showed me the picture of his beautiful young wife, and of his child; he invited me, ‘as soon as ever the campaign was over,’ to visit him in his home. In the massacre of Magenta I found myself, by accident, at his side. I spare you the sketch of the scenes that were going on—one cannot relate such things. Men, who have the warrior spirit, are seized in the midst of the powder-fog and bullet-rain with such an intoxication that they do not know exactly what is going on. Dotzky was a man of this kind. His eyes sparkled. He laid about him with a firm hand. He was in the full intoxication of war. I who was sober could see it. Then came a shell, and fell a few steps from where we were. When the monster burst ten men were blown to pieces, Dotzky among them. There rose a shriek of anguish from the injured men, but Dotzky gave no cry—he was dead. I and a few comrades stooped down to see to the wounded, and give them aid if possible. But it was not possible. They were all writhing in death, terribly torn and dismembered—the prey of horrible tortures. But Dotzky, at whose side I first knelt on the ground, breathed no more; his heart had stopped beating, and out of his torn side the blood was flowing in such a stream that if even his state was only faintness and not death, there was no fear that he would come to again.”

“Fear?” said I weeping.

“Yes, for we had to leave him lying there helpless. Before us the murderous ‘Hurrah!’ burst out again, and behind us mounted squadrons were coming on, who must charge over these dying men. Lucky those who had lost consciousness! His face had a perfectly placid, painless look, and when after the battle was over we picked up our dead and wounded, I found him on the same spot, in the same position, and with the same peaceful look. That is what I had to say to you, countess. I might indeed have done so years since, or, even if I had not met you, have written it to you, but the idea only came into my head yesterday when my cousin said she was expecting among her guests the beautiful widow of Arno Dotzky. Forgive me if I have recalled painful memories. I think, however, I have discharged a duty and freed you from torturing doubts.”

He stood up. I gave him my hand.

“I thank you, Baron Tilling,” I said, drying my tears. “You have indeed conferred a precious gift on me—the tranquillity of knowing that the end of my dear husband was free from pain or torment. But stay a little, I beg you. I should like to hear you speak more. You struck a note in your way of expressing yourself before which made a certain chord vibrate in my feelings. Without beating about the bush, you abhor war?”

Tilling’s visage clouded.

“Forgive me, countess,” he said, “if I cannot stop to talk with you on this subject. I am sorry, too, that I cannot prolong our interview. I am expected elsewhere.”

It was now my countenance which assumed a cold expression. The princess, I suppose, was expecting him, and the thought was unpleasant to me.

“Then I will not detain you, colonel,” I said coldly.

Without any request to be allowed to come again, he bowed and left the room.