Читать книгу Daughters of Men - Hannah Lynch - Страница 4

Table of Contents

That night Rudolph did not go to bed. He spent some hours walking up and down his room in a nervous agitation he could by no means account for. It seemed to him that he had been dropped into a disagreeably topsy-turvy world, and the thought made him wretched and unhappy: dissatisfied and perplexed by his own state, fierce in a vague kind of resentment against Agiropoulos, and filled with an immeasurable grief for Photini. With such soul in her fingers she appeared to him through an ugly cloud like a battered and draggled angel, and he sat disconsolately gazing at the blue and golden flames from the beautiful star-fire above, and asked himself how had it happened, and was there for her henceforth no struggling back into the paths of sweet womanhood from which she had strangely and openly strayed?

Yet why should he grieve so passionately for Photini? No affair of his if she courted slander and irreverent familiarity; nor yet if she indulged in inadmissible tastes in public, and wounded and insulted all who came near her. His own birth and its responsibilities surely excluded him from such preoccupations, and his natural fastidiousness made relations, however slight and flexible, with a woman like Photini impossible. This he knew well, and despite the knowledge felt miserably sad and unquiet. He wanted so much that she should not degrade his high ideal of the artist who has received nature’s patent of nobility, and a lonely impressionable boy like Rudolph could not afford to stand by tamely and watch the dethroning of his idol. For Photini had been his idol long before they had met. Her name had been borne into his retreat from many quarters, and no one had hinted to him her unlovableness—her disreputableness. Liszt had only spoken to him of her genius with enthusiasm. Had his small circle deliberately conspired to keep him in ignorance of this cruel reality, while he was wandering and losing himself in a forest of delicate and poetic illusions?—building hope upon hope of an unanalysable nature until his whole happiness grew to bind itself round the thought of this unknown woman crowned by art with a glory greater than her womanhood? Photini Natzelhuber! His mother had often told him of the time she first came to Vienna, a slip of a girl, with a curly boyish head and the strangest topaz eyes. Mossy dark hair and topaz eyes with divine fingers—what more did it require to set aflame a dreamy imaginative lad? And when strangers visited the Castle at Rapolden Kirchen and spoke of her, he never seemed to understand that years had flown and left her less girlish, but pictured her like Art, like a goddess ever young. And when he read of knightly reverence and allegiance, he told himself that one day he should go abroad and seek Photini. He dreamed of no conditions or reward, not of marriage or of love in the ordinary sense. To wear her colours, serve her in true devotion, honour her above all women, and humbly sue the privilege to obey her commands and caprices with some considerable recreative pauses for music—this was Rudolph’s innocent dream. Remember he was brought up by a high-bred mother, all grace and gentle benignity, a woman who wore her widowhood like a sovereign lady to whom man’s homage was a sweet claim. And her pretty and impracticable theories but helped to feed the fires of a fatally romantic temperament, while his complete and unboylike isolation left him an easy prey to the riotous play of fancy. Then is it any wonder that reality at the outset should both crush and bewilder him?

He opened the window, and leant far out with his head against his hand, that the cold night air might blow upon him. Through the confusion of his mind he could gather no dim or possible conclusion upon which to shape immediate action. He dreaded meeting Photini again, for he felt he could never forgive her for the havoc she had made of all his bright hopes. Then softly through the silence of the night waved in echoing dimness the lovely strains of the “Barcarolle,” with its ever recurrent note of passionate melancholy, its very voluptousness of exquisite pain and the musical rhythm of the oars breaking through the water murmur. The memoried sounds flushed his cheek with trembling delight, and he rushed to his violin and tried to pick out the dominant melody. But who could ever hope to play it as she did? And, happily, he became mindful of the possible objections of others to this faint nocturnal music, and generously put up his instrument.

“Ah!” he sighed, “if Photini be hardly a woman, what an artist, good heavens!” Must much not be forgiven undeniable genius? And was all the ideal love irrevocably vanished? If only he could know. For this uncertainty disturbed him and made him unhappy, and unhappiness is not exactly the condition that enables a young man to see clearly into his own mind or into anybody else’s. He would try to sleep, and then this tempest of emotion and harassing conflict would blow over and leave his eyes clearer to see what he ought to do and leave undone.

But Rudolph did not sleep, and a sleepless night, we know, works disastrously upon the nerves and looks. When he appeared downstairs his uncle glanced up casually from his papers, and, stirring his chocolate, said in surprise:

“Why, whatever is the matter with you, Rudolph? This is too absurd. A girl wouldn’t look so battered after a first ball.”

“Well, I am battered, I suppose. I’ve passed a bad night and I am not used to it,” said Rudolph listlessly.

“A bad night! a fellow of your age! Is it possible? Fact is, my dear boy, your mother has ruined you. Nothing worse than to pamper and coddle up lads as if they were girls. Your mother had no business to keep you immured in that ghostly old place with no hardier society than her own.”

“I wish she were there still and I with her,” said poor Rudolph, with a little break in his voice and a faint clouding of his blue eyes.

“Of course, of course,” hastily cried the volatile baron, whom all evidence of emotion struck chill. “The wish does you and her credit. But all the same, it is not exactly fit training for a boy. Makes him whimsical and sensitive and shy—a lively prey for all adventurers male and female, especially female. Fact is, it is most enervating and absurd. You ought to have seen something of society long ago, Rudolph; you ought indeed. Men and manners—you know your classics?”

“That is just my difficulty. Men and manners—to find them disappointing and strange. My brief glimpse of them has both sickened and saddened me.”

“Nonsense! You must face life like a man; not dream it away like a puny sentimental girl. You want backbone and nerve, Rudolph, you do indeed. Men are not saints nor women angels. Well, what of that? They are not expected to be so until they get into the next world, which time, as far as I am concerned, I trust will be postponed to the furthest limits. Then the ladies find their wings and the men get canonised, that is, if they haven’t taken snuff. I believe a very estimable saint was once refused canonisation because he took snuff; can’t swear to it, however. For the rest, my boy, adopt the aphorism of the wise German, who was good enough to discover that everything is arranged for the best in this best of all possible worlds.”

“You can take things lightly, uncle, but I cannot.”

“Of course not,” rejoined the baron, lighting a cigar. “Whoever heard of a young man taking anything lightly except his debts?”

“I do not ask that men should be saints nor women angels.”

“It is considerate of you to be so unexacting. Pass the saintship of your own sex, young men have the extremely awkward habit of quarrelling with women as soon as they discover they are not angels.”

“But I do seek for evidences of gentlemanly feeling, for decent manners and chivalrous speech,” Rudolph went on, ignoring the Baron’s interruptions.

“Now you are hardly so unexacting. This strikes me as demanding something more than sanctity, for it is quite possible that a saint may be an ill-mannered cad,” said the baron gravely.

“I hope, sir, that you will not be offended with me if I express a wish to return to Austria,” said Rudolph, after a pause, nervously devoted to industrious crumbling.

“Indeed, Rudolph,” cried the baron, facing him with a disconcerting steadiness of gaze, “I am very seriously offended to hear you express such a wish. Your aunt and I have cherished the hope that you would find your stay with us pleasant enough to make your visit a prolonged one. What has upset you? If there is anything we can do to make you comfortable, I beg you will state your wishes and count them fulfilled.”

“Nothing, nothing indeed, I assure you. You and my dear aunt are kindness itself, and I am most truly grateful. But I am not happy, uncle. Do not blame me if I seem capricious.”

“Seem! Well, and are you not?”

“I cannot help it if I am perplexed and grieved. I think I should feel less troubled in Rapolden Kirchen, that is all,” Rudolph slowly explained, bending his head with apparent anxiety over the little heap of crumbs he was making with his knife.

His uncle watching him narrowly saw the sensitive lips tremble under the soft moustache.

“Come, unveil the mystery, Rudolph,” he said with a quiet smile. “Who is the woman? For, Gad, it looks deucedly like a first prick of love. Nothing else smarts so keenly at your age.”

Rudolph shrank visibly from the coarse frank glance of worldly eyes directed upon a wound so intangible, so especially delicate, and yet open to misconstruction. To grieve about a woman argues the existence of the commoner sentiment, and he loathed the thought of his fine instinct being so misinterpreted. But could a bland and heavy ambassador, who smokes the best cigars and lounges on the softest cushions in irreproachable attire, skilful in gastronomy and a connoisseur in feminine points, be possibly expected to seize and rightly interpret the daintier emotions and pangs of a more exquisite and spiritual organism?

“There is nothing of that matter in my trouble, but I believe I am unfitted for society. I don’t like it; much that others, possibly wiser and better than I, hardly note offends me.”

“You find the charming illusions nurtured in the seclusion of Rapolden Kirchen rudely dispelled,” suggested the baron, looking what he felt, a trifle bored by the lad’s heavy earnestness, but admirably sustained by the comfort of good tobacco. “That happens to every one, though I have no doubt it would afford you immeasurable satisfaction to look upon your case as exceptional. All this is quite correct, since it is so, and if this very interesting and pleasant world realised the fastidious ideal of youth, my dear fellow, it would not be a fit place for any sensible man to live in. Be reasonable, Rudolph. Give poor society another chance before you decide to abandon it to inevitable perdition. There will be plenty of balls presently. Stay and see if you cannot reconcile your flighty imagination to a waltz or two with some pretty Athenians. You may not credit it, but there are two very pretty girls here.”