Читать книгу Erlach Court - Ossip Schubin - Страница 10

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Freddy has been terribly disappointed; instead of the bonbonnière, the snap-pistol, or the storybook, among which three articles he has allowed his expectant imagination to rove, his aunt has brought him Sanders's German Dictionary.

"I hope you will like it," Stella remarks, with emphasis, depositing the voluminous gift upon the school-room table. "We had to pay for at least five pounds of extra weight of luggage in the monster's behalf, and moreover it has crushed flat my only new summer hat. 'Tis a great pity."

Freddy, who, although hitherto rather puny and delicate in body, is mentally, thanks to clever qualities inherited from both his parents, far in advance of his age, and already thinks Voss's translation of the Odyssey entertaining, turns over the leaves of the three volumes of the Dictionary without finding them attractive.

"I put in a good word for the child," Stella says, with a laugh, to the captain, who with his friend Rohritz happens to be in Freddy's school-room, "but mamma insists that it is of no consequence; if it does not please him now, it will be very useful to him in future. Never mind, my darling," she adds, turning to her little cousin, who, with a sigh and not without much physical effort, is putting the colossal Sanders on his bookshelves; "it certainly presents an imposing spectacle, and I have a foolish thing for your birthday, the very finest my limited means could afford." As she speaks she strokes the little fellow's brown curls affectionately.

"Stella, Stella, where are you loitering?" a deep voice calls at this moment, and the girl replies,--

"In a moment, mamma, I am coming!--I have to write a letter to a Berlin publisher," she says by way of explanation to the two men, as she leaves the room.

The evening has come. Dinner is over. All are sitting in more or less comfortable garden-chairs on the terrace before the castle, beneath the spreading boughs of a linden, now laden with fragrant blossoms.

The stars are not yet awake, but the moon has risen full, though giving but little light, and looking in its reddish lustre like a candle lighted by day; the heavens are of a pale, greenish blue, with opalescent gleams on the horizon. The sun has set, twilight has mingled lights and shadows, the colours of the flowers are dull and faded. Around the castle reigns a sweet, peaceful silence, that most precious of all the luxuries of a residence in the country. The evening wind murmurs a dreamy duo with the ripple of the stream running at the foot of the garden, and now and then is heard the heavy foot-fall of a peasant returning from his work to the village.

Baroness Meineck is holding forth to her hostess, who listens patiently, or at least silently, upon the subject of the cholera-bacilli and the latest discoveries of Pasteur. To Rohritz, who, will he nill he, has had to place his hands at the disposal of the arch Stasy as a reel for her crewel, the Baroness's voice partly recalls a sentinel and partly a tragic actress; she always talks in fine rounded periods, as if she suspected a stenographer concealed near. While the quondam beauty, with a thousand superfluous little arts, winds an endless length of red worsted upon a folded playing-card, he glances towards the spot where Stella is telling stories to Freddy, and involuntarily listens.

Since the Baroness, perhaps because she has reached some rather delicate details in her medical treatise, sees fit to lower slightly her powerful voice, he can hear almost every word spoken by Stella. If he is especially susceptible in any regard, it is in that of a beautiful mode of speech. What Stella says he is quite indifferent to, but the delightful tone of her soft, clear, bird-like voice touches his soul with an indescribably soothing charm.

"Now that's enough. I do not know any more stories," he hears her say at last in reply to an entreaty from her little cousin for "just one more."

"No more at all?" Freddy asks, in dismay, and with all the earnestness of his age.

"No more to-day," Stella says, consolingly. "I shall know another to-morrow." She kisses him on the forehead. "You look tired, my darling! Is it your bedtime?"

"No," the captain answers for him, "but he could not sleep last night for delight in the coming of our guests, and he is paying for it now. Shall I carry you up-stairs--hey, Freddy?"

But Freddy considers it quite beneath his dignity to go to bed with the chickens, and prefers to clamber upon his father's knee.

"You are growing too big a fellow for this," the captain says, rather reprovingly: nevertheless he puts his arm tenderly about the boy, saying to Stella, by way of excuse, "We spoil him terribly: he was not very strong in the spring, and he still enjoys all the privileges of a convalescent,--hey, my boy?" By way of reply the little fellow nestles close to his father with some indistinct words expressive of great content, and while the captain's moustache is pressed upon the child's soft hair, Stella takes a small scarlet wrap from her shoulders and folds it about his bare legs.

"'Tis good to sleep so, Freddy, is it not? Ah, where are the times gone when I could climb up on my father's knees and fall asleep on his shoulder?--they were the happiest hours of my life!" the girl says, with a sigh.

"But, Baron Rohritz, pray hold your hands a little quieter," the wool-winding Stasy calls out to her victim. "You twitch them all the time."

"If you only knew how glad I am to see you all again, and to spend a few days in the country," Stella begins afresh after a while.

"Why, do you not come directly from the country?" the captain asks, surprised.

"From the country?--we come from Zalow," Stella replies: "the difference is heaven-wide. Yes, when mamma thirty years ago bought the mill where we live now,--without the miller and his wife, 'tis true,--because it was so picturesque, it really was in the country, or at least in a village, where besides ourselves there were only a few peasants, and one other person, a misanthropic widow who lived at the very end of the hamlet in a one-story house concealed behind a screen of chestnut-trees. I have no objection to peasant huts, particularly when their thatched roofs are overgrown with green moss, and misanthropic widows are seldom in one's way. But ten years ago a railway was built directly through Zalow, and villas shot up out of the ground in every direction like mushrooms. And such villas, and such proprietors! All nouveaux riches and pushing tradesfolk from Prague. A stocking-weaver built two villas close beside us,--one for his own family, and the other to rent; he christened the pair Giroflé-Girofla, and declares that the name alone is worth ten thousand guilders. He also maintains that the architecture of his villas is the purest classic: each has a Greek peristyle and a square belvedere. It would be deliciously ridiculous if one were not forced to have the monsters directly before one's eyes all the time. The worst of it is that one really gets used to them! Dear papa's former tailor has built himself a hunting-lodge in the style of Francis the First directly on the road, behind a gilded iron fence and without a tree near it for fear of obscuring its splendour. Like all retired tradesfolk, the tailor is sentimental. Only lately he complained to me of the difficulty experienced by cultivated people in finding a fitting social circle."

"Do you know him personally, then?" the captain asks, with an air of annoyance.

"Oh, yes, we know every one to bow to," says Stella. "In a little while we shall exchange calls: I am looking forward to that with great pleasure."

"What do you think of such talk, Baron?" Stasy asks under her breath.

Baron Rohritz makes no reply: perhaps such talk is to his taste.

Meanwhile, Stella goes on in the same satirical tone: "As soon as some one of these æsthetic proprietors has come to a decision as to where the piano is to stand, we shall certainly be invited to admire the new furniture. Then mamma will look up from her books and say, 'I have no time; but if you want to go, pray do as you please.' Mamma never cares what I do or where I go." Stella's soft voice trembles; she shakes her head, passes her hand over her eyes, and runs on: "Even the walks are spoiled; one is never sure of not encountering a picnic-party. They are always singing by turns 'Dear to my heart, thou forest fair,' and 'Gaudeamus,' and when they leave it the 'forest fair' is always littered with cold victuals, greasy brown paper, and tin cans. It is horrible! I detest that railway. It snatched from us the prettiest part of our garden; there is scarcely room enough left for 'pussy wants a corner,' and now mamma has rented half of it and the ground-floor of the mill to a family from Prague for a summer residence."

"I do not understand Lina," the captain says, with irritation. "You surely are not reduced to the necessity of renting part of your small house for lodgings."

"Mamma wanted just two hundred guilders to buy Littré's Dictionary,--the fine complete edition. Moreover, I think you are under a mistake with regard to our resources. I detest the railway, but if it had not bought of us, two years ago, a piece of land on which to build a shop, I hardly know what we should be living upon now. Ah, if poor papa could see how we live! He could not imagine a household without a butler or a lady's-maid. Mamma dismissed the butler at first upon strictly moral grounds----"

Anastasia von Gurlichingen casts down her eyes. "Did you ever hear anything like that, Baron Rohritz," she asks, "from a young girl?"

Rohritz shrugs his shoulders impatiently, and Stella goes on quite at her ease:

"He was always making love to the cook, and the lady's-maid was jealous and complained of it. Then the lady's-maid was dismissed, for pecuniary reasons; then the cook, for sanitary considerations: one fine day she nearly poisoned us all with verdigris, her copper kettles were so badly scoured. Her place was never filled, for in the interim, that is, while we were looking for a new cordon bleu, mamma discovered that a cook was a very costly article and that we could get along without one. Our last maid-of-all work was a dwarf not quite four feet tall, who had to mount on a stool to set the table. Mamma engaged her because she thought that her ugliness would put a stop to love-making----" Stella breaks the thread of her discourse to laugh gently; her laugh is like the ripple of a brook. "But real talent defies all obstacles. Mamma's experiment made her richer by one sad experience: she knows now that not even a large hump can make its possessor impervious to Cupid's arrows."

The captain laughs. Stasy's disapprobation has reached its climax; she twitches impatiently at the worsted she is winding from Rohritz's hands.

"What would papa say if he could see it all?" Stella says, in a changed voice.

"Do you still grieve so for your poor father, mouse?" the captain asks, kindly, perceiving that the girl with difficulty restrains her tears at the mention of her dead father.

"You would not ask that, uncle, if you knew what a life I lead," she replies, in a choked voice. "Yes, it is amusing enough to tell of, but to live---- There is no use in thinking of it!" She bends slightly above her little cousin, whose head is resting quietly upon his father's shoulder. "He is sound asleep," she whispers, brushing away a fluttering night-moth from Freddy's pretty face,--"poor little man!"

"It is growing cool," Katrine declares, glancing anxiously towards Freddy in the midst of the Baroness's interesting discourse upon the latest achievements of medical science, and then, rising, she leaves her sister-in-law to go to her little son, saying, "Give me the boy, Jack. I will carry him up-stairs."

"What! drag up-stairs with this heavy boy? Nonsense!" says the captain.

Whereupon Freddy wakes, rubs his eyes, is a little cross at first, after the fashion of sleepy children, but finally says good-night to all and goes off, his little hand clasped in his mother's.

"Here is some one else asleep too!" says Katrine, as she passes the general, who is sitting with his arms crossed and his head sunk on his breast.

"Can you tell me, Jack, whether mummies ever have the rheumatism?" she asks. "Indeed, you had better waken him. I will have the whist-table set out.--And you, sweetheart," she says to Stella, "might unpack your music and sing us something."

While Stella amiably rises to go with her aunt, and the Baroness makes ready to follow them, murmuring that she must unpack the music herself, or her manuscripts will be all disarranged, Stasy turns to Rohritz:

"What do you say to it all? Did you ever hear such talk from a well-born girl? Such a conversation! Some allowance, to be sure, must be made for her."

But Rohritz simply murmurs, "Poor girl!"

"Yes, she is greatly to be pitied; her training has been deplorable!" sighs Stasy, and then, lowering her voice a little, she adds, "The colonel----"

"What Meineck was he?" Rohritz interrupts her, impatiently. "There are four or five in the army,--sons of a field-marshal, if I am not mistaken. Was he in the dragoons or the Uhlans?"

"Franz Meineck, of the ---- Hussars," says Jack.

"The one, then, who distinguished himself at Solferino and got the Theresa cross?" Rohritz asks.

"The same," replies the captain.

"I do not know why I imagined that it must have been Heinrich Meineck. It was Franz, then." He adds, with some hesitation, "I did not know him personally, but I have heard a great deal of him. He must have been a charming officer and a delightful comrade, besides being one of the bravest men in the army----"

"He was particularly distinguished as a husband," Stasy exclaims, with her usual frank malice.

"We will not speak of that, Fräulein Stasy," says the captain. "My sister's marriage was certainly an insane, overwrought affair, and Franz gave his wife abundant cause for leaving him; but of the two lives his was the ruined one."