Читать книгу "O Thou, My Austria!" - Ossip Schubin - Страница 7

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Major Paul Von Leskjewitsch, proprietor of the estates of Lauschitz and Zirkow in southwestern Bohemia, had been for twenty years on the retired list, and was a prosperous agriculturist. He had formerly been a very well-to-do officer, the most steady and trustworthy in the whole regiment, always in funds, and very seldom in scrapes.

In his youth he had often been a target for Cupid's arrows, a fact of which he himself was hardly aware.

"What an ass I was!" he was wont to exclaim to his cousin, Captain Jack Leskjewitsch, when on occasion the pair became confidential at midnight over a glass of good Bordeaux. The thought of his lost opportunities as a lover rather weighed upon the worthy dragoon.

In his regiment he had been very popular and had made many friends, but with none of them had he been so intimate as with his corporal Krupitschka. There was a rumour that before the major's wooing of his present wife, a Fräulein von Bösedow, from Pomerania, he had asked this famulus of his, "Eh, Krupitschka, what do you think? Shall we marry or not?"

Fortunately, this rumour had never reached the ears of the young lady, else she might have felt it her duty to reject the major, which would have been a pity.

In blissful ignorance, therefore, she accepted his proposal, after eight days of prudent reflection, and three months later Baron Leskjewitsch led her to the altar.

Of course he was utterly wretched during the prolonged wedding festivities, and at least very uncomfortable during the honey-moon, which, in accordance with the fashion of the day, he spent with his bride in railway-carriages, inns, churches, picture-galleries, and so forth. In truth, he was terribly bored, tided himself over the pauses which frequently occurred in his conversations with his bride by reading aloud from the guide-book, took cold in the Colosseum, and--breathed a sigh of relief when, after all the instructive experiences of their wedding-tour, he found himself comfortably established in his charming country-seat at Zirkow.

At present the Paul Leskjewitsches had long been known for a model couple in all the country round. Countess Zelenitz stoutly maintained that they were the least unhappy couple of her acquaintance,--that they were past-masters of their art; she meant the most difficult of all arts,--that of getting along with each other.

As every piece of music runs on in its own peculiar measure, one to a joyous three crotchets to the bar, another to a lyrically languishing and anon archly provocative six-quaver time, and so on, the married life of the Leskjewitsches was certainly set to a slow four crotchets to the bar,--or "common time," as it is called.

The husband, besides agriculture, and his deplorable piano performances, cultivated a certain hypochondriac habit of mind, scrutinized the colour of his tongue very frequently, and, although in spite of his utmost efforts he was quite unable to discover a flaw in his health, tried a new patent tonic every year.

The wife cultivated belles-lettres, devoted some time and attention to music, and regulated her domestic affairs with punctilious order and neatness.

The only fault Leskjewitsch had to find with her was that she was an ardent admirer of Wagner, and hence quite unable to appreciate his own talent as a composer; while she, for her part, objected to his intimacy with Krupitschka and with the stag-hounds. These, however, were mere bagatelles. The only real sore spot in this marriage was the luck of children.

The manner in which fate indemnified these two people by bestowing upon them a delightful companion in the person of a niece of the major's can best be learned from the young lady herself, in whose memoirs, with an utter disregard of the baseness of such conduct, the major has meanwhile become absorbed.