"Papa! If Ossi begs you!" Gabrielle whispered, looking up at her father with the large pleading eyes of a child.
"Ah, you can"t understand how any one can possibly refuse Ossi anything," Truyn said, smiling in the midst of his annoyance.
She blushed and cast down her eyes.
"What can you find to like in this fellow, Ella?" her father rallied her. "A man ready to take fire, and clinch his fist upon the smallest provocation. What would you say if I should put my veto upon this foolish betrothal with a young savage who is only half-responsible?"
Gabrielle"s blush grew deeper, she looked alternately at her father and at her lover, and finally deciding in favour of the latter gently laid her hand upon his arm.
"You see, uncle!.... completely routed," exclaimed Oswald, his anger entirely dispelled by this little intermezzo. His voice rang with exultant happiness as he added, "nothing can part us now, Ella--not even a father"s veto!"
And Ella clung silently to his arm and looked blissfully content.
"Poor little comrade!" said Truyn tenderly. Mingled with his emotion there was something of the pity which men of ripe years and experience always feel at the sight of the perfect happiness of young lovers.
"Poor little comrade!--well, to win back some share of your favour I will e"en put a good face upon it and comply with the wishes of your tyrant."
CHAPTER II.
"How can a respectable household put up with such a servant!" thought Truyn, as he waited in the hall of the little Swiss cottage which stood between the park at Schneeburg and the vegetable garden, and had been appropriated to the son of the late owner of the soil. A slatternly woman with a loose linen wrapper hanging about her stout figure had come towards him, and after an affirmative reply to his inquiry if the Count were at home, screamed shrilly: "Malzin! Some one to see you!"
and vanished in the interior of the house.
An unpleasant suspicion a.s.sailed Truyn. "Can that be...." The next moment all else was forgotten in distress at the changed appearance of a fair, pale young man who rushed up to him exclaiming: "Erich!--you here!"
"Fritz, Fritz!" said Truyn in a broken voice, fairly clasping his unfortunate cousin in his arms.
Of all mortals he who has voluntarily resigned the position in which he was born is the most embarra.s.sing to deal with. He has by degrees broken with his fellows, and, almost like an outcast, seems scarcely to know how to comport himself when accident throws him among his former a.s.sociates; when he meets one of "his people" he usually alternates between intrusive familiarity and embittered reserve.
There was nothing of all this, however, about Fritz. He was so simple and cordial, that Truyn felt ashamed of having avoided a meeting.
Fair, with delicate, slightly pinched features, and large melancholy gray eyes, exquisitely neat and exact in his apparel, he looked from head to foot like a cavalry officer in citizen"s dress, and in poor circ.u.mstances, that is like a man who knew how to invest with a certain distinction even the shabbiness to which fate condemned him.
"You cannot imagine what pleasure your visit gives me! When I see one of you it really seems almost as if one of my dear ones had descended from heaven to press my hand," he said with emotion and Truyn replied:
"I should have come before, but I expected certainly that you .... that ...."
"That I ...." Fritz smiled significantly, "no, Erich, you could hardly ...."
"Well, well, and how are you? How are you?" said Truyn quickly.
"I still live," Fritz replied, and looked away.
Just then a voice was heard outside inquiring for "Count Malzin."
"I am not at home, Lotti, do you hear, not at home to any body," Malzin called into the next room. "Come, Erich!" and he conducted his guest out of what answered as a drawing-room into a very shabbily-furnished apartment which he called his "den," and where Truyn at once felt quite at home.
"That was young Capriani," Fritz explained hurriedly, "he probably came to talk with me about the burial vault. Perhaps you know that my late father had the vault reserved for us in the contract for the sale of Schneeburg. Capriani, whom usually nothing escapes, oddly enough overlooked the fact that the vault is in the park, and now he wants me to sell it to him. Let him try it--the vault he shall not have--it is the last spot of home that is left to me. I choose at least to lie in the grave with my people! But let us talk of something pleasanter. You are all well, are you not?--but there is no need to ask, I can see it by looking at you. And I know all about your domestic affairs from Ossi."
"He comes to see you often?"
"Yes," said Fritz, "and every time with a fresh scheme for my complete relief from all difficulties, which he always unfolds with the same fervid enthusiasm. The schemes are impracticable, but never mind!
Existence always seems more tolerable to me while I am talking with him, and when he has gone, it is as if a soft spring shower had just pa.s.sed over, purifying and freshening the air. There really is something very remarkable about the fellow. With all his fiery energy, he is so unutterably tender; ordinarily when a man situated as I am comes in contact with such a favorite of fortune, he inevitably feels annoyed--it is like a glare of light for weak eyes. But there is nothing of the kind with him--he warms without dazzling,--he understands how to stoop to misery, without condescending to it."
"Yes, yes, he has his good qualities," Truyn grumbled, "very good qualities. But he has stolen from me my little comrade"s heart, and I cannot say I am greatly pleased."
"You do not expect me to pity you on the score of your future son-in-law?" said Fritz, laughing.
"Not exactly--if I must have one, then ...."
"Then thank G.o.d that just these young people have come together," Fritz said in that tone of admonition, which even young men, when forsaken of fortune, sometimes adopt towards their happier seniors. "Do you know what he has done for me--among other things--just a trifle?"
"How should I? He certainly would never tell me."
"Of course not! We had not seen each other for years, but he came to see me as soon as he knew that I was at Schneeburg, and asked me if he could do anything for me. I thought it kind, but did not take his words seriously and so thanked him and a.s.sured him he could do nothing. He came again, bringing presents for the children with kind messages from his mother, and asked me to dinner. When we retired to the smoking-room after that dinner he said to me with the embarra.s.sed manner of a generous man, about to confer a benefit: "Fritz, tell me frankly; does no old debt annoy you?" Of course, at first I did not want to confess, but at last I admitted that a couple of unliquidated accounts did trouble me. An unstained name is a luxury that is the hardest of all to forego. He arranged everything, and now I am perfectly free from debt.
He has such a charming way of giving, as if it were the merest pastime.
I once asked him how a man as happy as he, found so much time to think for others? He answered that happiness was like a rose-bush, the more blossoms one gives away, the more it flourishes!"
"Yes, yes, he certainly is a fine fellow.--We quarrel sometimes, but he is a very fine fellow!" said Truyn, "he suits the child--you must know her. And what about your children? Ossi says they are very pretty--you have three, have you not?"
"No, only two," Fritz replied, and his voice trembled as he took a little photograph from the wall--"only two; my eldest died. Look at him--" handing the picture to Truyn, "he was a pretty child, was he not?--my poor little Siegi--but too lovely, too good for the life that had fallen to his lot. He is better dead--better!" he uttered in the hard tone in which the reason a.s.serts what the heart denies.
From the park the vague, dreamy fragrance of the fading white rocket was wafted into the room. The light flickered dimly through the leafy screen of the apricot tree before the open window that looked out upon the vegetable garden. On Fritz"s writing-table the old Empire clock, wheezing in its struggle for breath, struck five times. Truyn knew the old timepiece well, but formerly it used to swing its pendulum as merrily on into eternity as if it expected a fresh delight every hour.
It seemed as if by this time it had almost lost its voice from grief, so asthmatic was the sob with which it counted the seconds. And not only with the clock, with everything around him Truyn was familiar. The entire shabby apartment betrayed a fanatical worship of the past. The chairs were the same monstrosities with lyre-shaped backs and crooked legs, which had been wont to endure the angry kicks of the little Malzins, when their tutor kept them too long at their lessons. Even the pattern of the wall-paper, with its apocryphal birds and b.u.t.terflies among impossible wreaths of flowers, was the same which a travelling house-painter had pasted up there thirty years before.
But what most struck Truyn, was the decoration on one of the low doors in the thick wall--it was marked all over with lines in pencil and scribbled names. Upon that door the young Malzins used to record their growth from year to year.
"Pipsi, 14," he read, "and something over," "Erich,"--he smiled involuntarily, and read on,--"Oscar 12," and then far below in uncertain characters looking as if an elder sister had guided the hand of a very little child, "Fritzl."
And through Truyn"s memory there sounded the crumpling of copy-book leaves--of childrens" voices, of Cramer"s Exercises, and of sleepily recited Latin verbs. Yes, even the peculiar fragrance of lavender and fresh linen, formerly exhaled from the light chintz gown of his pretty cousin, came wafting to him over the past.
"This is your old school-room!" he exclaimed.
"Of course it is," said Fritz, "can you guess whom I have to thank for keeping it intact?"
"The avarice of your princ.i.p.al?"
"No, the delicacy of his wife. Before I moved in here she said to me, "my husband wished to have the house put in order for you, Herr Count, but I thought that perhaps you liked old a.s.sociations, and I therefore beg you to make only what changes you think best.""
"A good woman!" Truyn murmured.
Just then an extraordinary figure entered the room,--the same female that Truyn had encountered in the hall, but splendidly transformed, tightly laced, with cheeks covered thick with pink powder--Fritz Malzin"s wife!
"Very good of you," she began after Fritz had presented Truyn to her.
Her voice had the forced sweetness of stage training. "Very good to honour our humble dwelling with a visit. May I take the liberty of offering you a cup of coffee, that is, Herr Count," as Truyn evidently hesitated, "if you can put up with our simple fare; in the country, you know, when one is not prepared ...."