Fritz pulled his moustache nervously.
Although he had reached the age of gastronomic fastidiousness, and especially abhorred spoiling the appet.i.te between meals, Truyn good-naturedly accepted this pretentiously humble invitation.
CHAPTER III.
The dining-room, a long narrow apartment with three windows, smelled of fresh varnish and fly-poison; the walls were decorated with dusty laurel wreaths wound about with ribbons covered with gilt inscriptions, and with several photographs of the hostess in tights. The long table was loaded with viands. Malzin"s children, a girl and a boy, respectively five and three years old, shared the meal. They were pale, and sickly, but extremely pretty with a wonderfully sympathetic expression about the mouth and eyes, reminding one of their father. It was easy to see from the shy gentleness of their demeanour that Fritz had taken great pains with their training. He exchanged little tender jests with his small daughter, but he evidently made a special pet of the boy who sat beside him in a high chair, and to whose wants he himself ministered.
There was nothing about Fritz of the amusing awkwardness of aristocratic fathers, who now and then in an amiable dilettante fashion interest themselves in the care of their offspring. On the contrary it was easy to see from the way in which he set the child straight at the table, tied on the bib, and put the mug of milk into the little hand, that the care of the child was a real occupation of his life.
Truyn sat beside his hostess murmuring threadbare compliments, touching his lips to his coffee-cup, and crumbling a piece of biscuit on his plate.
"You do our fare but little honour," the actress said more than once, "try a piece of this cake, Herr Count. Count Capriani who has a French cook, and is accustomed to the very best, always commends it."
Fritz blushed. "Try this cherry cake," he said hastily. "Lotti makes it herself. She used always to feast me upon it when we were betrothed--eh, Lotti?"
This cheery reference to her housewifely skill, offended the actress, and before Truyn could make some courteous rejoinder she exclaimed, flushed with anger, "You know, Herr Count, that where the means are so limited the mistress of the house must lend a hand."
Truyn stammered something and Fritz smiled patiently as he stroked his little son"s fair curls.
It was a painfully uncomfortable hour.
Truyn looked from the photographs to the gla.s.s fly-traps beneath which innumerable flies were lying on their backs, convulsively twitching out their lives, and his glance finally rested upon his hostess. She was strongly perfumed with musk, and was painted around the eyes. Her stout arms were squeezed into sleeves far too tight, and her bust almost met her chin. After this keen scrutiny, however, Truyn discovered that she was certainly handsome, that her face although disfigured by too full lips, was strikingly like that of the capitoline Venus.
The intrusive humility of her manner, seasoned as it was with vulgar raillery, was insufferable.
"For this woman!" he repeated to himself again and again. "For this woman!" His eye fell upon a photograph portraying the Countess as "_la belle Helene_," in a costume that displayed her magnificent physique to great advantage, and he suddenly remembered that he had seen her in that role; that her acting was bad; but that she produced a dazzling impression on the stage.
"Did you recognize that picture, Herr Count?" she asked suddenly.
"Instantly," he a.s.sured her.
"Did you ever see me play?"
"I once had that pleasure."
"Ah!" A remarkable transformation was immediately manifest, her languid air grew animated, thirst for the triumphs of the past glittered in her eyes. She moved her chair a little closer to Truyn and coquettishly leaning her head upon her hand whispered, "Were you one of my adorers?"
Fritz frowned and glanced angrily towards her, twisting his napkin nervously.
His attention was suddenly distracted however, by the noise of the blows of an axe resounding slowly and monotonously through the heavy summer air. Fritz changed colour, sprang up and hurried to the window.
"What is the matter?" the actress asked him negligently.
"They are cutting down the old beech," he said slowly, turning not to her, but to Truyn.--"The Friedrichs-beech; planted by one of our ancestors, Joachim Malzin, with his own hands after the liberation of Vienna; we children all cut our names upon it. Don"t you remember how Madame Lenoir scolded us for it, and declared that it was not _comme il faut_, but a pastime befitting prentice boys only? Good Heavens--how long ago that is!--and now they are cutting it down. Capriani insists that it interferes with his view."
CHAPTER IV.
"If one could only help him!--but there is nothing to be done--absolutely nothing!"
Thus Truyn reflected, as distressed and compa.s.sionate, he rode home on his sleek cob, followed by his trim English groom.
There are many varieties of compa.s.sion not at all painful, which, when well-seasoned with a charming consciousness of virtue, may serve sensitive souls as a tolerable amus.e.m.e.nt. There is, for example, an artistically contemplative compa.s.sion that, with hands thrust comfortably in pockets, looks on at some melancholy affair as at the fifth act of a tragedy, without experiencing the faintest call to recognize its existence except by heaving sundry sentimental sighs.
Then there is a self-contemplative compa.s.sion which, quite as inactive as the artistically contemplative, culminates in the satisfactory consciousness of the comparative comfort of one"s own condition; then a decorative compa.s.sion, which is displayed merely as a mental adornment upon solemn occasions when the man marches forth clad in full-dress moral uniform.
But there is one compa.s.sion which is among the most painful sensations that can a.s.sail a delicate-minded human being--a compa.s.sion, always united to the most earnest desire to aid, to console, and yet which knows itself powerless in presence of the suffering; that longs for nothing in the world more ardently than to aid that which it cannot aid! And this it was that oppressed Truyn, as he rode home from Schneeburg,--this vain compa.s.sion lying like a cold, hard stone upon his warm, kind heart!
"If one could only help him, could but make life at least tolerable for him,--poor Fritz, poor fellow!" he muttered again and again.
The tall poplars, standing like a long row of gigantic exclamation points on the side of the road, cast strips of dark shade upon the light, dusty soil. The crickets were chirping in the hedges; in the wheat-fields to the right and left the ears nodded gently and gravely; red poppies and blue cornflowers--useless, picturesque gipsy-folk, amidst the ripening harvest--laughed at their feet. The clover-fields had pa.s.sed their prime,--they were brown and a faint odour of faded flowers floated aloft from them. The transparent veil of early twilight obscured the light and dimmed the shadows.
How thoroughly Truyn knew the road! The inmates of Schneeburg and Rautschin had formerly been good neighbours.
A throng of laughing, beckoning phantoms glided through his mind. Out of the blue mist of the morning of his life, now so far behind him, there emerged a slender, girlish figure with long, black braids, and a downy, peach-like face--dark-eyed Pipsi, for whom Erich, then an enthusiast of sixteen, copied poems--and a second phantom came with her, merry-hearted Tilda, who with the pert insolence of her thirteen years used to laugh so mercilessly at the sentimental pair of lovers; and Hugo, a rather awkward boy, always at odds with his tutor and his Greek grammar.
Where were they all? Hugo went into the army, and was killed in a duel; dark-eyed Pepsi married in Hungary, and died at the birth of her first child; Tilda married a Spanish diplomatist--Truyn had heard nothing of her for years;--not one of the Malzins was left in their native land, save Fritz, who at the time of Truyn"s lyric enthusiasm was a curly-headed, babbling baby, before whose dimples the entire family were on their knees, and who of his bounty dispensed kisses among them.
Truyn"s thoughts wandered on--he recalled Fritz as an dashing officer of Hussars. He was one of the handsomest men in the army, fair, with a sunny smile and the proverbial Malzin conscientiousness in his earnest eyes, very fastidious in his pleasures, almost dandified in his dress; spoiled by women of fashion.
"Who would have thought it!" Truyn repeated to himself, as he gazed reflectively between his horse"s ears. Suddenly he became aware of a cloud of dust,--and of a delightful sensation warming his heart. He perceived Zinka and Gabrielle sitting in a low pony-wagon, and behind them in the footman"s seat was Oswald. Zinka was driving, being the b.u.t.t of much laughing criticism from the other two. How pleased Truyn was with the picture, and how often was he destined to recall it, the fair, lovely heads of the two women, the dark, handsome young fellow, who understood so well how to combine a merry familiarity with the most delicate courtesy! How happy they all looked!
"You are late, papa!" Gabrielle called out.
"Have I offended you again, comrade?"
"But papa--!"
"I was beginning to be a little anxious," said Zinka, "Ossi laughed at me, and said I was like his mother, who if he is half an hour late in returning home from a ride always imagines that he has been thrown and killed on the road, and that the only reason the groom does not make his appearance, is because he has not the courage to tell the sad tidings."
Oswald laughed. "Yes, my mother"s fancy runs riot in such images, sometimes," he admitted, stretching out his hand for the reins, that he might help Zinka to turn round. "And how is poor Fritz?"
"Wretched--such misery is enough to break one"s heart--and no getting rid of it."
"And you are no longer angry with him?" Oswald asked with a touch of good-humoured triumph.
"Heaven forbid! but--," Truyn rubbed his forehead--"Oh, that stock-jobber--that phylloxera!"
Just then there appeared in the road an aged man, spare of habit and somewhat bent, but walking briskly; his features were sharp but not unpleasant, his arms were long, and his old-fashioned coat fluttered about his legs.
"Good-day, Herr Stern," Oswald called out to him in response to his bow.