He went on.
"I own a beautiful old estate, Lischnitz, in West Prussia, near the Vistula, to which my duties prevent me from going frequently. My household there is managed by a middle-aged aristocratic lady, Miss von Schwertfeger--but her name"s immaterial. If you were to go there she would receive you with open arms, I promise you that, and you would have an opportunity to develop under the most favourable conditions into the woman I already foresee in you. Your problems for the time being would be solved, and I should benefit by finding my home, when I visit it, lighted by a ray of youth and beauty."
He had risen and in his eagerness to persuade began to pace about her with short see-sawing steps. Each time he moved there was a clinking and jingling like delicate dance music played on small bells. Finally all she heard was this metallic ringing, and she no longer understood what he said.
She pressed against the back of her chair with an indistinct feeling that he was tying her with cords, packing her up, and carrying her off to some spot where no rescuer could hear her cries of distress. She knew she would not offer the least resistance, so completely was she in his power.
"Look at me," he said.
She wanted to obey, certainly--oh, she was so obedient! But she could not.
He put a finger under her chin and shoved her head back. She kept her eyes almost closed and saw nothing except the red border of his military coat.
Suddenly she felt herself sinking. The red border mounted to the ceiling, bees buzzed about her ears--then nothing.
When she came to, something cold and wet was lying on her breast, and a woman"s clothes smelling of smoke grazed her cheek.
The green twilight was still there.
A breastplate was hanging in front of her. It looked like a brightly scoured kettle.
She did not dare move, she felt so comfortable and easy.
A rough, bony hand kept chafing her forehead and a kindly voice repeated two or three times in succession:
"Poor little thing! Poor little thing! So young!"
After a time Lilly could not help giving a sign of consciousness, and the instant she stirred a sure arm came to the support of her head, and the kindly voice asked, was she feeling better and did she want anything?
"I want to go home."
"Not so easily done," said the voice, "because he gave orders that he wanted to speak to you again. But if you"ll take a good piece of advice, say "much obliged," and "good-by," and be off as quickly as you can.
This is no sort of place for a poor young girl like you."
Lilly sat up, and pulled down her waist.
The cook was standing beside her--a brown, furrowed, thick-lipped face.
Stroking Lilly"s shoulder she asked if she should bring her something to strengthen her heart, a cordial beaten up with the white of an egg, or something else.
"I want to go home."
"You shall, pretty soon, my dear. But I must call him in first."
She hustled out of the room.
Lilly reached for her hat, on which she must have been lying, because it was completely crushed and misshapen.
"Now I must certainly get a new one," she thought, and tried to reckon how much she could spare for it.
The door opened. He entered, followed by the cook.
Lilly was no longer afraid. Everything seemed far, far away. Even he.
Nothing seemed to concern her any more.
"I think she"s fit to be taken to the cab already," said the cook.
"You are no longer needed here," he said imperiously.
The cook ventured to stammer another suggestion.
"Get out!" he thundered.
With that she was outside the door.
Lilly experienced merely a lazy sensation of being startled.
"Nevertheless, I"m curious to know what he means to do with me now," she thought.
But her interest in her own fate was not great.
He walked up and down with a heavy tread. The silver spurs on his heels jingled.
"We"ll have some light," he said. "The subject we"re now to discuss requires clearness."
He summoned the lackey who had smiled the furtive, cunning smile. The lackey lit the gas jets of the chandelier, and on leaving the room gave Lilly a glance of wildly eager curiosity, this time without a smile.
Lilly still sat on the couch on which she had come back to consciousness, twirling her old hat without a thought in her brain.
In the full light of the chandelier she saw the colonel in all his resplendence still pacing silently up and down.
Lilly could look him in the face without a flutter.
"It"s all the same to me what he does," she thought. "I cannot defend myself at any rate."
He moved a chair in front of her, and sat down--so close that his knees almost touched her.
"Now listen to me, my child," he said. His words rang out steely and choppy as words of command at a drill. "While you were lying here in a faint, I thought about you in the other room, and came to a decision--but more of that later. You have long noticed, I suppose, that my feeling for you is not paternal. The older I grow the less I comprehend so-called fatherliness. To be brief--I am seized by a pa.s.sion for you which--rather upsets me. If I were ten years older than I am--I am fifty-four--I should say: "That"s senile." Do you know what I mean?"
Lilly shook her head.
She saw his face next to hers so distinctly that, had she never looked upon it again, she would have remembered it to the end of her days.
His eyes embedded in red puffs, burned and bored again in the way that had frightened her so at first. His hair lay in bristling strands of grey at his temples and over his ears, but his moustache was black as coal, and shadowed his dark teeth like a spot of ink with a white line down the centre. From his mouth started the two limp folds which pa.s.sed his shiny chin and disappeared in the collar of his military coat.
"How strange," thought Lilly, "that I must be the mistress of that bad old man."
But he wanted it so, and there was nothing else to do.