"Now stay where you are, gracious madame," said the old hag. "It will be much better not to jump down his throat, directly he does come." And she hobbled off coughing to receive the visitor.
But Felicitas ran into the garden-salon and laid her ear on the key-hole. As she recognised the man"s voice speaking in the hall, she put her hand on her heart and threw herself into an armchair with a deep sigh.
The old woman came back leaving the door half open behind her, and said, with the same a.s.sumed expression of vacancy with which she had probably received Leo--
"The Herr von Sellenthin is there, but I have said that madame is engaged----"
She broke off, for there he stood. He had pushed the old creature aside, and rushed in.
"At last! At last!" she said, as she calmly offered him her hand with a melancholy smile.
"Yes, at last," he repeated with a hard brusque laugh, the sound of which from him was strange to her. At a first glance she saw a change in him. His eyes rolled restlessly, and his forehead was deeply marked with lines of anger.
Her conscience was never quite serene, even when she was not aware of having erred afresh, so she asked, stammering--
"Have I done anything to offend you again, so soon?"
"Oh no, certainly not," he retorted, and leaned back for a moment against the wall, s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g up his eyes. Then he asked when Ulrich was coming, and watched greedily for her answer.
"Not before Christmas Eve, and it may be even later, for here we don"t distribute our presents till the Christmas Day."
He drew a deep breath.
"What ails you now?" she asked, feigning uneasiness.
He laughed that hard short laugh once more.
"What can ail me, dear heart? A _tete-a-tete_ with the most charming of cousins! Her husband safely out of the way, all scruples of conscience overcome; G.o.d Almighty Himself an accomplice. Could I wish for anything better?"
"Leo, don"t; you frighten me," she said, and crouched back in her armchair.
"Why should you be frightened, my dear child?" he answered, taking her hand. "I have become a little wilder these last few days, that is all.
That is, I have been trying not to come, like the honourable man I was once. There! That promise at the ferry, dear heart--(I always called you dear heart in old days, so, now we are so intimate, I may again, eh?)--that promise was rubbish, you wormed it out of me, because you are such a sly card; and----"
"Leo, please, you hurt me," she protested, covering two tearful eyes with her hand.
He caught her roughly by the arm and wrenched her hand from her face.
"You shan"t cry," he growled. "I can"t bear to see you cry. Although I know your crying, like your laughter, is a farce, I can"t stand your tears. Why not laugh instead? it all amounts to the same thing."
"Oh, if you should be heard talking like this!"
"What would it matter?" but nevertheless his eye wandered in some anxiety to the half-open doors.
"I can"t take you into the boudoir," she said, thinking of the litter of parcels. For a moment a picture rose before her of the child all expectation and excitement about his Christmas presents, but it quickly faded, giving place to the more vital interest of the moment.
He stretched his hands out towards the door in fear and abhorrence.
"You"ll never get me in there again alive," he cried. "Your cursed scent gets into my brain and drives me half mad. And to-day it would be ten times worse. But I tell you what;" his eye sought the window where the afternoon sun had made small clearings in the frost pattern on the panes. "Out there in the snow it is clear and bracing; and so quiet and lonely that one could talk in peace. Shout defiance at the world, too, if one has the mind. Put on a wrap and come."
She acquiesced joyously, and quickly wound a lace scarf round her head, threw over her diaphanous house dress a heavy fur-cloak, and hurried before him out at the door unseen by any one in the house. She could not refrain from congratulating herself on this point aloud, and he did so silently. Their flushed faces met the tingling cold of the winter evening. The sun was going down. A brilliant crescent moon hung in the steel blue eastern sky, above the stables, the copulas of which cut sharply into the air.
The drone of the threshing-machine was heard coming from the barn, otherwise the yard was still and deserted. They took the path skirting the gable wing of the castle, opened the postern gate, the latch of which was frozen, and entered the garden. It lay shimmering before them in its garment of snow with an opal haze hanging over it. The urns at the corners of the terrace were capped with white and the vines on the wall cowered under their straw covers like freezing children.
As they crossed the lawn Felicitas tried to take Leo"s arm, but her heavy furs impeded her movements, and she fell behind. The path became lost in the snow on the outskirts of the plantation, but still they were not disposed to turn back.
They walked on silently in single file, she trying to step in his footprints. Once he glanced round and asked where they were going.
"I don"t know," she said, "only let us go on."
Aimlessly they wandered round the plantation. They both had a feeling as if they would like to creep away beyond the ken of human eyes.
Then he heard her teeth chattering. "You are cold," he said; "we will go back."
"No, I am not cold," she declared, shivering in every limb. "I have only got on rather thin shoes;" and she pointed with a faint smile to her gold-embroidered slippers, which in her impatience to come out she had forgotten to change.
"Turn back at once," he commanded. She pouted a little, and he, to put an end to her resistance, added, "Or I shall carry you."
She spread out her arms beseechingly, and said, smiling, "Then carry me."
But his courage failed him, and he took back his offer. "You had better walk," he said. "We might be seen from the windows, and then there would be gossip."
She shrugged her shoulders and turned round. It was nearly dark now. A bar of sunset pink glowed between the bare boughs, and there was a rosy gleam on the wastes of snow ere they became bathed in night. Nothing stirred, only now and then little heaps of snow fell from the twigs and, star-shaped, plumped on the ground.
As they came by the greenhouse, Felicitas pointed to the reflection of a fire dancing on the panes of the gla.s.s.
"We could warm ourselves in there," she whispered.
"Hadn"t we better go on to the castle?" he asked hesitatingly, as he cast a dark sidelong look at the fire.
"No; come along," she exclaimed with a light laugh, and led the way into the gla.s.s-house.
He followed pa.s.sively. f.a.ggots of wood were stacked in the little room, and the firelight played on them mysteriously. They looked like wreckage gradually being devoured by a hidden conflagration. The door of the furnace was below the level of the floor. It was let into a recess in the wall, to which three steps led down. Flames escaped from the red-hot plaques, and the pungent odour of damp burning alder-wood.
Felicitas jumped the steps into the recess, and was going to hold her frozen feet to the furnace, when she recollected herself, and coming back to the swing-door which led into the greenhouse itself, she called the gardener"s name through the darkness. There was no response, only the sound of water dropping from leaf to leaf in the hot, moist atmosphere.
"Now we are quite safe," she laughed, and skipped down the steps again, sighing with contentment at the warm glow.
The cloak slipped from her shoulders, and as she reclined against the steps, her figure in the blue morning gown was revealed in soft lines against the white fur. The firelight flickered on her fair hair and cast a shimmer like a purple veil over the rounded face, which wore the childlike pathetic expression habitual to it when in repose, and when she was feeling particularly comfortable.
"Why do you stand there looking like an old owl?" she said with a laugh, throwing her head back in order to see him better.
Leo, who was leaning against a pile of f.a.ggots, lost in thought, replied--
"It"s a pity that that fur doesn"t grow on your body, then you would be the image of Elly"s white Persian cat."
"Don"t you think that you have said enough disagreeable things to me, my friend. I show you affection, and nothing but affection, but you insist on behaving like a surly dog."