LATO TREURENBERG.
Ding-dong--ding-dong! the Angelus bells are ringing through the evening
air with their message of rest for weary mortals.
The long shadows of the trees grow paler, and vanish, taking with them
all the glory of the world and leaving only a dull, borrowed twilight
to hover above the earth.
The sun has set. Ding-dong! rings the bell of Komaritz, near at hand,
as Lato rides past; the bells of the other villages echo the sound
dreamily, to have their notes tossed back by the bells of the lonely
chapels on the mountain-sides across the steel-gray stream, whose
waters glide silently on ward. Ding-dong! each answers to all, and the
tired labourer rejoices in unison.
The hour of rest has come, the hour when families reassemble after
the pursuits and labours of the day have ceased to claim and separate
them,--when mortals feel more warmly and sensibly the reality of family
ties. Thin blue smoke is curling from the chimneys; here and there a
woman can be seen standing at the door of a cottage, shading her eyes
with her hand as she looks expectantly down the road. Upon the doorstep
of a poor hut sits a brown, worn labourer, dirty and ragged, about to
eat his evening meal with a leaden spoon from an earthen bowl; a young
woman crouches beside him, with her back against the door-post, content
and silent, while a chubby child, with bare legs somewhat bowed, and a
curly head, leans against his knee and, with its mouth open in
expectation, peeps into the earthen bowl. The father smiles, and from
time to time thrusts a morsel between the fresh, rosy lips. Then he
puts aside the bowl and takes the little fellow upon his knee. It
is a pretty child,--and perhaps in honour of the father's return
home--wonderfully clean, but even were this not the case---- Most of
the children tumbling about before the huts on this sultry August
evening are neither pretty nor clean; they are dirty, ragged,
dishevelled; many are sickly, and some are crippled; but there is
hardly one among them to whom this hour does not bring a caress.
An atmosphere of mutual human sympathy seems to brood in silence above
the resting earth, while the bells ring on,--ding-dong, ding-dong.
Lato has left the village behind him, and is trotting along the
road beneath the tall walnuts. The noise of wagons, heavily laden
with the harvest, and the tramp of men upon the road fall upon his
ear,--everything is going home.
There is a languor in the aromatic summer air, somewhat that begets in
every human being a desire for companionship, a longing to share the
burden of existence with another. Even the flowers seem to bend their
heads nearer to one another.
Now the bells are hushed, the road is deserted; Lato alone is still
pursuing his way home. Home? Is it possible that he has accustomed
himself to call his mother-in-law's castle home? In many a hotel--at
"The Lamb," for example, in Vienna he has felt much more at home.
Where, then, is his home? He vainly asks himself this question. Has he
ever had a home?
The question is still unanswered. His thoughts wander far back into the
past, and find nothing, not even a few tender memories. Poor Lato! He
recalls his earliest years, his childhood. His parents were considered
the handsomest couple in Austria. The Count was fair, tall, slender,
with an apparent delicacy of frame that concealed an amount of physical
strength for which he was famous, and with nobly-chiselled features.
His duels and his love-affairs were numerous. He was rashly brave, and
irresistible; so poor an accountant that he always allowed his
opponents to reckon up his gains at play, but when his turn came to pay
a debt of honour he was never known to make an error in a figure. It is
scarcely necessary to mention that his gambling debts were the only
ones the payment of which he considered at all important. He was
immensely beloved by his subordinates,--his servants, his horses, and
his dogs; he addressed them all with the German "thou," and treated
them all with the same good-humoured familiarity. He was thought most
urbane, and was never guilty of any definite intentional annoyance;
but he suffered from a certain near-sightedness. He recognized as
fellow-mortals only those fellow-mortals who occupied the same social
plane with himself; all others were in his eyes simply population,--the
masses.
There is little to tell of his wife, save that she was a brilliant
brunette beauty, with very loud manners and a boundless greed of
enjoyment. She petted little Lato like a lapdog; but one evening, just
as she was dressed for a ball, she was informed that the child had been
taken violently ill with croup, whereupon she flew into a rage with
those who had been so thoughtless and unfeeling as to tell her such a
thing at so inopportune a moment. Her carriage was announced; she let
it wait while she ran up-stairs to the nursery, kissed the gasping
little patient, exclaimed, with a lifted forefinger, "Be a good boy, my
darling; don't die while mamma is at the ball!" and vanished.
The little fellow was good and did not die. As a reward, his mother
gave him the largest and handsomest rocking-horse that was to be found
in Vienna. Such was the Countess Treurenberg as a mother; and as
a wife--well, Hans Treurenberg was satisfied with her, and her
behaviour was no one else's affair. The couple certainly got along
together admirably. They never were seen together except when they
received guests.
Peace to her ashes! The Countess paid a heavy price for her short-lived
joys. When scarcely twenty-six years old, she was attacked by a mortal
disease. Her condition was all the more painful because she persisted
in concealing her malady from the world, even denying its existence. Up
to the last she went into society, and she died in full dress, diamonds
and all, in a glare of light, on a lounge in her dressing-room.
The widower at first took her death so terribly to heart that his
associates remarked upon it.
"Treurenberg is really a very good fellow!" they said, and so he was.
For a time he kept little Lato with him constantly. Even on the
evenings when gambling was going on, and they played long and high at
Hans Treurenberg's, the boy was present. When hardly twelve years old
he was fully initiated into the mysteries of all games of chance. He
would sit silent and quiet until far into the night, watching the
course of the game, trembling with excitement at any sudden turn of
luck. And how proud he was when he was allowed to take a hand! He
played extremely well for his age, and his luck was constant. His
father's friends made merry over his gambling ability. His father would
pat his cheeks, stroke his hair off his forehead, take his face between
his hands, and kiss him. Then, with his fingers beneath the lad's chin,
he would turn his face this way and that, calling his guests' attention
to the boy's beauty, to his eyes sparkling with eagerness, to his
flushed cheeks. Then he would kiss the boy again, make him drink a
glass of champagne, and send him to bed.
Then was sown the seed of the evil passion which was in after-years to
cause Lato so many an hour of bitter suffering. Calm, almost
phlegmatic, with regard to all else, as soon as he touched a card his
excitement was intense, however he might manage to conceal it.
When Count Hans grew tired of the constant companionship of his son, he
freed himself from it after a perfectly respectable fashion. He sent
him to Prague, a city renowned for the stolidity of its institutions,
committing him to the care of relatives, and of a professor who
undertook to supply the defects of the boy's neglected education. When
Lato was eighteen he entered a regiment of hussars.
Hereafter, if the father took but little pains about his son, he
certainly showed him every kindness,--paid his debts, and laughed while
he admired the young man's mad pranks. Moreover, he really loved him,
which did not, however, hinder him from contriving to have Lato
declared of age at twenty, that the young fellow might have possession
of his maternal inheritance, since he himself needed money.
It was at this time that the elder Treurenberg's view of life and the
world underwent a remarkable change. He became a Liberal, and this not
only in a political sense, but socially, a much rarer transformation.
He appeared frequently at the tables of wealthy men of business, where
he was valued not merely as an effective aristocratic decoration, but
as a really charming companion. His liberal views took on more
magnificent dimensions: he announced himself a heretic with regard to
the exclusiveness of the Austrian aristocracy, smiled at the folly of
Austrian court etiquette, and then, one fine day he made friends with
the wealthy _parvenu_, Conte Capriani, and, throwing overboard as
useless ballast impeding free action the '_noblesse oblige_' principle,
he devoted himself blindly and with enthusiasm to stock-gambling. The
result was hardly encouraging. When Lato applied to his father one day
for a considerable sum of money, it was not to be had. Melancholy times
for the Treurenbergs ensued; thanks, however, to the friendship of
Conte Capriani, who sometimes helped him to a really profitable
transaction, Count Hans was able to keep his head above water. And he
continued to hold it as high as ever, to preserve the same air of
distinction, to smile with the same amiable cordiality in which there
was a spice of _hauteur_; in a word, he preserved the indefinable
prestige of his personality, which made it impossible that Conte
Capriani's demeanour towards him should ever partake of the nature of
condescension. The only thing required of Count Hans by Capriani was
that he should spend a couple of weeks with him every year in the
hunting-season. This the Count seemed quite willing to do, and he
therefore appeared every year, in August or October, at Heinrichsdorf,
an estate in West Hungary, where Capriani had preferred to live since
his affair with young Count Lodrin had made his castle of Schneeburg
impossible for him as a place of residence.
One year the Count asked his son to accompany him to Heinrichsdorf.
Will Lato ever forget the weeks he spent there, the turning-point as
they were of his existence? How foreign and tiresome, how hard and
bald, it all was! how uncomfortable, how uncongenial!--the furniture,
among which here and there, as was the fashion, some costly antique was
displayed; the guests, among whom were various representatives of
historic Austrian nobility; the Conte's secretary, a choleric
Hungarian, who concealed the remnant of a pride of rank which ill
became his present position beneath an aggressive cynicism, and who was
wont to carry in his pocket, when he went to walk, a little revolver,
with which he shot at sparrows or at the flies creeping upon some wall,
by way perhaps of working off the bitterness of his soul. There, too,
was the master of the house, showing the same frowning brow to all whom
he met, contradicting all with the same rudeness, hunting to earth any
stray poetic sentiment, and then, after a violent explosion of pure
reason, withdrawing gloomily to his cabinet, where he could give
himself over to his two passions,--that for money-making, and that for
setting the world at naught.
The only person in the assemblage whom Lato found attractive was the
mistress of the mansion, with whom he often talked for hours, never
ceasing to wonder at the melancholy grace and quiet dignity of her
bearing, as well as at the well-nigh morbid delicacy and high moral
tone of her sentiments.
Above all did Lato dislike those among the guests of a like rank with
his own, men who were like himself in money difficulties, and who
hovered about this deity of the stock market in hopes of obtaining his
blessing upon their speculations.
Count Hans moved among all these aristocratic and un-aristocratic
luminaries with the same unchanging grace that carried him victoriously
over all annoyances,--always genial and courtly; but the son could not
emulate his father's ease of mind and manner; he felt depressed and
humiliated.
Then the Baroness Harfink and her daughters made their appearance. The
two striking, pleasure-loving girls had an enlivening effect upon the
wearied assemblage.
Paula was the cleverer of the two, but she talked too much, which was
tiresome, and then she had a reputation for learning, which frightened
men away. Selina, on the other hand, knew how to veil her lack of
cleverness beneath an interesting taciturnity; she had a fashion of
slowly lifting her eyelids which appealed to a man's fancy. With a
degree of prudence frequently displayed by rather dull girls, she
forbore to appeal to the crowd, and concentrated her efforts to charm
upon Lato. She accompanied him in the pheasant-shooting parties, took
lessons from him in lawn-tennis,--in a white dress, her loosened
hair gleaming in the sunlight,--or simply lay quietly back in a
rocking-chair in the shade in front of the castle, gazing at him with
her large, half-closed eyes, while he, half in jest, half in earnest,
said all sorts of pretty things.
There was always play in the evenings at the castle, and usually very
high play. The atmosphere about the gaming-tables was hardly agreeable,
and the Conte moved about among them, taking no share in such "silly
waste of time," while every one else was eager to win. Lato took part
in the unedifying pastime, and at first fortune befriended him; then he
lost. His losses embarrassed him, and he withdrew from playing. He was
not the only one to avoid the gambling-tables after a short trial of
luck; several gentlemen followed his example. The Conte took triumphant
note of this, and arranged a party for five-kreutzer whist, in which he
joined.
Lato bit his lip. Never before had his unfortunate pecuniary
circumstances so weighed upon him. The thirst for gold--the prevailing
epidemic at Heinrichsdorf--demanded a fresh victim.
There had been a hunting-dinner; Conte Capriani's wine had been
unusually fiery; every one was gay; Heinrichsdorf could remember no
such brilliant festivity. The windows of the drawing-room where the
company were assembled were open and looked out upon the park. The
intoxicating fragrance of the sultry August night was wafted into the
room; the stars sparkled above the black tree-tops, twinkling
restlessly, like deceitful will-o'-the-wisps, in the blue vault of
heaven; the sweet, wild music of a band of Hungarian gypsies came
floating into the apartment with the fragrance of the night. Selina
looked wonderfully beautiful on that evening, a sultana-like beauty,
nothing more, but she harmonized with the spell of the August night.
She wore a red crape gown, red as flickering fire, red as benumbing
poppy-blossoms, very _decolletee_, and its decided colour heightened
the white, pearly lustre of the girl's neck and arms. The lines about
her mouth had not then settled into a stereotyped smile; her nose was
not sharp; the sheen of her hair had not been dimmed by perpetual
powdering. Essentially commonplace as she was, for the moment there was
about her a mingling of languor and excitement, which betrays an
accelerated movement of the heart. Selina Harfink was in love. Lato was
perfectly aware of it, and that she was in love with him. He bestowed
but little thought upon this fact, however. What could come of it? And
yet, whenever he was with her, a cold shiver ran through him.
The mysterious shades of night were invaded by music and the summer
breeze; wherever Lato was he saw that red gown. A hand was laid upon
his arm, and when he turned he gazed into a pair of eyes veiled yet
glowing.
"Why do you avoid me?" Selina whispered.
"Southern Roses!" one of the gentlemen standing near a window called to
the musicians, and immediately there floated out into the night, to
mingle with the low whisper of the linden leaves, the notes of the
first bars of that most beguiling of all Strauss's beguiling waltzes.
He danced with her, and then--almost rudely--he left her. It was the
only time he had danced with her that evening, and now he left the
room, hurrying away to be somewhere where that red dress was not before
his eyes. And yet he had the sensation of overcoming himself, of
denying himself at least a pleasant excitement.
Why? What could ever come of it?
For the first time in several days he joined the gamesters. He played
high, with varying luck, but when he left the gaming-table he carried
with him the consciousness of having lost more than he was at present
in a condition to pay.
He went to his room and began mechanically to undress. A fever
seemed burning in his veins; how sultry it was! through the open
windows he could see black thunder-clouds gathering in the skies. The
air was damp and laden with a fragrance so sweet as to be almost
sickening. A low murmur sighed among the leaves of the shrubbery in the
park,--melancholy, mysterious, alluring, yet mingled with a soft
plaint, breathing above the late summer roses. "Enjoy! enjoy! life is
brief!" He turned away, lay down, and closed his eyes; but still he
seemed to see the red dress. He could not think of marrying her. A girl
from such a family and with such a crowd of insufferable connections!
Had she only been a poor little thing whom he could snatch away from
her surroundings; but no, if he married her, he was sufficiently clear
in his mind for the moment to understand, he must adjust himself to her
social position. The power was hers,--money!
Oh, this wretched money! At every turn the lack of it tormented him; he
had tried to retrench, to economize, but how paltry such efforts seemed
to him! What a good use he could make of it if he had it! She was very
beautiful----
A light footfall made itself heard in the passage outside his door. Was
not that his father's step? Lato asked himself. The door opened; Count
Hans entered, straight, tall, and slender, with haughty, refined
features and sparkling blue eyes, very bald, very gray; but what
vitality and energy he showed in his every movement! At this moment
Lato felt a great admiration for his father, beside whom he himself
seemed pitiably weak. He took shame to himself; what would his father
say could he know of the ideas which he, Lato Treurenberg, had just
been entertaining?
"Still awake, Lato?" the knightly old man asked, kindly, sitting down
on the edge of his son's bed. "I saw from below your light still
burning, and I wanted to ask if anything were troubling you. You are
not wont to suffer from sleeplessness."
Lato was touched, and doubly ashamed of the low, mean way of
extricating himself from his difficulties which had but now seemed to
him almost possible.
"One's thoughts run such riot, sometimes," he murmured.
"H'm!" The father put his cigar between his lips and puffed forth a
cloud of smoke to float upward to the ceiling. "I think you lost at
baccarat to-night," he remarked.
"Yes."
"Much?"
"More than I can pay at present," Lato replied, with a weary smile.
"As if that were of any moment!" Count Hans consoled him. "I am at your
service, and am, besides, your debtor."
"But, father----"
"Yes, yes, I tell you it is so. I am your debtor. Do you think I forget
it? Indeed I do not. I am sorry that I cannot help it; but 'tis the
fault of circumstances. The estates yield absolutely nothing; they
require money enough, but when it comes to looking for any return I
look in vain. No one who has not tried it knows what a sinking-fund
land is. It cannot go on thus; we must make a fundamental effort, or we
shall be ruined!"
"Yes, father," Lato murmured, "we must be in earnest, instead of
enjoying ourselves thoughtlessly and with a dread of work. We have lost
our force; we have been faithless to our principles; we must begin a
new existence, you and I." As he uttered these high-sounding words,
Lato had the unpleasant sensation of repeating something learned by
rote; the big phrases confused him; he was embarrassed by the
consciousness of his father's too ready satire. He looked up at him,
but the old Count did not seem to have heard him. This was a relief; he
sighed, and was silent. Suddenly the red dress fluttered before his
eyes again.
Count Hans raised his head, and murmured, "She looked very lovely this
evening."
"Who?" asked Lato, slowly. He did not need to ask; he knew that his
father had shared his thoughts. He was terribly startled. Something
seemed to be crumbling away which he had believed would always stand
firm.
"Selina, of course,--the only really pretty woman in the house," said
Count Hans. "Her beauty has expanded wonderfully in the last few days.
It is always becoming to pretty women to be in love."
"In love?" Lato repeated, his throat contracted, his tongue dry.
The old Count laughed. "Ah, you're a sly fellow, Lato."
Lato was mute.
His father continued: "They are all jealous of you, Lato. Did you not
see what happened this evening in the conservatory, just after dinner?
Pistasch Kamenz proposed to her, and she refused him. He told me of it
himself, and made light of it; but he was hard hit. I can quite
understand it. She is an exceedingly beautiful woman; she does not
carry herself well, 'tis true,--with women of her class the physical
training is sure to be neglected,--but all that can be changed."
Lato was still mute. So, then, Pistasch Kamenz had tried that of which
he, Lato, had been ashamed, and had failed. He should not fail.
The old Count waited a moment, and then went on: "I am sorry for
Kamenz; the match would have been an excellent one for him; he would
have settled down."
"Settled down--upon his wife's money!" Lato muttered, without looking
at his father.
"Is there anything new in that?" exclaimed the Count, with unruffled
composure. "A man of honour can take nothing from a woman whom he
loves, but everything from his wife. 'Tis an old rule, and it is
comical,"--Count Hans laughed softly,--"how here in Austria we require
that a rich wife should always belong to the same sphere with her
husband; he is forgiven for a _mesalliance_ only if he marries a
beggar. It is pure folly! We shall never amount to anything unless we
toss aside the entire burden of prejudice which we drag about with us.
It weighs us down; we cannot keep step with the rest; how can a man run
sheathed in mail? With the exception of a few magnates among us who are
able to enjoy their prestige, we are wretchedly off. We spend our lives
sacrificing ourselves for a position which we cannot maintain
respectably; we pamper a chimera to be devoured by it in the end. Most
of all do I admire the _bourgeoisie_, whom we impress, and whose
servility keeps bright the nimbus about our heads. Bah! we can do
nothing more with the old folly! We must mingle in the fresh life of
the present."
"Yes," Lato muttered again, but more indistinctly than at first, "we
ought to work, to achieve somewhat."
Count Hans did not, perhaps, hear this remark; at all events he did not
heed it.
"All the huge new fortunes in England marry into the aristocracy," he
said.
Outside, the same strange alluring murmur breathed above the thirsty
flowers; the breeze of the coming storm streamed into the room.
"To marry a woman for the sake of her money is detestable," Count Hans
began afresh, and his voice was almost as soft and wooing as that of
the summer night outside; "but, good heavens! why should one refuse to
marry a girl whom he loves just because she is rich?"
He paused. Lato had closed his eyes.
"Are you asleep?" his father murmured.
Lato shook his head, without speaking. The old Count arose,
extinguished the candle on the table, and softly withdrew.