STELLA.
Freddy has been terribly disappointed; instead of the bonbonniere, the
snap-pistol, or the storybook, among which three articles he has
allowed his expectant imagination to rove, his aunt has brought him
Sanders's German Dictionary.
"I hope you will like it," Stella remarks, with emphasis, depositing
the voluminous gift upon the school-room table. "We had to pay for at
least five pounds of extra weight of luggage in the monster's behalf,
and moreover it has crushed flat my only new summer hat. 'Tis a great
pity."
Freddy, who, although hitherto rather puny and delicate in body, is
mentally, thanks to clever qualities inherited from both his parents,
far in advance of his age, and already thinks Voss's translation of the
Odyssey entertaining, turns over the leaves of the three volumes of the
Dictionary without finding them attractive.
"I put in a good word for the child," Stella says, with a laugh,
to the captain, who with his friend Rohritz happens to be in Freddy's
school-room, "but mamma insists that it is of no consequence; if it
does not please him now, it will be very useful to him in future. Never
mind, my darling," she adds, turning to her little cousin, who, with a
sigh and not without much physical effort, is putting the colossal
Sanders on his bookshelves; "it certainly presents an imposing
spectacle, and I have a foolish thing for your birthday, the very
finest my limited means could afford." As she speaks she strokes the
little fellow's brown curls affectionately.
"Stella, Stella, where are you loitering?" a deep voice calls at this
moment, and the girl replies,--
"In a moment, mamma, I am coming!--I have to write a letter to a Berlin
publisher," she says by way of explanation to the two men, as she
leaves the room.
* * * * *
The evening has come. Dinner is over. All are sitting in more or less
comfortable garden-chairs on the terrace before the castle, beneath the
spreading boughs of a linden, now laden with fragrant blossoms.
The stars are not yet awake, but the moon has risen full, though giving
but little light, and looking in its reddish lustre like a candle
lighted by day; the heavens are of a pale, greenish blue, with
opalescent gleams on the horizon. The sun has set, twilight has mingled
lights and shadows, the colours of the flowers are dull and faded.
Around the castle reigns a sweet, peaceful silence, that most precious
of all the luxuries of a residence in the country. The evening wind
murmurs a dreamy duo with the ripple of the stream running at the foot
of the garden, and now and then is heard the heavy foot-fall of a
peasant returning from his work to the village.
Baroness Meineck is holding forth to her hostess, who listens
patiently, or at least silently, upon the subject of the
cholera-bacilli and the latest discoveries of Pasteur. To Rohritz, who,
will he nill he, has had to place his hands at the disposal of the arch
Stasy as a reel for her crewel, the Baroness's voice partly recalls a
sentinel and partly a tragic actress; she always talks in fine rounded
periods, as if she suspected a stenographer concealed near. While the
quondam beauty, with a thousand superfluous little arts, winds an
endless length of red worsted upon a folded playing-card, he glances
towards the spot where Stella is telling stories to Freddy, and
involuntarily listens.
Since the Baroness, perhaps because she has reached some rather
delicate details in her medical treatise, sees fit to lower slightly
her powerful voice, he can hear almost every word spoken by Stella. If
he is especially susceptible in any regard, it is in that of a
beautiful mode of speech. What Stella says he is quite indifferent to,
but the delightful tone of her soft, clear, bird-like voice touches his
soul with an indescribably soothing charm.
"Now that's enough. I do not know any more stories," he hears her say
at last in reply to an entreaty from her little cousin for "just one
more."
"No more at all?" Freddy asks, in dismay, and with all the earnestness
of his age.
"No more to-day," Stella says, consolingly. "I shall know another
to-morrow." She kisses him on the forehead. "You look tired, my
darling! Is it your bedtime?"
"No," the captain answers for him, "but he could not sleep last night
for delight in the coming of our guests, and he is paying for it now.
Shall I carry you up-stairs--hey, Freddy?"
But Freddy considers it quite beneath his dignity to go to bed with the
chickens, and prefers to clamber upon his father's knee.
"You are growing too big a fellow for this," the captain says, rather
reprovingly: nevertheless he puts his arm tenderly about the boy,
saying to Stella, by way of excuse, "We spoil him terribly: he was not
very strong in the spring, and he still enjoys all the privileges of a
convalescent,--hey, my boy?" By way of reply the little fellow nestles
close to his father with some indistinct words expressive of great
content, and while the captain's moustache is pressed upon the child's
soft hair, Stella takes a small scarlet wrap from her shoulders and
folds it about his bare legs.
"'Tis good to sleep so, Freddy, is it not? Ah, where are the times gone
when I could climb up on my father's knees and fall asleep on his
shoulder?--they were the happiest hours of my life!" the girl says,
with a sigh.
"But, Baron Rohritz, pray hold your hands a little quieter," the
wool-winding Stasy calls out to her victim. "You twitch them all the
time."
"If you only knew how glad I am to see you all again, and to spend a
few days in the country," Stella begins afresh after a while.
"Why, do you not come directly from the country?" the captain asks,
surprised.
"From the country?--we come from Zalow," Stella replies: "the
difference is heaven-wide. Yes, when mamma thirty years ago bought
the mill where we live now,--without the miller and his wife, 'tis
true,--because it was so picturesque, it really was in the country, or
at least in a village, where besides ourselves there were only a few
peasants, and one other person, a misanthropic widow who lived at the
very end of the hamlet in a one-story house concealed behind a screen
of chestnut-trees. I have no objection to peasant huts, particularly
when their thatched roofs are overgrown with green moss, and
misanthropic widows are seldom in one's way. But ten years ago a
railway was built directly through Zalow, and villas shot up out of the
ground in every direction like mushrooms. And such villas, and such
proprietors! All _nouveaux riches_ and pushing tradesfolk from Prague.
A stocking-weaver built two villas close beside us,--one for his own
family, and the other to rent; he christened the pair Girofle-Girofla,
and declares that the name alone is worth ten thousand guilders. He
also maintains that the architecture of his villas is the purest
classic: each has a Greek peristyle and a square belvedere. It would be
deliciously ridiculous if one were not forced to have the monsters
directly before one's eyes all the time. The worst of it is that one
really gets used to them! Dear papa's former tailor has built himself a
hunting-lodge in the style of Francis the First directly on the road,
behind a gilded iron fence and without a tree near it for fear of
obscuring its splendour. Like all retired tradesfolk, the tailor is
sentimental. Only lately he complained to me of the difficulty
experienced by cultivated people in finding a fitting social circle."
"Do you know him personally, then?" the captain asks, with an air of
annoyance.
"Oh, yes, we know every one to bow to," says Stella. "In a little
while we shall exchange calls: I am looking forward to that with great
pleasure."
"What do you think of such talk, Baron?" Stasy asks under her breath.
Baron Rohritz makes no reply: perhaps such talk is to his taste.
Meanwhile, Stella goes on in the same satirical tone: "As soon as some
one of these aesthetic proprietors has come to a decision as to where
the piano is to stand, we shall certainly be invited to admire the new
furniture. Then mamma will look up from her books and say, 'I have no
time; but if you want to go, pray do as you please.' Mamma never cares
what I do or where I go." Stella's soft voice trembles; she shakes her
head, passes her hand over her eyes, and runs on: "Even the walks are
spoiled; one is never sure of not encountering a picnic-party. They are
always singing by turns 'Dear to my heart, thou forest fair,' and
'Gaudeamus,' and when they leave it the 'forest fair' is always
littered with cold victuals, greasy brown paper, and tin cans. It is
horrible! I detest that railway. It snatched from us the prettiest part
of our garden; there is scarcely room enough left for 'pussy wants a
corner,' and now mamma has rented half of it and the ground-floor of
the mill to a family from Prague for a summer residence."
"I do not understand Lina," the captain says, with irritation. "You
surely are not reduced to the necessity of renting part of your small
house for lodgings."
"Mamma wanted just two hundred guilders to buy Littre's
Dictionary,--the fine complete edition. Moreover, I think you are under
a mistake with regard to our resources. I detest the railway, but if it
had not bought of us, two years ago, a piece of land on which to build
a shop, I hardly know what we should be living upon now. Ah, if poor
papa could see how we live! He could not imagine a household without a
butler or a lady's-maid. Mamma dismissed the butler at first upon
strictly moral grounds----"
Anastasia von Gurlichingen casts down her eyes. "Did you ever hear
anything like that, Baron Rohritz," she asks, "from a young girl?"
Rohritz shrugs his shoulders impatiently, and Stella goes on quite at
her ease:
"He was always making love to the cook, and the lady's-maid was jealous
and complained of it. Then the lady's-maid was dismissed, for pecuniary
reasons; then the cook, for sanitary considerations: one fine day she
nearly poisoned us all with verdigris, her copper kettles were so badly
scoured. Her place was never filled, for in the interim, that is, while
we were looking for a new _cordon bleu_, mamma discovered that a cook
was a very costly article and that we could get along without one. Our
last maid-of-all work was a dwarf not quite four feet tall, who had to
mount on a stool to set the table. Mamma engaged her because she
thought that her ugliness would put a stop to love-making----" Stella
breaks the thread of her discourse to laugh gently; her laugh is like
the ripple of a brook. "But real talent defies all obstacles. Mamma's
experiment made her richer by one sad experience: she knows now that
not even a large hump can make its possessor impervious to Cupid's
arrows."
The captain laughs. Stasy's disapprobation has reached its climax; she
twitches impatiently at the worsted she is winding from Rohritz's
hands.
"What would papa say if he could see it all?" Stella says, in a changed
voice.
"Do you still grieve so for your poor father, mouse?" the captain asks,
kindly, perceiving that the girl with difficulty restrains her tears at
the mention of her dead father.
"You would not ask that, uncle, if you knew what a life I lead," she
replies, in a choked voice. "Yes, it is amusing enough to tell of, but
to live---- There is no use in thinking of it!" She bends slightly
above her little cousin, whose head is resting quietly upon his
father's shoulder. "He is sound asleep," she whispers, brushing away a
fluttering night-moth from Freddy's pretty face,--"poor little man!"
"It is growing cool," Katrine declares, glancing anxiously towards
Freddy in the midst of the Baroness's interesting discourse upon the
latest achievements of medical science, and then, rising, she leaves
her sister-in-law to go to her little son, saying, "Give me the boy,
Jack. I will carry him up-stairs."
"What! drag up-stairs with this heavy boy? Nonsense!" says the captain.
Whereupon Freddy wakes, rubs his eyes, is a little cross at first,
after the fashion of sleepy children, but finally says good-night to
all and goes off, his little hand clasped in his mother's.
"Here is some one else asleep too!" says Katrine, as she passes the
general, who is sitting with his arms crossed and his head sunk on his
breast.
"Can you tell me, Jack, whether mummies ever have the rheumatism?" she
asks. "Indeed, you had better waken him. I will have the whist-table
set out.--And you, sweetheart," she says to Stella, "might unpack your
music and sing us something."
While Stella amiably rises to go with her aunt, and the Baroness makes
ready to follow them, murmuring that she must unpack the music herself,
or her manuscripts will be all disarranged, Stasy turns to Rohritz:
"What do you say to it all? Did you ever hear such talk from a
well-born girl? Such a conversation! Some allowance, to be sure, must
be made for her."
But Rohritz simply murmurs, "Poor girl!"
"Yes, she is greatly to be pitied; her training has been deplorable!"
sighs Stasy, and then, lowering her voice a little, she adds, "The
colonel----"
"What Meineck was he?" Rohritz interrupts her, impatiently. "There are
four or five in the army,--sons of a field-marshal, if I am not
mistaken. Was he in the dragoons or the Uhlans?"
"Franz Meineck, of the ---- Hussars," says Jack.
"The one, then, who distinguished himself at Solferino and got the
Theresa cross?" Rohritz asks.
"The same," replies the captain.
"I do not know why I imagined that it must have been Heinrich Meineck.
It was Franz, then." He adds, with some hesitation, "I did not know him
personally, but I have heard a great deal of him. He must have been a
charming officer and a delightful comrade, besides being one of the
bravest men in the army----"
"He was particularly distinguished as a husband," Stasy exclaims, with
her usual frank malice.
"We will not speak of that, Fraeulein Stasy," says the captain. "My
sister's marriage was certainly an insane, overwrought affair, and
Franz gave his wife abundant cause for leaving him; but of the two
lives his was the ruined one."