“By the way,” said the young man, still with his eyes closed, and
indisposed to follow his companion’s lead into the domain of sentiment,
“I saw the most beautiful woman last night that I ever saw in my
life--the most glorious creature! Such eyes! you can’t imagine such
eyes!”
“What color?” asked Mouse, with a glance at her own eyes in an adjacent
mirror and a displeased severity on her mouth.
“Black--black as night! At least, you know, perhaps they weren’t
really black; they were like that stone--what do you call it--opal?
No; onyx--yes, onyx. Such a woman! I’m a bad ’un to please, but, on my
honor----”
“You are very enthusiastic!” said Mouse, with the lines of her lips
more scornful and displeased. “Where did you see this miracle?”
Brancepeth smiled.
“Lord, how soon they are jealous!” he thought. “Take fire like tow!”
Aloud he answered:
“Yesterday my sister got me to go to complines at the Oratory. It was
some swell saint or another, and some of the cracks were singing there.
This woman was close to where I was. She was all in black, and seemed
very much ‘gone’ on the service; her eyes got full of tears at part of
it. Well, I don’t mind telling you she fetched me so that I asked the
Duc d’Arcy to see my sister safe home, and I followed the lady with the
eyes. She got into a little dark _coupé_, and my hansom bowled after
it. I ran her to earth at a private hotel--quite solemn sort of place
called Brown’s--and there they told she was the Countess zu Lynar.”
“Countess zu Lynar! then one can soon see who she is,” said Mouse,
as she went and got an Almanac de Gotha of the year from her
writing-table.
“Oh, I looked there last night,” said Brancepeth; “she isn’t there; but
the porter told me she used to be the wife of that awfully rich banker
Vanderlin.”
Mouse looked up, astonished and momentarily interested.
“Are you quite sure?”
“Positive.”
“Then she can’t be young now,” said Lady Kenilworth, with relief and
satisfaction.
“Oh, yes, she is; at least, quite young enough,” said Brancepeth
vaguely.
“Oh, I know all about her!” continued his friend. “She is not in
society. We stand a good deal in London, but at present we don’t
receive divorced women.”
Brancepeth laughed softly with vast amusement, and did not offer any
explanation of his laughter.
“Such eyes!” he murmured dreamily. His friend was silent. After a
while--“Oh, Lord, such eyes!”
“My dear Harry,” said Mouse, with cold dignity, “pray spare me your
lyrics, and go and write them in the porter’s book at the private
hotel. You could probably approach the lady without the formula of
introduction; a bouquet would do it for you.”
Brancepeth shook his head mournfully.
“Not that sort,” he said gloomily. “And you needn’t be in such a wax
about it, Mouse; she’s gone back to the Continent this morning. They
told me so at the hotel just now.”
“And you did not go to Dover instead of coming here?” said his friend
sarcastically. “I am amazed that old acquaintance had such a hold
remaining on you as to make you resist the seductions of the tidal
train.”
“You can be nasty about it if you like,” said the handsome youth with
sullen resignation. “You make the mistake which all women make. You
fly at a man when he tells you the truth; and then you are astonished
another time that he tells you a lie. If there’d been anything in it,
of course I shouldn’t have told you anything.”
“An admirable confession. I shall remember it another time.”
“Women always make fellows lie. You bite our noses off if we ever
happen to tell a word of truth!”
“But it breaks my heart to think that you even see that other women
exist, Harry!”
“Oh, bother!” said Brancepeth roughly. “Don’t be a fool, Mousie. You
see other men exist fast enough yourself.”
She was silent. She was conscious that she did do so. Happily for
the preservation of peace, there was at that moment announced Prince
Khristof of Karstein.
“Her father,” murmured Mousie in a swift whisper, but Brancepeth was
too obtuse to understand; he only stared, conscious that he had missed
a tip.
Prince Khristof was a bland, gracious person who had been very fair
in youth and early manhood, and still preserved a delicate clear
complexion and eyes as blue and serene as Clare Kenilworth’s; his
hair was white and silken, his form slender and stately, his carriage
elegant; and, alas! there was not a good club in all the world into
which he could take his charming presence. When the century was young
he had been born the seventh son of a then reigning duke in a small
principality of green pasture and glacier-fed stream, and pretty towns
like magnified toys, and many square leagues of resinous scented pine
forest. The century had seen the principality absorbed, the dukedom
mediatized, the towns ruined, and the pine-woods leased to Javish
banks. As in many other cases the gain of the empire had been the ruin
of the province. Prince Khristof’s eldest brother still abode in his
toy-city, and hats were lifted as he passed, but he reigned no more;
and Prince Khristof himself, who had been a Colonel of Cuirassiers
in his cradle, and at ten years old had seen a sentinel flogged for
omitting to carry arms when he had passed, was glad to furnish a
mansion for Mr. Massarene, and take forty per cent. from the decorators
and dealers, who under his patronage furnished the admirable Clodion
and the other rarities, beauties, and luxuries, to the adornment of
Harrenden House.
He felt it hard that when he had permitted his daughter to marry into
finance the misalliance had so little profited himself that he was
driven to such expedients. But so it was; and though the descent had
been gradual, it had been one which ended in Avernus, and royal and
patrician society had shut all its great gates upon him, leaving him
only its side entrances and back staircases. The man who could remember
when he had been a child in his nurse’s arms, seeing guards carry arms
to salute him as he was borne past them suffered acutely from his
degradation: but he was beyond all things a philosopher, and thought
that fine tobaccos and delicate wines soothe, if they do not cure, many
wounds, even when you can only enjoy such things at the expense of your
inferiors.
“This old beggar ought to know,” thought Brancepeth, occupied with
his new idea and to whom Germans meant every nationality from
Schleswig-Holstein to Moldavia; and he addressed the newcomer
point-blank.
“Do you know a Countess Lynar, sir?”
“I know a great many Lynars,” replied the Prince. “It is a very general
name. Can you add anything more definite?”
“She’s the woman whom that Jew fellow, Vanderlin, divorced,” replied
Brancepeth.
The Prince smiled and coughed.
“Olga zu Lynar? I know her--yes. She is my only daughter. Vanderlin is
a banker, but he is not a Jew.”
Brancepeth grew very red.
“I--I--beg you ten thousand pardons,” he muttered. “I didn’t know, you
know; I am always blundering.”
“There is nothing to pardon,” said Prince Khris sweetly. “Englishmen
are so insular. They never know anything about their neighbors across
the water. It is perfectly well known everywhere out of England that
my daughter was--separated--from Vanderlin, but that you, my Lord
Brancepeth, should not know it is _tout ce qu’il y a de plus naturel_.”
“He takes it uncommonly coolly,” thought Brancepeth, still under the
spell of his astonishment, and still distressed as an Englishman always
is at having made a stupid mistake and wounded an acquaintance.
“But is she married again?” he asked anxiously. “How does she come to
be Lynar?”
“Dear youth, you are not discreet,” thought the Prince, as he replied
frankly that her mother had been a Countess Lynar, and that his
daughter had taken her mother’s name, he was himself never very sure
why; but she was always a little self-willed and fanciful, she was a
woman; _femme très femme_! When she had married into _la haute finance_
she had of course forfeited her place in the Hof-Kalendar.
“But her maiden name is there.” He turned over the leaves of the
Almanac de Gotha and pointed to the entry of the birth of his daughter
the Countess Olga Marie Valeria.
“Why does she call herself Countess Lynar?” said Brancepeth with
curiosity, conscious of his own bad manners. Prince Khris pointed to
the page:
“It was her mother’s name, you see; and more than that, in the property
which my daughter possesses there is a little Schloss Lynar, hardly
more than a ruin, hidden under woods in Swabia which gives that title
to whoever owns it. Were you to purchase it you would have the right to
write yourself Graf zu Lynar.”
“I would rather own the lady than the castle,” said Brancepeth, too
stupid and too careless to note the deepening offence in the eyes of
Mouse.
Prince Khris smiled meaningly.
“The lady might give you the more trouble of the two.”
“How he hates her!” thought Brancepeth. “I suppose she keeps a tight
rein on the property.”
Brancepeth’s experiences, which had been extensive in range though
brief in years, had told him that these family dislikes and
disagreements usually had their root in the _auri sacra fames_; and
the fact was well known all over Europe that this serene, courtly,
distinguished-looking gentleman, whose name was recorded in the
Hof-Kalendar, lived very nearly, if not entirely, by his wits.
High play is one thing; cheating is another; if you ruin yourself it
is your own affair, but if you try to ruin others by unfair means it
is the affair of your neighbors. Prince Khristof’s mind was so made
that he had never been able to perceive or comprehend the difference;
of late years the meaning of that difference had been enforced on him
disagreeably.
“I suspect he is the devil and all to have anything to do with at
close quarters,” reflected Brancepeth, who was a very cautious young
man. “And what a mess he’s made of his life, good Lord, with all his
cleverness and position; why, a decent croupier’s a ten thousand times
better fellow; he’ll rook you like winking if he can get you down at
_écarté_.”
“And she came over here to see you, I suppose,” inquired Brancepeth,
still curious.
“Scarcely,” said the Prince with a fleeting smile.
“Would you--wouldn’t you give me a word of introduction?” said
Brancepeth hurriedly and conscious of his own temerity.
“To my daughter?” said the Prince blandly. “My dear lord, I should of
course be delighted to do so--delighted; but I am not on speaking terms
with her. I don’t call on her myself. How can I send anybody else to
call?”
“What did you quarrel about?” asked Harry bluntly. “Who was right?”
Prince Khris looked at him with amusement; it was so droll to find
people who asked questions like children instead of finding out things
quietly for themselves. To his finer and more philosophic intelligence
such a primitive question as right could not seriously affect anything.
He thought the young Englishman a fool, an impertinent and dense fool;
but he was never impatient of fools, they were too useful to him in the
long run. What wise man would be able to play _écarté_ unless there
were fools with whom to play it?
“Of course the divorce was all Vanderlin’s fault!” said Brancepeth with
clumsy curiosity.
“It is always the man’s fault in such cases. That is well known.”
Prince Khris smiled as he spoke; there was something sardonic and
suggestive about the smile which made it almost a grin, and which
seemed singularly ugly to Brancepeth considering that the person
concerned was the grinner’s only daughter. No one could more completely
or more cruelly have expressed the speaker’s conviction that Vanderlin
was entirely blameless in this matter.
Mouse listened in extreme irritation; it seemed to be beyond even
her Harry’s usual obtuseness to continue the theme of a woman’s
indiscretions to that woman’s own father. Besides, she hated women who
were divorced: they made it so difficult and unpleasant for the wiser
members of their sex.
“My daughter seems to have impressed you, Lord Brancepeth,” continued
the Prince. “Where is it that you have seen her?”
“At the Oratory,” said Brancepeth, “and in the street. She is so
awfully fetching, you know.”
“She is a woman who makes people look at her,” replied Prince Khristof
indifferently. “Did you hear her sing at the Oratory? She has a voice!
ah, such a voice! the most flexible mezzo-soprano. She could have made
her fortune on the stage.”
“No. She didn’t sing,” said Brancepeth, greatly interested. “She seemed
to pray no end, and she cried. But she cried so beautifully. Not as
most of them do who make such figures of themselves. But the tears just
brimming in her eyes and falling, like the what d’ye call ’em, you
know, the Magdalens in the picture galleries.”
The Prince laughed outright.
“For felicitous allusion your Englishman has never an equal,” he
thought, whilst he said aloud: “My dear lord, what did I tell you? Olga
is _femme, très femme_. If I wanted to weep I should not go to the
Oratory myself. But a woman does go. It is a consolation to her to be
admired and pitied, and I have no doubt she observed that you did both.”
“She didn’t even see me,” said the younger man, on whose not
oversensitive nerves something in the elder’s tone grated.
“Her father don’t do much to save her character,” he thought. “It’s an
ill bird fouls its own nest.”
Meanwhile Mouse had listened with scarcely concealed impatience to all
these questions and answers. She sat apparently engrossed in the pages
of the Almanac de Gotha, but in reality losing nothing of her friend’s
interrogations and implications. At last, out of patience, she closed
the little red book and said imperiously to Brancepeth:
“Surely it is time you went on guard? Have you any idea what time it
is? Besides, if you don’t mind my saying so, I want to talk about
something to the Prince before I go for my drive.”
“I aren’t on guard to-day; but I’ll go, of course, if you want me to
go,” murmured Brancepeth sulkily, raising his lazy long limbs out of
his comfortable resting-place with a sense of regret, for he would
willingly have gone on talking about the lady of the Oratory for
another hour.
“Such a dear good boy, but always wanting in tact,” said Lady
Kenilworth, as the door of the morning-room closed on him.
“Wanting in reason too. To talk of another woman when he is in the
presence of Lady Kenilworth! What obtuseness! what blindness,” said
Prince Khris with graceful gallantry. “But Englishmen are always
like that. They go all round the world and see nothing but their own
umbrellas; they keep on their hats in St. Peter’s, and set up their
kodaks at the Taj Mahal. I have always said that a people who could
conquer India and yet clothe their Viceroy in a red cloth tunic, are
a people without perception. They travel, but they remain islanders.
Their minds are enfolded in their bath-towels and sanitary flannels.
They do not see beyond the rim of their tubs. But I believe you did me
the honor to wish to speak to me? I need not say that if there be the
smallest thing in which I can be of service you command my devotion.”
Mouse sat dreamily and irritably opening and shutting the Almanac de
Gotha. Prince Khristof wore a wholly altered aspect to her now that she
saw him as the father of a woman whom Harry admired and had followed.
“Do you know--such is my insularity--that I never knew you had a
daughter or had had a wife?” she said abruptly, as she pushed the book
away.
“Dear Madame! you surely have not sent for me to speak of these two
ladies?” he said, picking up the little red book. “My deceased wife’s
name is here, if you chose to look for it; my daughter’s is not,
because she exiled herself into the _haute finance_. I once had the
entire collection of this Almanac since its beginning in 1760. If we
want to see how despicably modern editions fall below the standard
of all work of the last century, nothing will show us that fact more
completely and conclusively than this Almanac. Contrast the commonplace
portraits of to-day’s Gotha with the exquisite designs of the
eighteenth century kalendars.”
“Yes,” said Mouse shortly: “yes, no doubt. You are always right in
matters of art. My dear Prince, how very admirably you have housed
those people at Harrenden House. If only the birds were worthy the
nest.”
“Ah-ha! It was for this, was it, that you wanted to see me?” he
thought, as he said aloud: “I suggested--I merely suggested. I am
delighted the result meets your approval. They are excellent people,
those good Massarenes. You remember that I told you so in Paris. _Des
bons gens; de très bons gens._ A little uncouth, but the world likes
what is simple and fresh.”
She looked at him to see if he could really say all this with a serious
countenance; she saw that he could; his handsome fair features were
without the ghost of a smile and his whole expression was grave,
sincere, attuned to admiring candor.
“If he takes it like that I had best take it so too,” thought Mouse,
who was aware that she was but a mere beginner and baby beside him in
the delicate arts of dissimulation. But Nature had made her proud,
inclined to be blunt and sarcastic, and occasionally unwisely inclined
to frankness; she looked him straight in the eyes now, and said:
“But you and I are going to do our duty to our fellow Christians,
and polish them, aren’t we? I was quite straight with you about the
purchase of Vale Royal; but you weren’t so straight with me about
Harrenden House. Don’t you think, Prince, we can do our friends more
good if we are friends ourselves? Quarreling is always a mistake.”
He bowed and smiled. His smooth delicate features expressed neither
annoyance nor pleasure, neither wonder nor surprise.
“I am always Lady Kenilworth’s devoted servant,” he said graciously,
with the air of a suzerain accepting homage. “I am sorry you think that
I should have consulted you about the town-house,” he added. “It did
not occur to me; you were in Egypt. I never offend or forget those who
wish me well--of that you may be sure. It was amusing to arrange that
house, and one could be of so much use to artists and other deserving
people of talent.”
Mouse laughed, rather rudely, and her laughter brought a slight angry
flush to the cheek of Prince Khris. He had both noble and royal blood
in his veins, and at the sound of that derisive little laugh he could
have strangled her with pleasure. By an odd contradiction, Lady
Kenilworth offended him by precisely that same kind of bluntness and
nakedness of speech with which her brother had offended herself. The
delicate euphemisms which she expected to have used to please herself
seemed to her altogether ridiculous when they were required by another
person.
“Englishwomen are always so coarse,” he thought; “they never understand
veiled phrases. They will call their spade a spade. There is no need
to do so, whether you are digging a grave with it or digging for gold;
it can always be a drawing-room fire-shovel for other people, whatever
work it may accomplish.
“Yes, you are quite right, dear lady,” he added, after a slight pause.
“The task is not a light one; we will divide its difficulties. I have
experience that you have not yet gained; you have influence that I
have--alas!--lost. Let us take counsel together. Our friends the
Massarenes are good people--excellent people; it is a pleasure to guide
them in the way they should go.”
He remained with her half an hour, and only left her when it was
announced that her carriage was waiting below. He kissed her hand
with all the reverential grace which a fine gentleman can lend to his
farewell; but as he descended the staircase and went into the street,
he swore under his breath.
“There is no devil like a blonde devil!” he thought. “Mouse they call
her! A rat! a rat! with teeth as sharp as nails and claws which can
cling like a flying bat’s! It is little use for the world to have made
woman all these thousands of years; she remains just what she was in
Eve’s time, in Eriphyle’s time--always the same--always purchasable,
always venal, always avaricious! Ah! why was this rodent not my
daughter? We would have made the world our oyster, and no one should
have known the taste of an oyster but ourselves!”
Whilst he passed along Stanhope Street into the Park his own daughter
was standing in a room of a secluded and aristocratic hotel in the
Faubourg St. Germain, where she had arrived that morning.
She was dressed in black, with three strings of pearls round
her throat; they were the pearls she had worn on her ill-fated
marriage-day. She was a woman of singular beauty; the kind of beauty
which resists sorrow and time, and ennobles even the mask of death.
With her was one of her cousins, Ernst von Karstein, the only one of
her family who had been faithful to her through good and evil report,
who had loved her always, before her marriage and after it; but who had
always known that he could look for no response from her.
“You are always well, Olga,” he was saying now. “What amulet have you?”
“I imagine,” she answered, “that my talisman consists in absolute
indifference as to whether I be ill or well.”
“That is a blasphemy,” said her companion. “No one can be indifferent
to health. Ill-health intensifies every other evil and saps the roots
of every enjoyment.”
“Yet to lie on a sick bed, at peace with man and God, and surrounded by
those we love, would that be so sad a fate?”
“You speak of what you know nothing about; you are never ill! You grow
morbid, Olga. You live like a nun. You see no one. The finest mind
cannot resist the morbid influences of constant solitude. Whoever your
Pope is, you should ask his dispensation from such vows.”
“The law has been my Pope, and has set me free of all vows. I live thus
because I do not care to live otherwise.”
“I should have thought you too proud a woman to accept excommunication
in this submissive way.”
She smiled a little.
“Proud? I? The daughter of Khristof of Karstein, and the divorced wife
of Adrian Vanderlin?”
“Curse them both!” said her cousin under his breath.
“You have been in London?” he said aloud.
“A week, yes: my father’s affairs, as usual.”
“You never see him?”
“Never. See the man who ruined my life!”
“But you have no proof of that?”
She smiled again very sadly.
“A crime which can be proved is half undone. He was too wary to be
traced in all these schemes of infamy.”
“Yet you befriend him?”
“Befriend? That is not the word. I spend my mother’s money on him for
her sake. One saves him at least from public disgrace. But he games
away all he gets, and continues to live in the way you know.”
“I do not think you should waste your substance on him. Keep it for
yourself, and return to the world.”
“On sufferance, as a _declasée_? Never!”
“As my wife. I have said so many times. I never change, Olga.”
She held out her hand to him with a noble and grateful gesture.
“You are always faithful. You alone. I thank you. But you must leave me
to my fate, dear Ernst. It is not in your power to change it.”
“It would be in my power if you gave me the mandate.”
“But it is that which I cannot do; which I shall never do.”
“Because you still love the man who repudiated and disgraced you!”
She shrank a little as at a blow.
“One cannot love and unlove at will,” she said simply. “It is very
generous of you to be ready to give the shield of your umblemished
honor to a dishonored woman. But were I ungenerous, unworthy enough,
to accept such a sacrifice I should but make you and make myself more
unhappy than we now are. All the feeling which is still alive in me
lives only for the memory of the past.”
Her cousin turned away and paced the room to hide the pain he felt.
He had loved her through good and evil report, had remained unmarried
for her sake, and was ready now to accept all obloquy, censure and
discredit for her sake.
“Go, my dear Ernst,” she said very gently; “go, and forget me. You
might as well love a buried corpse as love a woman with such a fate as
mine.”
“My love should have power to magnetize the corpse into fresh life!”
She shook her head.
“It would be impossible. Were it possible, what use would be a
galvanized corpse? An unnatural unreal thing which would drop back into
the dust of death.”
He did not reply; he endeavored to control his emotion.
“My dear Olga,” he said, when he could do so, “allow me to say one
thing to you without causing you offence. Unknown to yourself, I think
you cherish an illusion which can only cause you unhappiness. You think
and speak as if your division from Adrian Vanderlin were but some
quarrel, some mistake, which explanation, mediation, or time could
clear away. You forget that you are entire strangers to each other;
worse than strangers, because there is an irrevocable chasm between
you.”
She did not reply; an expression of intense suffering came into her
eyes, but she restrained any outward utterance of it.
“It hurts me to say these harsh things to you,” he continued. “I would
so much sooner encourage you in your sentiment. But to what end should
I do so? You are a woman of deep and passionate feeling. You do not
forget; you do not change; your little boy’s grave is to you what
Bethlehem was to the Early Christians; Vanderlin is to you what Ulysses
was to Penelope. You never seem to realize that this past to which
you cling is a wholly dead thing, no more to be imbued again with the
breath of life than the body of your poor child, or the marble which
lies over him. It is intolerable that a woman as young, as lovely, as
rich, as admired and as admirable as you are should pass your years in
obscurity fettered to a pack of useless memories like a living person,
to a corpse. I have told you so often; I shall never cease to tell you
so. What do you expect? What do you hope? What do you desire?”
“Nothing.” The word was cold, incisive, harsh; he tortured her but she
did not give any sign of pain except by the nervous gesture with which
her fingers closed on the strings of pearls at her throat as if they
were a _collier de force_ which compressed and suffocated her.
“No one lives without desires or ends of some kind however absurd or
unattainable they may be,” he said with truth. “I think you deceive
yourself. I think that, without your being sensible of it, you brood so
much over the past because you fancy vaguely that you will evolve some
kind of future out of it, as necromancers used to stare into a crystal
until they saw the future suggested on its surface. The crystal gave
them nothing but what their own imagination supplied. So it is with
you. Your imagination makes you see in Vanderlin a man who does not
exist and never existed; and it also makes you fancy possible some kind
of reconciliation or friendship which is as totally impossible as if
you and he were both in your coffins.”
She had turned from the window and walked to and fro the room,
unwilling that he should see the emotion which his blunt speech
awakened in her. There was a certain truth in them which she could not
wholly deny and of which she was ashamed.
“Do not let us speak of these things. It is useless,” she said with
impatience. “You do not understand; you are a man; how can you
comprehend all that there is ineffaceable, unforgetable, for a woman in
four years of the tenderest and closest union? Nothing can destroy it
for her. For a man it is a mere episode more or less agreeable, more or
less tenacious in its hold on him; but to her----.”
She stopped abruptly: her companion looked at her with admiration and
compassion mingled in equal parts, and he smiled slightly.
“My dear Olga! Once in a hundred years a woman is born who takes
such a view as you do of love and life. They are dear to poets, and
furnish the themes of the most moving dramas. But they are women who
invariably end miserably, either in a cloister like Heloise, or in a
tomb like Juliet, or simply and more prosaically with tubercles on
their lungs at Hyères or the Canaries. You know the world, or you used
to know it. You must be aware that there are millions of women who in
your place would have consoled themselves long ago. I want you to see
the unwisdom and the uselessness of such self-sacrifice. I want you
to resume your place in the world. I want you to realize that life is
like the earth: there is the winter, more or less long, no doubt, but
afterward there is the spring. You know that poem of Sully Prudhomme,
in which he imagines that all the plants agree to refrain from bearing
flowers a whole year. But that year has never been seen in fact. The
poem is wrong artistically and scientifically.”
“Of the earth, yes; but in the human soul there are many spots stricken
with barrenness for ever.”
“But not at your age?”
“What has age to do with it?”
He sighed; he felt the use of argument, the futility of entreaty.
“Are you not too proud a woman,” he said at length, “to sit in the
dust, with ashes on your head, smitten to the ground by an unjust
sentence?”
“I have told you. All my pride is dead; not for a year like Sully
Prudhomme’s flowers, but for ever.”
“And you forgive the man who killed it?”
The blood mantled in her face.
“That is a question I cannot allow, even to you, dear Ernst.”
He was silenced.
“And you are going back to the owls and the bitterns of Schloss Lynar?”
he asked, as he took his leave of her half an hour later. “What a life
for you, that Swabian solitude!”
“The bitterns and owls are very good company, and at least they never
offend me.”
“Let me be as fortunate!” he said with a sigh. “I may return to-morrow.”
“Yes, I do not leave until evening!”
When he had left her she remained lost in the sadness of her own
useless thoughts for some moments; then she put on a long black cloak,
a veil which hid her features, and went out in the street, saying
nothing to the two servants who traveled with her or to the servant of
the hotel. She went out into the street and crossed the Seine by the
bridge of Henri Quatre, her elegance of form and her height making some
of the passers-by pause and stare, wondering who she could be, alone,
on foot, and so closely veiled. One man followed and accosted her, but
he did not dare persevere.
She went straight on her way to the Rue de Rivoli, for she had known
Paris well, and loved it as we love a place which has been the seat of
our happiness. It was near the end of a grey and chilly day; the lights
were glittering everywhere, and the animation of a great and popular
thoroughfare was at its height. The noise of traffic and the haste of
crowds made her ears ache with sound, so used as she now was to the
absolute silence of her Swabian solitude; a silence only broken by the
rush of wind or water. She approached a very large and stately building
which looked like a palace blent with a prison; it was the French house
of business of the great Paris and Berlin financiers, Vanderlin et Cie.
She walked toward it and past it, very slowly, whilst its electric
lamps shed their rays upon her.
She passed it and turned, and passed it and turned again, and as often
as she could do so without attracting attention from the throngs or
from the police. There was a mingling of daylight and lamplight;
above-head cumuli clouds were driven before a north wind. She waited on
a mere chance; the chance of seeing one whom she had not seen for eight
years pass out of a small private door to his carriage. She knew his
hours, his habits; probably, she thought, they had not changed.
She was rewarded, if it could be called reward.
As she passed the façade for the eighth time, and those on guard before
the building began to watch her suspiciously, she saw a tall man come
out of that private doorway and cross the pavement to a _coupé_ waiting
by the curbstone. In a moment he had entered it; the door had closed
on him, the horses had started down the Rue de Rivoli.
She had seen the man who had repudiated and dishonored her; the only
man she had ever loved; the father of her dead boy.
“Does he ever remember?” she wondered as she turned away, and was lost
amongst the crowds in the falling night.