The day after the funeral Strachinsky, in melancholy mood, paced to and
fro in the room where his wife had died. From time to time he walked to
the window and looked out,--then he would turn again towards the
interior of the chamber. Suddenly his eyes fell upon a sheet of
blotting-paper left upon the writing-table.
His wife's handwriting had been remarkably large, and the words which
were of course imprinted backwards upon the sheet attracted his notice.
With very little trouble he deciphered them: "My last will."
He frowned. "So she has made a fresh will," he said to himself. In
spite of his enormous self-conceit, he did not doubt that it could
hardly be in his favour. The blood rushed to his head. Where was the
will? Probably in her writing-table. But where were the keys? The
shrewdness which, in spite of his intellectual deterioration, stood him
in stead whenever he feared personal inconvenience came to his aid. He
remembered that his wife had been wont to keep her keys in the drawer
of a small table at her bedside, and he reflected that, in the sad
confusion ensuing upon her death, it was hardly likely that they had as
yet been removed. In fact he found them there, and with them he opened
the middle drawer of her writing-table. It contained a large sealed
envelope inscribed "My last will." Strachinsky slipped the document
into his pocket, and returned the keys to their place.
At that moment the door opened, and Erika entered. She looked
wretchedly pale and wan, with dark rings around her weary eyes. She
wore a black gown which her mother had made hastily for her when her
little brother died, and which she had outgrown during the winter.
Although the day was warm and sunshiny, she looked cold, and in all her
movements there was something of the timorous hesitation that a dog
will display after losing his master, when he seems uncertain where to
creep away and hide himself. The resolute attitude she had been wont to
maintain when with her step-father was all gone; heart, mind, and soul
seemed alike crushed.
"What do you want here?" Strachinsky asked, suspiciously.
She looked at him in what was almost surprise, and a tremor of pain
passed through her. "What should I want?" she murmured, in a hoarse
whisper. "I want to go to my mother!" She said it to herself, not to
him; she seemed to have forgotten his presence. Her chin trembled, her
lips twitched, the tears rushed to her eyes.
No, that pitiable creature never could have come to look for a will.
Strachinsky, always ready to be sentimental, gave a sigh of relief, put
his hand over his eyes, and left the room. Scarcely had he gone when
Erika's sad eye fell upon the bed: it had been stripped of all its
coverings and looked like some couch in a lumber-room that had been
unused for years. With a shudder the girl turned away. Yes, what could
she want here? She asked herself the question now. But on a sudden she
perceived hanging on the wall a black skirt, the hem soiled with mud.
It was the gown her mother had worn when she hurried across the fields,
the day before her death. Erika clutched it as if it had been a living
thing, and with a low wail buried her face in its folds, about which
some aroma of her dead mother seemed to cling.
Meanwhile, Strachinsky had locked himself into his room, where he
walked to and fro, lost in reflection, the portentous will in his
pocket, with the seal as yet unbroken. The only legal document of the
kind, in his opinion, was the will made by his wife eleven years
previously, shortly after their marriage, by which she constituted him
her sole heir and the guardian of her daughter. Any later testamentary
disposition he could not possibly regard otherwise than as the result
of an aberration of mind, of which she had for some time shown
symptoms, and which had, shortly before her death, come to be
distinctly developed.
Poor Emma! There was no doubt that her intellect, once so clear and
strong, had been clouded of late years.
So soon as he had entirely convinced himself of this fact, he broke the
seal of the will.
Even in his rascality he was a thorough sentimentalist. He never could
have committed a crime without first skilfully contriving to exalt in
his own eyes both himself and his motives.
Whilst reading the document he changed colour several times. When he
had finished he sighed thrice consecutively: "Poor Emma!" Then, after
pacing the room thoughtfully, he said to himself, "She would be indeed
distressed if this paper--worthless legally in view of her mental
condition, and throwing so false a light upon our marriage--should ever
be made public; she--to whom the tie between us was so sacred!" A flood
of proofs of his wife's devotion to him, interrupted but temporarily,
overwhelmed Strachinsky's soul. He lit a candle and burned Emma's last
will.
And then, without the slightest pricking of conscience, he betook
himself to his beloved lounge. He had the sensation of having performed
an act of exalted devotion.
"No need, dearest Emma," he said, apostrophizing his wife's portrait
which hung above his couch, "to say that I never shall let your child
want. No legal document is necessary to insure that. Poor Emma!" And,
remembering the extract-books which he had devised at a former period
of his existence, he moaned, drearily, "Oh, what a noble mind was there
o'erthrown!"
When, a few hours afterwards, he encountered his step-daughter, he felt
it incumbent upon him to be especially kind to her. He patted her
shoulder, with the insinuating tenderness people are apt to show
towards those whom they have wronged, and said, solemnly, "Poor little
Rika! Your loss is great. Your mother is gone; but never forget that
you still have a father."
Weeks passed,--months; everything in the house went on as best it
could. Strachinsky lay on the sofa from morning until night, reading
novels most of the time. In the pauses of this edifying occupation he
roused himself to an unedifying activity; that is to say, he scolded
all the servants, without assigning any grounds for his displeasure. No
one minded it much: every one knew that after such an episode he would
betake himself to his sofa again and to his sentimental romances.
With regard to his step-daughter's education, he showed the same
tendency to vehement attacks of zeal. He would suddenly go to the
school-room, inspect her written exercises, question her as to some
historical date which he had quite forgotten himself, and conclude by
asking her to play something upon the piano.
During her performance he would pace the room with a face expressive of
the gravest anxiety.
At first she took pains to play for him, but when she discovered that
he had determined beforehand to find fault, she rattled away upon the
keys of her old instrument like a perfect imp of waywardness, whenever
required to show what progress she had made.
Almost before her fingers had left the key-board the scolding began. "I
see no improvement; no, not the slightest improvement do I perceive!
And to think of all that has been done for your education! I fairly
work my fingers to the bone to give you every advantage that a princess
could claim, while you--you do nothing!" And then would follow a long
dramatic summary of the sacrifices that had been made for her. He
always talked to her like the father addressing a worthless daughter in
some popular melodrama, ending upon every occasion with, "What is to
become of you? Tell me, what--what will become of you?" Then he would
bring down both fists upon the top of the piano, to emphasize the
horror inspired by the thought of her future, shake his head for the
last time, and leave the room with a heavy stride. Afterwards he was
sure to complain of the injury the agitation had caused him, and to
betake himself to his sofa.
The girl was left more and more to herself. About six months after her
mother's death Miss Sophy was dismissed. She was a thoroughly capable
woman, personally much attached to her pupil, trustworthy and practical
as a housekeeper, but prone to fall in love with every man, and to find
a rival and foe in every woman who refused to be the confidante of her
morbid and distorted sentimentality.
During Emma's lifetime she had been able to conceal most of her
eccentricities in this respect, but afterwards she became positively
intolerable,--perhaps because there was no one to restrain or
intimidate her. Without a single personal attraction, she was
inordinately vain, forever striving by her dress and conduct to invite
attention from the other sex. In the forenoons she gave Erika lessons,
in the afternoons she mended and made her clothes,--she was a skilled
needlewoman,--and the evenings she devoted to music.
She sang. Her repertoire was limited, consisting principally of the
soprano part of Mendelssohn's duet "I would that my love could silently
flow in a single word," which she shrieked out as a solo, and in
Schumann's "I'll not complain,"--which last always caused her to shed
copious tears.
At last her love of self-adornment as well as her musical enthusiasm
passed all bounds. She cut off her hair, dressed it in short curls, and
purchased two new silk gowns. She also bought an old zither, and every
evening, with her hair freshly curled, and in a rustling silk robe, she
betook herself to the drawing-room, where Strachinsky, in pursuance of
his boasted activity, was wont to finish the day by endless games of
patience.
Her manner, the languishing looks cast at him over her instrument, left
no doubt as to her sentiments towards him.
At first the master of the house took but little heed of these
demonstrations. Her performance upon the zither he found rather
agreeable: the whining drawl of the tones she evoked from it soothed
his melancholy. But one evening when he had requested her to play for
him "The Tyrolean and his Child," and also to repeat "May Breezes," she
was so carried away by triumphant vanity that she attempted to sing
with her instrument, accompanying her shrill notes with such
languishing glances that their object could no longer ignore their
meaning.
The next morning Strachinsky sent for his stepdaughter. Clad in his
dressing-gown, as he reclined upon his lounge, with all the romantic
drawling indifference in his air and voice which he had learned from
his favourite hero "Pelham," he asked her as she stood before him,--
"The Englishwoman's behaviour must have struck you as extraordinary?"
She nodded.
He passed his hand thoughtfully across his brow. She did not speak, and
he went on playing the English nobleman to his own entire satisfaction.
His left hand, in which he held a French novel, hanging negligently
over the arm of the lounge, he waved his right in the air, and said,
"Of course I pity the poor creature, but she bores me. Rid me of the
fool, I pray,--rid me of her!"
He then inclined his head towards the door, and buried himself in the
perusal of his novel.
From that time Erika ceased to spend the evenings with Miss Sophy in
the drawing-room; she withdrew after supper to the solitude of the old
school-room, which in fact she greatly preferred.
Of course Miss Sophy suspected some plot of Erika's in Strachinsky's
altered demeanour, and lost every remnant of sense still left in her
silly head. She employed all her leisure moments in writing to her hero
letters which she bribed the maid to lay upon the table in his
dressing-room.
This would all have been ridiculous, if the affair had not taken a
tragic turn.
One morning Miss Sophy did not appear at the breakfast-table, and when
Minna went to call her she found the wretched woman in bed, writhing in
agony. In despair at Strachinsky's insensibility she had poisoned
herself with the tips of some old lucifer matches. The physician,
summoned in haste, was barely able to save her life; and of course she
left Luzano as soon as she was able to travel.
Strachinsky was much flattered that the poor woman's love for him had
ended in madness, and he invested her memory with an ideal excellence,
recalling her as brilliantly gifted by nature and endowed with many
personal attractions.
Erika was now left without instruction. Her step-father decided that a
young girl of her age needed no further supervision, and that the
daughter of a poor farmer could lay no claim to any personal luxury.
When he spoke of himself only, it was always as an 'impoverished
cavalier;' when he alluded to himself as her father, he was always
degraded to simply 'a poor farmer.'
All through the summer she was alone, and during a long dreary winter,
followed by another summer and another winter, she was still alone.
Another girl in her place might have fallen into gossip with the
servants to pass the time; another, again, might have married the
bailiff out of sheer ennui: assuredly any one else would have grown
stupid and uncouth. She did nothing of the kind.
She had occupation enough. She learned long pages of Goethe and
Shakespeare by heart, and declaimed them, clad in improvised costumes,
before a tall dim mirror; she played on the piano for hours daily, and
made decided progress, despite certain bad habits unavoidable in the
lack of instruction. The rest of her time was spent in building
numberless castles in the air, and in taking long walks about the
neighboring country.
But when three years had gone by since her mother's death, without the
least alteration in her circumstances, the poor child began to be
impatient and to look eagerly about for some relief from so sordid an
existence. Why could she not be an artist?--an actress, a singer, or a
pianist?
On a cold spring morning towards the end of April she seated herself at
the big table in her former school-room and indited a letter to the
director of the Castle Theatre at Vienna,--a letter in which she
partially explained to him her position and requested him to make a
trial of her dramatic talent, with a view to an engagement at his
theatre. She declared herself ready to go to Vienna if he would promise
her an audience. She had finished the clearly-written document, but
when about to sign her name she hesitated. Erika Lenzdorff she signed
at last. "Lenzdorff," she repeated, thoughtfully,--"Lenzdorff." What
possessed her to write to the director of a theatre--an utter
stranger--explaining her circumstances? Would it not be much better to
turn to her father's relatives? To be sure, she knew nothing about
them,--not even their address; but that, she thought, might be
procured. Her mother had never spoken of them; she had always abruptly
changed the subject when Erika asked about her father and his
relatives. Why?
Strachinsky and his wife had often spoken of the parents of the latter,
but never of those of her first husband.
"Lenzdorff." She wrote the name again and again on a sheet of paper. It
looked distinguished. Perhaps they were wealthy people, who could do
something for her; but----
Emma had told her daughter that her name was Lenzdorff the day after
the adventure with the young painter, when the child, mortified at not
having been able to tell it, had asked what it was. But when she had
precociously repeated, in a questioning tone, "_Von_ Lenzdorff?" her
mother had replied, sternly, "What is that to you? It is of no
consequence whatever."
Erika began to ponder. Her mother's parents had died long since; must
not her father's parents be dead also? If they were still living, it
was difficult to see why Strachinsky had not cast upon them the burden
of her maintenance. Still, there were reasons why he should not have
done so.
If her father's relatives were people of integrity and refinement, any
business discussion or explanation with them would have been most
distressing; no wonder that he avoided it, especially since Erika's
maintenance cost him little or nothing.
Thus far she had arrived in her reflections, when Minna entered and
asked her to go immediately to the drawing-room, where a visitor
awaited her.
A visitor at Luzano? Such an event was unheard of.
In some distress Erika looked down at her shabby gown, made out of an
old dressing-gown of her mother's, black, with a Turkish border. There
was a hole in the elbow of the left sleeve.
"What sort of a gentleman is it, Minna?" she asked, irritably,
suspecting him to be some business acquaintance of Strachinsky's.
"A foreign gentleman."
"Old or young?"
"An elderly gentleman."
"Well, if he is elderly, and has no lady with him," she murmured, "I
can go just as I am." She knew from books, whence she derived all her
worldly wisdom, that ladies were much more critical than gentlemen.
"What in the world can he want of me?"
She went up to the mirror, smoothed her hair, drew together with a
black thread the hole in her sleeve, and hurried down to the
drawing-room. The apartment to which this name was still given was on
the ground-floor, as large as a riding-school, and almost as empty.
Besides the piano it still contained two huge bookcases, a shabby sofa
behind a rickety table, and a round piano-stool. The rest of the
furniture had disappeared. Some chairs had been banished as unsafe; the
other things had been sold piece by piece, under stress of various
pecuniary embarrassments, to the Jew broker of the village.
Strachinsky had several times attempted to dispose thus of the books
also, but Solomon Bondy had no market for them. Once the Pole had tried
to sell the piano. But Solomon had curtly refused to find a purchaser
for it, knowing that with the piano the last remnant of enjoyment would
be snatched from the poor lonely girl vegetating in the castle. The Jew
had shown more mercy than the Christian. And then her dead mother had
been dear to him, as she was to all around her.
She had been dear to Strachinsky also, but he never allowed his
affection to stand in the way of his ease.
In consequence of the total lack of furniture, Strachinsky, when Erika
entered the room, was sitting beside the stranger on the sofa,--which
looked comical.
The stranger, a man of middle age, tall, broad-shouldered, and erect in
bearing, rose to receive her.
"May I beg you to present me to the Countess?" he said, turning to
Strachinsky.
"Countess!" It thrilled her. Had she heard aright?
"Herr Doctor Herbegg--my daughter," with a wave of the hand.
"Your step-daughter," the stranger corrected him, with cool emphasis.
"I have never made any difference between her and my own children, dead
in their early youth," said the other; and he was right, for he had
taken very little interest in his own children. "You know that, my
child," he added, in a caressing tone that in his stepdaughter's ears
was like an echo of his old love-making to his wife, and which offended
her. He would have taken her hand, but she withdrew it hastily from his
flabby warm touch.
Since there was no other scat to be had, she turned to the piano to get
the piano-stool. Doctor Herbegg arose and took it from her.
Then Strachinsky started up with incredible activity, and a positive
struggle for the stool ensued, a mutual "Pray, pray, Herr Baron--Herr
Doctor!"
Erika calmly looked on at their strange behaviour. Had she suddenly
become of such importance that each was striving to show her courtesy?
Through her youthful soul the word 'Countess' echoed again with
thrilling fascination.
Strachinsky finally gained the day: he placed the piano-stool for his
step-daughter, panting as he did so, so unused was he to the slightest
physical exertion.
Erika seated herself upon the stool, although each gentleman offered
her a place on the sofa, assumed a dignified air, or what she supposed
to be such, and calmly surveyed the situation and the stranger.
Something told her that his visit was an important event for her and
hinted at a turning-point in her life. She was not mistaken. Doctor
Herbegg was her grandmother's legal adviser.
He began to converse upon indifferent topics, watching her narrowly the
while.
Her step-father, who had become utterly unaccustomed to the reception
of guests, wriggled about on the sofa as if stung by a tarantula. He
had always been restless in his demeanour when he was not awkwardly
stiff, but formerly his good looks had compensated for his defective
training. They no longer existed: the self-indulgent indolence to which
he had given himself over, so soon as all social contact with the world
was at an end for him, had done its part in effecting their decay.
"A bottle of wine! Bring a bottle of wine!" he ordered the young girl,
forgetting the suavity of speech he had just before adopted, and
falling into his usual tone.
"Pray do not trouble the Countess on my account," Doctor Herbegg
interposed. "I can take nothing. My time is limited, since I must catch
the next train for Berlin."
"Surely, Herr Doctor, you will take a glass of Tokay," Strachinsky
persisted, and, perceiving that his manner of addressing his
step-daughter had offended the lawyer, he was amiable enough to add,
"Do not trouble yourself, my dear Rika; I will attend to it." He arose,
and as he was leaving the room he went on, "The Herr Doctor will inform
you, meanwhile, as to the change in your prospects."
The lawyer made no attempt to detain him. He cared very little about
the glass of Tokay, but very much about an interview with the young
girl. When Strachinsky had left the room he approached Erika, and in a
short time had explained matters to her.
The title of Countess, which her mother had concealed from her,
apparently because in the circumstances in which she was forced to
educate her child it would have been more of a hinderance than a help,
was hers of right. Her mother's first marriage had been with the only
son by a second marriage of Count Lenzdorff: he had held office under
the Minister of Foreign Affairs, and two years after his marriage had
been killed in a railroad accident. By her second marriage Frau von
Strachinsky had alienated her mother-in-law. Meanwhile, the two sons of
Count Lenzdorff's first marriage had died, childless, and finally the
Count himself had died, at a very advanced age,--so old that he had
persuaded himself that he had outlived death, and had therefore never
taken the trouble to make a will; consequently his entire estate
devolved upon his grand-daughter.
The lawyer had just imparted this intelligence to the grand-daughter in
question, when Strachinsky re-entered the room, very much out of breath
and excited, and followed by Minna, tall, gaunt, with the bearing of a
grenadier and the gloomy air of an energetic old maid whom it behooves
to be upon the defensive with the entire male sex. She carried a
waiter, which she placed upon the table before the sofa.
"One little glass, Herr Doctor,--one little glass!" cried Strachinsky.
The Doctor bowed his thanks, and touched the glass distrustfully with
his lips.
"The Tokay is excellent," he remarked, in evident surprise at finding
anything of Strachinsky's genuine.
"Yes, yes," his host declared; "you can't get such a glass of wine as
that everywhere, Herr Doctor. I purchased it in Hungary by favour of an
intimate friend, Prince Liskat,--_les restes des grandeurs passees_, my
dear Doctor."
After a first glass Strachinsky became tenderly condescending: he
patted the lawyer on the shoulder. "Pray don't hurry, my dear Herbegg;
you'll not easily find another glass of such Tokay."
Erika observed that Doctor Herbegg bit his lip and did not touch his
second glass. He looked at his watch and said, "Unfortunately,
Countess, I have but little time left, but I should like to inform
myself upon several points, in accordance with your grandmother's wish.
Where and with whom have you been educated?"
"At home, and with my mother."
"Exclusively with your mother?"
"Yes; she even gave me lessons in French and upon the piano."
She was burning to rehabilitate her mother in his eyes.
"My wife was an admirable performer, an artist, a pupil of Liszt's,"
Strachinsky interposed.--"Play something to the Doctor; be quick!" he
ordered, grandiloquently, dropping again his _role_ of tender parent.
His imperious tone provoked Erika unutterably: she would have liked to
rush from the room and fling to the door behind her, but she conquered
herself for her mother's sake and--out of vanity.
She opened the piano, and played the last portion of Beethoven's
Moonlight Sonata,--the last thing that she had studied with her mother.
Her execution was still rude and unequal, like that of an ardent
youthful creature whose musical aspirations have never been toned down
by culture, but an unusual amount of talent was evident in her
performance.
"Magnificent, Countess!" exclaimed the lawyer, rising and going towards
her as she left the piano.
"Very well; but you missed that last chord once," Strachinsky said,
pompously.
Doctor Herbegg paid him not the least attention. "Now I am forced to
go," he said to the young girl; "and you must not smile, Countess, if I
tell you that I leave you with a much lighter heart than the one I
brought with me. Your grandmother sent me here to reconnoitre, as it
were: I find a gifted young lady, where I had feared to encounter an
untrained village girl."
Then suddenly Erika's overstrained nerves gave way. "My grandmother had
no right to allow of such a fear on your part; no one who had ever
known my mother could have supposed anything of the kind."
He looked her full in the face more steadily, more searchingly than
before, and his cold, clear eyes suddenly shone with a genial light.
"Forgive me," he said, kissing the hand she held out to him; then,
turning, he would have left the room with a brief bow to Strachinsky.
His host, however, made haste to disburden himself of a fine speech.
"You will have something to tell in Berlin, will you not? You have at
least seen how a Bohemian gentleman lives. No lounging-chairs in the
drawing-room, but Tokay in the cellar. Original, at all events, eh?"
"Extremely original," the lawyer assented.
On the threshold he paused. "One question more, Herr Baron," he began,
bending upon his condescending host a look of keenest scrutiny. "Did
the late Frau von Strachinsky leave no written document by which she
provided for her daughter's future?"
Strachinsky listened to this question with a scarcely perceptible
degree of embarrassment. "Not that I know of," he said, shifting
uneasily from one foot to the other.
Erika suddenly remembered that her mother had been busily engaged in
writing a few days before her death.
Meanwhile, her step-father, having gained entire control of his
features, continued, "Moreover, in this case any testamentary document
would have been entirely superfluous. My wife knew well that should she
die I should care for her daughter as for my own."
"H'm!" the Doctor ejaculated. "And did Frau von Strachinsky never speak
to you of her Berlin relatives, Countess?"
"No," Erika replied, thoughtfully. "She was very restless for some
weeks before her death, and often told me that as soon as we were quite
sure of being uninterrupted she had an important communication to make
to me. But she never did so: death closed her lips."
The Doctor reflected for a moment, and then said, "I am rather
surprised, Herr von Strachinsky, that you did not advise old Countess
Lenzdorff of your wife's death."
Strachinsky assumed an injured air. "Permit me to ask you, Herr
Doctor," he said, with lofty emphasis, "why I should have informed
Countess Lenzdorff of my adored wife's death? Countess Lenzdorff was my
bitterest enemy. She opposed my wife's union with me not only openly,
but with all sorts of underhand schemes, and when she could not succeed
in severing the tie that united our hearts, she dismissed my wife and
her daughter without one friendly word of farewell. Since she entirely
ignored my wife while she lived, how was I to suppose that she would
take any interest in the death of my idolized Emma?"
"But the announcement of her death would have seriously influenced your
step-daughter's destiny," Doctor Herbegg observed.
"My wife considered me the guardian of her child," Strachinsky
declared, with pathos. "Another man might have refused to accept a
burden entailing upon him sacrifice of every kind. But I am not like
other men. My wife evidently supposed that her child would be best
cared for under my protection; and I was not the man to betray her
confidence. You look surprised, Doctor. Yes, no doubt you think it
strange for a man nowadays to vindicate his chivalry and
disinterestedness, to his own ruin. But such a man am I,--a Marquis
Posa, a Don Quixote, an Egmont----"
"Pardon me, Herr Baron, I shall be late for the train," said the
Doctor, and, with a bow to Erika, he left the room.
Strachinsky ran after him with astonishing celerity, expatiating upon
his chivalrous disinterestedness. Shortly afterwards a carriage was
heard driving out of the courtyard; and Strachinsky returned to the
bare drawing-room, which his step-daughter had not yet left.
His face beamed with satisfaction; rubbing his hands, he cried out,
"Now we shall lack for nothing!" Then, turning to Erika, he continued,
"I shall see to it that your German relatives do not squander your
property. This lawyer-fellow seems to me a schemer, a sly dog. But I
shall do my best to watch over your interests. In fact, it is my duty
as your guardian to administer your affairs. Moreover, in three years
you will be of age, and then we can avail ourselves of your money to
free Luzano from its weight of debt."
This delightful scheme made him extremely cheerful. After pacing the
apartment for a while, lost in contemplation of its feasibility, he
went to the table, and, taking up the Doctor's untouched second glass
of Tokay, he poured its contents back into the bottle. This he called
economy. Then with the bottle in his hand, apparently with a view of
re-sealing it, he went towards the door, saying, "The affair has
greatly agitated me. I am so very sensitive. But when one has had to
wait upon fortune so long---!"
He had settled it with himself that he was the person principally
interested; his step-daughter was quite a secondary consideration, at
most the means to an end. But circumstances shaped themselves after
what was to him a most unexpected and undesirable fashion. Erika
received a brief and rather formal letter from Countess Lenzdorff, in
which the old lady requested her to repair as soon as possible to
Berlin, but upon no account to allow Strachinsky to accompany her; in
short, the old Countess refused to have any personal intercourse with
him whatever.
By the same post came a letter from Doctor Herbegg to Strachinsky,
formally advising him to resign his guardianship voluntarily. Should he
comply, the Countess would refrain from closer examination of his
administration of the property of her daughter-in-law and of her
grandchild. But if, on the other hand, he made the slightest attempt to
interfere in the management of his step-daughter's German estate, she
would, as the guardian appointed by the late Count, resort to legal
means for relieving herself of such interference.
Had Strachinsky's conscience been perfectly clear he would probably
have set himself in opposition, but as it was he contented himself with
gnashing his teeth and raging for two days, indulging freely in
vituperation of old Countess Lenzdorff. Then he made a final tender
attempt to work upon Erika's feelings and to induce her to espouse his
cause with her grandmother. When this failed, he wrapped himself in his
martyr's cloak and submitted with much grumbling. Dulled as his nature
was, he bore his disappointment with comparative ease. At first he
assumed an air of magnanimous renunciation towards his step-daughter,
but after a while he overwhelmed her with good advice, and groaned for
her whenever she lifted any weight or stooped in her packing. Erika
herself, meanwhile, was in a state of tremendous excitement.
On the morning of her departure, when her trunks were all packed she
took a walk. She first visited her mother's grave for the last time,
and then went into the garden, pausing in all her favourite haunts, and
avoiding with a shudder even a glance towards the spot by the low
garden wall whence she had seen her mother hurrying across the fields
towards the river.
Still, in whatever direction she turned she felt the presence of the
stream: she heard its voice loud and wailing as it rushed along swollen
by the winter's snows. A soft breeze swept above the earth, mingling
its sighs with the graver note of the water. Everything trembled and
quivered; every tree, every sprouting plant, throbbed; all nature
thrilled with delicious pain,--the fever of the spring. And on a sudden
she felt herself carried away by a like thrill of excitement; a
nameless yearning, ignorant of aim, possessed her, transporting her to
the skies, and yet binding her to the earth in the fetters of a languor
such as she had never before experienced.
Once more there arose in her memory the figure of the young artist who
had drawn her picture there beside the brook as it rippled dreamily on
its way to the river. She saw him distinctly before her: her heart
began to throb wildly.
She hurried on to the spot where he had sketched her. The swollen brook
murmured far more loudly over the pebbles than it had done on that hot
day in midsummer; the reddish boughs of the willows began to show
silver-gray buds, and on the bank there gleamed something blue,--the
first forget-me-nots. She stooped to pluck them.
At that moment she heard Minna's voice calling, "Rika! where are you?"
She started, and, tripping upon the wet slippery soil, all but fell
into the brook. With difficulty she regained her footing, and without
her flowers; they grew too far below her. She looked at them longingly
and went her way.
When she reached the house she found the carriage already in the
court-yard,--a huge, green, glass coach, that clattered and jingled
at the slightest movement. It was lined with dark-brown striped
awning-stuff,--the shabbiest vehicle that ever ran upon four wheels.
Beside the carriage stood a clumsy cart, in which the luggage was to be
piled. Herr von Strachinsky was ordering about the servants carrying
the trunks. Everything in the house was topsy-turvy. Breakfast had been
hurriedly prepared, and was waiting--a most uninviting repast--upon the
dining-room table. Erika could not eat. She ran to her room and put on
her bonnet.
"Hurry, hurry!" Minna called up from below.
She ran down and crossed the threshold. The air was warm and damp, and
a fine rain was falling. Strachinsky helped her into the carriage with
pompous formality. "I shall not accompany you to the station," he said.
"I do not like driving in a close carriage. Adieu!" He had nothing more
affectionate to say to her, as he shook her hand. The carriage door
clattered to; the horses started. Thus Erika rattled out of the
court-yard, with Minna beside her. The servant looked tired out; her
face was very red, and she had a hand-bag in her lap, and a bandbox and
two bundles of shawls on the seat opposite her. The carriage was very
stuffy, and smelled of old leather. Erika opened one of the windows.
They were driving along the same road by which she had followed her
mother's coffin; there beyond the meadow she could see the wall of the
church-yard. She leaned far out of the window. The driver whipped up
his horses; the church-yard vanished. The young girl suddenly felt as
if the very heart were being torn from her breast, and she burst into
tears, sobbing convulsively, uncontrollably.