The birthday of the Emperor comes conveniently, in late August, in the
good weather which is pretty sure to fall then, if ever in the Austrian
summer. For a week past, at Carlsbad, the workmen had been building a
scaffolding for the illumination in the woods on a height overlooking the
town, and making unobtrusive preparations at points within it.
The day was important as the last of March's cure, and its pleasures
began for him by a renewal of his acquaintance in its first kindliness
with the Eltwins. He had met them so seldom that at one time he thought
they must have gone away, but now after his first cup he saw the quiet,
sad old pair, sitting together on a bench in the Stadt Park, and he asked
leave to sit down with them till it was time for the next. Eltwin said
that this was their last day, too; and explained that his wife always
came with him to the springs, while he took the waters.
"Well," he apologized, "we're all that's left, and I suppose we like to
keep together." He paused, and at the look in March's face he suddenly
went on. "I haven't been well for three or four years; but I always
fought against coming out here, when the doctors wanted me to. I said I
couldn't leave home; and, I don't suppose I ever should. But my home left
me."
As he spoke his wife shrank tenderly near him, and March saw her steal
her withered hand into his.
"We'd had a large family, but they'd all died off, with one thing or
another, and here in the spring we lost our last daughter. Seemed
perfectly well, and all at once she died; heart-failure, they called it.
It broke me up, and mother, here, got at me to go. And so we're here."
His voice trembled; and his eyes softened; then they flashed up, and
March heard him add, in a tone that astonished him less when he looked
round and saw General Triscoe advancing toward them, "I don't know what
it is always makes me want to kick that man."
The general lifted his hat to their group, and hoped that Mrs. Eltwin was
well, and Major Eltwin better. He did not notice their replies, but said
to March, "The ladies are waiting for you in Pupp's readingroom, to go
with them to the Posthof for breakfast."
"Aren't you going, too?" asked March.
"No, thank you," said the general, as if it were much finer not; "I shall
breakfast at our pension." He strolled off with the air of a man who has
done more than his duty.
"I don't suppose I ought to feel that way," said Eltwin, with a remorse
which March suspected a reproachful pressure of his wife's hand had
prompted in him. "I reckon he means well."
"Well, I don't know," March said, with a candor he could not wholly
excuse.
On his way to the hotel he fancied mocking his wife for her interest in
the romantic woes of her lovers, in a world where there was such real
pathos as these poor old people's; but in the company of Miss Triscoe he
could not give himself this pleasure. He tried to amuse her on the way
from Pupp's, with the doubt he always felt in passing the Cafe
Sans-Souci, whether he should live to reach the Posthof where he meant to
breakfast. She said, "Poor Mr. March!" and laughed inattentively; when he
went on to philosophize the commonness of the sparse company always
observable at the Sans-Souci as a just effect of its Laodicean situation
between Pupp's and the Posthof, the girl sighed absently, and his wife
frowned at him.
The flower-woman at the gate of her garden had now only autumnal blooms
for sale in the vases which flanked the entrance; the windrows of the
rowen, left steeping in the dews overnight, exhaled a faint fragrance; a
poor remnant of the midsummer multitudes trailed itself along to the
various cafes of the valley, its pink paper bags of bread rustling like
sere foliage as it moved.
At the Posthof the 'schone' Lili alone was as gay, as in the prime of
July. She played archly about the guests she welcomed to a table in a
sunny spot in the gallery. "You are tired of Carlsbad?" she said
caressingly to Miss Triscoe, as she put her breakfast before her.
"Not of the Posthof," said the girl, listlessly.
"Posthof, and very little Lili?" She showed, with one forefinger on
another, how very little she was.
Miss Triscoe laughed, not cheerily, and Lili said to Mrs. March, with
abrupt seriousness, "Augusta was finding a handkerchief under the table,
and she was washing it and ironing it before she did bring it. I have
scolded her, and I have made her give it to me."
She took from under her apron a man's handkerchief, which she offered to
Mrs. March. It bore, as she saw Miss Triscoe saw, the initials L. J. B.
But, "Whose can it be?" they asked each other.
"Why, Burnamy's," said March; and Lili's eyes danced. "Give it here!"
His wife caught it farther away. "No, I'm going to see whose it is,
first; if it's his, I'll send it to him myself."
She tried to put it into the pocket which was not in her dress by sliding
it down her lap; then she handed it to the girl, who took it with a
careless air, but kept it after a like failure to pocket it.
Mrs. March had come out in her India-rubber sandals, but for once in
Carlsbad the weather was too dry for them, and she had taken them off and
was holding them in her lap. They fell to the ground when she now rose
from breakfast, and she stooped to pick them up. Miss Triscoe was too
quick for her.
"Oh, let me carry them for you!" she entreated, and after a tender
struggle she succeed in enslaving herself to them, and went away wearing
them through the heel-bands like manacles on her wrist. She was not the
kind of girl to offer such pretty devotions, and Mrs. March was not the
kind of woman to suffer them; but they played the comedy through, and let
March go off for his last hill-climb with the promise to meet him in the
Stadt Park when he came to the Kurhaus for his last mineral bath.
Mrs. March in the mean time went about some final shopping, and invited
the girl's advice with a fondness which did not prevent her rejecting it
in every case, with Miss Triscoe's eager approval. In the Stadt Park they
sat down and talked; from time to time Mrs. March made polite feints of
recovering her sandals, but the girl kept them with increased effusion.
When they rose, and strolled away from the bench where they had been
sitting, they seemed to be followed. They looked round and saw no one
more alarming than a very severe-looking old gentleman, whose hat brim in
spite of his severity was limp with much lifting, as all Austrian hat
brims are. He touched it, and saying haughtily in German, "Something left
lying," passed on.
They stared at each other; then, as women do, they glanced down at their
skirts to see if there was anything amiss with them, and Miss Triscoe
perceived her hands empty of Mrs. March's sandals and of Burnamy's
handkerchief.
"Oh, I put it in one of the toes!" she lamented, and she fled back to
their bench, alarming in her course the fears of a gendarme for the
public security, and putting a baby in its nurse's arms into such doubts
of its personal safety that it burst into a desolate cry. She laughed
breathlessly as she rejoined Mrs. March. "That comes of having no pocket;
I didn't suppose I could forget your sandals, Mrs. March! Wasn't it
absurd?"
"It's one of those things," Mrs. March said to her husband afterwards,
"that they can always laugh over together."
"They? And what about Burnamy's behavior to Stoller?"
"Oh, I don't call that anything but what will come right. Of course he
can make it up to him somehow. And I regard his refusal to do wrong when
Stoller wanted him to as quite wiping out the first offence."
"Well, my dear, you have burnt your ships behind you. My only hope is
that when we leave here tomorrow, her pessimistic papa's poison will
neutralize yours somehow."