"I could not resolve to dress; to appear at dinner in a _peignoir_ is a
fault which is pardoned in convalescents, and after twenty-four hours
of railway travel, I feel at least like a convalescent. Ah, how pretty
it is here!"
So cried Linda, entering the drawing-room where Felix and Elsa awaited
her, a half hour later.
What she called a _peignoir_ was a confusion of yellowish lace and
India muslin with elbow sleeves and the unavoidable Watteau plait in
the back.
Her soft hair hung loose over her shoulders.
"I have a headache, and cannot bear a comb, and as we are _entre
nous_----" she excused herself smilingly at Elsa's astonished glance,
as she pushed back the heavy waves from temples and neck. Her gestures
were full of seductive grace, and her whole form was pervaded with a
moist, sweet perfume which reminded one of a summer morning after a
storm, and which exhales from a woman who has just taken a perfumed
bath. In her whole appearance lay something which excited Elsa's nerves
without her being able to explain it--which wounded her feelings of
delicacy.
Linda suspected nothing of the impression which she made. "It is pretty
here," she repeated, with a lazy glance of satisfaction around the
room--"I thank you so much, Elsa! One sees everywhere that a woman's
tact has superintended the furnishing--a workman never produces such an
impression. Everything looks so cosey, so irregular. How happy I am to
be home at last!" and Linda took her sister-in-law's slender, sallow
hand in her white, rosy-tipped one, and kissed it with childish
exaggeration.
"Who is already here besides the Deys?" she asked then. "Before next
week I must really think of paying calls."
Elsa was spared an answer by the quick rolling of a carriage. Springing
up she cried--whether her emotion betrayed merely a severe feeling of
propriety, and did not also display an unconscious premonition of
jealousy I cannot say--"Linda, it is Erwin who has come for me. Put up
your hair; it would be unpleasant for you to meet a strange man so!"
With a peculiar expression in glance and smile, Linda fulfilled her
sister-in-law's wish. Elsa quickly helped her to twist up her hair, and
thereby breathed the peculiar perfume which Baroness Lanzberg used.
She will think of this perfume in many terrible hours which fate has in
store for her.
With both hands at her neck, her beautiful figure clearly outlined, her
white arms exposed to the elbow by the falling back sleeves, Linda is
just fastening a pin in her improvised _coiffure_, when Erwin enters
the drawing-room.
"I did not think that you would take the trouble to come over here,"
stammers Linda, childishly, shyly offering him her hand, "or else you
should have found me in more correct toilet."
Elsa starts. Instead of answering, Erwin has kissed the warm white hand
of his sister-in-law.
The Garzins remained to dinner in Traunberg. Linda would not hear of
their return to Steinbach, she was so happy at last to have an
opportunity of learning to know her relations better. She asked advice
and indulgence so childishly, was so gay, so amusing, so charming, that
Elsa's antipathy to her increased and Erwin's rapidly lessened. Soon he
fell into the tone of indifferent gallantry with her which in society
almost every man takes with every woman who does not inspire a direct
repugnance in him.
But Elsa, inexperienced as she was, did not know this tone, did not
know that one can listen with an expression of the most intense
interest to a woman without having the slightest idea half an hour
later of what she had said; that one pays her the little flatteries for
which she hungers as one picks up her handkerchief--from polite habit;
that for the time which one devotes to her, one is obliged, if not
absolutely to forget the charms of all other women, still in no case to
remind her of them.
Linda behaved very cleverly with her brother-in-law, displayed a naive
wish to please him--no forward coquetry. She knew that naturalness,
lack of reserve in a really pretty woman is always the most dangerous
charm--she was refinedly natural. She told the drollest Parisian
stories, made the drollest faces without the slightest regard for her
symmetrical features; she made use of a momentary absence of the
servants to throw a bread-ball in Felix's face with all the skill of a
full-blooded street-boy, and as Felix frowned and Erwin could not
conceal a slight astonishment, she excused herself so penitently, told
with so much emphasis of how Marie Antoinette in her time had bombarded
Louis XVI. with bread balls in Trianon, that Erwin was the first to
console her, while there was something in his conventional courtesy of
the encouraging consideration which a mature man shows to a spoiled
child.
After dinner Linda offered to sing something. "She had to be sure no
voice, not even so much as a raven or Mlle. X----" she remarked
smilingly, "but she relied upon her dramatic accent and----" as she
remorsefully admitted--"she had taken such expensive lessons. Would not
Elsa accompany her?"
Elsa refused gently, almost with embarrassment. She could scarcely read
the notes, and Erwin? He could read notes and could play enough to
strum his favorite operatic airs by ear in weak moments. He would try
to accompany Linda if she would promise to be very patient.
"The worse you play, so much the more excuse will there be for my
faulty singing," cried Linda gayly, and opened that charming, foolish
cuckoo song from "Marbolaine."
A pretty confusion followed, a laughing, correcting, her little hands
playing between his. "Can we begin?" she cried finally, and still half
leaning over him with one finger pointing to the notes, she began to
sing "Cuckoo!"
Her voice, in truth, did not remind one in the least of the gloomy
organ of a raven, or the passionate hoarseness of the X----, rather of
a child's laugh, it was so clear and boldly gay, even if somewhat thin
and shrill.
Felix, who had meanwhile been telling Elsa of Gery's scarlet fever with
most interesting explicitness, grew silent, not, perhaps, because the
cuckoo song was even half as interesting to him as Gery's parched lips
and little hands--no! But because he noticed that the usually so
patient and sympathetic Elsa no longer listened to him. Her eyes were
fixed on Linda; that thin, flippant voice pained _her_, could it please
Erwin?
Then the last note ceased. "I am so sorry that I have hindered you by
my miserable playing," he excused himself. "You sing so very
charmingly! Another one, I beg you."
For the first time in her life Elsa was vexed that she was not musical.