without a word of greeting. His eyes were fixed on the red rose which
adorned her hair, and only a slight movement among the palm leaves
betrayed that the blood rushed vehemently through his veins.
The lady's face was raised towards him with an earnest expression, as
if she were trying to solve a problem. Was the veil which sleep had
thrown over her eyes, not yet removed? Was this meeting only the vision
of a dream. But no, could a dream have the power of changing, as time
had done, the well known features before her; of thinning the curly
hair, and of drawing those lines above the eye-brows which she had
noticed at the first glance?
The longer he delayed in addressing her, the deeper grew the blush that
suffused her cheek. Several times her lips parted as if to speak, but
still she remained silent, and fixed her eyes on the ground. Her fan
slid on the carpet. He did not pick it up.
At last he said, "Madam Eugenie, permit me to call you so, for I have
just arrived here and have omitted to ask our host for your husband's
name; how strangely we meet in this life. I am truly astonished at my
want of presentiment which never foretold me by a sign from heaven or
from earth that I should find you here."
"A special motive caused me to undertake this journey," she hastily
said. "I intend to put my son to school and I am told that there is one
here in which he will be well taken care of. I arrived to-day after
having spent a sleepless night in the carriage, and I must confess to
you that just as you came up, weak human nature, against all good
breeding, was on the point of making up for lost time. I tell you this
because the cool, and absent way in which I received you must have
seemed strange to so old a friend."
She stretched out her hand to him. "I thank you," he replied, and his
face brightened, "for having remembered my small claim on your
friendship. Pray continue to treat me on the old footing, and resume
your repose, which I unfortunately disturbed. I will take care that no
one enters the bower: I can keep watch behind this palm-tree."
She laughed. "No, I did not mean that. I am only too tired to converse
with perfect strangers. Come, sit down by me, if you will be satisfied
with my good intentions, and tell me how the past, and the present have
fared with you."
"You will best be able to judge for yourself how it has fared with me
when I confide to you my situation at the present moment. My friend has
only invited me here for the sake of marrying me. He regards it as a
duty. What do you say to that? In what a sad state must not that man be
whose friends consider it their duty to render him harmless?"
"You alarm me," she replied with a smile. "When I first knew you, you
were, if not actually harmless, at least far from causing so much
mischief that you had to be laid in chains for the sake of the public
safety."
"You are deriding me, Madam. Ah that talent of yours, how well I know
it. This time however your darts did not touch me. My charitable cousin
fears not for others, but for my own safety. He believes that if I
continue to reside alone in the old castle which I have bought;
abandoned to my own crotchets, only occupied in catching hares and
helping the peasants in their agricultural affairs, which I do not
myself understand, that I should sooner or later lose the little sense
which he kindly presumes is left to me. You see he wishes to treat me
homeopathically, dispersing one folly by another. Perhaps he is right.
Those who have proved themselves incapable of regulating their lives
properly, should be grateful, should they not, to their friends for
taking the trouble off their hands, and quietly follow their advice;
but I fancy sometimes that their kind intentions have come too late for
me."
"Too late? I must combat that assertion. Fourteen years have passed
since we last met, and if you did not then make yourself younger than
you were, you can hardly now have reached the prime of life."
"Make myself younger! Good heavens! to do just the contrary would then
have conduced more to my interests. But of what are you reminding me
Eugenie?"
"Is your betrothed young, handsome amiable?" she quickly resumed; "I
would not ask these questions which imply a doubt, if you had not told
me that you had authorized your friend to dispose of your heart, and in
these matters friends are not always to be relied on."
"You greatly wrong our most amiable host," he said laughingly; "Not
only are these cardinal virtues not wanting, but all three of them are
three times combined."
"Three times?"
"I mean in three different samples, as I have been told; so it will be
difficult to choose."
"And each of the three young ladies is desperately in love with you?
Then a twofold catastrophe is inevitable."
"Up to this hour none of my destined brides know of my existence. Their
father----"
"So they are sisters?"
"Yes. A fair, an auburn, and a dark haired one. You see there is no
possibility of escape; Every taste is provided for. Early to-morrow the
merciless disposer of my heart, and hand takes me in his carriage, and
delivers me over to my destiny. They live in L---- not quite four hours
drive from this. Horse dealing is to be the pretext. The father who is
the doctor of that small town, has a thorough-bred grey Arab in his
stables."
"You go forth as Saul the son of Kish. I hope you may return like him
with a kingdom."
"If you but knew," he said pensively, "how little I covet that dignity:
is not a king fettered by his duties? To-day I am still free, so I take
the liberty of sitting down beside you, and of talking with you of that
happy time when I too was held captive, but by enchanting fetters."
She remained silent while he threw himself into the second arm-chair,
and turned it so that he could see nothing of the company in the
saloon; but only the plants before him, and the charming face of the
young woman, lighted up by the solitary candle. Meanwhile the mistress
of the house had sat down to the piano, and began to play a waltz; and
soon the light branches of the palm-tree trembled in the whirlwind
caused by the passing couples. Eugenie silently watched the gay scene
before her. With her left hand she played with a gold chain, and in the
right, held carelessly a large bouquet on her lap.
Valentine stedfastly gazed at her; when she observed it, she took up
the nosegay and buried her face in it. "You think it somewhat
indiscreet on my part," he said, "that I sit before you, as though I
were admiring a fine painting; but is it not pardonable if I gaze with
astonishment on that soft bloom which remains as fresh as though hardly
a day had passed since our last meeting. If I banished from my mind the
thought that fourteen years have gone over my head, and that I may be a
married man to-morrow, I might easily delude myself into the belief
that I am sitting in the conservatory of your parent's house, and have
just laid aside the book in which I had been reading aloud to you, who
were meanwhile watching the gnats dancing on the pond, or the falling
of the leaves. In reality however, only youth can give us those hours
of enraptured extasy, that entire blending of the soul with the soul of
nature, when we are freed from the fetters of our own individuality
only to be united, like a plant, all the more closely with the
elements. When I walked home, still entranced, after one of those
evenings, I felt as if I were carried along the poplar alley, as a
feather is borne by the breeze. In later years we often call that
feeling sentimentality, but even now I cannot laugh at it."
"If I smiled at it in those days, I now feel as if I ought to apologize
for it. We girls are taught by our education to watch over our
sentiments, and to be cautious in our enthusiasms. Now I may confess to
you that I often only wished for Cora to disturb our reading hour by
her barking, or for Frederick to summon us to tea, because I could no
longer restrain my tears."
"You always had the firmer character of the two. The cement which has
consolidated my nature has only grown hard in the bracing atmosphere of
a stirring, and active life. But the names you have just uttered, what
remembrances they bring back to me! My friend, and my enemy, Frederick,
and Cora. That dear old Frederick. I know that he heartily pitied me, a
feeling which is said to be rare between rivals. You cannot be ignorant
of the feelings with which you inspired him. He worshipped you as
devotedly as a gardener, a servant, can worship his young mistress. He
looked on his case as still more hopeless than mine, though with regard
to our social position, his was by far the more settled of the two. The
quiet sympathy of hopelessness united us. Often when he had come to
fetch us from the conservatory and you were skipping before us after
your dog, and overtaking it, would catch it up in your arms, and kiss
it, he would turn to me with jealous wrath, and say: 'Now, can you
understand. Master Valentine, what pleasure our young lady can find in
hugging that stupid brute?' With an indignant shake of his head; the
hair of which he always arranged carefully, since he served at table,
and could offer you the dishes. If you confess the truth, you will own
that you only fondled that ugly creature for the sake of driving us
distracted."
"Do not speak ill of the dead," rejoined Eugenie. "Cora sleeps the
sleep of death, not far from the pond where the bench stands underneath
the elm-tree; do you remember it?"
"How could I have forgotten it? Was it not on that bench that I
fastened your skates, when we started on that skating expedition with
your cousin Lucy. How is your cousin getting on?"
"She is now a fine lady, with a large family. If she only knew that I
have met you here! Not more than a month ago we were talking of you.
She has a kind remembrance of you, and has not forgotten that bright
winter's afternoon, when we first initiated you in the art of skating,
and she maintains that you squeezed her hand on that occasion with more
ardour than your later behaviour warranted. Since then a shade of
fickleness darkens the otherwise favourable recollection she has of
you."
"Good heavens!" he exclaimed laughing; "so the most harmless cannot
escape suspicion. To be sure I was not wholly guiltless, but as it so
often happens I must suffer for another sin than that which I really
committed. When you both held my hands to guide my first steps on the
slippery plain, I longed to express more to you by the firm pressure of
my hand than the mere desire not to fall. But you were always
inaccessible to any intelligence of that kind. You will now bear me
witness that I need not reproach myself with regard to little Lucy. Ah!
I still remember it all as if it had been yesterday! I still feel the
glow which rushed through my veins, in spite of the cold December wind;
the enrapturing touch of your hand, which seemed to linger with me for
weeks after. Do not be displeased," he continued, "at my speaking so
freely of all this. We are no longer the same and can now talk of these
things as though they had occurred to some one else. Is it not an
innocent pleasure if I now tell you what so often hung on my lips in
those days, and was always repressed by that unlucky timidity of mine.
We now meet as good comrades do after having settled a debt."
"And which of us is the creditor?" she asked. "Both of us," he replied.
"Do you not think that I too have some right to that title? If you but
knew what trouble you have caused me; how long your image stood between
me, and every enjoyment of life. But you must have guessed it. When I
used to watch for you on your way to your drawing lesson, when my heart
beat at the sight of your checked cloak, and grey hat--and when I
passed you with all the equanimity I could muster, happy in having been
allowed to salute you, did the unfortunate fate of the poor lad who so
humbly bowed to you never smite your conscience?"
"You are greatly mistaken my dear friend," she said, with a charming
look of merriment. "I blushed whenever I met any one in that attire
which I fancied gave me the appearance of a scarecrow. The cloak had
long passed out of fashion, but my mother thought it good enough for
the drawing lesson. How many tears of mortified vanity have I not dried
with a corner of that detested garment."
He laughed. "You see how widely our natures differ. Fate did wisely in
separating us. I for my part on my travels through the world vainly
sought for a similar cloak which seemed to me to be the essence of all
that is beautiful. In France I once remarked at some distance the same
kind of checked stuff. I rushed after it, but found to my
disappointment that the wearer in no way resembled the lady of my
thoughts. Since that time I am inclined to believe that it was the
wearer and not the garment which haunted the dreams of my youth."
During this conversation the music had continued and the air in the
apartment became hot and oppressive. The young woman agitated her fan,
and inhaled with parted lips the refreshing breeze from it. She
reminded her friend of a remark he had once read in a French book on
the affinity existing between certain blue eyes, and certain glittering
teeth. He told her so. "You see," he continued, "how freely I take
advantage of the privilege of friendship, telling you every thought
which crosses my mind, I make up for my long silence, and you will not
take it amiss. Truly it seems that Providence intends to make me a good
husband and father as on the eve of the important step I am about to
take it relieves my mind from all anxiety regarding it. If I had not
met you, I should never, even in the midst of every domestic felicity,
have been able to rid myself of the fear that some day or other you
would appear, and turn my head as you did years ago. Now that you know
my intentions and that we have placed our friendship on a warm, and
steady footing, I can start on to-morrow's expedition in search of a
wife, with an easy heart."
They had both risen, and now admired the flowers. "How beautiful this
candelabra is," she remarked. "Fortuna subjected by man, and made to
give him light."
"I believe it to represent the goddess of victory. The ball on which
fortune glides from us, is wanting here, but Victory remains faithful
to the daring."
"In that case Victory by serving you on the eve of your expedition,
foretells you good luck."
"I see you doubt my courage Madam. Certainly you above all others have
a right to do so. But this time I hope to manage my affairs better than
I did fourteen years ago. I intend to challenge my fortune, be it good,
or bad, and force an answer from it. If she smiles on me, I promise you
that to you first, I shall be the herald of my heroic achievement. But
enough of myself as a topic; as yet you have told me nothing of your
own life, and how the years have passed with you. I could not muster
courage to make enquiries about you. After I heard that you were
married, I studiously avoided every place where tidings of you could
reach me. I am even unacquainted with the name of your husband. Will
you introduce me to him. He probably has accompanied you here?"
"I lost my husband seven years ago."
He started--"My son is all that is left to me," she resumed, "and I
must now part with him. He has become quite unruly from staying with my
mother in the country, and even if I could find a tutor who knew how to
manage him, I should be sorry to see him pass the merry time of youth
without any companions of his own age."
"I long to see him," he hastily said, without lifting his eyes from the
flowers in her hand. "So he has lost his father; poor child! When he
has grown up you must send him on a visit to me. I will take him out
hunting, give him my horses to ride, and if he should fall in love with
my daughter, why in that case the beginning and the end would once more
be united, although in a different manner from what I blind mortal,
once dreamt. Would you consent to the match Eugenie?" and he stretched
out his hand to her.
"With all due regard to the future father-in-law of my son," she
replied gaily. "I should wish first to see the young lady herself,
especially as you cannot even answer for her mother."
"Of course you must approve of the mother; I should never think of
marrying her, if she had the misfortune to displease you! The wisest
course would be!"--
The conversation was here interrupted by a young man, who hesitatingly
approached the embrasure of the window, with the intention of inviting
the lady to dance. She declined, alleging the fatigue of her night
journey as an excuse, and then she left the bower, and mingled with
the rest of the company. Valentine who had remained standing by the
palm-tree, watched her figure amongst the others, and now and then he
fancied he heard her voice. It appeared to him as if he had forgotten
some question of importance, and he tried to recall it to his mind. At
last he remembered that he ought to have enquired for her mother. He
went in search of her to repair his neglect but he could not find her
either in the saloon or in the adjoining rooms. She had disappeared.
* * * * *
It was on the second day after this meeting; a dense morning fog
still filled the street but the air above was clear, and promised a
sunny day, that in one of the rooms of the hotel, Eugenie sat at a
writing-table, an unfinished letter lying before her. Her folded hands
rested on the paper, and her thoughts strayed far away from the
contents of those lines.
Now and then when a step was heard in the passage, she started up, and
listened, but they always passed the door, and she remained alone.
Why did all her thoughts revert to the past, to that particular walk in
the garden where the sunflowers and china asters grew, and the small
fruit-trees threw long shadows across the cabbage beds. The sun was
shining through the high hedge but the air did not resound with the
song of birds. To-morrow when the day waned, she would be far away from
this homely spot, and when she returned, the fruit-trees would be bare,
and snow would cover the ground. The young student who walked by her
side and was digging holes in the gravel with the point of her parasol,
was fully aware of this. He had seen the travelling carriage in the
courtyard, and watched Frederick fastening the valise on the box. When
people start on a journey, who can tell if they will return, or at
least return the same as they went, Is it not expedient then to
exchange one's last bequests, especially if each is disposed to
bequeath body and soul to the other.
If he had but known how highly he ought to value her condescension in
leading the way to this remote and solitary corner of the garden. As
she walked along, she upbraided herself with having thus far made
advances to him. But she would not take a step further, now it was his
turn to forward matters, and if he did not, she would never forgive
herself for having done so much to loosen his tongue. For it had a high
opinion of the dignity of its sex, this young head of seventeen, and if
the unfortunate youth by her side, had choked with mute respect, she
would not have spoken a word to help him. Was not this walk
sufficiently secluded, and the sun at their backs; was it not the only
time she had ever walked with him in the kitchen garden, and above all,
had he not seen the travelling carriage in the yard.
On no account, however, was he to perceive that she had contrived all
this for his sake. She talked eagerly of the approaching journey,
expressed her pleasure at seeing her cousins again, and laughingly
described every one of them.
They had reached the end of the walk, and had looked over the hedge,
but he became more and more laconic. At last he quite ceased talking
and she too became silent. Feelings of passion and mortification rose
in her breast, and nearly choked her. Then she suddenly turned towards
him, and colouring deeply said: "Let us now go back; and give me my
parasol. I shall want it on my journey, and you will break it to
pieces. I must hasten home, as I still have many things to pack. Do you
know that I quite shudder when I think of how much my intellectual
refinement will retrograde during my absence. I shall hardly remember
the English kings in Shakespear's works, which you have taken so much
trouble to impress on my mind. It is a pity, but what can I do? My
cousins are not such pedants as you are. If I return--but who can tell
whether my aunt will not keep me through the winter. Well, it may be a
long time before we can resume our studies and if I pass my examination
badly, this long absence must plead for me."
More than a year passed before they met again--When the morning
arrived, the travelling carriage was ready to start and the ladies
sitting in it, he approached the door of it and offered a bouquet. The
mother accepted it with many thanks. Eugenie nodded gaily to him, and
gave him her gloved hand. He did not see her pale face, and swollen
eyes behind her thick veil. He closed the door and bowed. As the
carriage drove away, Frederic turned once more towards Valentine, and
across his honest face there passed an expression of pity for his less
fortunate rival.
This had been in autumn. When they returned in the middle of winter,
Valentine had left the town; he was occupied at a small court of
justice in the country. Only in the following summer he once again rang
the well known bell at the garden gate. On being told that the house
was full of visitors, cousins, and others who were strangers to him, he
charged the servant with a message that he would return another time;
but a cold bow from her mother whom he met in the streets next day,
showed him that he should not find all as he had hoped; so he never
returned.
Was his absence regretted? Who could solve the enigma on Eugenie's pale
face, when three years later, she married the man her mother had chosen
for her. But now when her thoughts wandered back from the letter before
her to those days of old, the words of a pensive song resounded in her
heart: "There was a time when happiness was mine to give and take
etc."----
The clattering of swift hoofs was now heard in the street, and she flew
to the window. A horseman on a beautiful grey Arab galloped through the
thick fog which closed behind him. Clouds of steam arose from the
reeking nostrils of the horse.
With an agitated glow in her eyes, she watched the proud and manly
bearing of the rider, and the ease with which he managed his restless
horse.
What a difference between this chivalrous firmness, and the soft
pensive manner of his youth. Still she had recognized at their first
meeting, that his heart had lost none of its fresh bloom; it was
developed not changed. Had he this time divested himself of his former
timidity, and spoken the binding words? She shuddered at the thought.
Rapid steps were now heard ascending the stairs. Her habitual
self-command did not forsake her, and when Valentine entered the room,
her face was calm in spite of the quick beating of her heart. She met
him with a smile, and offered him her hand. "Good morning," she said:
"so you have kindly kept your promise! The triumphant prancing of your
horse has already apprised me that you return crowned with success."
"Eugenie," he replied, "you must highly value my visit of to-day, for I
have made it in spite of my conviction that you will have a good laugh
at my expense. My only acquisition by yesterday's expedition is this
horse which I paid for in ready money, and this apple which I stole."
And he laid a fine wax-like apple on the table. "I do not hold the
booty obtained by your campaign so very despicable. I understand
nothing about horses, but as you doubtless obtained the apple from the
hands of your chosen one"----
"If I had but reached that point," he resumed despondingly; "the rest
would be easy enough. You are greatly mistaken, however, if you are
inwardly accusing me of having been again wanting in courage. It was
the superfluity of it which in this case hindered my success. Upon my
word, I would, without the slightest hesitation, have made a
declaration to each of the three young ladies, one after the other."
"What a pretty disaster you would have caused." "I never expected
anything of you but an ironical pity. Still--you may judge from this
how thoroughly perplexed I am--I turn to you for help."
"You expect more of me than with the best intentions I can give you."
"Ah, but you can help me Eugenie. Now listen and I will give you an
account of it all. My friend, and I spent a whole day in their
company."
"That is either a very long, or a very short time as you take it."