Part 3

And for the first time in my life I saw mamma angry. Turning to Mme. Duphot, who was courtesying to the ground, she haughtily inquired why I was not wearing my spring costume; and as she passed on we caught the words, “Really, these governesses are insupportable.” And I--I could have wept for pity over my poor Duphot, and for shame over myself; wept--but sparks of fire, like Shakspere’s Queen, of whom, by the by, I knew nothing in those days.

For three whole days we did not dare present ourselves in the Prater.

So I grew up.

Year by year my parents prolonged their stay at Trostburg, until they have got to spend the whole of the summer there. My dear mother’s life is now passed in good works. She treats the sick folk of the village homeopathically, and has already effected some marvelous cures among them. She has founded a _crèche_, and a house of correction, where the lazy are to be made to work, and the ne’er-do-wells to be kept under stern discipline. Nothing could be more practical; the pity is that one cannot force the people to go into it; and, left to their own choice, they prefer to stay away.

My Duphot is in her element.

She accompanies mamma twice daily to church, reads religious books aloud to her, and prepares homeopathic dilutions.

Meanwhile I am papa’s companion--and he is such a dear! We take long rides together. At first we used to follow the hounds, and he was delighted when I shot a hare--more delighted than I was. As far as I am concerned, hares might have free lease of their lives to the detriment of any number of plantations and cabbages. Last autumn something happened that forever put me out of conceit with hunting. The preserves were to be thinned, and some of the chamois to be shot. Papa, who had to leave home on a short absence, entrusted the commission to me, thinking I should thoroughly enjoy the task, and I had not the courage to tell him that it would be anything but an enjoyable one to me.

So, accompanied by the head ranger and my good gun, I sallied forth one afternoon into the peaceful shade and green depths of the deer park. Along the moss-grown path, whence I had so often heard the rustle of the herds going down to water, we came to the pond, skirted it, and saw, through a break on the other side, a young chamois just emerging from the wood on the slope. Stretching her slender neck, she snuffed the air and came slowly forward.

“That’s what we want, the female,” whispered the ranger. “Take steady aim--fire!”

His lips trembled with eagerness, his old gray eyes looked mistrustfully at me. As for me, an ice-cold thrill ran through me as, raising my gun in feverish haste and nervously pulling the trigger, I was only conscious of having taken aim. There was a report. “A dead hit!” exclaimed the ranger triumphantly, and ran forward. I slowly followed, my heart beating so loudly I could not run.

“Shot in the heart!” cried the old forester from afar. “A crack shot! Could not have been better.”

Intoxicated at my success he wildly waved his hat, then begged mine that he might stick a pine twig in it. While thus engaged, and I standing there gazing with wide-open eyes at the pretty young creature lying prone, its graceful head thrown back, there appeared on the verge of the wood a tiny kid.

“Good Heavens, Bayer!” I exclaimed. And looking up, the ranger cried:

“My word! had she got a little one! If I had only known it!”

Meanwhile the young one came confidingly and fearlessly up to us. Surely if mother could lie so quietly on the grass by those people they would do it no harm, it thought, and began pushing its mother with its moist shining nose, and then quietly to drink in its last nourishment from the accustomed source; and when no more would come, not one drop, left off trying, and stood up looking inquiringly at its mother and at us, looking as innocently as only an animal can look.

The ranger, taking it up in his arms, carried it home. It had the warmest corner in the pine plantation given to it; a little hut was built for it, with a soft bed of moss and hay. I have spent whole days by it. Never in all my life did I desire anything so ardently as that it should grow used to me and not be afraid of me. But trustful in freedom, timid and full of mistrust in confinement, it never grew used to me, never lost its dread of me--it died.

When my dear father came home I told him I never would go shooting again. He laughed; and in my excitement I cried:

“You ought not to desire it of me. If ever I married, and had a daughter who took pleasure in shooting any living creature, I should be utterly miserable.”

“Don’t talk such nonsense. You have grown quite idiotic, child. And,” he continued entreatingly, “and, above all, do talk in English.”

* * * * *

Now I am going to tell of my dear father. To describe him so accurately as that all who read these memoirs should seem to have his living presentment before them is beyond my power; I will only endeavor to portray him as he is, and, especially, as he is to me. He really often has occasion to find fault with me. I am either too noisy and too merry, or else too much in my own room reading. He says a learned woman is the greatest of all calamities. He looks upon learning as an importunate being ever ready to spring upon one unawares, on one’s making it the slightest advance. In vain do I try to comfort him with the assurance that I might know of the whole contents of my library by heart, and yet not have any pretensions to be a bluestocking.

“Heaven grant it!” is his answer. “A woman’s head should be in her heart. From her heart and disposition should come all her understanding.” He has said this so often to me, that I yesterday ventured to raise an objection.

“You tell me it must come; but it does not. There are things which even a woman cannot fathom from the mere depths of her temperament. So Baron Schwarzburg von Livland said lately; and I have not the least idea what he means, and my heart certainly has not told me.”

But I am anticipating events.

There is not a single handsome book in my library that papa himself has not given me; he, who is always inveighing against love of books. Handsome, I mean here, more with regard to exterior than to interior. But happy for me that there are handsome editions of books with irresistible illustrations. Happy for me that you have lived and sketched, Gustave Doré! To you I owe the pearl of my collection; to you is it due that my beloved father has grown almost into a bookworm--as much a bookworm, that is, as I can be called a bluestocking. The noble knight of La Mancha it was that conquered him. At first it was the illustrations which captivated him, and on their account I acquired the book. The unimportant text, though not even English, was, as it were, thrown in with the purchase. What a surprise it was to me! I had thanked him profusely for a picture book, and what a treasure had come into my possession! I could not keep my rapture in it for myself, and day by day as I read, I told the story to my father, and day by day his interest in Dulcinea’s knight grew warmer.

“What has the donkey been doing to-day?” he would ask, and for a while I suffered it to be “the donkey.” Not for long, though. Soon I laughed no longer; rather melted with sympathy, burned with admiration. I grew to love the man ever deceived, but ever believing; the knight so often worsted, but never vanquished; and declared to my father that I desired no better fortune than to meet with such a Don Quixote in real life, and become his wife. Then papa began to think I was getting too excited over it, and it would be well to change the course of my studies. And from that time he took to overlooking my reading, and got to do what he had never done before--to read. And it would have been impossible to see anything more beautiful than the expression of devotion and absorption in his noble Wallenstein-like countenance, in every fold of the fine brow, when thus engaged. Sometimes he heaves a deep sigh, and twists one side of his mustache so furiously that the point is all awry, his eyes get fixed, the eyelids red with the unwonted application. Then I can stand it no longer; I jump up, go to him, and giving him a light kiss on the shoulder, so light that he can pretend he does not perceive it, say:

“Shall we go for a walk, papa? I am quite stiff with sitting.”

“Upon my word, so am I,” he says, and it does me good to see how he straightens himself and draws in a free breath. But he does not immediately carry out my suggestion; the book-marker must first be deliberately placed in the page.

“So far”; he takes the perused pages between the palms of his hands. “Will it be too little for you?”

And I, unthinking, ungrateful as I can be, have so often thoughtlessly made reply, “Oh, much too little; why, it is hardly anything. You must let me read on further, papa.”

Closing the book, he slowly shakes his head, looks at me, considers a little, looks at me again, and then follows: “Do whatever you like!”

And I, before he can defend himself, rush into his arms.

“No, no, only what _thou likest_, not what _I like_, shall be done, now and always.”

“You might just as well have said that in English,” he answers.

“Oh, you dear good father of mine!”

* * * * *

Last year my sister, for the first time since her marriage, passed the winter in Vienna. Report said that her husband on the wedding journey had informed her that she should not set foot in the capital again until he had cured her of her “countess” ways.

He is a tall, cold, haughty man, who barely vouchsafes to utter twenty words in a day, even when most loquacious. It is difficult to know what his tastes are. The sole interests he seems to have are his palace, his equipages, his servants’ liveries, and his wife’s toilets; and that merely to show them off. She makes merry over it, and sometimes says very witty things about it; but I think she would do better if she were to say them to his face instead of behind his back. She has no children, to my sorrow; I should so love to be an aunt. It was decided that I was to come out at one of the balls my sister was to give in the course of the season. I had already been to several soirées the previous winter with papa during Lent; thus had a tolerably extended acquaintance with society folk, and had been mostly struck by the dead level of quality when taken in the quantity. At seventeen one begins to exercise one’s thinking powers, and my reflection had been: If one could disembody the souls of all these fine people and let them go free (the men especially), it would be a sheer impossibility to distinguish one from the other.

Their conversation was simply comical. I could tell off on my fingers the set questions: “Are you coming out next Carnival?” “Are you fond of dancing?” so often had they been put to me; and not a man among them had appeared to me to be one whit different from the crowd of others.

One morning I was informed that papa and mamma desired to see me in the small drawing room--style: Empire, white and gold.

Mamma was sitting upon the sofa, knitting woolen comforters for the Reformatory. With a dainty little white lace cap upon her head, and her white India cashmere morning dress, she looked like a queen or a saint. Papa was sitting beside her in an armchair, very erect and agitated, as could be easily seen from the blinking of his eyes, a trick he had when much moved. My Duphot, in her boundless diffidence, had chosen for her seat the smallest possible tabouret with the most slender of legs, and the effect of her corpulent person upon its ethereal support was killing.

“Will you be pleased to be seated?” my father asked, with forced gayety, and I took a chair as close as possible to my Duphot, so as to be at hand to lend my aid in the event of a catastrophe.

The faces of my parents grew more and more solemn. A sudden feeling of dread came over me, and I began to examine my conscience if perchance----It was clear, thank Heaven, else I should have felt very miserable.

My father looked expectantly at my mother.

“Caroline, will you have the kindness?”

“I thought that you meant to----” returned my mother.

“Oh, no, I beg you----” said he. And with an effort, and dropping her hands upon the comforter, my mother began:

“Paula, you are now grown up; nearly eighteen----”

“And look as if you were twenty,” added my father; to which my Duphot, making assent, becomes scarlet, and totters upon her treacherous seat.

My mother continues: “Next year, dear child, you are to go out into the great world.”

“Oh, yes; I am so glad, dear mamma.”

“You are glad because you do not know how poor and worthless are the pleasures which await you there, and how dearly bought.”

“Yes, yes,” put in papa, “and one should ask one’s self _cui bono_, what is the aim of it all?”

Mamma took up the argument. “None other than that of self-examination, and to enable one to arrive at the conclusion, _que le jeu ne vaut pas la chandelle_. Everyone plays at the game for a time, my dear Paula, because it is the correct thing to do.”

“Oh, and because it is amusing, mamma, and because one is young and loves gayety and dancing!”

She assented.

“But thinking persons cannot hide from themselves the consciousness of the hollowness of it all, and then they turn to the realities of life, often bitterly to repent of their wasted years. Now my question to you is: Were it not wiser to save yourself these wasted years, and to begin at once with the realities of life?”

“It is but a question,” interposed my father, in a tone of deepest affection, and I read in his words the silent refrain, “Do whatever you like.”

“Yes, certainly, it is but a question,” assented mamma.

And my Duphot echoed, “_Une question_,” while drops of perspiration stood out upon her forehead. Her trouble and agitation overcame me. I thought, “Great Heavens! what can they be meaning to do with me?” And seized with a sudden dread, I cried:

“Am I to go into a convent?”

Mamma smiled; papa laughed; Mme. Duphot blurted out: “_Tout au contraire!_”

I grew still more agitated. Suddenly it flashed across me. “Then I am going to be married!”

Papa patted me kindly on the shoulder. “You must surely have observed that one of the gentlemen introduced to you at your sister’s house has been paying you marked attention?”

“No, papa. I assure you I have not.”

“But he has conversed with you every evening; the last time he remained a full half hour in conversation with you.”

“Who is it?”

“Count Taxen.”

“A tall, dark man?”

“No, a fair young man, of middle height.”

At length I remembered. Of course, a fair young man, of middle height, had often come up to talk to me. About what? Had I been placed on the rack I could not have told, so completely had the subject of our various talks vanished from my memory.

Papa and mamma now imparted to me that he was an exceptionally delightful young man, the darling of his mother, who had never allowed him to be separated from her, and had brought him up with the strictest principles. My parents actually vied with each other in singing the count’s praises, and Mme. Duphot, with tears of emotion, exclaimed enthusiastically:

“_Quel bonheur, mon enfant!_”

The gate bell struck twice.

“They are coming,” said my mother; and my father gave, oh, such a loving look at me! I cannot describe it other, even had it been enveloped in ever so tyrannical a “You shall, you must!” than the old gentle, heart-stirring, tender, “Do whatever you like.” And my oppressed heart beat freely once more, my downcast courage revived; I even felt an irresistible longing to laugh; while Mme. Duphot, who had made a precipitate movement to rise from her tabouret--it had really belonged to Josephine’s _salon_--fell back upon it, and I said:

“Do take care; or you will go to pieces like the French Empire.”

“Child, child!” remonstrated my mother.

“And now, whatever you do, no display of bluestockingism,” added my father hurriedly, as the door was thrown open and the Countess Taxen and her son were announced.

* * * * *

And from that day forth they appeared regularly twice a week at three o’clock, to make their afternoon call; and, moreover, every Saturday I met the count at my sister’s. My parents treated him with marked attention. Mme. Duphot designated him “_un jeune homme accompli_.” Even my brother-in-law, whom I had never seen unbend before, did so to him. The countess never failed to tell me, in her conversations with me, that her son had never caused her an uneasy hour, and that she was to be esteemed the happiest of mothers. I should have gone contrary to the wishes of my dear ones, and of those whose opinion I valued, had I found the least objection to the state of things; and yet, withal, I felt the strongest inclination to do so, though without knowing why.

No formal proposal had been made. I was only told that the count was attracted by me; and that, through his mother, he had begged permission to become more nearly acquainted with me. It must, however, in his estimation, have been of far greater importance that I should know him than that he should know me, for his whole conversation was about himself, his mode of life, his habits, and tastes. He seemed especially to like to dilate upon his love of order, and the punctuality he exacted from his _entourage_. He graphically described to us his old historic castle, the arrangements of the apartments, the decorations of its halls and corridors. We heard less of the country where his estates were situated; of the people living about, not one word.

“And what about the neighborhood?” my sister asked one day. And Bernhard, my brother, home on leave, exclaimed:

“Bruno Schwarzburg must have lived somewhere in your vicinity before his troubles.”

Thus, on April 13, 1882, for the first time I heard the name afterward to be so dear to me. They began talking and laughing about him as a half-mad man, Bernhard constantly putting in, good-naturedly, “After all, he is a fine fellow!”

“Yes, with a bee in his bonnet,” returned the count. “He will never make his fortune, as I have often told him, even at the time he was doing the craziest thing of all and entering an action against himself.”

“How could he do that?” I asked. “How can anyone enter an action against himself?”

“Ah, how can one!” replied the count; “I don’t understand it, nor would any other man with a grain of common sense in his composition. His father, who left a heap of debts behind him, had had the foresight just before his death to hand over to his son, by deed of gift, the indisputable possession of a small capital. The father dead, the creditors seized upon everything--a set of miserable money-lenders, for the most part, who had been paid over and over again during the old baron’s lifetime. But one widow woman with five children----”

“Excuse me,” interrupted Bernhard, “one daughter, a blind girl.”

The count, who does not like to have his statements questioned, here said impatiently:

“My dear fellow, what does it matter? So this widow came off badly,” he resumed, turning to me. “‘Nothing is left,’ she was told when she presented her claim. ‘What do you mean--there is my money,’ says Bruno. ‘The creditors have no claim upon that,’ explains the lawyer, who was also Schwarzburg’s trustee. His father, I must explain, had taken the precaution to appoint a trustee, as Master Bruno had already shown signs of emulating his progenitor in the matter of squandering. So now he insists upon paying the widow’s claim; the trustee objects, and the upshot of it was a trial, in which Schwarzburg appeared as plaintiff against himself, and which he won by losing the little property he had.”

The laughter was general, and more things were told about the man whom they all seemed to look upon as an original.

But I thought to myself, all his mad pranks--and many were told of all kinds and descriptions--seem always to agree in two points; there is invariably a noble motive at the bottom of them, and he invariably comes off worst in them. So I remarked:

“This baron certainly seems to do any number of foolish things, but luck is very unkind to him.”

“That I cannot see,” returned the count; and I had already learned to know that those words, with him, meant, If I do not see a thing, it does not exist. “If I choose to do idiotic things, I have no right to call myself unlucky because I find myself on the wrong side of the hedge. Moreover, what people are so ready to call want of luck is, more often than not, want of sense. A common-sense man is rarely unlucky.”

Here Bernhard murmured half aloud, “Sickness, death, tempest.”

Again the irritation with which the count greets the most modest expression of opinion became evident--an irritation he seems incapable of checking--as he dryly observed:

“I insure against tempest.”

I felt a sudden exasperation against this child of fortune, who seemed so disposed to take to himself as individual merit the lavish gifts of Providence, and I rejoined:

“Had you had such a father as that of Baron Schwarzburg, who squandered away all the family property, you would have been unable to exercise that wise foresight, for you would have nothing left to you worth insuring.”

His mother crimsoned; my parents exchanged a concerned look, and I felt more than ever alarmed at my own temerity. The greatest of heroes experience a reflex fear, we are told; but there was nothing of the hero in me at that moment, only a rush of feelings of shame, embarrassment, and dread; and these wretched feelings rose like smoke, so to speak, from a still darker background--the knowledge that I had offended the count!