Countess Erika's Apprenticeship Part 22

But she interrupted him hurriedly: "No, no; I have been aware of nothing,--nothing at all."

She trembled violently, and turned into a broad road, where a gay cavalcade came cantering towards her,--the Princess Dorothea and her train of several gentlemen.

"Turn to the right," called Goswyn, and the cavalcade pa.s.sed, the dust raised by their horses enveloping everything like a misty cloud.

Erika coughed slightly. "Good heavens! perhaps he understood, and will save me from replying," she thought.

But no, he did not save her from replying.

"Well, Countess Erika?" he began, after a short pause, gently, but very firmly.

"Wha--what?" she stammered.

"Will you be my wife?"

She gasped for breath: never could she have believed that she should find it so hard to refuse an offer. But accept it--no; something within her rebelled against the thought--she could not.

"N--no. I am very sorry," she stammered, every pulse throbbing wildly.

She was terribly agitated as she glanced timidly up at him. Not a muscle in his face moved.

"I was prepared for this," he murmured.

"Thank G.o.d, he does not care very much!" she thought, taking a long breath; and the next moment--nay, even that very moment--she was vexed that he did 'not care very much.'

They had reached the railway bridge, beneath which they were wont to turn into the grand avenue for a final gallop. For a moment she contemplated sacrificing to her rejected suitor this gallop, the crown and glory of their daily ride. She reined in her horse.

"No gallop?" he asked, as if nothing had pa.s.sed between them, except that his voice was still a little hoa.r.s.e.

"Oh, if you will. I only thought----" she stammered.

He replied with the chivalric courtesy with which he always treated her, "I am entirely at your service."

For a moment she hesitated; then, with a touch of the whip on her steed's right shoulder, she started.

"Oh, how glorious!" she exclaimed, as they turned just before reaching the pavement. "Shall we not have one more?"

And so they rode twice up and down the grand avenue. The air was clear and cool, and there was in it the fragrance of freshly-planed wood, coming from a large shed that was being erected on one side of the avenue for an exhibition of horses.

Years afterwards Erika could never recall that ride and her miserable cruelty without again perceiving that peculiar fragrance.

The young man was in direful plight. Whatever he might say, he had not been prepared for this. The last few days had been pa.s.sed by him in a state of blissful agitation in which, try as he might, he could not torment himself with doubts. He had fallen from an immense height, and he was terribly bruised. In spite of all his self-control, he began to show it. Erika grew more and more depressed, glancing sympathizingly aside at him from time to time. Now she would far rather that he had not cared so much. Evidently she did not herself know what she really wished.

They trotted along side by side; then just as they turned into Bellevue Street he heard a low distressed voice say,--

"Herr von Sydow--I would not have you think that--that--I--intended to say that to you. I so value your friendship--I should be so very sorry to lose it--and--and----" She threw back her head slightly, and, looking him in the face from beneath the stiff brim of her riding-hat, she said, with a charming little smile, "Tell me that all shall be just as it has been between us."

"As you please, Countess Erika," he replied, unable to restrain a smile at this novel way of treating a rejected suitor.

When he lifted her from her horse shortly afterwards, he just touched her gray riding-glove with his lips; she looked kindly at him, and as he gazed after her from the hall as she ascended the staircase she turned her head to give him a friendly little nod.

His heart grew lighter; he would not take too seriously her rejection of his suit; it was not final. "After all," he thought, "in spite of her precocious intelligence she is but a charming, innocent child; and that is what makes her so bewitching."

The sunlight gleamed on the gilded tops of the iron railings of the front gardens in Bellevue Street, upon the leaves of the trees, and upon the long line of red-painted watering-carts stretching away in perspective like the beads of a huge rosary. The heat was already rather oppressive in Berlin. But Goswyn was robust, and sensitive neither to heat nor to cold. His ride with Erika was but the beginning of his daily exercise, and he trotted off to finish it.

In the Charlottenburg Avenue he encountered the same cavalcade he had seen before in the Thiergarten in the midst of his declaration to Erika. Thanks to her agitation, the girl had recognized none of the party, but he had bowed to his sister-in-law and her esquires. Now she beckoned to him from a distance, and called, "Goswyn!"

She was considerably taller and more slender than Erika, but she looked well in the saddle. Her gray-green eyes sparkled with malicious mockery from beneath the brim of her tall hat. "Goswyn," she cried, speaking with her accustomed rapidity in her high piercing voice and with her strange lisp, "you were just now made the subject of a wager."

"But, Thea," Prince Nimbsch interrupted his cousin, "we none of us agreed to wager with you."

"What was it about?" asked Goswyn, with a most uncomfortable presentiment that some annoyance threatened him.

The three men with Dorothea looked at one another; Dorothea giggled. At last Prince Nimbsch said, "My cousin wished to wager that the Countess Erika would be wooed and won this spring."

"Oh, no," Dorothea interrupted him; "that was not it at all. I wagered that you had been refused by Erika this morning in the Thiergarten, Gos. Helmy would not believe me; but I have sharp eyes."

She said it still giggling, with the wayward insolence of a spoiled child, not consciously cruel, who for very wantonness pulls a beetle to pieces. "Am I not right?" she persisted.

The men turned away as men of feeling would turn away from beholding an execution.

There was a red cloud before Goswyn's eyes, but he maintained his outward composure perfectly. "Yes, Dorothea, I have been rejected," he said, and the words sounded oddly distinct in the midst of the absolute silence of the little group, surrounded as it was by the bustle and noise of the capital. "May I ask what possible interest this can have for you?"

"Oh," she laughed still more insolently, ready as she always was to exaggerate her ill-breeding when she was tempted to be ashamed of it,--"oh, I only wanted to make sure I was right. Helmy contradicted me so positively, declaring that a man like you never could be rejected. Aha, Helmy! Well, the other Berlin men will be glad!"

"And why?" Goswyn asked, with the unfortunate persistence in pursuing a disagreeable subject often shown by strong men who would fain establish their lack of sensitiveness.

"Why? Because you are a dangerous rival, Goswyn," cried Dorothea. "Do you suppose that you are the only one to covet the hand of the heiress?"

For a moment Goswyn felt as if a naming torch had been hurled in his face. He grew giddy, but, still maintaining his self-control, he simply rejoined, "Dorothea, there are circ.u.mstances in which your s.e.x is an immense protection," and then, turning with a bow to the three men, he galloped off in an opposite direction.

Dorothea still giggled, but she turned very pale; her companions, on the other hand, were scarlet.

"Ride home with whomsoever you please: I am ashamed to be seen with you!" Prince Nimbsch said, angrily; and he hurried after Sydow. But when he overtook him the two men looked at each other and were silent.

At last Nimbsch began, "I only wanted to say----"

Goswyn interrupted him: "There is nothing to be said;" and there was a hoa.r.s.e tone in his voice that pained the young Austrian. "I know you to be a gentleman, Prince, and that you consider me one. There is nothing to be said."

Before the Prince could say another word, Goswyn was well-nigh out of sight.

Two hours afterwards Goswyn von Sydow might have been seen on a horse covered with foam galloping over the sandy hilly tracts of land by which Berlin is surrounded. He had never bestowed a thought upon Erika's wealth: now he felt that he never could forget it. He had been robbed of all ease in her society. It was all over.

CHAPTER X.

If Erika could have known anything of the unpleasant scene in Charlottenburg Avenue, her warm-hearted indignation would immediately have developed into vigour the germ of affection for Goswyn that already, unknown to herself, slumbered in her heart. She would certainly have committed some exaggerated, irresponsible act, which would have overthrown at a blow Goswyn's rudely-aroused, tormenting pride. She never could have borne to have another inflict upon him pain or humiliation. The entire disagreeable complication would have come to a crisis in a most touching scene, and in the end two people absolutely made for each other would have been sitting hand clasped in hand on the lounge beneath the fan-palms in Countess Lenzdorff's drawing-room, conversing in low tones, and Erika would have arrived at the sensible and agreeable conviction that there could be nothing better in the world than to share the life of a strong, n.o.ble husband to whom she could implicitly confide her happiness. The problem of her life would have found its solution, and she would have been spared the perilous errors and hard trials awaiting her in the future.