Countess Erika's Apprenticeship Part 29

Erika arose, cold and courteous. "You wanted to tell me--what?" she asked, as she laid aside her book.

"That--that----" Erika's dry manner embarra.s.sed her a little, but after a pause she went on: "I wanted to tell you not to take any fancies into your head with regard to Goswyn."

"Fancies? Of what kind?" Erika asked, calmly, becoming absorbed in the contemplation of her almond-shaped nails.

"You would do him great injustice by supposing that his regard for you is one whit less than it ever was."

"Indeed! I should do him injustice?" Erika questioned in the same unnaturally quiet tone. "I think not. It is not my fashion to deceive myself. I know perfectly well that--that I have sunk in Goswyn's esteem; it is a very unpleasant conviction, I confess; and, to be frank, I would rather you did not mention the subject again."

"But, Erika, if you would only listen," the old Countess persisted. "He adores you. His pride alone keeps him from you: you are too wealthy; your social position is too brilliant."

Erika waved aside this explanation of affairs. "Say no more," she cried. "I know what I know! But you must not waste your pity upon me: my vanity is wounded, not my heart. I value Goswyn highly, and it troubles me that he no longer admires me as he did, but, I a.s.sure you, I have not the slightest desire to marry him. I pray you to believe this: at least it may prevent you, perhaps, from throwing me at his head a second time, without my knowledge. If you do it, I declare to you, I will reject him." As she uttered the last words, the girl's self-command forsook her, her voice had a hard metallic ring in it, and her eyes flashed angrily.

Her grandmother turned and left the room with bowed head.

Scarcely had the sound of her footsteps died away when Erika locked her door, threw herself upon her bed, buried her face in the pillows, and burst into tears.

What she had declared to her grandmother was in a measure true: she herself supposed it to be entirely true. She really had no wish to marry, and there was in her heart no trace of pa.s.sionate sentiment for Goswyn, but she was bruised and sore, and she longed for the tender sympathy he had always shown her. At times she would fain have fled to him from the cold judgment and scrutiny of the world.

After she had relieved herself by tears, she understood herself more clearly. Sitting on the edge of her bed, her handkerchief crushed into a ball in her hand, she said, half aloud, "I have lied to my grandmother. If he had come I would have married him,--yes, without loving him; but it would have been wrong: no one has a right to marry such a man as Goswyn out of sheer despair because one does not know in what direction to throw away one's life. But why think of it? He does not care for me. Why, why did my grandmother write to him? I cannot bear it!"

CHAPTER XVI.

A few days afterwards the Lenzdorffs left Berlin, to spend the winter in Rome, where Erika, incited thereto by her grandmother, went into society perpetually, without taking the least pleasure in it. And she made no secret of her indifference, her discontent. The bark of her existence, once so safe and sure in its course, seemed to have lost its bearings: she saw no aim in life worthy the effort to pursue it.

She indulged in fits of causeless melancholy; yet all the while her beauty bloomed out into fuller perfection, and all unconsciously to herself life throbbed within her and demanded its right. The old Countess, who did not understand her condition, looked upon it as a morbid crisis in the girl's life; but she never dreamed how fraught with danger the crisis was.

Thus she utterly failed to appreciate or to sympathize with her grand-daughter; and, whether because of her exaggerated admiration for her, or because her age was beginning to tell upon her powers of perception, she did not suspect the slow approach of the fever which had begun to undermine the young creature's existence.

Towards the end of February, just at the close of the Carnival, Erika told her grandmother that she was heartily tired of Rome, and wished to see Italy from some other point of view.

After much deliberation, Venice was chosen for their next abode; and here the old Countess refused to follow the usual custom of foreigners and rent a palazzo: she declared that in Venice true comfort was to be found only in a hotel. So a suite of rooms was hired in the Hotel Britannia,--four airy apartments, in which their predecessor had been a crowned head, and two of which looked out upon the church of Santa Maria della Salute, whilst the other two had a view of the small garden of the hotel, and, across its low wall, of the Grand Ca.n.a.l.

Of course they had a gondola for their own private use; but Erika was not fond of availing herself of it. The rocking motion, the monotonous plash of the water, excited still further her irritated nerves; she preferred taking long walks,--at first, out of deference to her grandmother's wishes, accompanied by the maid Marianne. She soon tired, however, of such uncongenial companionship, and induced her grandmother to allow her to pursue alone her investigations of the corners and by-ways of Venice. She explored the curiosity-shops, spent whole days in the galleries, and made wonderful discoveries in the way of bargains in old stuffs and artistic antiquities, until her little salon became a museum of such treasures. In one corner stood a grand piano, seated at which at times she poured out her soul in all that is most beautiful and most tragic in music.

The old Countess left her to pursue her own path, and occupied herself very differently.

In spite of her original and independent view of life, and her readiness to criticise frankly all that was artificial and conventional, she loved _les chemins battus_. She went the way of the mult.i.tude,--saw nothing of Venetian by-ways, but devoted her time to museums and works of art, being indefatigable in her daily round of sight-seeing. And yet, although her health seemed as robust as ever, and she could apparently endure far more fatigue than her grand-daughter, she was no longer what she had been.

Her extraordinary memory began to fail, and the interest which formerly had been excited only by affairs of some moment was now ready to be aroused in petty concerns. She took pleasure in gossip, allowed Marianne to detail to her sc.r.a.ps of the Venetian _chronique scandaleuse_ picked up from the couriers in the hotel, and, worst of all, the fine edge of her moral sentiment seemed in a degree blunted.

She would repeat to Erika, without the slightest idea of the pain she was inflicting, stories and reports of a nature to offend the girl's sense of morality and delicacy.

Nothing any longer shocked her: love and hatred of her kind seemed blunted under the influence of a low estimate of human nature which she called a philosophic view of life.

She simply never observed how Erika's cheeks burned when she suddenly disclosed to her the lapse from virtue, hidden from the superficial world, of some woman whom they had met in society; she never perceived the girl's feverish agitation upon hearing her grandmother calmly advance all sorts of excuses for the so-called indiscretion. She did not suppose her revelations could affect Erika disagreeably; although Erika did not always allow her to talk on without interruption; she would sometimes bluntly declare that she could not believe what her grandmother thus told her.

Then the old Countess would reply, "I really cannot see what reason you have to disbelieve it. You cannot alter human nature by shutting your eyes to its defects."

Whereupon Erika would say, with annihilating emphasis, "If human nature really is what you describe it, I cannot understand your pleasure in frequenting society, since you must despise unutterably those who compose it."

"Despise!" her grandmother repeated, shaking her head. "I despise no one. Knowing, as I do, how mankind struggles under the burden of animal instincts, I wonder to see it ever rise above them, and I am forced to esteem men in spite of everything."

Erika only repeated, angrily, "Esteem! esteem!" Her grandmother's mode of esteeming mankind was certainly extraordinary.

CHAPTER XVII.

The Princess Dorothea was pacing her salon restlessly to and fro. From time to time she gazed out of the window into the dreary Berlin March weather, upon the heaps of dirty snow shovelled up on each side of the street and slowly melting beneath the falling rain.

The Princess was annoyed. She had been left out in the invitation to a court ball. Usually she would have ascribed the omission to an oversight of the authorities, but to-day the matter disturbed her: instead of an oversight she suspected the omission to have been an intentional slight, and her steps as she walked to and fro were short and impatient.

Why were they so frightfully moral in Berlin, so aggressively moral?

she asked herself. Everywhere else people might do as they chose, if only appearances were preserved.

What had she done, after all? Long ago in Florence Feistmantel had explained to her that marriage, as arranged in civilized countries, was entirely unnatural. The Princess, still pure, in spite of the degradation about her, had laughed aloud at the philosophic view thus advanced by her companion and guide. Years afterwards she had recalled this theory that it might serve to justify herself to herself; and lately--only yesterday--Feistmantel, who was established in Berlin and gave music-lessons in the most aristocratic circles, had enunciated the same views at a breakfast to which Dorothea had invited her, and the Princess had contradicted her positively, had been rude to her, had nearly turned her out of doors, but at the last moment had apologized almost humbly and had finally dismissed her with a handsome present.

She had suspected behind Feistmantel's a.s.sertion of her philosophic view a mean attempt to ingratiate herself with her hostess. "As if Feistmantel could suspect anything! No human being can suspect anything," she repeated several times. "And, after all, there is scarcely a woman, beautiful and admired, who is not worse than I."

In the midst of all her superficiality and moral recklessness, she had always been characterized by a certain frankness, which at times had pa.s.sed the bounds of decorum; now she writhed under a burden of hypocrisy which weighed most heavily upon her.

And why was this so?

It had all been the gradual result of the tedium of the life she led. A man more coa.r.s.e and rough than any of her other admirers had paid court to her in a way that flattered her vanity; he amused her, he brought some variety into her life; his lavishness was astounding. Once when he had lost a wager to her he brought her a diamond necklace in an Easter egg.

She knew that this was wrong, but she had been wont as a girl to accept presents from men, and then she had an almost morbid delight in diamonds. And what stones these were!--a chain of dew-drops glittering in the morning sun! And he had so careless a way of throwing the costly gift into her lap, as if it had been the merest trifle.

She could not resist wearing the necklace once at the next court ball,--explaining to her husband, who understood nothing of such things, that she had purchased it for a mere song at a sale of old jewelry.

She intended to return it; but she did not return it. From that moment he had her in his power. He lured her on as a serpent lures a bird, extorting from her one innocent concession after another, until one day---- Good G.o.d! if she could but obliterate the memory of that day!

To call the torment which she suffered from that time stings of conscience would be to invest it with ideality. No, she felt no stings of conscience; her moral sense was entirely blunted; but she was enraged with herself for having fallen into the snare; her pride was humbled in the dust, and she was in mortal dread of discovery. She was a coward to the core. What would she not have given to be free? She would have broken with her lover ten times, but that she feared him more than she did her husband.

He was a Russian, fabulously wealthy, and notorious in the Parisian demi-monde which he habitually frequented. Orbanoff was his name, and outside of his own country he was credited with princely rank to which he had no t.i.tle,--a man with no moral sense, brutal on occasion, with no idea of the laws of honour prevailing in Western Europe, but of an undoubted physical courage, which helped him to maintain his present position.

Princess Dorothea was convinced that should she break with him he would commit some reckless, impossible crime.

Oh, if he would only release her! She began to build castles in the air. Never, never again would she be concerned in such an adventure.

All the romances that she had read were lies: there was nothing in the world more hateful than just this. Only once in her life had she been conscious of any real preference for a man, and that had been for her cousin Helmy; now of all men her own clumsy, thoroughly honourable and intensely good-natured husband was the dearest. He was at present on his estate in Silesia, where he was much happier than in the society of the capital. Dorothea had made him so uncomfortable in Berlin that he always stayed as long as possible in Silesia.