Countess Erika's Apprenticeship Part 3

"No?" her husband rejoined, with easy a.s.surance. "I surely wrote you about it; or could the trifle have slipped my memory? Yes, now I remember you were with the children at Johannisbad. Lowy came and pestered me with its being such a splendid chance,--told me I had no right to hold back; and so I bought a hundred shares of Schonfeld.'

Good heavens! what do I understand of business?--how is such knowledge possible for a gentleman? In the army one never learns anything of the kind, and what can one do save follow advice? I trust others far too readily,--you have always told me so; it is the natural result of the magnanimity of my nature. I blame myself for it. I am an Egmont,--a perfect Egmont. Poor Egmont! There is nothing left for me but to sigh with him, 'Ah, Orange! Orange!'"

Strachinsky imagined that this confession, uttered with an indescribably tragic emphasis, would quite reconcile his wife to his unfortunate speculation. But, to his great surprise, the antic.i.p.ated result did not ensue. Frau von Strachinsky pushed her thick dark hair back from her temples, and exclaimed, "I cannot understand you; you promised me so faithfully not to speculate in stocks again."

"But, my dear Emma, the opportunity seemed to me so brilliant a one, that I should have thought myself a very scoundrel not to try at least----"

"And you see the result."

"When a man acts conscientiously and with the best intentions, he should not be reproached, even although his efforts result in failure,"

he said, pompously. "No, my dear Emma, not a word; do not speak now: you will only be sorry for it by and by."

But Emma Strachinsky was not on this occasion to be thus silenced: she was indignant, and almost in despair. "You have always acted with the 'best intentions'!" she exclaimed, hoa.r.s.e with agitation, "and the result of your good intentions will be to beggar my children. Can you take it ill if I withhold from you my few farthings, that there may be some provision for the children in the future?"

Jagello von Strachinsky looked her over from head to foot. "_Your_ few farthings!" he said, with annihilating severity. "What indelicacy!

Well, I shall steer my course accordingly. Do as you choose in future.

I have nothing more to say." And, with head haughtily erect, cavalier and martyr every inch of him, he stalked from the room.

She looked after him: she had gone too far; again her impulsiveness had led her astray. Her heart throbbed; she felt sore with agitation, shame, and remorse.

When Erika, towards evening, was playing hide-and-seek with her little brother in the garden, she saw her mother and her step-father strolling affectionately along the gravel path between the hawthorn bushes. He was already rather bald; his limbs were loosely knit; he wore full whiskers, and there was a languishing glance in his eyes, but he was still handsome, in spite of a dissipated air; she was tall, slender, and erect, with large dark eyes, and a pale, n.o.ble countenance, that could never, however, have been beautiful. They walked close together, and to a casual observer presented an ideal picture of happy wedded life. And yet when one observed more narrowly--his arm was thrown around her shoulder, and he leaned upon her instead of supporting her; the swing of his heavy frame, the languishing, sentimental expression of his face, everything about him, bespoke a self-satisfied, luxurious temperament; while she----in her eyes there was restless anxiety, and her figure looked as though it were slowly being bowed to the ground by a burden which she was either unable or afraid to shake off.

She walked with a patiently regular step beneath her heavy load.

Suddenly she seemed uneasy: she shivered.

"What is it, darling?" Strachinsky asked her, clinging still closer to her.

"Nothing," she murmured, "nothing," and walked on.

They were pa.s.sing the spot where the little brother and sister were playing, and in the gathering twilight Emma Strachinsky became aware of a pair of clear dark-brown childish eyes that seemed to ask, "How can she love that man?"

Those childish eyes were positively uncanny!

The child's dislike dated from far in the past; it was in fact the first clearly formulated emotion of her little heart. During the first years of her second marriage the mother, prompted by an exaggerated tenderness, had concealed from her little daughter as long as possible the fact that Strachinsky was not her own father: the child had learned the truth by accident. When she rushed to her mother to have what she had heard confirmed, she was received with the tenderest caresses, as though she were to be consoled for a great grief, while she was entreated not to be sad, and was told that "'papa' was far too good and kind to make any difference between herself and his own children, that he loved her dearly," etc.

The mother's caresses were highly prized by the child, all the more that they were rather rare, but on this occasion she could not even seem to enjoy them, since she could not endure to be pitied and soothed for what brought her in reality intense relief.

Her mother perceived this, and it angered her, although at the same time the child's evident though silent dislike made a deep impression upon her. Perhaps the consciousness of its existence in so frank and childish a mind first gave occasion to distrust of the terrible infatuation to which the gifted woman's entire existence had fallen a sacrifice.

Frau von Strachinsky was wont to go herself every evening to see that all was as it should be in the large airy apartment where both the children slept. She hovered noiselessly from one bed to the other, signing the cross upon the brow of each,--an old-fashioned custom to which she still clung although she had long since adopted very philosophical views with regard to religion,--and giving each sleeping child a tender good-night kiss.

The evening after her return she went to the nursery at the usual hour, but lingered only by the crib of the sleeping boy, pa.s.sing her daughter's bed with averted face. Rika sat up and looked after her; her mother had reached the door without once looking back. This the child could not endure. She sprang out of bed, ran to her mother, and seized her by her skirt. "Mother! mother!" she cried, in a frenzy, "you will not go without bidding me good-night?"

"Let go of my gown," Frau von Strachinsky replied, in a cold voice, which nevertheless trembled with emotion.

"But what have I done, mother?" the child cried, clinging to her pa.s.sionately.

"Can you ask?" her mother rejoined, sternly.

"Why should I not ask? How should I know what he has told you? I was not by when he accused me."

"Erika! is that the way to speak of your father?" her mother said, angrily.

The little girl frowned. "He is not my father," she declared, defiantly.

Frau von Strachinsky sighed. "Your ingrat.i.tude is shocking," she exclaimed, and then, controlling herself with an effort, she added, "But that I cannot alter: you are an unnatural, hard-hearted, stubborn child. I cannot soften your heart, but I can insist that you conduct yourself with propriety, and I forbid you once for all to run after vagabonds in the street. And now go to bed."

"I will not go to bed until you bid me good-night!" cried the child.

She stood there with naked little feet, in her white night-gown, over which her long reddish-brown hair hung down. "And I was not so naughty as you think. You ought not to condemn me without giving me time to defend myself."

The child was so desperately reasonable, her mother could not think her wrong, in spite of her momentary anger. She paused. An idea evidently occurred to the little girl. "Only wait one minute!" she exclaimed, as she flew across the room to a drawer where she kept her toys, and, returning with her _protege's_ water-colour sketch, held it up triumphantly before her mother's eyes. "Look at that!" she cried.

Involuntarily Emma looked. "Where did that come from?" she exclaimed, forgetting her vexation in freshly-aroused interest.

"Do you know who it is?" asked Erika, stretching her slender neck out of the embroidered ruffle of her night-gown.

"Of course; it is your picture. It is charming. Who did it?"

"The vagabond whom I ran after, the house-painter fellow," Erika replied. "At least you can see he was not _that_, but a young artist."

Her mother was silent.

"Ah, if you had only been at home!" the child's bare feet were growing colder, and her cheeks hotter with excitement, "you would have done just as I did. If you had only seen him! He was very handsome, and so pale and thin and weary with hunger,--why, _I_ could have knocked him down,--and he never begged,--he was too proud,--only held out the portfolio to papa, and his hand trembled----" Suddenly the excitable temperament which the girl had inherited from her mother a.s.serted itself, and she began to sob, her whole childish frame quivering with emotion. "And papa turned him out of doors, and told the cook--to give--to give him two kreutzers. He threw them away--and then--then I ran after him!"

Frau von Strachinsky had grown very pale; the child's agitated story had evidently made an impression upon her, but she did her best to preserve a severe demeanour. "But it is very improper to run after strangers in the street; you are too old."

Erika hung her head, ashamed. "But I should not have done it if papa had not abused him," she declared, by way of excuse. "I did it out of pity for him."

"Pity is a very poor counsellor." Her mother said these words with an emphasis which Erika never forgot, and which was to echo in her soul years afterwards. Then she extricated herself from the child's embrace and left the room, closing the door behind her.

A few minutes afterwards she reopened the door. Little Erika was still standing where she had left her.

"Go to bed," said her mother, in a far more gentle tone, stooping down to kiss her, "and be a better girl another time."

The child clasped her slender little arms tightly about her mother's neck in a strangling embrace, crying, "Oh, mother, mother, you do love me still?" The pale woman did not answer the question, save by a kiss; she waited until the little girl had crept back to bed, and then tucked in the coverlet about her shoulders, and once more left the room.

Erika, precocious child that she was, was a prey to emotions of a very mingled character. She had won a great victory over her step-father,--of this she was well aware,--but then she had grieved her mother sorely. All at once she was seized with profound remorse in recalling to-day's stroke of genius. Beneath her mother's severity she had been sure of having right on her side; now a great uncertainty possessed her. "It is very improper to run after strangers in the street; you are too old," she repeated, meekly, and she grew hot. "What would my mother think if she knew that I had kissed him?"

In the midst of her distress she was overpowered by intense fatigue: her eyelids drooped above her eyes, and with her nightly prayer still on her lips she fell asleep.

Emma von Strachinsky did not sleep; she sat in the bare room adjoining the nursery, the room where she taught Erika her lessons. She wrote two very difficult letters to her husband's creditors, and then proceeded to sew upon a gown for her daughter. She was proud of the child's beauty as only the mother can be who has all her life long been conscious of being obliged to forego the gift of beauty for herself.

She loved her daughter idolatrously,--the daughter whom she often treated with a severity verging upon injustice, and whom she sometimes avoided for days because the glance of those clear eyes troubled her.

The windows of the room were open, and looked out upon the road. The fragrance of ripened grain was wafted in from the earth outside, resting from its summer fruitfulness and saturated with the August sunshine. A song floated up through the silent night: the reapers were working by moonlight. The low murmur of the brook accompanied the song, and now and then could be heard the soft swish of the grain falling beneath the scythe. A cricket chirped.

Emma dropped her hands in her lap and gazed into vacancy.