Countess Erika's Apprenticeship Part 5

The only ray of sunshine in the unhappy wife's gloomy lot was her little son. Out of several children by her second marriage he alone had survived. He was strong and healthy, the darling of all, his sister's idol. Then--he had hardly pa.s.sed his seventh birthday when he too died.

The little fellow had sickened in the midst of his play, had run to his sister and had fallen asleep with his head in her lap. The girl sat still, not to disturb him, and enjoined silence upon Miss Sophy, who was in the room. The twilight stole gray and vague in upon the bare apartment. The maid-servant--there were no longer any men-servants at Luzano--brought in a lamp, and a plate of rosy-cheeked apples for the children's supper. The boy opened his eyes, but closed them again with a low moan and turned his head away from the light.

His mother appeared, saw at a glance how matters stood, and put the little fellow to bed. She did not come down to supper, and when Erika went, as was her wont, to say good-night to her brother, she was not allowed to enter his room. The next morning the doctor was sent for.

Whilst he was in the sick-room Erika was taking her daily lesson in English with Miss Sophy, with no thought of any trouble. She was learning by heart her scene from Shakespeare, when her mother suddenly put her head in at the door and said, "Diphtheria!" The tone of her voice and the expression of her face were such as to terrify the girl.

But when Erika, trembling with dread, ran towards her, she waved her off and vanished.

Miss Sophy was established in the sick-room, which Erika was not allowed to enter. No one paid her any attention, and she spent hours forlornly watching at the end of a long gloomy corridor the door behind which so much that was terrible was going on. If she was seen she was sent away; but before long the entire household was too anxious to pay her the slightest heed.

It was about eleven in the forenoon of the fifth day since the first symptoms of the disease had appeared. Erika stood listening eagerly near the door, trembling with a sense of something vaguely terrible going on behind it. Suddenly it opened, and her mother staggered out, her dress disordered, her face distorted with agony, and supported by the little boy's nurse. Behind her came Strachinsky, his handkerchief at his eyes.

In absolute terror Erika looked after her mother, who pa.s.sed her by, even brushing her with her skirt, without seeing her. Then she entered the room which the wretched woman had just left. The bed was covered with a white sheet, which revealed the outline of the little form beneath it. The girl's heart throbbed almost to bursting. She lifted a corner of the sheet: there lay her little brother, dead, so white, and with his sweet face unchanged by disease. The little hands lay half open upon the coverlet, as though life had just slipped from them. A grace born of death hovered above the entire form. His sister gazed in tearless distress. She could not cry; she felt no definable pain, only a terrible heaviness in her limbs, and a weight upon her heart that almost choked her. She bent over the corpse to kiss it, when Miss Sophy rushed into the room, seized her by the arm, and thrust her out of the door.

Of course the first thing Erika did was to look for her mother. She found her in the morning-room, seated in a large arm-chair, quivering in every limb. Minna, the nurse, was moistening her forehead with cologne, but she seemed entirely unconscious. Her hands were folded in her lap, and her gaze was fixed on vacancy. Erika could not summon the courage to approach her.

Meanwhile, Strachinsky was pacing the room in long strides: his tears were already dried; every now and then he would pause and heave a profound sigh. At first Emma seemed not to notice him, but on a sudden she roused from her apathy, and, pa.s.sing her hand over her brow, with a feeble, wailing cry, she said, "For G.o.d's sake, stop, Nello!"

He paused, cleared his throat several times, took an English penknife from his pocket, began to pare his nails, and then went to his wife and stroked her cheek. She shrank from him involuntarily.

He groaned feelingly, left her, and went to the window: with one hand he stroked his whiskers, with the other he jingled the keys in his pocket.

After a while he began in an undertone, probably with the foolish expectation of distracting the wretched mother's thoughts, to detail what was going on outside, all in a melancholy, sentimental monotone, that would have set healthy nerves on edge. "Ah, see that little sparrow with a straw in its beak! it must be fitting up its winter nest."

Poor Emma sat bolt upright, except that her head inclined somewhat forward, and gazed at the man at the window.

Suddenly she uttered a short, shrill scream, and, pressing both hands to her temples, rushed out of the room.

When she had gone Strachinsky shrugged his shoulders, sighed as if gross injustice had been done him, and retired to his room to make a list of the names of all those whom he wished notified of the death.

The funeral took place the third day afterwards.

On that day they a.s.sembled at the dinner-table as on other days. The poor mother ate nothing, and Erika could scarce swallow a morsel. The tears which had refused to come at first were falling fast upon her new black gown.

Strachinsky ate, but after a while he too pushed his plate away. For the first time in her life his stepdaughter was conscious of an emotion of compa.s.sion for him. She thought that his grief had made eating impossible, when he cleared his throat, and, "This is intolerable," he whined; "at best I have no appet.i.te, and here is tomato sauce! You know I never eat tomato sauce."

His wife made no reply: she only looked at him with her strange new gaze, with eyes from which the last veil had fallen, and which were pained by the light. The look in those eyes would have made one shudder.

The clock in the castle tower struck one quarter of an hour after another, bringing ever nearer the time for the interment. The little body was already laid in the coffin. The coffin-lid leaned up against the wall. A fierce restlessness, the strained expectation of a certain moment which was to be the culmination of an intolerable misery, possessed Erika: she hurried from place to place, and at last ran after her mother, who had gone into the garden.

It was cold and stormy. The autumn had come late and suddenly. Some bushes had kept all their leaves, but they were blackened and shrivelled; others had retained only a few red and yellow leaflets that fluttered in the wind. The trees, on the other hand, were almost entirely bare. The naked boughs showed dark gray or purplish brown against the cloudy sky: the birches alone could still boast some golden-coloured foliage. On the moist gravel paths and the sodden autumn gra.s.s lay wet brown leaves mingled with those but lately fallen.

The asters and chrysanthemums, nipped by the first frost, hung their heads, and among all the autumnal decay the poor mother wandered about, seeking a few fresh flowers to lay in her dead child's coffin. With faltering steps, tripping now and then over the skirt of her gown, she tottered from one ruined flower-bed to another. The sharp autumn wind fluttered her dress and outlined her emaciated limbs. From her lips came a low moaning mingled with caressing words. She kissed the few poor flowers, frost-touched, which she held in her hand. Erika walked close behind her. Once or twice she stretched out her hand to grasp her mother's skirt, but withdrew it hastily, as if fearing to hurt her by even the gentlest touch.

Ten minutes afterwards the sharp strokes of a hammer resounded through the castle, and the unhappy woman was crouching in the farthest corner of her room, her hands held tightly to her ears.

In the night following the funeral Erika was waked from sleep by a low moan. She started up. By the vague light of early dawn, in which the windows were defined amid the darkness, she saw something dark lying upon the floor beside her bed. She cried out in terror, and then it stirred. It was her mother lying there upon the hard floor, where she must have been for some time, for when Erika touched her she was icy-cold. The girl took her in her arms and drew her into the soft warm bed beside her. Neither spoke one word, but their hearts beat in unison: all discord between them had vanished.

She had thrown off her burden; she breathed anew; she would stand erect once more. Then she discovered that a heavier burden yet, a fresh tie, bound her to the husband whom now, stripped of all illusion, she detested. The consciousness of this misfortune crept over her slowly; at first she would not believe it, and when she could no longer doubt, it seemed to her that her reason must give way.

Erika soon perceived that her mother's misery was not due alone to the loss of her child. No, that pain brought with it a tender and gentle mood. Another burden oppressed her, something against which her entire nature angrily rebelled, and under the weight of which she displayed a gloomy severity from which her daughter alone never suffered. Towards her since the boy's death Emma had shown inexpressible tenderness, and the girl, thirsting for affection, was never weary of nestling close in her mother's arms, receiving her caresses with profound grat.i.tude, almost with devout adoration. Sometimes the mother would smile in the midst of her grief as she stroked the gold-gleaming hair back from her child's pale face with its large dark eyes. "They do not see it," she would murmur, "but I see how pretty you are growing. Poor little Erika!

you have had a sad youth; but life will atone to you for it when I am no longer here."

"Do not say that!" cried the girl, clasping her mother in her arms. "As if I could endure life without you! Mother! mother!"

"You do not dream of what can be endured," her mother said, bitterly.

"One submits. Learn to submit; learn it as soon as may be. Do not ask too much from life; ask for no complete happiness: it is an illusion.

You, indeed, are justified in claiming more than your poor, ugly mother had any right to, my beautiful, gifted child!" She uttered the words almost with solemnity. Something of the romantic strain which had characterized her through every stage of her prosaic, humiliating existence came to light now in her worship of her daughter.

She strongly impressed Erika with the idea that she was an exceptional creature, and, although she was always admonishing her to expect nothing of life, she nevertheless gave her to understand that life was sure to offer something extraordinary for her acceptance. On the whole, in spite of the girl's grief at the loss of her little brother, she would have been happier than ever before had it not been for a growing anxiety with regard to her mother, whose health had entirely given way.

Whereas she had been wont from early morning until late at night to make her presence felt throughout the household and on the estate, grasping with a firm and skilled hand the reins which her husband had idly dropped, now she took an interest in nothing.

Erika was tortured by anxiety, an anxiety all the more distressing from the fact that she could not define her fears.

Towards her husband Emma displayed a daily increasing irritability. But his easy content was not at all disturbed by it. Thanks to a fancy which was ever ready to devise means for sparing and nourishing his self-conceit, he discovered a hundred reasons other than the true one for his wife's att.i.tude towards him. Her irritability was all due, so he informed Miss Sophy, to her situation. And in receiving Miss Sophy's admiring and compa.s.sionate homage he found, and had found for some time, his favourite occupation.

Emma now lived apart in a large room, which, besides her bed and wash-stand, was furnished only with a couple of book-shelves, two straight-backed chairs covered with horsehair, and a round tiled stove decorated with a rude bas-relief of a train of mad Bacchantes and bearing on its level top a large funeral urn. The boards of the floor were bare, and in a deep window-recess there was an arm-chair. In this chair the miserable woman would sit for hours, her elbows resting upon its arms, her hands clasped, staring into vacancy.

In the garden upon which this window looked the snow lay several feet deep; upon the meadow beyond, which sloped gently to the broad frozen river, and upon its icy surface, it was so deep that meadow and river were undistinguishable from each other; upon the dark pine forest that bounded the horizon--upon everything--it lay cold and heavy. All cold!--all white! Huge drifts of snow; no road definable; never a bird that chirped, never a leaf that stirred; all cold and white, without pulsation, without breath, dead,--the whole earth a lovely stark corpse.

And the wretched woman's gaze could fall upon naught outside save this white monotony.

Spring came. The dignified repose of death dissolved in feverish activity, in the restless change of seasons, vibrating between fair and foul, between purity and its opposite.

The earth absorbed the snow, except where in dark hollows it lingered in patches, to disappear slowly in muddy pools.

Emma still sat for hours daily in her room with hands clasped in her lap, but her eyes were no longer fixed on vacancy; they had found an object upon which to rest. Among the tender green of the meadows so lately stripped of their snowy covering, glided the river, dark and swollen. How loudly it exulted in its liberation from its icy fetters!

"Freedom!" shouted its surging waves,--"Freedom!"

Upon this river her gaze was now riveted.

Days pa.s.sed,--weeks; the air was warm and sweet; the window by which she sat was open, and the voice of the river was clear and loud.

One afternoon at the end of April the ploughs were creaking over the road, there was an odour of freshly-turned earth in the air, and the fruit-trees were already enveloped in a white mist.

The sun had set, and in the west the crescent moon hung pale and shadowy.

Erika was standing at the low garden wall, looking down across the meadow. Her youthful spirit was oppressed by anxiety so vague that she could neither define it nor struggle against it: she seemed to be blindly dragged along to meet the inevitable.

Her mother had to-day been especially tender to her, but sadder than ever before. She had talked as if her death were nigh at hand, and had spent a long time in writing letters.

On a sudden the girl perceived a dark object moving rapidly along in the warm damp evening air,--a tall figure in a black gown which fluttered in the south wind. It was her mother.

How quickly she strode through the high rank gra.s.s! how strange was her gait! Erika had never before seen any one hasten thus, with long strides, and yet falteringly as though borne down by weariness, on--on towards the dark-flowing river.

Suddenly the girl divined what her mother intended to do. She would have screamed, but for an instant her voice failed her, and in the next she was silent from presence of mind, the clear-sight of terror.

She clambered over the low wall and flew after her mother, her feet scarcely touching the ground, her breath coming in painful gasps.