Countess Erika's Apprenticeship Part 51

For a moment she stood uncertain on the border of the ca.n.a.l. Her gondolier had departed, having judged it best to be rid as soon as possible of his wet clothes. It was late, and she was alone.

Around her was the ghostly moonlight, before her the dark lapping water. She was not afraid: what was there to fear? But, with the world in ruins as it were about her, what should she do? What, except return to the Hotel Britannia?

She threaded her way through the zigzag narrow streets, across bridges and along the sh.o.r.es of the ca.n.a.ls, her eyes bent on the ground. It never occurred to her that any one whom she knew could meet her wandering thus late at night with uncovered head; for she had left her hat in the sick woman's room. All through these last terrible hours she had had no thought for her reputation. She walked on and on. Suddenly there fell upon her ear,--

"Ninon, Ninon, que fais-tu de la vie, Toi, qui n'as pas d'amour?

Comment vis-tu----"

As she crossed a narrow ca.n.a.l by a small bridge, the singers' gondola came directly towards her. She saw it close at hand. The soprano was a faded, hollow-cheeked woman, the men were quite ragged.

Was that the phantom that had lured her on all through the spring?

The guttering candles in the gondola were burned almost into the sockets. One of the paper lanterns took fire. The boat glided beneath the bridge. When it emerged on the other side the lights were extinguished, the singers silent. The gondola floated drearily on, a black formless spot in the moonlight.

Shortly afterwards Erika found a gondola in which she reached the hotel.

In consequence of the arrival of a large number of fresh guests, the hotel was brilliantly lighted, all the doors were open, and Erika went up the staircase to her room without attracting special notice.

"Perhaps," she thought, "my grandmother has not yet returned: I may be able to recover my letter before she has read it." She went instantly to her bedroom. Light issued from the c.h.i.n.k of the door: she was too late. She opened the door. There, beside her bed, sat her grandmother in an arm-chair, erect and stiff, her eyes looking unnaturally large in her ashy-pale face, where the last few hours had graven deeper furrows than had been made by all the other experiences of her seventy years.

A strange cry escaped the old Countess's lips when she perceived the wan, sad apparition in the door-way. Half rising from her seat, her hands grasping the arms of the chair, she gazed at the girl as if she had been a corpse newly risen from the tomb. Trembling in every limb, "Erika!" she stammered. She tried to walk towards her grandchild, and could not. Erika's strength barely sufficed to carry her to the bedside, where she sank at her grandmother's feet and laid her head in her lap.

Neither could speak for a while. The old lady only stroked the girl's hair with her delicate hand, which grew warmer every minute. The girl sobbed. After some minutes the grandmother bent over her and murmured, "Erika, tell me how you have been rescued at the eleventh hour. Where have you been?"

Erika lifted her head, and in a faint voice told all that had occurred until the moment when she had gone down into the garden to take leave of Lozoncyi. There she hesitated.

Her grandmother listened breathlessly, and in an instant the girl began afresh: "I had forgotten myself. I would have done more for him than was ever done for man before; I would have borne him aloft to the stars. And he--the way was too hard; he had no heart for it; he would have dragged me down into the mire from which I would fain have rescued him. And when at last I understood, I fled----" A fit of convulsive sobbing interrupted her: she could not go on.

Her grandmother understood it all. She said not a word, only gently stroked the poor head in her lap. After a while she persuaded Erika to lie down, helped her to undress, and smoothed the pillow in which the poor child hid her tear-stained face.

She sat at the bedside until the dull weariness sure to follow upon intense nervous agitation produced its effect and the girl slept. The grandmother still sat there, motionless, until far into the morning.

About nine o'clock Marianne softly opened the door of the room. Erika awoke. She had forgotten everything,--when her glance fell upon a small black travelling-bag in the maid's hand.

"Please, your Excellency, a gondolier has just brought this bag,"

Marianne explained. "He says the Countess Erika left it in the gondola yesterday after the accident,--after the fright, I mean: he told me all about it. Poor Countess Erika! what a terrible thing for her! But it was fortunate, too, because she was able to save the poor woman. The gondolier has come for the hundred lire which the Countess promised him for getting the woman out of the water."

The old Countess drew a deep breath. Everything was turning out more favourably for Erika than she had dared to hope. The adventure, which would of course be discussed freely by all the hotel servants, would explain Erika's long absence and strange return.

"Is the Countess Erika ill?" asked the faithful Marianne, with an anxious glance at the young girl, whose cheeks were flushed with fever.

"Only suffering from the effects of agitation," said Countess Lenzdorff, who had meanwhile brought the money and given it to the maid.

"No wonder! Poor Countess Erika!" the servant murmured as she withdrew.

Weary and wretched, Erika again closed her eyes. When she opened them she saw her grandmother at the writing-table, her head resting on her hand, and a blank sheet of paper before her.

"To whom are you writing, grandmother?"

"I want to write to Goswyn," the old Countess replied, in a low tone.

"I must answer his letter; and--I am not sure----" She hesitated.

Upon Erika's mind flashed the remembrance of the letter she had written the previous day to Goswyn. She had forgotten it.

"Of course I must tell him not to come," said her grandmother.

Erika sighed. Must she give her grandmother that pain too? At last she managed to say, in a voice that was scarce audible, "He will not come: he----"

Startled by a terrible suspicion, her grandmother looked at her in dismay. Erika's face was turned away from her.

"Well?" asked the old Countess.

"I wrote to him yesterday," poor Erika stammered, "telling him what I was about to do. I thought he must hear of it sooner or later, and I wished that he should hear it in a way that would give him least pain."

"Oh, Erika! Erika!"

But Erika lay still, her head turned away from her grandmother. After a while she said, almost in a whisper, "Grandmother, please write to him that"--she buried her face in the pillow--"that---- Oh, grandmother, tell him--that--he need not despise me!"

Her grandmother made no reply. For a while absolute silence reigned in the room. Then Erika suddenly heard a low sob. She looked round. The Countess had covered her face with her hands, and was weeping.

It was the first time since Erika had known her that she had seen her shed tears.

CHAPTER XXVII.

No trace of spring can be seen. The garden of the Hotel Britannia is a sunburned desert, where the rose-bushes show withered leaves and not a single bud. The breath of the yellowish-gray lagoons is stifling. All is limp and faded,--both vegetation and human beings. The hotels are emptying: the season here is over, and the season for the watering-places not yet begun. Moreover, there is in Venice an epidemic of typhus fever.

Scarcely half a dozen people a.s.semble every evening at the _table-d'hote_ of the Hotel Britannia, and the small table appropriated to the Lenzdorffs in the far corner of the dining-hall is deserted.

Nevertheless the Lenzdorffs have not left the hotel; but Erika is ill, stricken down by malarial fever, and the old Countess does not leave her bedside.

The attack was sudden,--sudden so far as could be seen by those in daily intercourse with her, but p.r.o.nounced very gradual by the physician, who maintained that the disease had long been latent in the girl's system.

In the afternoon of the day after that upon which Erika had, as by a miracle, escaped the most terrible peril of her life, she had, by her grandmother's desire, donned a charming gown and had gone with the old Countess to pay a round of farewell visits. She had gone patiently in the gondola from one palazzo to another, and with a pale, calm face had answered question after question as to the terrible catastrophe which her timely presence had been the means of preventing.

There were various versions concerning the reasons for Frau Lozoncyi's attempt at suicide: thanks to the jealousy of Lozoncyi's numerous feminine adorers, none of these versions approached even distantly the truth, for none of his adorers would have admitted that the artist had ever bestowed a serious thought upon Erika.

In the evening she had dressed for dinner, and then, overcome by fatigue, she had lain down upon her bed to rest for a quarter of an hour. She did not rise from it for weeks.

Now the disease has left her. The physician has not only allowed but advised her to leave her bed. Every forenoon at eleven o'clock Marianne and the old Countess dress her,--ah, how tenderly and carefully!--and then, leaning heavily upon her grandmother's arm, she walks slowly about the room.

It is nearly six o'clock. The intense heat has somewhat abated, and Erika is sitting in the most comfortable arm-chair to be had in the hotel, her head resting upon a pillow, her hands in her lap. And what hands they are!--so slender, so white and helpless! To please her grandmother, she has swallowed a few spoonfuls of soup,--without the slightest desire to eat,--as if it had been medicine.