Felix Lanzberg's Expiation Part 23

These effusions were published in a Vienna paper. The superficial public found the themes old, and did not read the articles. The intimate friends of the author read the first five sentences, had the satisfaction of discovering a grammatical error therein, and as, with the malice with which friendship meets every young striver, they sought nothing else in the articles, they laid them aside, satisfied. Raimund felt deeply wounded. The world seemed to him nothing more than an immense porcupine, which, with all its quills of prejudice, repelled his genius.

He pa.s.sed his days in gloomy brooding--then a message from his humorous cousin, Eugene von Rhoeden, in Venice, waked him.

"Help what can be helped," he wrote. "He is going courting again; this time it is in earnest."

Yes, it was in earnest.

In Marienbad, the year before, he had first made her acquaintance; he had followed her to Venice. She had there, under the name Juanita, tried to obliterate the reputation of Pepita. Later she had borne the name of a Marchese Carini. She had been obliged to dance even as a Marchesa, for the Marchese did not disdain to make use of his wife's talent, and had dragged her from theatre to theatre. At one of her brilliant performances in St. Petersburg she broke her leg, and since then could dance no more. Now she became fat, sleepy, devout and irritable; the Marchese gambled away the greater part of her fortune, and died of galloping consumption. Ignorant of all business, continually deceived by her lovers, the Marchese Carini would have come to a sad end if the Knight of Harfink had not appeared as rescuer in her need.

He married her in the beginning of June.

Raimund, very depressed and deeply in debt, did not refuse to offer to kiss his new mamma's hand dutifully. She knew how so to fascinate him at the first meeting, that he was almost as slavishly submissive to her as his father. Juanita desired social position. She insisted upon being introduced to Linda. Harfink did not know that she had formerly had strange relations with Felix--she did not touch upon it; on the contrary, she reserved her power over Felix, which she had so boundlessly misused, for a favorable moment.

Mr. von Harfink told his nephew, Eugene, when he met him in Marienbad, his wife's desire. "I really do not know what to do; Linda is so curious," he said.

And Rhoeden answered with his sly smile, "Write Linda and ask her when you may bring her new mamma to see her--or, really I see no reason why you should not quietly drive over one of these days without announcing yourself."

"I do not understand what any one could have against Chuchu!" said the young husband, enthusiastically. "What a woman she is! She has diamonds from the Emperor of ---- and a gold coat of mail from the Duke of ----, and with all that, she is nevertheless all domesticity and love! She calls me Tony, and darns my socks from pure love."

XXI.

At this time life was for poor Felix only a heavy, oppressing burden.

He knew that Juanita was staying in Marienbad; knew that she had married his father-in-law. He felt neither horror nor astonishment at this step; nothing which she did would have astonished him, but he felt oppressed by the sense of her nearness; a true superst.i.tious fear of the magic charm which her beauty had for him weighed upon him. His recollections, his imagination, had been busy with the picture of her which he still possessed--had invested it with the most refined charms.

For Felix, the only excuse for his inexcusable conduct, by which he had ruined his life, lay in the demoniac fascination of the dancer.

Linda had written her father, before his marriage, an annihilating letter, to which she had received no answer. She believed her father angry, and therefore expected nothing less than a visit from him.

Felix, who thought her opinion sensible, nevertheless showed from time to time a certain fear, and thereby excited the spirit of contradiction in Linda.

"One can be glad that papa has done nothing worse," she remarked once, indifferently. "It is not to be supposed that they will have children--_et pour le reste_, such a marriage with a dancer has a certain _cachet_. I shall make no advances to her, but if she comes I must receive her!"

Felix shuddered and was silent.

Bitterly ashamed of himself, for a time he had tried to restrain his thirst for liquor. But he could control himself no longer. When the old remembrance began to burn in his heart like eating poison, he at first tried hard to occupy himself. He read, but, unaccustomed to all mental activity, a book scarcely chained his attention. He took long walks, he was too uneasy to become tired; he rode, he was too good a horseman to have any trouble with his horse.

His heart grew more and more heavy, and he drank--drank privately in his room so as not to be surprised in an unreliable condition. He was always temperate at table. No one saw him now with flabby lips and tottering knees, and his friends did not notice that he was really never quite sober now. His hands shook perpetually, there was a watery look in his staring, hollow eyes. A slight bluish flush colored his nostrils, and his voice was quavering.

Meanwhile Linda, careless and indifferent, fluttered around him, bitterness in her heart, on her lips a charming smile and malicious jests. A b.u.t.terfly with a wasp's sting, Scirocco had called her, and Pistasch repeated it to her. It had greatly pleased her.

At this time Pistasch came to Traunberg almost daily. Linda coquetted with him, but her coquetry was vague and cold, and was neither challenging nor encouraging. He made no progress, as he expressed himself to Scirocco. "She has no temperament and no heart," he grumbled, and once he added, "Perhaps I am not the right one----"

"What do you mean?" replied Scirocco, impatiently, remembering the suspicion which had been cast upon him. But Pistasch only answered crossly, "Garzin!"

"Impossible!" replied Scirocco, unwillingly. Pistasch only shrugged his shoulders, and when Sempaly began to consider the matter, he must admit that Garzin went oftener than was necessary to Traunberg, that Linda had quite a different glance and voice when she was with him from what she had for others, that she made concessions to him which she granted no one else, never wore again the most becoming toilets if he had once condemned them, and did not sing the most piquant couplets if he shrugged his shoulders over them, and, once on the slippery path of distrust, Scirocco told himself also that the charming sisterly confidence which Linda permitted herself with her brother-in-law was scarcely in place in such a beautiful woman with such a young man.

He was angry with Garzin.

"He really does not think of wrong, but he should be careful--for----"

Like all people of his stamp, Scirocco, in affairs of pa.s.sion, did not believe in free will, but so much the more in the compelling influence of opportunity.

"You have a new bracelet, Linda," said Felix one day, after dinner, to his wife as she smoked a cigarette with him in the drawing-room.

"Do you like it?" said she, and held out her white arm to him. The bracelet consisted of a thick gold chain to which a little coin was fastened.

"Charming!" answered Felix, apparently indifferently. "Did you buy it in Marienbad?"

"No; Kamenz gave it to me to-day--he owed me a philopena," replied Linda.

"Hm!" Felix looked gloomy, but did not know exactly how to put his vexation into words. He asked himself, "Have I the right to reprove my wife?"

"Ah, the bracelet seems to please you less since you know where it comes from," said Linda, smiling maliciously. "Poor Felix! Are you, perhaps, jealous of this handsome, silly Pistasch? He is about as dangerous to me as that dandy there," and she pointed to a dainty Meissner figure in knee breeches and flowered vest, who with c.o.c.ked hat under his arm, smiled down from a bracket.

"Well, I certainly do not wish to disturb your little amus.e.m.e.nt,"

stammered Felix, "but you do not know how much gossip arises from intercourse between a woman like you and a man like Pistasch, and if he is really so indifferent to you--why--then--perhaps you might receive him somewhat less frequently."

"Hm!" said Linda, thoughtfully. "However indifferent that porcelain dandy yonder is to me, I have not the slightest inclination to throw him out of the window." She blew a few whiffs of smoke up to the ceiling.

"But there is no question of that," replied Felix, "only see him less often----"

Linda would not let him finish.

"But do you not see, my dear Felix," said she, knocking the ashes from her cigarette, "to the house of a woman like me, who--let us speak plainly--really does not belong to his set, a man like Pistasch either comes not at all or every day. I am of a sociable nature--I must a.s.sociate with some one, or else I should die of _ennui_. If no ladies will come, then I will receive men."

"I cannot understand why you do not get on better with Elsa," remarked Felix, uneasily.

"I was there recently; she has not returned my visit," said Linda. "I cannot force her to come. I believe she is vexed with me because Erwin amuses himself with me. Heaven knows our intercourse is of wholly an innocent nature!"

The young woman rocked softly back and forth in her chair and laughed to herself, striking the finger-tips of her loosely clasped hands together.

"I do not doubt that for a moment, but you should have some consideration for Elsa--she is nervous and sensitive."

"Ah! and I am to suit my behavior to her interesting nervous condition," laughed Linda. "That is to say, I am to be intolerable to Erwin. _Eh bien, non merci!_ He is the only man of my present acquaintance of whom I think anything."

Felix was silent. Then without was heard a rustling and puffing as of a heavy silk gown and an asthmatic person. A foreboding distressed Felix.

Linda half rose. "That is surely not----?" she murmured, but already the servant had opened the door. "Baron and Baroness Harfink!" he announced.

Very red-faced, even fatter than formerly, with confident bearing, shining with happiness and perspiration, and with the air of a youthful dandy, Linda's father approached his daughter.

Although she had thought that she remembered him very well, she is still somewhat abashed at his astonishing appearance. Nevertheless she makes the best of a bad game, and condescendingly offers him her cheek to kiss. He kisses her loudly on the mouth.

"Ah, you look splendidly--no matter, you wrote me a foolish letter, but the past shall be forgotten. Here I bring your new mamma to you. She was good-hearted enough to pay you the first visit. You have certainly heard of the Marchesa Carini."

"Also of Juanita," says Linda, giving the tips of her fingers to her step-mother. "I am indescribably pleased to make the acquaintance of such a great _coryphee_. I have never yet had the pleasure of seeing a dancer except on the stage." The colossal insolence of her words is lost upon Juanita, owing to her stupidity and deficient knowledge of German, but the depreciation in tone and glance is perceptible to the dancer. She feels helpless and irritated.