Felix Lanzberg's Expiation Part 5

"Linda, where are you?"

"Here."

"Here! I have been looking for you for an hour," says he, scarcely believing his eyes.

"Where? In the sky apparently--I have not been there, and have no wish to go. Do not stare at me so, please, as if I were my own ghost. Come up here, I have such a lovely secret."

With that she withdraws from the balcony, but the secret with which she has enticed him she does not tell him when he comes up.

"To-morrow, to-morrow," says she, clapping her hands, leaning far back in an old-fashioned arm-chair.

Raimund cannot get a word from his pretty, capricious sister.

"Who brought you home then?" he asks finally.

"Ah! That is just it, ha-ha-ha!" answered she.

"Linda! You have met Lanzberg--he has declared himself!" cries Raimund, excitedly.

"Will you be silent?" replies she, laughing--triumphant.

Meanwhile her parents, who have been to the farewell performance of a famous Vienna artiste at the theatre, enter.

"Hush!" cries she with a decided gesture to her brother. "Good evening, papa and mamma!" without leaving her arm-chair. "I am frightfully fond of you, for, if you only knew of it, I am to-day, for the first time, glad to be in the world."

Papa Harfink smiles delightedly, Mamma Harfink asks, "What is it?" and all her cameos and mosaic bracelets rattle with excitement.

"She----" begins Raimund.

"Hush, I tell you!" cries Linda, then laying her arms on the old-fashioned arms of the easy-chair, her head thrown teasingly back, she asks: "Is Baron Lanzberg a good _partie_?"

"His affairs are very well arranged. I saw in the country register. He has scarcely any debts," says Papa Harfink.

"And he is of the good old n.o.bility, is he not?" asks Linda.

"Did not his father receive a tip in the form of an iron crown from some tottering ministry?"

"The Lanzbergs descend from the twelfth century," says mamma. "They are the younger line of the Counts Lanzberg, who are now known as the Counts Dey."

"Oh! and what was his mother's maiden name?" Linda continues her examination.

"She was a Countess Bohl."

"Why does he a.s.sociate so little with people, and is so sad?--because of his past?"

Linda's eyes sparkle and shine, and capricious little dimples play about the corners of her mouth.

"What do you know of his past?" bursts out mamma.

"Oh, nothing; but I should so like to know something about it--it is not proper, eh?"

"He had at one time a _liaison_, hm--hm--was deceived"--murmurs Mrs.

Harfink--"never got over it."

"Ah!--but it seems so--for--in a word, if all does not deceive me, he will come to-morrow to ask for my hand."

Without leaving her arm-chair, her little feet dance a merry polka of triumph on the floor.

"And do you love him?"

"I?"--Linda opens her eyes wide--"naturally; he is the first man with a faultless profile and good manners whom I have met--since Laure de Lonsigny's father!"

Old Harfink, wholly absorbed in gazing at his tongue in a hand-gla.s.s, has not heard the bold malice of his daughter. Raimund, on the contrary, says emphatically, "I find your delight at marrying a n.o.bleman highly repulsive," and leaves the room.

And Felix? He does not undress that night. Motionless his face buried in the pillows, he lies on his bed and still fights a long-lost battle.

The air is heavy with the fragrance of linden blossoms and the approaching thunder-storm. A ma.s.sive wall of clouds towers above the horizon like a barrier between heaven and earth.

V.

Susanna Blecheisen, now Mrs. Harfink, usually called Madame von Harfink, was a famous blue-stocking. As a young girl she was interested in natural sciences, studied medicine, complained of the oppression of the female s.e.x, and wrote articles on the emanc.i.p.ation of woman, in which with great boldness she described marriage as an antiquated and immoral inst.i.tution.

In spite of the energetic independence of her character, in her twenty-eighth year she succ.u.mbed to the magnetic attraction of a red-cheeked clerk in her father's office, and generously sacrificed for him her scorn of manly prejudice and ecclesiastical sacraments--she married him.

Hereupon she moved with her husband to Vienna, and soon enjoyed a certain fame there on account of her fine German, and because she subscribed to the _Revue des Deux Mondes_, and had once sat beside Humboldt at a dinner, perhaps also because her husband was a very wealthy manufacturer.

Soon convinced of the inferior intellect of this man, she did not give herself up to cowardly despair at this discovery, but did her best to educate him. She patiently read to him works on capital, during which he incessantly rattled the money in his pockets, as if he would say, How does the theoretical a.n.a.lysis of capital concern a practical man, as long as he relies solely upon the actual substance? This rubbish furnished occupation for poor wretches, he thought to himself, which opinion he finally announced to his wife. But when she told him that Carl Marx and La.s.salle were both very wealthy men, he listened to her dissertations with considerably heightened respect. From political economy, which she treated as a light recreation, fitted to his case, she led him into the gloomy regions of German metaphysics, and plunged him confusedly into the most dangerous abysses of misused logic.

He listened calmly, without astonishment, without complaining, with the lofty conviction that to cultivate one's self, as every kind of tasty idleness, was a very n.o.ble occupation, and, like many more clever people, he made a rule of despising everything which he did not understand. Instead of any other comment, during his wife's readings he merely rubbed his hands pleasantly, and murmured as long as he was not asleep, t.i.tteringly, "This confusion, this confusion."

Yet, however Mrs. Susanna strove, his mental wings did not strengthen, and his digestion remained the most absorbing interest of his life.

He always fell back again into his insignificant commonness, like a dog whom one wishes to train to walk upon two legs, but who always falls back upon four again. At an aesthetic tea, for which his wife had most conscientiously prepared him, most generously lent him her intelligence, she heard him, in the midst of a conversation upon Schopenhauer and Leopardi, say to his neighbor: "Have you a weakness for pickles, ma'am? I have a great weakness for pickles, but--he-he-he!--I--it is really very unusual--I always feel such a disagreeable p.r.i.c.kling in my nose when I eat anything sour."

With years, Susanna somewhat neglected the difficult education of this hopeless specimen, and transferred her pedagogic capabilities to the bringing up of her son, of whom she tried to make a genius.

She designed him for jurisprudence. He, however, devoted himself to song. Instead of poring over law books in consideration of his examination, he pa.s.sed two-thirds of his time at the piano, diligently trying to attain the summit of his ambition, high C, while he did not fail to twist himself into the original contortions which on such occasions all particularly ambitious but faulty voices find so effectual.

With Linda, mamma Harfink from the first could do nothing, and in consequence she sent her to a Swiss pension. There she learned, besides a little French and piano thumping, to carry her head very high, learned to go into nervous spasms over creaking boots--in a word, she acquired the refined delicacy of feeling of the "princess with the pea."

What torture when upon her return home she lay upon not a single pea, alleviated by comfortable mattresses, but upon a whole sack of undisguised peas! Her home was frightful to her. The unrestrained, coa.r.s.e admiration which the young men of her circle offered her seemed unbearable to her. Discontented, weary of life, without an aim that was not bound up in vanity, she vegetated from one day to another; in desperate moments thought of going on the stage, or perpetrating some outrageous act to make herself notorious.

The only consolation of this desolate time was the intercourse with her cousin, Eugene von Rhoeden, who had been educated in the Theresanium, had learned to turn up his nose more frequently and with more fine distinction than she herself, but to her misery, had his brand new t.i.tle of Freiherr, and a couple of intimate friends of very old family beside. A pa.s.sionate enemy of his relatives, he had greeted her enthusiastically with the words, "_Sapperment_, you are wholly different from your family, Linda!"

"Do not call me Linda, that sounds so operatic," she had answered him.

"My friends always called me Linn!"