Gloria Victis! Part 21

The old man advanced a step, eagerly scanned the face that had grown wan and haggard almost past recognition, then opened wide his arms and clasped his son to his heart. All anger, all bitterness on both sides was forgotten.

They sat down in the dim, sordid room in which Siegi had died, and Fritz laid bare his heart.

They sat close enough to read the deep sympathy in each other's eyes, and to hear each other's low tones, and in the midst of his inconsolable grief, Fritz rejoiced in being once more with some one who understood him, some one to whose loving compa.s.sion he could confide the wretchedness of his life.

He told his father everything; of his marriage, of his imprudence--of his misery. He soon perceived that the old Count had believed Charlotte to be worse than she was, and therefore had refused to acknowledge Siegi as his grandson.

But that was all past and gone! He made his son bring out all the likenesses of the dead boy, and was absorbed in every detail concerning him; he asked endless questions, and seemed as if he would thereby fain have a.s.sumed a share of his son's overwhelming grief, relieving Fritz of it to that extent at least.

At last steps were heard outside, and Charlotte entered with the children. Fritz winced.

"Father, this is my wife."

The grand old Count advanced to meet her as if she were a princess, called her "daughter" and kissed her forehead. He could not sufficiently caress and pet the children.

The next morning Fritz with the children paid him a visit at the Hotel Munsch, and they took leave of each other with affectionate cordiality.

"Of course you will come to Schneeburg with your family as soon as possible," the old Count said anxiously, as they parted. "You need your home, my poor boy."

And Fritz rejoiced--in the midst of all his grief,--at the thought of home.

They had already begun to get ready to leave Vienna, when a letter arrived from Schneeburg.

"Dear Fritz,

Hard as it is to write it, I must ask you not to give up your situation in Vienna for the present. My poor, dear boy, I can do nothing for you until my affairs are arranged. Only have patience and all will soon be well, etc...."

When the hoped-for arrangement was completed it was discovered that the old Count was penniless. In his costly expedients to raise money he had begun frittering away his property and then--it seemed incredible--he became infected with the general mania for finding millions on the highway, and had entangled himself in a colossal speculation in Australian gold mines. Conte Capriani, with whom he had become acquainted in Vichy, had convinced him of the certainty of gain in the affair. Capriani's name alone was sufficient warrant for the value of the stock. The old Count was made president of the company; his name was used to inspire the public with confidence,--his n.o.ble old name which he had borne so honourably for sixty-five years! The first year the company paid enormous dividends--out of their capital. In the second year matters began to look suspicious. The Conte slowly withdrew from the scheme--he found that certain things were different from what he had supposed; he had been falsely informed.... He advised the Count, who went to Paris to consult him, to dispose of his stock slowly without exciting suspicion. But the Count would not listen to anything of the kind. He had pledged himself to the public, his easy confidence had induced hundreds of men to buy the stock, he had urged many of them to do so thinking it was for their advantage. Among them were poor people, impoverished relatives, nay even old servants, his children's former tutors who had invested all their savings in this unfortunate scheme, upon his recommendation. He was beside himself, bought up as much of the stock as he could, and went himself to Australia to investigate matters. He, who in his whole life from his school-days up had never known anything of figures beyond what enabled him to keep the reckoning at whist, now ciphered and calculated, bringing all his powers of mind to bear upon the possibilities of profit.

He found matters by no means as desperate as had been represented in Europe--the affair might have been made a success with prompt energetic management; what was needed was more capital. But the confidence of the stockholders was shaken; the Count upon his return to Europe tried in vain to issue fresh stock, he applied fruitlessly to the Conte Capriani, representing to him that as the originator of the entire speculation he was bound to help. The Conte maintained that he was powerless.

The stock fell lower and lower, fell with bewildering rapidity.

One day Fritz received a letter: "Schneeburg must be sold."

The poor fellow felt as if his sore heart had been struck with a hammer. His sad yearning for his home was turned to a burning thirst--a consuming desire. He was as homesick as a peasant, nay--as a Slav.

Men who live in cities and change their dwelling-place three or four times, never strike root anywhere, and consequently can have no conception of the homesickness that attacks a man who is separated from the soil upon which he and his ancestors for generations have been born and bred. A man thus bred has become acclimated like a plant, to this special air, this special soil, and however long the years of absence, wherever he may have lived meanwhile, he will always yearn for 'home.'

Fritz had caught a cold upon leaving Wipling street, at the same time that Siegi had been taken with the illness that ended in his death.

Fritz recovered, but his health was shattered, his voice was husky, and h had feverish nights which in spite of weariness were wakeful. For hours he would pace the wretched room where stood Siegi's empty little bed, which he had not brought himself to have removed, and would conjure up visions of Schneeburg.

Sell Schneeburg! In his pain at this fresh blow he forgot for a moment his grief for his child. Memories of 'home' thronged about him with a vividness that savoured of mental hallucination. He saw the morning sun glitter in the dewy moss that lay green on the thatched roofs of the village, he saw the very puddles before the houses wherein the swine wallowed, and a flock of fowls scratching on a muck-heap, and a group of shivering children cowering beneath the cross before the smithy.

He saw the pond in the middle of the village; the little dusky waves swelled and rippled beneath the nipping wind of autumn and a single rugged elm cast its long reflection across the broken surface. He saw the soft black soil on the edge of the pond stamped with countless impressions of webbed feet. He saw the geese themselves, hissing and flapping their wings while the sunlight played upon the rough pink surface of their plucked b.r.e.a.s.t.s. Thatched roofs, swine, and geese had certainly never interested him much--these detailed impressions had been made upon his mind all unconsciously--they belonged to the whole.

He saw long transparent wreaths of mist like ghostly shrouds, floating above the freshly-ploughed fields, and the crows flapping above the brown leafless trees, in gloomy processions, mourners for the dead summer,--a dun-coloured cow was standing between two gnarled apple-trees by the way-side, looking inquisitively out of her dark-blue glazed eyes.

The pictures grew confused, and again distinct. He saw the park with its broad emerald meadows where the venerable trees grew in large dense clumps. He knew the voice of every single tree, the rustle of the oak differed from the murmur of the copper-beech; he knew the very tree which would turn orange-coloured in autumn, which one only yellow, edged with black, and which one dark crimson. They stirred their grand old heads and broke into a chant; it sounded like a magnificent choral through the still autumn air, while single leaves, frosted with dew, as with delicate molten silver, loosed their hold and sank slowly fluttering down upon the gra.s.s.

And the kitchen garden, that Paradise of childhood, with its h.o.a.ry apricot-trees, whose mellow fruit always dropped on the old-fashioned sage beds. Ah, what fruit it was, so big, and so yellow, and so juicy!

Then he laughed softly at something that had happened twenty years before, and--waking from his visions, and his reverie, pa.s.sed his hand across his brow. Where was he? Sitting in the room of a miserable lodging-house, beside the empty little bed of his dead child.

He lay down very weary. The last thing that he saw distinctly before falling asleep was a large circle of red gravel in front of Schneeburg Castle, furrowed with delicate ruts. These ruts formed the figure of eight--the first figure of eight which he, a boy of fifteen, had drawn in the gravel with his father's four-in-hand--the delicate fragrance, not perceptible to every one, of wild strawberries floated past him, and then all faded. Sleep compa.s.sionately laid her hand upon his heart and brain. He slept the sleep of the dead for a couple of hours, and the next morning his torture began afresh.

He could have wandered barefoot like a beggar to Schneeburg, only to be able to fling himself down on that dear earth, and kiss the very soil of his home.

The sale was long in concluding,--purchasers chaffered as usual, when in treaty for an impoverished estate. There were fears that it would be brought to the hammer. But in the spring Capriani appeared and offered a price for Schneeburg which was at least sufficient to cover the Count's indebtedness. His lawyer urged the old man not to delay accepting this offer, but Siegfried Malzin still hesitated. For three days he wandered about Schneeburg like one distraught, then he began to yield conditionally, but all conditions vanished before Capriani's energy. Malzin lost his head, and made many injudicious concessions. He sold with the estate very many valuable articles that he ought to have kept for himself. He forgot everything--and as a man at a fire will finally rescue in triumph an old umbrella, and a child's toy, so he rescued from his property, in addition to the family vault, which from the first he insisted upon keeping, nothing, save--the stuffed charger which stood in the hall, and which a Malzin had bestridden on the occasion of the liberation of Vienna by Sobiesky.

The morning after the deed of sale had been signed, the former possessor of Schneeburg was found dead in his bed--heart-disease had delivered him from misery.

On one and the same day Fritz heard of the sale of Schneeburg and of his father's death;--he was crushed.

Capriani had a weakness for taking into his service impoverished men of rank. They worked but indifferently well, as he knew; but nevertheless he preferred to employ them. He paid them well, and treated them cruelly.

One day he offered Fritz the post of private secretary. To the astonishment, nay, to the horror, of all his friends, Fritz accepted the position.

On a cool evening in May he took possession with his wife and children of the little cottage on the borders of the park, close to the kitchen garden, and a sense of delight mingled with pain, thrilled through him, as he hurried along the paths of the dear old home that now belonged to another.

He had to warn his children not to run on the gra.s.s, not to pull the flowers, and upon his own land!--yes, his own by right--he never could appreciate that this land had ceased forever to be his.

He could not look upon Capriani except as a temporary usurper. He could not but believe in counter revolutions--what was to bring them about he could not tell.

Sometimes when he suddenly came upon old Miller, his former nurse who had found an asylum with him, he would say: "Miller, do you remember this--or that?" and upon her "yes, Count," he would smile languidly.

All the fire, all the impetuosity of his nature was extinct.

Sometimes he roused himself to feel that it was his bounden duty to do something to reinstate his son in his rights. But what?

Conte Capriani, to be sure, had begun life with a single gulden in his pocket, but that was quite a different thing. It was not for Fritz Malzin to enter the lists with the stock-jobber, who knew so well how to keep just within the letter of the law.

And so he continued to live, sadly resigned, dreaming of old times, hoping for wonderful strokes of fortune that never took shape. All the while he indulged in visions, and every evening, when he laid his cards for Patience he consulted them, always asking the self-same question--"Will Schneeburg ever revert to my children?"

BOOK THIRD.

CHAPTER I.