Gloria Victis! Part 8

"Fault--fault! I am not reproaching you, Ossi! No, but my child, I was half dead with anxiety. You are always so punctual, and one quarter of an hour after another pa.s.sed and you did not come.--And then the storm.

The lightning struck near here in several places, and your John Bull is skittish,--you do not think so,--but I know the beast well. If it had gone on for one more quarter of an hour .... but what detained you, my child?"

Oswald smiled tenderly and considerately, as tall chivalric sons are wont to smile at the exaggerated anxieties of their mothers. "Give me only five minutes to change my dress and I will tell you all," he said, and once more kissing her hand he hurried away.

Oswald's was one of those impetuous temperaments which are always stirred to the depths morally and physically by a violent outburst of anger; even when its cause is forgotten every pulse and vein will still thrill.

Although he joined his mother in the drawing-room some minutes later in a perfectly cheerful mood, she instantly saw from his face that something must have provoked him excessively.

"Anything disagreeable?" she asked drawing him down beside her upon a sofa, "did you have a distressing scene with Schmitt? did he reproach you? or ...."

"Heaven forbid, mamma!" broke in Oswald. "Schmitt and reproach?--he is the most devoted soul--humiliatingly devoted and faithful! Poor Schmitt! No, no, my horse cast a shoe. I was terribly vexed, I had to ride slowly, and take the roundabout way through Rautschin." He spoke quickly and with forced gayety.

"You are concealing something, lest it should annoy me," the countess said decidedly. "When will you learn that nothing in the world annoys me as much as your considerate reticence! I lie awake half the night when I see that you have some vexation to bear which you will not share with me. You ought to have no secrets from me."

"In a certain way every honourable man must have secrets from her whom he respects as I respect you," Oswald said half-annoyed, half-tenderly, while he puzzled his brains to discover a way of pacifying his mother without telling either a falsehood or the whole truth. A brilliant idea then occurred to him. "In fact the matter is a very stupid affair. In the inn where I stopped during the storm I suddenly heard one of three men who were in the room speak with contempt of the Lodrin generosity; the fellow a.s.serted that on the Lodrin estates the labourers lived in pens like pigs, and,--er--my temperament is not exactly stoical, and I,--in short I got angry. It is hard to hear such things when one honestly tries to treat his people well! And there may be some truth in it; I will make inquiries to-morrow, no, I will find out for myself. I can learn nothing from my bailiffs, they only cajole me. Last year there was typhus fever in Morowitz, the people died like flies, and I knew nothing of it; when at last I did learn about it I went there immediately, but the epidemic was well nigh at an end. _A propos_, mamma, I cannot but forgive you if it be so, but was it not all concealed from me at your request? You knew that I should go over there at once, and you were afraid of contagion."

"No, my dear child," the countess said gravely, "foolishly anxious as I am about you upon trifling occasions,--and I have just shown how foolishly anxious I can be,--I never would lift a finger to seclude you from a peril if such peril lay in the path of duty. I would rather die of anxiety than hamper you or exert a detracting influence upon you in your line of conduct. I would be broken on the wheel to save your life, but----" she shuddered and moved closer to him,--"I would rather see you dead, than anything else save what you are--my pride, and a blessing to all around you!" She looked him full in the face, the mother's large, earnest eyes gleaming with exultant enthusiasm. "If you only knew how I suffered during that stupid storm! I am so glad to have you again, my boy, my fine, n.o.ble boy!" And drawing his head down to her she kissed him on the brow.

The rustle of a newspaper attracted Oswald's attention, and for the first time he observed Georges, who, buried in the depths of a luxurious arm-chair, had been watching from behind his newspaper the little scene between mother and son.

A servant appeared at the door--dinner was announced.

CHAPTER X.

"Very remarkable!" Georges said a few hours later as, smoking a cigar, he entered his cousin's bedroom, where Oswald was already in bed.

"What is very remarkable?" Oswald asked drowsily as he lay on his back, his hands clasped under his head.

"The change in your mother," said Georges, sitting down on the edge of the bed, "I should hardly have known her again."

"I can't understand that," Oswald rejoined. "Her hair has grown gray--it grew gray when she was quite young,--but her features are the same. I think her very beautiful still."

"I think her more beautiful than ever," Georges said gravely, "but...."

he thoughtfully blew the smoke from his cigar upwards to the ceiling--"how old is your mother?"

"Fifty-six."

"Only fifty-six--and yet she seems an old woman."

"An old woman....! What are you thinking of? My mother can do nearly as much as I can, she can ride for five hours at a time, and can take long walks and never...."

"My dear fellow," interrupted Georges impatiently. "I did not mean to say that your respected mamma seemed at all decrepit, but only that her features, her whole bearing, wear the stamp of that calm, kindly cheerfulness that belongs to those who have done with life. She asks nothing more--she bestows. And that, Ossi, is not a characteristic of youth--no, not of even, the most generous youth."

"There you are right," Oswald rejoined thoughtfully. "Many a woman of her age would still go into society and enjoy its distractions, she, since my father's death, has had no thought of anything except my education and the management of my property. It is wonderful, the knowledge she has of business. You would laugh if I should tell you of what large sums she saved up for me during my minority. Such strict economy was not to my taste, and I put a stop to it, but it must be forgiven in a mother."

"And the gentleness and kindness of her manner!" Georges continued, "her unreasoning maternal nervousness! I a.s.sure you it was no easy task, the hour spent in trying to allay her anxiety. Her feeling for you is positive idolatry."

"Try to be patient with this weakness of hers."

"My dear boy, he would be a worthless fellow who did not respect this weakness. It only surprises me in your mother; I had not expected anything of the kind. Before I left home she kept you at such a distance. I could not then understand why she always treated you so coldly and harshly, and, to tell the truth, I took such, lack of affection on her part, very ill."

Oswald leaned upon his elbow among the pillows. "That was while my father was alive," he said softly, "yes, I have often thought of that, and have thought also that I could explain her conduct. You see my father's foolish fondness for me irritated her, and she suppressed the manifestation of her own affection. Between ourselves, Georges, my mother was wretched in her marriage; her poor heart was always upon the rack, it could no more beat freely and naturally than a man with a rope tight about his neck can sing. I respected my father immensely, but ... well, Georges, look there...." he pointed to a large painting above his bed, the portrait of the countess in the proud splendour of her youthful beauty, "and then, look there...." and he pointed to a white plaster death-mask framed in black velvet hanging on the wall opposite. "As far back as I can remember, my father looked just like that; they were never congenial. And now let me go to sleep, old fellow, good-night!"

CHAPTER XI.

No, 'congenial' they never had been and never could have been.

Although the painting was far from portraying the charm of the Countess Lodrin's beauty in the bloom of youth, the repulsive death-mask opposite did full justice to the deceased count. The face that it represented was almost horse-like in its length; smoothly shaven as that of a monk, with a sharp-pointed nose, little round eyes, a mouth like the slit in a child's money-jug, and seamed with innumerable wrinkles, it resembled one of those bloodless aged heads which abound in pictures by Memmling or Van Eyck.

It would be an error to suppose that illness and the final agony had distorted the face before it had been perpetuated in the plaster cast.

Count Lodrin had never looked otherwise, he had always looked like a corpse, and Pistasch Kamenz boldly maintained that 'the old gentleman looked his best in his coffin.'

Not only Count Pistasch, but everybody else ridiculed Count Lodrin; few men have ever lived who have been more ridiculed. One fact, however, no ridicule could affect--Count Lodrin was a gentleman through and through.

That he possessed a tender heart and a sense of duty, which, in spite of the vacillations of a timid temperament, always triumphed in important crises, no one had ever denied who had seen him in any grave emergency,--and that this sense of duty, with a mild admixture of pride of rank, belonged to him more as a gentleman than as a human being, did not detract from his merit.

Given over in his youth to the ghostly influence of priestly tutors, he had led a melancholy, misanthropic existence. His delicate const.i.tution made impossible any partic.i.p.ation in the manly sports of his equals in rank. Therefore there was developed in him, as in many another recluse, an intense devotion to art; he was indefatigable in sifting and enlarging his collections.

People of his rank usually marry young. It was not so with him. As with several historic characters, the timidity of his temperament culminated in an aversion to women, which rendered futile all the bold schemes of ambitious mammas. In his solitude he had come to be forty-five years old; it was an article of faith in Austrian society that he never would marry, when suddenly his betrothal to Wjera Zinsenburg was announced.

His brother's creditors made wry faces; society laughed. Two months afterwards the strange couple were united in the chapel of the palace of the Zinsenburgs. Among those present at the ceremony there were some who envied the bridegroom, many who ridiculed him, and a few who pitied him.

As the pair stood beside each other before the altar they presented a strange contrast.

The face of the bride, n.o.bly chiselled, and with an indignant curve of the full, red lips, recalled to the minds of all who had been in Rome a beautiful but unpleasing memory,--the profile of the Medusa in the Villa Ludovisi, that wondrous relievo in which the pride of a demon seems contending with the suffering of an angel.

The bridegroom looked as he did fifteen years afterward on his bier, only more unhappy, for upon the bier his face wore the expression of a man who had just been relieved of an old burden; at the altar his expression was that of one who bends beneath the weight of a burden just a.s.sumed.

It was shortly manifest that no late-awakened pa.s.sion had decided him to contract this alliance. A weaker will had been forced to bow before a stronger.

CHAPTER XII.

But what had induced the exquisitely-beautiful girl to choose such a husband as this, every one asked; and no one answered. The question had to be dismissed with a shrug, and, 'She is a riddle!'

The same thing had been said four years previously, when with an air of proud indifference, and with cold, 'level-fronting eyelids,' she had appeared in Vienna society. There was about her an exotic air always irresistible to the genuine Austrian temperament. Her father was a diplomatist, her mother a Russian. Wjera's Russian blood betrayed itself in everything about her, in her deep, almost harsh voice, which was, nevertheless, capable of exquisite modulations, in the hybrid combination of Oriental nonchalance and northern energy that characterized her whole bearing, her gestures, her figure.

When she reclined upon a divan or leaned back in an arm-chair there was a suggestion of the odalisque in her att.i.tude; but in her walk there was a short, sharp rhythm; it was firm and despotic like that of a race-horse, and yet light as the fluttering of a bird. She was tall and not too slender--the beauty of her shoulders and bust was so great that it had become famous--her head was small and faultlessly poised upon her neck--her features were not perfectly regular, but how charming was her face! pale, with ripe red lips, and brown hair with a shimmer of gold about the temples and the back of the neck. The cheek-bones were rather too high, the face not quite oval enough; the brow was low; the profile haughty, and delicately modelled.