The Benefactress Part 42

"This very morning. Poor fellow, his aged father----"

"I don't care a curse for his aged father. What train?"

"The half-past nine train. He went in the post-cart at seven."

Dellwig jerked his horse round, and without a word rode away in the direction of Stralsund. "I'll catch him yet," he thought, and rode as hard as he could.

"What can he want with the vicar?" wondered Frau Manske.

"A rough manner, but I doubt not a good heart," said her husband, sighing; and he folded his flapping dressing-gown pensively about his legs.

Klutz was on the platform waiting for the Berlin train, due in five minutes, when Dellwig came up behind and laid a hand on his shoulder.

"What! Are you going to jump out of your skin?" Dellwig inquired with a burst of laughter.

Klutz stared at him speechlessly after that first start, waiting for what would follow. His face was ghastly.

"Father so bad, eh?" said Dellwig heartily. "Nerves all gone, what?

Well, it's enough to make a boy look pale to have his father on his last----"

"What do you _want_?" whispered Klutz with pale lips. Several persons who knew Dellwig were on the platform, and were staring.

"Why," said Dellwig, sinking his voice a little, "you have heard of the fire--I did not see you helping, by the way? You were with Herr von Lohm last night--don't look so frightened, man--if I did not know about your father I'd think there was something on your mind. I only want to ask you--there is a strange rumour going about----"

"I am going home--_home_, do you hear?" said Klutz wildly.

"Certainly you are. No one wants to stop you. Who do you think they say set fire to the stables?"

Klutz looked as though he would faint.

"They say Lohm did it himself," said Dellwig in a low voice, his eyes fixed on the young man's face.

Klutz's ears burnt suddenly bright red. He looked down, looked up, looked over his shoulder in the direction from whence the train would come. Small cold beads of agitation stood out on his narrow forehead.

"The point is," said Dellwig, who had not missed a movement of that twitching face, "that you must have been with Lohm nearly till the time when--you went straight to him after leaving us?"

Klutz bowed his head.

"Then you couldn't have left him long before it broke out. I met him myself between the stables and his gate five minutes, two minutes, before the fire. He went past without a word, in a great hurry, as though he hoped I had not recognised him. Now tell me what you know about it. Just tell me if you saw anything. It is to both our interests to cut his claws."

Klutz pressed his hands together, and looked round again for the train.

"Do you know what will certainly happen if you try to be generous and shield him? He'll say _you_ did it, and so get rid of you and hush up the affair with Miss Estcourt. I can see by your face you know who did it. Everyone is saying it is Lohm."

"But why? Why should he? Why should he burn his own----" stammered Klutz, in dreadful agitation.

"Why? Because they were in ruins, and well insured. Because he had no money for new ones; and because now the insurance company will give him the money. The thing is so plain--I am so convinced that he did it----"

They heard the train coming. Klutz stooped down quickly and clutched his bag. "No, no," said Dellwig, catching his arm and gripping it tight, "I shall not let you go till you say what you know. You or Lohm to be punished--which do you prefer?"

Klutz gave Dellwig a despairing, hunted look. "He--he----" he began, struggling to get the words over his dry lips.

"He did it? You know it? You saw it?"

"Yes, yes, I saw it--I saw him----"

Klutz burst into a wild fit of sobbing.

"_Armer Junge_," cried Dellwig very loud, patting his back very hard.

"It is indeed terrible--one's father so ill--on his death-bed--and such a long journey of suspense before you----"

And sympathising at the top of his voice he looked for an empty compartment, hustled him into it, pushing him up the high steps and throwing his bag in after him, and then stood talking loudly of sick fathers till the last moment. "I trust you will find the _Herr Papa_ better than you expect," he shouted after the moving train. "Don't give way--don't give way. That is our vicar," he exclaimed to an acquaintance who was standing near; "an only son, and he has just heard that his father is dying. He is overwhelmed, poor devil, with grief."

To his wife on his arrival home he said, "My dear Theresa,"--a mode of address only used on the rare occasions of supremest satisfaction--"my dear Theresa, you may set your mind at rest about our friend Lohm. The Miss will never marry him, and he himself will not trouble us much longer." And they had a short conversation in private, and later on at dinner they opened a bottle of champagne, and explaining to the servant that it was an aunt's birthday, drank the aunt's health over and over again, and were merrier than they had been for years.

CHAPTER XXVII

It was an odd and a nearly invariable consequence of Anna's cold morning bath that she made resolutions in great numbers. The morning after the fire there were more of them than ever. In a glow she a.s.sured herself that she was not going to allow dejection and discouragement to take possession of her so easily, that she would not, in future, be so much the slave of her bodily condition, growing selfish, indifferent, unkind, in proportion as she grew tired. What, she asked, tying her waist-ribbon with great vigour, was the use of having a soul and its longings after perfection if it was so absolutely the slave of its encasing body, if it only received permission from the body to flutter its wings a little in those rare moments when its master was completely comfortable and completely satisfied? She was ashamed of herself for being so easily affected by the heat and stress of the days with the Chosen. How was it that her ideals were crushed out of sight continually by the mere weight of the details of everyday existence? She would keep them more carefully in view, pursue them with a more unfaltering patience--in a word, she was going to be wise. Life was such a little thing, she reflected, so very quickly done; how foolish, then, to forget so constantly that everything that vexed her and made her sorry was flying past and away even while it grieved her, dwindling in the distance with every hour, and never coming back. What she had done and suffered last year, how indifferent, of what infinitely little importance it was, now; and yet she had been very strenuous about it at the time, inclined to resist and struggle, taking it over-much to heart, acting as though it were always going to be there. Oh, she would be wise in future, enjoying all there was to enjoy, loving all there was to love, and shutting her eyes to the rest. She would not, for instance, expect more from her Chosen than they, being as they were, could give. Obviously they could not give her more than they possessed, either of love, or comprehension, or charitableness, or anything else that was precious; and it was because she looked for more that she was for ever feeling disappointed. She would take them as they were, being happy in what they did give her, and ignoring what was less excellent. She herself was irritating, she was sure, and often she saw did produce an irritating effect on the Chosen.

Of sundry minor failings, so minor that she was ashamed of having noticed them, but which had yet done much towards making the days difficult, she tried not to think. Indeed, they could hardly be made the subject of resolutions at all, they were so very trivial. They included a habit Frau von Treumann had of shutting every window and door that stood open, whatever the weather was, and however pointedly the others gasped for air; the exceedingly odd behaviour, forced upon her notice four times a day, of Fraulein Kuhrauber at table; and an insatiable curiosity displayed by the baroness in regard to other people's correspondence and servants--every postcard she read, every envelope she examined, every telegram, for some always plausible reason, she thought it her duty to open: and her interest in the doings of the maids was unquenchable. "These are little ways," thought Anna, "that don't matter." And she thought it impatiently, for the little ways persisted in obtruding themselves on her remembrance in the middle of her fine plans of future wisdom. "If we could all get outside our bodies, even for one day, and simply go about in our souls, how nice it would be!"

she sighed; but meanwhile the souls of the Chosen were still enveloped in aggressive bodies that continued to shut windows, open telegrams, and convey food into their mouths on knives.

The one belonging to Frau von Treumann was at that moment engaged in writing with feverish haste to Karlchen, bidding him lose no time in coming, for mischief was afoot, and Anna was showing an alarming interest in the affairs of that specious hypocrite Lohm. "Come unexpectedly," she wrote; "it will be better to take her by surprise; and above all things come at once."

She gave the letter herself to the postman, and then, having nothing to do but needlework that need not be done, and feeling out of sorts after the long night's watch, and uneasy about Axel Lohm's evident attraction for Anna, she went into the drawing-room and spent the morning elaborately differing from the baroness.

They differed often; it could hardly be called quarrelling, but there was a continual fire kept up between them of remarks that did not make for peace. Over their needlework they addressed those observations to each other that were most calculated to annoy. Frau von Treumann would boast of her ancestral home at Kadenstein, its magnificence, and the style in which, with a superb disregard for expense, her brother kept it up, well knowing that the baroness had had no home more ancestral than a flat in a provincial town; and the baroness would retort by relating, as an instance of the grievous slanderousness of so-called friends, a palpably malicious story she had heard of manure heaps before the ancestral door, and of unprevented poultry in the _Schloss_ itself.

Once, stirred beyond the bounds of prudence enjoined by Karlchen, Frau von Treumann had begun to sympathise with the Elmreich family's misfortune in including a member like Lolli; but had been so much frightened by her victim's immediate and dreadful pallor that she had turned it off, deciding to leave the revelation of her full knowledge of Lolli to Karlchen.

The only occasions on which they agreed were when together they attacked Fraulein Kuhrauber; and more than once already that hapless young woman had gone away to cry. Anna's thoughts had been filled lately by other things, and she had not paid much attention to what was being talked about; but yet it seemed to her that Frau von Treumann and the baroness had discovered a subject on which Fraulein Kuhrauber was abnormally sensitive and secretive, and that again and again when they were tired of sparring together they returned to this subject, always in amiable tones and with pleasant looks, and always reducing the poor Fraulein to a pitiable state of confusion; which state being reached, and she gone out to hide her misery in her bedroom, they would look at each other and smile.

In all that concerned Fraulein Kuhrauber they were in perfect accord, and absolutely pitiless. It troubled Anna, for the Fraulein was the one member of the trio who was really happy--so long, that is, as the others left her alone. Invigorated by her cold tub into a belief in the possibility of peace-making, she made one more resolution: to establish without delay concord between the three. It was so clearly to their own advantage to live together in harmony; surely a calm talking-to would make them see that, and desire it. They were not children, neither were they, presumably, more unreasonable than other people; nor could they, she thought, having suffered so much themselves, be intentionally unkind. That very day she would make things straight.

She could not of course dream that the periodical putting to confusion of Fraulein Kuhrauber was the one thing that kept the other two alive.

They found life at Kleinwalde terribly dull. There were no neighbours, and they did not like forests. The princess hardly showed herself; Anna was English, besides being more or less of a lunatic--the combination, when you came to think of it, was alarming,--and they soon wearied of pouring into each other's highly sceptical ears descriptions of the splendours of their prosperous days. The visits of the parson had at first been a welcome change, for they were both religious women who loved to impress a new listener with the amount of their faith and resignation; but when they knew him a little better, and had said the same things several times, and found that as soon as they paused he began to expatiate on the advantages and joys of their present mode of life with Miss Estcourt, of which no one had been talking, they were bored, and left off being pleased to see him, and fell back for amus.e.m.e.nt on their own bickerings, and the probing of Fraulein Kuhrauber's tender places.

About midday Anna, who had been writing German letters all the morning helped by the princess, letters of inquiry concerning a new teacher for Letty, came round by the path outside the drawing-room window looking for the Chosen, and prepared to talk to them of concord. The window was shut, and she knocked on the pane, trying to see into the shady room. It was a broiling day, and she had no hat; therefore she knocked again, and held her hands above her head, for the sun was intolerable. She wore one of her last summer's dresses, a lilac muslin that in spite of its age seemed in Kleinwalde to be quite absurdly pretty. She herself looked prettier than ever out there in the light, the sun beating down on her burnished hair.

"Anna wants to come in," said Frau von Treumann, looking up from her embroidery at the figure in the sun.

"I suppose she does," said the baroness tranquilly.

Neither of them moved.

Anna knocked again.