The Children of Alsace Part 21

"Yes, since you have gone so far, and since our father has given his consent, and since our mother's opposition might only cause still greater unhappiness...."

"You are right, Jean. Greater unhappiness, for father told me that----"

"Yes, I guess. He told you that he would crush all opposition, that he would leave our mother rather than give in. That is all very likely. He would do it. I shall not enter into any struggle with him. Only, I keep my liberty of action with regard to von Farnow."

"What do you mean by that?" she asked quickly.

"I wish," Jean replied, in a tone of authority, in which Lucienne felt her brother's invincible determination, "I wish to let him know exactly what I think. I shall find some means of having an explanation with him. If he persists, after that, in his desire to marry you, he will make no mistake, at least as to the difference of feeling and ideas which separate us."

"I do not mind that," answered Lucienne, rea.s.sured, and she smiled, being certain that von Farnow would stand the trial.

She turned towards Alsheim. A cry of victory was on her lips, but she restrained it. For some time she stood silent, breathing quickly, and seeking with her eyes and mind what she could say so that her happiness should not appear an insult to her brother.

Then she shook her head.

"Poor house," she said. "Now that I am going to leave it, it is becoming dear to me. I am persuaded that later on, when life in the garrison takes me away from Alsace, I shall have visions of Alsheim.

I shall see it in imagination, just as it stands there."

In the midst of its girdle of orchards were ma.s.sed together the red roofs of the village. And both village and trees formed an island among the corn and April clover. Little birds, gilded by the sunshine, were flying over Alsheim. The house of the Oberles at this distance seemed only to be one of many. There was so much sweetness in all things that one might have imagined life itself sweet.

Lucienne gave herself up to this appreciation of beauty, which only came to her as a consequence of her thoughts of love. Again she heard her own words, "I shall have visions of Alsheim just as it stands there." Then the undulating line of the Bastians' wood, which rose like a little blue cloud beyond the farthest gardens, reminded her of Jean's trouble. She only then realised that he had not answered her. She was moved, not enough to ask herself if she should renounce her happiness to make Jean happy, but up to the point of regretting, with a sort of tender violence, this conflict between their loves. She would have liked to soothe the pain she had caused, to comfort it with words, to put it to rest, and not to feel it so close to her and so alive.

"Jean, my brother Jean," she said, "I will requite you for all you are doing for me by helping you, by doing my very best for you. Who knows but by working together we may not be able to solve the problem?"

"No; it is beyond your power and mine."

"Odile loves you? Yes, of course she loves you. Then you will be very strong."

Jean made a movement of weariness.

"Do not try, Lucienne. Let us go back."

"I beseech you. Tell me at least how you came to love her? I can understand that. We said we would tell each other more than the names. You have only me to whom you can speak your mind without danger."

She was making herself out to be humble. She was even humiliated by her secret happiness. She renewed her request, was affectionate, and found the right words to describe Odile's stately beauty, and Jean spoke.

He did it because his need to confide to some one the hope which had been his--a hope which was still struggling not to die. He told of the Easter vigil at Sainte Odile and how he had met the young girl on Maundy Thursday in the cherry avenue. From that, each helping the other to recall happenings, to fix dates, to find words, they went back into the past, up to long-ago times when their parents were not at variance, or at least when the children were ignorant of their dissensions or did not perceive them, when in the holidays Lucienne, Odile, and Jean might believe that the two families, united in intimate friendship, would continue to live as important land-owners, respected and beloved by the village of Alsheim.

Lucienne did not realise that in calling up these pictures of the happy past she was not calming her brother's mind. He may have found pleasure in them for a moment, hoping to get away from the present, but a comparison was immediately drawn, and his revolt was only the more profound, arousing all the powers of his being, against his father, against his sister, against that false pity behind which Lucienne's incapability of sacrifice was hidden. Soon the young man gave up answering his sister. Alsheim was getting nearer, and was now a long outline broken here and there. In the calm evening the Oberles' house raised its protecting roof amid the tops of the trees, still bare. When the park gates, closed each day when the workmen left, were opened for the two pedestrians, Jean slipped behind Lucienne, and, making her go on, said, in very low, ironical tones:

"Come, Baroness von Farnow, enter the house of the old protesting deputy, Philippe Oberle."

She was going to make a retort, but an energetic footstep scrunched the gravel, a man turned into the avenue round a gigantic clump of beeches, and a resonant, imperious voice, which was singing in order to appear the voice of a happy man without any regrets, cried:

"There you are, my children! What a nice walk you must have had!

From the waterfall by the works I saw you in the corn leaning towards each other like lovers."

M. Joseph Oberle questioned the faces of his children, and saw that Lucienne at least was smiling.

"Did we have things to tell each other?" he went on. "Great secrets, perhaps?"

Lucienne, embarra.s.sed by the nearness of the lodge, and still more so by the exasperation of her brother, answered quickly:

"Yes; I have spoken to Jean. He has understood. He will not oppose my wishes."

The father seized his son's hand. "I expected nothing else from him.

I thank you, Jean. I shall not forget that."

In his left hand he took Lucienne's, and, like a happy father between his two children, he crossed the park by the long, winding carriage drive.

A woman behind the drawing-room window saw them come, and her pleasure in looking at this scene was not undiluted. She asked herself if the father and children had united against her.

"You know, dear Jean," said the father, holding up his head and, as it were, questioning the front of the chateau. "You know that I wish to spare susceptibilities and to prepare solutions, and not to insist on them until I am forced to do so. We are invited to the Brausigs'----"

"Ah! is it already settled?"

"Yes, to a dinner, to a fairly large evening party--not too many people. I think that would be a very good opportunity to present Lieutenant von Farnow to your mother. I shall only speak of this to your mother later on. And in order not to bias any of her impressions--you know how timid she is--so that she does not meet my look when she talks to this young man, I shall refuse for myself--I shall confide Lucienne's future to you. All my dream is to make this dear one happy. Not a word to my father. He will be the last to learn what does not really concern him but secondarily."

The great empty s.p.a.ce by the flight of steps had not seen for a long time such a united group walk on the well-rolled gravel.

In the drawing-room, keeping herself a little back, trying to make her mind easy and not succeeding, Madame Oberle had left off working. The embroidery was on the floor.

Jean was thinking.

"I shall thus a.s.sist at the interview, and I shall take mamma there, who will suspect nothing. What a part to play to avoid greater evils! Happily, she will forgive me one day when she knows everything."

Late that night, kissing her son, Madame Oberle said:

"Your father insists upon my accepting the Brausigs' invitation. Are you going, my darling?"

"Yes, mamma."

"Then I shall also go."

CHAPTER X

THE DINNER AT THE BRAUSIGS'

At seven o'clock the guests of the Geheimrath Brausig were gathered together in the blue drawing-room--with its plush and gilded wood--which that official had taken with him to the different towns he had lived in. The Geheimrath was a Saxon of excellent education, and of amiable though somewhat fawning manners. He seemed always to bend in any direction in which he was touched. But the frame-work was solid; and, on the contrary, he was a man whose ideas were unchangeable. He was tall, ruddy, nearly blind, and wore his hair long, and his red beard streaked with white, he wore short. He did not wear spectacles, because his eyes, of a pale agate colour, were neither shortsighted nor longsighted, but were worn out and almost dead. He was a great talker. His speciality was to reconcile the most opposite opinions. In his offices, in his relations with his inferiors one saw the real basis of his character. Herr Brausig had an Imperial spirit. He never allowed private people to be in the right. The words "Public interest" seemed to him to answer all arguments. In the official world they talked about raising him to the n.o.bility. He repeated this. His wife was fifty years old, had the remains of beauty and an imposing figure; she had received the officials of eight German towns before coming to live in Strasburg.

At her entertainments she gave all her attention to supervising the servants, and her impatience at the countless annoyances connected with their service, which she tried to hide, did not allow her to reply to her neighbours except in sentences absolutely devoid of interest.

The guests formed a mixture of races and professions which one would not so easily come across in any other German town. There are so many imported elements in the Strasburg of to-day! They were fourteen in number, the dining-room could seat sixteen with a little over two feet of table for each person, such s.p.a.ce being an essential in the eyes of the Geheimrath. He had in his house, around him--and he dominated them with his sad, insipid head--some proteges, people recommended to him, or friends gathered together from various parts of the empire: two Prussian students from the University of Strasburg, then two young Alsatian artists, two painters who had been working for a year at the decoration of a church; these were the unimportant guests, to which we must add the two Oberles, brother and sister, and even the mother, who was looked upon in the official world as a person of limited intellect. The guests of note were Professor Knapple, from Mecklenburg, cultured and studious, whose erudition consisted chiefly of minutiae, and the author of an excellent work on the socialism of Plato. He was the husband of a pretty wife, round and pink, who seemed fairer and pinker by the side of her dark husband, with his black beard curling like an a.s.syrian's. The Professor of aesthetics, Baron von Fincken from Baden--who shaved his cheeks and chin, so that the scars gained in the duels of his student days might be better seen, was of a slender, nervous build; his head was of the energetic type, his nose was turned up and showing the cartilage very plainly; ardent, pa.s.sionate, and very anti-French, and yet he looked more like a Frenchman than any one present, except Jean Oberle. There was no Madame von Fincken. But there was beautiful Madame Rosenblatt, the woman who was more envied, sought after, looked up to, than any other woman in the German society of Strasburg, even in the military world, because of her beauty and intelligence. She came from Rhenish Prussia, as did also her husband, the great iron-master, Karl Rosenblatt, multi-millionaire, a man of sanguine temperament, and at the same time methodical and silent, and one said that he was bold and cold and calculating in business.