The Undying Past Part 36

"If you don't mind," she said, "I think that we ought to make the world take the responsibility."

"For what?"

Neither of them understood her.

"For your coming together."

"How can we?" asked Leo.

"I don't know yet; ... but I'll think it over. And when I have hit on something, I'll let you know, dear Leo, at once."

She spoke with such a comic, important little air that Ulrich broke into relieved laughter, and said, with jocose pity--

"Poor child! She's going to think it over."

She pouted, and while he caressed her small, curly head awkwardly she closed her eyes, and threw herself back against his arm.

He gazed down on his wife for a moment shyly and pa.s.sionately, then rose quickly and went into the next room, in case his new-found happiness should unman him.

Soon after, the rich, low notes of an organ sounded on Leo's ear. In astonishment he listened attentively to the sweet, full volume of melody. There used to be only an old quavering harmonium in the music-room, on which Ulrich had been wont to practise his chorales.

"What does this mean?" he asked Felicitas, who was putting away her crewels.

She laid her finger on her mouth. "It is a new sort of organ that he has got from America," she whispered across the table. "Stay here, and don't disturb him. I must go and see if he wants to use the pedal-notes; when he does, he likes me to blow for him."

She went out noiselessly, leaving the folding-doors wide open behind her. A few moments later, candles illumined the darkness, whence the mysterious flood of sound proceeded.

Ulrich, lost in the music, was seated before a curious instrument resembling a cottage piano, except that it was built upwards in several stages, like a staircase. His head was thrown back, and he was staring at the ceiling. Felicitas, in her diaphanous dress floating about the rosily-glowing room like a cloud, laid softly a score on the desk in front of him.

He nodded his thanks without taking his hands from the keys. Then, transposing the key, he began to play the piece she had chosen. Leo knew it well. It was a Ma.s.s by Scarlatti, which, in old days, Ulrich had loved better than anything.

He himself had never been tired of girding at the antiquated fugues, which he had called "pictures of the saints set to music," but now, when he heard again, after years of wild wanderings, the old familiar homely notes, his heart was stirred to warm emotion. Fighting down his tears, he threw himself into an armchair which stood in a dark corner nearest the door, enveloped himself in clouds of tobacco, and meditated, dissolving thoughts, half formed, pa.s.sing through his mind.

It was all over now, of course, with the plans he had made at his home-coming. Johanna might triumph, and the old chaplain with her. But what did that matter, after all? Ulrich's happiness was the main thing.

"And is he happy?" He asked the question with a momentary, horrid doubt of himself, of her, and everything good.

Then he bent forward and looked through the door. He devoured with his eyes the picture. If that was not happiness, no one was happy on this earth.

She stood by Ulrich in all her loveliness, encircling his long, lean neck tenderly with her arm, following the music with vigilant eagerness, so that she might be ready to help at the right moment.

"The vox humana!" Ulrich begged, glancing up at her.

She seized one of the stops, which sprang out with a slight click, and as Leo listened, there rose the trembling, plaintive sound of a human voice, struggling with fervent, imploring notes towards heaven.

"Was it not human what I did?" the voice seemed to be asking. "Was not the sin sweet for which I am now in sackcloth and ashes?"

Then there came into his head the old maxim.

"Repent nothing," roared from the depths of his being.

He pulled himself together defiantly.

No, in truth he repented nothing. He was not penitent. Now there would be no more secrecy. Ulrich was happy. Lizzie, freed of her old fears, was turning to her husband. _And the past was as if it had never been._

"Leo, are you satisfied with me?" murmured a melancholy, wistful voice at this moment in his ear, and a strong perfume enveloped him.

He started. He was almost choked by anger, and was obliged to put the utmost restraint on himself not to hurl some coa.r.s.e epithet at the head of her who bent over him with a resigned smile, as if she were a lamb going to the slaughter.

"If you want to be praised, go to your husband," he said roughly; and then he stood up to take his leave.

XVII

A few days after Leo's first visit to Uhlenfelde, which had been kept a secret, Frau von Stolt of Stoltenhof had invited some of her particularly intimate friends and acquaintances to an afternoon coffee.

The Kletzingks had accepted, and, as it happened that both the young cuira.s.sier officers had come home on eight days' leave after the autumn man[oe]uvres, several county families, with grown-up daughters and nieces, had been added to the party at the last minute. This was done at the request of the master of the house; the wily old fox, having been for more than a year on the trail of Felicitas, wished thus conveniently to rid himself of the rivalry of his sons.

The ladies had seated themselves in the small salon with the gra.s.s-green paper, on which a collection of racehorses, framed in polished light oak, formed a kind of brown-rimmed lattice-work dado.

The large entrance-hall, the pride of the house, with its wooden galleries and mighty chandeliers of stag's antlers, was reserved for the gentlemen. Felicitas von Kletzingk, to-day attired in a black silk dress, which transformed her usually _degagee_ charms into a sedate matronliness, sat on the right of the worthy Frau von Sembritzky, reclining in the depths of the capacious sofa of honour, covered with green plush, which formerly she had flown from as if it had been a veritable trap. Now she was following with sincere sympathy the complaints which the ladies, all heads of large households, were pouring out to each other. Her ma.s.s of fair curly hair, that she was wont to frizz out in the wildest fashion, was smoothly brushed back from her brow, and a modest gold chain surrounded the high plain collar of her dress.

The conversation, suitably to the season, turned on preserving. Frau von Neuhaus of Zubowen, a rotund s.e.xagenarian with a greenish fringe-net over her tousled hair, had tried the new steam apparatus, and had found it, in spite of its apparent advantages, thoroughly unpractical. The Baroness von Kra.s.sow opposed this view in an exaggerated fatigued voice; and old Frau von Sembritzky, who, since the marriage of her son with little Meta Podewyl, was doing her very best to revive the tradition with regard to wicked mothers-in-law, glared about her wrathfully like a teased vulture through the bars of its cage, as if she suspected that some one cherished the design of ousting her from the seat of honour. Meta sat next her; the poor young thing pressed the old termagant's hand in hers in nervous awe, while, with a longing smile that threatened every minute to become tearful, she glanced across at the table for "young girls" from which she was banished for ever.

The hostess herself had taken a place to the left of Felicitas. Bolt upright and stiff as a grenadier she sat there, and, though smiling down amiably on her neighbour, she kept watch that no stolen glances were exchanged between her and the gentlemen in the next room.

But even Frau von Stolt had not the smallest fault to find to-day with the much-abused young woman. She appeared charmed with the conversation, and, like a pupil thirsting for knowledge, she put in shy little questions in the pauses. Only now and then did she cast a wandering look along the collection of famous racehorses. No one noticed how her arms stiffened as if with cramp, and her fingers clasped and unclasped convulsively. She had dared much, and the next few minutes would be pregnant with events.

The ladies from Halewitz, as an understood thing, had not been invited.

For the last two years every hostess in the neighbourhood had known that a meeting between Felicitas and any member of the Sellenthin family was something to be avoided. Otherwise the table consecrated to the young would have been less quiet, and enlivened by Hertha's sharp repartees.

Amidst the young men, too, there prevailed a subdued, almost depressed tone. The admirers of Felicitas hung about the doorposts, and ogled her through the folds of the _portiere_ in vain; for none had she to-day the old intense look and soft understanding smile. And as none of them could summon up the courage to penetrate to the corner sacred to chaperons, much that pressed for a solution had to remain unexplained.

They wanted to know why for six weeks they had been ignored as if they didn't exist by the fair chatelaine of Uhlenfelde. They put their heads together, and exchanged observations with the nave, unchaste laugh in which immature men of the world are accustomed to find vent for the illegal desires of their hearts.

Besides the sons of the house, there were in the forefront Hans von Kra.s.sow and Frank von Otzen, the two swells of the neighbourhood. The first, a brown and brawny youth of twenty-one, with a long jockey neck and retreating forehead, had been for half a term a Bonn undergraduate, but, on receipt of the first bundle of bills, his father had sent for him home again. Since then he had comported himself as a kind of uncrowned king who, for the rest of his days, expects the whole world to be at his feet. And in the eyes of others, too, the reflected glory of those "kneips" with the Prussians at Bonn cast a nimbus round him.

For the rest, he was good company, sportive, and full of lively tricks and whimsicalities, the heart's delight of all the barmaids for six miles round.

The other, Frank von Otzen, liked to be taken more seriously. His high ambition had been to go on a foreign emba.s.sy, but he had been ploughed in his exam for the diplomatic service, and since was obliged to be content with helping his father to exploit the local coal-mines; but he retained the cryptic monosyllabic phraseology of diplomacy, used French soap, and went to English tailors. He was laughed at for his wide trousers, but nevertheless envied for his air of intimacy with the world of fashion.

Then there was the young heir of Neuhaus, an extremely fair, plump stripling, whose clothes, according to "Hinterwald" modes, were too narrow and too tight. He had a pair of big blue eyes in his smooth handsome face, and was so stupid that he was thought to suffer from melancholia, so that Felicitas had chosen him for the confidant of her elegiac moods. Benno von Zesslingen, who had once drunk three gallons una.s.sisted, and Hans von Kleist, of whom there was literally nothing whatever to record, made up the party. These young gentlemen were the cream of Felicitas's train of admirers--"Lizzie's untamed team," as she herself dubbed them.

After they had lounged about the door for some time, still longingly expectant that their lovely friend would come to their rescue, Lothair Stolt said it was no use waiting any longer, and contemptuously ignoring the young girls, asked the others to go with him into the garden and start a shooting-match with papa's new pistols.

Old Stolt, who, as host, had been daring enough to approach the dangerous corner now and again with a joke, also abandoned the siege, and remembered that Ulrich von Kletzingk had asked his advice as friend and neighbour about a valuable half-bred that was showing signs of going blind after castration. He hastily tasted the bowl of peach-punch that already stood on the ice, and then set out for the stables, where Ulrich, with several of the elder gentlemen, was waiting for him.

Thus the hall completely emptied itself. Then suddenly there came a thunderclap in the midst of the pompous, now languishing, conversation of the ladies on the sofa. A servant had entered the salon, and was announcing in a loud, unmistakable voice, "Herr von Sellenthin wishes to know if the Gnadige Frau can receive him."

The last murmur died away. Every eye turned to Felicitas, who, as if turned to stone from terror, stared her hostess in the face.