Part 28 (1/2)
He had seated himself upon a low stool at her feet.
”No, no, mamma,” he replied smiling, ”this seat is all right, and now tell me of what you were thinking as I came towards you. Your thoughts must have been very pleasant!”
”Must you know everything,” she replied gaily, ”I had no thoughts,--my dreams....” she patted him lightly on the cheek and whispered--”were of my grandchildren.”
”Indeed? Perfectly reconciled, then, to my marriage?”
”We must learn to acquiesce in the inevitable, and--and--it really would be delightful to have a chubby little Ossi, in miniature, to pet, and cosset.”
He did not speak, but leaned a little forward and pressed the hem of her gown to his lips.
”You goose!” she remonstrated; but when he raised his head she perceived that his eyes were filled with tears. ”What is the matter?”
”A momentary weakness, as you see,” he said with forced gaiety; adding earnestly,--”I am not ashamed of it before you. Of the evil that is in us, we are more ashamed before those whom we love than before all the rest of the world; but of our weaknesses we are ashamed only before those to whom we are indifferent!”
Paler and paler grow the blossoms of the sweet rocket, sweeter and sweeter their fragrance rises aloft, like a mute prayer,--twilight hovers over the meadows and the leafy summits of the lindens grow black. The quiet air is stirred by the village bells ringing the Angelus. The Countess folded her hands,--of late years she has grown devout. Oswald is overcome by intense la.s.situde, the la.s.situde that follows the sudden relaxation of nervous tension in men upon whom severe physical exertion has no effect.--He lays his head upon his mother's knee, and recalls the time when, only twenty years old, and smarting under a severe disappointment, he had taken refuge there. Then he had lain his head upon her lap, and sleep, wooed in vain through feverish nights, had fallen on him.--He remembers how, regardless of her own discomfort, she had let him sleep there for hours, never moving, lest he should be disturbed. And how many other instances of her love and self-sacrifice fill his memory! She strokes his hair, and for a moment he wishes he might die, thus, now, and here,--yes, it would be far better, a hundredfold better to die thus at her feet, his heart filled with filial adoration, than to have to live down again the anguish of the last three days.
BOOK FOURTH.
CHAPTER I.
After all, what had induced Conte Capriani to spend his summer in Austria? His wife and his children were unutterably bored in their exile, and he--he was consumed with secret chagrin. He had intended to astound the earth whereon he had once run barefoot, but nothing had fulfilled his expectations, absolutely nothing. The Austrian climate did not agree with him, decidedly not. Instead of the intoxicating consciousness of triumph wherein he had hoped to revel, he was tormented, from morning until night, by a sensation of rasping humiliation. His arrogance sickened, shrivelled up; even his possessions suddenly seemed to him insignificant. His wealth was, to be sure, more easily convertible into cash, more available than that of the Austrian aristocrats. But what availed his airy, fleeting millions compared with these well-nigh indestructible possessions, rooted for centuries in native soil?
Many, many years before, on a muddy road the sides of which were spotted with patches of dirty snow fast melting in the early spring, little Alfred Stein had run behind a high old-fas.h.i.+oned green coach hung on spiral springs, and had tried to steal a ride on the hind axle.
The bearded coachman--a stout, patriarchal coachman with a broad fur collar--looked back, saw him, and snapped his whip at him, so sharply that the boy, frightened, let go the axle, and fell off into a puddle.
A chubby child, at the carriage window, leaned far out to see him, and laughed, without any malice, loud and heartily, as all healthy children laugh at anything comical. But rage seized young Alfred, and when he could do it un.o.bserved, he clenched his fist, and shook it at the carriage.
At that time his envy did not reach higher than to a green coach, with a stately fur-clad coachman who could cut at all barefoot boys who were clinging on behind. How many miles his envy had travelled since then, how many ragam.u.f.fins his coachman had since then whipped off from his carriages, and yet at times it seemed to him that in reality he had not gained a step since that warm damp day in spring, when he had fallen into the puddle, and had been laughed at by the saucy little boy.
The child of poor parents, his extraordinary beauty had attracted the notice of a Bohemian Countess, who oddly enough was the owner of that same green coach. He was the best scholar in the village school, and the Countess befriended him. He became the playmate of her proud, good-natured, indolent children. By-and-by he shared their lessons, and his progress was remarkable. He was patted on the shoulder, his diligence was commended, and at last, by dint of flattery and servility, he obtained the means to study in Vienna. The years of his student life were most wretched. He possessed neither the dullness nor the imagination that can make poverty tolerable, but his were the endurance and the cunning that overcome poverty. Averse to no secret infamy, he, nevertheless made a parade of morality, and was an adept in what a witty Frenchman calls _le charlatanisme du desinteress.e.m.e.nt_.
Although a Sybarite by nature, and susceptible to all physical enjoyment, the instant that the attainment of his aims was at stake, he became a pattern of abstinence. He knew how to allow himself to be heaped with benefits, without acquiring the reputation of a parasite on the one hand or of a man who used his friends without any show of grat.i.tude on the other.
From the outset of his career he owed his success, not alone to his personal beauty, but to his faculty for intuitively detecting the evil propensities of others, and for privately pandering to them, yet always preserving a show of indulgent charity withal. His medical practise opened to him the doors of certain social circles which would else probably have been forever closed to him. He practised medicine for a while at fas.h.i.+onable watering places, and he had many distinguished patients among the fair s.e.x; at last, however, his marriage to a rich Russian girl relieved him from the necessity of pursuing his profession, and led his speculative mind into other paths.
His wife's fortune, however, was soon but a small part of that which he acc.u.mulated and added to it. Always restless, often unprincipled, he heaped up his millions, seeming fairly to conjure money out of other men's pockets. His greed of gain was no petty pa.s.sion, there was in it something of the heroic. Wealth was not his end, but a means to his end, a weapon,--power.
In Paris this power had not failed him, but in Austria no one was dazzled by it except those towards whom he felt utterly indifferent.
Day by day he grew more irritable, more bitter; what did his millions avail with these Austrian aristocrats who, had, with indolent elegance dragged after them for centuries, in spite of all levelling tendencies of any age, the burden of their ancient traditions--called by the Liberals prejudices--and who had grown weary at last of justifiable carping at their official and unofficial prerogatives, and had taken refuge upon an island as it were of determined exclusiveness, where, entrenched as behind the wall of China, they loftily ignored all the revolutionary hubbub around them.
He had succeeded in much, why should he not succeed in making a breach in this wall of China? This was the aim of all his efforts. He was one of those who would fain destroy what they cannot attain. By a thousand enticing temptations he had striven to arouse the avarice of the _Right Honourables_, as he called them, that the base, degrading greed of gain might bruise the strict sense of honour that was like a 'hoop of gold to bind in' Austrian exclusiveness. To brand an aristocrat as a swindler would be a keener joy than to make him a beggar.