Part 66 (2/2)
Emily's escape had hardly been noticed in the house. The only one who knew more about it, the porter, felt no disposition to speak about it, as he was not quite sure of his own share in the matter. It was thought, therefore, that the lady had not been the gentleman's wife, as was first believed, but his sister, and that the other gentleman who had come for her had been her husband. The times, moreover, were too eventful to leave much room for such small matters.
Such were Mrs. Captain Black's ideas when she called next day at noon on Oswald, after the custom of the house. For it was the lady's notion that she ought to inquire in person after the welfare and the wishes of those of her guests who seemed to propose staying there for some time.
This was partly a matter of courtesy with her, and partly prompted by her good old heart. She had a twofold interest in Oswald. The young man's appearance, the expression of his eyes, and the tone of his voice, had struck her, and reminded her wonderfully of long by-gone days, and of a person whom she had loved tenderly and whose loss she had never yet been able to forget. Then the young man came direct from France, from where that unfortunate young friend had also come, and where she had probably died. It is true the poor girl had never given a sign of life, and it was highly improbable therefore that she was still alive, but that did not keep Mrs. Black from feeling glad whenever a Frenchman came to her house, as it looked like another chance to hear something of the poor girl.
The good old lady was, therefore, not a little astonished and grieved when she saw how pale and haggard Oswald looked this morning, a mere shadow of the stately young man of last night. He had had a bad night to be sure. It must have been a very bad night to pull down a young man so grievously. Should she send for the doctor? No? But a cup of strong beef tea with an egg stirred in? _Qu'en dites-vous, Monsieur?_ The good old lady tripped away to attend to the beef tea herself, as no one else could make it as well. And while she was busy about it she shook her gray head again and again, because Monsieur Oswald--the stranger had given that name--spoke German so very well, and looked so very sick and unhappy, and yet had some resemblance to the lost one. Her eyes filled with tears and she decided to ask him about the cause of his grief at the risk of being considered indiscreet.
With this desire she entered Oswald's room once more and found the young man in the same position in which she had left him. He was sitting on the sofa, his arms crossed on his bosom, his eyes staring fixedly at an old French engraving, in which Andromeda was represented chained to the rock and guarded by a dragon, while Perseus was coming through the air to her rescue, with the gorgon's head in his hand. He had noticed the picture in the early twilight, and long tried to find out in the imperfect light what it could mean, till at last, as day broke, he found it out. The engraving was extravagant, as most pictures of that epoch. Andromeda was rather too small, a mere child in comparison with the very tall and slender hero, who was just putting one foot on the rock and preparing to strike a blow at the monster, which opened its huge mouth wide and stared at him with basilisk eyes.
Still, it was not without merit in the conception, nor without delicacy in the execution. The spark of hope which appeared in the girl's eyes and the whole of her childish, beautiful features, and the heroic indignation in the face of the youth, were well rendered; while the landscape--a lonely rock in the boundless ocean, with the sun rising above the horizon and the first rays trembling on the waves up to the rock--showed something of Claude Lorraine's cheerful vigor and grandeur. Oswald had looked at the picture again and again with a feeling of painful sadness. The beautiful meaning of the ancient myth--that bold courage carries the happy possessor with G.o.d-like wings over land and sea, that the hero overcomes danger by a mere glance, and finally that for him alone there blooms the sweet flower of love and beauty on the rude rock in the vast inhospitable ocean of life--all this had reminded the dreamer painfully of what he also had already called his own of love and beauty; but only, alas! to lose it in a short time and forever, forever!
Even now--when Mrs. Black at his request took a seat on the sofa, and told him all she knew about the excitement in the city, the b.l.o.o.d.y scenes which had taken place last night quite near by, in Brother street, the large a.s.semblies of people Unter den Linden, and the sad times in which everything seemed to be turned upside down--even now Oswald could not take his eyes from the picture. The old lady noticed it and said:
”Yes! It was just so twenty-five years ago! It used to belong to a countryman of yours, a dear old gentleman who has lived here many years, and whom I loved like a brother. The picture is here, but he----”
She sighed so grievously that Oswald, whom his own sorrow had not made insensible to the sorrows of others, asked her kindly:
”He died, the old gentleman, did he?”
”I do not know,” replied the old lady. ”He went into the wide world in order to save a girl whom I had brought up as my own child; a sweet, lovely creature; but he did not come back, and she did not come back, and I grieve over my loss, although it is now nearly twenty-five years old. Have you, monsieur--ah! it is foolish in me to ask, but after all nothing is impossible in this world--have you, monsieur, ever heard anything of a Mademoiselle Marie Montbert and a Monsieur d'Estein?”
The old lady had asked the question so often, and received so often nothing but a curt: _Non madame!_ in reply, that she scarcely noticed Oswald's regretful shake of the head, and continued with animation:
”Ah, I knew it was so! No one ever heard of them. The world is so large, and there are so many people in it! And in this great world and this mult.i.tude of people how soon are two unhappy beings forgotten!”
The manner of the old lady was, with all her ingenuousness, so refined and dignified; the deep-sunk eyes, still full of expression, looked so gentle and kind; and her voice had such a true, good sound, that Oswald felt strangely moved, and begged her with cordial warmth to tell him something more about the two persons whose unhappy fate she deplored so painfully after so long a time. Mrs. Black smoothed her black-silk ap.r.o.n, and told him in simple words a simple, touching story.
Her husband, a brave but wild and reckless man, had compelled her for years before he lost his life on the battle-field of Waterloo to provide for her own support. She had taken lodgings in the rear part of the building which she now owned, and rented out the larger part of the rooms to single gentlemen. She had always tried to keep up pleasant relations with her ”foster-children,” but with none of them had she been on as friendly a footing as with a certain Monsieur d'Estein, a descendant of French refugees, who supported himself by giving lessons in the tongue of his ancestors. Monsieur d'Estein was an old bachelor of kind heart but very eccentric, who had fallen out with the whole world, and yet shared his last mouthful of bread with any one who asked him for it. He had his own ideas about everything, and brooded constantly over plans how to overthrow the whole world, while he led all the time a most simple, harmless life.
Monsieur d'Estein had been living with her several years and had become a warm friend of hers, who listened patiently to all her complaints about hard times and domestic troubles, when one fine day a Colonel Montbert, of the French army, came and called on his relation, Monsieur d'Estein. The colonel was under orders for Russia--it was in 1812--and he was accompanied by a little daughter of eight, a lovely child, whom the father loved tenderly, and perhaps all the more tenderly as she stood perfectly alone in the world, and had no one on earth to love and protect her except her father. Until now she had followed the colonel in all his campaigns, but the brave old soldier trembled at the idea of exposing his only treasure to the dangers of a winter campaign, the results of which he might even then have antic.i.p.ated. As he had been in Berlin in 1807, and had then made Monsieur d'Estein's acquaintance, he came now once more to ask him to take care of Marie till he returned; and if he should not return, there were the family papers, and a large sum of money in gold and bills of exchange; and the friends looked at each other and shook hands. The colonel kissed his little girl, promised to bring her a sleigh with two reindeer from Russia, kissed her once more, cried: _Adieu, ma chere! Adieu, ma pet.i.te!_ mounted his horse and was gone.
Colonel Montbert never fulfilled his promise about the sleigh and the reindeer. His little girl waited and waited for the sleigh and the father till she was a tall young lady, but sleigh and father never came.
Marie had grown up a tall, fair girl, so beautiful that the whole neighborhood called her, unanimously, pretty Marie. She was a good girl too, with a good heart, that could be merry with the joyous and weep with the sorrowful. Her only fault was an over-active imagination, a fondness of strange, extraordinary things--an inheritance from her father, the French colonel of cavalry, whose adventurous, fantastic disposition Monsieur d'Estein said approached very near to insanity.
This peculiarity of the girl caused much anxiety to Monsieur d'Estein and to Mrs. Black, but especially to the former, whose plain, straight-forward mind was utterly averse to everything irrational or fantastic. ”The girl ought to have no time for dreams,” he used to say; ”she must learn to think and to act. She ought to have a counterpoise to her gay dream-world in the prosaic reality of life. No man ought to live in castles in the air.” According to these views he sketched out a plan of education for little Marie, with which Mrs. Black never could fully agree, in spite of the unbounded respect she had for Monsieur d'Estein's intelligence and character. Marie was to dress in the simplest way, like the children of humble mechanics; she was to learn every kind of domestic labor: and when she was grown up Monsieur d'Estein carried his oddity so far that he sent her to a respectable milliner. ”One could never know but that it might become useful to her in after life.” Mrs. Black shook her head, but she could not be angry at the old gentleman's odd notions when she saw how well he meant it, and especially how successful he was. For the girl grew brighter and fairer every day, and looked, in her simple calico dress and her plain straw bonnet, as refined and as distinguished as the greatest lady in the land.
Mrs. Black was proud of the girl. She had never had any children of her own, but she felt as if she could never have loved one of her own better. And was she not the child's mother? Had she not watched over her in health, and nursed her in sickness? And was the girl not as fondly attached to her as a daughter could be to a mother? Mrs. Black was almost jealous of this love (she had had so little love in her life) and did not like it that Marie had not evidently more confidence in her than in her adopted father. But the latter was, for his part, not less jealous. Mrs. Black even sometimes suspected that monsieur was cheris.h.i.+ng very different feelings for his beautiful niece, as he called her, from those of an uncle for his niece, and that his system of education which confined Marie very strictly to the house, might have been prompted by other than pedagogic considerations. Monsieur was at that time only forty years old. It was the mere shadow of a suspicion, but subsequent events gave it strength.
One evening--it was a Sunday--monsieur returned from his promenade with Marie very much out of temper. Marie also looked excited, and showed traces of tears in her beautiful eyes. She went to bed as soon as supper was over, and Mrs. Black begged monsieur to tell her what had happened, till he at last consented.
Marie and he had been walking up and down in the long avenues of the public park, chatting cozily with each other, and had then gone into one of the public gardens, there to order some refreshments for Marie and himself. They had just taken their seats at a table when two gentlemen, who had before been sitting at a distance, had come and taken seats near them. Monsieur, who turned his back to them, had not noticed them, and only became aware of their presence when he saw Marie, who was talking to him, cast half-curious, half-embarra.s.sed glances at somebody behind him. He turned round to see what was the matter. At the same moment one of the gentlemen approached their table.
He was a remarkably handsome man--monsieur could not deny that, in spite of his irritation--a lofty, n.o.ble figure, a superb head, a fine though somewhat exhausted face, large deep-blue eyes, with a haughty and yet kindly expression. He lifted his hat and in very good French--monsieur and Marie had as usual conversed in French--he asked leave for himself and his companion to join their company. Monsieur was the most courteous man in the world, but he said there had been something in the manner of the distinguished stranger which had filled him instantly with a violent aversion against him, and he had therefore replied dryly and curtly that he and mademoiselle preferred remaining alone. Thereupon a slight altercation between him and the stranger had taken place, which ended in his rising and leaving the garden with Marie, pursued by the scornful laugh of the two gentlemen. From that evening Marie showed a decided change in her whole manner. Formerly gay and cheerful, she now hung her head, turned pale and red by turns, was at one time immoderately merry and at another time wretchedly sad.
Neither Mrs. Black nor monsieur knew what to make of it. Misfortune would have it that monsieur must be taken sick just then, so that Mrs.
Black had to spend nearly her whole time in his room nursing him, and Marie consequently was left much to herself. Formerly monsieur had regularly gone for her to the place where she learnt her profession; now she had to come home alone. What happened to her during these days, into what snares she had fallen, Mrs. Black never found out. But one morning, when she came to wake the poor girl, she found the room empty, and a little note on the table, in which the unfortunate child stated that irresistible reasons, which she could not now explain, compelled her to leave town; that she begged her benefactors with tears in her eyes to forgive her if she rewarded them for their great love with apparent ingrat.i.tude, and that she hoped to G.o.d the day would come, and come soon, on which all this sorrow would be changed into joy.
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