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.
“She will be sunstruck,” observed Frau von Treumann.
“I think she will,” agreed the baroness.
Neither of them moved.
Anna stooped down, and tried to look into the room, but could see nothing. She knocked again; waited a moment; and then went away.
The two ladies embroidered in silence.
“Absurd old maid,” Frau von Treumann thought, glancing at the baroness. “As though a married woman of my age and standing could get up and open windows when she is in the room.”
“Ridiculous old Treumann,” thought the baroness, outwardly engrossed by her work. “What does she think, I wonder? I shall teach her that I am as good as herself, and am not here to open windows any more than she is.”
“Why, you are here,” said Anna, surprised, coming in at the door.
“Where have you been all the morning?” inquired Frau von Treumann amiably. “We hardly ever see you, dear Anna. I hope you have come now to sit with us a little while. Come, sit next to me, and let us have a nice chat.”
She made room for her on the sofa.
“Where is Emilie?” Anna asked; Emilie was Fräulein Kuhräuber, and Anna was the only person in the house who called her so.
“She came in some time ago, but went away at once. She does not, I fear, feel at ease with us.”
“That is exactly what I want to talk about,” said Anna.
“Is it? Why, how strange. Last night, while we were waiting for you, the baroness and I had a serious conversation about Fräulein Kuhräuber, and we decided to tell you what conclusions we came to on the first opportunity.”
“Certainly,” said the baroness.
“It is surprising that Princess Ludwig should not have opened your eyes.”
“It is truly surprising,” said the baroness.
“But they are open. And they have seen that you are not very — not quite — well, not very kind to poor Emilie. Don’t you like her?”
“My dear Anna, we have found it quite impossible to like Fräulein Kuhräuber.”
“Or even endure her,” amended the baroness.
“And yet I never saw a kinder, more absolutely amiable creature,” said Anna.
“You are deceived in her,” said Frau von Treumann.
“We have found out that she is here under false pretences,” said the baroness.
“Which,” said Frau von Treumann, unable to forbear glancing at the baroness, “is a very dreadful thing.”
“Certainly,” agreed the baroness.
Anna looked from one to the other. “Well?” she said, as they did not go on. Then the thought of her peace-making errand came into her mind, and her certainty that she only needed to talk quietly to these two in order to convince. “What do you think I came in to say to you?” she said, with a low laugh in which there was no mirth. “I was going to propose that you should both begin now to love Emilie. You have made her cry so often — I have seen her coming out of this room so often with red eyes — that I was sure you must be tired of that now, and would like to begin to live happily with her, loving her for all that is so good in her, and not minding the rest.”
“My dear Anna,” said Frau von Treumann testily, “it is out of the question that ladies of birth and breeding should tolerate her.”
“Certainly it is,” emphatically agreed the baroness.
“And why? Isn’t she a woman like ourselves? Wasn’t she poor and miserable too? And won’t she go to heaven by and by, just as we, I hope, shall?”
They thought this profane.
“We shall all, I trust, meet in heaven,” said Frau von Treumann gently. Then she went on, clearing her throat, “But meanwhile we think it our duty to ask you if you know what her father was.”
“He was a man of letters,” said Anna, remembering the very words of Fräulein Kuhräuber’s reply to her inquiries.
“Exactly. But of what letters?”
“She tried to give us that same answer,” said the baroness.
“Of what letters?” repeated Anna, looking puzzled.
“He carried all the letters he ever had in a bag,” said Frau von Treumann.
“In a bag?”
“In a word, dear child, he was a postman, and she has told you untruths.”
There was a silence. Anna pushed at a neighbouring footstool with the toe of her shoe. “It is not pretty,” she said after a while, her eyes on the footstool, “to tell untruths.”
“Certainly it is not,” agreed the baroness.
“Especially in this case,” said Frau von Treumann.
“Yes, especially in this case,” said Anna, looking up.
“We thought you could not know the truth, and felt certain you would be shocked. Now you will understand how impossible it is for ladies of family to associate with such a person, and we are sure that you will not ask us to do so, but will send her away.”
“No,” said Anna, in a low voice.
“No what, dear child?” inquired Frau von Treumann sweetly.
“I cannot send her away.”
“You cannot send her away?” they cried together. Both let their work drop into their laps, and both stared blankly at Anna, who looked at the footstool.
“Have you made a lifelong contract with her?” asked Frau von Treumann, with great heat, no such contract having been made in her own case.
“I did not quite say what I mean,” said Anna, looking up again. “I do not mean that I cannot really send her away, for of course I can if I choose. Exactly what I mean is that I will not.”
There was a pause. Neither of the ladies had expected such an attitude.
“This is very serious,” then observed Frau von Treumann helplessly. She took up her work again and pulled at the stitches, making knots in the thread. Both she and the baroness had felt so certain that Anna would be properly incensed when she heard the truth. Her manner without doubt suggested displeasure, but the displeasure, strangely enough, seemed to be directed against themselves instead of Fräulein Kuhräuber. What could they, with dignity, do next? Frau von Treumann felt angry and perplexed. She remembered Karlchen’s advice in regard to ultimatums, and wished she had remembered it sooner; but who could have imagined the extent of Anna’s folly? Never, she reflected, had she met anyone quite so foolish.
“It is a case for the police,” burst out the baroness passionately, all the pride of all the Elmreichs surging up in revolt against a fate threatening to condemn her to spend the rest of her days with the progeny of a postman. “Your advertisement specially mentioned good birth as essential, and she is here under false pretences. You have the proofs in her letters. She is within reach of the arm of the law.”
Anna could not help smiling. “Don’t denounce her,” she said. “I should be appalled if anything approaching the arm of the law got into my house. I’ll burn the proofs after dinner.” Then she turned to Frau von Treumann. “If you think it over,” she said, “I know you will not wish me to be so merciless, so pitiless, as to send Emilie back to misery only because her father, who has been dead thirty years, was a p
ostman.”
“But, Anna, you must be reasonable — you must look at the other side. No Treumann has ever yet been required to associate — —”
“But if he was a good man? If he did his work honestly, and said his prayers, and behaved himself? We have no reason for doubting that he was a most excellent postman,” she went on, a twinkle in her eye; “punctual, diligent, and altogether praiseworthy.”
“Then you object to nothing?” cried the baroness with extraordinary bitterness. “You draw the line nowhere? All the traditions and prejudices of gentlefolk are supremely indifferent to you?”
“Oh, I object to a great many things. I would have liked it better if the postman had really been the literary luminary poor Emilie said he was — for her sake, and my sake, and your sakes. And I don’t like untruths, and never shall. But I do like Emilie, and I forgive it all.”
“Then she is to remain here?”
“Yes, as long as she wants to. And do, do try to see how good she is, and how much there is to love in her. You have done her a real service,” Anna added, smiling, “for now she won’t have it on her mind any more, and will be able to be really happy.”
The baroness gathered up her work and rose. Frau von Treumann looked at her nervously, and rose too.
“Then — —” began the baroness, pale with outraged pride and propriety.
“Then really — —” began Frau von Treumann more faintly, but feeling bound in this matter to follow her example. After all, they could always allow themselves to be persuaded to change their minds again.
Anna got up too, and they stood facing each other. Something awful was going to happen, she felt, but what? Were they, she wondered, both going to give her notice?
The baroness, drawn up to her full height, looked at her, opened her lips to complete her sentence, and shut them again. She was exceedingly agitated, and held her little thin, claw-like hands tightly together to hide how they were shaking. All she had left in the world was the pride of being an Elmreich and a baroness; and as, with the relentless years, she had grown poorer, plainer, more insignificant, so had this pride increased and strengthened, until, together with her passionate propriety and horror of everything in the least doubtful in the way of reputations, it had come to be the very mainspring of her being. “Then — —” she began again, with a great effort; for she remembered how there had actually been no food sometimes when she was hungry, and no fire when she was cold, and no doctor when she was sick, and how severe weather had seemed to set in invariably at those times when she had least money, making her first so much hungrier than usual, and afterwards so much more sick, as though nature itself owed her a grudge.
“Oh, these ultimatums!” inwardly deplored Frau von Treumann; the baroness was very absurd, she thought, to take the thing so tragically.
And at that instant the door was thrown open, and without waiting to be announced, Karlchen, resplendent in his hussar uniform, and beaming from ear to ear, hastened, clanking, into the room.
“Karlchen! Du engelsgute Junge!” shrieked his mother, in accents of supremest relief and joy.
“I could not stay away longer,” cried Karlchen, returning her embrace with vigour, “I felt impelled to come. I obtained leave after many prayers. It is for a few hours only. I return to-night. You forgive me?” he added, turning to Anna and bowing over her hand.
“Yes,” she said, smiling; Karlchen had come this time, she felt, exactly at the right moment.
“I wrote this very morning — —” began his mother in her excitement; but she stopped in time, and covered her confusion by once again folding him in her arms.
Karlchen was so much delighted by this unexpectedly cordial reception that he lost his head a little. Anna stood smiling at him as she had not done once last time. Yes, there were the dimples — oh, sweet vision! — they were, indeed, glorious dimples. He seized her hand a second time and kissed it. The pretty hand — so delicate and slender. And the dress — Karlchen had an eye for dress — how dainty it was! “Your kind welcome quite overcomes me,” he said enthusiastically; and he looked so gay, and so intensely satisfied with himself and the whole world, that Anna laughed again. Besides, the uniform was really surprisingly becoming; his civilian clothes on his first visit had been melancholy examples of what a military tailor cannot do.
“Ah, baroness,” said Karlchen, catching sight of the small, silent figure. He brought his heels together, bowed, and crossing over to her shook hands. “I have come laden with greetings for you,” he said.
“Greetings?” repeated the baroness, surprised. Then an odd look of fear came into her eyes.
He had not meant to do it then; he had not been certain whether he would do it this time at all; but he was feeling so exhilarated, so buoyant, that he could not resist. “I was at the Wintergarten last night,” he said, “and had a talk with your sister, Baroness Lolli. She dances better than ever. She sends you her love, and says she is coming down to see you.”
The baroness made a queer little sound, shut her eyes, spread out her hands, and dropped on to the carpet as though she had been shot.
CHAPTER XXVIII
“Is Herr von Treumann gone?”
It was late the same afternoon, and Princess Ludwig had come into the bedroom where the Stralsund doctor was still vainly endeavouring to bring the baroness back to life, to ask Anna whether she would see Axel Lohm, who was waiting downstairs and hoped to be allowed to speak to her. “But is Herr von Treumann gone?” inquired Anna; and would not move till she was sure of that.
“Yes, and his mother has gone with him to the station.”
Anna had not left the baroness’s side since the catastrophe. She could not see the unconscious face on the pillow for tears. Was there ever such barbarous, such gratuitous cruelty as young Treumann’s? His mother had been in once or twice on tiptoe, the last time to tell Anna that he was leaving, and would she not come down so that he might explain how sorry he was for having unwittingly done so much mischief? But Anna had merely shaken her head and turned again to the piteous little figure on the bed. Never again, she told herself, would she see or speak to Karlchen.
The movement with which she turned away was expressive; and Frau von Treumann went out and heaped bitter reproaches on Karlchen, driving with him to Stralsund in order to have ample time to heap all that were in her mind, and doing it the more thoroughly that he was in a crushed condition and altogether incapable of defending himself. For what had he really cared about the baroness’s relationship to Lolli? He had thought it a huge joke, and had looked forward with enjoyment to seeing Anna promptly order her out of the house. How could he, thick of skin and slow of brain, have foreseen such a crisis? He was very much in love with Anna, and shivered when he thought of the look she had given him as she followed the people who were carrying the baroness out of the room. Certainly he was exceedingly wretched, and his mother could not reproach him more bitterly than he reproached himself. While she was vehemently pointing out the obvious, he meditated sadly on the length of the journey he had taken for worse than nothing. All the morning he had been roasted in trains, and he was about to be roasted again for a dreary succession of hours. His hot uniform, put on solely for Anna’s bedazzlement, added enormously to his torments; and the distance between Rislar and Stralsund was great, and the journey proportionately expensive — much too expensive, if all you got for it was one intoxicating glimpse of dimples, followed by a flashing look of wrath that made you feel cold with the thermometer at ninety. He had not felt so dejected since the eighties, he reflected, in which dark ages he had been forced to fight a duel. Karlchen had a prejudice against duelling; he thought it foolish. But, being an officer — he was at that time a conspicuously gay lieutenant — whatever he might think about it, if anyone wanted to fight him fight he must, or drop into the awful ranks of Unknowables. He had made a joke of a personal nature, and the other man turned out to have no sense of humour, and took it seriously, and expressed a desire for Karlch
en’s blood. Driving with his justly incensed mother through the dust and heat to the station, he remembered the dismal night he had passed before the duel, and thought how much his dejection then had resembled in its profundity his dejection now; for he had been afraid he was going to be hurt, and whatever people may say about courage nobody really likes being hurt. Well, perhaps after all, this business with Anna would turn out all right, just as that business had turned out all right; for he had killed his man, and, instead of wounds, had been covered with glory. Thus Karlchen endeavoured to snatch comfort as he drove, but yet his heart was very heavy.
“I hope,” said his mother bitingly when he was in the train, patiently waiting to be taken beyond the sound of her voice, “I do hope that you are ashamed of yourself. It is a bitter feeling, I can tell you, the feeling that one is the mother of a fool.”
To which Karlchen, still dazed, replied by unhooking his collar, wiping his face, and appealing with a heart-rending plaintiveness to a passing beer-boy to give him, um Gottes Willen, beer.
Axel was in the drawing-room, where the remains of Karlchen’s valedictory coffee and cakes were littered on a table, when Anna came down. “I am so sorry for you,” he said. “Princess Ludwig has been telling me what has happened.”
“Don’t be sorry for me. Nothing is the matter with me. Be sorry for that most unfortunate little soul upstairs.”
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