A Woman's Will Part 27

"Perhaps."

"Where will you be?"

She told him.

"And I shall be in the 'Vierjahreszeiten'; why do you not come there?"

he added.

"Because I love the _pension_ with my whole heart," she declared fervently; "I was there for an entire winter before my marriage; it is like home to me."

He stopped, pulled out his note-book and carefully wrote down the name and address; as he put it up again, he remarked:

"That was droll, what you said to-night, that you would never marry again! Where do you get that idea?"

"From being married once."

"I have it from never being married any, and I have it very strong. Have you it very strong?"

"Yes," said Rosina decidedly, "very strong indeed."

"Then when we know all is only nothing, why may I not come to Constance?"

"Because you can't," she said flatly, "I don't want you to come."

"But I will be very good, and--"

"Yes," she said interrupting; "I know, but to prevent further misunderstanding, I may just as well tell you that I want all my time in Constance for my other friend--"

They were at the door of the hotel, and she had her foot upon the lower step; he was just behind her, his hand beneath her elbow. She felt him give a violent start and drop his hand, and, looking around quickly to see what had happened, she forgot to end her sentence in the emotion caused by the sight of his face. A very fury of anger had surcharged his eyes and swelled the veins upon his temples.

"So!" he said, in a low tone that almost shook with intense and angry feeling, "that is why I may not come! He goes, does he? _Bete que je suis_, that I did not comprehend before!"

Rosina stared at him, motionless, for the s.p.a.ce of perhaps ten seconds, and then an utter contempt filled her, and every other consideration fled.

She ran up two or three steps, crossed the hall, and pa.s.sed the _Portier_ like a flash, flew up the one flight of stairs that led to her corridor, and broke in upon Ottillie with a lack of dignity such as she was rarely guilty of.

"Ottillie," she exclaimed, panting under the weight of many mixed feelings, "I want to leave for Constance by the first train that goes in the morning. I don't care if it is at six o'clock, I'll get up. Ring and find out about everything, and then see to the bill and all. I _must_ go!"

Ottillie stood there, and her clever fingers were already unfastening her mistress' hat-pins.

"Madame may rest a.s.sured," she said quietly, "all shall be as she desires."

Meanwhile below stairs Von Ibn had entered the cafe, lit a cigarette and taken up one of the evening journals.

He appeared to look over the pages of the latter with an interest that was intent and unfeigned.

But was it so?

Chapter Nine

"I shall certainly not tell Molly one word about these latest developments," Rosina said firmly to herself, and she remade the resolution not once but a hundred times during the train ride of that early Wednesday morning. She was too tired from excess of emotion, and no balance of much-needed sleep, to feel anything but unhappy over the termination of the preceding evening.

Everything was over now, and the only glory to be reaped in any direction would be the dignified way in which Molly should be kept in ignorance of all that had occurred.

Outside, the freshness of a Suabian morning lay over valley and mountain. The country was beautiful with the charm of midsummer's immediate promise, which spread over the fields of ripening grain and lost itself among the threading rivulets, or in the shadow of forest and mountain. The white-plastered farmhouses with the stable-door at one end, the house-door at the other, and the great sweep of straw-thatched roof sloping down over all, peeped out from among their surrounding fruit-trees. Old, old women knit peacefully under the shadow of the stone-bound well, and little, little children tumbled about their knees in the gra.s.s. Out in the garden at one side the boys and girls were busy gathering berries or vegetables for the market of next day. Yokes of oxen pa.s.sed slowly to and fro upon the shaded roads, their high, two-wheeled carts loaded to the very top; beside a pond a maiden herded geese; upon a hill a boy lay sleeping, his sheep nibbling the herbage near by. It was all quaint and picturesque, and to the American eyes surpa.s.sing strange to see, but those two particular American eyes before which all the panorama was displayed, happened just then to be blind to everything except one vivid spirit-photograph, and grew moist each time that they pictured that afresh.

"No, I shall not tell Molly one word," she repeated mentally; "I can't tell her part,--I won't tell her all,--so I just shan't tell her anything," and then she stared sightlessly out of the wide-open window, and knew not that it was the dregs of her own evaporated anger which veiled the sunlit landscape in a dull-gray mist.

The train came slowly in by the banks of the Bodensee, and halted at the Kaufhaus soon after eleven o'clock. The Kaufhaus is that delightful old building where Huss was tried before the great Council. Built for a warehouse, it is now again a warehouse, Huss and his heresy having been but a ripple on the tranquil centuries of its existence.

Molly (who had been telegraphed to) was at the Gare to meet her friend, and managed to smother her surprise over the sudden turn of events with complete success.

"Let the maid take the boxes to the hotel," she said, after having greeted the traveller, "and you and I will just have a nice drive before dinner, and a good long nap right afterwards."

Rosina submitted to be led pa.s.sively to a cab, and the strength of her resolution was such that before they reached the spot where Huss was burnt, Molly was in possession of the last detail as to the preceding evening. She said never a word in reply, being much engaged in looking out of the side of the cab to see if she could see the monument, an action which struck her unhappy friend as heartless in the extreme. When they drew up beside the iron fence, both got out and peered between the bars at the huge ivy-covered boulder within the enclosure.

"Was he burned _on_ this stone?" Molly called to the cabman in German; "now why does he laugh, do you suppose?" she asked in English of Rosina.

"Oh," the latter replied wearily, "you used the word for 'fried,'

instead of the word 'burned,' but it doesn't matter," she added with a heavy sigh.

"I wonder whether he was looking towards the woods or towards the town when they lighted him!" Molly pursued with real interest.

Rosina felt that such talk was horribly frivolous, her own tale of woe considered, and made no reply; so they went back to the cab, and then Molly clasped her hands in her lap and became serious.

"I would forget all about him, if I was you," she said; "you will never get any satisfaction out of a man who is always going in for jealous rages like that."

Rosina felt with a shock that Molly was of a nature more intensely unsympathetic than any which she had hitherto encountered. She looked at the Rhine, wondered if it flowed past Leipsic, and wished that she had kept to her original determination and said nothing at all about any of it.

"I'm glad that I did as I did," she said, with an effort to speak in a tone of indifference (the effort was a marked failure). "I'm sure that I want to forget him badly enough," she added, and swallowed a choke.

Molly put her hand upon hers and nodded.

"Certainly, my dear; it was the only thing to do with a man like that.

You explained once, and once is enough, for one night, surely. Forget him now and be happy again."

"Don't let us talk about it any more," said Rosina, feeling bitterly that Molly lightly demanded oblivion of her when all her inclinations were towards tears.

They drove some distance in silence, and then Rosina said slowly:

"Do you suppose that I shall ever see him again now?"

"Yes, if you want to. One always sees the men again that one wants to see again."