A Woman's Will by Anne Warner (best 7 inch ereader txt) 📕

eyes openly in preparation for the visit to be.

“You are lonely to-day,” said Fraülein sympathetically. “I am glad that your cousin did come.”

“Yes,” said Rosina, “but he went away so soon again.”

Her eyes immediately refilled.

“You love each other so very much in America,” said the German girl gently; she stood still for a minute and then smiled suddenly. “I will tell madame to come here,” she added, and left the room.

Rosina went back to the window and her unseeing contemplation of the outdoors. Presently some one knocked and she turned, crying:

“_Entrez!_”

The door opened, and instead of the French lady whose husband was fleeing the revolution in Caraccas by bringing his family to Munich for the winter, a man entered.

The man was tall and dark, with brown eyes and a black moustache, and his eyes were oddly full of light and laughter.

She stood still staring for one short minute, and then suddenly something swallowed up all the space between them, and her hand was fast between his grasp, pressed hard against his lips, while the pleasure in her eyes rose and fell against the joy of his own.

“_Vous me voyez revenu!_” he said.

“Where is Jack?” she asked; both spoke almost at once, and Von Ibn was conscious of sharing a divine sense of relief with her as he replied:

“He is gone alone to Vienna!”

It was as if a heavy cloud had been lifted from her horizon. She sank down in one of the big easy-chairs and he dragged another close, very close to her side.

“Not so near!” she exclaimed, a little frightened.

He withdrew the chair two inches and fixed his eyes hungrily upon her face.

“Has it been long to you?” he asked, his tone one of breathless feeling.

And then she realized to the full how very long it had been, and confessed the fact in one great in-drawn sigh.

“Why did you go so far?” she demanded.

“It was one step beyond the another; I have no idea but of the Tagernsee when we leave.”

“You’ve been gone weeks!”

He leaned forward and seized her hand again.

“Was it so long?” he questioned softly.

“You know that I only saw my cousin just that one evening!” she had the face to say complainingly.

“Yes,” he said sympathetically; “he is so nice, your cousin. I have learned to like him so very much; we have really great pleasure together. But,” he added, “I did not come back to talk of him.”

“Why did you come back?” she asked, freeing herself and pushing her chair away.

He smiled upon her.

“You ask?” he said, in amusement; “shall I say that it was to see you?”

“I hope that you did not return on my account.”

He paused, twisting his moustache; then started a little and said:

“No, I am returned wholly for business.”

Rosina received the cold douche with a composure bred of experience, and after a liberal interval he went on.

“But I wanted also to see you too.”

“Well, you are seeing me, are you not?”

“Yes, but you do not smile as before your cousin is come. I want you to smile. Oh,” he exclaimed, suddenly interrupting himself, “have you ride horseback since I left?”

“Oh, yes, almost every day.”

His face clouded slightly.

“Who have you ride with?”

“With my friends who are here, and twice with the lieutenant.”

Then his face clouded very heavily.

“Is he interesting?” he asked; “yes?”

“It was the Englischergarten that was wonderful,” she told him. “We rode very early in the morning and the dew was on the grass and we could hear the pheasants in the underbrush when the noise of the horses’ feet frightened them further away.”

“And the lieutenant?” he asked.

“And oh,” she continued, “you know that place where the woods open so widely, and you can see so far across,--_eh bien_, we saw one morning the deer standing in the edge of the forest just there, one would have said fifty miles from civilization, not at all as if they were in the midst of Munich.”

“And the lieutenant?” he repeated.

“And then another day the clouds of morning mist were so thick that we could see their outlines as they lay upon the earth, and ride into them and ride out of them,--a quite new experience for me.”

“But the lieutenant?” he exclaimed impatiently, “the lieutenant? what did he talk of? what did you speak together of?”

Rosina laughed, nodding merrily over his impatience.

“We talked of the pheasants,” she said, “of the deer, of the fog. Are you satisfied?”

He shrugged his shoulders, his frown lifted.

“It is quite one to me,” he said indifferently; “you know that I have said before that I am not of a _tempérament jaloux_.”

Then he got up and walked about the room, taking a cigar from his pocket and holding it unlighted in his mouth.

“May I smoke here?” he asked.

“I don’t care if you do.”

He returned suddenly to his chair, laid the cigar on the table, and took her hand again.

“Your cousin is so nice,” he told her, as if the recollection of Jack’s charms had necessitated his at once expressing his feelings towards Jack’s cousin.

“When is he coming back?” she asked.

“In one week.”

“When does he sail? Do you know?”

“On the nineteenth day, from Genoa.”

She quite sprang from her seat.

“Not really!” she exclaimed.

“Yes, so he tell me.”

He drew her back into her chair and she forgot the hand which he still held in her desperate feeling of the instant. She was helplessly choked with conflicting emotions. October instead of December! That came of having a cousin!

The kingdom of the other chair advanced its border-line more than two inches, and she did not appear to notice the bold encroachment.

“What does it matter?” she asked herself bitterly; “in a few days I’m going, and then I shall never lay eyes on him again,” and the tears welled up thickly at the thought.

“_Qu’est-ce que vous avez?_” he said anxiously; “you must not cry when I am returned, you know!”

At that she sobbed outright.

He looked at her with an intentness very foreign to his usual expression, and seemed to weigh two courses of action and deliberate as to their relative advisability; he ended by laying her hand down gently and going to the window, where he remained for several minutes, looking out and saying nothing.

She dried her eyes quickly and quietly (only a foolish woman continues to weep after the man has gone), and waited for him to turn. Finally he did so.

“It is not raining once more,” he said; “let us go out and walk far. That will do you quite well; I cannot bear that you weep.”

He added the last words in a lower tone, and coming close behind her chair suddenly stooped.

She realized all in a flash where he was, what he was meditating, the half-open door, and writhed quickly out of the chair and away.

“Why not?” he asked, looking after her unsmilingly. “It will do you no hurt and me much good.”

“I’m out of the habit,” she said shortly, recollecting Jack’s words on that famous night of his arrival.

They were both on their feet, she by the window and he by the chair which she had just left.

“Was your husband very _tendre_?” he asked.

She felt the corners of her mouth give way under the stressful shock of this question. “I might say, ‘I never tried him to see,’” she thought, “but he _never_ would understand,” and so there was an instant of silence.

“Why do you smile?” he demanded, smiling himself.

“Because we don’t call men ‘tender.’ We call meat ‘tender’ and men ‘affectionate.’”

“But I _am_ tender,” he affirmed.

“Are you? Well, you are younger than my husband and perhaps that accounts for it.”

He reflected, but did not appear to understand; finally he gave it up for a bad job and said, changing to a less abstruse subject:

“We go to walk? yes?”

“Certainly; if you will wait while I have some proper boots found for me.”

“Yes, I will wait.”

He came towards her.

“Oh, you had better go into the corridor and wait,” she exclaimed hastily. “I’ll come in a moment.”

He stopped short and smiled his irresistible smile.

“You are so madly queer. _Qu’est-ce que vous avez_? You scream always, and yet I have not done nothing.”

Then without another word he left the room.

When she was alone Rosina rang for her maid. As Ottillie knelt at her feet, she frowned deeply, thinking how more than horrid it was that Jack should have come, that she should be obliged to go, and that women may not allow themselves to be kissed. Later she recollected that Jack was in Vienna, that there was the half of October yet to be lived, and that all disembodied kisses must of necessity have an incarnation yet to come. And then she smiled once more.

Ottillie brought her wraps and adjusted her hat.

“Will madame take supper here?” she asked.

“_Je le pense, oui._”

The maid muffled a sigh; she would have made Von Ibn a conquering hero indeed, if her heartfelt wishes could have given him the victory. And apropos of this subject, it would be interesting, very interesting, to know how many international marriages have been backed up by a French _femme-de-chambre_ burning with impatience to return to her own continent.

Rosina went to the salon and found her hero looking at a “Jugend” with a bored expression. When he saw her he sprang to his feet and sought his hat and umbrella forthwith.

Then they went down the three flights of stairs to the street, and found it wet indeed.

“We cannot go on the Promenade,” he said, after casting a comprehensive glance about and afar. “I think we will go by the Hofgarten and walk under the arcade there; there will it be dry, _n’est-ce pas_?”

“Yes, surely it will be dry there,” she acquiesced. “It is always dry under cover in Europe, because your rain is so quiet and well behaved; it never comes with a terrible gale, whirling and twisting, and drenching everything inside and outside, like our storms.”

“Why do your storms be so?”

“We haven’t found any way of teaching them better manners yet. They are like our flies; our flies are the noisiest, most intrusive, most impertinent creatures. You don’t appreciate your timid, modest little flies.”

“I do not like flies.”

“Yes,” she laughed, “that is the whole story. You ‘do not like flies,’ while we go crazy if there is one around, and have our houses screened from cellar to garret.”

“I do not find this subject very amusing,” he said; “let us speak of another thing.”

Rosina glanced up at the prison-like façade which they were passing.

“I find the architecture of the Hoftheater terribly monotonous,” she said warmly. “Why do you not have a more diversified style of windows where so many must be in a straight row?”

“Munich is not my city,” he responded, shrugging his shoulder; “and if you will to find fault with