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

with the sweet impulsive gesture of a pleading child.

The gold had all faded from the sky, and the pink reflection in the far west was sunk beyond the horizon. The path was very solitary; they were quite alone except for an occasional peasant returning from his labor.

“Say that you understand,” she said anxiously, as a break in the trees revealed a long stretch of river; “you _must_ say something, because I want to know how far it is to the next bridge.”

He stopped and stared ahead.

“There are no more bridges,” he proclaimed.

“No more bridges,” she cried.

He shook his head.

“Must we go the whole way back along this same muddy path?”

“Yes, surely.”

She turned.

“Then let us go back now. There is no fun walking any further this way after the sunset is over.”

“Is it for the sunset alone that you walk?”

“What shall I say?” she asked, looking up at him.

“Say that you walk for me.”

“And then what follows?”

“I follow.”

They laughed together.

“I am so good to you,” he declared; “even when you laugh at me I am never angry. I am truly so very good.”

He appeared so well content with himself that they went the whole distance to the Peace Monument before she disturbed his placid introspection. There was a pleasure to her in simply walking beside him in silence; it was a sensation which she had never attempted to analyze, but its existence had become a part of her own.

“Do not let us go home,” he proposed suddenly, when her turning to cross the Luitpoldbrücke recalled him to himself; “let us go somewhere and dine alone together. It is perhaps the last time; Jack returns to-morrow.”

“Oh, let us,” she agreed delightedly; but then her voice altered suddenly for the worse. “No, it’s impossible,” she said sadly, “I can’t go to a café and dine in this short skirt.”

“Why can you not?”

“Can’t you see why?”

He walked off some ways to the side and gazed critically at her skirt.

“Yes,” he said, rejoining her, “I can see why.”

They were halfway across the bridge; he laid his hand on her arm and stopped her.

“_Je vous ferai un propos_,” he said eagerly; “we will take a car going to the Ostbahnhof, and then we will leave it at a quiet place and seek a quiet café and dine there.”

“All right,” she said; “but you must telephone to the _pension_, or they won’t know what has become of me.”

“I can say that we are gone to the theatre,” he suggested.

“They won’t believe that because of this skirt.”

“I will say we are gone too far and must send for a cab, and will eat while we wait.”

“I think that whatever you say will sound like a lie, so it doesn’t really matter.”

“Then I will say that we do not return until after the supper, and nothing else.”

“Where will you telephone from?”

“From the café. Where would I telephone from?”

Rosina looked vaguely around in the darkness.

“We are only three or four blocks from the _pension_ now, are we not?”

He glanced about.

“It will be droll if we meet some one you know.”

“Yes,” she said coldly; “it will be very funny--like Mrs. Jones to-day.”

“I am quite vexed when she came in,” he said seriously; “why do people come in like that?”

“We’ll be just as thoughtless when we’re her age,” Rosina said charitably. “I think myself that it is astonishing that so many young people manage to get betrothed when there are so many old people to keep coming in.”

“Getting betrothed is very simple,” said Von Ibn, “because always the young girl is willing; but when she is a young widow and not willing, that is what is difficult, and makes Mrs. Jones _de trop_.”

She was obliged to laugh.

They were come to the Maximiliansstrasse, and a car was making its way jerkily around the corners of the monument in the middle of the square. It was a car for the Ostbahnhof, and full--very full.

“Let it go by,” he said. “We will walk on and another comes in a moment.”

They let it pass, and wandered on towards the rushing river.

“You see why it was so foolish to be sad,” he remarked, as they approached the bridge; “here is the second time that you have seen the Isar since you weep good-bye forever this afternoon.”

“I didn’t weep,” she said indignantly.

“Did you not? I thought that you did.”

They waited for another car at the end of the bridge; the island where the Isarlust sports its lights and music all summer, looked particularly deserted in the contrast of this October night. She spoke of the fact.

“You were often there?” he asked; “yes?”

“Yes, very often.”

“With who?”

She smiled a little in the dark.

“We used to come in the evenings,” she said; “every one used to come.”

Another car approached--again crowded.

“Let us walk,” she suggested; “all the cars will be crowded for the next hour.”

“Will your feet go further?” he inquired anxiously.

“Yes, I think so.”

They turned their faces to that gardened slope which rises to the right of the Maximilianeum. The full moon was coming up behind the stately building, and its glorious open arches were outlined against the evening sky. The great tower which rose at the end near them seemed to mount straight upward into heaven itself.

“I don’t want to leave the Maximilianeum,” she exclaimed, reft with an intense admiration for the grandeur of what was before her; “I don’t want to leave the Bavarian moon; oh, I don’t want to leave Munich; not a bit.”

“And me?” said her companion, taking her arm, “do you want to not leave me also?”

“I don’t want to leave you either,” she declared. “I don’t want to leave anything, and I must leave everything. Oh,” she exclaimed suddenly and viciously, “I wish I might know who it was that wrote home to Uncle John.”

“But you have thought to know?”

“Oh, I’m almost sure that it was that man in Zurich.”

“He was not so bad, that Zuricher man,” he said, reflectively. “Did I ever say to you that I did go to the Gare with him when he went to Lucerne?”

“No, you never told me that. What did you go to the station with him for?”

“I thought that I would know whether after all he really went to Constance. At the Gare, after he has bought his ticket for Lucerne, I find him most agreeable.”

“Did you really think that perhaps he _was_ going to Constance?”

“Yes, I did. I find it very natural that he shall want to go to Constance. I am surprise that day at every one who can decide to go any other place because I so wish to get to Constance myself. _Vous comprenez?_”

She was obliged to smile audibly.

“It was very funny the way that you came into the Insel _salle-à-manger_ that night. I never was more surprised in my life.”

“I like to come to you that way,” he went on. “When you are so your face becomes glad and I believe that you have been really lonely for me and--”

He stopped suddenly; two big electric lights loomed at the corner to their right and the scene which was revealed by the uncurtained state of the window was responsible for the sudden turn of the current of his thoughts.

“We can eat there,” he exclaimed.

She stopped, astonished.

“Can we?” she asked. “I wouldn’t think so.”

“But surely yes,” he affirmed; “it is a café.”

He flung the door open as he spoke and stood back to let her pass inside.

“It is a little smoky,” he continued, as the door fell to, “but--”

“A little!” she interrupted.

“But what does that do to you? and there is another lady, so it is very right for you to be here too.”

“She doesn’t look like a lady to me,” said Rosina, dodging under a billiard-cue, for in this particular café the centre of the room is occupied by the billiard-tables; “she looks decidedly otherwise.”

Von Ibn glanced carelessly at the person alluded to.

“It is always a woman,” he remarked; and then he led the way around to a vacant corner where there was somewhat less confusion than elsewhere. “Here you may sit down,” he commanded, and laid aside his own hat and overcoat.

She obeyed him, contemplating her surroundings with interest as she began to unbutton her gloves.

For the place was, to her eyes, unique of its kind, her lot having been cast hitherto in quite another class of cafés. It was very large, and decidedly hideous, wainscoted in imitation panels and frescoed in imitation paintings. The columns which supported the ceilings were brilliantly banded in various colors and flowered out below their pediments into iron branches of oak leaves among which blossomed the bulbs of many electric lights. By each column stood a severely plain hat-rack. In the middle of the room were four billiard tables, around its sides numberless small marble-topped stands where beer was being served galore. Against the walls were fastened several of those magnificent mirrors which testify so loudly to the reasonable price of good glass in that happy land across the seas; each mirror was flanked by two stuffed eagles, and decorated above its centre with one ornate quirl in gilt and stucco. And the whole was full and more than full of smoke.

Von Ibn rapped on the tiled floor with his umbrella, and a waitress serving at a table near, five beer-mugs in each hand, nodded that she heard. Then he turned to Rosina:

“_Eh bien!_”

“I never was in a place like this before.”

“You may very likely never be in such a one again,” he told her seriously; “so you must be as happy as you can while you’re here.”

“That reason for having a good time hadn’t occurred to me,” she answered, giving him back his smile.

“Then think to occur it now,” he rejoined.

The waitress had by this time gotten rid of her ten mugs and came to them, beginning proceedings by spreading the ménu down on the table and running her pencil through item after item.

“You had better order before everything is gone,” Rosina suggested.

“I must think the same,” he replied, and took up the ménu.

“_Haben Sie bouillon?_” he demanded immediately.

The waitress signified that bouillon was not to be.

“How shall I do?” he asked, looking blank. “In all my life I have never eat without a bouillon before?”

Rosina and the waitress felt their mutual helplessness in this difficulty, and the proceedings in hand came to a standstill natural under the circumstances.

“Can’t they make you some?” the American brain suggested.

He turned the idea over in his mind once or twice and then:

“No,” he said; “it is not worth. It will be better that we eat now, and later, when I am in town, I will get a bouillon.”

So, that difficulty being disposed of, he ordered a species of repast with an infinite sense of amusement over the bill of fare.