We felt some pity for the lad when we took him abroad with us; but it must be confessed that at first he was not a very desirable travelling companion. There was a gloom about him. Despite the eight months that had elapsed, he professed that his old wound was still open. Tita treated him with the kindest maternal solicitude, which was a great mistake; tonics, not sweets, are required in such cases. Yet he was very grateful, and he said, with a blush, that, in any case, he would not rail against all women because of the badness of one. Indeed, you would not have fancied he had any great grudge against womankind. There were a great many English abroad that autumn, and we met whole batches of pretty girls at every station and at every table d’hote on our route. Did he avoid them, or glare at them savagely, or say hard things of them? Oh no! quite the reverse. He was a little shy at first; and when he saw a party of distressed damsels in a station, with their bewildered father in vain attempting to make himself understood to a porter, he would assist them in a brief and businesslike manner as if it were a duty, lift his cap, and then march off relieved. But by-and-by he began to make acquaintances in the hotel; and as he was a handsome, English-looking lad, who bore a certificate of honesty in his clear gray eyes and easy gait, he was rather made much of. Nor could any fault be decently found with his appetite.
So we passed on from Konigswinter to Coblenz, and from Coblenz to Heidelberg, and from Heidelberg south to Freiburg, where we bade adieu to the last of the towns, and laid hold of a trap with a pair of ancient and angular horses, and plunged into the Hollenthal, the first great gorge of the Black Forest mountains. From one point to another we slowly urged our devious course, walking the most of the day, indeed, and putting the trap and ourselves up for the night at some quaint roadside hostelry, where we ate of roe-deer and drank of Affenthaler, and endeavoured to speak German with a pure Waldshut accent. And then, one evening, when the last rays of the sun were shining along the hills and touching the stems of the tall pines, we drove into a narrow valley and caught sight of a large brown building of wood, with projecting eaves and quaint windows, that stood close by the forest.
“Here is my dear inn!” cried Tita, with a great glow of delight and affection in her face. “Here is mein gutes Thal! Ich gruss’ dich ein tausend Mal! And here is old Peter come out to see us; and there is Franziska!”
“Oh, this is Franziska, is it?” said Charlie.
Yes, this was Franziska. She was a well-built, handsome girl of nineteen or twenty, with a healthy, sunburnt complexion, and dark hair plaited into two long tails, which were taken up and twisted into a knot behind. That you could see from a distance. But on nearer approach you found that Franziska had really fine and intelligent features, and a pair of frank, clear, big brown eyes that had a very straight look about them. They were something of the eyes of a deer, indeed; wide apart, soft, and apprehensive, yet looking with a certain directness and unconsciousness that overcame her natural girlish timidity. Tita simply flew at her and kissed her heartily and asked her twenty questions at once. Franziska answered in very fair English, a little slow and formal, but quite grammatical. Then she was introduced to Charlie, and she shook hands with him in a simple and unembarrassed way; and then she turned to one of the servants and gave some directions about the luggage. Finally she begged Tita to go indoors and get off her travelling attire, which was done, leaving us two outside.
“She’s a very pretty girl,” Charlie said, carelessly. “I suppose she’s sort of head cook and kitchen-maid here.”
The impudence of these young men is something extraordinary.
“If you wish to have your head in your hands,” I remarked to him, “just you repeat that remark at dinner. Why, Franziska is no end of a swell. She has two thousand pounds and the half of a mill. She has a sister married to the Geheimer-Ober-Hofbaurath of Hesse-Cassel. She had visited both Paris and Munich, and she has her dresses made in Freiburg.”
“But why does such an illustrious creature bury herself in this valley, and in an old inn, and go about bareheaded?”
“Because there are folks in the world without ambition, who like to live a quiet, decent, homely life. Every girl can’t marry a Geheimer-Ober-Hofbaurath. Ziska, now, is much more likely to marry the young doctor here.”
“Oh, indeed! and live here all her days. She couldn’t do better. Happy Franziska!”
We went indoors. It was a low, large, rambling place, with one immense room all hung round with roe-deers’ horns, and with one lesser room fitted up with a billiard-table. The inn lay a couple of hundred yards back from Huferschingen; but it had been made the headquarters of the keepers, and just outside this room there were a number of pegs for them to sling their guns and bags on when they came in of an evening to have a pipe and a chopin of white wine. Ziska’s uncle and aunt were both large, stout, and somnolent people, very good-natured and kind, but a trifle dull. Ziska really had the management of the place, and she was not slow to lend a hand if the servants were remiss in waiting on us. But that, it was understood, was done out of compliment to our small Queen Tita.
By-and-by we sat down to dinner, and Franziska came to see that everything was going on straight. It was a dinner “with scenery.” You forgot to be particular about the soup, the venison, and the Affenthaler when from the window at your elbow you could look across the narrow valley and behold a long stretch of the Black Forest shining in the red glow of the sunset. The lower the sun sank the more intense became the crimson light on the tall stems of the pines; and then you could see the line of shadow slowly rising up the side of the opposite hill until only the topmost trees were touched with fire. Then these too lost it, and all the forest around us seemed to have a pale-blue mist stealing over it as the night fell and the twilight faded out of the sky overhead. Presently the long undulations of fir grew black, the stars came out, and the sound of the stream could be heard distantly in the hollow; and then, at Tita’s wish, we went off for a last stroll in among the soft moss and under the darkness of the pines, now and again starting some great capercailzie, and sending it flying and whirring down the glades.
When we returned from that prowl into the forest, we found the inn dark. Such people as may have called in had gone home; but we suspected that Franziska had given the neighbours a hint not to overwhelm us on our first arrival. When we entered the big room, Franziska came in with candles; then she brought some matches, and also put on the table an odd little pack of cards, and went out. Her uncle and aunt had, even before we went out, come and bade us good-night formally, and shaken hands all round. They are early folk in the Black Forest.
“Where has that girl gone now?” says Charlie. “Into that lonely billiard-room! Couldn’t you ask her to come in here? Or shall we go and play billiards?”
Tita stares, and then demurely smiles; but it is with an assumed severity that she rebukes him for such a wicked proposal, and reminds him that he must start early next morning. He groans assent. Then she takes her leave.
The big young man was silent for a moment or two, with his hands in his pockets and his legs stretched out. I begin to think I am in for it—the old story of blighted hopes and angry denunciation and hypocritical joy, and all the rest of it. But suddenly Charlie looks up with a businesslike air and says:
“Who is that doctor fellow you were speaking about! Shall we see him to-morrow?”
“You saw him to-night. It was he who passed us on the road with the two beagles.”
“What! that little fellow with the bandy legs and the spectacles?” he cries, with a great laugh.
“That little fellow,” I observe to him, “is a person of some importance, I can tell you. He—”
“I suppose his sister married a Geheimer-Ober-under—what the dickens is it?” says this disrespectful young man.
“Dr. Krumm has got the Iron Cross.”
“That won’t make his legs any the straighter.”
“He was at Weissenburg.”
“I suppose he got that cast in the eye there.”
“He can play the zither in a way that would astonish you. He has got a little money. Franziska and he would be able to live very comfortably together.”
“Franziska and that fellow?” says Charlie; and then he rises with a sulky air, and proposes we should take our candles with us.
But he is not sulky very long; for Ziska, hearing our footsteps, comes to the passage and bids us a friendly good-night.
“Good-night, Miss Fahler!” he says, in rather a shamefaced way; “and I am so awfully sorry we have kept you up so late. We sha’n’t do it again.”
You would have thought by his manner that it was two o’clock, whereas it was only half-past eleven!