It was a sorrowful evening, when Count L——
told his mistress of his father’s determination.
“If I do not give you up, I shall be able to
do nothing for you,” he said at last, “and
I shall not even know how I should manage to live
myself, for my father is just the man to allow me to
want, if I defy him. That, however, is a very
secondary consideration; but as a man of honor, I
cannot bind you, who have every right to luxury and
enjoyment, to myself, from the moment when I cannot
even keep you from want, and so I must set you at
liberty.”
“But I will not give you up,” Henrietta
said proudly.
The young Count shook his head sadly.
“Do you love me?” the ballet girl said,
quickly.
“More than my life.”
“Then we will not separate, as long as I have
anything,” she continued.
And she would not give up her connection with him,
and when his father actually turned Count L——
into the street, she took her lover into her own lodgings.
He obtained a situation as a copyist clerk in a lawyer’s
office, and she sold her valuable dresses and jewels,
and so they lived for more than a year.
The young man’s father did not appear to trouble
his head about them, but nevertheless he knew everything
that went on in their small home, and knew every article
that the ballet girl sold; until at last, softened
by such love and strength of character, he himself
made the first advances to a reconciliation with his
son.
At the present time, Henrietta wears the diamonds
which formerly belonged to the old Countess, and it
is long since she was a ballet girl, for now she sits
by the side of her husband in a carriage on whose
panels their armorial bearings are painted.
At present she is a great lady, an elegant, intellectual
woman, a celebrated actress; but in the year 1847,
when our story begins, she was a beautiful, but not
very moral girl, and then it was that the young, talented
Hungarian poet, who was the first to discover her gifts
for the stage, made her acquaintance.
The slim, ardent girl, with her bright, brown hair
and her large blue eyes, attracted the careless poet,
and he loved her, and all that was good and noble
in her nature, put forth fresh buds and blossoms in
the sunshine of his poetic love.
They lived in an attic in the old Imperial city on
the Danube, and she shared his poverty, his triumphs
and his pleasures, and she would have become his true
and faithful wife, if the Hungarian revolution had
not torn him from her arms.
The poet became the soldier of freedom, and followed
the Magyar tricolor, and the Honved drums, while she
was carried away by the current of the movement in
the capital, and she might have been seen discharging
her musket, like a brave Amazon, at the Croats, who
were defending the town against Goergey’s assaulting
battalions.
