The faded lips of the baronesses and countesses uttered
many a “For Shame!” but all in
vain, neither was it any good for the Baroness to
make up her mind that she would never again put a social
medley before the Prince in her drawing-room, for
he had seen through her intrigue, and gave her up
altogether. Sic transit gloria mundi!
She, however, consoled herself as best she could.
Fortuna, the goddess of chance and good luck, has
always been Cupid’s best ally and Arnold
T., who was a lieutenant in a hussar regiment, was
evidently a special favorite of both those roguish
deities.
This good-looking, well-bred young officer had been
an enthusiastic admirer of the two Countesses W.,
mother and daughter, during a tolerably long leave
of absence, which he spent with his relations in Vienna.
He had admired them from the Prater, and worshiped
them at the opera, but he had never had an opportunity
of making their acquaintance, and when he was back
at his dull quarters in Galicia, he liked to think
about those two aristocratic beauties. Last summer
his regiment was transferred to Bohemia, to a wildly
romantic district, that had been made illustrious
by a talented writer, which abounded in magnificent
woods, lofty mountain-forests and castles, and which
was a favorite summer resort of the neighboring aristocracy.
Who can describe his joyful surprise, when he and
his men were quartered in an old, weather-beaten castle
in the middle of a wood, and he learnt from the house-steward
who received him that the owner of the castle was
the husband, and, consequently, also the father of
his Viennese ideals. An hour after he had taken
possession of his old-fashioned, but beautifully furnished,
room in a side-wing of the castle, he put on his full-dress
uniform, and throwing his dolman over his shoulders,
he went to pay his respects to the Count and the ladies.
He was received with the greatest cordiality.
The Count was delighted to have a companion when he
went out shooting, and the ladies were no less pleased
at having some one to accompany them on their walks
in the forests, or on their rides, so that he felt
only half on the earth, and half in the seventh heaven
of Mohammedan bliss. Before supper he had time
to inspect the house more closely, and even to take
a sketch of the large, gloomy building from a favorable
point. The ancient seat of the Counts of W. was
really very gloomy; in fact it created a sinister,
uncomfortable feeling. The walls, which were crumbling
away here and there, and which were covered with dark
ivy; the round towers, which harbored jackdaws, owls,
and hawks; the AEolian harp, which complained and
sighed and wept in the wind; the stones in the castle
yard, which were overgrown with grass; the cloisters,
in which every footstep re-echoed; the great ancestral
portraits which hung on the walls, coated as it were
with dark, mysterious veils by the centuries which
had passed over them—all this recalled
to him the legends and fairy tales of his youth, and
he involuntarily thought of the Sleeping Beauty
in the Wood, and of Blue Beard, of the
cruel mistress of the Kynast,[7] and that aristocratic
tigress of the Carpathians, who obtained the unfading
charms of eternal youth by bathing in human blood.
