“Good heavens! you may perhaps have been wrongly informed. Besides, surely all men are not alike!”
“Yes, they are—all—believe me. I know none of our gentlemen who do not. … Among those who pay me attention are several married men. And what is their object? Certainly not to give me or themselves exercises in fidelity to marriage.”
“I suppose they know you will not listen to them. And do you think Frederick belongs to this crew?” I asked with a smile.
“That is more than I can tell you, you little goose. But for all that it is very good of me to let you know how much I am struck with him. Now, all you have to do is to keep your eyes open.”
“My eyes are wide open already, Lori, and they have before now observed with displeasure several attempts at coquetry on your part.”
“Oh, that’s it! Then I must disguise it better in future.”
We both laughed, but I still felt that in the same way as behind the jealousy which I pretended for fun a real movement of this passion lay hid, so behind the chat with which she affected to tease me there lay a germ of truth.
The arrangement to marry my son Rudolf one day to Lori’s little Beatrix was still kept intact. It was of course more in play than in reality—the main question whether the children’s hearts would beat for each other could only be decided by the future. That in a worldly point of view my Rudolf would be a most eligible match was certain, and so much the more fastidious might he be in choosing. Beatrix indeed promised to be a great beauty, but if she took after her mother in coquetry and shallowness of mind she would not be one I should desire for a daughter-in-law. But all that was in the far distance.
Lori’s husband had not shared in the Schleswig-Holstein campaign, and that annoyed him much. Lori too was grieved at this “ill-luck.”
“Such a nice victorious war,” she complained. “Griesbach would have been sure to have got a step by this time. However, the comfort is that in the next campaign—”
“What are you thinking of?” I broke in. “There is not the least prospect of that. Do you know any cause for it? What should a war be waged about now?”
“What for? Really I have nothing to do with that. Wars come—and there they are. Every five or six years something breaks out. That is the regular course of history.”
“But surely some reasons must exist for it.”
“Perhaps, but who knows what they are? Certainly I don’t, nor my husband either. I asked him in the course of the late war ‘What is the exact thing they are fighting about down there?’ ‘I don’t know,’ he replied, shrugging his shoulders, ‘it is all the same to me. But it is a bore that I am not there,’ he added. Oh, Griesbach is a true soldier. The ‘why’ and ‘what for’ of the wars are not the business of the soldiers. The diplomatists settle that amongst themselves. I never bothered my brains about all these political squabbles. It is not the business of us women at all—we should besides understand nothing of it. When once the storm has broken we have only to pray—”
“That it may strike our neighbours and not ourselves—that is certainly the most simple plan.”
“Dear Madam—A friend—or perhaps an enemy, no matter—a person who knows but wishes to remain unknown—takes this means of informing you that you are being betrayed. Your husband, so seeming virtuous, and your friend who wants to pass for an innocent, are laughing at you for your good-humoured confidence—you poor blinded wife. I have my own reasons for wishing to tear the mask off both their faces. It is not from goodwill to you that I so act, for I can easily imagine that this detection of two persons dear to you may bring you more pain than profit—but I have no goodwill to you in my heart. Perhaps I am a rejected adorer, who is taking his revenge this way. What matters the motive? The fact is there, and if you wish for proofs I can furnish them to you. Besides, without proofs you would give no credit to an anonymous letter. The accompanying ‘billet’ was lost by Countess Gr⸺”
This astounding letter lay on our breakfast-table one fine spring morning. Frederick was sitting opposite to me, busied with his letters, while I read and reread the above ten times over. The note which accompanied the traitorous epistle was enclosed in an envelope of its own, and I put off tearing it open.
I looked at Frederick. He was deep in a morning paper; still he must have felt the look which I fixed on him, for he let the newspaper fall, and with his usual kindly, smiling expression, turned his face to me.
“Hollo, what is the matter, Martha? Why are you staring at me in that way?”
“I wanted to know whether you are still fond of me.”
“Oh, no, not for a long time,” he said jestingly. “Really I have never been able to bear you.”
“That I do not believe.”
“But now I begin to see—But you are quite pale. Have you had any bad news?”
I hesitated. Should I show him the letter? Should I first look at the piece of evidence which I held in my hand still unbroken? The thoughts whirled through my head—my Frederick, my all, my friend and husband, him whom I trusted and loved—could he be lost to me? Unfaithful, he! Oh, it must have been only a momentary intoxication of the senses—nothing more. Was there not enough indulgence in my heart to forgive it, to forget it, to regard it as having never happened? But to be false! How would it be, if his heart, too, had turned from me; how, if he preferred the seductive Lori to me?
“Well, do speak. You seem quite to have lost your voice. Show
