“The Count is conscious again. He only mumbles your name. He must speak to you. He can’t have long to live. You won’t let him die quite alone. …”
Laura’s voice sounded like a cry of distress, half in despair, half in fury:
“Good God … I … I told you, nurse, that I was ill myself … that I am in bed … that the doctor has forbidden me. … But I will try to send somebody. …”
She rushed in to Georg. She was pale, very much décolletée, dressed in black rustling silk and covered with jewels. She did not notice how her son quickly hid a parcel under the table. She stroked him on his arm and hand quickly and nervously.
“Dear little Georg, you must go to the nursing home again! Alexis has become worse. I can’t bear to see him suffer. My nerves are quite exhausted. Yes, it would quite finish me. I have some friends here but they must leave, they must leave at once. … I am simply done. …”
Georg turned away. Her perfume enveloped him. As she bent forward he saw with a shudder her dazzling white breasts move below her low-cut frock. He suddenly felt a strange sickening shame that she should be his mother, that he had sprung from her body. He jumped out of his chair:
“No, mamma, you go yourself!” he exclaimed.
But she clung to him, moaned, begged, caressed, kissed him. Yes, in her miserable panic she seemed to have forgotten that he was her son and she was prepared to employ all the artifices that a frightened woman can employ in order to move a man.
Georg jumped up and pushed her away from him:
“Leave me alone!” he said, “I don’t want you to touch me!”
Merely from anxiety and in order to get away from her he at last rushed out for the second time to the sick man.
Laura stood at the table with a rigid smile on her lips. The danger she had escaped seemed to have numbed every limb in her body. She pulled her shawl over her bare shoulders. Her son’s contempt passed like a chill shiver over her skin. Your own flesh and blood! Bah! The boy was like wax in her hands.
She went into the sitting room. She walked slowly and carefully. It seemed as if there were something cold, frail and motionless within her, something that could not bear a shock.
Laura excused herself to her guests:
“My husband is worse and I must go to him,” she said, quietly and solemnly.
Appearances must, of course, be saved.
They said goodbye with many regrets and expressions of sympathy. The young Russian musician had a refined and a very sensitive face. He meant to kiss his hostess’s hand but stopped halfway and turned a little pale. As he bent over this beautiful and robust woman’s body it seemed as if he had suddenly been startled as before something dead, before the stench of a dead soul.
Laura hurried to bed, took a sleeping draught and pulled the bed cover over her head.
Early the next morning she was awakened by the message of the death of her husband. She first felt a strange creepy sensation of relief. Now he would never call for her again. Now she no longer need go and see him. Now she could escape the nursing home. …
But then she was seized by a bitter ague. Her nerves at least had not forgotten him. A cold breath chilled certain of her more intimate memories and the cold bony fingers of death groped too close to her own spine. It was like a poisoning of the senses.
Laura felt so out of sorts and so sick that she quite believed she was mourning her dead husband and felt keenly sorry for herself. She dressed in her plainest black frock and sank down into an easy chair.
Then a tall thin man in a black frock coat, carefully buttoned, and dismal folds on his forehead appeared ghostlike on the scene. He was the undertaker. Laura told him with a tired, an infinitely tired gesture, and in a few monosyllables to address himself to her brothers at Selambshof and Trefvinge. After which the gloomy looking figure withdrew bowing solemnly.
Laura sank together. “I am an old woman,” she thought. “Everything inside me feels so frozen and dead. I am an old, broken, lonely woman. My life is finished.”
Then she suddenly thought of Georg. Good God, Georg! She had forgotten Georg. Of course, she had Georg. She was not alone. Her life was not finished. She had her son, a big, handsome, clever, brave boy.
A glow of warmth surged once more through Laura’s veins. A certain remorse for her previous indifference and neglect stirred inside her. For once she really suspected something of a mother’s feelings.
She flew into Georg’s room.
It was empty.
She sat down to wait. She sat on the edge of his bed, fingering his pillow and his night shirt and got out her watch every second minute. Never before in her life had she really waited for any human being.
She called the chambermaid. She inquired of the waiter and the hall porter. No, nobody had seen the young gentleman. And still he had been sleeping in his bed, you could see that.
Laura worked herself up into a state of nervous, shivering, whining anxiety. Towards dinner time the hall porter sent up a letter that had been left by a messenger boy. It was from Georg and read as follows:—
To my mother,
I am writing to say goodbye. We shall not see each other again. I had not meant to leave like this, but what happened yesterday was too cowardly. I can’t stay any longer. I am going to sign on as soon as I get a chance and sail to America to find father. It is no good trying to find me because I am sixteen years of age and I am not coming back to you. I know all about how you and Uncle Peter behaved to father. I know it
