“I have told you already that it was not from Herr Schmidt that I learnt that Herr von Werben is visiting you again.”
“Then you heard it from Count Golm, and I cannot abide him; he will have to wait a long time before I give him a good word, and now—”
“My dear child, permit me to observe that you are not very judicious,” said Giraldi, smiling. “You have half a dozen personal reasons for doing what you are doing; I pay you besides, and beg you moreover to consider me at your disposal in that matter, and you want to give the whole affair up because—”
“It bores me! I can bear anything except being bored.”
“What is it that bores you? Explain that to me.”
“What is there to explain?” cried Bertalda; “it is just tiresome. If one is foolishly in love with a man, and he comes and weeps in one’s arms, and one hears from others why he weeps, why should one not do him a kindness and help him to gain the woman he loves? Why, goodness me, there is nothing very hard in that; I am a good-natured creature, and if there is a little acting to be done—why one learns to cut a few capers in the ballet, and it is all the more amusing. And the acting you suggested was very pretty so far, and there is no great harm in standing as a model for a couple of days, when there is nothing to be done but to hold up your bare arms, and half the time is spent in talking too; but on the third day one ought to be able to say, So-and-so is waiting for you at such a place, and make an end of it!”
“I gave you permission yesterday to hint at the real state of affairs.”
“Oh yes, hint!” cried Bertalda. “I told her the whole story today. There!”
Giraldi half started from his chair, but immediately recovered himself, and asked in his quiet way:
“What do you mean by the whole story, my dear child?”
“Why, that I am not a model, and that I have come on Herr von Werben’s account—”
“Sent by Signor Giraldi—”
“What! as if I would have allowed myself to be sent if I had not chosen.”
“Of your own accord then—so much the better! And how did she take it?”
Bertalda burst into a ringing laugh.
“My goodness!” cried she, “it was a farce! She did not know whether to thank me on her knees, or to trample me under her feet. I think she mentally did first one and then the other, whilst with clasped hands, and crying as I never saw a girl cry before, she stood in front of me, and then raged about the room with uplifted arms, as I never saw anyone rage before either. First she called me a saint, a penitent Magdalen, I don’t know what all, and a moment after a hussy, a—well, I don’t know what either. It went on so for at least an hour without pause, and the end of the story was—”
“That you were not to presume to return?”
“Heaven forbid! Tomorrow I was to return, and then it would all begin over again, and it really is too wearisome, I say, and I shall not go there again tomorrow.” Bertalda got up with one last energetic tap of her boots. Giraldi remained sitting, stroking his beard.
“You are right,” he said; “do not go there again tomorrow, nor the next day; on the third day she will come to you.”
Bertalda bent forward to look more closely at the man, who said this with such certainty, as if he were reading it from a paper which lay on the table before him.
“Supposing, of course,” continued Giraldi, “that you do not answer the letter which she will write to you on the second day, and that altogether you play at drawing back a little as a person whose kindness has been misunderstood, and so on. If you can and will do this we remain friends; if you will not—it is not well to make an enemy of me, believe me.”
Bertalda rose and went behind her chair, and leant both her elbows on the back.
“If I only knew,” she said, “what you have to do with it all?”
“And if you knew?”
“Then I should know what to do myself. I am not afraid of you—what can you do to me? but I fear for poor Ottomar. I do not wish that any harm should happen to him.”
Giraldi got up also, seated himself sideways in the chair on which Bertalda leant, and took her hands in his.
“Good girl!” he said; “and if I swear to you that I am Ottomar’s best friend, that he has no secrets from me, not even that of his debts; that it is I who have just now helped him up again, that it is from me that he has the hundred-thaler notes, of which, perhaps, one or two have found their way into your pocket; and if in case you will not believe me, I show it to you in black and white, in Ottomar’s own hand, what would you say then?”
“Nothing at all,” answered Bertalda. She had, while he still held her hands, come round the chair, and suddenly sat down on his lap, with her hands, which she now freed, stroking his soft black beard. “At most, that you are a charming uncle, such as are scarce, and that you deserve a kiss, and—there, you have one.”
She had wound her arms round his neck, and kissed him, first teasingly, then with a passion which seemed to surprise even herself, and which also deprived him for the moment
