“I really do not know,” answered Elsa, “I only know that we are very poor, and that as far as I am concerned you may still marry your Count.”
“I would do it very readily,” said the little lady seriously, “but I am not pretty enough for him with my insignificant little face and my snub nose. I shall marry some day a rich city man, who will be impressed with our old nobility—for the Strummins are as old as the island, you know—some Herr Schulze or Müller or Schmidt. By the by, what is the name of the officer who came with you?”
“Schmidt—Reinhold Schmidt.”
“No; you are joking!”
“No, really; but he is not an officer.”
“Not an officer? But how is he a captain then?”
“He is captain of a ship.”
“In the navy?”
“Only a merchant-captain.”
“No! you don’t say so!”
It came out so comically, and Meta clasped her little hands in such naive amazement, that Elsa could not help laughing, and laughed all the more to hide the blush of confusion which rose to her cheek.
“But then he will not have supper with us?” said Meta.
“Why not?” asked Elsa, suddenly becoming quite grave again.
“Only a merchant-captain!” repeated Meta. “What a pity! such a good-looking man! I had quite counted upon him for myself! But a merchant-captain!”
Frau von Strummin here came in to accompany the two girls to supper. Meta flew to her mother to communicate her great discovery.
“It has all been arranged,” answered her mother. “The Count asked your father and the President if they wished Captain Schmidt to be invited to join the party. Both gentlemen expressed themselves in favour of it, and so he will appear at table. He really seems a very well-mannered sort of person,” concluded Frau von Strummin.
“I am really curious to see him,” said Meta.
Elsa said nothing; but as, coming into the corridor, she met her father just leaving his room, she whispered to him, “Thank you!”
“One must make the best of a bad job,” answered the General in the same tone.
Elsa was a little surprised; she had not thought that he would have taken so seriously the question of etiquette which he had decided according to her view. She did not consider that her father could not understand her words without some explanation, and did not know that he had given them quite another meaning.
He had been put out, and had allowed his annoyance to be seen—even when they were received in the hall. He thought that this had not escaped Elsa, and that she was pleased now to see that he had meanwhile made up his mind to submit quietly and calmly to the inevitable, and therefore met him with a smile. The young sailor had only been recalled to his mind by the Count’s question. He had attached no importance to the question or to his own answer, that he did not know why the Count should not invite Captain Schmidt to his table.
Happily for Reinhold himself he had not even a suspicion of the possibility that his appearance or nonappearance at table could be a question to be seriously discussed by the other members of the party.
“What is begun may as well be continued,” said he to himself, as with the help of the things he had brought with him in a handbag from the ship in case of accidents, he arranged his dress as well as he could; “and now away with melancholy. If I have got aground by my own stupidity, I shall get off again in time. To go about hanging my head, or losing it, would not make up for my folly, but only make matters worse, and they are quite bad enough already. But where are my shoes?”
At the last moment on board he had changed the shoes he was wearing for a pair of high seaboots. They had been most useful to him since through rain and puddles, in the wet sands on the shore, and on the way to the farm; but now! Where were the shoes? Not in the bag, at any rate, into which he thought he had thrown them, and out of which they would not appear, although at last in his despair he tumbled all the things out and strewed them around him. And this garment which he had taken up a dozen times and let fall again, half the skirt was missing. It was not his blue frockcoat, it was his black tailcoat, the most precious article in his wardrobe, which he had only been in the habit of wearing for a dinner with his owners, or the consul, and on other most solemn occasions.
Reinhold rushed at the bell—the broken rope came away in his hand. He tore open the door and looked into the passage—not a servant to be seen. He called softly at first, then louder, not a servant would hear. What was to be done? The rough pilot-coat which he had worn under his waterproof, and which yet had got wet through in some places, had already been taken away by the servant to be dried. In a quarter of an hour the man had said the Count begged him to come to supper, twenty minutes had already passed; he had distinctly heard the President, whose room
