Sebastian, who had an oddly judicial air, such as men acquire who are in authority, held the balance evenly between the sisters, and smiled apologetically over his fiddle towards the victim of Désirée’s impetuosity.
“Yes,” he would reply to watching mothers, who tried to lead him to say that their daughter was the best dancer in the school: “Yes, Mathilde puts it into their heads, and Désirée shakes it down to their feet.”
In all matters of the household Désirée played a similar part. She was up early and still astir after nine o’clock at night, when the other houses in the Frauengasse were quiet, if there were work to do.
“It is because she has no method,” said Mathilde, who had herself a well-ordered mind, and that quickness which never needs to hurry.
V
The Weissen Röss’l
The moth will singe her wings, and singed return,
Her love of light quenching her fear of pain.
There are quite a number of people who get through life without realizing their own insignificance. Ninety-nine out of a hundred persons signify nothing, and the hundredth is usually so absorbed in the message which he has been sent into the world to deliver that he loses sight of the messenger altogether.
By a merciful dispensation of Providence we are permitted to bustle about in our immediate little circle like the ant, running hither and thither with all the sublime conceit of that insect. We pick up, as he does, a burden which on close inspection will be found to be absolutely valueless, something that somebody else has thrown away. We hoist it over obstructions while there is usually a short way round; we fret and sweat and fume. Then we drop the burden and rush off at a tangent to pick up another. We write letters to our friends explaining to them what we are about. We even indite diaries to be read by goodness knows whom, explaining to ourselves what we have been doing. Sometimes we find something that really looks valuable, and rush to our particular ant-heap with it while our neighbours pause and watch us. But they really do not care; and if the rumour of our discovery reach so far as the next ant-heap, the bustlers there are almost indifferent, though a few may feel a passing pang of jealousy. They may perhaps remember our name, and will soon forget what we discovered—which is Fame. While we are falling over each other to attain this, and dying to tell each other what it feels like when we have it, or think we have it, let us pause for a moment and think of an ant—who kept a diary.
Désirée did not keep a diary. Her life was too busy for ink. She had had to work for her daily bread, which is better than riches. Her life had been full of occupation from morning till night, and God had given her sleep from night till morning. It is better to work for others than to think for them. Some day the world will learn to have a greater respect for the workers than for the thinkers, who are idle, wordy persons, frequently thinking wrong.
Désirée remembered the siege and the occupation of Danzig by French troops. She was at school in the Jopengasse when the Treaty of Tilsit—that peace which was nothing but a pause—was concluded. She had seen Luisa of Prussia, the good Queen who baffled Napoleon. Her childhood had passed away in the roar of siege-guns. Her girlhood, in the Frauengasse, had been marked by the various woes of Prussia, by each successive step in the development of Napoleon’s ambition. There were no bogeymen in the night-nursery at the beginning of the century. One Aaron’s rod of a bogey had swallowed all the rest, and children buried their sobs in the pillow for fear of Napoleon. There were no ghosts in the dark corners of the stairs when Désirée, candle in hand, went to bed at eight o’clock, half an hour before Mathilde. The shadows on the wall were the shadows of soldiers—the wind roaring in the chimney was like the sound of distant cannon. When the timid glanced over their shoulders, the apparition they looked for was that of a little man in a cocked hat and a long grey coat.
This was not an age in which the individual life was highly valued. Men were great today and gone tomorrow. Women were of small account. It was the day of deeds and not of words.
Désirée had never been oppressed by a sense of her own importance, which oppression leaves its mark on many a woman’s face in these times. She had not, it would seem, expected much from life; and when much was given to her she received it without misgivings. She was young and lighthearted, and she lived in a reckless age.
She was not surprised when Charles failed to return. The chaise that was to carry them to Zoppot stood in the Frauengasse on the shady side of the street in the heat of the afternoon for more than an hour. Then she ran out and told the driver to go back to his stables.
“One cannot go for a honeymoon alone,” she explained airily to her father, who was peevish and restless, standing by the window with the air of one who expects without knowing what to expect. “It is, at all events, quite clear that there is nothing for me to do but wait.”
She made light of it, and laughed at her father’s grave face. Mathilde said nothing, but her silence seemed to suggest that this was no more than she had foretold, or at all events foreseen. She was too proud or too generous to put her thoughts into words. For pride and generosity are often confounded.
