He turned his head slowly, with a hunter’s consciousness of the approach of someone, and contemplated the canoe with a sense of placid satisfaction.
The small craft was passing in the shadow of a great tree—stealing over the dark, unruffled depth. A girl dressed in white, with a large diaphanous white hat and a general air of brisk English daintiness, was paddling slowly and with no great skill.
“A picture,” said Steinmetz to himself with Teutonic deliberation. “Gott im Himmel! what a pretty picture to make an old man young!”
Then his gray eyes opened suddenly and he rose to his feet.
“Coloss-a-al!” he muttered. He dragged from his head a lamentable old straw hat and swept a courteous bow.
“Mademoiselle,” he said, “ah, what happiness! After three years!”
Maggie stopped and looked at him with troubled eyes; all the color slowly left her face.
“What are you doing here?” she asked. And there was something like fear in her voice.
“No harm, mademoiselle, but good. I have come down from big game to vermin. I have here a saloon rifle. I wait till a water-rat comes, and then I shoot him.”
The canoe had drifted closer to the land, the paddle trailing in the water.
“You are looking at my white hairs,” he went on, in a sudden need of conversation. “Please bring your boat a little nearer.”
The paddle twisted lazily in the water like a fish’s tail.
“Hold tight,” he said, reaching down.
With a little laugh he lifted the canoe and its occupant far up on to the bank.
“Despite my white hairs,” he said, with a tap of both hands on his broad chest.
“I attach no importance to them,” she answered, taking his proffered hand and stepping over the light bulwark. “I have gray ones myself. I am getting old too.”
“How old?” he asked, looking down at her with his old bluntness.
“Twenty-eight.”
“Ah, they are summers,” he said; “mine have turned to winters. Will you sit here where I was sitting? See, I will spread this rug for your white dress.”
Maggie paused, looking through the trees toward the sinking sun. The light fell on her face and showed one or two lines which had not been there before. It showed a patient tenderness in the steady eyes which had always been there—which Catrina had noticed in the stormy days that were past.
“I cannot stay long,” she replied. “I am with the Faneaux at Brandon for a few days. They dine at seven.”
“Ah! her ladyship is a good friend of mine. You remember her charity ball in town, when it was settled that you should come to Osterno. A strange world, mademoiselle—a very strange world, so small, and yet so large and bare for some of us!”
Maggie looked at him. Then she sat down.
“Tell me,” she said, “all that has happened since then.”
“I went back,” answered Steinmetz, “and we were duly exiled from Russia. It was sure to come. We were too dangerous. Altogether too quixotic for an autocracy. For myself I did not mind, but it hurt Paul.”
There was a little pause, while the water lapped and whispered at their feet.
“I heard,” said Maggie at length, in a measured voice, “that he had gone abroad for big game.”
“Yes—to India.”
“He did not go to America?” enquired Maggie indifferently. She was idly throwing fragments of wood into the river.
“No,” answered Steinmetz, looking straight in front of him. “No, he did not go to America.”
“And you?”
“I—oh, I stayed at home. I have taken a house. It is behind the trees. You cannot see it. I live at peace with all men and pay my bills every week. Sometimes Paul comes and stays with me. Sometimes I go and stay with him in London or in Scotland. I smoke and shoot water-rats, and watch the younger generation making the same mistakes that we made in our time. You have heard that my country is in order again? They have remembered me. For my sins they have made me a count. Bon Dieu! I do not mind. They may make me a prince, if it pleases them.”
He was watching her face beneath his grim old eyebrows.
“These details bore you,” he said.
“No.”
“When Paul and I are together we talk of a new heaven and a new Russia. But it will not come in our time. We are only the sowers, and the harvest is not yet. But I tell Paul that he has not sown wild oats, nor sour grapes, nor thistles.”
He paused, and the expression of his face changed to one of semi-humorous gravity.
“Mademoiselle,” he went on, “it has been my lot to love the prince like a son. It has been my lot to stand helplessly by while he passed through many troubles. Perhaps the good God gave him all his troubles at first. Do you think so?”
Maggie was looking straight in front of her across the quiet river.
“Perhaps so,” she said.
Steinmetz also stared in front of him during a little silence. The common thoughts of two minds may well be drawn together by the contemplation of a common object. Then he turned toward her.
“It will be a happiness for him to see you,” he said quietly.
Maggie ceased breaking small branches and throwing them into the river. She ceased all movement, and scarcely seemed to breathe.
“What do you mean?” she asked.
“He is staying with me here.”
Maggie glanced toward the canoe. She drew a short, sharp breath, but she did not move.
“Mademoiselle,” said Steinmetz earnestly, “I am an old man, and in my time I have dabbled pretty deeply in trouble. But taking it all around, even my life has had its compensations. And I have seen lives which, taken as a mere mortal existence, without looking to the hereafter at all, have been quite worth the living. There is much happiness in life to make up for the rest. But that happiness must be firmly held.
