Flappers & Fiction

RICHARD BOLLMANN found himself in the world without any reason that he could think of. Bollmann, whose name somehow got attached to him, hinted, when he was intoxicated, that he did not hold himself in any way responsible. As Mrs. Bollmann seemed likewise disposed to decline the responsibility, Richard found the problem of his existence quite unnecessarily complicated. If it had not been for little Rikka, who was fond of him, he would have run away from the Bollmanns. To be kicked, and cuffed, and yelled at, all day long, did not agree with him. But Rikka, in spite of her youth, had such a maternal way with her that Richard could never be unhappy when she was with him. She was two years older than he, but of slender growth, with large, thoughtful eyes and pale skin. But her hair was dark and long and her mouth clearcut and resolute. She was marvelously skillful with her hands, active as a weasel, eager and passionate. What first attracted her to Richard was his helplessness, and, as they grew older, his complete dependence upon her appealed to her little woman’s heart. She loved, and petted, and protected him. He filled a void in her barren life; gave her a sense of responsibility which unconsciously she relished. When she sat at night before the fire on the open hearth, weaving baskets, in which art she was an expert, it filled her with a vague contentment to feel that he was near. She looked up occasionally and met his serious, blue eyes fixed upon her; he was so fine, so handsome, so delicately fashioned; his hair was light and silky; his nose slightly curved and with an expression of princely disdain which she admired immensely. Though he was forced to handle oars and coarse fishing tackle, his hands did not lose their beautiful shape, although, to be sure, they blistered and bled on slight provocation. It was very odd; but it was particularly a large, blue vein in his temple which made Rikka feel that Richard was something apart and exceptional. She had never seen any other person with such a vein. It looked like a lasso flung up in the air and traced itself with a bold curve under the transparent skin, vanishing under the curls about the right ear.

Old Bollmann had once been a pilot, but had been discharged for drunkenness. On the dangerous Pomeranian coast, where he lived, the pilot guild kept strict watch over the habits of its members, and two or three sprees were enough to send a man into retirement. Bollmann’s retirement had lasted fully ten years, during which he had lived in comfort, though he had rarely, to anybody’s knowledge, earned a shilling. Those who could remember so far back, asserted that for a year the family had starved and frozen; but that, with the strange boy whom they called Richard, prosperity re-entered their cottage. It would have been only fair, the gossips thought, if, considering what they owed the boy, they had treated him decently. But Bollmann was, as a rule, too drunk to have any sense of fairness, and his wife was a shrew, who would have blustered and scolded in paradise itself. If Rikka had not protected the boy, he would scarcely have grown up without injury to life and limb. But she flung herself in the way of the missiles that were aimed at him; she invented ingenious fictions to shield him from punishment; and, with resolute effrontery, appropriated his misdemeanors. Sometimes she fought fierce battles with her mother on his account and came off victorious.

One fine day, when Bollmann went in person to set his lobster traps, he failed to return, and the next day his body was washed up on the beach. It was the end everybody had been prophesying for him. He had two crushed bottles in his pockets. Mrs. Bollmann’s temper grew perceptibly worse after her husband’s death, and she scolded and growled from morning till night. She almost hated the little boy, and rarely touched him without leaving a black and blue mark on him. Especially when, without any warning, the mysterious stipend ceased, Mrs. Bollmann went into such paroxysms of rage that Richard ran in terror at the sight of her. For several nights he slept under the boats on the beach, and Rikka, like a faithful raven, brought him the last provisions that were in the house. On the third night she came to him with a face pale with fright, seized his hand and bade him follow. In the cottage they found Mrs. Bollmann lying on the floor — dead. She had died in a paroxysm of wrath. Rikka was then sixteen years old and Richard fourteen.

After the burial and the auction, Rikka had about thirty dollars in her pocket. A small portion of this sum she invested in third-class railroad tickets to Berlin, for herself and Richard. She was silent and determined; but sat all the while smiling to herself as if she had some happy secret. Richard had been so accustomed to look up to her that it did not occur to him now to question the wisdom of anything she chose to do. And when, after their arrival in the city, she proposed that he should go to school, he interposed only a feeble objection. They hired a furnished room, which Rikka divided into two by means of a curtain, and began their new lives courageously. They were both as happy as larks, who see the world shimmering in sun-lit mist beneath their feet. Rikka made baskets and took in washing and ironing. Gradually she got quite a large trade among the students, because of her peculiar skill in doing up collars. Richard was sent to a gymnasium, where he learned Latin and even Greek, and all sorts of strange sciences. He had to tell Rikka every evening what he had learned, while she stood at the ironing board, and her eager face shone with delight as she listened to him. When he told her something which she did not understand she would give a thump with her iron and nod with triumphant delight; for then she knew that her judgment was right; that Richard would learn to be a gentleman, and was endowed beyond the measure of simple creatures like herself. “Lord knows, Dick, how your brain can hold all those queer things,” she would say, admiringly, as her dimpled arms moved up and down the board; “but it is what I have always said about you, Dick. You were born to be a gentleman, Dick. You weren’t our kind, Dick. I saw that the moment I clapped eyes on you, though you were only a small baby then; I wasn’t much more myself. But that blue vein you have in your temple, Dick, I never saw that on common folks. That blue vein, Dick, that means something, and it means good luck, as sure as my name is Rikka Bollmann. That’s the reason I wanted you to go to school and grow up as a gentleman, Dick; for if your fine folks should come some day and claim you, I want to be able to say to them: Here he is, ladies and gentlemen, and as blamed good as any of you! Supposing they should come and find you a ragged fisher boy, who sits barefooted in the sun, and hasn’t got neither manners nor learning. Why, Dick, they would turn up their noses at you, no matter whether you were their own flesh and blood. They wouldn’t take you by the hand and say, ‘Look a’ here, Dick, we’ve played a shabby trick on you; but we won’t do it no more. Now you shall wear a tall silk hat, and orders on your breast, and ride on a big horse with a big curved neck, and froth dripping from his bit.’ They wouldn’t say that to you, Dick, if you were a barefooted ragamuffin, with no manners nor learning.”

She would go on thus by the hour, while she sprinkled her shirts, wet her fingers and touched them to the iron to see if it was too hot, stirred the starch and attended to other details of her work. It was obvious that she had dwelt long and fondly upon this vision of Richard’s meeting with his kindred; for every time she returned to it, it had gained new freshness of detail in her mind. She was indefatigably active from morning till night; never for a moment did he see her idle. She cut and made his clothes, which caused him considerable mortification during the first year he went to school. But then, by a kind of maternal intuition, she discovered that they were not right and scolded him for not having told her. She then went on a sham purchasing expedition in order to get a chance to study the tailor-made article, and made haste to profit by her observations. Once only did she cause him embarrassment, and that came about most innocently. She received a circular from the school authorities, inviting parents and guardians to be present at the annual examinations. As Richard’s guardian, she thought she might claim to be admitted; for she would have liked so much to have the right to feel publicly proud of him. So she dressed herself in her best and presented herself at the door of the examination room. The door-keeper refused to admit her; then the Bollmann wrath rose within her and she pushed the little man roughly aside. In his fall he kicked the door open and the pompous principal rose from his desk and inquired freezingly whom she wished to see. She paused for a moment, surveying the class.

“No one,” she said, with a little gulp; “no offence, sir; it was a mistake.” She made a hurried courtesy, and was about to retire, when Richard rose and turned to the principal.

“She wishes to see me, sir,” he said calmly; “with your permission, I will conduct her to a seat.”

The teacher nodded gravely. Richard walked to the door, and, with flaming cheeks, took Rikka’s hand and conducted her to one of the front seats.

“God bless you for that, Dick,” she whispered in his ear, as with a bow he left her.

The next moment he was called up for examination, and, for the first time in his life, made a failure. He was so agitated that the walls danced about him; the names, dates, and events were jumbled together in hopeless confusion. Rikka, too, was so anxious that she could scarcely keep from crying. She had a great clearance of vision as she sat there among all the dignified parents and heard the boys snickering behind her. When she got home she took Dick in her arms and wept over him and called him a brave, noble boy. She had a dim feeling of what it had cost him, on that occasion, to be brave and noble.

From that day, however, her feeling for the boy underwent a change. Her sense of protectorship vanished, and a strange shyness sometimes came over her in his presence. She studied to please him, not in her deeds only, but also in her appearance. All sorts of strange thoughts invaded her brain, which formerly had had no place there. It never occurred to her any more to pat him on the cheek while he sat studying, or to kiss him when he came home from school; and she surprised herself one day by proposing to hire the garret on the top floor for his bedroom and study. The eagerness with which he accepted the proposition hurt her a little; and when, in order to make amends, he kissed her on the cheek, a slight shiver ran through her. She gave a little embarrassed laugh, and the next moment blushed furiously.

WHEN Richard was nineteen years old, he entered the university and began the study of law. He supported himself by proofreading for a newspaper and by tutoring in a nobleman’s family. Life was beginning to show some of its interesting phases to him, and, with the courage of an explorer, he started out, determined to conquer success. He adapted himself with marvelous ease to luxurious ways, and caught the social tone of the highest circles, as it were, instinctively. In the house of the Baroness Schaffhausen, whose sons he instructed in the classics, he met the beau monde of the capital; whirled beautiful women through shining halls, drank champagne and ate dainty dishes. But a pang always nestled in his breast when, in the small hours of the night, he wended his way homeward. He thought of Rikka, standing at her ironing board or weaving baskets until her finger tips were so sore that the tears came into her eyes when he shook hands with her. How much nobler and grander Rikka was, with her resolute will and her perseverance in self-sacrificing toil, than the pleasure-seeking triflers whom he met in the gay salons. A great tenderness for her began to arise in his heart at the thought of what she had been to him and what she had done for him. Gradually, as the world taught him to perceive and to judge, he learned to estimate the magnitude of her sacrifice. Her pale, earnest face acquired a beauty in his eyes that no other face ever possessed. The very restraint that had stolen into their relation, the shy reserve with which, at times, she hedged herself about, made her more precious in his sight. Constantly oscillating, as he did, between the extremes of society, seeing the frivolity, the glitter and the sham of the favored few, and the unrelieved monotony of toil that falls to the share of the multitude, he could not help being impressed with the contrast. It even seemed at times as if he must choose between the two worlds, since they were so wide apart, so irreconcilable. Would he be a worker in the world at Rikka’s side, or would he be a frivolous pleasure-seeker. That he belonged by birth to the gay and refined world, he vaguely felt; and that Rikka, in giving him the chance of an education, had meant to place him where he originally belonged, was also plain to him. But could he ever draw her up into this world? He knew he could not. Even his own position, as long as he clung in gratitude to her, was insecure. He carried his head like a man who had ancestors; and society, at first sight, took it for granted that he had them. When he began to be noticed and discussed, however, it was found that he was a plebeian, and society resented its own mistake as if it had been he who had endeavored to impose upon it. But the snubs which he had to endure did not break his courage; they aroused his defiance.

One day, in the Baroness von Schaffhausen’s salon he found himself face to face with a lady who started at the sight of him. Wherever he turned, during the entire evening, he found the lady’s eyes fixed upon him as with a strange fascination. At last, when most of the guests had gone, she requested an introduction. She was well up in the forties, but stately and handsome. “Countess Turgau,” said the hostess, “permit me to present to you Mr. Bollmann.” The Countess sank down upon a lounge and, with a strained society smile, begged Mr. Bollmann to be seated next to her.

“Pray tell me something about yourself,” she said, with a pathetic attempt at indifference; “you remind me strikingly of a friend I once held very dear. That blue vein in your temple has a positive fascination for me. He had one exactly like it.”

Richard gave briefly a few reminiscences of his joyless childhood.

“Pardon me,” said the Countess, before he had proceeded far in his narrative, “I shall have to leave you.”

She took his arm, but trembled in spite of her effort to be calm. “I am not quite well,” she explained, with the same strained smile; “please take me to the dressing-room.”

The next day he received a note from the Countess, begging him to call upon her. The flunkeys at the door did their best to stare him out of countenance, as he entered, but he refused to be overawed. The Countess gave him her hand with languid grace, and gazed into his eyes with a strange, yearning tenderness. She questioned him with a transparent pretense of indifference about the Bollmanns and his early life. When he came to tell of Rikka’s self-sacrificing zeal for his welfare, his words grew warmer and more eloquent. He scarcely noticed, at first, that there was a sudden chill in the Countess’ manner, at the mention of the girl’s name.

“I suppose this young woman is — is — what shall I say? — your fiancee?” she queried cautiously.

“Rikka my fiancee!” Richard could not help laughing at the absurdity of the thing.

“Oh, not at ail.” he added.

“What is she, then, to you?” asked the Countess.

“What is she to me? Why, she is everything to me! She is my-my — Rikka.”

“Exactly! She is your Rikka.”

The interview came quickly to an end; a singular constraint had suddenly come between them. When he reached home, Rikka was breathlessly awaiting him. She was expecting to see him return as a prince or a duke, or, at the very least, a baron. That the Countess had sought his acquaintance and interested herself in his biography out of pure curiosity, she could not be made to believe. She cross-examined him so shrewdly and unweariedly that, inadvertently, the secret escaped him. He turned with shame the moment he had allowed her to suspect it. It was amazing how quick she was to seize the idea. She who was his best and only friend in the world, she who had made him what he was, she was the stumbling block in his way; she was the obstacle to his reaching what, without her, he never could have thought of reaching. The thought was a painful one to Rikka; it stung and humiliated her.

FOR three days Rikka wrestled with her resolution. She ironed with a fierce, ruthless vigor. The perspiration rolled in large drops down her forehead. It was terrible. How hard it was to come to a decision! She singed the shirt of a professor of philosophy, and the cuffs of a captain in the horse guards. The discoveries she was making in her own heart appalled her. She blushed guiltily. Good God! that she could be so depraved, she who had prided herself on the purity of her motives, she who had gloried in her disinterestedness! And this was the outcome of her dreams and struggles; her labor by day and by night; her noble aspirations!

There was something pathetically absurd to Rikka in her situation. It was a grand collapse, a humiliating failure. In order to chastise herself, and perhaps also to save her self-respect, she determined to force herself to the sacrifice. She was in Richard’s way now; she could no more advance his interests. It was her obvious duty to betake herself out of sight, so that his mother would have no excuse for failing to acknowledge him; and yet, before ascertaining this, would it be Rikka’s duty to throw her own happiness away? No; that would be folly. She would make a definite bargain with the Countess. If the Countess acknowledged her son, she would go to America. If she refused — ah! yes, if she refused! Rikka, in a moment of forgetfulness, prayed to heaven that she would refuse. Then she would persuade Richard to cross the Atlantic with her, and in that great, free land beyond the sea, where there were said to be no distinctions of rank and social station, there he would learn to judge her for her worth; to love her, perhaps, because of her great love for him; and the barrier between them, which she had herself raised, would vanish.

It was these meditations that occupied Rikka’s mind, as she presented herself at the house of the Countess von Turgau, and, without much delay, was ushered into the presence of the great lady. Her pale face flushed as she entered, and, from sheer nervousness, the tears came into her eyes. The Countess, whose lithe figure reclined upon a lounge, wrapped in lace and exquisite drapery, stared hard at her through her eyeglasses.

“You are the young person whom Mr. Bollmann mentioned to me,” she observed coolly.

“I am Rikka Bollmann,” answered the girl simply.

“And to what do I owe the honor of your visit?”

Rikka detected the note of irony in this question, but she determined, for Richard’s sake, not to heed it; for she felt convinced, the moment she put her eyes on the Countess’ face, that she had found Richard’s mother. The shape of the mouth and chin, the expression of the eyes, and the disdainful nostrils were all Richard’s.

“I came to speak to you of — your — of Mr. Bollmann,” she said; “I think — that is — I believe you are interested in him.”

“Yes, it would give me great pleasure if I could do anything for him.”

“Do anything for him, ma’am! He is not in need of alms, thank God! and he is quite able to take care of himself.”

Rikka flared up a little; she quite misunderstood the Countess’ meaning; she did not know the system of protection and intrigue by which a man’s fortunes are advanced in the shadow of a court. It occurred to her, just then, that it might be well to hasten her errand; for, before getting her out of the way, the Countess would evidently make no compromising concessions in regard to Richard.

“What I wanted to say, ma’am,” she went on, catching her breath, and hastily brushing away a tear, “what I wanted to say was this: If I am in your way, ma’am, or, I mean if I am in his way, I wouldn’t for the world stay near him; if you think that I injure him — injure his prospects, I mean, ma’am — I’ll go far away — to America, ma’am — and never see his face again, if by staying I keep his own kinsfolks from giving him the name that is his due. It was for this I tried to do right by him, ma’am, not letting him grow up as a beggar, as he would have done, if it had not been for me.”

The Countess, who felt the sting of reproof in this remark, seemed to have great difficulty in getting her pillows to rights.

“You acted very properly, I think,” she observed languidly.

“Acted properly!”

The Bollmann wrath rose in Rikka’s breast, and she advanced fearlessly up to the lounge of the Countess. Was she to endure such insolent patronage from the very woman whose duties she had shouldered after she herself had shamefully shirked them?

“Countess,” she ejaculated, “if you think I am going to go away leaving Richard to your tender mercies, without coming to an agreement with you first, then you do not know me. It is no use pretending any longer. Your face tells no lies, even though your tongue may. You bore him under your heart, ma’am, and you know it as well as I do. Now, if you will acknowledge to him that you are his mother, I’ll not stand in his way; I’ll go as I have said; but I’ll not go and then leave you to shirk your duty again, as you have done before. There is no sense in that.”

She stared defiantly at the Countess, who was bending over her vinaigrette, visibly avoiding her glance. If somebody had taken her by the shoulders and shaken her, she could not have been more frightened. A scene of any sort always unnerved her and made her tremulous and uncomfortable. Rikka, who supposed that it was her conscience that smote her, was eager to follow up her advantage.

“You know, ma’am,” she went on in a gentler voice, “I knew well enough that Dick wasn’t my mother’s child; and I knew, too, that he couldn’t have come out of the ground. That blue vein in his temple, I said to myself, ‘that means something; it means that he has high kinsfolks, and that some day they will come and claim him.’ Some day, I thought, they would come and say to him, ‘Look here, Dick, we have been playing a shabby trick on you, denying you your birthright.’ Then I could say in return, ‘Here he is, ladies and gentlemen, as sweet and good and pure a lad as ever breathed on God’s earth!’ And often I thought, too, of his mother, ma’am, who had borne him under her heart and had never seen him since the hour of his birth. She, I thought, cannot choke her love for him, however she may try; and when she sees him, so good, and pure, and beautiful, her eyes will be blinded with tears of joy, and in her heart she will thank me for the years I’ve kept him in trust for her. She will give herself no peace, ma’am — this is what I kept saying to myself-until she has put her arms about his neck, and cried over him, and kissed him, and claimed as her own all the love that, for want of a mother, he has been giving to me.”

The tears now rolled down Rikka’s cheeks, and she made no attempt to brush them away. The Countess had buried her face in the pillow and lay motionless. Once her shoulders shook as if she was shivering.

Presently she struggled up to a sitting position, and the pallor in her face changed to a feverish red. She put her hand to her forehead, as if she were battling with a momentous resolution. But the weakness of her nature apparently conquered.

“I am somewhat indisposed today,” she said, turning wearily to Rikka; “you will do me the favor to leave me for the present.”

Rikka stared in blank bewilderment. She had expected quite a different termination. She took the invitation to leave as positively insulting.

“Shame on you, ma’am!” she burst forth, planting herself boldly in front of the Countess; “shame on you! you don’t deserve to be his mother. If you don’t want him — you, to whom God gave him — then I tell you, ma’am, that I do. I shan’t fing him at your head a second time. You will grow old, in childless age, ma’am, and you will have no son, whom you can be proud of, to lean upon. Then, ma’am, you’ll rue the day you turned your back upon your own flesh and blood.”

It was inconceivable that the Countess von Turgau could listen so meekly to reproaches from a person like Rikka. But her effort not to betray herself absorbed her energies completely. Her dignity seemed dead or too weak to assert itself. She listened to Rikka’s insulting remarks with no more indignation than if they had been addressed to the man in the moon. She was conscious only of a painful strain on her mind, and a desperate determination not to forfeit her social station by giving free rein to her emotions. But when Rikka was gone and the Countess sat alone in her gorgeous salon, staring at the dancing cupids in the ceiling, a terrible loneliness came over her. Everything in the world seemed empty and valueless, everything except the filial love which she had rejected. She remembered the day he was born; how he looked at her with his serious child eyes, the first and only time she held him at her breast. and how she trembled at the sight of the blue vein. She remembered his small, pudgy hands, fumbling aimlessly over her bosom, and that memory brought the tears to her eyes. She flung herself down and wept. She had been betrothed to the Lieutenant von Teplitz, his father, and they had loved each other dearly. It was that blue vein in his right temple, with its bold curve, as of a lasso flung into the air, which had been the occasion of their first acquaintance. It had a romance, a lurid, medieval one, about a guilt-stained ancestress, and it was after having heard the romance that her curiosity was excited to know the possessor of such a delightful distinction. The acquaintance led to love and love to quarrels. Her brother made the matter ten times worse by his interference; was challenged by Von Teplitz and seriously wounded. The birth of the child in some remote corner of Italy made no difference. It was taken away from her, and she was given to understand that Von Teplitz had claimed it and was caring for it. When he died the support had evidently ceased, and the boy would have grown up in ignorance and poverty, if it had not been for the brave girl who had sacrificed her own welfare to save him. Ah! there was the romance again, the romance of the blue vein.

As all these memories rushed back upon the Countess, her nervousness increased. Since her husband, the Count von Turgau, died, she had been obliged to accustom herself to solitude. But such a terrible, oppressive void as today surrounded her she had never before been conscious of. A chill vapor seemed to inwrap her mind and to rest upon everything that she gazed upon. She loathed herself, and yet had not the courage to redeem her self-respect at the price that it would cost. In sheer despair, in order to escape from herself, she ordered her carriage and drove out through the Brandenburg gate into the Thiergarten.

DAY after day the Countess drove through the Thiergarten, Unter den Linden, out to Potsdam; in fact, everywhere she could think of; but her restlessness increased, rather than diminished. Her conscience was like an accusing voice, ever pursuing her, crying in her ear night and day: “Shame on you; you have denied your own flesh and blood.”

However fast the horses ran, they did not seem to the Countess to run fast enough. She would have liked to jump out and push the carriage. She did not know what a futile task it is to run away from a bad conscience. She wrote a polite note to Mr. Bollmann, begging him to come and see her, and received an equally formal reply, declining her invitation. He evidently was as proud as she; and, what was worse, he probably despised her. That was a torturing thought. If the girl had told him of the scene between them, as no doubt she had, then he must share her conviction, and he must believe his mother a shallow and heartless creature, whom it was scarcely worth the trouble to claim. And how that brave, self-sacrificing girl must shine by comparison; she who, though she had no obligation toward him, had shouldered the duty that his own father and mother had shirked. Through the long, sleepless nights the Countess imagined the conversation between them, their contemptuous reference to herself, their reveling in the secure sense of mutual devotion. Nay, she imagined, with an exquisite pang of jealousy, how her own faithlessness must have heightened this sense and drawn them more closely together. That was the last drop that made her cup of bitterness overflow. She could endure it no longer. Yielding to an impulse that welled up from the depth of her soul, she sprang to her feet, resolved to be brave. She rang the bell and ordered her carriage. It was about 8 o’clock in the evening and quite dark. The coachman dropped his hat with astonishment when he was told where to drive. He thought his mistress had gone mad.

Half an hour’s drive brought the Countess to the obscure street where Rikka Bollmann’s laundry was situated. She directed the coachman to ring the door bell, which he did with vigor. But no one came to open the door. She put her head out of the carriage window and noticed that the house looked dark and deserted. A vague apprehension came over her; she stared at the black façade of the house despairingly. A girl who came out of the bakeshop next door stopped to gaze at the fine carriage.

“Can you tell me,” asked the Countess,

“ if there is a young student named Bollmann living in the house?”

“Yes; but he has gone to America,” said the girl.

“America!”

The Countess fell back in her seat, with a swimming sensation in her head. She did not shriek; she wished she could have shrieked. But she moved and spoke with a nameless oppression, as if a nightmare, clammy and leaden, were weighing upon her breast.

She roused herself with an effort and her pallid face was revealed in the light of the gas lamp.

“When did he go?” she asked in a hoarse, strained voice.

“Today,” said the girl; “about noon.

The ship sails from Bremen tomorrow.”

Tomorrow! Ah, then there was yet hope. The Countess, inspired with the energy of despair, drove to the railroad station as fast as her horses could carry her, and caught the Bremen night express. All her petty misgivings had suddenly been dissipated. She feared, but no longer for herself. Her only fear was that she might come too late; that she might lose her son. It seemed inconceivable to her that she could ever have hesitated. To havea son, flesh of her flesh and blood of her blood, one who owed his life to her, whom she could lean upon in her old age, whose beauty and manly accomplishments she could feel proud of: it seemed inconceivable that she could have weighed the empty honors of her shallow and meaningless life against the enduring happiness of such a relation. All night long her feelings alternated between joy and apprehension — joy at the thought that she had a son, and apprehension lest he might disown her.

From the guards on the train she obtained all the information she could in regard to the transatlantic steamships. She was told that their time of sailing varied with the tide. But about the present condition of the tide no one knew anything. The journey seemed endless. She had never known a train to crawl along so slowly before, and to make so many irritating stops. She felt tempted to confide to the guard, with plebeian impetuosity, how much she had at stake, hoping that, perhaps, if he knew he might hurry on the train. But, though she had fully made up her mind when the moment came for speaking, her lifelong habit of reserve reasserted itself. At last, when she had given up the hope of reaching Bremen, there was a jingling of bells and blowing of whistles and much excited running, from which she concluded that she was at the end of her journey. She rushed out the moment her compartment was unlocked, threw herself into a carriage, flung a twenty-mark piece to the driver, and told him breathlessly to take her to the pier of the North German Lloyd in Bremerhafen. With a quaking heart, she counted the minutes. She knew it was not permitted to drive fast in the streets of the city. Oh, God! if she should be late! She would never find peace again in all the days of her life. With a hungry, anxious tenderness, she pictured to herself the scene of the meeting, felt his arms about her neck, and her head reposing upon his breast. Then, again, the other possibility, the terrible possibility that he might already be lost to her. She saw the forest of masts in the harbor. It came nearer and nearer. The horses turned into a narrow alley, black with coal dust, then galloped out upon an open wharf. There lay the great steamer, smoking and puffing. Thank God! then he was not lost. But what was that? The whistles were blowing! The gang-board was being pulled up. Stay! in the name of heaven, stay! But one instant — one second! The Countess leaped out of the carriage and stood scanning the dense throng of faces, leaning over the gunwale. To her dazed eyes they all seem a confused blur.

She sees them all, and she sees them not; and yet, there at Rikka’s side, yes, that radiant face at his side is Rikka’s; she sees a grave and handsome countenance, which makes her tremble with fear and with joy.

She tries to call him by name but her voice sticks in her throat. She tries to scream, but she cannot. Oh, God! There, the steamer begins to move, to glide slowly out from the wharf. Now Rikka has caught sight of her; her features are suddenly darkened! There is a moment’s struggle. Then she touches Richard’s arm; he starts, and sees his mother on the pier, but a few feet away from him, stretching out her arms to him.

“Come!” she cries, suddenly finding her voice.

“Countess von Turgau!” he exclaims.

“No, child!” she calls back, despairingly; “it is your mother!”

Then, amid the smoke and the cheering, and the noise of brass bands and shrieking whistles, a figure is seen rising up on the gunwale. He stands, hesitating, looking now at the girl on the boat, now at his mother. The boat glides on. His form stands in relief against the sky. He is on the point of leaping. Cheer after cheer goes up around him. He turns once more to Rikka, gazes at her fondly; she has conquered. He waves his hand sadly to the Countess von Turgau, and leaps down upon the deck, clasping Rikka in his arms.

The Countess cannot quite believe it. She stares at the great black hull that is now speeding out through the harbor, as if she expected it, by some miraculous chance, to alter its course and come back to her. But slowly, as it fades from her sight among the light mists of the morning, the hope fades from her soul.