The Progressionists, and Angela. Conrad von Bolanden

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ views which you once held concerning the present."

      "Smile at, my dear miss? Hardly. I should rather have to mourn the destruction of my belief. Moreover, it is questionable whether I could breathe in an atmosphere which is unhealthy and destructive of all the genuine enjoyments of life!"

      "And what do you look upon as the genuine enjoyments of life?" asked she with evident curiosity.

      He hesitated, and his childlike embarrassment appeared to her most lovely.

      "I beg your pardon, Mr. Seraphin! I have been indiscreet, for such a question is allowable to those only who are on terms of intimacy." And the beauty exhibited a masterly semblance of modesty and amiability. The artifice proved successful, the young man's diffidence fled, and his heart opened.

      "You possess my utmost confidence, most esteemed Miss Greifmann! Intercourse with good, or at least honorable, persons appears to me to be the first condition for enjoying life. How could any one's existence be cheerful in the society of people whose character is naught and whose moral sense expired with the rejection of every religious principle?"

      "Yet perhaps it might, Mr. Seraphin!" rejoined she, with a smile of imagined superiority. "Refinement, the polished manners of society, may be substituted for the rigor of religious conviction."

      "Polished manners without moral earnestness are mere hypocrisy," answered he decidedly. "A wolf, though enveloped in a thousand lambskins, still retains his nature."

      "How stern you are!" exclaimed she, laughing. "And what is the second condition for the true enjoyment of life, Mr. Seraphin?"

      "It is evidently the accord of moral consciousness with the behests of a supreme authority; or to use the ordinary expression, a good conscience," answered the millionaire earnestly.

      A sneering expression spontaneously glided over her countenance. She felt the hateful handwriting of her soul in her features, turned crimson, and cast down her eyes in confusion. The young man had not observed the expression of mockery, and could not account for her confusion. He thought he had perhaps awkwardly wounded her sensitiveness.

      "I merely meant to express my private conviction," said Mr. Seraphin apologetically.

      "Which is grand and admirable," lauded she.

      Her approbation pleased him, for his simplicity failed to detect the concealed ridicule. After a walk outside of the city which Gerlach took towards evening, in the company of the brother and sister, Carl Greifmann made his appearance in Louise's apartment.

      "You have at last succeeded in capturing him," began he with a chuckle of satisfaction. "I was almost beginning to lose confidence in your well-tried powers. This time you seemed unable to keep the field, to the astonishment of all your acquaintances. They never knew you to be baffled where the heart of a weak male was to be won."

      "What are you talking about?"

      "About the fat codfish of two million weight whom you have been successful in angling."

      "I do not understand you, most mysterious brother!"

      "You do not understand me, and yet you blush like the skies before a rainstorm! What means the vermilion of those cheeks, if you do not understand?"

      "I blush, first, on account of my limited understanding, which cannot grasp your philosophy; and, secondly, because I am amazed at the monstrous figures of your language."

      "Then I shall have to speak without figures and similes upon a subject which loses a great deal in the light of bare reality, which, I might indeed say, loses all, dissolves into vapor, like will-o'-the-wisps and cloud phantoms before the rising sun. I hardly know how to mention the subject without figures, I can hardly handle it except with poetic figures," exclaimed he gaily, seating himself in Louise's rocking--chair, rocking himself. "Speaking in the commonest prose, my remarks refer to the last victim immolated to your highness--to the last brand kindled by the fire of your eyes. To talk quite broadly, I mean the millionaire and landholder Seraphin Gerlach, who is head and ears in love with you. Considered from a business and solid point of view, it is exceedingly flattering for the banker's brother to see his sister adored by so considerable a sum of money."

      "Madman, you profane the noblest feelings of the heart," she chidingly said, with a smile.

      "I am a man of business, my dear child, and am acquainted with no sanctuary but the exchange. Relations of a tender nature, noble feelings of the heart, lying as they do without the domain of speculation, are to me something incomprehensible and not at all desirable. On the other hand, I entertain for two millions of money a most prodigious sympathy, and a love that casts the flames of all your heroes and heroines of romance into the shade. Meanwhile, my sweet little sister, there are two aspects to everything. An alliance between our house and two millions of florins claims admiration, 'tis true; yet it is accompanied with difficulties which require serious reflection." The banker actually ceased rocking and grew serious.

      "Might I ask a solution of your enigma?"

      "All jesting aside, Louise, this alliance is not altogether free from risks," answered he. "Just consider the contrast between yourself and Seraphin Gerlach's good nature is touching, and his credulous simplicity is calculated to excite apprehension. Guided, imposed upon, entirely bewitched by religious phantasms, he gropes about in the darkness of superstition. You, on the contrary, sneer at what Seraphin cherishes as holy, and despise such religious nonsense. Reflect now upon the enormous contrast between yourself and the gentleman whom fate and your father's shrewdness have selected for your husband. Honestly, I am in dread. I am already beginning to dream of divorce and every possible tale of scandal, which would not be precisely propitious for our firm."

      "What contradictions!" exclaimed the beauty with self-reliance. "You just a moment ago announced my triumph over Seraphin, and now you proclaim my defeat."

      "Your defeat! Not at all! But I apprehend wrangling and discord in your married life."

      "Wrangling and discord because Seraphin loves me?"

      "No--not exactly--but because he is a believer and you are an unbeliever; in short, because he does not share your aims and views."

      "How short-sighted you are! As you conceive of it, love is not a passion; at most, only, a cool mood which cannot be modified by the lovers themselves. Your apprehension would be well grounded concerning that kind of love. But suppose love were something quite different? Suppose it were a passion, a glowing, dazzling, omnipotent passion, and that Seraphin really loved me, do you think that I would not skilfully and prudently take advantage of this passion? Cannot a woman exert a decisive and directing influence over the husband who loves her tenderly? I have no fears because I do not view love with the eyes of a trader. I hope and trust with the adjurations of love to expel from Seraphin all superstitious spirits."

      "How sly! Surely nothing can surpass a daughter of Eve in the matter of seductive arts!" exclaimed he, laughing. "Hem--yes, indeed, after what I have seen to-day, it is plain that the Adam Seraphin will taste of the forbidden fruit of ripened knowledge, persuaded by this tenderly beloved Eve. Look at him: there he wanders in the shade of the garden, sighing to the rose-bushes, dreaming, of your majesty, and little suspecting that he is threatened with conversion and redemption from the kingdom of darkness."

CHAPTER IV.

       Table СКАЧАТЬ