Part 38

He was surprised, and asked why.

"Because I'm convinced," she said, wagging her head, "that your Ueberbein, for all his sparkling conversation, is an unhappy sort of creature. He may swagger about the place; but he lacks reserve, Prince, and that means that he will come to a bad end."

Her words startled Klaus Heinrich, and made him thoughtful. Then turning to the Countess, who awoke with a smile out of a brown study, he said something complimentary about her riding, for which she thanked him gracefully. He said that anybody could see that she had learnt to ride as a child, and she confessed that riding lessons had formed a considerable part of her education. She spoke clearly and cheerfully; but gradually, almost imperceptibly, she began to wander into a strange story about a gallant ride which she had made as a lieutenant in the last manoeuvres, and suddenly started talking about the dreadful wife of a sergeant in the Grenadiers, who had come into her room the previous night and scratched her breasts all over, meanwhile using language which she could not bring herself to repeat. Klaus Heinrich asked quietly whether she had not shut her door and windows.

"Of course, but anyone could break the glass!" she answered hastily, and turned pale in one cheek and red in the other. Klaus Heinrich nodded acquiescence, and, dropping his eyes, asked her quietly to let him call her "Frau Meier" now and then, a proposal which she gladly accepted, with a confidential smile and a far-away look which had something strangely attractive about it.

They got up to visit the "Pheasantry," after Klaus Heinrich had taken back his cloak; and as they left the garden, Imma Spoelmann said: "Well done, Prince. You're getting on," a commendation which made him blush, indeed gave him far more pleasure than the most fulsome newspaper report of the valuable effect of his appearance at a ceremony which Councillor Schustermann could ever show him.

Herr Stavenüter escorted his guests into the palisaded enclosure in which six or seven families of pheasants led a comfortable, petted life. They watched the greedy, red-eyed, and stiff-tailed birds, inspected the hatching house, and looked on while Herr Stavenüter fed the pheasants under a big solitary fig-tree for their benefit. Klaus Heinrich thanked him warmly for all that he had shown them, Imma Spoelmann regarding him the while with her big, searching eyes. Then they mounted at the gate of the tea-garden and rode off homewards with Percival barking and pirouetting under the horses' noses.

But their ride home was destined to give Klaus Heinrich, in the course of his conversation with Imma Spoelmann, yet another significant indication of her real nature and character, a direct revelation of certain sides of her personality which gave him food for much thought.

For soon after they had left the bramble-hedged by-way and joined the high-road, Klaus Heinrich reverted to a subject which had been just touched on at his first visit to Delphinenort during the conversation at tea, and had not ceased to exercise him ever since.

"May I," he said, "ask you one question, Miss Spoelmann? You need not answer it if you don't want to."

"I'll see about that," she answered.

"Four weeks ago," he began, "when I first had the pleasure of a talk with your father, Mr. Spoelmann, I asked him a question which he answered so curtly and abruptly that I could not help feeling that my question had been indiscreet or a false step."

"What was it?"

"I asked him whether he had not found it hard to leave America."

"There you are, Prince, there's another question which is worthy of you, a typical Prince-question. If you had had a little more training in the use of your reasoning powers you would have known without asking that if my father had not been ready and glad to leave America, he most assuredly would not have left it."

"Very probably you are right; forgive me, I don't think enough. But if my question was nothing worse than a want of thought, I shall be quite content. Can you assure me that that is the case?"

"No, Prince, I'm afraid I cannot," she said, and looked at him suddenly with her big black eyes.

"Then what has want of thought to do with it? Do please explain. I ask you in the name of our friendship."

"Are we friends?"

"I hoped so," he said pleadingly.

"Well, well, patience! I didn't know it, but I'm quite ready to learn it. But to return to my father, he really did lose his temper at your question--he has a quick temper, and has plenty of occasion to practise losing it. The fact is that public opinion and sentiment were not over-friendly to us in America. There's such a lot of scheming over there--I may mention that I am not posted in the details, but there was a strong political movement towards setting the crowd, the common people, you know, against us. The result was legislation and restrictions which made my father's life over there a burden to him. You know of course, Prince, that it was not he who made us what we are, but my redoubtable grandfather with his Paradise nugget and Blockhead Farm. My father could not help it, he was born to his destiny, and it was no gratification to him, because he is naturally shy and sensitive, and would much have preferred to have lived for playing the organ and collecting glass. I really believe that the hatred which was the result of the scheming against us, so that sometimes the people hurled abuse after me when I motored past them--that the hatred quite probably brought on his stone in the kidneys; it's more than possible."

"I am cordially attached to your father," said Klaus Heinrich with emphasis.

"I should have made that, Prince, a condition of our becoming friends. But there was another point which made things worse, and made our position over there still more difficult, and that was our origin."

"Your origin?"

"Yes, Prince; we are no aristocratic pheasants, unfortunately we are not descended from Washington or from the Pilgrim Fathers."

"No, for you are German."

"Oh yes, but there's something besides to get over. Please look at me closely. Does it strike you that there is anything to be proud of in having blue-black wispy hair like mine, that's always falling where it's not wanted?"

"Goodness knows, Miss Spoelmann, you've got glorious hair!" said Klaus Heinrich. "I know that you are partly of Southern extraction, for I've read somewhere that your grandfather married in Bolivia or thereabouts."

"He did. But that's where the trouble lies, Prince. I'm a quintroon."