The Breaking of the Storm. Spielhagen Friedrich
amazement, that Elsa could not help laughing, and laughed all the more to hide the blush of confusion which rose to her cheek.
"But then he will not have supper with us?" said Meta.
"Why not?" asked Elsa, suddenly becoming quite grave again.
"Only a merchant-captain!" repeated Meta. "What a pity! such a good-looking man! I had quite counted upon him for myself! But a merchant-captain!"
Frau von Strummin here came in to accompany the two girls to supper. Meta flew to her mother to communicate her great discovery.
"It has all been arranged," answered her mother. "The Count asked your father and the President if they wished Captain Schmidt to be invited to join the party. Both gentlemen expressed themselves in favour of it, and so he will appear at table. He really seems a very well-mannered sort of person," concluded Frau von Strummin.
"I am really curious to see him," said Meta.
Elsa said nothing; but as, coming into the corridor, she met her father just leaving his room, she whispered to him, "Thank you!"
"One must make the best of a bad job," answered the General in the same tone.
Elsa was a little surprised; she had not thought that he would have taken so seriously the question of etiquette which he had decided according to her view. She did not consider that her father could not understand her words without some explanation, and did not know that he had given them quite another meaning.
He had been put out, and had allowed his annoyance to be seen--even when they were received in the hall. He thought that this had not escaped Elsa, and that she was pleased now to see that he had meanwhile made up his mind to submit quietly and calmly to the inevitable, and therefore met him with a smile. The young sailor had only been recalled to his mind by the Count's question. He had attached no importance to the question or to his own answer, that he did not know why the Count should not invite Captain Schmidt to his table.
Happily for Reinhold himself he had not even a suspicion of the possibility that his appearance or non-appearance at table could be a question to be seriously discussed by the other members of the party.
"What is begun may as well be continued," said he to himself, as with the help of the things he had brought with him in a handbag from the ship in case of accidents, he arranged his dress as well as he could; "and now away with melancholy. If I have got aground by my own stupidity, I shall get off again in time. To go about hanging my head, or losing it, would not make up for my folly, but only make matters worse, and they are quite bad enough already. But where are my shoes?"
At the last moment on board he had changed the shoes he was wearing for a pair of high seaboots. They had been most useful to him since through rain and puddles, in the wet sands on the shore, and on the way to the farm; but now! Where were the shoes? Not in the bag, at any rate, into which he thought he had thrown them, and out of which they would not appear, although at last in his despair he tumbled all the things out and strewed them around him. And this garment which he had taken up a dozen times and let fall again, half the skirt was missing. It was not his blue frockcoat, it was his black tailcoat, the most precious article in his wardrobe, which he had only been in the habit of wearing for a dinner with his owners, or the consul, and on other most solemn occasions.
Reinhold rushed at the bell--the broken rope came away in his hand. He tore open the door and looked into the passage--not a servant to be seen. He called softly at first, then louder, not a servant would hear. What was to be done? The rough pilot-coat which he had worn under his waterproof, and which yet had got wet through in some places, had already been taken away by the servant to be dried. In a quarter of an hour the man had said the Count begged him to come to supper, twenty minutes had already passed; he had distinctly heard the President, whose room was some doors off from his, walk along the passage on his way downstairs. He must either remain here in the most absurd captivity, or appear before the company below in the extraordinary attire of seaboots and a dress-coat! Before the eyes of the President, whose long, thin figure, from the crown of his small aristocratic head to the soles of the polished boots which he had worn even on board, was a model of the most painfully precise neatness; before the stiff, tightly buttoned-up General; before the Count, who already showed some disposition to consider him of small account in society; before the ladies; before her--before her laughter-loving brown eyes! "Well, if I was fool enough to follow a sign from those eyes, this shall be my punishment; thus will I do penance in tailcoat and seaboots."
And with one effort he pulled on the garment which he had still held in his extended left hand, looking at it from time to time with dismay, and again opened the door, this time to pass with steady step along the corridor, down the broad stairs, and into the dining-room below, whose whereabouts he had already ascertained from the servant.
CHAPTER IX.
The rest of the party were already assembled. The two girls had appeared arm-in-arm, and kept together, although the Count, who had come forward hastily to meet them, directed his conversation to Elsa alone. He hastened to inform Fräulein von Werben that the carriage that was to fetch the doctor from Prora had been gone a quarter of an hour. Did Fräulein von Werben take any interest in painting, and would she allow him to direct her attention to some of the more important objects that he had brought from the gallery of Castle Golm for the decoration of the dining-room here, which really had appeared to him too bare. This was a Watteau bought by his great-grandfather himself in Paris; that was a fruit-piece by the Italian painter Gobbo, surnamed Da Frutti, a pupil of Annibale Caracci; this large still-life scene was by the Dutchman Jacob van Es. This flower-piece would be peculiarly interesting to her, as it was by a lady, Rachel Ruysch, a Dutchwoman, of course, whose pictures were in great request. Here, on the étagère, was a service of Dresden china, formerly belonging to Augustus the Strong, from whom his great-grandfather, who for many years had been Swedish ambassador at the court of Dresden, had received it in exchange for a team of Swedish horses, the first which had been seen on the Continent; here was an equally beautiful service of Sèvres, which he himself the preceding year had admired at the château of a French nobleman, and had received as a gift from him, out of gratitude for his successful efforts to preserve the château, which he (the Count) had converted into a hospital.
"You do not care for old china, however?" said he, observing that the lady's dark eyes only very briefly inspected his treasures.
"I have seen so little of it," said Elsa; "I do not know how to appreciate its beauty."
"And then we are all rather hungry," said Meta, "I am at least. At home we have supper at eight, and now it is eleven."
"Has not Captain Schmidt been told?" asked the Count of the butler.
"Yes, sir, a quarter of an hour ago."
"Then we will not wait any longer. The courtesy of kings does not seem to be shared by merchant captains. Allow me."
He offered his arm to Elsa; hesitatingly she laid the tips of her fingers upon it, she would gladly have spared the Captain the awkwardness of finding the whole party at table. But her father had already offered his arm to Meta's mother, the gallant President had given his to Meta herself; the three couples were moving towards the table which stood between them and the door, when the door opened, and the wonderful figure of a bearded man in a tailcoat and high seaboots appeared, in whom Elsa, to her horror, recognised the Captain. But the next moment she was forced to smile like the others. Meta dropped the President's arm and fled into a corner of the room, where she tried to conceal behind her handkerchief the convulsive laughter which had seized her at the unexpected appearance.
"I must apologise," said Reinhold, "but I have unfortunately only just discovered that the haste with which we left the ship was not favourable to a careful choice in my wardrobe."
"And as that haste was for our benefit, we have the less occasion to lay unnecessary stress upon the small mishap," said the President very courteously.
"Why