HE Count St. Polten-Vassima was walking slowly along one of his forest paths. He was not in the least thinking where he was going. He had quite recently and unexpectedly come into both the title and the property, and he was, for the time being, staying in one of the smaller rooms of the great unfinished castle which his father had begun and his brother had continued. The new Count St. Polten was tall, dark, meditative—a soldier, yet nevertheless constitutionally inclined to a certain graceful melancholy. Even his recent dignities had not very obviously cheered him. It was now that still hour of the afternoon when Nature takes its summer siesta, and St. Polten walked along the woodland glade, sober as a funeral to look upon, but nevertheless happily and conscientiously sad within. It pleased him to observe the absence of elation in himself. As he sauntered, his mind far away, he did not observe that he had approached close to one of the cottages of his people—that of Alt Karl, his ancient , whom many years ago his father had ordained to teach him all the mysteries of the hunt and the secrets of the wood, while yet he was but a wild younger son of the great house of the Counts of St. Polten.
“Cuckoo! cuckoo!” called suddenly a bird-voice above his head. Something whirled lightly through the air and settled about his neck. The Count looked up quickly and caught just one glimpse of a girl’s laughing face vanishing at the window above him. Then he looked down and found a daisy-chain caught round his neck and hanging about his shoulders.
The Count St. Polten-Vassima stood awhile in wonder, not ill pleased, only fingering the ring of flowers, and smiling quietly to himself. Presently there came along the forest path towards him a stern-faced erect old man, who carried himself with a curious mixture of forest freedom and soldierly precision.
It was Alt Karl, the tenant of the house under which the Count stood. He looked curiously at the daisy-chain, but said nothing. The Count noticed the question in the old man’s eyes.
“No, Karl, I do not wear one of these chaplets as a rule,” he said; “but the fact is, either an angel from heaven crowned me with flowers, or
And he paused and looked up.
“It was my minx of a Trudchen!” cried Alt Karl, finishing his master’s sentence; “I saw her busy at the making of it. I cannot control her since her mother died. She will do nothing but play pranks or scour the hills with a gun, and boasts that she is as good a jäger as there is in all the forest (which is a thing most true)—besides being as good a mountaineer as there is on the mountains, as if these were worthy ambitions for a young girl. But it is a good thing that she goes to-morrow to her aunt’s school in Breslau; there of a surety she will learn something more befitting a modest maiden.”
“I trust,” said the Count, pleasantly, “that you will convey to the young lady my sense of the great honour she has done me by bestowing upon me this flowery token of her favour.”
“On the contrary,” cried Alt Karl, “I shall bestow upon her a great scolding whenever I catch her, minx that she is!”
And so with a mutual salute of military exactness the Count and his old and privileged Jagdmeister parted, the nobleman to return to his vast and lonely barracks, Alt Karl to enter angrily the cottage with the roses crowding about the porch.
“Gertrud!” Alt Karl called sternly, stamping his foot a little. He had stopped to listen, standing just within the door of the quiet dusky sitting-room.
No one answered to his call. He could hear the two clocks ticking loudly, one on the wall of the salon and the other over the mantelpiece in the kitchen.
“Cuckoo!” all suddenly cried a voice behind him.
Alt Karl could not restrain a violent start. The bird seemed so near him—at his very ear, in fact. He looked up just as the Count had done, and instantly he found himself bepelted from head to foot with a shower of roses, which a tall bright-faced girl of thirteen or fourteen poured out of her apron upon his upturned face. She had been standing on tiptoe all the time upon a chair set behind the sitting-room door.
The tricksy maid clapped her hands and laughed merrily.
“A forfeit! a forfeit!” she cried. “It is the fête day of the flowers. And the new Count owes me a forfeit also!”
“I would have you understand that it is not the custom”—began her father sternly.
“A forfeit or a kiss, father!” she cried; “and if you scold me a single word I declare I shall ask the Count for a kiss too!”