A Legacy (15 page)

"What?" said Grandmama.

"Nothing can separate us now."

"Have they eloped?" said Grandmama.

"Worse," said Markwald and her husband.

"Worse!" said Emil.

"Our treasure has been baptized," said Gottlieb.

The same night Edu and Friedrich called at the Kaiser-hof demanding immediate marriage. Julius was sitting up, puzzling over the hotel charges. Edu was embarrassed, and spluttered; Friedrich was grim.

He spoke about dishonour.

Julius found his attitude most Prussian, but he consented and the two men withdrew.

A date was fixed for the end of June. The old Merzes, unwilling to see their daughter deprived of pin-money as well as Christian, stated that they would make her an annual allowance of fifty thousand marks.

Clara had sorted out her keys and with Gustavus's help —she was never very good at such tasks—unlocked and locked again plate and embroidered cloth. Then she set out for Berlin. She refused to have the express flagged for her, took a local for Karlsruhe instead, where she made

rather a muddle over her changes. She had written a note to Julius, and Count Bernin had telegraphed the Bavarian Legation. (The Badensian Minister was a bachelor, and anyway quite small beer.) Julius booked a suite for her at the Hotel Bristol; at the Legation they prepared a room and sent the carriage to the station. Julius met the same morning train. Clara arrived by a later one. She had sat bolt upright all night in a second-class carriage; now she walked to the exit looking neither right nor left, carrying her own bag, and took the horse-tram to the Grauen Damen in the Stettiner Strasse. There she was in time to assist at the end of mass, changed her linen but resumed her dress, had a short pleasant talk with the Superior and the Sister Porter, and set out again. She took another horse-tram and went straight to Voss Strasse.

She sent her card in to Melanie; Gottlieb announced her without comment.

Clara came swiftly forward, inclined her head to the old lady in the chair, ignored the men, held out her hands. "My child—I had to see you!"

Melanie stood wary. All women were her enemies. But she kept to her pretty ways.

"Tell me? You are being prepared?"

"She is going to be married on the 29th," said Grand-mama.

"The quietest wedding," said Markwald.

"Then your Reception . . . ?"

"It's all been done," said Melanie.

"Dearest child!" Clara, her face radiant, advanced again. Tears stood in her eyes. "So soon! Oh you wonderful girl. The grace. And I, who doubted your readiness. . . . Will you forgive me? What it must mean to your instructor!"

"Pastor Voller—"

"Not Pastor, dear, Father. We call our priests Father."

"Father Voller," said Melanie.

"Do I know him?"

Melanie tendered the certificate she carried in her dress.

Clara, already a little farsighted, held it at arm's length. She looked, frowned, shifted the distance again, looked, her lips moving— Then she emitted a faint hissing sound, and swayed. Gottlieb was in time with the chair.

Grandmama proffered her sal volatile. Clara stirred. "A Protestant," she groaned, and to everyone's consternation slipped from the chair to the floor. "On our knees, my child! and may He have mercy on us."

Grandmama signed to Gottlieb. "Bring the poor lady an egg in port wine."

But Clara, who had taken nothing since the previous day, waved sustenance aside. She rose and said in a strong voice, "It is His Will that you should pass through this abominable trial. I may have been sent to lead you out of it. We must not allow heresy to take root in you, we must send for a priest at once. This is an emergency and I believe you will be received. Instruction can come later."

The gasp this time came from the armchair. "They want to baptize her twice!" cried Grandmama and sank back into the cushions.

Gottlieb turned and presented the eggnog on the tray. Grandmama took it.

The Jesuits at Fasanen Strasse did not see it with Clara's eyes and Melanie was not received into the Church on that day, nor the next. The Merzes rallied their wits; Count Bernin and Gustavus were summoned to Berlin; Edu discovered that his family was the laughingstock of half the town—yet in the general uproar that followed it was Clara's purpose that worked every interest her way. Melanie was instructed and became a Roman Catholic, soon enough for her wedding to be but briefly postponed; the Merzes used the second outrage to bargain for the disappearance of the chimpanzees. Count Bernin, who shared Sarah's financial grasp, was able to increase the pressure. At Hamburg a man called Haagenbeck was doing wonders in a new kind of cageless zoo. Julius met Herr Haagenbeck

and liked him. The two men had some useful talks; Jules made the donation (half of which came from Grandpapa) of a heating apparatus with lamps, already in use in the monkey apartments at Copenhagen, and was only just prevented from accepting the return present of a seal. This disposal of the monkeys had been Edu's idea; Sarah lent her electric brougham, and in this Julius set out on the snail's pace journey to the Hanseatic port where he bade farewell to Robert and to Tzara.

Count Bernin indited a statement to the judicature, and the charges against Julius were dismissed. Sarah and Clara were going through the invitations together, and Clara, very simply, told her about Johannes. "There is another brother. Did you not know? He was ill for a long time because of a mistake that had been made. He got better but the doctor said he would never be like other people. The doctor wanted to keep him, but my father wished him to be in the world and have as nearly the kind of life he would have had as possible. He could not live with us as he must not meet his brothers. It is part of the illness. Jules went to him the first year, it was very dreadful. Gustavus never tried. So you see there wasn't much open to him; the doctor said he ought to be kept active, and my father thought of the Army. Papa knew a few people and our old Grand Duchess was very much attached to the family and there was nothing else for him to do. So they got him a commission in the Body Dragoons. Of course he wears no uniform, and he didn't have any training. But he's on the Army list; and he draws pay like everyone else. Not that he needs it—his share of his father's estate was put aside for him and my father left him quite a large legacy, he doesn't seem to spend anything, poor boy—but apparently you cannot do things halfway with the military."

She reached for a fresh box of envelopes. "He was put in charge of an Army stud farm and he's been a great success with the horses. He sits up with them when they're
ill. They say he's never lost a foal. Of course there are sergeants and people on the place who run things for him. The farm's the other side of the Black Forest, he is quite alone with them out there; and of course he has his own house. Her Highness died, as you know, but the Grand Ducal family are being very kind. The colonel is a friend; he doesn't bother him. He hasn't got to report or salute, or see anyone or dine in mess. And everybody is very pleased about the horses. He's a captain now. Papa did not think it wise. But Conrad says it attracts less attention to do things in the usual way; he was due for promotion, being over thirty-five. He doesn't speak; though they say he sometimes does. He looks well, quite healthy and splendid really. He will not eat meat. It is all very sad. He cannot go to mass as he cannot stand being indoors with people, but I'm sure God loves him. I think we'll send him an invitation—his orderly will read it and know he's thought of and put it away."

Clara slid a card into an envelope and addressed it in her rapid, careless hand. "Curious thing," she said, looking up, "we all thought Jean was going to be as tall as Gus-tavus and Jules, and do you know, he stayed quite short. Stocky-short; more like a farmhand. You really think we ought to seal all these? It seems an unnecessary expense." She held an open flap. "Perhaps Jules and Melanie will have a son," she said.

"Do you think that a good thing?" said Sarah.

Her and Edu's cheque was large. The other presents came in. Distressing china from Merz cousins, the Landen plate relinquished by Gustavus, the boxful of jewels that had belonged to Julius's and Gustavus's mother which Clara now insisted on sharing with Melanie. Melanie found the settings pretty, just out of date enough to be wearable again; the rest of the Merzes told each other that the stones did not amount to much. Clara also gave a thin medal blessed by Leo XIII; and Jeanne—who was not asked and thus did not meet Melanie—sent a fan and a mother-
of-pearl rosary that was supposed to have belonged to the original of the heroine of Adolphe. Both fan and rosary were exquisite. Julius, when reminded of the custom, gave Melanie his father's ring, a topaze so large, deep and clear that for many years the old Baron had not been able to bring himself to disturb that limpid surface by a banal incision, and when at last he had come upon, and sketched himself, a Chinese bird, he found, perhaps to his relief, that the craftsmen capable of executing such intaglio had died out. On his death Gustavus had assigned the crestless stone to Julius who, it having become too ornamental for the men of his day, always carried it in his pocket. Edu had it sent to Friedlander's, where it was competently carved with the Felden arms.

Grandmama parted with some diamonds. The girls' trousseaus—cambric, linen, lace—had been ready for years except for the initials; these with the German Baron's seven-pointed coronet were being rushed through the embroidery department at Braun's. Melanie, single-handed, turned down the nearby spa selected for their journey; the South, she stated, was where she wished to go. Julius had told her Spain; one place abroad was as bad as another; again her parents gave in. Gustavus declared he would be seen dead sooner than in Berlin Cathedral with the Merzes; this and other awkwardnesses at the ceremony were forestalled by Count Bernin's arranging with a Dean of his acquaintance to have the marriage service held at Voss Strasse, a convenience not usually afforded by their own religion which almost reconciled the old Merzes to its taking place. They now said they would give the couple forty-five thousand marks a year, and Grandmama, in a movement of attendrissement, lent her own maid Marie for her daughter's going away.

And so in this manner, on a sultry day in July, Julius Maria von Felden and Melanie Ida Merz were made man and wife.

Julius had given his parents-in-law a pair of seventeenth-century Persian china cats. They were large, bright yellow, upright animals with turquoise spots and glinting jewelled eyes, and they were stood on pedestals opposite each other in the first anteroom at Voss Strasse, where they gleamed, monstrous, beautiful and alien, for many years. They were very rare, and supposed to be most valuable. Sarah, who had been given nothing and had coveted them on sight, passed them on her way out after the young couple had left, and felt vaguely mystified and quite cross.

Julius and Melanie stayed on in Spain. They discussed no plans; the future was not broached. Julius took another whitewashed house, left the garden and the patio as they were, slowly filled the cool bare vaulted rooms with things—sombre ornamental furniture, great looking-glasses, extravagant statuary, arriving laboriously from Granada by carter over the brilliant roads: carved Vermillion folds and gilt scrolls white with dust exposed above the wide-spread horns of oxen; packing cases from Seville shaped like harps, and packing cases marked fragile, large as boulders, swaying up the magnolia alley above the invisibly placed steps of an ant-line of packmules. From behind shuttered windows, Melanie was watching.

"Oh, Jules, what's that? Where does it come from?

"Won't they drop it?

"Can we have it out at once? Where are you going to put it?"

Julius liked to be alone for the unpacking.

He engaged manservants, arranged for fruit and fowls; got a pharmacist at Rhonda interested in composing weekly a lump of butter for Melanie's maid whose complaints centred round the oil. This butter, a softish fragment of uncertain colour, afloat in a large sealed tank, was borne one early morning up the drive like a tabernacle in procession by its creator, his boy assistant and a crowd. Melanie seemed ready to stay idle. Her maid, also, whom the lower servants assumed to be a lady and the upper ones their mistress's old wet-nurse, was expected to do no work. But Marie, ignoring a prejudice that went

against her every fibre, went about a hundred unwanted tasks in stays and starch with compressed lips. Julius felt her as a part of his new burden, wondered if there were no means of making away with her, was not displeased when his valet hinted that there were, yet, his mind on bravos, honestly strove to feed her according to her lights. The slow posts caught up with them and catalogues, dealers' announcements and trade journals reached him once more, as did the boots from Paris, sherry from the South, shirts from Madrid. He missed his monkeys, but realized that they were happy and active in their larger sphere. He now had a new marmoset, some tame cock pheasants and a straggle of ailing beasts. The gardener had an angora goat with two white kids; the carrier kept a styful of donkeys. None of these were looked after as they should have been. Julius went round bribing peasants, arguing with muleteers. He bought off caged rabbits, watered cattle, whisked flies off horses' faces, treated harness sores— the animals were the one heartbreaking thing in this country, he told Melanie and he told her often. Melanie listened because she liked to be spoken to; she had learnt to look at certain animals with pleasure, she often stroked the golden pheasants by the fountain and she was sure it was all dreadful, but what really frightened her was the beggars. She was much alone.

Julius came and went. He spent the night at Seville, a day or two at Algeciras, stayed at some estate, had an errand at Cadiz, and he looked up startled when she asked him where he was going and when he might return. It was the look that came over him in mid-morning, when they met, both exquisitely dressed, in the latticed penumbra of the sala and she never failed to ask him how he had slept.