A Good-For-Nothing | Page 5

Ralph, as the
music, after some prefatory flourishes, broke into the delicious rhythm
of a Strauss waltz, "then it is no use struggling against fate. Come, let
us make the plunge together. Misery loves company."
He offered her his arm, and she rose, somewhat hesitatingly, and
followed.
"I am afraid," she whispered, as they fell into line with the procession
that was moving down the long hall, "that you have asked me to dance
merely because I said I felt forlorn. If that is the case, I should prefer to
be led back to my seat."
"What a base imputation!" cried Ralph.
There was something so charmingly naive in this
self-depreciation--something so altogether novel in his experience, and,
he could not help adding, just a little bit countrified. His spirits rose; he
began to relish keenly his position as an experienced man of the world,
and, in the agreeable glow of patronage and conscious superiority,
chatted with hearty abandon with his little rustic beauty.
"If your dancing is as perfect as your German exercises were," said she,
laughing, as they swung out upon the floor, "then I promise myself a
good deal of pleasure from our meeting."
"Never fear," answered he, quickly reversing his step, and whirling
with many a capricious turn away among the thronging couples.
When Ralph drove home in his carriage toward morning he briefly
summed up his impressions of Bertha in the following adjectives:
intelligent, delightfully unsophisticated, a little bit verdant, but devilish
pretty.
Some weeks later Colonel Grim received an appointment at the fortress
of Aggershuus, and immediately took up his residence in the capital.

He saw that his son cut a fine figure in the highest circles of society,
and expressed his gratification in the most emphatic terms. If he had
known, however, that Ralph was in the habit of visiting, with alarming
regularity, at the house of a plebeian merchant in a somewhat obscure
street, he would, no doubt, have been more chary of his praise. But the
Colonel suspected nothing, and it was well for the peace of the family
that he did not. It may have been cowardice in Ralph that he never
mentioned Bertha's name to his family or to his aristocratic
acquaintances; for, to be candid, he himself felt ashamed of the power
she exerted over him, and by turns pitied and ridiculed himself for
pursuing so inglorious a conquest. Nevertheless it wounded his egotism
that she never showed any surprise at seeing him, that she received him
with with a certain frank unceremoniousness, which, however, was
very becoming to her; that she invariably went on with her work
heedless of his presence, and in everything treated him as if she had
been his equal. She persisted in talking with him in a half sisterly
fashion about his studies and his future career, warned him with great
solicitude against some of his reprobate friends, of whose merry
adventures he had told her; and if he ventured to compliment her on her
beauty or her accomplishments, she would look up gravely from her
sewing, or answer him in a way which seemed to banish the idea of
love-making into the land of the impossible. He was constantly
tormented by the suspicion that she secretly disapproved of him, and
that from a mere moral interest in his welfare she was conscientiously
laboring to make him a better man. Day after day he parted from her
feeling humiliated, faint-hearted, and secretly indignant both at himself
and her, and day after day he returned only to renew the same
experience. At last it became too intolerable, he could endure it no
longer. Let it make or break, certainty, at all risks, was at least
preferable to this sickening suspense. That he loved her, he could no
longer doubt; let his parents foam and fret as much as they pleased; for
once he was going to stand on his own legs. And in the end, he thought,
they would have to yield, for they had no son but him.
Bertha was going to return to her home on the sea-coast in a week.
Ralph stood in the little low-ceiled parlor, as she imagined, to bid her
good-by. They had been speaking of her father, her brothers, and the

farm, and she had expressed the wish that if he ever should come to that
part of the country he might pay them a visit. Her words had kindled a
vague hope in his breast, but in their very frankness and friendly regard
there was something which slew the hope they had begotten. He held
her hand in his, and her large confiding eyes shone with an emotion
which was beautiful, but was yet not love.
"If you were but a peasant born like myself," said she, in