Castle Hohenwald: A Romance

Count Karl Styrum had never been very fond of large entertainment, and had accepted his uncle the President's invitation on this evening only because he did not wish to be rude to a relative whom he had not seen for years. The ball had hitherto been rather a bore; he did not dance, and, stranger as he was in this society, he took little interest in watching others dance. The only figure that his eyes followed with any pleasure in the waltz was his cousin Adèle's, and he had intended to slip from the room unobserved, when her gracious and cousinly invitation to him to conduct her to supper frustrated his unsocial plan.

He could not refuse so amiable a proposal, but he promised himself but little entertainment in her society, since, although cousins, they were now almost entire strangers to each other. He had last visited his uncle, his mother's brother, ten years before, when Adèle was a pretty little girl with fair curls, whom he had made a pet of and called his little sweetheart. In the busy years that ensued he had almost forgotten her; indeed, he had hardly remembered her name. Now he had come to M---- to arrange a personal adjustment with his uncle of a lawsuit between them concerning an inherited estate. It had been the cause of a not quite friendly correspondence, and the Count had not looked forward to a renewal of intercourse with his relatives without some misgivings. He was all the more pleased, therefore, by the cordiality with which his uncle received him, and begged him to forget the odious lawsuit entirely, except when it absolutely demanded attention as a matter of business.

"I think, my dear Karl," the President said, when the Count first presented himself at his house a few days before the birthday ball, "we can manage to leave all quarrelling over mine and thine to our lawyers; let us do all we can to aid in the settlement of the question, but if this settlement be delayed, do not, for Heaven's sake, let it disturb the friendliness of our relations with each other any more than should our difference in politics, which latter, most unfortunately, embittered your father towards me during the last years of his life; to the day of his death he could not forgive me because we Prussians were victorious in 1866. I trust that you, Saxon soldier though you be, are more placable, and will reflect, as I do, that your dear mother was my favourite sister, and that we loved each other faithfully as long as she lived. It was not our fault, as we both thought, that our grand-uncle involved us in a lawsuit by an ambiguous will."