The Matriarch by G. B. Stern

Author:G. B. Stern [G. B. Stern]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781907970290
Publisher: Daunt Books
Published: 2013-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

6

The cave was a hollow, walled by great sacks and creaking clothes-baskets, under one of the out-jutting bits of roof in the smallest attic. It was approached by a sort of maze, in and out of the trunks, ducking your head beneath the low sag of the beams. This attic had not yet been disturbed by the Matriarch’s packings, for it held more rubbish than treasures. Gaunt broken pieces of furniture were here; the four carved gilt posts of a Louis XVI bed, lopsided and no more in use; an old perambulator and cradle were disconsolate shapes in these recesses of dust and silence; some huge gilt-framed portraits of bygone Czelovars and Bettelheims stood in a stack with their faces to the wall, and over the battered silk shade of the standard lamp which had once helped to illumine the baroque drawing-room, spiders had draped a grey shimmer of cobwebs.

Derek, tiptoeing behind Toni to their cave, was quite certain that there had never been a doubt in his mind, but that he and she stood for all that was noble and sacrificial, against a troop of blundering ordinary beings who heard no clarions and knew no romance. He was impressionable to atmosphere, and though Toni’s Jesuit creed was as yet far more instinctive than deliberate, yet she had done well, for the furtherance of her ends, to have led him up here. To her ear, there was a marching rhythm in the tramp past of a great family; for the moment, the family was menaced, and Derek’s individual self must be subordinate to his uses in averting that menace.

… Toni started to charm him out of his everyday mood, with a fantastic jumble of stories. She told him about the old lady who had spilt wine over the tablecloth so that the Hungarian peasants at her dinner-table should not feel uncomfortable over what they might spill. She told him how Anastasia had gathered round her, in the train, all the emigrés fleeing from the siege of Paris, and had been so witty and contemptuous about the Prussians who shot at them, that the journey ceased to be a nightmare. She told him how Maximilian had been known everywhere as Le Grand Seigneur, because of his prestige and straight dealing and ‘mannificence’. Travelling back again, at random, she told him how their ancestor, Simon Rakonitz, had been the first to obtain privileges for the Jews in the ghetto at Pressburg; how he had fought for them, not sparing himself, so that his name was on a tablet in the synagogue wall, and they praised and revered him. And she told him how their grandfather, Paul Rakonitz, Anastasia’s husband, had ruined himself by giving his name as security, in a crisis, to his two great friends, when he knew that their business might collapse at any moment; as, indeed, it did, in spite of his loyal support; and Grandpapa had died brokenhearted because he could not make good again, and could not

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