The Burning Secret by Stefan Zweig

Zweig never disappoints and it is amazing how he can make a rather thrilling story out of simple actions.

"The suave Baron, bored on his holiday in an Austrian mountain resort, begins a flirtation with a beautiful woman. When his advances are rejected, he seeks a new way to her heart - by befriending her twelve-year-old son. To the Baron all this is a game, but he cannot begin to imagine the effect he is having on the boy's life..."

A holiday flirtation that turns out to have a dramatic and traumatic impact on a young, lonely boy, who is proud to get the attention of the older man. After having got the boy's attention, and getting closer to the mother, the Baron sees the boy only as a hindrance in the affair. The boy who, all of a sudden, is somewhat alienated both from his mother and the Baron, decides to take matters in his own hands.

It is always a pleasure to read Stefan Zweig. His way of describing the environment is fantastic. Just look at this first paragraph of the novella.

"The train, with a shrill whistle, pulled into Summering. For a moment the black coaches stood still in the silvery light of the uplands to eject a few vivid human figures and to swallow up others. Exacerbated voices called back and forth; then, with a puffing and a chugging and another shrill shriek, the dark train clattered into the opening of the tunnel, and once more the landscape stretched before the view unnbroken in all its wide expanse, the background sept clean by the moist wind."

... and a description of the Baron.

"Although not without inner resources, he was a thoroughly social being, his sociability being the very quality for which his friends liked him and for which he was welcomed in all circles. He was quite conscious of his inability to stay by himself and had no inclination to meet himself, as it were, but rather avoided his own company, feeling not the least urge to become intimatelyacquainted whit his own soul. ... Alone he was like a match in a box, frosty and useless."

... and the boy.

"A deep furrow cut itself between the child's brows. He looked almost old as he sat in the carriage painfully cogitating this great mystery and never casting a single glance at the landscapre, which was shading into all the delicate colors of the spring, the mountains in the freshened green of their pines, the valleys in the mistier greens of budding trees, shrubbery and young grass. All he had eyes for werre the man and the woman on the seat opposite him, as though, with his hot gaze, as with an angling hook, he could snatch the secret from the shimmering depths of their eyes."

I also found a movie from 1988, based on the novella; with Faye Dunaway, Klaus Maria Brandauer and David Eberts as the son. Available on Youtube.