Part 10

The pastor resumed his petition. His exhortations became more and more fervid, his voice more and more broken with tears, and the whole time his eyes never left Leo's face.

Even if it had not been so perfectly natural on this occasion for the dependent parson to refer in his discourse to the powerful Church patron and landowner, there could have been no manner of doubt for whom his sermon of vengeance and penitence was intended. But outwardly, at least, Leo was on his guard against betraying the horrid suspicion which long since had become a certainty in his heart.

The words of the peasant orator, like waves of flame, rolled over him, rising and falling with deadening regularity, till at last they filled and oppressed his brain. Yet he still fought with all his might to master the tormenting thoughts rising within him, to trample them down with brutal scorn. But it was in vain. The pictures of his vanished youth, which his whilom tutor skilfully interwove with his scriptural phantasies, were too forcibly driven home for his relaxed soul to resist them.

And then suddenly he started, as if a whip had lashed him. The word "Jonathan" descended from overhead, uttered in a tone that was alike caressing and threatening.

He knew why the old pastor leaned his bulky form far over the edge of the pulpit, as if he would have delighted to fly at the unrepentant sinner's throat, knew well why his fat fingers pointed at him, why the plump, bull throat twisted and craned in demoniacal contortions.

The zealot had now played his last trump, and would have liked to strengthen the effect with the power of his fists. But this he dared not do.

Jonathan! The mere mention of that name had been sufficient to conjure up before Leo's mental eye the vision of his friend in the _role_ of an accusing angel. He gazed at him with his luminous eyes--he, the betrayed and deceived--and, between the thunder claps of the Brenckenberg lungs, his voice, sad and low, asked perpetually--

"Why hast thou done this thing?"

Then was heard a cry from a woman's mouth, a half-stifled gurgle of fear.

Johanna had fainted. Enveloped in her heavy, black veil, she lay, a motionless heap, on the red tiles in the shadow of the pew.

XI

The drive home was silent and depressing, and so was the midday meal which followed.

Leo wrestled in his mind with conjectures and resolves. It seemed certain that some connection existed between Johanna and the old pastor's denunciatory sermon. To-day the mystery must be cleared up. It was an obligation that he owed his house.

As usual, the eldest sister did not appear at table. So, at dessert, he sent Hertha to ask if she would see him. Hertha brought back word that mamma did not feel quite equal to receiving him then, but in an hour's time she hoped that she might be well enough.

Without waiting till grace was said, he rose and strode into the garden, which lay gasping in the blazing noonday heat. The roses languished on their stems; the lazy, slime-covered carps sunned themselves on the surface of the pond. A draught of hot air came from the fallen pyramid, whose cracked gold letters, commemorating the heroic deeds of a Sellentine ancestor, caught the sun like panes of glass.

"_He_ had to get himself out of many a tight corner," Leo thought, and resolved that he would let no furious priest bully him in future. The dull, oppressive weight in his head dispersed; once more his plucky, defiant humour bubbled up.

He looked at the clock. Half an hour--just time in which to smoke a cigar. He threw himself on a bench full in the baking sun, and let the blue clouds curl about him, enjoying the warm thrill which trickled along his limbs.

But still Johanna's image, blurred by tears, would not vanish. He had of old regarded her with a kind of proud respect, and had always esteemed it as a happy privilege when she had made him the confidant of her strange, introspective thoughts. And though he had delighted to hold up to ridicule the extravagant enthusiasm with which Ulrich, in his gymnasium days, had raved about the serious playmate, in his heart he too had thought her the most sublime of female creatures. And the day after the ceremony in the Temple of Friendship, when he and Ulrich had taken their vow to be friends for life, they had secretly rowed Johanna over to the Island, that she, as a kind of priestess, might sanctify what to them was more sacred than anything else in the world.

He let these pictures of an intimate brother-and-sister affection pass before him, half-awake, half-dreaming, till three jangling strokes from the castle tower roused him into a sitting position.

Johanna's apartments were on the first floor, close to the desolate drawing-room suite. No one answered his knocks and he walked in. A big bare room met his eye. It was in semi-darkness, owing to the closed shutters, and polished tables and stiff chairs were apparently arranged at regular intervals along the walls, on which hung, as large as life, pictures of scriptural subjects and black-letter alphabets. An atmosphere of poverty and dirt, that abominable "poor-people's odour" so offensive to aristocratic nostrils, lingered in this room even on Sundays, and met him pungently as he entered it. This, then, was the widely known "ragged-school," which turned Halewitz day by day into a "kindergarten" institution for the poor. The room was empty; but through an opening in the folds of the partition he saw his sister in the next apartment, leaning, almost lying, back with closed eyes in an armchair. Quivering, bluish shafts of light zigzagged across the dusky floor. One of these fell on her sunken face, and brightly illumined the red-gold hair which she generally wore hidden under her black widow's veil.

He stood still and looked at her contemplatively. He studied the hollows on the haggard cheeks, the crow's-feet at the relaxed corners of the mouth, and that hard straight line running from chin to throat, the autumnal sign which no art can eradicate.

A shiver ran through him. What must her life have been since, as the young bride of a gay cavalier, she went out into the world, that she should have come back a faded wreck at little more than thirty years of age to bury herself alive in this living grave--a mere sister of charity, with no interest outside the wretched scrofulous children of the peasantry?

He pulled the _portiere_ aside. A curious scent of heliotrope and strong hartshorn was wafted towards him.

She had not heard his footstep till now, and slowly opened her tired eyes, which, directly she saw who it was, took on that fixed clairvoyant expression that had made them so terrible to him.

Some of his old youthful respect for her came back momentarily, so that he needed to give himself a slight reminder before he could resume his manner of easy defiance.

"I have come to talk seriously to you," he said, frowning, as he placed a chair not quite opposite her, so that the corner of the table was still between them.

She drew herself slowly erect, and pushed the leather cushion against which her head had been resting lower to support her back.

"I have been expecting you, dear Leo," she said, "ever since that day we met again. You must have been saying to yourself all the time that it was not the same between us as it used to be, yet you have not come for an explanation. It is your own fault that you have had to carry about with you the consciousness of being estranged from your sister. But, all the same, you have managed to go your way laughing and whistling. That is the first thing I have to reproach you with."

He felt his heart harden under her words. Did she want to impress upon him the superiority of her mind over his own? And as a sign that he was not the man to be easily intimidated, he took his chair, twirled it three times on its castors, then seated himself straddle-legged upon it, and leaned his elbows on the back.

"You will permit me to make myself comfortable, I trust?" he said. "One's persuasive arguments are not so likely to be effective if one begins too ceremoniously."

A haughty lowering of her lids showed him that she was not inclined to tolerate his roughness without protest.

"Oh, please," she said, "don't put any restraint on yourself because of me. Why should you? You have accustomed the others to expect the manners of the bar at Halewitz."

"At Halewitz the manners which I approve shall not be criticised, dear Hannah," he replied; "and, if they seem too coarse for you, I advise you to withdraw to our aristocratic dower-house, where you will not be in the least troubled by them."

"Does that mean, Leo, that you will drive me and my stepdaughter from under your roof?"

"It means, Hannah, that I will be master in my own house, and that I have no desire to let my temper be spoilt by the whims of parsons and women. For my good temper is very necessary to me, more so than you are."

She folded her hands. "What has come to you, Leo?" she cried, staring at him.

He laughed in her face. "Come to me? Nothing, except that I am now an ordinary healthy-minded fellow, who intends to do his work in life without being dictated to by any woman, sister, or any one else."

"You are well satisfied with yourself," she asked, "as you are?"

"Perfectly, so long as I am left unmolested."

"You positively are aware of no fault? Nothing that you would like to obliterate from your memory?"

"Ha! ha!" he exclaimed. "Now I know what you are driving at. Well, I am in the mood to let you preach. So fire away."

She cast her shadowed eyes in a heavenward direction.

"Oh, don't turn up the whites of your eyes over me," he added. "I can assure you, I and the Almighty are on excellent terms."

His scoffing tone appeared to wound her deeply. She put her hands before her face, and leaned back in her chair, trembling.

His mothers advice occurred to him. He saw now that he ought to have made more allowance for the excitable condition of her nerves, and was vexed with himself for having been so rude.

"Hannah," he entreated, in a voice full of kindness, "be reasonable. Let us talk freely and openly, straight from the heart, as we used to do in old days. If we are frank with each other, things must be cleared up. A quarrel between you and me is a pure caprice. Come, Hannah, tell me, what is the grudge you bear against me?"

She let her hands fall from her face. Every drop of blood receded from her cheeks and brow. Then, as she raised both arms as if shielding herself from him, she cried, in a voice from which all the pent-up torment of a thousand sleepless nights seemed to break forth--

"Leo, she was your mistress!"

Now he needed his utmost strength to parry the attack. "I don't understand you, my dear," he said, shrugging his shoulders with affected coolness.

"Are you going to deny it, Leo?" she asked.

He looked hard at her, full of suspicion. Yet, after all, what could she know? A rumour from the gossip round neighbouring coffee-tables may have reached her ears, which had become a fixed idea in her pondering brain, and now seemed to her an actual fact. That must be it. It couldn't be otherwise. Yet he resolved, at all events, to sound her cautiously.

"Look here, my dear child," he said, "nothing is further from my thoughts than to pose to you as a saint. I am, and have been all my life, a full-blooded piece of goods.... But, I assure you ... I haven't the slightest notion to which of my foolish affairs--all are over now--you are referring."

"I am not speaking of 'foolish affairs,' but of adultery," she answered.

"Indeed! Is it possible?" he inquired, still schooling himself to scorn. "That is almost worthy of the holy mouth of our old pastor Brenckenberg. And that leads me to a conclusion at which I have slowly arrived, that you have had a hand in the lamentations he poured out over me to-day."

"You have only just arrived at that conclusion?" she exclaimed.

"You know I am a little dense," he replied, with a laugh. But a cold sweat had broken out on his forehead.

She gazed at him, seeking to find a passport into his soul. "You want to spare her," she said, with a weary smile of contempt. "It is hardly necessary now. I let myself be deceived by her long enough. She knew well how to play, the innocent with those eyes. Through her consummate acting she ruined you all ... the perfidious woman."

She had clasped the arm of the chair with her thin hands, and sat erect as if preparing for a spring.

Leo hung greedily on her lips. "She understands the art of hating," he thought, and his heart beat loud.

And then, without further inquiry on his part, she told him how she had discovered the secret.

It was about two years ago, when Felicitas was already engaged, that she had found her one day in his study rummaging in his writing-table, the key of which was generally in Ulrich's keeping, and, when she saw that she was caught, she went down on her knees and had besought Johanna not to betray her; it was because she could no longer endure the thought of her fiance sitting at the same writing-table which contained her letters that she had searched for them. Her letters, and to whom? So it had come to light.

"The fool!" Leo burst forth. "She might have known that her letters were burnt long ago."

His sister seemed to have awaited this incautious exclamation. "You confess, then?" she said, pleased.

He hesitated. "Confess! There is nothing to confess! A few scrawls belonging to the time of that boy-and-girl flirtation which went on under your eyes. Beyond that, I never had a line from her."

She looked at him again with her tired smile. "You are stubborn, dear friend," she said. "Your whilom mistress capitulated at once. She did me the doubtful honour of making me her confidante, but the _role_ was not to my taste. The very next moment I showed her the door."

Leo saw at last that his secret, for good or ill, was in his sister's possession. To deny any more would be sheer madness.

"And instead of using your knowledge to help and to save," he said, grinding his teeth, "you must needs rush and confide it to the bosom of our old private chaplain, and through that crooked channel try to ruin your brother's honourable name and peace of mind, eh?"

She shrugged her shoulders. "He knew it long ago," she responded.

"How? From whom?"

"From Rhaden himself."

"The hound! the hound! He and I were sworn to secrecy. He has broken his vows to the dead."

"Do you deserve anything else?"

He leapt up. "Hannah!" he said, controlling himself with difficulty, "I should advise you to adopt another tone, or else I may forget that we are the same flesh and blood."

"Alas that we are!" she replied, folding her hands.

A voice cried within him, "Jeer at her, overwhelm her with your scorn and contempt!" but his victorious courage had forsaken him. He could only utter a hoarse, jarring laugh. Her eye rested on him, hard and pitiless, and he felt a narrowing of his heart as if iron hoops gradually encircled it. In his despair he bethought him of the covenant of friendship, in which Johanna had played the part of priestess.

"Is he not your friend as well as mine?" he asked. "Why did you not warn him? It was in your power to avert the evil. Why didn't you do it?"

A smile of self-torture hovered about her lips. "That is my concern. On that point I refuse to answer you," she said.

It dawned upon him faintly that here somewhere was the key that might solve the riddle presented by her distraught mind, but before he could put the thought into words it had eluded him.

"And what of our covenant?" he stammered--"our old covenant?"

"That was broken long ago," she answered, while in her bitterness a dark flush mounted to her cheek. "It was broken when you both put me aside to play with that white kitten. Neither of you troubled your heads about me then. And when I became engaged, no one asked me why I did it. Even _he_ took no interest. And what I have suffered as wife of an adventurer ... who knows or cares? Or how he bundled me about from racecourse to gambling-saloon, and from gambling-saloon to racecourse. Ah, what a life that was! But why do I talk of myself? I too only got what I deserved."

"What have you to reproach yourself with?" he asked.

She bit her lips and brooded. "Every one of us has something to repent, Leo," she said, after a pause; "I, as well as you. All day and all night I am repenting without ceasing. It is my right. No one can deprive me of it. It is the only way in which I can repair, in some measure, my ruined life."

"And yet you were able to endure that man?" he inquired.

"Wasn't I forced to?" she replied. "If I had left him we should all have been disgraced. When he died in a hospital, I could not be with him, for I was travelling about in order to redeem a cheque that he had forged."

"Johanne!"

Wrath at the conduct of the scoundrel who had wormed himself into his family seized him so hotly that, for a moment, everything swam before him.

Tearless, with her tired smile, she looked up at him. "Till now no human soul has heard of it," she continued. "So you have no need to be ashamed of your sister."

He stretched out both his hands towards her. "Forgive me, Hannah. If only I had guessed!..."

"Leave me alone," she answered, pushing his hands aside. "We are not talking about myself. It is only better that you should know with whom you have to deal. And in case you should feel inclined to laugh at me again because I trust in Jesus, my Saviour"--a faint gleam shot from her eyes towards the crucifix--"I may as well tell you how I found Him. At the time that I was degraded and polluted by contact with that man; when I couldn't think, eat, or sleep for loathing, I sought a place where I could cry out my heart in peace.... I slunk about like an outcast, seeking and seeking, and could find no haven till one day I saw a church door standing open, and went in. There no one persecuted me; there I found home and husband; the Spouse who did not strike or outrage me, who Himself had suffered as I suffered; who smiled down at me from the cross when I clung to His poor bleeding feet. Will you blame me for having gone to Him again and again?"

He gave her a softened glance. Certainly he could never again mock at her pious exercises.

"But I was not then quite what you see me now," she went on. "I only realised to the full how utterly alone I was in the world when that person who now reigns at Uhlenfelde confessed all to me. After that I wrestled on my knees whole nights through. I prayed to God, saying, 'Lord, take me as a sacrifice; let me expiate the shame which he has brought on our heads who are nearest to him and love him. Do what Thou wilt with me in Thy anger, only take the reproach from him, and let him live honourably again.' ... But my prayer was not heard.... Since then God has forsaken me as He has you."

She let the hands which had been raised imploringly to the crucifix drop in her lap, and she sank back exhausted.

No cynical smile stole over Leo's face now. His powerful neck bent, as if he willingly offered it to the scourge which was being wielded over it. There was a silence. Then he said in a low tone, "Hannah?"

She did not answer.

"Hannah," he said again, with a look in his straight, honest eyes that seemed secretly to beg mercy from her, "you speak to me as if I were a felon."

Still she was silent.

"Hannah," he urged her, "what am I to do? This unhappy thing cannot be undone."

There was a light in her half-closed eyes. "You are sorry, then, for what has happened?" she asked, raising herself erect again.

"My God! am I such a monster," he replied, scarcely audibly, "that I should take a special pleasure in the thought that I have slain a man for no other crime than defending the honour of his name?"

"Then you are ready to repent?" she asked, bending towards him with a sort of impetuous greed.

A shudder ran through his frame. "Repent nothing," came the old cry within him. Now that he knew what she was demanding of him, his manliness returned.

"What do you call repenting?" he asked, and thrust his hand in his pockets. "Shall I whimper and whine and tear my hair? Shall I crawl on my knees like a scurvy hound? No, dear Hannah. I must stick to my defiance, to my merry heart and thick skin, if I am to set things right. And now, out with it. What have I got exactly to repent? What more did I do than is done every day in the world out there? I am not a paragon. I could only act as I have seen others act."

"Then, from the point of view of comfort, your outlook on life leaves nothing to wish for?"

"Why should I rush headlong into discomfort?" he retorted, more intrepid than he really felt. "But to continue; you know my cousinship with her. I trust that you will not fling that up at me; and with regard to Rhaden, I was never on intimate terms with him. I knew him as a grumbling, cross-grained fellow, nothing more. So there can be no question of a breach of friendship. Later, when the affair got wind, and a challenge to fight was given me in the garden, everything was done correctly. He it was who desired that the seconds should not be initiated into the cause of the quarrel. His wife's reputation must be saved at any cost I simply had to say 'Yes.' And this is how it is Ulrich rushed into matrimony in ignorance of what had really happened, and now I see the folly of it, and that is the mistake I so bitterly rue. Well, to proceed. The quarrel at cards had to be arranged as a blind, and just as little as he was to be blamed for not firing in the air, can I be blamed for shooting him down. For, you see, I was obliged to defend myself. I will admit that it all sounds very barbaric in black and white, but it is not my vocation to revolutionise morals--I leave that to the social democrats. I accepted my sentence and punishment, and with my period of exile in America I have done with the whole thing. So _basta_!"

He raised his fists as if relieved of some heavy weight. With this drastic explanation he hoped to break once for all the chain with which his sister had tried to bring his will into subjection to her own. But he could not evade that searching, hungry glance. He had learned to fear her, and felt that she meant him harm.

"If you will deliberately revel in evil thus," she said, "I must give you up as lost. But are you become so uncivilised and lawless that even the disgrace which your friend has suffered through you does not weigh on your conscience?"

"Be silent!" he shouted, jumping up. "You don't wish to be reproached on that score, neither will I be reproached. The misfortune has happened--any step that I might take now would only increase it. I have given up intercourse with him. Do you think that was easy? Do you think I can ever be quit of the fear of what may befall him?"

"And still you say that all is over, as if it had never been?"

"I say it is bound to be so."

"Yet the consequences of your deed cry to Heaven, dear Leo, on every side."

"How cry to Heaven?"

"If you don't know it, I must tell you. Your former mistress is again causing scandals without end. Your friend's repute is in bad hands. Who knows if all the world is not jeering and laughing at him."

"Johanna!" he cried, with a feeling as if his heart were being sundered in pieces within his breast. "Johanna, you lie!"