Part 13

The St. Bernard looked up at him with intelligent eyes.

"Like a fairy tale," she had said. And this was like being in a fairy tale, too. The walls were covered with rough household utensils. The huge open chimney-place was all encrusted with glittering flakes of soot that struggled upwards in fantastic zigzag shapes, and when loosened from the velvet cloud of smoke, rained down on to the hearth in a shower of metallic scales. Above the fire of crackling logs, along which the blue flames greedily felt their way before plunging into their heart, the steaming flower-patterned blouse belonging to the careless child wreathed the hearth with a festive-looking garland. The quivering reflection of the flames shot up brilliantly and filled the room one moment, the next they sank, giving place to dark shadows, his own shadow most conspicuous, magnified to gigantic proportions on the wall and rising to the ceiling, with a black hatchet grasped in his hand ... a grim sentinel.

Like this shadow, he thought, holding the hatchet and waiting a chance to bring it down, was that old sin. There was no path along which it did not follow him. Where he was, it was, too. In this hour it would not tolerate for a moment that he should forget it. He looked at the clock. Ten minutes past eleven; and still there was no sound of the carriage coming.

He rose and went out on tiptoe up to the dyke to look round. As he came to where his mare was standing, he saw with alarm that its smoking body was convulsed with cold shivers.

"Well to be born a landed proprietor," he reflected. "If I was my groom this negligence would cost me my situation and bread."

Hurriedly he went back and found in a corner of the kitchen a patchwork square such as the poor people use instead of carpet. In this he wrapped the shaking animal, after he had dried its legs and flanks with a towel.

Far and wide darkness and silence reigned. Only on the other side of the stream a torchlight came and went, and reappeared in another place. Probably nocturnal crab-catchers were abroad. The mist had thickened, and appeared to be heavy on the river. Bluish-white tags detached themselves now and then, and melted in the starry sky, or hung about the bushes and shrubs, whose blurred blackness rose out of a milky surface. He heard a soft trickling sound coming from the trees near. The dew was falling. He shivered in his damp clothes.

"God be praised that I have got her safe," he thought, and turned back to the house. As he stepped softly over the threshold, he fancied he heard Hertha speaking his name. He stood still in astonishment.

"Leo ... my dear, dear, _dear_ Leo!"

He had never heard any words in his life so fervid, so full of awed and hesitating tenderness.

But the problem was soon solved. She was sitting on the oak stump, bending down caressing the dog whose head rested between her feet, which were now shod in stockings and wooden shoes.

He was inwardly vexed, and laughed. But she, when she heard him coming, sprang up with a cry as if she had been doing something very wrong.

"I was so big a blockhead for a minute," he confessed, laughing, "as to think that was meant for me."

A fresh wave of colour swept her cheeks. Then, shrugging her shoulders, she said, "You are mistaken."

"Yes, I always am being mistaken," he answered; and turning to the dog, he added, "You are lucky, old boy. Your master is treated _en canaille_, but you who are _canaille_ itself get caresses and endearments."

"Uncle Leo," she began, with flashing eyes, "I hope that you will be chivalrous enough, to-day at least, not to take advantage of my helpless position to scoff at me."

"But, my dear child, ..." he said soothingly.

"Don't call me your dear child. I am not your dear child.... I am a stranger to you, as much as any one else. I am a lonely forsaken girl, whom you found receiving hospitality under your roof; you let her stay, because you cannot very well tell her to go. But simply because I am still your guest, I beg that you will not speak to me now, but go away. Leave me to my fate. I dare say that I can find my way home, though after that I am not quite certain what I shall do."

She stood leaning against the inglenook biting her lips, and stared at the fire, which cast a golden glow over her flowing hair and naked brown arms. He was quite unmanned by the loveliness of the picture.

He came close to her, and smiling into her amazed eyes, stroked her on the forehead and cheeks three times.

She gazed up at him motionless, with half-open mouth. She seemed scarcely to comprehend what was happening. For it was the first time any man had ever stroked her cheek.

"What's the matter, sweet one, dearest? What have I done to you?" he asked in a low voice, leaning over her. "Tell me why you rage so furiously against me."

She tried to speak, but her lips would not obey. She wanted to guard herself, but her arms sank to her sides.

"Listen," he continued, "I delight in you, every hour that I see you. Every day you grow dearer to me. You are the sunshine of the house, but you keep up your feud with me, just as if I were positively your arch-enemy, or God knows what monster."

She shut her eyes, and swayed as if she must lie down and fall asleep.

"And look here," he began again. "If I have teased you a little now and then, you must take it in good part. While I have been away, all of you have just got into the habit of doing what you like. But I want to inculcate method and order; and you, too, my dear child, I would have fall in with my rules. And that won't be so difficult, for I shall require nothing very dreadful of you. Will you agree? Say yes, please. Do me the favour."

Whereupon she dropped down on the wooden stump, and covering her face with her hands, began to cry bitterly.

"What a quaint young thing it is," he thought. "Instead of throwing herself into my arms, which I, as a good uncle, deserve, she sits down and howls."

He placed himself beside her, and looked down on her head. Slowly, half uncertain, he raised his left hand. "May I?" he wondered, and let it glide gently over her damp hair, which shone, red as a fox, in the firelight.

Then she clung with both hands to his arm, and leaning her head against it, whispered, still sobbing--

"Why--why are you so horrid to me?"

"When have I been horrid? I have always meant to be good to you, child."

"Really! Will you really be good to me?"

"Of course, my child."

He stooped, and was going to kiss her on the forehead; but as at this moment she moved her head sideways, it happened that their lips rested on each other.

"How innocently she lets herself be kissed," he thought.

And then suddenly she jumped up, and tore out of the room as fast as her clattering pattens would permit.

He ran both hands through his hair, and strode like one possessed up and down the uneven tiles of the kitchen.

A childlike, foolish blissfulness filled his soul. He felt as if he was again fifteen years old, in jackets and with curly hair, coming home triumphant from his first rendezvous, when Felicitas had given him her first kiss.

Felicitas!

Like the stab of a knife the thought of her pursued him. But the next minute he laughed out loud, and raised his hands in proud confidence to the ceiling. The kiss of the innocent child had opened founts of youthful gladness within him.

If he dared hope one day to win this young heart for his own, then all would be made right again. Then the burden of guilt, borne for years, would fall of itself. Then what filled his life with vague uneasiness, and made him sometimes not know himself, would yield to peace and a happy state of mind. It would die away--die like that flickering, greedy, leaping flame, which now, at last, had sunk, and lay at rest in a dull red-hot glow. And when he turned round he saw that the grand spectre which had cast its shadow, hatchet in hand on the wall, had gone too.

His mood became pleasantly dreamy. He rested his head in his hands, and his foot on the body of the dog that lay stretched full length on the hearth luxuriating in the warmth. As he stared at the red ashes, an earnest of how his future was to shape itself made him feel as if a cool hand were laid soothingly on his brow.

He must have sat musing thus for quite a quarter of an hour, when the St. Bernard barked. Carriage-wheels sounded without, and voices.

"How glad I am they didn't come before," he thought, full of gratitude for the blessings the last hour or so had rained upon him. He went out. A long waggonette full of men and lights stood on the dyke, and close behind it one of the smaller Halewitz carriages, from which his mother's voice greeted him, half choked by tears.

"Found!" he cried, gleefully.

There was great rejoicings at the news. His mother climbed down from the carriage followed by the stout lady-help, who was laden with a supply of dry clothes.

Elly had, of course, given wrong directions. For two hours the carriages had been driving about from village to village.

His mother went into the house with the clothes, and begged him to wait outside.

"Don't scold her," he called after her on the threshold. "She has already had her share."

"I hope that you were not too hard on her!" she exclaimed.

He felt that he was growing red, and did not meet her glance.

It was a long time before any one came out again. The servants stamped on the dyke to keep their feet warm. The brandy bottle circulated. The maids let themselves be tickled, and gave a suppressed squeal when the lads went too far. Some of them hummed now and again a snatch of song. He leaned against his grey mare. Sounds and shadows passed before his consciousness like a dream. At last, after about half an hour, she appeared, holding his mother's hand, in the doorway, her head wrapped in a woollen shawl and a wide fur-cloak flung round her.

The servants wanted to cheer, but he forbade any demonstration.

"Just think," protested grandmamma, while her eyes beamed with delight; "the little rogue did not want to come away a bit. Only when I had promised that Mamselle should stay and tend the sick woman, would she graciously condescend to follow me."

Hertha cast down her eyes and was smiling coy dreamy smiles. When she came into the light of the lanterns he saw that her whole face was radiant with great excitement. Her cheeks seemed rounder, her mouth like a flower.

"What a charming metamorphosis," he thought. "A woman all in a minute, before she has become a woman."

And when they had settled her comfortably in her corner, they began the homeward journey. He put a short pipe in his mouth, and rode in the wake of the carriage.

A soft breeze had risen, and drove the mist in his face. The grasshoppers were silent, and a great stillness lay on the world. Slowly he recalled one sweet picture after the other, and as they passed before his mind's eye, one in particular arrested him.

How expectantly her lips had been rounded to receive his threatened kiss, and to return it with emphasis.

He felt the impression of it still, he felt, too, the thin outline of the slight young form as his arm had encircled it.

"Aren't you ashamed of yourself?" something spoke within him. "Don't hurt the child. Don't carry on a 'bud' flirtation."

XIV

When Leo entered his bedroom towards two o'clock in the morning, in passing the little table by the bedside, a penetrating and peculiar perfume met him, a perfume that years before had often clung to his clothes and person. Astonished, he turned the marble salver upside down, and between newspapers and books found a small ivory-coloured note with the device in silver of a baron's coronet, and a carrier pigeon beneath it on the outside. The handwriting was disguised. Nevertheless he recognised it at a first glance, and turned pale. He tore open the envelope with trembling fingers. The contents were as follows:--

"Leo,

"I trust you, and I trust myself, to make a meeting between us possible. It would be simply cowardice to avoid it any longer. It is time that we arrived at a clear understanding with regard to our position to each other and to the outside world. I will wait for you every morning when the fog lies on the stream, at the Isle of Friendship. For the sake of one who is dear to us both I conjure you to come. Our unhappiness makes it imperative that you should come."

With a harsh laugh he cast the note from him. It flew between the bed-curtains and rested on the pillow.

This was too good. He had struggled with himself honestly--weary days and nights, resisted and been proof against the excommunication of scripture, the appeals of honour and friendship, the exhorting of his own conscience, and now was all his defiance and hardihood to be swept away by this small clandestine billet?

"But what can I do?" he murmured, seeing his position with sudden distinctness. "I am in for it."

Still, there should be no question of repentance. Let all the priests and all the hysterical women of the earth enter into a conspiracy of vengeance against him, he would yet remain true to himself and his principle.

In one thing, however, Johanna had been right. If Felicitas did not understand what was due to the honour of her house he must be the first and only one to remind her of her duty. If it was true that their common guilt had really given him a power over her weak and vacillating nature, he must use that power for Ulrich's welfare. It would, indeed, be cowardice not to do so.

Besides, she was so vain that she might easily interpret his avoiding her as a sign that he was afraid to meet her because he had preserved the old passion intact in his heart all these years with doglike fidelity. Nothing could be more absurd than such an idea.

Indeed, he never could have believed that love for a woman, which had amounted almost to madness, could have been so completely lived down.

He blew over the point of his thumb-nail. Not so much as that even remained. As far as he was concerned Ulrich might rest in peace.

And then he recoiled before this impure train of thought. His eye wandered to the wall above, where was the smooth wooden case, within which reposed a pair of unfailing comforters, that formerly he had thought a thousand times of resorting to in a distressful situation. He walked up and down the room and rehearsed the declamatory speech he would make to her when they met.

"Woman," he would say, "have you not a spark of shame in your composition, that you sacrifice the dignity and good name of the best and noblest of men to your childish folly? Hasn't your own sense of guilt taught you to take life more seriously?"

Just then he passed the mirror. A fleeting glance at it showed him, to his satisfaction, how tall and powerful and full of self-possession he would appear before her, the beautiful, smiling sinner.

"Our unhappiness makes it imperative." Her letter had closed with that hollow phrase. It could mean nothing. The child's banishment, the only event that could cast a shadow on her existence, had been her own deliberate choice.

Anger rose within him. "She shall answer for it," he cried, and shook his fists.

Then, in sudden need of air, he tore open a window and leaned out, drinking in the cool, damp night.

Over there, in the corner gable, was the girls' bedroom. The hours that had just gone by occurred to him. How entirely they had vanished, and all that had happened in them seemed a far-off dream. He shut the window, burnt the letter, and undressed, for he wanted to sleep for the two hours still left to him. From habit, he was going to place beside his watch and purse on the bedside table the ring he had been wearing, when he hesitated. It was one Felicitas had given him in return for a diamond one of his. He contemplated the slender hoop with the line of sapphires, through the facets of which broke a play of light and dark-blue fire. Then he examined the inside, where, close to their initials, was inscribed the date of a memorable and fateful day. The custom of wearing the ring had become so mechanical, that he had kept it on his finger long after the last spark of his passion for the giver had been utterly extinguished.

"Now you had better leave it off," he said to himself; for if she saw it on his finger she might easily draw her own conclusions. He determined, when morning came, to lock it away for ever.

As he threw himself on the bed and settled his head in the pillows, he started up again, horrified, for some demon seemed to have enveloped him in the scent which the letter of his former mistress had brought home to his senses, and then he remembered that he had hurled the sheet of paper on the bed, and it had evidently left its traces behind.

And though he turned and shook the pillow, and finally tossed it out of bed, that powerful odour--a mixture of iris and opoponax, with which everything around her was saturated, a sort of symbol of herself--the cursed odour would not budge. It tortured him with hateful dreams one minute, and the next brought him back to a grim awakening.

At half-past five the gate watchman's long pole knocked on the window-pane, according to custom.

He jumped up with his head on fire, the blood racing and thumping in his temples. The morning douche did not brace him. He scarcely felt the cold water as it ran down his slackened limbs.

The weather was favourable, for the mist of the night shrouded the garden. The obelisk was a mere shadow, and there was not a trace of the trees to be seen. There was not the slightest fear of being observed from Uhlenfelde if he approached the island by boat. Why, then, should he put it off?

Quarter of an hour later he was galloping along the high road under the dripping branches. He was obliged to take the round by Wengern, as the only boat the nearer landing-place boasted had sailed away with Hertha the day before.

He left his horse at the farm, and walked down to the ferry with no spring in his step. He was scarcely yet awake to what he was doing. That in the next hour he would be standing face to face with the woman who had played the part of Fate in his life seemed incredible, and, at the same time, a matter of indifference. He walked on like a somnambulist. Only a pressure about his skull, a tormenting contraction of his breast, intimated dully that the path he was taking might lead to significant events.

Old Juergens could not contain his astonishment at sight of his master out on foot at such an ungodly hour of the morning. He got the boat ready for him in garrulous haste, distributing, by the way, all sorts of advice and warnings, and let the frail craft sink low in the water to ensure the master having a comfortable "push off." But he had not dreamed of the bright half-crown which dropped into his hand at parting. Now he knew what service was expected of him. It was the same as of old, "Keep your mouth shut."

As Leo moved through the mist over the grey eddying water, he felt the pressure which had weighed on the top of his head clasp his forehead like an iron ring, as if it would crush in his very brains. His limp arms had scarcely strength enough to keep firm hold of the oars. He let himself drift down-stream almost unconsciously.

The watery vapours welled and whirled all around him. They rose and rocked like masses of jelly that had been invisibly shaken and then sank again. Here and there the sun made its way in sulphur-coloured shafts through the milky thickness, cut circles of light on the water, and then by tremulous waves of mist was forced back and obscured. The water seemed to be rising hungrily in small bubbles, that swam about everywhere, and were driven by the circling ripples into the centre of the stream.

The banks had disappeared. Alone on the Halewitz side a fantastic mass of sedge and reeds from time to time loomed out through the grey vapour.

Then from the distance came a short shrill sound, like cracked sleigh-bells. It was ringing for the servants' breakfast at Uhlenfelde. The hour was six.

"What curious customs she must have introduced," he thought, "when she is able to slip out at this hour unnoticed, not once, but day after day."

He drew himself up, yawned, and let the cold water spray over him. Anticipation of the coming interview paralysed his limbs like a load of chains. Then gradually he began to feel brisker. Every stroke of the oars drove the blood quicker through his veins, and the first reflection that this renewed strength produced in him was, "Turn back."

But that would be insane folly. Rather he ought to congratulate himself that this inevitable meeting had been arranged in such a natural manner. There would be no necessity to set foot on Uhlenfelde ground, neither would he have to put Ulrich off with subterfuges, and afterwards he would be free as he was now.

He brought the oars out of the water with all his might, so that behind him gurgling whirlpools of foam dug the stream's depths.

Ulrich's peace; Ulrich's happiness. That was a goal for which he need not be ashamed to strive.

A few minutes later, when he looked round, he saw that the wall of fog behind the keel was split in two by a dark urn-shaped shadow standing up like a tower.

His heart began to beat with violent thumps against his breast. "You are behaving just as if you were still in love with her," he said, trying to laugh at himself.

The boat crunched on to the sand of the landing-place, the only one that the island boasted, the bank of which, half washed away by the encroachments of the stream, rose steeply from the water with nothing to protect it but a tangle of lichen-covered roots.

Here a brook, that divided the island into two halves, had hollowed out a sheltered little cove, whose calm waters could provide accommodation for three boats at least.

A small gleaming white sandbank, shaded by a huge canopy of alder branches, formed a charming nook, above which the brook murmured and babbled as it came tumbling down to join the water of the bay in a circle of foam.

Leo's first glance fell on the snow-white boat, which a long, polished chain, stretching over the sand, fastened to an alder-stump.

So she was waiting for him. The clouds of mist that floated about between the dripping boughs of the trees, and became immovable veils around their trunks, wrapped the interior of the island in impenetrable grey. Not a sign of the temple even was visible.

He walked slowly by moss-covered stepping-stones along the brookside up the incline. The undergrowth was quite a wilderness of shrubs and thickets, through which a long irregular path had been pierced. A blue-silk scarf hung on one of the branches. Instinctively he put it in his pocket. It became lighter, and the mist lifted. The blackberry bushes that hitherto had densely covered the floor of the wood with their thorny brambles, now sent forth arms like heralds in the direction of the lawn, which was set in the midst of the shrubs on the highest point of the island. The ripening berries, blue-black and rose-red, glistened through the leaves, and big drops hung on the thorns.

Not far from the edge of the clearing lay the old sacrificial stone. He paused beside it and drew a deep breath, stroking with a trembling hand the shattered surface, to the hollows of which scarlet creepers clung, looking like streams of spilt blood.

His eye sought the temple, that resembled somewhat a beroofed tombstone, with its two pillars and the statue-group between, rising out of the mist.

The shivering figure of a woman cowered on the steps. She was leaning against the pedestal, and at his approach slowly raised her head, which, after a quick, melancholy shy glance, sank again into the upturned palms of her hands.

But that one brief glance was enough. "She is the same as ever," he thought.