Part 18

But she hurled the temptation from her. Looking into her mind and probing it to the sad depths, she saw clearly that she must spurn low standards and dishonest means, if she was to preserve the power of conjuring up the beautiful and pathetic picture which she delighted to dwell on as the reflection of her soul. "Be noble, let your motives be exalted," a voice said within her; "perish like a vestal who offers up body and soul as a sacrifice. Renunciation is beautiful. How wonderful, without desires or inclination, to fade slowly away." A shiver ran through her as the word "fade" echoed within her. She repeated it with trembling lips. Then she went to the mirror, folded her hands, and contemplated herself for a long time. So fair, so young, yet fated to wither and die.

A well-known picture of Queen Marie Antoinette came into her mind, representing her in prison, with folded hands, behind a bed-screen, glancing heavenwards, chaste and resigned. She fetched a lace fichu, which she knotted loosely on her bosom. The resemblance seemed to her most striking, though in reality her pretty Watteau-like face had nothing at all in common with the haughty features of the aquiline-nosed daughter of the Hapsburgs. "So fair and so young to perish thus," she repeated. She almost fancied that she felt the cold steel of the guillotine fall upon her neck. "Poor, poor Queen," she whispered, and tears of belated compassion filled her eyes.

The uneasiness which Leo's distance caused her, gave her no more peace of mind. Indeed every day it grew worse, so that at last, after thinking and thinking it over, she conceived an enterprise, the boldness of which nearly took her breath away.

The only road to Halewitz for her she knew lay over Johanna's threshold; and she resolved to take it.

"Don't you find," she said at lunch to Ulrich, in a low voice, "that your intercourse with Leo leaves much to be wished for as regards freedom?"

Ulrich gave her a hurried, alarmed look. Was it, then, as plain as a pikestaff that which he had hardly dared own to himself?

She confided to him her observations. His visits were too rare and too fleeting; and, above all, he seemed to think he must hold aloof from her.

"It has never occurred to me," he said, much relieved. "But, my dearest," she replied, "we women have quicker insight into such things. I rejoice from the bottom of my heart over his scruples, but they are really no longer necessary; and that there may be no further doubt about the sincerity of my forgiveness, and that you, too, may not doubt it, mistrustful man, I propose that we order round the new landau this afternoon and drive over to Halewitz."

He was so astounded that he nearly dropped his wine-glass.

"But your rupture with Johanna?" he asked. "I thought you were deadly enemies."

She shrugged her shoulders, laughing lightly. "Women's squabbles," she explained; "I can easily put that right."

"I never asked you the reason of that feud," said he; "but perhaps now the time has come when I may."

"Don't be curious, beloved," she whispered, and at this moment, noticing that the bailiffs had done rolling up their serviettes, she threw them a friendly "Gesegneter Mahlzeit," accompanied by a fascinating smile, which filled the poor devils, who were a long way off being society men, with extreme delight. "Doesn't it seem, Uli, as if the whole of your staff were in love with your little wife?" she asked, when they were alone together, nestling within his arm to receive the customary kiss after meals.

He was going to administer an affectionate rebuke, for this kind of pleasantry was abhorrent to him, when he remarked that her whole body trembled with excitement.

"What is the matter?" he asked in alarm.

She drew away from him quickly. "With me!" she laughed; "what should be the matter? The carriage will be round at four. Yes?"

XIX

On the outskirts of Halewitz Park, half hidden in the shrubs, there stood a lonely, grey, one-storied house, the five windows of which were surrounded by stucco spirals and flourishes, which gave it an air of incongruous frivolity. The front looked out on a field path, while the gable and back walls were buried in the greenery of the park.

No sound of what was going on in the courtyard of the great house penetrated here, only from time to time a plough or a harvest waggon passed on its way home, and the melodious shout of a half-childish woman's voice, the joyous barking of a playful dog echoing it, came through the thicket. Every morning, at an early hour, a troop of poorly, though neatly clad children, bare-headed and barefooted, aged from three to seven, assembled at the gate, the little ones holding the hands of their elders, or in some cases led by their mothers--wretched, prematurely faded creatures, bowed to the earth with the double burden of work in the fields and child-bearing.

At seven o'clock the iron gate opened, and the children streamed into the pleasance, climbed the steps, and disappeared into the house. Almost directly afterwards the shrill chorus of children's voices was to be heard by passers-by on the road, led by a deep, slightly cracked woman's alto.

When the dinner-bell sounded from the other side of the park, the door opened again, and the little troop came out and trotted towards the village.

Then all was quiet again around the lonely house, only an anaemic servant girl moved now and then backwards and forwards between the cellar stairs and the front door. Not till after the vesper hour did footsteps, light yet energetic, sound from the direction of the park, breaking through the undergrowth to cut off the curves of the pathway.

It was Hertha, come to pay her daily visit to her stepmother. The relations between mother and daughter had never been very intimate. The gloom that had overshadowed Johanna's temperament, her sybilline air, the atmosphere of incense and carbolic with which she was surrounded, all combined to repel the child with her craving for light and joy, and to make a close affection between her and her stepmother impossible. Yet, in her innermost heart, she cherished a sentiment of gratitude towards her as the benefactress who had opened a new world of love to her, the homeless one, by introducing her into her parental house.

Hertha would have considered it her duty to accompany the Countess Prachwitz when, after the explanation with her brother, she had retired to the dower-house; but her stepmother had herself opposed the plan, saying she would rather be alone with her God. Since which it had been the rule for Hertha to spend an hour with her every day, an hour in which, according to her lights, Johanna made a point of ministering to the madcap child's soul.

Hertha had to read bulky devotional books, into whose dreary waste of prayers a fervid hymn flamed up here and there like a bonfire on a rainy day.

In the middle of such an improving hour was it that mother and daughter were sitting together at the open window, the outside blinds of which were let down, so that a dim green dusk was all that was reflected within, of the brilliant sunlight without. Hertha read in a monotonous voice (which was a little husky from a too prolonged swim the day before) the good old formulas by which for centuries men in their direst need have found their spiritual daily bread. In the happy irresponsibility of her sixteen years, she did not let them disturb her. Indeed, the God to whom she prayed for the man she loved earnestly every night. Who spoke to her comfortingly out of the rustling leaves and wrathfully in the rush of the storm, was on the whole a stranger to her.

While the reading was going on, there was a knock. It was some one who knocked softly and timidly once, and then after a pause, as if gathering the necessary strength, a second time.

The countess was greatly put out at the interruption, so strictly forbidden at this hour of the afternoon.

"Go and see who it is, and send them away," she said.

Hertha went and opened the door, and found herself standing opposite the daintily clad figure of a young and beautiful woman, deadly pale, who looked at her with great imploring eyes; with difficulty she collected herself sufficiently to ask what she wanted.

But scarcely had the unknown's trembling lips mentioned her mother's name, than there was a cry behind her. The countess had torn the handle of the door out of her grasp, and said in a hoarse voice--

"Felicitas, _you_?"

The strange woman covered her pale sweet face dumbly with both hands.

And at the same moment Hertha felt herself pushed violently out into the passage. The key turned twice in the lock. The lady had gone in with her mother, and she was alone in the dusk.

And then she ran, driven by a secret dismay, down the shaky steps, through shrubs and bushes, by woodland path and lawn, past the garden-house and pond, to where joyous laughter rang down from the terrace with a reassuring sound.

The two whilom girl-friends confronted each other. The one, humble and supplicating, leaned against the door as if she hardly dared set one foot before the other, a cowering, crushed penitent, yet triumphant in personal charm, radiantly beautiful in her slender youthfulness of figure and the grace of her movements. The other stood erect, triumphantly sure of victory, filled with a sense of her high principle and stainless morality, supreme in the realm of self-torturing virtue, invulnerable in suffering, and proof against temptation, but at the same time faded and withered, with the hard lines of perpetual renunciation round her mouth, with lean throat and hollow cheek, and the smouldering fire of unattained wishes in her sunken eyes, a conqueror, but also a defeated woman. Johanna was the first to break silence.

"Have you considered what will be the consequences of taking this step?" she asked.

Felicitas bowed her head still lower.

Johanna did not accept this gesture as an answer. "You seem to have a short memory," she burst forth contemptuously.

"I have thought it all over, and remember everything," Felicitas breathed.

"Then you are prepared for your husband's eyes being opened to what you are, to-morrow?"

For the first time Felicitas gave her a direct look, touching, hopeless, yet withal collected.

"Why wait till to-morrow?" she said, in the same low tone. "He is here."

A faint colour spread over Johanna's face. "Here! do you mean in this house?"

"No; over at the castle."

"What for? It is a long time since he was there."

"I asked him to come, Johanna."

The two women looked at each other for a while in silence, one full of suspicion, the other of seraphic resignation. Then Johanna drew a step nearer.

"Felicitas, you are playing a dangerous game," she said.

"I want to end it, Johanna."

"And that is why you have brought him?"

"I thought I would make it simple for you, Johanna."

Again silence reigned. Then Johanna said, with averted eyes--

"Why do you stand at the door? You may come nearer if you like."

"Thank you," whispered Felicitas. She approached an armchair with quaking knees, and clung to the back for support.

"Speak out," said Johanna. "What has brought you here?"

"Necessity," murmured Felicitas--"the necessity of my soul."

Johanna laughed out loud. "Really, your phrases are as good as ever. And what can I do for your soul's necessity?"

"Despise and scout me," said Felicitas. "You have the right; but believe me when I say that I am no longer what I was.... I am not the same as I was when you cast me off. Then I was cowardly and bad. To-day I come back to you purified and courageous, and the reason that I stand before you thus, Johanna, is"--her face lighted with enthusiasm--"is because he, in the two years of our married life, has made me what I am. I owe it to him."

Johanna shrugged her shoulders. She thought of the gossip in everybody's mouth about the flirtations of the fair chatelaine of Uhlenfelde.

"Your reputation is not above reproach, Felicitas," said she. "Is that also his doing?"

"What? Johanna?"

"I mean what people say about you?"

"I must ask you, then, first what it is people say about me? No; but I am too proud to defend myself. That I can make such a boast is his doing likewise."

And she spread out her arms, while in her mind she replaced Ulrich's name with Leo's.

Johanna passed her hand over her brow, as if she would clear away some confusing impression. There was something in the bearing of this creature indeed which formerly she had not been acquainted with, and it wrung from her an unwilling sympathy.

"Again I ask, what is it you want with me?"

Felicitas smiled faintly. "Won't you let me sit down? It has cost me something to come here."

And it was true enough that she was ready to drop. But she waited for Johanna's gesture of consent before she sank into the chair against which she had been leaning for so long. Her eyes closed, and she drew a deep breath. Then she began to talk in a subdued tone.

"It is like being in a dream, Johanna. I can hardly believe that to-day I shall attain that peace of mind after which I have been groping for years. Believe me when I say that I haven't once had any real joy in what is mine. Your image has stood between us.... It has seemed to me as if I had got everything by stealth...."

"And so you have," Johanna broke in harshly.

"Yes; as if I had robbed some one worthier of the position. You see that, so long as I live at his side, I carry about with me the thought that my fate is in your hands. And now I feel that what you resolved to do would be my salvation. But what have I not had to endure before I reached this point?" And, as if shuddering at the thought of the past, she cowered back in the chair.

Johanna had regained her self-possession. How well she knew these languishing glances, these veiled flute-like tones. Her eyes, sharpened by hate, saw through all the pretty wiles and artifices as through a glass case. Her gaze rested unmercifully on the cowering one, and only waited for her to reveal her hand, then woe to her.

Felicitas suspected all this. The lean sister of charity with the lofty bosom--Felicitas thought it must be padded with virtue--was more difficult to deal with than her brother, the dear, overgrown schoolboy.

But even she had her weak spot; even she! And with folded hands and softly breathed words, Felicitas went on with the history of her suffering and struggles. It was very much the same as what she had confided to Leo on the Isle of Friendship, only a little altered to suit the special case. A blend of self-accusation and self-justification, of declarations of ardent attachment to her husband and outbreaks of torturing fear of him; a tossing between consciousness of unworthiness and the impulse to lose this consciousness in new unworthy acts--all this poured out in a stream of humility and penitence, radiated by the magic reflection of a soul hungry for beauty and love.

How much she believed of it herself she scarcely knew. In her easily impressionable mind, which she could play with as one plays with a spoilt child, truth changed into lies and lies into truth as the emergency required. Now she had reached in her story the first meeting with Leo. She halted, for she had not had time to consider, in the excitement of the moment, which of the three motives she should make use of--that suggested by the world, that which made out it had been done for Ulrich's sake, or that which was really the true one.

"Be large-minded; be noble, and not petty," a voice said within her. And she told the truth. Of course it was not the truth by a long way, but only what she took for the truth.

At the mention of the first letter to Leo, Johanna gave a sigh of satisfaction. Then she froze again into her stony aspect, but watched her enemy with ravenous eyes. Felicitas had nearly finished.

"It seems as if it would all be in vain," she concluded, "what I have tried to do for Ulrich's happiness, if I don't succeed in bringing about a reconciliation between our families; that is to say, between you and me."

Johanna laughed shrilly.

"Ulrich must come in and out here," Felicitas said eagerly, "as he used to in old times, without any fears about injuring the honour of his wife. Now, Johanna, you know why I came. This is the 'dangerous game' I am playing. I feel and see that I have lost it, for you only answer me with scoffing laughter. If you laugh again, I shall know there is no further hope."

And then suddenly she fell on her knees, and, seizing Johanna's skirts, cried, sobbing--

"No, don't laugh; don't laugh! Forgive me! Don't let me be ruined. Be my refuge and rock of strength. I am devoured by a longing for absolution.... You are pure.... A saint. Will you show me the right way--guide and help me to repent? Pray for me, and teach me to pray. Let me come to you when my guilt is driving me to distraction and despair. Let me kneel and weep ... like this ... at your feet."

She made an attempt to embrace Johanna's knees, but she who had been looking down on her with hard compressed lips, quickly drew herself away, and, picking up the train of her dress, stepped by her.

"Listen to my answer," she said. "You have laid your scheme very skilfully, that must be admitted; but you are in error if you imagine I don't see through you. You and I understand each other, Felicitas; there can be no fencing between us. I take very little interest in you now. I say of you what the Apostle Paul said of the heathen--'What are they to me that I should judge them?' What are you to me that I should condemn or forgive you? You must make your own reckoning with what you call life. But if you think that I shall quietly stand by and look on while you draw my brother into your toils for a second time, and ruin him body and soul----"

"Oh, Jesus!" cried Felicitas. However much she might have planned and rehearsed this interview, that bitter cry from the depths of her tormented soul had not been in the programme.

Even Johanna seemed for a moment impressed by it; then she quickly took up again the thread she had dropped.

"Naturally, you deny it. You are an adept at playing the innocent. To be quite open with you, I myself have been instrumental in my brother's approaching you, as a means of putting an end to your insane conduct; for your husband's house must be cleansed at any price. But it was not your place to make the first advance. For you to do it was shameless, if not something worse. The foundation of your soul is overgrown by rubbish and weeds. But they shall be dug up."

A gleam of secret terror flitted over the unhappy penitent's tear-stained countenance. She rose slowly and threw herself into the armchair.

"This is the reward one gets for speaking the truth," she thought. "I might just as well have used the Ulrich pretext, and the rest would have been simple." Was she now to throw up the game as lost? No, not yet. She felt that the highest trump of all was up her sleeve. But she wasn't quite sure how to play it. So, like one who was at the last gasp and resigned, she said--

"Very well, send for him. I am ready."

Johanna fixed her eyes on her piercingly, as if she expected a new trick. Then she caught hold of the bell-rope, but let it fall again.

"You still think that I am in joke?" she asked; while Felicitas, apparently calm, followed every movement of her hands with a pained smile.

"I think that you are bent on ruining me," she replied; "and that is enough."

"Why should I wish to do that?"

"Because you hate me, Johanna."

Johanna came nearer to her, and in a voice which seemed nearly to choke her, she hissed in her ear--

"I will be honest. Yes, I hate you, I never hated my husband as much as I hate you. But that is not here or there. It has nothing to do with the matter in hand. As far as I am concerned, you might lead as pleasure-loving and sinful a life as you pleased. I shouldn't care. But you have laid hands on those who are dear to me. I could tear my own eyes out over it. Why should I spare you?"

"This is the right moment," thought Felicitas. And pressing her hand to her beating heart, she said, with the same martyr-like air--

"If that is the reason, Johanna, you and I are quits after all."

"What do you mean?"

"Don't you see that to-day you yourself are laying hands on some one dear to you?"

Johanna shrank back a little, her eyes opened wide with a fixed expression, as if she beheld in front of her this approaching evil. And Felicitas continued--

"Don't you see that it will hurt _him_? Aren't you afraid that it may kill him? But you are strong, and you are so great, Johanna, that you would rather he died than remained the possession of one unworthy of him. All I say is, that you ought to have done sooner what you intend to do to-day. It should have been done before habit had made him used to the new conditions. I speak of 'habit' because I daren't mention love in your presence."

Johanna spread her trembling hands on the table, and Felicitas continued in a still humbler and more resigned tone.

"Perhaps my imagination paints things too black. Perhaps he may recover from the blow which is to be dealt him ... for it lies with you, Johanna, to repair this day's work and to help him to forget it."

Johanna started up. Her eyes pierced the face of her opponent anxiously.

"What are you trying to convey to me?" she stammered.

Felicitas went on, with her plaintive smile. "I only know this, Johanna, that I--I shall not recover from it. Whether he shoots me, whether I throw myself into the river, I don't care. Perhaps neither will happen. He is so kind and noble ... and I--I am so afraid of death. Maybe I shall perish in shame and misery somewhere, for I am rudderless, Johanna. I count for nothing. In any case, I shall be cleared out of the way; from henceforth I shall be as good as dead; as you said, Johanna, there can be no fencing between us, least of all to-day. Why, then, conceal anything?" She opened her arms, "We love him, both of us, I as much as you ... this is the ground of our hate."

Johanna cried aloud. She made a motion with her fingers as if she would spring on the defenceless woman, then collapsed on to the sofa and buried her face in the cushions.

Felicitas licked her lips with the point of her little red tongue, which was a habit she had. She was quite sure now that the bell-rope would be left untouched. She came closer to the prostrate form, and was going to lay her hand on her shoulder, when she recollected herself and cautiously withdrew a few steps.

"The only thing we have to consider," she began anew, "is his happiness. If you are certain, Johanna, that you can secure it better than I can, I will yield to you willingly. And even if I did not wish, I am bound to do so because I am in your power. But I am weary of all this anxiety and unrest, and I do it of my own free will. And now, you see, there is really no reason why we should hate each other any more. It might be possible that together we may hit on a way which will spare him the worst pain, for don't forget that when he loses me he loses his friend at the same time, whom he values more highly than anything on earth."

Johanna raised herself and cast her wildly rolling eyes up at the crucifix which, with its white arms, shone out of the twilight.

"Oh, my Saviour," she moaned, "how could I want to do it? How couldst Thou permit that I should want to do it?"

"Don't distress yourself," Felicitas went on, and now she really did lay her hand on the heaving shoulder. "Nothing has actually happened yet, and therefore I will make another proposal to you. To-morrow I will leave his house and write to him from Muensterberg. 'Forgive me. I see that I can't make you happy. You have made a mistake. I set you free. Choose the woman who is worthy of you."