Part 37

But the next moment she was convinced of the groundlessness of her suspicion. In was quite impossible that Johanna could know anything of what she had planned for to-day. Her meeting with Ulrich seemed to confirm this. Although for a moment the first searching look that he fixed on her was full of uneasiness, he soon became reassured at finding her sitting over the remains of her supper in solitude.

The alarming telegram had so far had effect that it had brought him back to Uhlenfelde unannounced post haste in a hired sleigh, but if he did not, in answer to Lizzie's questions, give the reason of his sudden return, it was simply to spare his wife unnecessary anxiety rather than because he mistrusted her.

He knew Johanna of old. She had always looked on the blackest side of things, and her well-meant warning might concern some question of estate management.

He resolved to drive over to Halewitz early the next morning, and to be content to-day only to subject house, yard, and staff to a more stringent examination than was usual on the day of his coming home.

He felt limp and low-spirited, and his wife's persistent chatter pained him. As soon as he could, he rose from the table to start on his round with the bailiffs.

Scarcely had he vanished through the door, than old Minna ran in, wringing her hands.

"Ah, gracious little mistress, gracious one," she whispered, "we must send word to Halewitz at once, otherwise something dreadful may happen."

Felicitas reflected.

If Leo heard of Ulrich's return, it was not improbable that he might change his tactics, and, to avoid a meeting with him, go back to his original intention of flight. Then she would be left behind to mourn for him to the end of her days. On the other hand, if he were allowed to come and all due precaution taken, there would not be a shadow of risk. At Fichtkampen Minna had often brought him to her in ten times more difficult circumstances.

And, besides, when she considered the matter more closely, she saw an unspeakable advantage in Ulrich's presence. Should dear old Leo refuse to be weaned altogether from his suicidal resolve, she would only have to tell him who had come home that day and was sleeping in the room through the dressing-room, to bring him to a tractable and peaceable frame of mind.

This decided her.

"Stay where you are, Minna," she said. "You know all the secrets of the house, and if you manage to smuggle him in all right I will give you another silk dress."

Towards ten o'clock Ulrich came back from his walk. He reported himself dead tired, and said that he would retire to his room.

"And mind you go to bed at once," Felicitas said.

He nodded assent, and kissed her on forehead and hand, according to his habit when saying good night.

"How hot your cheeks are," he remarked.

"I am so glad that you are here," she answered, and she did not lie.

"This time it will be no joke. We shall not drink toothache drops."

Again those words of Leo's occurred to her unpleasantly. She lighted her husband upstairs, closed the shutters in his room, and looked at the thermometer to see that he was neither too warm nor too cold for the night. Then, saying good night once more, she left him and went down again to give Minna some last hints.

When she entered her bedroom half an hour later she heard Ulrich still pacing up and down. That was fatal. She dared not put on the _crepe de chine_ peignoir yet, lest he should surprise her in it, for though their present relations were such that he would not come to her for conjugal reasons, he might, hearing her move, at any moment open the door and ask some question. So she contented herself with arranging her hair _a la grecque_, and giving her face a soft film of powder. The peignoir lay spread out ready in the dressing-room. The clock struck eleven. Still another hour!

What should she do to kill time? She sat down at the writing-table, and began to turn over old papers with a tremulous hand. A happy idea came into her head. She would begin a new existence from this hour, an existence full of glorious joy and imperishable youth, a masque of spring, a midsummer's night dream, a revel of sweetest, lightest laughter. For this end, all that had any connection with years of shame and tormenting anguish must be destroyed and burnt. Nothing should be left, nothing but him, whom, after what sacrifices God only knew, she had at last reconquered.

She tore letter after letter into little pieces. They contained declarations of love of every description, ranging from the sentimental balderdash of young Neuhaus to the cynical quips of old Stolt. As she read them she laughed.

"If he had not come home," she thought, "I should have had to give myself to one or the other."

Then her hand fell on her dead boy's little packet of letters. A cold shiver ran through her. But she wouldn't be sad. She would not. He was happily at rest for ever, her dear Paulchen. Still, it was not easy to destroy his letters. But it must be done, for it was more necessary than anything else. She kissed the poor little packet, then slowly tore the first sheet across, and the second. The clock chimed half-past eleven, and she started up and listened, breathing hard, into the darkness of the dressing-room. Ulrich's tired footsteps still echoed from the room beyond--up and down! Up and down!

The minutes flew, and there lay the Greek costume waiting to be donned. Might she, dare she, array herself in it now? With bent ear she listened and listened. It was too late to turn back.

Punctually at midnight Leo von Sellenthin entered the bedroom of Ulrich Kletzingk's wife, to take her with him to meet death, as they had agreed to meet it.

When she heard the door behind her creak on its hinges she sprang back from her post and softly drew the bolt. Only then had she the courage to look round.

Her first emotion as she beheld him standing at the door was one of intense chagrin that at this long-looked-for tryst she should appear before him as black as a crow. And this wound to her vanity put even the threat of death out of her head.

He wore a long riding-cloak, which completely hid his arms, and he was covered from head to foot with snow.

"Is it still snowing?" she asked, and wiped his moustache, from which icicles hung, with her black-bordered pocket-handkerchief. "My poor darling, how wet you are!"

He did not stir, or even take the fur cap from his head.

"You stand there like a post," she said. "Why don't you take off your things?"

And as he continued motionless, she unbuttoned his collar for him, and the heavy cloak slipped off his shoulders on to the floor. She fancied she heard something hard in its folds strike against the panelling of the wall.

"What was that?" she inquired, terrified.

"Nothing," he growled, and blew through his teeth in an attempt to laugh.

A cold shudder ran through her. "What a good thing Ulrich is there," she thought Had she been alone with Leo in the house, she would have been horribly frightened.

Then she threw both arms round his neck and pillowed her head against his breast. Thus she stood for a few minutes, murmuring--

"Now I have got you all to myself. But you must be very quiet," she added quickly, in a warning tone, "for some one is sleeping not far off."

He nodded.

"And do you love me?"

She saw his face change, and felt how he trembled. She pressed her hands against her breast, breathing rapidly.

"I must do it now," she said to herself. It was no matter whether he was asleep over there or not.

She took a box of matches from the bedside table, and said, smiling--

"Wait a minute, dearest. I have something to attend to."

She disappeared, softly bolting the door as she went.

Leo still stood on the same spot. "Here I am, at my goal," he thought. Then he let his eyes wander round the room in dull curiosity. He looked at the lamp hanging from the ceiling, and noticed that the silken, befringed shade was rose-pink. At Fichtkampen it had been blue. The difference impressed itself on his mind, which seemed incapable of taking in anything else. He wished that she would come back so that he needn't stand there feeling so stupid and wretched. Then he remembered the smiling promises with which she had parted from him the other day. A pang of anxiety, mingled with a weak hope to which he could not give a name, overwhelmed him. It seemed to him as if she had the power of paralysing his limbs, and draining the marrow from his bones.

"What am I doing here?" he stammered, looking round with a wild glance. "Why have I come?"

Five, ten minutes passed, and she did not reappear. He stared at the door through which she had vanished. It was certain that she had another scheme on hand. Whatever it might be, she would find him pliable as putty. How tired he was! He dragged himself to the chair on which she had been sitting before he came in. He buried his head in his hands and brooded absently over the papers and letters which were strewn about the writing-table.

"My Dear Mamma,

"Nearly all the boys are going home for Christmas. Eric Froben will stay here, because he has no mamma, and Fritz Lawsky because he has only a guardian, and If., who comes from India, and is as yellow as a Gruyere cheese. All the other boys are going home. Why mayn't I come home? Some have a longer journey to their homes than I have. Oh, I do want to come home so badly. I cry every morning and every night, because I mayn't come home----"

He had read so far mechanically, hardly conscious that he was not reading the advertisement column of a newspaper, when suddenly he awoke to the reality. He took the sheet in both hands, and turned it over and over, while a sound like a faint whine came from his throat. With fixed, fierce eyes, he read on.

He read of the distribution of presents beneath the Christmas tree; of the bell which would be rung when the happy hour came; what If., the boy from India, was to get. He did not skip one of the childish wishes, from the lead soldiers to the pocket inkstand and the sweets. He half rejoiced that each item stabbed his breast like a sharp sword. He seemed to hear a child's voice crying out of the distance and the night, "Uncle Leo! Uncle Leo!"

He sprang to his feet. His mind was made up. Lifting his cloak from the floor, he threw it over his shoulder, and tapped and tested the double trigger of the weapon that was ready for coming events in the breast-pocket. And so he waited, armed and prepared. Then, noiselessly, the door opened. A half-naked figure stood on the threshold with the rosy light of the lamp cast full upon it. The softly rounded arms were lifted longingly in an arch above her head, displaying her full breasts. The white drapery fell from her plump shoulders in straight, unbroken folds to her pink, bare feet. She stood there like the very goddess of love, although there was nothing divine truly about the small, round face, with its tip-tilted nose and sensuous lips.

He looked at her, and she seemed the incarnation of the sin to which he had been an easy victim from the first--the smiling, flattering sin that meant no harm yet stalked on its complacent way over all hindrances, even over the body of the dead. Wrath and disgust convulsed him. It was for this, then, that he had come, for this!

She, on her side, expected that he would rush at her with an exclamation of delight, and, as Ulrich was not yet asleep, she gave a warning "Hush!" Then she let the door fall back in the lock with experienced caution.

Still he did not move, and, misinterpreting his stupefaction, she determined to give him courage. She glided across the room, and, nestling against him, she whispered, half roguishly, half humbly--"There! Now you have come into your property." Her bare arms encircled his neck. But he pushed her away from him with swift decision.

"Listen, Felicitas," he said, fighting for breath, "I have just read a letter from your boy. After that I have no inclination to make love to you. Neither can I take you with me now. It would seem like murder. Die where and how you like. But, excuse me--I must be going."

At the mention of the letter she had started back; but now she smiled once more and pressed herself against him with renewed ardour.

"But, dearest," she whispered, "don't think any more about that stupid plan."

"What stupid plan?"

"Why, about death and dying."

"What?"

"Don't you see," she whispered, stroking his cheeks, radiantly confident of conquest, "it would be utterly ridiculous to die now? Why should we? Just when we have got each other again? It seems to me that we shall begin to live now for the first time."

In blank astonishment he gazed at her. He had been so accustomed during the last twenty-four hours to regard himself and her as destined that night for death that he could hardly grasp the ignoble course her lips proposed. When he had grasped it he was threatened by one of his old furious rages. The blood-red mist floated before his eyes, and a voice cried within him, "End it."

"Wretched woman," he said, and caught at his breast-pocket.

She noticed his action, and saw the blue gleam of steel flash towards her. In deadly terror she shrieked for help. Before he had time to cock the pistol she had fled into the dressing-room, crying in a shrill, piercing voice--

"Help! Murder! Help!"

"Beast!" he muttered, and put the weapon down on the writing-table.

For a moment he stood irresolute, not sure whether to attempt escape or let himself be found where he was. Then he raised his eyes and saw standing on the dark threshold a tall, ghost-like form. It was Ulrich, and the woman was grovelling at his feet. Leo felt no shock of surprise.

"Now he knows!" was his first thought--"knows." And he wondered coolly how he would take it.

"Speak," said Ulrich, in a voice that was strange to Leo. "What are you doing here?" It seemed as if he grew taller and taller.

"Speak," said the strange voice, a second time.

"He was going to murder me!" sobbed Felicitas, kneeling before him in her nakedness. "Because--I--wouldn't do--what he wanted, he was going to murder me----"

Leo came a step nearer. His hands itched to strangle her before she could lie further. But Ulrich's eyes petrified him.

"Don't listen to her," he stammered. "But shoot me down; here I am."

The figure in the door began to reel, and a long bony hand was stretched out to the wall for support.

"Can he survive it?" thought Leo, in readiness to catch him if he fell. But Ulrich, with an effort, pulled himself together.

"Not here," he said; "we will meet at daylight!"

"Where?"

"On the Isle of Friendship, Leo."

"Very well, on the Isle of Friendship." And he turned to the door.

Outside old Minna was waiting in the darkness.

"Make haste, sir," he heard her say; "there are people moving about already down below."

XXXIX

A pale, snowy twilight came through the window. Leo sprang up in bed where he had slept for four hours, in his clothes, like a dead man.

He extinguished the lamp which smoked, still burning near him on the table. Now it seemed to be almost night again. It was a quarter-past seven by his watch. "At eight it will be daylight," he thought. "If I start then, I shall be early enough."

Then slowly, as one recalls a wild dream, he went over again the events of the past night. Why had she not turned him back at the garden gate, when she knew Ulrich was in the house? For a moment he entertained the mad suspicion that she had laid a trap for him, but the next, he rejected it as unlikely.

He had not quite regained clear consciousness. His forehead ached, his eyes burned. A confused medley of thoughts and images passed through his brain; and then there leapt up within him an illuminating flame of certainty--

"Now he knows!"

Now he knows--he knows. It was all over with hypocrisy, lying, and evasion, nervous anxiety, and enervating desire. The long corrupting process to which his inner man had been subjected had reached its finality. Once more he might draw a deep free breath from his sorely weighted lungs.

He thrust open the window, and breathed in long draughts of the snow-laden air, which braced and refreshed him. His mood was now so clear and calm, that he felt as if body and soul had been purified and hallowed in that white mantle of snow.

The flakes descended in whirling columns. They seemed to push and struggle with each other as to which should first reach the earth.

They hid the yard in impenetrable clouds. Only here and there a gable or a stable window peeped out on the battle-field of snowflakes.

He had taken farewell already of his belongings; had consigned to ruin with rage and scorn the heritage that had come down to him from his forefathers.

But to-day it was with calm resignation that he relinquished everything that his heart had so long held dear. A supreme indifference to all that had happened, and was yet to happen, overcame him. Even the wrong that he had done Ulrich no longer deeply affected him.

He would let him shoot him dead, and then _basta_! But suppose he should miss! What if his hand trembled. It could not, it must not. To outlive this day was unthinkable. He would receive the sanctifying bullet in silence, in grateful silence that he had been allowed to die an honourable death.

He drew down his case of pistols, oiled and tested the triggers, and put his eye to their mouths. On the butt end of one he found the little cross, scratched with a knife, the mark which he had made years ago to distinguish the pistol which had killed Rhaden from the others.

Then he loaded it, and before doing so he held the bullets in his palm and passed his other hand almost affectionately over the leaden pellets.

Slowly the day advanced. One thing he had to do which would be more difficult than it had been yesterday, and that was to take a mute farewell of his loved ones. The day before he had slunk into the house like a thief in the night, to-day he could scarcely resist the longing to press openly a parting kiss on his mother's brow. But she was still asleep, and as he went by her door he stroked the latch with his hand. That was his good-bye.

The only person he met face to face was Hertha. He found her in the dining-room as he came into it, to get a drink of something warming. She wore a white smock over her dark house-dress, and the lamplight which struggled with the dawn shone on her smooth hair.

She started at the sound of his morning greeting, for it was a long time since such a thing had happened as his appearing at breakfast.

"Up already, Hertha?"

"Yes, of course," she gasped. "I have been going to the milking again lately."

And then she pressed her elbows nervously against her sides, as if she was afraid that she had said too much, and cast her eyes shyly along the table.

"That is capital," he said; "will you pour me out a cup of coffee?"

"When the water boils," she answered, and busied herself with the flame of the spirit-lamp.

He sat down opposite her, and as he looked at her he thought, "There sits one who should have been my housewife."

And he held a silent burial. All the hopes of his youth, his dreams of happiness, his unspoken wish for wife and children, and the small dear comforts of a home, all that was best and purest within him, that he had imagined dead long ago, at this moment, when he was conscious it still lived, he laid in a solemn grave.

She brewed the coffee, and the porcelain filter trembled in her hand. Then she handed him a steaming cup.

He drank it, and she began to move towards the door.

"Don't go, my child," he said, eager to enjoy to the full these few minutes. "Stay with me."

She paused irresolute, her eyes wide with wonder, then she slowly went back to her place.

He did not speak to her again, and for something to do, she cut bread and butter.

The clock struck eight and he sprang up. "Now for it, old boy. Now for it."

At the door he stopped and looked back. She was sitting turned away from him, her head a little on one side, her industrious hands fallen idly in her lap.

And now the anguish of parting unmanned him. He came behind her, and bending her head backwards he laid his hand on her forehead with a gentle caress.

He saw the colour deepen in her cheeks, and her two rows of regular white teeth shining between her anxiously parted lips, and he looked into her large frightened eyes.

"My dear child," he said; "my dear, dear child."

Their eyes melted into each other, and from the depths of her breast came a short gurgling sob.

"You have been very good to me, child," he went on, "and you would have done still more for me if I had let you. And in return I have been bearish and rough to you. Forgive me. I would like to make up for it, but it may not be--may not be. Stay with my mother, dear; you are the only one who can keep a cool head."

He kissed her rigid lips softly and hurried away.

Outside the falling snow hung like a thick veil over the fields. Not a breath of wind, not a sound came out of the distance. The trees became blurred in the dense, silent dance of the flakes. They looked almost as if they were tied up in bags, so entirely were they wrapped in the snowy foam.

Beneath his feet the fine new snow rose over his boots at every step and flew before him in little powdery clouds. Road and path were quite lost to view, and one had to grope one's way over the ground step by step.

Leo felt warm under his heavy cloak, and the weight of his case of pistols oppressed him too. He opened his mouth, and swallowed as many of the flying crystals as he could catch, for his throat burned. Then he took off his cap and let the cooling flakes fall refreshingly on his bare head.

"Would he be there?" he asked himself, and the thought of a personal meeting alarmed him more than the prospect of death.

"My God, what sort of a meeting will it be?" he stammered half-aloud, and grew hot all over.

They would have to speak to each other. They could not glare from their respective posts and then fall on one another without a word like two red Indians; and suddenly in a flash the thought came to him--

"Suppose you are so bad that he declines to waste powder and shot on you."

He held his breath for a moment almost petrified with shame. Then he roused himself and ran with all his might through the reeds, and over the groaning ice to the spot where "finis" was to be written on everything. On the frozen little bay, whereby it was alone possible to reach the island, he found footprints which must have been quite freshly made, though the snow had half covered them up already.

This first sign of his friend's waiting presence made his heart rise to his throat.

He tore on, following the foot-marks up the steep incline to the clearing which was lost to sight in the ever-thickening snowstorm. For a moment anxiety at what was to come made him giddy. Death was mere child's play compared with the inevitable conversation that must precede it. He leaned against a tree to get his breath, and it seemed to him that instead of the white flakes a shower of red and blue flames were falling around him. And then he made a last great effort to shake off all cowardice, and stepped on to the open space to offer his heart as a target to his friend.

But he could see no sign of him. On all sides the white noiseless tumult, the dark interior of the temple making the one shadow in the milky lightness, but nowhere any trace of a human figure.

He walked the length of the clearing, took a rapid glance in passing at the two statues, spied into the thicket, hunted at the back of the temple, and at last he found him.