Читать книгу The Undying Past - Hermann Sudermann - Страница 9

"Oh no, not in the least," she replied. "When you were gone we associated the same as before, for we said to ourselves that we poor women oughtn't to suffer more than was necessary for the men's sake. It told upon us all heavily. I won't speak of myself. Johanna appeared in deep mourning, for she had just buried her husband. Lizzie was so desolate and in need of help, and so we comforted each other. It was not till Lizzie's engagement to Ulrich began to be talked about, that there was an estrangement. I don't know exactly why--for we all congratulated her. But just before the wedding, she and Johanna quarrelled. The reason has never come out, for you know how Johanna can be as silent as the grave. The day it happened Felicitas drove away, deadly pale, without saying good-bye, and has never been here since. Johanna vowed that she would rather die than go to the wedding, and prayed me not to go. And when any one begs me not to do a thing ... well you know----"

"Yes, I know, mummy," he said, and caressed her hair compassionately.

She had always given in to his strong-willed sister. There was silence. He bit at the ends of his beard and meditated.

"Oh, rubbish!" he exclaimed on a sudden, and jumped to his feet. "Be courageous and repent nothing. That is the whole secret of life."

"What do you mean, my son?" his mother asked nervously.

For answer, he kissed her on the forehead and seized his cap. But at this moment the door opened and a tall, nun-like figure, dressed in unrelieved black, stood on the threshold.

He glanced at her quickly, then recoiled. Could this be Johanna? Her beauty, her youth--what had become of them?

Motionless, and without showing a sign of pleasure, she stood before him, and did not even stretch out her hand to him.

"Johanna!" he cried, and was going to embrace her.

But she only offered him her forehead to kiss slowly and unwillingly as if performing a great sacrifice, and it seemed to him that she shuddered under the touch of his lips.

This was the reception his pet sister, his childhood's companion, chose to give him after a separation of six years.

He tried with his ready humour to master the situation. "I have gone through a lot, Hannah, since I saw you last," he said laughing. "I have been received in various odd ways in different parts of the globe. With bullets, with poisoned arrows, with rotten eggs, with sour mare's milk, and I don't know what else. But such a welcome as this is altogether novel in my experience."

Her blue-rimmed, melancholy eyes, sunk deeply in her thin haggard face, gazed at him gloomily and searchingly.

"You have been away a long time," she said, and sat down.

"Yes; that is true."

"And you have kept your splendid health and spirits."

"Yes; I have kept in capital health, thank you."

There was a pause. He regarded her more and more as a stranger. A grim, inscrutable stoniness seemed to have frozen her nature. She had evidently nursed and cultivated an old grief with an egoism that had become fanatical. And then, as he recalled all the vanished splendour of her beauty, and looked at the emaciated throat and angular shoulders which made the flatness of her bust the more apparent, pity and his old love for her gained the upper hand. What must she have suffered to have so changed in appearance?

"We can't go on like this, Hannah," he said. "If I have done anything to displease you, speak out and let us make it up."

For a moment a kindlier glance shot from her eyes. But he fancied it meant that she pitied him, and so he was not reassured.

However, he did not wish to rely on conjecture. He would try and put things on the old hearty footing between them.

"Look here!" he said, "it is plain that your soul is cherishing some old grudge. You and I always held to one another. Can't you feel the old confidence in me again? Tell me what your trouble is, and see if I can't heal the wound."

"It seems to me that you stand in greater need of healing than I do," she answered, without taking her sphinx-like eyes off him.

"How so?" he asked, and plunged his hands into his trouser-pockets, stretching his legs wide apart as he planted himself in front of her.

"I have often asked myself, Leo, what sort of man you would come back. I hoped you might appear before us serious and subdued, a little burdened by the consciousness of what you had brought upon yourself and us. Often enough I have prayed God that it might be so. But instead you are--are---- Aye, what you are any one can see with half an eye."

"Well, what am I?" he asked, hardening into an attitude of scoffing amusement.

"I can only hope, for your own sake," she went on, "that your conduct is not real, but a mask, that behind there is something more than one would suppose from your plump, happy face. But if you are not acting and deceiving us, if in reality you are so thoroughly satisfied with yourself, then, dear Leo, it would have been better if our mother had never borne you."

"But, Johanna!" their mother exclaimed, running between them in horror.

"Leave her alone, mummy," he said. "You see she is over-strung. You prepared me for it yourself."

"Have patience with her," the mother entreated softly.

"I have, haven't I?" he laughed. "If I hadn't learnt by this time to put up with a few feminine vagaries, I should indeed be incorrigible. I am not so thin-skinned, and when you choose, my dear sister, to adopt a more reasonable tone towards me we shall be friends again. Does that suit you, eh?"

She looked at him and did not speak.

He flung out of the room and the door banged behind him. He stood for a moment in the outer hall and drew a deep breath. His sister's immovable, sphinx-like glance had oppressed him like a nightmare. A vague suspicion began to dawn within him, but he struggled against it.

"Now for work!" he exclaimed, and he shook his fists in the air.