Читать книгу In Paradise (Musaicum Must Classics) - Paul Heyse - Страница 23

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Of course he had come to apologize. Angelica must have urged the necessity of his doing so very strongly indeed: must have depicted to him in pretty glowing colors the anger of her deeply insulted friend, to judge from the fact of his knocking at her door but two hours after. Her first thought was to refuse to see him. But then, what if he should be disposed to treat the matter altogether too lightly; what if he thought to appease her by some jesting or even gallant apology? Well, she would soon let him know with whom he had to deal, and that he could not escape so easily. Had she not been called "the girl without a heart," and was she not at this moment without friend or protector, forced to rely entirely upon her native dignity, which had just been so audaciously insulted?

"If the gentleman would have the goodness--I should be very glad to see him--very glad!"

She stood in the middle of the room as he entered. Her beautiful face had struggled hard to assume its coldest and haughtiest expression. But with the first look that she cast upon the visitor, the armor of ice that she had fastened about her bosom melted away.

For, in fact, a very different man from the one she had expected stood before her. Where was the confident smile that sought to make the matter appear in the light of a jest, or even of an act of homage? Where the confidence with which the famous master reckons upon absolution for the sin of having made an unknown beauty immortal?

It was true, he did not appear quite like a penitent malefactor. Erect, and with a scarcely perceptible inclination of the head, he saluted her, and his eyes did not avoid hers; on the contrary, they even dwelt upon her features with so gloomy a fire that she involuntarily lowered her eyelids, and asked herself in secret whether she was not the guilty one after all, since this man appeared before her so sad and melancholy.

"Gnädiges Fräulein," he said, "I have given you reason to be very angry with me. I merely come to inform you that the cause of your displeasure is already removed. If you were willing to visit my atelier again--which, unfortunately, I must doubt--you would see in the place where your own features confronted you this morning nothing but a shapeless mass."

"You have--you really ought to have--"

"I have done at once what I owed to you, in order that you might not form a wrong opinion of me. Sooner or later I should have had to do it in any case--even though no one had urged me to it. I wish sincerely that you would believe me when I say this--though I scarcely dare to hope so, since you do not know me--and are perhaps still too angry with me not to--not to believe me capable of any piece of discourtesy."

"I?--I confess--I have until now thought neither well nor ill of--"

She did not complete the sentence--she felt that she blushed, as she tried to assure him of her complete indifference--three steps from the drawer where her confessions were lying.

"I know it," continued he; and his dark glance wandered over the dimly-lighted room. "I am so perfectly indifferent to you, that it must, after all, be very easy for you to pardon something that cannot have awakened any very strong personal feeling in your mind. One who is entirely unknown to us cannot insult us. When he has taken back again that with which he has wounded us, it is as if nothing had happened. And so I might perhaps take my leave of you, gnädiges Fräulein, with the renewed assurance of my sincere regret that I have unconsciously offended you."

She made a scarcely perceptible motion toward the sofa, as if she would invite him to be seated. He was much too occupied with his own thoughts to pay any attention to it.

"Perhaps it is folly," continued he, after a pause--"perhaps more than that--wrong, if I intrude any longer, and give you an explanation for which you have no desire, and which will perhaps strike you disagreeably, since it turns upon something that cannot but be a matter of perfect indifference to you: not much more interesting than if you should hear there had been a thunderstorm at a place forty miles away, and that the lightning had struck a tree. Still--now that I have acknowledged my wrong and have done all in my power to make it good again--I owe it to myself not to permit you to take a worse view of me than I have really deserved. When, before a court of justice, one can put forth the plea of mental irresponsibility, it is considered the most important of all mitigating circumstances. Now this is just the case in which I find myself placed in regard to you. I can plead, as an excuse for the insane thought of giving your features to my Eve, the fact that since I first saw you I have actually been insane; that waking or dreaming no other face floated before me except yours; that I have gone about as if in a fever, and that I knew no better way of dealing with my hopeless passion than by striving, shut up alone in my workshop, to reproduce your face--and wretchedly enough did I succeed!"

He made a movement as though he were about to leave her; but once again he remained where he was, and appeared to be struggling painfully for words.

"You are silent, Fräulein," he continued. "I know you think it very strange that I should endeavor to atone for a great and almost unpardonable act of audacity, by committing a still greater one. Perhaps you will not believe me, or will consider me a raving madman for betraying to you, after so short an acquaintance, a passion that has carried me beyond all bounds of propriety and decorum. But you would judge differently, if you knew in what dreariness and isolation of heart I have passed the five years since I came to Munich; that not an hour's happiness has been vouchsafed to me; that no womanly being capable of awakening a single deeper thought has come near me. It is true I have not thought it worth my while to seek for such companionship. I have deluded myself with the idea that I missed nothing, that my heart and feelings did not hunger and thirst--until you suddenly crossed my path--and then this sudden vision of beauty and grace, coming as it did after long loneliness, brought about an intoxication that has completely robbed me of my senses.

"I doubt whether this explanation will be clear to you. I know nothing more of you than your enthusiastic friend, our good Angelica, has told us. Perhaps you may never have had any experience yourself that would lead you to believe that a passion which bursts so suddenly upon reasonable men could be found anywhere but in a fairy tale. Enough, I thought I owed it to myself to tell you of this fact, merely as a singular instance that need trouble you no farther. And now, permit me to take my leave. I--I should really have nothing more to tell you, and as for you--I find it no more than right that you should prefer to reply only by silence to such singular and extraordinary disclosures."

"No," she cried suddenly, as he already had his hand upon the door-knob; "it is not so right as you think, for one to tell all that he has upon his heart, while the other only accepts it all, and gives no confidence in return. To be sure, I know very well--I must attribute much of what you have confided to me to the easily-excited fantasy of an artist. Nevertheless, I am not so vain as not to imagine that in the course of five years you have never encountered a face fairer and more blooming than this of mine, that I have now borne about with me for full thirty-one. And for that reason I am almost forced to believe that there really is a secret bond of fate that quickly draws two human beings together in an altogether inexplicable way. For see--" she continued, covered with a confusion that only made her more beautiful, as she opened the drawer of her writing-desk and drew forth her diary--"I, too, although I perhaps knew less of you than you of me--I, too, have often had you with me in my thoughts--and since you have destroyed again the image that you took from me without my knowledge, ought not I also to destroy those pages in which you are spoken of--"

She made a gesture as if she were about to tear out the pages. In an instant he had sprung to her side and had seized firm hold of her hand.

"Julie!" he cried, as if beside himself; "is it true--is it possible? Your thoughts were with me?--and in these pages--I beseech you, let me have but one look--only let me see one line, so that I shall not think that you have invented all this in order to give me comfort, and to relieve me from my shame--"

"Shame!" she whispered. "But cannot you see that in spite of my thirty-one years I am trembling like a child detected in some naughtiness? Must I really read aloud to you out of this book what you--what you might long ago have guessed from my silence--if you had not been trembling so yourself?"

The last words died away on her lips. The book slipped from her hands and fell on the carpet, where it lay without his bending to pick it up.

A kind of stupor had come over him. He seized both her hands and clasped them so tightly that it pained her; but the pain did her good. His face was so near hers that she could see every muscle in it quiver; his eyes gleamed with a wild fire, like the gaze of a somnambulist. And yet she had no horror of him. She would gladly have stood so forever, and have felt her hands in his, and have encountered the power of his fixed gaze.

It was only when she felt that her eyes were on the point of overflowing, and feared that he might misunderstand it, that she said softly, smilingly shaking her head: "Don't you believe me even yet?"

Then at last he released her hands, threw his arms about her yielding figure, and pressed her wildly to his breast.

A noise was heard in the front room; the old servant apparently wished to remind the visitor, by the rattling of plates and knives and forks, that dinner-time was something that must be respected.

As if startled out of a dream, Jansen suddenly tore himself from Julie's arms. "Unhappy wretch that I am!" cried he, hoarsely, covering his face with his hands. "Oh, God! Where have I let myself be carried?"

"You have only followed where our hearts had already led!" said Julie, with a happy smile, while her moist eyes sought his. "What is the matter with you, best and dearest friend?" she continued, anxiously, for he was about to seize his hat. "You are going--and now? What drives you away from me? Who--who can part us? What have I done that you again turn away from me? My best and dearest friend, I entreat you--"

He struggled hard to answer; a dark red flush overspread his pale face. "Do not ask me now," he stammered; "this blessed hour--this inconceivable happiness--no--it must--it cannot be!--Forgive--forget--"

At this moment the old servant opened the door; he cast a look at the visitor that could hardly be interpreted as an invitation to stay longer. Jansen stepped hastily up to the agitated and speechless girl. "You shall hear from me soon, everything. Forgive--and may you be forever blessed for this hour!"

He seized her hand and pressed it passionately to his lips. Then he rushed from the room, followed by the old servant shaking his head, while Julie gazed after him, lost in a maze of conflicting emotions.

It is true that the moment she was alone again the happiness of knowing that her love was returned overpowered all feelings of doubt that had been awakened within her. His mysterious behavior, his sudden flight, his strange awakening from the sweetest realization of a hopeless dream, ought that to make her distrust him, when it merely confirmed what he had said of himself; that this intoxication had driven him out of his senses? And was it not best upon the whole that this miracle which had happened to them both should not be reduced all at once to an affair of everyday life, but that they should part, bearing away with them in their hearts their new-found treasure in all its fullness? To-morrow--to-morrow he will come again, and all will be new and wonderful once more, as it was to-day; and is that day lost which one can spend in thoughts of one's great happiness, or that night in which one can dream of it?

She threw back her head, as if in doing so she would shake from her the last remaining doubts. Then she stepped to the mirror, and began to rearrange her hair that her violent friend had completely disordered. What would her old servant have thought had he found her in this state? As she thought of this she smiled mysteriously at her own image, as if it were a confidante who alone knew of some great happiness that had just fallen to her lot. Little as she ordinarily cared to look at her own reflection, to-day she could not tear herself away from the glass; "So, to please him, one must look as I do," she said to herself.

"I wonder whether he saw this wrinkle here, and that deep line, and all those traces that these hateful, anxious years have left upon my face? But it cannot be helped now; I have not cheated him, at all events, and besides, he has eyes of his own--and such eyes!"

Then she sighed again and pressed her hand to her heart. "Who would have dreamed it?" she said, once more walking up and down: "only yesterday and I was so calm here--wearied and tired of life--and to-day!--And not a soul besides us two knows anything of it! Angelica, it is true--I wonder whether she suspects nothing?--the good soul! Perhaps I ought to go and confess to her.--But would not that look as if I wanted to boast to her of my happiness? And then I will wager that she herself is secretly in love with him--who could live under the same roof with him and resist it?--'Julie Jansen'--It sounds as though it could never have been otherwise since the world began."

Suddenly the room felt so close and oppressive to her that she sent the old servant to call her a droschke, that she might go out into the air for a while. He was allowed to take a seat on the box, and in this way they drove at a slow trot around the English Garden. The beautiful weather, and the fact that it was Sunday, had filled all the avenues and paths with people; all the beer-gardens were gay with music and thronging crowds. Heretofore she had never felt at home among these multitudes of merry people, for her solitary life with her unhappy mother had made her unaccustomed to scenes of noise and confusion. But to-day, she would like nothing better than to have joined the throng, feeling that she really belonged there now; for had not she too found a sweetheart, like all these other girls dressed in their Sunday clothes? She ordered the carriage to stop in front of the Chinese tower, and sat there for a long time, listening, and really moved by the music of a band that would on any other day have provoked a smile. The people who passed her wondered at the beautiful, solitary Fräulein, who sat, lost in thought, gazing up at the tree tops. They did not know that the color of the sky, up there between the two tall silver poplars, recalled certain eyes that were ever present to the lady in the carriage.

It was already dusk when she reached home after her drive. A note was lying on the table, that had been brought during her absence. She felt a shock of alarm as she took it up. If it should be from him--if he had written, instead of coming himself; and yet, although she had never seen his handwriting, it was impossible that these lines could be his; they were in a woman's hand. With a quieter heart she stepped to the window, and read these words:

"A person unknown to you, whose name is of no consequence, feels it her duty to warn you, honored Fräulein, against a man whose attentions to you can no longer be a secret, since he is regularly to be found every evening before your window, and to-day even went so far as to pay you a visit. This letter is to tell you that this man has a wife, and a child six years of age; a fact, however, which he carefully conceals from all his acquaintances. Leaving it to you to form your own opinion of this conduct, the writer signs herself respectfully, N. N."

Half an hour after, the bell in Julie's room was rung. The old servant found his mistress sitting at her writing-desk, with a calm face, but with traces of tears still on her cheeks, that she had forgotten to wipe away. She had just sealed a letter, which she now handed to the old man.

"See that this letter is delivered to-day, Erich, and at the studio; I do not know where Herr Jansen lodges. Tell the janitor to hand it to him the first thing to-morrow morning. And now, bring me something to eat. We were cheated out of our dinner. I--I shall die of exhaustion unless I eat something."

The anonymous note was inclosed in the letter to Jansen. Julie had added nothing but the words:

"I shall be at home all day to-morrow. Come and give me back my faith in mankind and my own heart.

"Your Julie."