“It takes longer.”
“Yes; but shaving you may cut yourself.”
Rosina laughed; he heard her and turned suspiciously.
“Why do you laugh?”
“Because.”
“What amuses you?”
“You do.”
He smiled and they walked one or two blocks in silence. They were now in the suburb of Schwabing, far out by the western end of the Englischergarten. The street was very uninteresting and comparatively deserted.
“Do you see my cravat?” he asked.
She was wondering if they had not better be returning towards home.
“I know that you have one on,” she said; “I can’t say that I notice anything especial about it.”
“I will show you something very curious about it.”
“You’re not going to take it off, are you?”
“I will show you how I tie it.”
“I know how to tie that kind myself.”
“Not as I tie it.”
Then he deliberately handed her his umbrella and untied his cravat, and proceeded to turn one end up and fold the other across and poke a loop through and draw an end under, and thus manipulate the whole into a reproduction of the same tiny bowknot as before. She held the umbrella and contemplated the performance with an interest which was most flattering to his labor.
“I don’t see how you ever do it,” she exclaimed when the job was complete and he took the umbrella again.
“I will teach you some day,” he said readily. “I have myself invented four cravats,” he added with pride.
“Will you teach me all the four?”
“Yes; I have thought, if I shall ever be poor, to go to Paris and have a cab and drive aboutfrom house to house each morning and tie cravatspour les messieurs. You can see how many would pay for that.”
“Yes; but when you arrived and they were not ready,—were still in bed, you know,—what would you do then?”
He reflected, and then shrugged his shoulders.
“I would put on the collar, tie the cravat, and leave monsieur to sleep again.”
Rosina’s marital past presented her mind with a lively picture of one of the cravat-tier’s clients struggling to bring his shirt into proper connection with thechef d’œuvre, when he should arise to attire himself for the day. She laughed outright. Then she grew sober and said:
“We ought to go back; it must be after five.”
He took out his watch.
“No, it is not.”
“Yes, it is; it was after four when we left thepension. I know it’s after five now.”
“It is not after five,” he declared calmly; “it is not after five because it is after six.”
She laughed again; he looked at her, smiling brightly himself.
“It is good together,n’est-ce pas?” he said, putting his hand upon her arm as they turned back upon their steps. There was in his eyes the happy look that dispelled every trace of the usualshadow on his face. “We are again those same children,” he went on, “children that the same toy amuses both. What pleasures you always makes joy for me also.”
Something came up in her throat as she listened. It might have been a choke, but she was so positive that it was only Genoa that she swallowed it at once and looked in the opposite direction. He had kept his hand upon her arm, and now he bent his head a little and said, his voice lowering:
“I think—”
The dusk was gathering heavily. The Siegesthor loomed blackly great against the lights of the city beyond. It was no longer quiet about them, but the hum and buzz of all the bees swarming home was in the air, on the pavement, along the trolley wires.
“I think,”—he said, his fingers closing about her arm,—“I think that we might be always very happy together.”
She looked up quickly, and then down yet more quickly.
“Why do you speak that way when you know that I am going so soon?”
“Let us turn here,” he said eagerly; “by here it will be quiet. Do walk so,” he added pleadingly, as she hesitated, “we have not long to betogether.Il faut me gâter un peu.There is but a week left for us.”
She started.
“A week! If we sail the nineteenth we need not leave here until the fourteenth surely.”
“But your cousin will leave on the eighth.”
She looked up at him, and by the light of a street lamp which they were just passing, he saw the great tears starting in her eyes, tears of helplessness, the tears of a woman who feels and cannot speak. It was a very quiet little street, that into which they had turned, with lines of monotonous gray houses on either side, and certainly no better place for tears was ever invented. Rosina’s appeared to know a good thing when they saw it, and rolled heavily downward, thus proving in their passage the sincerity of both her nature and her color. Her companion drew her hand within his own, pressing her fingers hard and fast. He did not say one word, and finally she wiped her eyes, smiled through the mist that hung upon her lashes, and said with simple directness:
“I don’t want to go.”
“I know.”
“But they want me to, and I must.”
There was another long silence, and then he said:
“You would not stay for me?”
His voice was wonderfully soft and persuasive, and for a single instant she admitted the possibility into her mental future; but the instant after it found itself driven violently forth again.
“No, no,” she cried, forcibly, “I will not—I cannot. Ineverwant another husband.”
He hesitated one step in his gait and then went on as before.
“I do not say that all would be as you wished,” he said slowly, with pauses between, “or that I would live only to joy your life. That would be very untrue. To be with you this week I put aside as it would not be right for me to put aside again. These days I have throw away because I will not say all in my after life that I did not try.” He stopped and his voice changed strangely. “I must try with all my strength,” he continued, drawing each breath as if in great pain; “I must, because to me with my work it is what does not trouble, what gives me sympathy, that is the most large of all. I have never marry because I know that so well. How could I ever do my work if a single discord is there to fret—fret—fret? As well ask me to play in concert on an untuned instrument. To my ear the untune is agony; to my music, a discord in my day is death to what would have been written that day. It isso that I have come to expect to never marry. My music must be first, and how can I risk—” he stopped his speech and his steps. She tried to move on but he held her still. “But,” he said, very low but with an accent the intensity of which cut into her very heart, “but now I know that better work would be if you were there; I should have greater force; I should—I—if you loved—”
He trailed his speech helplessly, faltered, and was silent. The night had come heavily down and they learned the fact by the discovery that they could no longer look into the eyes of one another. The quiet little street had led them down to the borders of the Englischergarten, and its forest rose up before them. He led her straight towards it.
“It will be wet,” he said, in reply to the resistance in her arm; “but we must be alone until I have finished all that I will to say. The trees about us are best; we do not want cabs and streets just now.”
She felt blindly, miserably wretched.
“I don’t want to be married again,” she declared in a voice that was thick with more tears; and then she gathered her skirt well into her hand and they plunged together into the darkness beyond.
The park was dusk with night’s downfall andheavily misted by the day’s rain. Its paths, usually like hard gray cement, were a slippery mosaic of clay and brown leaves, and on either hand arose a stockade-like effect of tree-trunks knowing no light beyond. Wind there was none to rustle the leaves, nor sound of bird or beast. An utter and complete silence echoed the footfalls of these two who had come into the solitude, to the end that they might search there for a solution of themselves.
At the first forking of their way, Rosina said timidly:
“We must not go too far; it is so lonely, I am afraid.”
Von Ibn stopped short, drew one of her arms behind his back, caught her firmly to his bosom, and approached his face so close to hers that his breath came and went against her lips.
“Are you frightened?” he asked.
“No,” she said, wrapt in a sort of awe at the wonder of her own sensations, “I have the utmost faith in you.”
He loosed her instantly, and walked a little way off for a moment.
“I felt that you wished not,” he said, bitterly, “and so I held myself back.Mon Dieu, how good I am to you,—how cruel to myself,—and no thanks.”
Her heart was wrung.
“Oh, let us go back and go home,” she cried; “all this is of no use. It makes me glad to go away, because I see now that for me to go will be better for you.”
“And for you?” he asked, returning to her side.
“I said ‘for you,’” she answered gently.
“Then not at all for you too?”—he laid his hand insistently upon her arm,—“not at all for you too?” he repeated.
She was silent.
“It was there in Lucerne,” he went on presently; “I knew it at first—the first time I see you; and when I found that it was you who had sent for me—I—I dared to hope that you too felt something, even then, even so at the very first. Have you never known that feeling?”—he exclaimed, his breath rising passionately, “has such storm never swept within you?—and you have no other life for a while but its longing,—no sleep but the stupid fatigue when one cannot think more? What has my existence been since that day on the Quai by the Vierwaldstattersee?—Je ne peux rien faire!—To the world I am dead.—There is perhaps no future for me because I have learned to love and have not learned to be loved.”
His voice broke utterly; he loosed her arm, walked apart once more, and was once more silent.
Then her agitation suddenly found voice and to her own intense horror she heard herself laughing—laughing a loud hysterical laughter, that resounded hideously and was beyond her own control.
“You are amused,” he exclaimed, and his mood took on a justifiable tone of outraged anger; “you laugh. You have made me like this and now you laugh. If you were suffering and I had made you so, I should be ashamed and sorry; but a woman laughs. You are as that other,” he continued, impetuously, “and it will be the same some time after. When she had made me wild, then she laughed. When I heard her laugh, I grew quite cold, I cared no more, never more. Then, when I cared no more, she learned to care, she grew to love, she wrote me many letters, she became most miserable; but for me nothing mattered. Because I could not care more.”
Her laughter continued spasmodically in spite of her struggles to check it. But between the paroxysms she gasped:
“I never tried—to make you love me. I never wanted you to come where I did—”
“But now that I am all yours,” he interrupted,“now that nothing is left for me, but you—” He paused. “What will I do now?” he added, asking the question with a simplicity at once boyish and heartrending.
She was silent; her laughter had ceased. He came close to her and took her hand again within his own. And then in the darkness beside him he suddenly heard the bursting misery of her sobs.
“You weep,” he cried.
“No,” she whispered faintly, “no.”
“You weep,” he repeated slowly, and gathered her warmly and closely within his arms.
“What is it necessary that we suffer?” he asked her softly. “Let us cease struggling, let us be only happy,” and then he bent his head so that his cheek touched hers, and waited for the words of her answer. “Your heart is very near mine,” he whispered to her silence, “let it stay near mine, let it rest mine.” Still she was silent. “N’est-ce pas?” he asked, pressing her closer yet.
To her, at that instant, the darkness was flashing with strange lights, the silence was roaring in thunder, the trees charging and whirling in giant combat. Her head was suddenly light and then suddenly heavy; her breath strangled her and then failed altogether. She swayed from side to side, her head fell backward, and Von Ibn had itborne upon him, that instead of being in love she had fainted.
“Qu’est-ce que vous avez?” he cried, as he felt her reeling, and then he knew; and knowing, recognized the fact that he was alone in the depths of the rain-soaked forest, with a helpless woman on his hands, and that the situation was infinitely more novel than amusing.
He was obliged to let his umbrella fall in order that he might raise her in his arms; and when she was so raised he felt a poignant wonder as to what to do with her next. He had no idea which direction to take, for the night was now night in good earnest, and the Englischergarten is so large that one may walk for two hours and a half without passing its limits. He felt uncertain as to just where they had entered it, the common ingress not being from Schwabing, and also uncertain as to just how far towards the centre they had penetrated. A pale, young moon peeped up above the tree-tops; he looked at the moon and then at Rosina, and they both appeared unnecessarily weak and inadequate to the urgent necessities of the moment.
“She should be laid on her back and have water thrown upon her face,” he murmured to himself in French, and then he felt his boots sinking deeply into the mud, and recognized the impracticabilityof that means of resuscitation at this particular moment.
“Why did I ever pray that I might hold her in my arms?” he thought in German. “Mein Gott, what shall I do?”
Failing all other remedies, he shook her hard, and her eyes flew open on some wax-doll-like principle. She gave him a look of complete unrecognition, and closed them with a sigh.
“You must not faint once more,” he cried, anxiously; “you cannot, you know.”
Something like physical despair swept over him as he felt her tremble and sway again.
“What can I do?” he cried, shaking her very hard indeed, “we are far from all. I cannot leave you to get a carriage, I cannot take you—”
“I don’t care what you do,” she murmured, with the usual complete resignation of the swooning, always so exasperating to those who care for them. He felt desperately that she was telling the truth.
There was a sound in the wilderness beyond, a sound that thrilled him with hope and fear at the same instant. The developments of a sound may under some circumstances prove one’s salvation or destruction. He riveted his eyes anxiouslyin the direction from whence the echo of a horse’s feet splashing through the mud was now drawing nearer each second.
“If it prove the Prinz Regent himself,” he said decidedly, “he must take us in.”
It proved to be, not a royal coach, but a mere ordinary cab, than which nothing more welcome had ever crossed his vision in all his life before. He hailed the cabman, and the cabman stopped in the greatest possible astonishment, and was good enough to descend in the mud and open the door. He asked no questions—cabmen never do—but took the address, mounted to his seat, and put his horse to a rounder trot in the direction of the city.
Rosina leaned back in her corner and shook as if she had the ague. Her hands and feet were icy cold; Von Ibn took her hands in his and feared that she was ill, or going to be so.
“What did make you like that?” he asked, as the wheels dashed the mud-spatters up against the windows; “was it that I distress you, yes?”
“Yes,” she sighed.
Then he kissed her hands.
“Forgive me,” he said, contritely, “I have not meant it so. There in the trees, when you were unconscious, I did not kiss you, I did nottouch even your hair,—not thirty men in all Germany had been so good as that. You see what I try to be for you.”
He was leaning over her, the blood seemed to be boiling up into her ears. She put up her hand:
“If you speak so,” she said, “I shall faint again; I get dizzy when you talk to me in that way.”
“But if I kiss you only once,” he whispered.
“No—no—no,” she reiterated, and raised her hand and pushed his lips away with it.
“En effet vous n’êtes pas du tout gentille,” he cried, in violent anger, for his moods knew no shading in their transposition from one to another; “you are cold and without heart. How long do you think that I stood there in the wet and hold you back from the mud, and now you will do nothing for me; and you were quite heavy too, and—oh,mon Dieu!” he exclaimed sharply, interrupting himself, “my umbrella!”
“Have you lost it?”
“Have I lost it? Naturally I have let it fall to upraise you, and now I have leave it there.”
“I will give you another,” she said pacifically.
“Another,” he commented scornfully; “do you think that I have no other?” Then hisweathercock cast of mind whirled again: “I do not want an umbrella,” he said more forcefully, “I want a kiss.”
“I thought that you were distressed over losing it.”
“Not at all; I have already very many others. But a kiss from you I have never yet.”
He seized her hand again, and tearing off the glove with a haste that demolished two buttonholes, pressed the bare cold fingers to his lips and eyes and forehead.
“Oh, I do love you!” he cried in a fresh storm of feeling. “Youmustlove me, because my muchmustmake of you a little.”
Then he kissed her hand many times more, stopping his rapid caresses to gaze upon her with that curious, burning glow firing the sombreness of his eyes the while he held her wrist against the fever of his face.
“If I obeyed myself,” he said hoarsely, “how I would hold you and kiss you.Je vous embrasserais tellement!”
She wondered why she was not distressed and alarmed. Instead the awe at her own emotion that had come upon her spirit in the wood was with her again. Something like strength seemed rising within her, and what it rose against was—strangelyenough—not him, but herself. She was conscious of a sympathy for him in place of any fear for herself.
She looked from the window and saw that they were now rolling rapidly through the brightly lighted streets, and a glimpse of the Hof told her that the end was but five minutes further on.
“You answer not,” he said, insistently; “you must say me some word.”
“Oh, what can I say?” she cried helplessly.
“Say that you love me.”
“But I do not.”
Then he loosed her hand and ground his teeth.
“Decidedly you are queer,” he said bitterly; “it is there in your eyes and you will to deny it. You are senseless,—vous n’avez pas de cœur!I am always a fool to go on as I go.”
She turned her eyes upon him.
“Je ne suis pas pour vous,” she said gently and very, very sadly; “mais je ne suis pour personne non plus,” she added, and there was a tone in her voice that he had never heard before. His temper faded instantly.
“You think of me with kindness, always,—n’est-ce pas?” he said, returning her look.
Their eyes rested steadily upon each other for a little space. Then he exclaimed:
“You do love me,” and started to seize her in his arms forgetful of lights, streets, passers-by, and all other good reasons for self-restraint.
But just then the cab stopped before the door of No. 6, the cabman descended.
There was no further question as toles convenances.
“Buda-Pesth.
DEAR ROSINA,—If you’re laid up I might just as well take a week more in this direction. Plenty to see, I find, and lots of jolly company lying around loose. I’ll get back about the twelfth and we’ll plan to skip then as fast as we can. Keep on writing Poste Restante, Buda, and I’ll have them forward. Don’t try to fool me any by being too sick to sail. I’ve got to go the nineteenth and you must too.
“Lovingly,
“Jack.”
She sat in the little salon the night of October fifth and read the above affectionate epistle which the postman had brought to keep her company, because every one else in the house was gone to the famous concert of the famous pianist.
She could not go; that little episode in the Englischergarten and all the attendant agitation had put her in bed for three days and rendered her quite unable to go out for two or three more. She had been obliged to write Jack that she was ill, with the above results, and she read his answer with the sensation that life was long, the futureempty, and none of its vistas worth contemplating. Her heart ached dully—it was forever aching dully these days, and she—
There was a tap at the door. Europe has no open-door policy, be it known; all doors are always shut. Even those ofpensionsalons.
She looked up, and saw him coming in, his violin case in his hand. Then life and its vistas underwent a great transformation, because he smiled upon her and, putting the case down carefully, came eagerly to kiss her hand.
“Vous allez bien ce soir?” he asked pleasantly, standing before her chair and looking down into her face.
“Oh, I am almost well, thank you; but why are you not gone to the concert?”
He pointed to his violin with a smile.
“It is a concert that I bring to you who may not go out,” he said.
“But you are making a tremendous sacrifice for me, monsieur.”
He stood before her, twisting his moustache.
“It is that I am regretful for the other night,” he said briefly, “for that I am glad to give the concert up and make you some pleasure. The other night—”
“Don’t,” she pleaded uncomfortably; “never mind all that. Let it all go.”
“But I would ask your pardon.J’étais tout-à-fait fou!”
“If I have anything to forgive it shall be forgiven you when you play. Do so now, please. Oh, you have no idea how impatient I am to hear you.”
He stared through her and beyond her for several seconds, and then came back to himself with a start.
“Then I do play,” he exclaimed, and went to where he had placed the case of rosewood, and lifting it from the small table, set it on the floor and knelt before it, as a priest at some holy shrine. She leaned her head against the chair back and watched him, her eyes searching each detail of his appearance without her spirit being cognizant of the hunger which led to the seeking, of the soul-cry which strove to fortify itself against the inevitable that each hour was bringing nearer.
He felt in his pocket for his key-ring, chose from the many one particular key, inserted it, turned it, left it sticking in the hole, and then, with a curious breathless tightening of the lips, he raised the lid, put aside the knit wool shield of white and violet, and with the tender care which a mother bestows upon a very tiny baby lifted the violin from its resting-place. As he didso his eye travelled with a sudden keen anxiety over its every detail, as if the possibility of harm was ever present, and as he held it to his ear and snapped the strings one after another, she beheld with something akin to awe the dawning of another nature upon his face, of another light within his eyes, the strange light of that abnormal, unworldly gift which God gave man and which we have elected to call by the name of genius. As he rested there before her, tightening one cord, trying another, listening to a third, she realized—with a sorrowful sense of her own remoteness at the minute—that this man was some one who, in spite of all their hours of intercourse, she had never met before.
He loosened the bow from its buttons and rose slowly to his feet. His eyes sought hers, and he said dreamily:
“What shall I play?” even while his fingers were forming dumb notes, and the uplifted bow quivered in the air as if impatient.
“Oh,” she said, acutely conscious of her inferiority,—of the ten thousand leagues of difference between his grandeur and her commonplace,—“play what you will.”
He hardly seemed to hear, his eyes roved over the little salon as if its walls were gone, and he beheld a horizon illimitless. He just slightlyknit his brows and then he bowed his head above the instrument and said briefly:
“Listen!”
And she listened.
And the unvoiceable wonder of his magic!
It was an intangible echo of the Tonhalle at Zurich, with the music that they had heard there sounding as the waves lapped up against the embankment and the crowd laughed and chatted after; those strains to which she had then been deaf on account of her agitation came back now, and the thrill of her pain was there still, rising and falling amidst the music and the water breaking up against the stones. While she waited on the verge of tears, the whole shifted to Constance, and through the slow sweep of the steamers coming into the harbor sounded the “Souvenir” of Vieuxtemps, drifting across the rose-laden air and carrying her back to the minutes when—Ah, when! She put her hand before her eyes and it was not the cords of his violin, but the sinews of her soul which responded to his bow. That which man may not voice he played, and that which our ears may not hear she absorbed into the depths of her being. Something within them each burst bonds and met at last, but neither knew it then, and the wonder carried her out upon the bosom of theBodensee, showed her the charm of its gracious peace, and then drifted as the breezes drift, to the concert in the open air that is given each day by the Feldherrnhalle, a concert that knows no discord, because the murmur of life, the calls of the birds, the splashing of the fountains, and the light-hearted joy of the crowd around, all meet and mingle in its chorus. He echoed them all with the sublimity of the power which he controlled, and all—bird-calls, fountain-drip, desultory laughter, and careless joy, all flowed from him, and took from him as they flowed that subtle and precious subconsciousness which lines our every cloud with the infinite hope that is better than all else in this world.
She leaned forward breathlessly, her fingers interlaced around her knees; her eyes had grown as dark as his own, her heart stood still, and between its throbs she asked herself ifthiswas the secret of their sympathy,—ifthiswas the basis of his mastery.
Then there was silence in the room and he stood motionless, his eyes on the floor, the violin still resting against his shoulder in its rightful position, above his heart, quite touching his head.
She did not speak and he did not speak,—neither knew for how long that period of silenceendured. But after a while he lowered the instrument and looked at her.
“You like, yes?” he said with a faint smile.
“Can you ask?”
He laid his hand upon a vase that sat upon the table and shook his head.
“All this is not good, you know,” he said, as if communing with himself alone; “here is no room for the music to spread. All these,” he pointed to another ornament, “are so very, very bad. But some day, perhaps,” he added, with another smile, “you will hear me in a good place.”
Then he raised the violin to position once more.
“Choose what you will have,” he told her.
“Oh, forget that I am here,” she pleaded, speaking with a startled hushedness, as if no claim of conventional politeness might dare intrude itself upon that bewildering hour, “do not remember that I am here,—play as you would if you were quite alone.”
“That is very well,” he said, with a recurrence to his unseeing stare and dreamy tone, “because for me you really are not here. Nothing is here;—the violin is not here;—I am myself not here;—only the music exists. And if I talk,” he added slowly, “the inspiration may leave me.”
He went beside the piano and turned his back towards her, and then his prayer made itself real and his love found words....
She wept, and when he ceased to play he remained standing in silence as the very reverent rest for a short interval after the termination of holy service....
After a while he moved to where the case lay open on the floor and knelt again, laying his instrument carefully in its place and covering it with its little knit wool quilt. Then he locked the lid down, replaced the keys in his pocket, and, rising, seemed to return to earth.
“Can you understand now,” he asked, taking a chair by her side,—“can you understand now how it would be for me if I lost my power to create music?”
“Yes,” she said, very humbly.
“I think that nothing so bad could arrive,” he went on, pulling his moustache and looking at her as he spoke, “because I am very much more strong than anything that may arrive at me, and the music is still much more strong than I. But if thatcouldarrive, that a trouble might kill my power, you can know how bad it would be for me.”
She sat there, gazing always at her new conception of him. The tears which she had shedduring his music filled her face with a sort of tender charm. It did not occur to her that any words of hers could be other than a desecration of those minutes.
“I am going now,” he said presently, rising. “I have done no work since in June, but I feel it within me to write what I have played to-night.” He went over and took up the violin case and then he laid it down again and came back to her side.
“I shall kiss you,” he said, not in any tone of either doubt or entreaty, rather with an imperativeness that was final. “In the music that I go to write to-night I want to put your eyes and also your kiss.”
He put his arms about her and raised her to his bosom.
“Regardez-moi!” he commanded, and she lifted her eyes into his.
Their lips met, and the kiss endured.
Then he replaced her gently upon the sofa, took up the violin and went out.
Later that night she reproached herself bitterly.
“I ought to have a chaperone,” she told her pillow in strict confidence.
But the kiss had a place now in her life, and the place, like the kiss itself, endured.
Von Ibn, in his room at the hotel, paused over his manuscript score, laid down his pen and closed his eyes.
“Elle sera à moi!” he murmured, and smiled.
For him also the kiss was enduring.
JACK was expected on the morrow, and on the day after the start for Genoa was to be made.
Under these cheerful circumstances Von Ibn came to call at the pension, and Amelia tapped at Rosina’s door to announce to the “gnädige Frau” that “der Herr von Ibn ist im Salon.”
Rosina was dressed for dinner and when her visitor saw her gown with its long trailing skirt his face fell.
“We go to walk, yes?” he said, in a doubtful tone. She looked from the window out upon the rainy view.
“It’s too wet,” she said hopelessly; but the hopelessness was hypocritical, because she had resolved to never walk alone with him again.
He threw himself down upon the divan and entered into a species of gloomy trance. She took a chair by the window and unfolded her embroidery. Since the night of the music their mutual feelings had become more complicated than ever, and sometimes she wanted to get awaywith a desperation that was tainted with cowardice, while at other times she almost wondered if she should ever have the strength to go at all. What he was meditating in these last days she could not at all divine. He continued to have fits of jealousy and periods of long and absorbing thought. The new knowledge of the spirit which he revealed in his art was always with her and always held her a little in awe. Also the recollection of the Englischergarten and of her own overwhelming sensations there stayed by her with a persistence which knew no diminution.
“I wouldn’t be off like that with him again for anything,” she thought, as she drew a thread of red chenille from the skein upon her knee, and stole a glance at the dark face opposite her.
“Why may we not walk?” he asked, looking up as if she had spoken aloud. “I will betrès raisonable.”
“It isn’t that,” she replied, annoyed to feel herself blushing; “it is that it is so wet. I should ruin a skirt.”
He started to argue the question but just then the salon door opened and Mrs. Jones came in with a book in her hand. He saw the book and she knew it. Mrs. Jones had evidently come to stay. The salon was public property, and Mrs. Jones had just as much right there as they had.Nevertheless when she smiled and said, “Shall I disturb you?” they resented her question as a sarcasm unworthy of Genoa’s proximity. Von Ibn stood up and said, “Certainly not,” with a politeness which did credit to his bringing up, but Rosina as she threaded her needle took a vow to remember tonever, in all time to come, pause for an instant even in a room where two people were talking together.
Mrs. Jones seated herself and then made the discovery that she had left her glasses in her own room; she rose at once and started to get them.
“Now wemustgo out,” he exclaimed, hurriedly, “we may not talk here with her. She speaks French as well as we, and German much better than you;” he referred to the cosmopolitan custom of altering one’s tongue to disagree with an (unwelcome) third party.
Rosina was already huddling her work together in hot haste.
“Yes,” she said, “I have a short skirt that I can wear.” She rose and went towards the door. “I won’t be five minutes,” she said, turning the knob.
Mrs. Jones was leisurely about coming back. She did not want to inconvenience them too much, but she did want to find the salon empty on her return, and she found it so.
While she was smiling and settling herself, they were going down the three flights of stairs and out of the large main door. The rain had ceased but it was still blackly and distinctly wet. Von Ibn had a tightly rolled umbrella which he held with a grasp that somehow suggested thoughts of their other promenade at nightfall.
“You can walk well, yes?” he said, as they turned in the direction of the Isar.
“In this skirt,” she laughed, glancing down at her costume whose original foundations had been laid for golf, “in this skirt I am equal to anything!”
“But if you slip?” he supposed, anxiously.
“You ought to see the soles of my boots. I sent them to the little shoemaker in the Wurzerstrasse and he soled them with rubber half an inch thick.”
“How much is an inch?” he asked.
“Twice the width of the rubber on my boots.”
“No, but earnestly,” he said, “is it acentimètre?”
“Twocentimètresand a half make one inch.”
“You are droll, you English and Americans,” he said, “you see nothing but your own way. I have heard Englishmen laugh as to how yet the Russians count their time different from the civilization part of the world, and then all Englandand America do their measure and weight in a manner so uneven that a European is useless to even attempt to understand it. There was a man there at Lucerne,—what did he say to me? ‘A mark is a quarter, is it not?’ that is what he asked. ‘Mon Dieu,’ I said, ‘if you cut it in four pieces it is four quarters, and if you leave it whole it is whole,’ then he looked to find mebête, and I was very sure that he was, and we spoke no more.”
Rosina laughed.
“He meant a quarter of a dollar,” she explained.
“I know that. You do not really think that I did not know that, do you? It was for his poor careless grammar that I find the American even morebêtethan for his ignorance. Do you believe that in my own tongue I would speak as many of you speak yours? In my own tongue I am above correction.”
They were under the long arcade in front of the Regierung and in view of the discussion which seemed impending she judged it advisable to say, with a gesture:
“There is where we met Jack; you remember?”
Von Ibn looked quickly about.
“Yes, it was here,” he said, and then he shuddered slightly. “It was very well to laugh after, but that might have been so bad. I was angryand I struck a fearful blow then; I have often think of it when we were travelling together.”
She grew thoughtful also, and her imagination found food among some miserable possibilities which might have been.
So they came to the river banks and the Maximilianbrücke, and paused by its rail.
The air was grand, fresh and moist, reminiscent of summer’s breath while also prophetic of winter’s bite, and the Isar swept below them, carrying its hurry of tumult away, away, far into the west, towards a wealth of rose and golden sky. Between the glory and the water, in the middle distance, lay a line of roofs stretching irregularly into the blackness of their own shadows, and beyond them was the forest, to the fringing haze of whose bare branches the distance lent a softness not their own. The banks of the Promenade were still green, but the masses of vine that trailed in the green ripples were all of a crimson or reddish brown, and the shrubs showed here and there an echo of the same color.
It was beautiful and wonderful to see, and they stood still and feasted their eyes for some long minutes.
“Oh, Isar,” Rosina cried softly, holding her hand out towards the singing waters below, “when shall I see you again?”
“You will return some day,” her companion said hopefully.
“Who can tell?”
“But always you must come over some bridge to return to-night.”
She felt that such levity jarred upon her mood, and refused to return his smile. She did not like him to feel like smiling too often these days.
“Do not be of a bad humor,” he entreated. “I am this afternoon of such a good one; and how can you know that you will not return? A woman can never be decided, so you may very well see the Isar soon again.Vous comprenez?”
“Is it being bad-humored to be sad?” she asked; “and why can’t I be decided if I want to be?”
“Because,” he said, wisely, “you are a woman; and a woman is very foolish to ever be decided, for she always changes her mind; and then all her decided seems to have been quite useless.”
Rosina felt that this sentence called for study before reply, and so walked on without speaking.
“Is that not so?” he asked, as they went down by the little stone stair.
“I never change.”
“Oh, now you know well that you do not speak the truth,—you are so very changeable. This afternoon,par exemple, when I first cometo ask you to go out, you say you cannot of any possibility make it, and then, very suddenly, we go.”
“But I recollected that I might wear this skirt.”
“And there was that lady, also,” he said thoughtfully.
“Yes, she was there, too.”
“But always you did change.”
“I don’t call it being changeable when one has a good reason for so doing.”
He stopped short; and she, after going a few steps further, discovered herself to be unaccompanied and stopped also.
“What is the matter?”
“Suddenly, I think.”
“Can’t you walk and think at the same time?”
He smiled, and came up with her again.
“If I make you a good reason—” he began, and then hesitated and was silent.
They followed the muddy path almost to the Luitpoldbrücke before he continued his phrase.
“If one can change for a good reason, and if I make you a good reason, then will you change about me?”
She drew a quick little breath.
“I can’t change in that way,” she said; “you know that I do not want to marry again: marriage is too awful an undertaking. Don’t you see that even now it does not make you always happy to be around me—”
“I am never around you,” he exclaimed indignantly. “I never have hardly touch you. I have been with you not as a man, but as an angel.Je me comporte comme un ange—comme un ange—c’est moi qui vous le dit!I have given you one kiss such as a small baby might give its mother, and that is all;—and then you say that I am always around you.”
He ceased speaking, and looked straitly and darkly before him. She wanted to laugh and cry at the same time.
“I tell you,” he continued violently after a short interval, “I am very much too good. Whatever you bid me do, that I do. Whatever you bid me not do, that I do not. And you do not thank me, or trust me, or treat me as a friend.Vous avez toujours peur de moi.When I approach you, you have always the air to expect that I will displease you. Have I deserved that? Have I behaved badly once? Did I kiss you when you knew nothing and I held you there in the mud—the night when I lose my umbrella?Mon Dieu, you are verydrôle, if you have known many men and do not appreciate me.”
He stopped as if choked.
They had passed beyond the bridge and entered upon a path along the river bank, a path bordered with willow trees. The sky was more brilliantly gorgeous than ever, but under foot it was wet indeed.
“Try not to stamp so much as you walk,” she asked him very gently; “you keep splashing me.”
“What is splash?” he demanded gloomily; “something that annoys your ears?”
“No, something that spoils my boots.”
“I do not care if I spoil those boots; I find them most ugly.”
“Perhaps; but I could not be here but for them.”
He walked on with somewhat less vigor.
“Let us talk about us,” he suggested, presently.
“With reference to what?”
“To me.”
“No, no,” she said unwillingly.
“Yes; why not?”
“You always come back to that same subject; your mind appears to follow a circuit, like a squirrel in a ring.”
“‘Wheel,’ you mean.”
“Well, ‘wheel,’ then.”
“What squirrel? We never have talked of a squirrel before.”
Rosina’s laugh rang out among the willows.
“Decidément vous n’êtes pas du tout poli,” he cried angrily. “You say I am like a squirrel; I ask what squirrel, and you begin to laugh.”
“I never said that you were like a squirrel,” she exclaimed, greatly shocked; “how can you think that I would say such a thing?”
“You did,” he declared bitterly. “You said I was like a squirrel in his wheel, because I tell you so often that I love you.”
“Oh, monsieur, youknowthat I never meant it in that way; how can you think for an instant that I could have—have said that—that—” She felt it impossible to define her offence again without having the corners of her mouth give way; but she went close beside him and faced his vexation with earnest, upraised eyes the while that she laid one hand upon his arm with the sweet impulsive gesture of a pleading child.
The gold had all faded from the sky, and the pink reflection in the far west was sunk beyond the horizon. The path was very solitary; they were quite alone except for an occasional peasant returning from his labor.
“Say that you understand,” she said anxiously, as a break in the trees revealed a long stretch of river; “youmustsay something, because I want to know how far it is to the next bridge.”
He stopped and stared ahead.
“There are no more bridges,” he proclaimed.
“No more bridges,” she cried.
He shook his head.
“Must we go the whole way back along this same muddy path?”
“Yes, surely.”
She turned.
“Then let us go back now. There is no fun walking any further this way after the sunset is over.”
“Is it for the sunset alone that you walk?”
“What shall I say?” she asked, looking up at him.
“Say that you walk for me.”
“And then what follows?”
“I follow.”
They laughed together.
“I am so good to you,” he declared; “even when you laugh at me I am never angry. I am truly so very good.”
He appeared so well content with himself that they went the whole distance to the Peace Monument before she disturbed his placid introspection.There was a pleasure to her in simply walking beside him in silence; it was a sensation which she had never attempted to analyze, but its existence had become a part of her own.
“Do not let us go home,” he proposed suddenly, when her turning to cross the Luitpoldbrücke recalled him to himself; “let us go somewhere and dine alone together. It is perhaps the last time; Jack returns to-morrow.”
“Oh, let us,” she agreed delightedly; but then her voice altered suddenly for the worse. “No, it’s impossible,” she said sadly, “I can’t go to a café and dine in this short skirt.”
“Why can you not?”
“Can’t you see why?”
He walked off some ways to the side and gazed critically at her skirt.
“Yes,” he said, rejoining her, “I can see why.”
They were halfway across the bridge; he laid his hand on her arm and stopped her.
“Je vous ferai un propos,” he said eagerly; “we will take a car going to the Ostbahnhof, and then we will leave it at a quiet place and seek a quiet café and dine there.”
“All right,” she said; “but you must telephone to thepension, or they won’t know what has become of me.”
“I can say that we are gone to the theatre,” he suggested.
“They won’t believe that because of this skirt.”
“I will say we are gone too far and must send for a cab, and will eat while we wait.”
“I think that whatever you say will sound like a lie, so it doesn’t really matter.”
“Then I will say that we do not return until after the supper, and nothing else.”
“Where will you telephone from?”
“From the café. Where would I telephone from?”
Rosina looked vaguely around in the darkness.
“We are only three or four blocks from thepensionnow, are we not?”
He glanced about.
“It will be droll if we meet some one you know.”
“Yes,” she said coldly; “it will be very funny—like Mrs. Jones to-day.”
“I am quite vexed when she came in,” he said seriously; “why do people come in like that?”
“We’ll be just as thoughtless when we’re her age,” Rosina said charitably. “I think myself that it is astonishing that so many young people manage to get betrothed when there are so many old people to keep coming in.”
“Getting betrothed is very simple,” said Von Ibn, “because always the young girl is willing; but when she is a young widow and not willing, that is what is difficult, and makes Mrs. Jonesde trop.”
She was obliged to laugh.
They were come to the Maximiliansstrasse, and a car was making its way jerkily around the corners of the monument in the middle of the square. It was a car for the Ostbahnhof, and full—very full.
“Let it go by,” he said. “We will walk on and another comes in a moment.”
They let it pass, and wandered on towards the rushing river.
“You see why it was so foolish to be sad,” he remarked, as they approached the bridge; “here is the second time that you have seen the Isar since you weep good-bye forever this afternoon.”
“I didn’t weep,” she said indignantly.
“Did you not? I thought that you did.”
They waited for another car at the end of the bridge; the island where the Isarlust sports its lights and music all summer, looked particularly deserted in the contrast of this October night. She spoke of the fact.
“You were often there?” he asked; “yes?”
“Yes, very often.”
“With who?”
She smiled a little in the dark.
“We used to come in the evenings,” she said; “every one used to come.”
Another car approached—again crowded.
“Let us walk,” she suggested; “all the cars will be crowded for the next hour.”
“Will your feet go further?” he inquired anxiously.
“Yes, I think so.”
They turned their faces to that gardened slope which rises to the right of the Maximilianeum. The full moon was coming up behind the stately building, and its glorious open arches were outlined against the evening sky. The great tower which rose at the end near them seemed to mount straight upward into heaven itself.
“I don’t want to leave the Maximilianeum,” she exclaimed, reft with an intense admiration for the grandeur of what was before her; “I don’t want to leave the Bavarian moon; oh, I don’t want to leave Munich; not a bit.”
“And me?” said her companion, taking her arm, “do you want to not leave me also?”
“I don’t want to leave you either,” she declared. “I don’t want to leave anything, and I must leave everything. Oh,” she exclaimedsuddenly and viciously, “I wish I might know who it was that wrote home to Uncle John.”
“But you have thought to know?”
“Oh, I’m almost sure that it was that man in Zurich.”
“He was not so bad, that Zuricher man,” he said, reflectively. “Did I ever say to you that I did go to the Gare with him when he went to Lucerne?”
“No, you never told me that. What did you go to the station with him for?”
“I thought that I would know whether after all he really went to Constance. At the Gare, after he has bought his ticket for Lucerne, I find him most agreeable.”
“Did you really think that perhaps hewasgoing to Constance?”
“Yes, I did. I find it very natural that he shall want to go to Constance. I am surprise that day at every one who can decide to go any other place because I so wish to get to Constance myself.Vous comprenez?”
She was obliged to smile audibly.
“It was very funny the way that you came into the Inselsalle-à-mangerthat night. I never was more surprised in my life.”
“I like to come to you that way,” he went on. “When you are so your face becomes glad andI believe that you have been really lonely for me and—”
He stopped suddenly; two big electric lights loomed at the corner to their right and the scene which was revealed by the uncurtained state of the window was responsible for the sudden turn of the current of his thoughts.
“We can eat there,” he exclaimed.
She stopped, astonished.
“Can we?” she asked. “I wouldn’t think so.”
“But surely yes,” he affirmed; “it is a café.”
He flung the door open as he spoke and stood back to let her pass inside.
“It is a little smoky,” he continued, as the door fell to, “but—”
“A little!” she interrupted.
“But what does that do to you? and there is another lady, so it is very right for you to be here too.”
“She doesn’t look like a lady to me,” said Rosina, dodging under a billiard-cue, for in this particular café the centre of the room is occupied by the billiard-tables; “she looks decidedly otherwise.”
Von Ibn glanced carelessly at the person alluded to.
“It is always a woman,” he remarked; andthen he led the way around to a vacant corner where there was somewhat less confusion than elsewhere. “Here you may sit down,” he commanded, and laid aside his own hat and overcoat.
She obeyed him, contemplating her surroundings with interest as she began to unbutton her gloves.
For the place was, to her eyes, unique of its kind, her lot having been cast hitherto in quite another class of cafés. It was very large, and decidedly hideous, wainscoted in imitation panels and frescoed in imitation paintings. The columns which supported the ceilings were brilliantly banded in various colors and flowered out below their pediments into iron branches of oak leaves among which blossomed the bulbs of many electric lights. By each column stood a severely plain hat-rack. In the middle of the room were four billiard tables, around its sides numberless small marble-topped stands where beer was being served galore. Against the walls were fastened several of those magnificent mirrors which testify so loudly to the reasonable price of good glass in that happy land across the seas; each mirror was flanked by two stuffed eagles, and decorated above its centre with one ornate quirl in gilt and stucco. And the whole was full and more than full of smoke.
Von Ibn rapped on the tiled floor with his umbrella, and a waitress serving at a table near, five beer-mugs in each hand, nodded that she heard. Then he turned to Rosina:
“Eh bien!”
“I never was in a place like this before.”
“You may very likely never be in such a one again,” he told her seriously; “so you must be as happy as you can while you’re here.”
“That reason for having a good time hadn’t occurred to me,” she answered, giving him back his smile.
“Then think to occur it now,” he rejoined.
The waitress had by this time gotten rid of her ten mugs and came to them, beginning proceedings by spreading the ménu down on the table and running her pencil through item after item.
“You had better order before everything is gone,” Rosina suggested.
“I must think the same,” he replied, and took up the ménu.
“Haben Sie bouillon?” he demanded immediately.
The waitress signified that bouillon was not to be.
“How shall I do?” he asked, looking blank. “In all my life I have never eat without a bouillon before?”
Rosina and the waitress felt their mutual helplessness in this difficulty, and the proceedings in hand came to a standstill natural under the circumstances.
“Can’t they make you some?” the American brain suggested.
He turned the idea over in his mind once or twice and then:
“No,” he said; “it is not worth. It will be better that we eat now, and later, when I am in town, I will get a bouillon.”
So, that difficulty being disposed of, he ordered a species of repast with an infinite sense of amusement over the bill of fare. The waitress then retired and they were left alone in their corner.
“The other lady is getting kissed,” Rosina said. The publicity of a certain grade of continental love-making is always both interesting and amazing to the Anglo-Saxon temperament.
He looked behind him without at all disturbing what was in progress there. After a minute’s quiet stare he turned back in his seat and shrugged his shoulders.
“You see how simple it is when the woman is still,” he said pointedly. “There is no fainting there; he loses no seventeen-mark umbrella from Baden-Baden.”
She ignored the gist of this remark, and beganto unhook the collar of her jacket. Then she decided to take it off altogether.
“You find it too warm?” he said, rising to assist her.
“I certainly do.”
“It is curious for you and I to be in such a place,n’est-ce pas?”
“Very curious.”
“But it is an experience, like eating in the woods.”
“I don’t think that it is at all like eating in the woods; I think that nothing could be more different.”
“We are so alone.”
“Oh!”
“Now you understand what I mean.”
“Yes, now I understand what you mean. And it is really a little like the woods, too,” she added. “Those iron acorns and leaves are the branches, and the stuffed eagles are the birds.”
He looked at the oak-branches and the eagles for some time, and then he said:
“Let us talk.”
“What are we doing now?”
“We are waiting for what is to be to eat.”
“I thought that that in itself was always sufficient entertainment for a man.”
“I like better to talk. I have not much time more to talk with you,vous savez.”
“We will talk,” she said, hastily. Her eyes wandered vaguely over the room seeking a subject for immediate discussion; all that she saw was the perpendicular cue of one of the billiard players.
“Watch!” she exclaimed. “He’s going to make an awfully difficult shot.”
Von Ibn looked towards the player with very little interest depicted on his countenance.
“Oh, he missed,” she exclaimed disgustedly.
“But of course. How could a man like that do such amassé? You are so hopeful ever. You say, ‘See him make so difficult a play,’ when only looking upon the man’s face tells that he himself is sure that he is about to fail.”
“I’ll give you a riddle,” she went on, receiving his expostulation with a smile. “But perhaps you don’t know what a riddle is?” she added questioningly.
“Yes, I do know what a riddle is; it is what you do not know and must tell.”
“Yes, that is it.”
“And your riddle is?”
“Why am I like a dragon?”
“Like a—” he faltered.
“Dragon.”
“What is a dragon?”
“It’s a horrible monster. Don’t you know the picture in the Schaak Gallery of that creature running its neck out through the slit in the rock so as to devour the two donkeys?”
“Yes, I know the picture. But that creature is blue.”
“Oh,” she said hopelessly, “it’s no use trying to tell you riddles, you don’t understand.”
“Yes, I do,” he cried eagerly. “I understand perfectly and I assure you that I like very much. Dragon is ‘drachen,’n’est ce pas?”
“Yes.”
“And you are as one?”
“I askwhyam I like one?”
He looked particularly blank.
“You are perhaps hungry?” he hazarded.
She began to laugh.