On the afternoon of the second Christmas festival, the two friends met again, after a separation of nearly six weeks.
Ulrich, who had arrived home on Christmas Eve, waited a day to see if Leo would turn up; but when he neither came nor sent word, he started off to call on him.
He found him in his study, still arrayed in nightshirt and dressing-gown, reclining on the sofa, enveloped in clouds of smoke.
"What a sluggard you've become," cried Ulrich, with a laugh, but his heart sank at the sight of the waste of so much splendid vigour.
The entrance of his friend gave Leo a slight shock of alarm. But he suppressed it immediately, and rising, hurried to greet him.
Ulrich was aghast at the red, bloated appearance of Leo's face, and the puffiness of his eyes.
"What is the matter with you? Are you ill?" he inquired.
Leo answered, laughing, "It's simply laziness--an attack of laziness, that's all," and he gave his friend's hands a pressure that was nerveless and limp.
Ulrich said nothing, but continued to gaze searchingly at Leo's features in solicitous anxiety.
"Sit down and make yourself at home. Won't you have a hot drink. Coffee, tea, grog, negus, eh? Damned cold out of doors. I preferred the storm. Have you had a comfortable journey? It's a long way from Berlin here. Why do you look at me so hard? You'll know me soon."
"I beg your pardon. I will look at something else if you wish it."
"Devil take it! Don't be so touchy, man. One has to be so beastly careful in talking to you. Now, have a cognac to please me. I have got it here--old Hennessy--it would pick up a corpse."
"You know that I never drink spirits or liqueurs."
"Very unwise. In the highest degree unwise, dear Ulrich. One ought to provide for one's bodily needs. It's a duty we all owe ourselves. Excuse me if I attend to mine."
He fetched a flask of cognac from the cupboard of his writing-table, and tossed off hastily three or four glasses, which seemed to have a soothing effect upon him.
"You'll think," he said laughingly, "that I am becoming a secret bibber. But, I ask you, what else is a lonely beggar to do, when his heart----"
"It is your own fault that you are lonely," interrupted Ulrich.
"How my fault?"
"You hold yourself aloof from all your neighbours. You seem to have forgotten even the way to Uhlenfelde."
"Ho, ho!"
"It used to be the custom for you to come over to Uhlenfelde on Christmas Day."
"You might have come here as easily."
Ulrich looked at him in stupefaction. For the first time it struck him that, like more ordinary friendships, theirs might be subject to friction. So, in a gentler and almost caressing tone, he went on--
"As you didn't come to me, I was compelled to come to you. But I regarded it as my duty not to leave Felicitas yesterday, after being away so long. Putting yesterday out of the question, Felicitas tells me that you have been only once to Uhlenfelde during my absence, and that quite recently."
"The hypocritical creature!" he said to himself, and he felt a kind of melancholy admiration for her powers of dissimulation.
"Your wife is not you," he said, with a feeble attempt at emulating her.
"But she is part of me," responded Ulrich. "And it would have given me pleasure, now that things are straight between you, if----"
"Oh yes, perfectly so," he scoffed inwardly, and a short bitter laugh, which he could not check in time, made Ulrich halt in the middle of a sentence to give his friend another amazed scrutiny.
"For God's sake! stop staring at me like that," he cried, interpreting every glance of Ulrich's as a want of confidence. "You must put up with me as I am, whether I please you or not. And let me repeat what I have often said before, old boy--you, with your narrow chest and anæmic temperament, can have no conception of the evil passions which rampage about in this powerful roomy carcase."
He struck his bare breast with his clenched hand, and thought to himself, "What a brute I am!"
Ulrich made no response, but looked at him blankly, more and more unable to comprehend him. Leo was conscious how, step by step, he was losing ground with his friend. He saw as clearly what was passing within him as if his heart lay exposed under the X-rays. To himself he appeared in the light of a clumsy actor, disgusted with hisrôle, yet making renewed efforts to play it out to the bitter end. So he went on.
"Think what a life this is for a fellow like me. In America I was in the saddle sometimes for eight days together, and only happy when I was going for man or beast. But here I am at a loss, and what interest can I have in this hole? How amuse myself? It will end either in going to pieces or putting a bullet through my brain. Look at me. As I lie here now, I have lain since yesterday morning. They bring my meals to my room, and at night I creep into bed. I shall be glad when these cursed holidays are over, for then I shall at least be able to work again; if you can call it work. The futile rushing about on the estate, with scowling face, and air of undue importance, when in reality all there is to be done is done by God Almighty. But one must needs interfere, must be doing something to deaden reflection, to hunt the wretched thoughts that torment one out of one's head. Yet every day they recur, whether one runs away from them or lies in wait for them like a panther in a cage, and the burden of them is intolerable."
"What are these thoughts to which you are always alluding? For God's sake explain," cried Ulrich, scarcely able to master his anxiety.
Leo gave a discordant laugh. "It would not interest you," he said, and he gave Ulrich's face a piercing sidelong glance.
Ulrich sprang to his feet, and began to pace the floor. His breathing came in gasps, and his haggard cheeks were flushed. Then he stood still in front of Leo, and said, with resolve burning in his brilliant eyes--
"Look here, I'll speak seriously to you, old boy. I, too, have my burden to bear. I have never felt more keenly the desolation of my home than this Christmas, when the little chap who should have been dancing round the fir-tree has not been there. He ought to have come home, but my wife didn't wish it. There's something strained in the atmosphere of the house now, a feeling somehow as if misfortune were pending. I feel a stranger at my own fireside!"
Leo cowered under the touch of his thin hand, which he had laid on his shoulders, and Ulrich continued--
"My single joy now rests in my activity as a politician. Of course it means incessant and untiring labour. You know what commissions are? But the seed is sown, and by Easter we may expect results. Probably our object will have been gained. But there is an enormous amount to be done, and I shall be of more use in Berlin than anywhere else. Now listen? When I left home six weeks ago you seemed to me to be all right; you might have been a little grave for you, but you talked reasonably and your eye was clear. And now I am back and find you in such a state that I cannot forbear saying to myself, 'He looks as if he were going to the devil.'"
"Well, I am at liberty to do so if I please," laughed Leo.
"I don't envy you that liberty, my boy," Ulrich replied. "Yet I cannot help thinking that even if I have lost your confidence and you treat me as an intruder, things would not have come to such a pass with you if I had been at home."
"What fault have you to find with me? Am I not to be trusted out of your sight?"
"Soon after the new year I am going away again. Goodness knows how I shall find you when I come back."
"Stony broke," laughed Leo, feeling his irritation grow.
Ulrich closed his eyes, moved to emotion by this insane burst of self-annihilation on Leo's part. Then after a moment he asked--
"Would you like to travel again?"
"No," was the short rejoinder.
"Very good. Shall I not go away, then? Would it be any help to you to feel that I was near at hand?"
Leo gave him a quick look in which eager hope and anguish were mingled; but then he answered, turning his head aside impatiently--
"Thank you, I am not in need of a keeper."
Ulrich blanched. "I hope," he said, pronouncing his words with difficulty, "that you don't mean what you say. I offer to sacrifice for you my goal, my ambition, all that I strive and live for, and you give me an answer which is an insult to me and our friendship. I am not sure now whether to treat you as a sick man or a stranger."
There was a silence. Leo had risen and stood motionless, with his fists resting on the table. The feeling of impotence and vacillation which so often overcame him was at this moment a positive physical martyrdom. Softer sentiments welled up within him; but all expression of tenderness was repressed by the stern necessity of deceiving his friend, a course to which he was eternally committed. To yield a jot would be half a confession.
"You take everything too tragically," he said in a jocular tone. "Idleness doesn't suit me, that is all. I, who am used to all sorts of escapades and a life of adventure and movement, am simply bored now, and can't help it. Inactivity makes my blood sluggish and gives me horrid thoughts. Wait till the spring and I shall be myself again."
He grasped Ulrich's hand timidly, and received in return a long and searching pressure. It was as if Ulrich felt to his finger-tips the unaccountable change in his friend. They began to speak of general topics--of agriculture and political affairs. But Leo could not recover his equilibrium. His conversation was a mixture. One moment it lacked confidence, the next it showed an excess of zeal.
Cynical jokes alternated with dull platitudes, and Ulrich was more and more perplexed.
They parted--Leo with a sensation of relief that the interview had come to an end, Ulrich sad and depressed. He recognised with sorrow that this friendship, which as long as he could remember had been part of his being, which had survived triumphantly Leo's four years of absence and his own marriage with Rhaden's beautiful widow, was now in danger of being dissolved. The future filled him with fears. But he did not dream that on the threshold of his home there awaited him a blow so unexpected and so terrible that it would drive all the gloomy impressions of to-day from his mind.
When he arrived at Uhlenfelde he found Felicitas lying on the floor in hysterics, with old Minna tending her, amidst wailing and lamentations. Half an hour before a telegram had come for him from Wiesbaden, and had been opened by his wife. It ran--
"Your son Paul is seriously ill, owing to an unfortunate accident for which the school authorities are in no wise to blame. He ran away on Christmas Eve; probably homesick. Was found to-day in a neighbouring village, where he was being cared for. High fever; and doctor earnestly requests you will come immediately."
The sad news reached Leo in a note which Ulrich despatched the same night from the station at Münsterberg.
"Felicitas," it said, "suffers so intensely that it was impossible to take her with me; her uncontrolled grief might also be bad for the child. So if you feel that you can and still care to do anything, please help her."
That was a hard thrust--"if you still care."
Leo was terribly upset, and a dull gnawing self-reproach made him feel as if he were to blame for the turn events had taken. He steeled himself to write a long letter to Felicitas, in which, under the pretext of ordinary sympathy, he put his time and his person at her disposal, and offered to share her sorrow as brother and friend. He awaited her answer, fearful that she might accept. But he need not have been afraid. Her note contained only a few words of entreaty to him to stay away.
"For God's sake, don't come," she wrote. "I can only pray and weep night and day. You are the last person I wish to see." Whereupon he asked his mother to take compassion on the heartbroken mistress of Uhlenfelde. The good old lady, deeply pitiful, set out at once on her mission, but Felicitas refused to see her.
Four days full of awful suspense went by. Leo sent a messenger twice daily to Uhlenfelde to inquire, and he brought back tidings gleaned from old Minna that the telegrams from Wiesbaden still gave hope, but the case was a grave one. The gracious mistress was confined to her bed and prayed. The doctor from Münsterberg visited her every day. The hours between one piece of news and the next seemed an eternity. Leo didn't know what else to do, but shoulder his gun and stride aimlessly over the snowy fields. He passed the time by oracular questionings as to whether the child would live or die. He counted the poplars by the road-side, the hares running across the furrows, and the buttons on his shooting-jacket. He counted the number of breaths he must draw before he reached a certain spot, the sunbeams that pierced the dusky undergrowth of the fir woods, and the cries of the ravens that echoed through the silent forest--a monotonous game with varied results. He made vows, too, that were the next moment forgotten. Now and then he was demoniacally jubilant, and sent a whoop over the meadows and was startled at the echo of his own voice. In the evenings he turned into the Prussian Crown for distraction, and drank in the company of its frequenters enormous quantities of grog and red wine, with two cognacs in between. The two cognacs went by the name of "a pair of flannel trousers." There he found his old friends--Hans von Sembritzky, who had drunk heavily since his marriage; the elder Otzen, a melancholic, shy personage by day, but at night, after the second bottle, a wild singer of comic songs; Herr von Stolt, always on the scent of women, and hoping, through associating with Leo, to approach Felicitas once more.
Nothing had leaked out here of the misfortune which had befallen Uhlenfelde. Even Ulrich's sudden departure had called for no remark, because, as one of the social magnates of the district, his absences were frequent. The only person who knew was Dr. Senftleben, who attended Felicitas. This taciturn old bachelor, who enjoyed the reputation of being a cynic, and was much feared in consequence, was in the habit of devouring his supper in a corner of the Prussian Crown, and going away without saying good night to any one.
Leo, however, ventured to speak to him one night, and asked what was the matter with Felicitas.
"Nothing," answered the doctor, and seized his hat.
"But she is in bed, and you see her every day."
"She has what you call 'anxious' fever, Herr von Sellenthin. She is taking morphine in raspberry syrup--plenty of raspberry, but no bromide; that is too depressing. Good evening, Herr von Sellenthin."
On the morning of the fifth day, when Leo was dressing, Lizzie's old factotum rushed in upon him, sobbing and wringing her hands.
"What has happened, Minna?"
"Misfortune upon misfortune! Paulchen is dead, the gnädige Frau has taken poison in her despair, and, though still alive, is unconscious. The doctor has been sent for, but for God's sake come, gnädiger Herr, for everything is topsy-turvy, and I don't know what to do."
Leo felt as if cold water were running down his back, and he reeled against the wall.
"It can't be true, it can't be true," was his first thought. Then he said to himself, "You must put on your boots;" and he went about the simple task with a feeling as if in another minute he would lack the strength to accomplish it. Suddenly he burst into a loud derisive laugh, and the old woman crept into a corner, frightened at the sound.
After all it was only what was to be expected. It was fate. The child dead; Felicitas dying; Ulrich, with his weak heart, unable to bear the blow; and then it would be his own turn.
He glanced at the spot where his weapons hung. The bullet that would do the work was waiting for him. He stretched himself, and a murderous lust overcame him for a moment; then he finished his dressing, and, leaving the old woman panting behind, he tore across the snow-covered fields and over the frozen river to Uhlenfelde, and as he ran he asked himself, "Do I love her?" and the answer was, "No; love isn't like this. I am not even sorry for her. My guilt, if she dies, seems far worse than her death itself." But the child, and Ulrich--in thinking of them too, the hideous spectre of his own guilt reared itself, grimacing, before him.
Everything in the courtyard at Uhlenfelde was the same as usual, which surprised him. He expected, at least, that the barns would be on fire.
A two-horsed sleigh was waiting at the door. "Who is there?" he inquired of old Wilhelm, who, red and half frozen, touched his fur cap with his customary imperturbable air of deference.
"The doctor, gnädiger Herr."
Leo met him in the hall, hurrying, after the manner of busy doctors, to his conveyance.
"How is she, doctor?" he asked, detaining him.
"As well as can be expected," was the curt reply.
"What does that mean? That all danger is past?"
"It means that the baroness is simply suffering from an attack of bile, which I don't envy her."
"Hasn't she taken poison?"
"Poison! Humph! My dear sir, it depends on what you call poison. The baroness may have had the intention of taking her life, I dare say. But she went the wrong way about it. She drank her toothache drops, Herr von Sellenthin, a mixture of ether, alcohol, and oil, not exactly unpleasant to the taste, but one that few would be of sufficiently tough constitution not to feel some disagreeable effects from imbibing. Now she seems to have slept herself out, but will probably suffer a day or two yet from a disordered stomach. Good day to you, Herr von Sellenthin."
He got into the sleigh, bowed, and drove off.
Leo felt disgusted, and half disappointed; the most sacred spot in his heart seemed to have been rudely tampered with.
The tragedy had become something very like a farce. Still, the child, the dear child, was dead. There was no getting over that. The wrath which always flamed up within him against this woman, at moments when his will was weakest and most impotent to meet her, hardened into cold aversion. He could have strangled her on account of those toothache drops. Everything, even the desire to die, became in her hands a miserable petty fraud. But the child was dead, and could not be brought back to life.
He asked a maid-servant, who was apparently affected by the general alarm in the household, whether her mistress was visible. She answered shyly that she would go and see, and ran upstairs.
Meanwhile, old Minna, coughing and sobbing, came in at the front door, and asked, wringing her hands, if the gracious one was still alive.
Leo turned his back on her without deigning to answer, and she hobbled on up the stairs as fast as she could. He was alone, and it seemed a long time before any one came. He paced up and down between the pillars, where he and Ulrich as boys had played hide-and-seek, and he thought, "What shame have she and I brought on your house!" It would have come almost as a consolation if some one had hounded him with a horse-whip out at the door, the threshold of which his feet had desecrated.
Instead, old Minna returned with beaming eyes and champing jaws, and declared joyously that the gracious little mistress was better again, and the gracious little mistress wished to see him.
He clenched his teeth and followed the old woman upstairs. What he wanted to say to her he did not know; he was only aware of a dull desire to lay his fingers about her throat and choke her. So bitterly, at that moment, did he hate her.
Minna led him into her bedroom. He had not entered it since the days at Fichtkampen. A wave of the opoponax perfume met him as the door opened, and he found himself in a rosy gloaming, penetrated here and there by a ray of hard, cold daylight. He felt as if he were plunged into a warm scented bath, and a cover shut down upon him. He remained stationary by the door, and breathed quickly.
The old hag caught him by the sleeve and pulled him forward towards the bed where she lay. Her face was illumined by the light from the window, and her pillow gleamed round her like an aureole, while the rest of the bed was bathed in purple, semidarkness.
"She has arranged thismise en scène," he thought.
Her face had a waxen hue; there were dark rims round her eyes, which, from beneath their half-closed heavy lids, looked at him without recognition or intelligence. It seemed to him that the effects of her drug-taking had not entirely passed off.
He approached her bedside on tip-toe; the thawing snow fell from his boots and left little discoloured streams on the carpet.
"Felicitas?"
She raised her left hand and motioned to him to come nearer, and he dragged a chair close to the bed. There was a night-table standing beside it, with bottles and phials of every description; one was empty, and labelled, "Cure for toothache--Not to be taken." This admonition must have induced her to drink it.
"Felicitas?" he repeated.
Then she slowly raised her large dim eyes and stared at him, while a bitter smile played about her mouth.
"Felicitas, pull yourself together," he exhorted, feeling uneasy.
She stammered Paulchen's name, and looked into vacancy again. A reflection of death seemed to lie on this white face, rigid from anguish.
Leo would have sunk on his knees beside her, deeply moved and anxious, had not the doctor's words hardened and steeled him against her.
"Leo?" she whispered, without looking at him.
"What can I do for you?"
"Are you my friend?"
"Of course. You know that I am."
"Leo, I can't go on living. Leo, you must get me poison."
He took comfort from her words. After all, then, she had seriously wished to take her life. For that he thanked her from the bottom of his heart.
A quiver of pain passed over her drawn features, which the grief of the last few days had lengthened and pinched. Her face was now marked by lines, which made it look older, but gave it more character. This was not the pink-and-white laughing face of the syren who lured him on to the edge of a precipice, but the woe-struck face of a madonna who had endured and come through much tribulation.
And it was fitting that the partner of his guilt should be thus. He felt for the first time how thoroughly she belonged to him, and his hate gradually evaporated.
"Don't sin against yourself, Felicitas," he said, for the sake of saying something.
"Sin against myself!" she repeated, speaking in a low, hopeless monotone. "Oh, my God! As if there was anything worse for me to do! Could I sin more than I have done? My little Paul is dead, and I am still alive. I sentenced my child to death, and am allowed to live. Matricide; isn't that the most horrible of crimes? How can I go through life with such a burden of guilt weighing upon me? How can any one who cares for me wish me to do it?"
"Matricide!" he exclaimed in bewilderment. "What do you mean?"
"I know what I mean," she said, and smiled.
A cold shudder ran through him. This woman's brain must be unbalanced by grief; she was going out of her mind. Her fingers groped on the counterpane.
"Where is your hand?" she whispered. "Give me your hand. I implore you to give me your hand."
He stretched it towards her mechanically, and she grasped it in her hot moist palm.
"Lean down to me," she whispered on, "and I will tell you in your ear how it happened."
He inclined his head as she commanded, till it was close to her mouth.
"You remember that evening you came before Christmas?" she continued--"that was the hour when I sacrificed my boy's life to you. When we were warming ourselves at the furnace in the greenhouse, it was then that he died."
"You are talking deliriously, Felicitas!" he exclaimed, drawing himself erect.
"Hush!" she said, pulling him down to her again. "They may be listening at the door, and no one must know this but you and I. It was three days before Christmas. I was doing up his presents, and there wasn't much time. For I had sent him far, far away for your sake, and kept from Ulrich how unhappy he was at school; for your sake I did that too. But I wanted him to have his Christmas presents, but in the middle you came in. And then I forgot everything else. I thought no more about Christmas, or my child. My whole soul was filled with you. I wanted nothing else but to go away with you into some corner where no one could see us or hear us. And when you were gone, I was in a sort of mad ecstasy. I ran up and down stairs. I stood by the window looking towards Halewitz half the night through, and then I sat by the stove, and stared into the fire and thought, 'This is how he and I sat beside the furnace.' And at last when I came to my senses it was too late--too late."
"Why too late?" he asked hoarsely.
"Yesterday morning," she answered, "Ulrich's telegram came, and last night the letter. Everything is in the letter. It is somewhere in the room. Look for it."
He rose, with faltering steps, and with unsteady fingers fumbled about in search of the fatal letter. But he could not find it. He ransacked the whole apartment that lay before him in a mysterious twilight, with its luxurious appointments, its silken cushions and covers, its veiled mirrors and countless silver and ivory toilette articles. He wandered from one piece of furniture to another, and while he gazed in stupefied astonishment at all the glittering knickknacks, he asked himself what it was he was looking for. But a voice from the bed reminded him.
"Look in the dressing-room; it may be there."
Ah, the letter--of course, the letter. He opened the door to which she pointed, and found himself in a small room so brilliant and light that it hurt his eyes. The floor was of porcelain tiles, and he saw on the left a bath with steps leading down to it, on the right a marble table surrounded by a threefold full-length mirror, before which were strewn yet more articles of the toilette of crystal and tortoiseshell in every conceivable design.
"Howhemust hate all this show and luxury!" he thought. And then his glance wandered through a door standing wide open opposite him. He saw a plain camp-bedstead covered by a white crochet counterpane, with a deer-skin rug on the bare boards beside it. Photographs in dark frames were on the wall, and amongst them, staring at him with laughing eyes and plump cheeks, his own. He groaned aloud, and, putting his hands before his face, flew back into the perfumed, purple prison.
"Have you got the letter?" she asked.
"No."
"Did you look everywhere?"
"I don't know; I think so."
"Leo, what's the matter with you?"--her voice trembled with anxiety.
"The matter with me?" he cried. "Only this: I am ashamed of myself--ashamed! ashamed!" He drew himself up, and then flung himself down on his knees beside the bed. She raised herself on the pillows and laid her hand on his head, while her eyes filled with tears.
"My poor, poor boy," she said, "you are broken-hearted already, and yet you don't know nearly all."
"What more is there?" he asked, shaken with emotion.
"The letter says," she continued, "that all the others got their presents from parents and friends in time for the distribution. Only his table was empty. And he couldn't believe it--couldn't believe that his mother had forgotten him. And when the rest were playing round the Christmas-tree, he slipped out unseen, without hat or overcoat. He must go to the post-office, he said, to inquire whether mamma had sent nothing. Not the soldiers and the cannons, and the pocket inkstand, and all the things that he had wanted so badly, and which mamma had promised him? But he couldn't find the post-office, and ran on and on over the open fields in a snowstorm,without cap and overcoat, and because he could not believe that his mother had forsaken him (for your sake, Leo), he died--died."
She pressed her forehead against the bowed head of the kneeling man, sobbing bitterly, and clung to his shoulders. And so they cried together and would not be comforted. When at last they lifted their heads they looked into each other's eyes, astonished and questioning. Was he this man? Was she this woman? It seemed as if their common sorrow had made them new creatures, and linked them as one for all time in guilt and the wretched consequence of their sin. She smiled at him inconsolably, but at the same time she was almost happy.
"Lizzie, we are lost," he murmured.
"Yes, we are lost," she said, still smiling, and then he left her.
On the first Sunday of the New Year, Ulrich alighted at the station at Münsterberg, after seeing the grave close over his step-son. He had decided, after long consideration, to have the boy buried in the place where he died, and if his wife felt herself equal to the strain, to have the body removed later to be interred in the family vault of the Rhadens at Fichtkampen.
Felicitas had not spared him any of the details of her despair, illness, and attempted suicide, and had painted all in the darkest colours. She had too much to conceal to be able to express her grief simply and sincerely. The task lay before her of excusing herself, as far as was possible, of any blame in her child's death, and of presenting the whole unhappy affair to Ulrich and the world and to herself, tricked out in the guise of romance.
Above all, it had never occurred to her to spare her husband. The letters she had written him from her bed with a feverish hand were full of endless laments that they had ever sent the boy so far away to school, which strengthened the pangs of remorse that already tortured his sensitive soul.
With the instinct of self-preservation, she had tried to shunt the responsibility for what had happened on Ulrich's shoulders, in the same way as she had blamed Leo as an accomplice, so that Ulrich's easily disturbed conscience began to accuse him of being the cause of all the misery.
"She was only like an irresponsible child," he said to himself, "following the whim of the moment. I ought to have thought of that and have remained firm in opposing her, even when it was the fate of her own flesh and blood that she was deciding upon."
And then, what was worst of all was, that she had done it for him and him alone. So that he might continue to enjoy the friendship of the man who bore on him the stain of having killed the child's father, that child had been sent into banishment to meet his death. A sacrifice so cruel and unnatural had, as it was bound to be, been avenged, and, as things had shaped themselves, it had all been of no avail. The object for which the stupendous sacrifice had been made was not attained.
For he could no longer shut his eyes to the fact that he was losing his friend, his boyhood's comrade and well-beloved who, ever since he could remember, had been first in his thoughts, who had been his pride and glory and rock of strength, who seemed to embody all the health and physical power that fate had denied to himself.
He no longer understood him. The laws that governed his emotions were strange to him, and what once had seemed to him like a perfect, rushing harmony of Mother Nature's, now was like a shrieking confusion of discordant notes.
Whether it was himself who had changed so much, or the other, he couldn't say; he was only clear on one point, that every fresh utterance of Leo's estranged and hurt him.
No one knew better than his friend how dear the small step-son had been to his heart; but on the day of the funeral he had got a letter from Leo so stiffly and frigidly expressed, that it might have been the conventional condolences of an absolute stranger.
It was indeed a melancholy home-coming for Ulrich. No one met him at the station. But the station-master, who recognised the baron as he flashed his lantern upon him, helped him out of the railway-carriage, and spoke a few words of respectful sympathy.
The old coachman, Wilhelm, seated on the box, wiped away his tears at his master's approach, and when he laid his hand on his shoulder and said to him in a low voice, "Ah, Wilhelm, we shall not see our boy again," he nearly let the reins slip out of his weather-beaten hands from emotion.
Ulrich had brought back with him Paulchen's trunks and play boxes, and these were piled high on the back seat of the sleigh. Among them were the two big Christmas parcels of toys which the little fellow had looked out for so expectantly on Christmas Eve, and gone in search of. They had been delivered the next day by the pleased postman.
The sleigh glided on through the moonless night. On the plain the whiteness of the snow made a faint glimmer; the poplars bordering the road emerged in blurred outline one after the other out of the dark. Ulrich fancied that from behind each tree Paulchen must appear and call to him, "Take me home. I am afraid; so afraid. Take me home, please."
Then came the long bridge which had been Paulchen's delight. It was a hundred and fifty paces in length, and had balustrades of black and white palings, on which he had always said that he wanted to climb when he was "big enough." Underneath the bridge, where it was often dry enough to walk, there was an echo, and when a carriage passed overhead it was like the rolling of thunder.
And a little further on was the chief wonder of the road, a windmill that stood on a roof. Think of it! a windmill high up on a roof! Forlornly it spread its snowy wings now, like the ghost of a giant stretching its arms into the grey night sky.
So the drive continued till the demesne of Uhlenfelde came in sight. Here there seemed scarcely an inch of land that was not sanctified by some association with the dead boy. How gloomy and desolate were the wide fields! They looked as if a bright day could never dawn again to bathe them in sunshine; as if eternal winter had settled on the world.
He looked forward to the prospect that awaited him with shuddering. He dreaded alike his work and his leisure.
Then he thought of Felicitas, and was ashamed of thinking so much of his own feelings. The task before him was to coax with gentle patience and tactful caution, a despairing woman, slowly back to the ordinary walks of life.
A burst of compassionate love for her gushed forth from his soul. He felt as if she and Leo were a legacy left to him by the poor little fellow who had died so tragically.
Yes, with Leo too he must try and set things right. He would go to him, look him straight in the eyes, clasp his hand; and say--
"Man, speak out, and over the dead tell me honestly, what is the barrier that has grown up between you and me?"
The sleigh turned through the courtyard gateway. The servants and labourers lined the drive in black groups, and in silent sympathy bared their heads. All had foregone their beer, and none had spent the sabbath hours of repose at home with wife and child, because they all wished by their presence there to show him how they felt for him in his bereavement.
The sleigh drew up. His heart beat faster, for he feared Felicitas would come out to meet him; but she did not come. She was waiting for him in her corner-boudoir, standing erect by the writing-table. Her deep mourning-dress made her look taller. She appeared to him almost majestic, or was it her sorrow which invested her in his eyes with majesty? yet the expression of the haggard eyes, which looked bigger than ever because her face had grown so thin, was not one of sorrow. Rather did it appear to be anxiety and horror that gazed out of them, as if she feared being surprised in a defenceless position.
"Lizzie," he stammered, holding out his arms to her.
She dropped her lids, and leant against the wall for support. He drew her head to his breast and led her to an easy-chair, murmuring over her, softly, words of comfort. All the love with which his heart was overflowing he lavished upon her. He spoke of their belonging to each other more completely than ever before, of the sacred hallowing influence the death of the innocent child would have upon both their lives. He promised to give her for the future boundless confidence, most fervent trusty and tenderest consideration; all, indeed, that he had given her for years, which for years she had accepted with smiling indifference, and without heeding the giver.
So soon as it dawned on her that he was not in the least disposed to make her responsible and call her to account, her nervous rigidity relaxed; she slid on to the carpet, and, burying her head on his knees, sobbed bitterly.
He went on speaking to her in the same soothing, gentle tone. She wrung her hands, and beat her forehead. For an instant her maternal grief, which in spite of everything was strong within her, had full sway without anyarrière penséinterrupting it. But her expressions were so wildly exaggerated, that soon even her grief became artificial, and the last remnant of pure and noble sentiment she had possessed was destroyed.
Gradually she grew calmer, and she let her arms fall to her sides. A lassitude that was almost pleasant overcame her. She let him raise her and lay her on the couch. She felt the burning desire that children feel after a whipping--to be pitied and consoled.
"Oh, Ulrich," she murmured, "what I have suffered!"
He started. A sense of disappointment suddenly damped his sympathy. Surely at this hour her first words should not have been words of pity for herself.
He said nothing; but his eyes wandered about the room as if he were pondering on some new experience. Supper was announced. The officials who generally sat at table with them had tactfully begged to be excused to-night. Husband and wife were alone.
The tea-kettle hummed, and the bronze hanging-lamp shed a soft lustre on the snowy damask and gleaming silver.
Felicitas busied herself about his creature-comforts, acting on an impulse to pay off the gigantic debt she owed him with the small coin of little kindnesses and attentions. She prepared his sardines in his favourite way, cut him the thinnest bread-and-butter, and poured two spoonfuls of rum in his tea--a pick-me-up he was obliged sometimes to resort to. She put a cushion at his back, and drew the shade low over the lamp, so that his "poor tired eyes" should not be dazzled.
He watched her in painful amazement. He would have preferred satisfying his hunger to-night silently and unobserved, like a dog, and not to have been reminded that there were such things as dainty living and tit-bits in the world.
"How can she think of these trifling matters, when a few moments ago she was idling on the floor in despair?" he asked himself.
With a fine instinct she divined what was passing in his mind, and changing her tack, began again to give a harrowing account of her own sufferings.
"No, Ulrich," she said, "you can't conceive what torture it was to me to think of you alone at his grave: not to be there to help you, and stand by you. But it could not be helped. The doctor gave strict orders that I was not to attempt the journey; besides, I was very ill; a little more and you would not have found me alive."
She paused, expecting him to question her about the attempted suicide; but as he was silent she led the conversation round to it herself.
"Are you still angry with me, dearest?" she asked.
"Why should I be angry?"
"Because I acted so wickedly, and, in the first shock of my grief, doubted God and His mercy, so that I believed it was impossible to go on living. Ah, Ulrich, if you knew the state I was in then, you would, I am sure, forgive me."
"I have nothing to forgive, Felicitas."
"But you say it so severely, Ulrich. I know, of course, that I have committed a great sin, that one ought to endure patiently any misery God inflicts on us; but I was so alone, so utterly alone--you away, no one to turn to. First, I thought of throwing myself in the river. That would have been the quickest; but the river was frozen. Next, I thought I would roam about the fields and freeze to death--and I did stay out half one night, and it didn't kill me, and so I came home, and snatched up some poison--the first that came to hand--and drank, drank. It was like liquid fire in my throat, and I saw dancing suns before my eyes, and then I fell, and I don't know what happened afterwards. Do you see, Uli, what a terrible time your poor little wife has gone through?"
In her longing to hear him console her, she began to cry once more. But the desired consolation was not forthcoming.
"Ah! how much better it would have been," she lamented further, "if I had never awoke. What is life? Nothing but sorrow, wretchedness, and misunderstanding. When one's heart is torn, one is always most alone. Ah, Uli! for you, too, it would have been best. Would you have mourned for me a little?"
He did not answer. He looked at her, and looked again, and she turned him to stone. He had been waiting for the bitter cry of maternal anguish. But she talked of herself, and only of herself. His eyes beheld her in her fair loveliness, rocking herself to and fro on her chair. The rounded curves of her slender figure were set off by the close-fitting mourning-gown. Her masses of curly golden hair shone like a halo above her forehead and small rosy ears. The perpetual smile, half-melancholy, half-injured, on the small face, seemed to say that she would like to smile all death and pain out of existence. He was conscious of a slight repulsion as he examined her, and was ashamed of it the next moment. Why was he suddenly become so embittered? Had he not always known that patience was very necessary in dealing with this fair, light creature?
And in a voice more of reproach than blame, he said, "Have you no questions to ask about the boy, Felicitas?"
She held out her hands in horrified entreaty.
"Not to-day, dearest," she implored. "Not to-day. It would excite us both too much. I have pictured it all a thousand times over. All the dreadful scenes have floated before my eyes by night and day, and I am tired, oh, so tired, I crave for sleep--for one real good long sleep--and never to wake again How beautiful that would be!"
Shutting her eyes, she laid herself across the arm of the chair, so that her full creamy throat dimpled over the tight folds of black chiffon that encircled it.
Again he had to struggle with a feeling of disgust; but with a quiet determination, characteristic of his methodical nature, he adhered to his purpose of giving her an account of Paul's last hours.
"Our feelings ought not to make cowards of us, Lizzie," he said. "I know you must have suffered much. I should have known it, even if you had not told me. But it is in vain to try and spare yourself this. Our thoughts will always be returning to it, and not till you have drunk your cup of sorrow to the dregs can you hope to get any truly refreshing rest."
"Very well, speak, then," she said, cowering together, as if resigning herself to her fate. "Tell me what you like."
But when he saw the terror with which she contemplated hearing his story, the words froze on his lips, and he felt as if he could never impart to her the painful and sacred impressions that were so fresh in his memory. He had expected that she would have drunk in all with passionate eagerness, and would have questioned him about every minute that he had passed by Paul's deathbed, till she was in complete possession of the whole scene. Instead, she shrank from it, in a vulgar fear of her nerves being upset.
Unmotherly, almost inhuman, did her conduct appear. Now, he felt that to speak of the child's quiet, pathetic death to the mother, would be profanation. Though there had been no tie of blood between them, he had belonged to him in life and in death. This woman from whose womb he had sprung, this smiling, frightened woman, who only thought of her own discomfort, and wished to be pitied for herself, had become a stranger--a stranger to her child, and a stranger to him. He saw, with horror, the gulf that she set between him and her, which no seductive charm, no flattering little speeches, could ever bridge again.
"Perhaps you are right, Felicitas," he said coldly. "We will leave it for the present; it may be too sad a subject and too exciting for you."
"Ah, how good you are!" she whispered gratefully; "you can feel for your poor, heart-broken wife."
And as she had often done when she wanted to bewitch him with a cheap endearment, she stretched over to him and pillowed her head against his arm, looking into his face with ecstatically uplifted eyes.
He submitted passively, and glanced down in cold astonishment on the pale, pretty features on which an almost coquettish smile was now playing. In a flash he seemed to see through the thousand machinations with which, for years, she had chained him to her chariot-wheel: the allurements with which she had awakened desires within him without any intention of satisfying them, and the extravagant caprices, obeying which had weakened his will and degraded his intellect. The whole tissue, woven of laughing selfishness and self-seeking affability and mocknaïveté, now fell away, showing the being he had humbly worshipped in her naked unreality and insincerity.
He could not guess that all she said and did at the moment was a kind of veiled apology, for in her mania to excuse her past faults she had revealed herself to him in her true colours. He saw all that was hollow and vain and false in her, without understanding why she prevaricated and lied. They sat on together for another hour. The table was cleared, but the spirit-lamp still hummed. The antique Dutch clock in the corner kept up its solemn and deliberate tick. Now and then a shower of snow-flakes whirled against the window and the sashes rattled gently. A profound, dreamful peace seemed to have descended on the apartment, a peace well ordained to bring healing to two wounded hearts.
Felicitas, all unsuspecting, yet inwardly anxious, continued to make herself charming and amiable. She spoke of the sympathy shown her by friends and neighbours, the countless letters of condolence which she had received, the many callers she had refused to see. She even made plans for the future, and promised all sorts of wonderful things to comfort and distract him. He listened with grave courteous attention; and in every word he found confirmation of his new reading of her character. His eyes wandered round the room. He saw the lights and shadows dancing on the walls; the dear old objects amidst which he had been brought up, which he would have bequeathed to his step-son; so soon as he could have legally adopted him. He listened to the ticking of the clock and all the familiar sounds which in peaceful evening hours are the music of happy homes.
But now everything seemed different, everything was strange, unreal, almost disquieting.
"Away!" a voice cried within him. "Flee from this house which is no longer yours." And when the watchmen whistled outside the hour of ten, he rose. His torture had lasted long enough. She offered her forehead to be kissed with a weary sigh, but he bowed low and kissed her hand instead.
"And you really aren't angry with me?" she asked in a whisper, her conscience stirring again.
He shook his head, smiling. The scorn which had taken possession of his soul made him composed and frigid. He left her, and as the door closed behind him she threw up her hands and exclaimed--
"Thank God!"
The next morning Ulrich explained to his wife that urgent business called him to Königsberg, where the committee for the Agricultural Exhibition was holding its meetings, and it was uncertain whether he would return to Uhlenfelde before the opening of the Reichstag.
Felicitas was at first a little taken aback, then readily acquiesced.
The parting of husband and wife was friendly but undemonstrative. Felicitas indeed regarded the separation so much in the light of a deliverance that she forgot to act a part.
When the sleigh reached the top of the dyke, Ulrich halted, and took a long look across at Halewitz, whose hoary old castle seemed to nod a greeting at him amidst its snow-covered barns and out-buildings. Though his heart cried out for his friend, he was afraid to meet him, afraid that if he did the last precious thing left to him on earth might slip through his fingers.