In these days Leo became anhabituéof the Prussian Crown. He was received there with open arms by a jovial company, according to whose standard he was a thoroughly "decent chap," being capable of drinking as hard as most.
The handful of Uhlan officers could talk big, but when it came to putting their prowess to the test by a genuine prolonged carousal, they could not be depended on, and dropped out of the ranks before the struggle had really half begun. The truth was that the colonel in command had strict orders to guard against any excesses, lest the demoralising civilian influence should bring the mixed garrison into disrepute.
The citizens were, on the whole, a famous crew, and as often in debt and in drink as befitted old corps students. One, it was true, held himself aloof, because he was a Jew and feared baiting. But his place was filled by a newspaper reporter, likewise a Jew, who adopted opposite tactics, and, with the plasticity of his race, had become the most convivial of the party and the wildest of a wild lot.
The circle was sometimes joined by a couple of landed proprietors, unable to put in a regular appearance owing to their wives and the distance of their homes, and whose presence, when they did come to drink away dull hours, added to the gaiety of the topers.
As beer and red wine were considered little stronger than innocent ditch-water, a particularly piquant kind of punch was the beverage chosen, by means of which the object desired was most quickly accomplished. This was an appalling mixture of cognac and port-wine, with sugar added, and it was carried to the table piping hot. The man had never been met with yet who could hold out against the peculiar effects of this devilish concoction. And every time that the punch was brewing on the kitchen fire, the waiters and ostlers received orders to hold themselves in readiness to act the part of good Samaritan to the guests.
Nevertheless, the milieu of the Prussian Crown was a little too steady and staid for some tastes. Certain respectable worthies came there to read the newspapers, have a game of cribbage or chess, and their request for quiet had perforce to be regarded.
Another drawback was the lack of female society. At other resorts in Münsterberg, where the more plebeian revellers sought their distractions with indifferent beer and good grog, were to be found ladies with whom one could chat behind the bar.
At Engelmann's, for instance, was the barmaid known as the fair Ida; and Gretchen, nicknamed the "Toad," ogled through the window of Gambrinus's which was generally empty; while, if one wanted variety, there was the Restaurant Königgrätz, where the young ladies came and went in rapid succession. Johann, the Halewitz coachman, had waited many an hour, of late, freezing on his box before the curtained windows of these hostels, and he and Christian had entered into a conspiracy together to screen their master and hide his ruin from the world; they invented a hundred excuses for his late home-coming, and lied to every one who questioned them on the subject. Yet, in spite of that, all the servants and tenants knew their master had become a drunkard, and spent his nights in debauchery. And there was no surprise after the scene of Christmas Eve, which had impressed itself so deeply on their memory. In the castle itself the evil was felt without the cause of it being clearly understood. Its inmates were in terror of Leo's sudden outbursts of temper, his growling and grumbling. When his behaviour was tolerable, the poor women would venture hopefully on drawing a smile or a kind word from him, but were generally roughly repulsed, and would retire from the attempt with tears of shame and indignation in their eyes.
Dear, sweet-tempered grandmamma suffered no less than Hertha, and Elly and her fat pug between them got well bullied.
But there was no one who suffered as much as himself. Despite his efforts to be a fiend, he remained nothing but a poor wretch, bleeding from the scourgings of self-contempt; a martyr to feverish longing and the craving of the senses, seeking mental and physical exhaustion by plunging into one soul-deadening dissipation after the other.
The idea of making an end of himself grew stronger day by day. He played with his despairing resolves as a child does with its toys. Sometimes he felt as if he must commit murder, and a favourite occupation of his distorted mind was to picture himself laying hands on innocent people who had done, and never would do, him any harm, but whom in his suspicious irritability he chose to regard as enemies and slanderers. Yes, murder some one, and afterwards go to gaol and the gallows; that would be peace and salvation at last. He had seen no more of Felicitas since that memorable morning. She had twice written to him, but he had evaded answering her. The last remnants of his strength of will were used to keep up this cowardly attitude. He had heard from Ulrich too, begging him to forgive him for not having looked him up the last time he was at home. This made him laugh his harshest laugh. If they had met, what a delightful meeting it would have been!
It was at this time that something happened to rouse him from the contemplation of his own degradation. His old friend, fat and honest Hans von Sembritzky, drew him cautiously one day at the Prussian Crown into a corner and said, puffing and short of breath--
"A word with you, old man. Although it is not a very serious matter in itself, and may not mean much, you ought to look after your little sister Elly a bit. She is just at the age, you know, when girls do silly things. At any rate, it would be wise to keep writing-materials out of her way; ink is rather a dangerous medium for flirtation."
Leo, half alarmed and half annoyed, demanded an explanation.
"You know Pastor Brenckenberg's cub, who has been loafing about at home for more than a year, doing no good? Swaggering corps student, boasts of his colours and his clubs; but to what purpose? The fellow gets more and more dissipated and dissolute, and he dare not show his nose now in any decent house; even the bailiffs are sick of him. And no wonder, as----"
Leo interrupted with a brusque suggestion that he should come to the point.
"Well, my bailiff Lawrence, a thoroughly honest and reliable person, told me yesterday that the Kandidate Brenckenberg had been passing round his love-letters from little Elly Sellenthin in a beer cellar at Münsterberg, and had also read passages from them aloud. Some of the company had been amused, others indignant. In short, the affair has caused a scandal."
Leo felt a sense of cruel triumph mingle with his rage. He had wanted some object that he could crush, pulverize, and annihilate, and here he had one to his hand. Hans was astonished at the loud laughter with which he greeted his information, and a little hurt.
"You don't seem to take the matter seriously," he remarked.
"Wait a bit, old fellow; only wait," said he, and clapped him on the shoulder.
Then he sat down and drank deeply, while his friend shook his head and privately deplored his rapid degeneration.
At first Leo intended to give his sister a scolding, but when on the following day he was face to face with her, he had lost the desire to humiliate her. Why draw forth tears and wailings from this child when the youth was in his power? Better reserve himself for that encounter.
He confined himself, therefore, to taking hold of her by the arm, and teazing her by a hundred taunts and gibes. He felt a kind of malicious sympathy with her. Had she, after all, done anything very bad? He, who was on the high-road to ruin and fully conscious of what he was doing, could not be hard on this little fool for stumbling in the blindness of her youthful pursuit of enjoyment. So when he had tormented her sufficiently, he kissed her and let her go. This had happened shortly after the dinner-hour was over. A little later, Hertha, pale from suppressed excitement, came to him with a letter from Johanna. His eldest sister wrote that she had things of urgent importance to speak to him about, and prayed that on the receipt of her note he would come to her immediately.
"She may congratulate herself that I can obey her summons," he thought.
But in spite of his feigned scorn and indifference, he knew that he was afraid of Johanna, or, if not of her, of the discomfort with which she always threatened him. For a reminder from Johanna that she existed meant nothing pleasant. A sudden current of vigorous life shot through his limbs and told him how much he could still hate. He hated her, and Felicitas, and every one. But her most of all.
He put on his fur coat and strode over the park. It was nearly four o'clock. The pale winter sun was sinking, and scarcely able to illumine the monotonous greyness of the snow-covered fields with its feeble parting rays, though here and there there trembled over the landscape a crystalline-blue reflection. The shrubberies seemed like black crouching figures on the ground, and between the highest straggling branches the light peeped like a thousand round eyes.
The girls had made a slide on the snowy surface of the carp pond, and it spanned it like a narrow dark ribbon from bank to bank. Absently Leo slid along the slide, and considered himself lucky that he got to the other side without a fall. He recalled the sultry afternoon on which he had smoked his cigar here, stretched out on the seat, and had awaited with perfect calm the interview with his sister. The seat was now cushioned with snow, on which the footmarks of birds had made a star-like pattern. He felt inclined to throw himself down there again in spite of the snow, and try to recover the equable frame of mind that he had been in then.
"Ah, but she won't get off so well this time," he thought, and he made his way along the overgrown path that led to the dower house.
She stood at the window waiting for him. As he entered the room, she turned round and, biting her lips, gave him a cold glassy stare. She had aged still more since he had last seen her, and seemed more gaunt and wasted. The flesh on her throat hung in folds, and the sharp line of pain from mouth to chin completely marred the oval of her face. The greyish side light which fell upon her gave a chalk-like hue to her complexion peculiar to people who are fitting themselves for the next world by ascetic exercises, and to those who have imposed on themselves some great mental strain.
"So this is where you prefer to dwell," he said, and looked round him.
He saw the white crucifix in its corner, with theprie Dieuin front of it, and heavy pieces of furniture on which the fading daylight lay unbecomingly. The odour of poor children which the scholars had left behind them almost suffocated him, and with it was mingled the smell of dried grasses and mouldy hymn-books.
"Please sit down," Johanna said, without offering him her hand.
There was a weary, sad, almost tearful sound in her voice which was new to him. Also the manner in which she went to the sofa and slowly sank amongst the cushions seemed the action of one physically weak and broken in spirit.
"I have asked you to come here," she began, "so that you shall know God's decision with regard to us. For what is about to happen is the judgment of God. I have no will in the matter, except to do His bequest. But you shall not be able to reproach me with having dealt this blow from behind in an underhand way."
Of course she was threatening him; he had expected nothing else.
"Well, what is it now?" he inquired, suppressing his rising antagonism. "What do you want of me, and will it cost me much? You pious folks have your own prices, I know."
His scoffing raillery had no effect upon her.
"Look here, Leo," she said, in a still more tired and subdued voice, "I am sorry for you. I would have given much to be able to save you and all of us, for you have involved us all in your ruin. But there is no contending against God's law, and He has spoken. The child is dead. Do you know why the child died?"
"Leave the child out of it," he murmured. "What has the child to do with you?"
"That I will tell you, Leo," she replied, stretching her languid arm towards the crucifix. "On that spot she sentenced the child to death; and she did it for your sake."
He felt as if some one had struck him with open hand on the forehead. He tried to speak, but his thoughts were in a whirl. Only a strangled laugh rose from his throat.
Was this embittered sister of charity in league with the devil, that she could divine human secrets and see into the future? For a moment a deathlike stillness reigned in the oppressive, over-heated room, which was filled now with the shadows of falling dusk. Johanna kept her eyes fixed stonily on the dark corner where the crucifix stood out in luminous relief, like a witness of the crime.
"On that spot," Johanna went on, "she knelt and took her oath, and I believed her, for one doesn't swear falsely on the head of one's own child. And you were both warned. I let you take the sacrament together, so that you both should be quite honest in your good resolutions. Then I saw how wild you became, and I felt anxious. And the child was still alive, nothing had happened; 'but God will speak in His own good time,' I thought. And day after day I sat and waited for the child to die. Then it did die, and I knew what I wanted to know. It is useless for you to defend yourself, or deny anything, Leo; God has spoken, and I believe God beforeyou."
He boiled with inarticulate wrath, scarcely knowing what words he could use to lash her with.
"What noble conduct! What sublimely noble conduct," he snarled, "to sit and wait like a cat watching for a mouse, all eager expectancy to hear of the death of an innocent child!"
"There is nothing left for me to live for," she said, with a moan. "No one wants me; I am quite superfluous--quite."
"It doesn't seem like it," he scoffed. "Why have you summoned me to come to you? Speak out. What is the blow you are holding up your sleeve?"
"Blow!" replied his sister. "Don't call it that. Say rather benefit--benefit for us all. I have kept silent from one year's end to another, and have staked everything upon it--youth, happiness, peace of mind! But now I must speak--God wills it so. God directs that I shall tell Ulrich all, so that his house may be purified again, and his eyes opened to what sort of woman his wife is, and what sort of man his friend."
He had sprung to his feet, and his hands groped towards her. For an instant his insensate fury blinded him. "Put an end to her, so that she can do no more mischief," something said within him. "Kill her rather than let her betray you."
His eyes wandered over the walls. He saw a bouquet of dusty pampas grass in a blue china jar on a bracket, a good shepherd smiling sweetly down on the lamb in his arms, and other religious lithograph prints. Slowly he collected himself.
"When do you propose to carry out your intentions?" he inquired hoarsely.
"So soon as it is necessary," she answered.
"When will it be necessary?" he eagerly questioned her again. "Ulrich is away. From Königsberg he will be going to Berlin. He can't be back before March. So till then you will have to be patient."
"I can urge him to come home," she replied in a low tone, with a tearful smile.
"That you shall not do," he cried, seizing hold of her roughly.
The room spun round. Again he saw nothing but the blood-red vapour of his fury, and through it a pair of widely opened eyes staring up at him in agonised terror. He felt a lean throat yielding to the pressure of his fingers. At that moment his sister was nothing more to him than an insect, a moth shying at the light, that could be crushed to powder in his grasp.
"You will hold your tongue," he hissed, "or I'll throttle you."
He tried to pull her up, but with a sharp hollow bang her head struck against the corner of the sofa. An expression of acute pain passed over her face, and she sank in a kneeling attitude on to the floor. Then he half regained his senses. He let go of her throat, and propped her head against the cushion. And then he tore about the room, his eyes searching in desperation every corner, as if there must be some solution concealed there as to how he was to save himself and Ulrich. The crucifix floated weirdly white in the gathering shadows. He saw the good shepherd smile, and the dusty grasses seemed to tremble.
"How can I save myself, how can I save myself?" he cried inwardly. And he felt as if the hatchet which the shadow of evil had held over his head for so many months was about to fall. But at the sight of his sister lying motionless on the ground, with her head resting against the sofa, he began to feel ashamed.
"Get up, Johanna," he begged. "It is true that I would like to kill you, but I don't want to ill-treat you."
He held out a hand to help her rise. She rejected his offer, and with difficulty seated herself again in her former position.
"Poor Leo!" she said, and there was a note of compassion in her tired voice.
"Yes, indeed poor Leo, poor Leo!" he exclaimed, planting himself before her in his consternation. "You can pity me, but you won't hesitate, nevertheless, to ruin me."
"You are ruined already," she muttered.
"And if I am, whose fault is it but yours and that cur of a priest? I'll be even with him too. You want to speak now, when neither God nor devil can do anything. But why did you not speak out at the time that Ulrich was going to take the insane step of marrying? You were the only person in the world who might have prevented the blunder. Why did you keep your mouth shut then, eh?"
She glanced at him from under her lids in furtive distress. Then a shudder swept the angular shoulders, on which her dress hung in ill-cut folds.
"I have repented. Oh! how I have repented everything--everything!" she murmured.
"Repented or no, that is not the question. When I asked you in the summer, it was the same. You answered by evasion. I say that if you have a clear conscience, you would have answered me then, and would answer me now."
"Oh, don't torment me!" she implored, in growing anxiety, and leant far back in the corner of the sofa. And on Leo repeating his demand even more emphatically, she burst into hysterical weeping. Motionless she sat there, with the tears streaming in rivulets over her hollow cheeks.
He had never seen her look so yielding and so defenceless, and in the midst of his wrath and misery a gleam of chivalrous pity stirred within him, and he began involuntarily to speak to her in gentler tones.
"Listen, Johanna. I came here hating you very sorely, God knows. A little more, and I might have---- But you are not what you were, for all your threats. You and I are both poor bruised and broken creatures, so we may as well be frank with each other. Come, tell me what I wish to know, before it is too late."
Her tears were quenched, and she looked at him in utter mystification at the unexpected softness in his manner. So accustomed was she to regard him in the light of some wild beast, that she could hardly grasp that he meant to be kind. Gradually her eyes recovered their fixed and glassy expression, and she nodded her bead mysteriously towards the crucifix in the corner. "Look at Him," she said--"near, quite near."
"At whom?"
"The Saviour."
He approached theprie Dieu, and gazed into the white face of the Crucified, so calm in its supreme repose, as if weary of all earthly contentions and excitement of the emotions.
"Do you see the resemblance?" asked his sister, with an almost prudish smile.
"No; to whom?"
"Oh, Leo! can't you see?" she replied, with a melancholy little attempt at playfulness, "Any child could tell you whom it is like. It is Ulrich; exactly like Ulrich!"
"Ah, really!" exclaimed Leo, and as he saw the look of half-triumphant possession in her face, the martyrdom of a lifetime was revealed to him in a flash.
"Hannah," he said, "why, if you loved him so much, did you take up with that villain Prachwitz?"
She started. "Love!" she stammered. "Who spoke of love? How can I love any one?"
"What is the use of dissimulating? Haven't you as good as confessed?" he answered.
Whereupon she threw herself back on the sofa-cushion and began to weep again silently, as if she feared the intense sorrow of her soul being brought to light. She tried to speak, but could only articulate a confused murmur. It was not only that she had suffered, but, worst of all, she was ashamed of her suffering.
And then at last she found words sufficiently humble in which to begin her tale.
"It would sound ridiculous to say so, Leo, and you may scoff at me as much as you like, but you are right. I love him, and I have always loved him. That has been my fate, and God meant me for him---me, and me alone. For I understood his character as no one else in the world could do, not even you, Leo, with all your great friendship. If I had become his wife, I would have kissed his feet and hands. I would have watched over his poor weakly body with the tenderest care, which now languishes because no one troubles about it. But she came--I won't abuse her; she has had her punishment--and for her sake he forgot me. He ran after her in the same way as you did. And, out of defiance, I took the first man who asked me.
"When I came back here as a widow, I wondered if he would care for me then; but she had become a widow too, thanks to you, and I was embittered and wretched, and daren't hope for happiness any more. She, on the contrary, had added attractiveness and fascinations in her mourning, and seemed to say, 'Come, take me and comfort me; here I am.' I saw how he was drawn to her more and more on the pretext of compassionating her loneliness, and I looked on, paralysed with agony that I might lose him a second time. But instead of making a fight for him, I kept out of his way. And so I lost him--lost him."
She stopped, smiling faintly before her. He writhed in his anger against the fate which seemed to be crushing them both beneath its relentless heel, and felt as if he must resist it with his last strength.
His sister went on. "Then came the day when I learnt your secret, and had her in my power. But so ungovernable had my hate and jealousy become that I said to myself, if he thought so lowly of me that he could prefer that degraded creature, I would let him marry her and rue the day, as you and I should rue it. There, now you know all. I have confessed the horrible sin I committed, which I repent bitterly to this hour, and shall repent so long as my poor head holds out. But it is, oh, so tired, my head; and my knees are tired too. It can't last much longer, dear Leo."
She laid her open palms upon her temples and sank back in the corner of the sofa.
"What plans have you for the future, Johanna?" he asked.
"I? None I shall go into a lunatic asylum."
"Hannah!" he cried.
"Yes. Don't you see that I am going mad?" she asked. "If you only knew the visions and hallucinations I have, I doubt whether you would let me go about without restraint. I have seen fiery swords, and the burning of Jerusalem; and I have seen the great Moloch, whenshethrew him little Paul as a sacrifice. Uriah's wife have I seen inhershape; and every night, do you know"--her eyes grew bigger as she poured out on him the horror of her sleepless nights--"every night the Saviour comes to me, and I may sit at His feet and put my fingers in His wounds; and then the whole room is full of His radiance, and hundreds and thousands of angels flap their red and blue wings like birds of paradise. That is a marvellous sight, I can assure you; but if I go on telling you more, two strange men will come and lay hold of me and drag me to a madhouse. But you won't let them do it, dear Leo, will you?" She sat upright and stroked his arm beseechingly with her outstretched hand.
He almost forgot his own position in pity for this poor wretched existence. It was true that just for a moment the thought passed through his mind that if he had her put under restraint, he would be saved. But the next he flung the idea from him in disgust. No; he too was sick and tired of life.
"Poor woman!" he said, coming nearer to her--"poor woman!" and he laid his right hand gently on her puritanically smooth head.
She looked up at him with the glance of a whipped hound, sighed deeply, and made an effort to lean her head against him. Seeing the movement, he sat down beside her and put his arm round her neck. They sat thus for a long time, clasping each other closely, their eyes fixed on the floor.
Now, when he realised how much the woman in his arms was his deadly enemy, every vestige of his hatred for her ebbed from his heart. Was she not made of the same clay as himself? She half a lunatic, he half a criminal, and both the victims of a tragic fate? The Sellenthin blood which had boiled so hotly in their veins had driven them along different paths to the same end.
He took Johanna's head caressingly between his hands, and they gazed at one another as if they could never look away. Brother and sister had found each other again in this encounter of savage fury, and in the depths of profoundest misery.
At last he kissed her on the forehead, and rose to go. "And you still feel that you must tell him?" he asked. "It is your firm resolve?"
Her features became strained, and her eyes again started and burned feverishly.
"Don't ask me," she said, in a tone of tearful obstinacy. "It is God's decree; God Himself has demanded it of me. Can I disobey God? And it must be soon, or my statement may not be credited as rational."
"Well, then, God's will be done," he said, taking up his cap. "Good-bye, Hannah."
"Good-bye, Leo."
Outside, he began to whistle his favourite "Paloma" air. He felt that he had received his death-sentence.
"Die, old boy; die--die!" a voice seemed to call to him as he walked along, and his spectral giant with the hatchet nodded assent as much as to say, "So far, so good."
There was only one alternative, and that was flight. In four-and-twenty hours he might be at Hamburg, thence take ship over the ocean, never to return.
There was a sum of three thousand marks to draw upon, the rest he must trust the Lord to provide; or, more strictly speaking, Ulrich.
Who would come and go through the accounts, appease the creditors, call in interest, and work heaven and earth to save the reputation of the disgraced fugitive? Ulrich, again; Ulrich, and no one else.
The reflection was so intolerable that it robbed him of the power of making any decision.
A written confession was out of the question, for what would become of Felicitas, exposed and betrayed, left behind in Ulrich's house?
How could he leave her in the lurch--she who clung to him with the deadly terror of a guilty woman? Besides, he was full of longing for her. There was not a fibre of his being that did not crave to possess her. He was incapable of picturing an existence without this horrible, agonising desire, which must remain for all eternity unfulfilled.
The next afternoon he set out for Uhlenfelde. He was drawn there by the effects of a sleepless night, a wretched day of dull despair, and, not least, by a malicious curiosity to know how she would take the threatened blow. If she set him free, he would start the same evening for the New World.
A groom informed him that the Baroness had gone forth alone, on foot, more than an hour ago.
Where had she gone? The man could not say. Yesterday and the day before she had done the same, and not returned home till long after dark.
His first emotion was one of unworthy, miserable jealousy, but he shook it off.
"To Münsterberg," was his command to the coachman, as he got into the sleigh.
It drove out of the courtyard, and in a few minutes he was surrounded by the snow-covered fields. It was just at this hour yesterday that he had gone to see Johanna.
The sky hung heavily over the landscape, like a brownish-grey canopy. Another fall of snow was coming, but the clouds were not yet low enough to open. Evening shadows were beginning to colour the vast expanse of monotone whiteness, and a soft wind stirred the bare brambles that flanked the ditches, and it made the remains of their dried, withered berries shiver as if they felt the cold. Through the silence rang out in stately measure the music of the moving sleigh. No other sound broke the stillness. From the hazel-wood which skirted the road for some distance, a covey of crows had slowly risen, and now hung noiselessly floating in the clouds. The pointed poplars by the roadside seemed every second to grow more black and massive.
Here he hoped to meet her, and he was not disappointed. He had scarcely turned into the wide main-road, when he saw a dark figure in flowing draperies of crape, walking towards Münsterberg. He quickly overtook her. She turned round. The wind had brought colour to her cheeks, and beneath the brim of her mourning hat, which cut a dark tricom on the fairness of her forehead, her face looked girlishly fresh and sweet. The tired, dark-rimmed eyes alone showed that she had suffered. They shone when she saw him, and she held out her hands as of old, charmed and radiant. His soul responded to her in jubilation. He sprang out of the sleigh, and bidding the man walk the horses slowly up and down, he offered her his arm.
"What are you doing here, Felicitas?" he asked.
"I have been on the prowl for you," she whispered. "Are you angry with me for doing it?"
"Why should I be angry?" he answered. "I have just been to see you."
"At last!" she sighed, and leaned closely against him. "My whole life is nothing but one long waiting for you, Leo. I am sick with longing for you."
"And I for you," he muttered.
Her arm trembled violently in his. They were both silent for a moment, for they now knew what they had wanted to know.
Bars of rosy twilight from the west fell on the snowy plain. The hazel-wood, as they walked towards it, deepened in colour from brown to violet, and the crows were on the ground again, sitting in black clumps amidst the scanty undergrowth, their beaks uplifted to the sky. Now and then there sounded from the road the sharp, sudden jingle of a bell, when the waiting horses stamped a hoof or moved a head.
Leo's heart beat. He felt that in the next few minutes their fate must be decided.
"Listen, Felicitas," he began; "things are in a bad way with us."
"What has happened?" she stammered, standing still, full of dismay, in the sleigh ruts.
"Nothing has happened yet. But we must part before something does."
She began to lament. "I knew you would desert me--I felt sure of it. But I won't let you. I will stay with you. I can't live without you." And she clung passionately to his arm, as if she feared he might, that minute, be snatched from her.
As he saw her face blanch, and her eyes raised to his in beseeching fear, he abandoned all thoughts of flight. He felt that responsibility for this trembling fellow-sinner was yet another burden added to his already sorely weighted soul.
She buried both hands in his fur, and held him fast as if she would never let him go. Had he walked on, he would have had to drag her after him along the ground.
"Then all I can do is to put a bullet through my brain," he murmured, looking beyond her.
She gave a sharp cry. "Have mercy on me," she implored. "Don't frighten me so. What have I done that you should frighten me so?"
"You have done nothing, Felicitas," he answered. "But Johanna is going to speak."
There was silence. The gentle breeze stole over the snow plains and whispered in the hedgerows. The crows had changed their squatting attitude, and were circling above the pair, with lazily flapping wings, while the more distant ones were preparing to fly.
Felicitas slowly loosened her grasp, and passed her hand three times dreamily over her forehead. She glanced searchingly to right and left, as though she suspected the avenger might be crouching in the ditch.
"Come into the wood," she said; "no one will see us there." And without waiting for his consent she plunged sideways over the deep snow, furrowed here and there by the footprints of wild creatures. She did not dare to stop, till she had reached the protection of the thin branches of the underwood. He followed her with deliberate steps, and he, too, felt relieved when the shrubs hid them from view.
"Sheshallnot speak," exclaimed Felicitas, clasping her hands. "I pray you, dearest, to prevent it. You must put a seal on her lips; promise that you will."
He laughed gloomily. "There is one means by which I might prevent her," he said; "and if she insists, I could resort to it."
But again he felt disgust at the idea which he had before entertained for a moment, and then rejected as monstrous.
"Leave me alone!" he cried out to her. "I am sick and tired of it all ... I must end it."
"Only, don't run away," she whimpered, clinging to him once more. "Don't run away--anything rather than that."
"I agree with you," he replied; "there is one other course for me to take--better than flight" He shuddered, and was silent.
"You mean die?" she asked, half inquisitive, half terrified, pressing herself against him, like a child in the dark.
He nodded. "You must see there is no third course."
"Yes, I see. Then die," she whispered, throwing back her head with an inviting smile. "Much better die."
He grew hot. "You seem to be in a tremendous hurry to get rid of me," he said with half fretful jocularity.
"To get rid of you?" she asked, offended. "Do you think I would let you die without me?"
"Felicitas!" he exclaimed, seizing both her hands.
"Could there be a more blissful fate for me, beloved," she went on in a whisper, "than to die in your arms?"
He held her close to him. A feeling of intoxication, which he interpreted as a longing for death, took shuddering possession of his soul. It was succeeded by a damping mistrust--mistrust of himself, and much more of her.
"Are you serious?" he asked. "For I tell you plainly this time it will be no joke--we shall not drink toothache drops!"
"How can you?" she pouted; and then, with a smile of rapture, she added, "I will be yours ... yours. If not in life, at least in death!"
"Reflect on it well, Felicitas," he warned her again. "Remember, that it is not only the bald fact that we die. It may cost us no great pain to leave this scurvy world. But we shall forfeit in doing it all that man holds precious. We shall be cast like a dog into a nameless grave. They will spit at our memory."
"What will that matter to us?" she asked, smiling. "We shall know nothing about it."
"Then you wish to die?"
"Yes, in your arms I wish to die," she breathed, and laid her head back with eyes blissfully closed, so that the evening light illuminated the fairness of her face.
"That's how she will look," thought he.
She lifted her lids. "Yes, yes; but I am still alive," she said, guessing his thoughts. Then with half playful melancholy, she sought his mouth thirstingly with her lips, and they proceeded to discuss how things should be arranged.
The next day was to be consecrated to their last business affairs. At the hour of midnight they were to meet on the river's bank to select the place where the light of another day should dawn on them, united in death.
Felicitas shivered.
"You are already drawing back?" he asked, seized by fierce suspicion
She hid her head on his breast. "And before?" she whispered up to him.
His glance wandered into the distance. He seemed to see the blue-hanging lamp at Fichtkampen, in whose rays he had lost for ever his pureness of heart, shining at him alluringly again.
"What do you mean by 'before'?" he stammered.
"I am a weak woman. At the very last moment I might lose my nerve and not be able to go down to the water alone, knowing that death would be waiting for me there. So please make it easier by coming up to fetch me. Then we could start together on our last walk."
For a moment a wild hope leapt up within him only to be quickly smothered. He looked down on her silently, and breathed in the fragrance of her body, that white, delicately moulded body, in which his young senses had once found rest and riches.
"If you are afraid," he said, "I will come."
She caught at the promise, and eagerly and anxiously began to explain how his visit was to be managed. Minna should go down to the stream and wait for him by the sandbank, and when he came, unlock the park gate and lead him up to her room by the new turret staircase.
He listened to her instructions half in a dream. He was shaken body and soul more strongly than before by that mysterious sense of intoxication, which was nothing, could be nothing else but the omnipotent desire for death.
And then they separated. She took the path to Uhlenfelde, and he went back to the sleigh.
When he reached the road, he stopped, leaned against a poplar, and looked after her. Her figure was a mere black strip in the midst of the vast white duskiness of the snow fields. It grew smaller and rounder, and finally shrank to a vanishing point. All at once a wave of cruel devouring scorn swept over him. Scorn of himself, scorn of her, scorn of the whole world.
This was the end! This was the end!
He laughed aloud, so fierce and mirthless a laugh, that Johann, who was sitting on his box twenty paces away, started and looked round.
The horses moved forward, the bells rippled through the air.
"What now?" Leo asked himself, and stared absently in the old coachman's face. He had intended to drive to Münsterberg. What did he want in Münsterberg? Ah, to be sure, he had been going to see the old Jew Jacobi in order to raise cash for his voyage to America. But that would not be necessary now. Nevertheless he must kill time somehow till the fatal hour drew near.
To Münsterberg, then. Sleighing was good sport, he said to himself, as he flew through the twilight, and the wind met his face. He tried to recollect what other business he had in Münsterberg. The threshing-machine wanted repairing. Hang the threshing-machine. Then there were debts to pay; paltry little debts; the big ones would have to remain unsettled. He owed a clerk called Danziger fifteen marks. A betting loss. Fritz, the head waiter at the Prussian Crown, had not been paid for the last drinking bout. And then he remembered that the fair-haired Ida had drunk his health in three brandy bitters, and was so far the loser by the transaction.
"Fair Ida isn't a bad sort," he thought "She mustn't suffer through my death."
On the road, to the right, he passed the tumble-down seat of the Neuhaus family, who rack-rented their tenants to stave off bankruptcy. A little further on was Althof, where fat Hans Sembritzky was gradually developing into the worst of husbands through having too easy a time.
All was vain and rotten. Life was a hollow mockery, and he whistled contemptuously as he adopted the embittered attitude of the abandoned outcast towards the world he was leaving. Aye, to quit it was the only wisdom. For everything else was folly, even Ulrich's ... Hush! he must not think of Ulrich.
The blow would kill him, that was certain. Not the strongest could survive such a betrayal. All he could do to soften it would be to leave behind a few hasty lines, alluding to the old sin, but not to the renewal of the old love. Ah, why had Ulrich committed the insane folly of marrying a woman who belonged by nature to a scamp like himself? No, he must not, could not think of Ulrich.
How charming she had looked in her mourning weeds. Like a nun in a novel. With what tactful care she had avoided mentioning Ulrich's name, as if no such person as Ulrich existed. And it had not occurred to her either to waste a word or a tear on the poor little fellow in his distant grave.
He was dead, and forgotten before the grass had grown over him. Dead and forgotten as he, Leo Sellenthin, would soon be dead and forgotten. Well, the only thing that mattered now was that fair-haired Ida should be paid for the absinth.
First he went to pay his debts at the Prussian Crown, and found two or three of his recent associates there, fat Hans, of course, among them. They were busily engaged playing games of dice of their own invention over their glasses of flat beer. They played "The Naked Sparrow," and "The Highest House-number" at six-pfenning points.
Leo was greeted with a roar of welcome, and asked to join. He answered with sudden reckless indiscretion: "My boys, I am going to shoot myself to-morrow, so I don't know whether I ought."
They considered the question seriously, then the majority agreed that it would be permissible for him to play if the games chosen bore on the gravity of the situation. So they forthwith proposed, "The Wet Funeral," "The Corpse in the Forest," and because they could not think of anything else particularly sad, "The Hole in the Ceiling."
Leo made his throws, and cracked his jokes, but all the time a voice cried triumphantly in his ear, "Die, old boy, die--die."
When he had lost the game and paid up, he explained that he had business to settle with the fair Ida, and as it was dark, the others offered to accompany him. Leo took the lead. He pushed open the swing-door of Engelmann's beer-cellar, and found in the hot little room, reeking with smoke, a table full of toping bailiffs and farmers.
Fair Ida flew to him and hung round his neck; but he shook her off roughly, for there at the head of the drinkers he beheld the Candidate Kurt Brenckenberg smug and smiling as ever, and a cruel satisfaction thrilled through him.
"The fellow is now in my clutches," he said to himself; "and so I shall not go to another world without having avenged the insult my family has suffered from this impudent cur."
The Halewitz bailiffs, at the entrance of the new-comers, had risen respectfully to give up their seats, but the candidate, though visibly paler, pretended not to have noticed or seen any one come in. Leo went up to him.
"I have something to say to you, Herr Kurt Brenckenberg."
"You know where to find me, Herr Leo von Sellenthin," replied the Candidate, without stirring from his place.
"Thank God I have found you," Leo replied.
The boy struggled to put on his most arrogant air.
"Excuse me, Herr von Sellenthin," he said, toying nervously with the badge in his buttonhole. "I must remind you that I am corps-student, and know what is etiquette in these matters. Once before you have treated me in this extraordinary fashion. Please leave me alone. I have no time to give you at present."
Something like pity awoke in Leo, as he smiled down on this wretched little upstart bristling with pugnacity. At another time he might have challenged him to face his pistol, and might have shot him down, but now that his own death-knell had sounded, such a course seemed hardly worth while and to belong too much to the things that did not matter; to the petty despicable affairs of the world on which his hold was loosening.
Nevertheless he determined to give the young man a lesson, so that his foolish little sister should be safe from his impertinent attentions for the future.
"Get up!" he roared, seizing him by the arm, and putting him on his feet.
The Candidate raised his fist to strike him in the face. But before he could carry out his intention Leo's left hand gripped both his wrists as in a vice.
The fair-haired Ida screamed loudly and ran out. The bailiffs drew aside perturbed, and Hans Sembritzky initiated the rest of his party in the cause of the quarrel.
For a few minutes dead silence reigned in the stuffy, crowded room, which was insufficiently lighted by one smoking lamp.
The Candidate in his frantic efforts to free his hands bounded up and down like a dancing doll.
"You young blackguard," said Leo; "instead of sitting on your form at school you swagger about the countryside and play the devil. If your old father won't spank you I must."
He looked round for an instrument that would serve his purpose, and saw hanging against the wall a stout ruler, which the landlord used when making up his accounts. He tore it from its nail, then, supporting himself in a half-sitting posture against the nearest chair, he stretched the youth full length across his left knee. And while with his right he controlled the Candidate's desperately kicking feet, he did execution on his tightened trousers with a vigour that would have astounded the "Normans" and "Westphalians" had they been spectators of the scene.
"There, my son," said Leo, when he had done; "now you have got what you deserved. Go home and give your father my compliments."
With a face white as chalk and starting eyes, the Candidate reeled to a seat.
Leo calmly hung up the ruler again on its nail, and made a deep bow to the onlookers who stood round in a breathless and amazed circle. Then, giving Hans Sembritzky his hand, he strode to the door, laughing heartily. Not till he was seated in the sleigh did he remember that he had not paid fair Ida for her three absinths.