The Gropphusens" house, with its closed shutters and lowered blinds, looked half asleep; but Hannah"s windows were as usual draped in their pale pink curtains. Reimers went through the garden and into the porch.
He hesitated a moment and listened; not a sound was to be heard.
Then he rang. The electric bell echoed sharply in the deep stillness; but everything remained quiet. He could only hear the beating of his pulses.
He rang for the second time, but silence still reigned. Had the unhappy wife returned to her parents? Was the household broken up?
Then a door banged within the house, and light steps approached. The chain was taken down and the key turned in the lock.
Hannah Gropphusen stood on the threshold, a weary expression on her pale face; she was clad in a loose flowing gown of thin white silk. Her shoulders scarcely seemed fit to bear the weight of anything heavier than this light airy texture. Her small head was bowed as though unable to support the burden of her hair.
Her eyes expressed the astonished query: "How come you here?" And she stepped back hesitatingly.
"I have come on business," stammered Reimers.
Hannah opened the door and signed to him to enter. Her noiseless steps preceded him as she led him into her own little sitting-room.
She seated herself on the edge of the sofa and pointed to a chair.
"Won"t you sit down?" she said gently. But Reimers remained standing, gazing down upon the woman he loved. At last he was near her; he could see her and hear her voice.
She raised her eyes to his, as if asking why he would not be seated.
Their glances met, greeting and caressing each other in the first shy emotion of love.
The man threw himself down before the woman, covering her feet, her dress, her hands, her knees with kisses, and sobbing out the irrepressible confession of his love, over and over again, in unceasing repet.i.tion: "I love you! how I love you! I love you! how I love you!"
Hannah suffered his protestations silently. An unspeakable bliss weighed upon her and paralysed her. Tears streamed down her cheeks, and as though in the far distance she heard the soothing call of love: "I love you! how I love you!"
She bent over him with a glad, loving look. Her deep blue eyes shone darkly and protectingly, like the night sky.
"Hannah, I love you. I have always, always loved you. Only you, Hannah, only you!"
Her beautiful hand cooled his burning forehead. "I know," she whispered.
And he a.s.severated: "Even when I was hovering round Marie Falkenhein, it was you, you that I loved. You, only you! Hannah, do you believe me?"
She nodded: "I know."
Suddenly her aspect changed, and instead of the overpowering happiness came a hard, bitter expression.
"I know, too," she continued, in a low voice, "why you have broken off with Marie Falkenhein."
The words struck Reimers like a blow. He started back and tried to disengage himself from her. But the slender fingers held his hand with a spasmodic grasp which almost hurt him.
"You!" he cried. "How can that be?" Hannah had become calm. She stroked his hair tenderly. "How can that be?" she repeated. "Dearest! a woman can always find out anything she really wants to know. I wished to know this, and I know it."
In bitter shame the man broke down completely. He kissed the hem of her robe, and would have turned to the door.
"Forgive! forgive me!" he murmured.
But the fair hands would not let him go, and close in his ear a trembling voice whispered: "Stay, my beloved! For we belong to each other. I am--what you are. We are d.a.m.ned together, both of us. Stay!"
Reimers gazed up at her speechless, his eyes full of a terrible question.
Hannah rose. All signs of weariness had fallen from her; she stood erect, a sombre dignity in the expression of her countenance. She pointed back to that part of the house formerly inhabited by her husband.
"Through him," she said, in accents of denunciation, "I have been ruined. He has destroyed my life, so that I am--what I am."
She looked down upon the kneeling man before her, and suddenly the wild look of hatred and unrelenting sternness died out of her face.
"And now," she went on softly, "as things are, I could almost bless him for what he has done." Bitter irony invaded her tone. "Besides, he has bidden me adieu now like a man of honour. He is in Paris, and is going henceforth to devote himself entirely to art."
But then again lamentations burst from her lips, and long pent-up confessions, which she poured forth with a self-accusing candour.
"Listen, beloved," she said. "When he took me for his wife, a sort of dizzy enchantment overwhelmed me. We lived as in a mad whirl of intoxication. The hours that were not pa.s.sed together we counted lost; and there was nothing he could have asked of me in vain. He set my foot on his neck and called me queen, G.o.ddess. And I--I gave him my beauty."
She lifted her head with an imperial gesture, and a proud smile curved her lips.
"I was a spendthrift," she went on. "Undraped I have danced before him; and down in the garden he had a tent erected--people never could guess the purpose of those canvas walls, but there I sat to him, naked, on his dun-coloured Irish mare, Lady G.o.diva. And he fell weeping on his knees and worshipped me. He longed for a thousand eyes, that he might drink in the twofold beauty--mine, and the n.o.ble animal"s. He boasted that he would not repine if his eyes were stricken with blindness after having looked upon us."
She paused for a moment. The eternal might of beauty illumined her brow as though with an invisible crown. Then she bowed her head, and her voice lost its resonance.
"All that I gave him. I was no miser. The day came in which I repented my generosity. I suffered when he turned from me; but jealousy I felt none. Perhaps I was to blame for not recovering my pride at once. But through my love he had taught me that it is bitter indeed to love in vain."
She was silent. Her features hardened, and a deep furrow was graven in her smooth forehead.
"And then," her voice continued; "then came the moment of that terrible revelation. I do not know how I bore it. I was struck as by a lightning-flash; I was shattered. I wanted to leave him; but my people at home would not consent, and I--I could not tell him. Unresisting I let them do with me what they would. I would lie like a corpse, without movement or sensation; then I would rave, needing the most careful watching. And he--he came to me again, as the culmination of his misdeeds. I had become changed for him, more desirable. But I spat in his face. He came crawling and begging to me on his knees, and I struck him in the face and spurned him."
She raised her clenched hand to her brow, and shook it as against an invisible enemy. Her eyes glowed with resentment, and her breath came pantingly.
Then again the unnaturally excited bearing relaxed; she sank gently down on the couch, and bent over her lover, who hid his face in the silk of her gown.
"Beloved," she whispered, in an infinitely softened tone; "it was then, just when I had recovered from my delirium, that you returned. When I saw you again, here in this room, it was borne in on me that we belonged to each other, and I thought you must feel as I did."
Reimers looked up at her, and made a movement to seize her hand.
"I know now that I already loved you," he said, "but I fought against it, because I feared unhappiness for you."
Hannah gently shook her head.
"Do not speak of unhappiness, beloved," she exhorted him. "Do I not love you, and do you not love me? Are we not happy?"
She stooped to him, and pressed her lips to his in a long kiss.
"I could not see clearly through my dreadful doubts," she went on.
"What could I be to you--impure, defiled, ruined? There was only in me the longing that you should love me. What was the mad intoxication of my girlish folly to the happiness that possessed me when I became certain that you did love me? I could have denied you nothing, dearest.
How happy I was!"
She smiled softly to herself, sunk in tender recollection, and Reimers felt her light hand touch his hair gently with a caressing motion. He grasped that fair hand and kissed it reverently.