"Ah, yes," she said slowly. "I confess I never thought of _that_ consideration...."
"But I did all the more, for that very reason. And only the consciousness that I would some day be able to pay you the last penny of my debt sustained me in my consciousness as a decent fellow."
"Ah, well, if that"s the case, go ahead!" she said, suppressing the bitter sarcasm that she felt.
First came the receipts: The proceeds of the stolen jewels began the long series. Then followed the savings in fares, food and drink and the furniture rebates. Next came the presents of the county-counsellor, the profits of the champagne debauches during which she had flung shame and honour under the feet of the drinking men. She was spared nothing, but heard again of sums gained by petty thefts from the till, small profits made in the buying of milk and eggs. It was a long story of suspense and longing, an inextricable web of falsification and trickery, of terror and lying without end. The memory of no guilt and no torture was spared her.
Then he took up the account of his expenditures. He sat there, eagerly handling the papers, now frowning heavily when he could not at once balance some small sum, now stiffening his double chin in satisfied self-righteousness as he explained some new way of saving that had occurred to him.... Again and again, to the point of weariness, he reiterated solemnly: "You see, I"m an honest man."
And always when he said that, a weary irony prompted her to reply: "Ah, what that honesty has cost me." ... But she held her peace.
And again she wanted to cry out: "Let be! A woman like myself doesn"t care for these two-penny decencies." But she saw how deep an inner necessity it was to him to stand before her in this conventional spotlessness. And so she didn"t rob him of his childlike joy.
At last he made an end and spread out the little blue books before her--there was one for each year. "Here," he said proudly, "you can go over it yourself. It"s exact."
"It had better be!" she cried with a jesting threat and put the little books under a flower-pot.
A prankish mood came upon her now which she couldn"t resist.
"Now that this important business is at an end," she said, "there is still another matter about which I must have some certainty."
"What is that?" he said, listening intensely.
"Have you been faithful to me in all this time?"
He became greatly confused. The scars on his left cheek glowed like thick, red cords.
"Perhaps he"s got a betrothed somewhere," she thought with a kind of woeful anger, "whom he"s going to throw over now."
But it wasn"t that. Not at all. "Well," he said, "there"s no help for it. I"ll confess. And anyhow, _you"ve_ even been married in the meantime."
"I would find it difficult to deny that," she said.
And then everything came to light. During the early days in Berlin he had been very intimate with a waitress. Then, when he was an a.s.sistant in the surgical clinic, there had been a sister who even wanted to be married. "But I made short work of that proposition," he explained with quiet decision. And as for the Lithuanian servant girl whom he had in the house now, why, of course he would dismiss her next morning, so that the house could be thoroughly aired before she moved in.
This was the moment in which a desire came upon her--half-ironic, half-compa.s.sionate--to throw her arms about him and say: "You silly boy!"
But she did not yield and in the next moment the impulse was gone.
Only an annoyed envy remained. He dared to confess everything to her--everything. What if she did the same? If he were to leave her in horrified silence, what would it matter? She would have freed her soul. Or perhaps he would flare up in grateful love? It was madness to expect it. No power of heaven or earth could burst open the doors or demolish the walls that towered between them for all eternity.
A vast irony engulfed her. She could not rest her soul upon this pigmy. She felt revengeful rather toward him--revengeful, because he could sit there opposite her so capable and faithful, so truthful and decent, so utterly unlike the companion whom she needed.
Toward twilight he grew restless. He wanted to slip over to his mother for a moment and then, for another moment, he wanted to drop in at the fraternity inn. He had to leave at eight.
"It would be better if you remained until to-morrow," she said with an emphasis that gave him pause.
"Why?"
"If you don"t feel that...."
She shrugged her shoulders.
It wasn"t to be done, he a.s.sured her, with the best will in the world.
There was an investigation in which he had to help the county-physician.
A small farmer had died suddenly of what did not seem an entirely natural death. "I suppose," he continued, "one of those love philtres was used with which superfluous people are put under ground there. It"s horrible that a decent person has to live among such creatures. If you don"t care to do it, I can hardly blame you." She had grown pale and smiled weakly. She restrained him no longer.
"I"ll be back in a week," he said, slipping on his goloshes, "and then we can announce the engagement."
She nodded several times but made no reply.
The door was opened and he leaned toward her. Calmly she touched his lips with hers.
"You might have the announcement cards printed," he called cheerfully from the stairs.
Then he disappeared....
"Is the new uncle gone?" Amanda asked. She was sitting in her little room, busy with her lessons. He had forgotten her.
The mother nodded.
"Will he come back soon?"
Antonie shook her head.
"I scarcely think so," she answered.
That night she broke the purpose of her life, the purpose that had become interwoven with a thousand others, and when the morning came she wrote a letter of farewell to the beloved of her youth.
THE SONG OF DEATH
With faint and quivering beats the clock of the hotel announced the hour to the promenaders on the beach.
"It is time to eat, Nathaniel," said a slender, yet well-filled-out young woman, who held a book between her fingers, to a formless bundle, huddled in many shawls, by her side. Painfully the bundle unfolded itself, stretched and grew gradually into the form of a man--hollow chested, thin legged, narrow shouldered, attired in flopping garments, such as one sees by the thousands on the coasts of the Riviera in winter.
The midday glow of the sun burned down upon the yellowish gray wall of cliff into which the promenade of Nervi is hewn, and which slopes down to the sea in a zigzag of towering bowlders.
Upon the blue mirror of the sea sparkled a silvery meshwork of sunbeams. So vast a fullness of light flooded the landscape that even the black cypress trees which stood, straight and tall, beyond the garden walls, seemed to glitter with a radiance of their own. The tide was silent. Only the waters of the imprisoned springs that poured, covered with iridescent bubbles, into the hollows between the rocks, gurgled and sighed wearily.
The breakfast bell brought a new pulsation of life to the huddled figures on the beach.
"He who eats is cured," is the motto of the weary creatures whose arms are often too weak to carry their forks to their mouths. But he who comes to this land of eternal summer merely to ease and rest his soul, trembles with hunger in the devouring sweetness of the air and can scarcely await the hour of food.
With a gentle compulsion the young woman pushed the thin, wrinkled hand of the invalid under her arm and led him carefully through a cool and narrow road, which runs up to the town between high garden walls and through which a treacherous draught blows even on the sunniest days.