And all the time the rain beat down on her, soaking through her clothes, while the cold wet of the pavement crawled up her legs.
"Konni, Konni," she called louder.
Pa.s.sersby offered her their umbrellas; others taunted her, and cried, "Konni, Konni."
At last the shadow halted. One of the windows went up.
"Lilly--you?" his voice called, hoa.r.s.e with fright.
"At last--do come, my sweet Konni," a tipsy man, who had persistently held his umbrella over her, answered in her place.
"For G.o.d"s sake!"
The light disappeared from the windows, and a few moments later Konrad appeared in the doorway with the front-door key and his lamp in his hand.
The tipsy gentleman said good-by, bowing and sc.r.a.ping.
"Lilly--what has happened? What are you doing here?"
She pressed against the doorpost trembling. She was unable to speak.
"I am with him," was her one thought. "So all"s well."
He pa.s.sed his hand over her clothes.
"Why, you"re dripping wet. You"re in house slippers. For G.o.d"s sake, Lilly!"
She wanted to say something, but was ashamed to let him see how her teeth were chattering.
"And I can"t even take you to my room. You know why. But I must. If I were to let you go back home again in the state you"re in, you might catch your death of cold. We will be very careful--just as we were that time. We can"t speak above a whisper. The girl"s not out of danger yet.
Give me your hand. Come on."
With half-closed eyes she let herself be led up the stairs. Her wet dress flapped against the bal.u.s.ters. She felt she would have to crouch down on one of the steps and lie there until the porter came to sweep the dust and dirt away. But each step only took her nearer to the fate awaiting her up there in the third storey.
Then with bent head she crept along the corridor into his room, where the imprisoned sultriness of the summer day suffocated her.
Konrad pressed her into his desk chair. He drew off the soggy velvet rags from her feet, and brought her dry stockings; and after peeling her wet dress from her body he wrapped her in his great coat and blankets.
She sat there accepting his service without a will of her own. She wanted to taste the delicious sensation of his loving care of her until the last moment.
She had not said a word.
When she had attempted to thank him, he pointed to the door leading to the next room.
"Speak very low," he said, his mouth close to her ear. "The poor thing, it seems, is having a good night for the first time."
Languid pity awoke in Lilly.
But she had to talk.
"What"s the matter with her? Tell me," she breathed.
He hesitated.
"My landlady swore me to silence. But you"re mine now. You will keep the secret. Her daughter, her one child, ran away four months ago and gave birth to a baby. The mother went to fetch her back home. She"s been hovering between life and death for six weeks. She"s at last getting better."
"Poor thing," said Lilly. And then the consciousness of her own misery came upon her with redoubled force.
"Konni, Konni," she moaned on his neck. "Now it"s all over. I was willing to starve with you, go begging with you. But what"s the use?
When once you know everything--"
"That can"t be so very bad, darling."
"About me. About my life--my past."
With a little jerk he freed himself and sat down opposite her.
The look of questioning and terrified presentiment that congealed his pale face, seeming to turn it into a mask, filled her with fright, such fright as she had never experienced, because it was not on her own behalf; she was afraid of converting her own pain into his pain.
"I wanted to write it to you--just the way it was, but I couldn"t. It turned out wrong while I wrote. So I came to you before morning. If you want, I will tell you now--everything--"
She could not continue. She turned her face aside and buried it on the desk.
"Why don"t you speak?"
Konrad had quite forgotten the need for quiet, and both of them shrank at the sudden sound of his voice. "She"s probably asleep," he said lowering his voice again. "Now tell me! What can it be?"
He breathed heavily under the growing oppression of his soul.
She began to speak. In a whisper, her upper body inclined toward him, she tried to tell him the things for which she had not been able to find words in her own home.
The truth did not come out this time either. She felt it.
Less, much less of it, than her letters would have given him. To distress him with every detail--never! No power in the world could have driven her to that.
Her life became a long list of martyrdoms--a funeral procession draped in black--insults, humiliations, mortifications--an imprisonment without a ray of light or mercy--and all the time a constant struggle for deliverance--a n.o.ble withdrawal into herself--a dismal sacrifice for nothing.
She talked and talked.
He listened, with wide-open eyes. But when she uttered the name she had no right to omit, "Dr. Salmoni," he started and shrank back.
Both of them had completely forgotten the sick girl in the next room.
Sometimes Lilly had to wipe tears away, sometimes she grew indignant; now she ventured to glide by difficult points, now she lingered over touching self-reproaches.
"It _is_ the truth after all," she said to herself defiantly, yet in fear, as she drew near the end of her narrative.
It was the truth in so far as it was a resume of the good in her, the truth as it might take shape in his troubled mind, regardless of fact--and this truth, too, had its rights.