He leapt up. "Hannah!" he said, controlling himself with difficulty, "I should advise you to adopt another tone, or else I may forget that we are the same flesh and blood."
"Alas that we are!" she replied, folding her hands.
A voice cried within him, "Jeer at her, overwhelm her with your scorn and contempt!" but his victorious courage had forsaken him. He could only utter a hoa.r.s.e, jarring laugh. Her eye rested on him, hard and pitiless, and he felt a narrowing of his heart as if iron hoops gradually encircled it. In his despair he bethought him of the covenant of friendship, in which Johanna had played the part of priestess.
"Is he not your friend as well as mine?" he asked. "Why did you not warn him? It was in your power to avert the evil. Why didn"t you do it?"
A smile of self-torture hovered about her lips. "That is my concern. On that point I refuse to answer you," she said.
It dawned upon him faintly that here somewhere was the key that might solve the riddle presented by her distraught mind, but before he could put the thought into words it had eluded him.
"And what of our covenant?" he stammered--"our old covenant?"
"That was broken long ago," she answered, while in her bitterness a dark flush mounted to her cheek. "It was broken when you both put me aside to play with that white kitten. Neither of you troubled your heads about me then. And when I became engaged, no one asked me why I did it. Even _he_ took no interest. And what I have suffered as wife of an adventurer ... who knows or cares? Or how he bundled me about from racecourse to gambling-saloon, and from gambling-saloon to racecourse.
Ah, what a life that was! But why do I talk of myself? I too only got what I deserved."
"What have you to reproach yourself with?" he asked.
She bit her lips and brooded. "Every one of us has something to repent, Leo," she said, after a pause; "I, as well as you. All day and all night I am repenting without ceasing. It is my right. No one can deprive me of it. It is the only way in which I can repair, in some measure, my ruined life."
"And yet you were able to endure that man?" he inquired.
"Wasn"t I forced to?" she replied. "If I had left him we should all have been disgraced. When he died in a hospital, I could not be with him, for I was travelling about in order to redeem a cheque that he had forged."
"Johanne!"
Wrath at the conduct of the scoundrel who had wormed himself into his family seized him so hotly that, for a moment, everything swam before him.
Tearless, with her tired smile, she looked up at him. "Till now no human soul has heard of it," she continued. "So you have no need to be ashamed of your sister."
He stretched out both his hands towards her. "Forgive me, Hannah. If only I had guessed!..."
"Leave me alone," she answered, pushing his hands aside. "We are not talking about myself. It is only better that you should know with whom you have to deal. And in case you should feel inclined to laugh at me again because I trust in Jesus, my Saviour"--a faint gleam shot from her eyes towards the crucifix--"I may as well tell you how I found Him.
At the time that I was degraded and polluted by contact with that man; when I couldn"t think, eat, or sleep for loathing, I sought a place where I could cry out my heart in peace.... I slunk about like an outcast, seeking and seeking, and could find no haven till one day I saw a church door standing open, and went in. There no one persecuted me; there I found home and husband; the Spouse who did not strike or outrage me, who Himself had suffered as I suffered; who smiled down at me from the cross when I clung to His poor bleeding feet. Will you blame me for having gone to Him again and again?"
He gave her a softened glance. Certainly he could never again mock at her pious exercises.
"But I was not then quite what you see me now," she went on. "I only realised to the full how utterly alone I was in the world when that person who now reigns at Uhlenfelde confessed all to me. After that I wrestled on my knees whole nights through. I prayed to G.o.d, saying, "Lord, take me as a sacrifice; let me expiate the shame which he has brought on our heads who are nearest to him and love him. Do what Thou wilt with me in Thy anger, only take the reproach from him, and let him live honourably again." ... But my prayer was not heard.... Since then G.o.d has forsaken me as He has you."
She let the hands which had been raised imploringly to the crucifix drop in her lap, and she sank back exhausted.
No cynical smile stole over Leo"s face now. His powerful neck bent, as if he willingly offered it to the scourge which was being wielded over it. There was a silence. Then he said in a low tone, "Hannah?"
She did not answer.
"Hannah," he said again, with a look in his straight, honest eyes that seemed secretly to beg mercy from her, "you speak to me as if I were a felon."
Still she was silent.
"Hannah," he urged her, "what am I to do? This unhappy thing cannot be undone."
There was a light in her half-closed eyes. "You are sorry, then, for what has happened?" she asked, raising herself erect again.
"My G.o.d! am I such a monster," he replied, scarcely audibly, "that I should take a special pleasure in the thought that I have slain a man for no other crime than defending the honour of his name?"
"Then you are ready to repent?" she asked, bending towards him with a sort of impetuous greed.
A shudder ran through his frame. "Repent nothing," came the old cry within him. Now that he knew what she was demanding of him, his manliness returned.
"What do you call repenting?" he asked, and thrust his hand in his pockets. "Shall I whimper and whine and tear my hair? Shall I crawl on my knees like a scurvy hound? No, dear Hannah. I must stick to my defiance, to my merry heart and thick skin, if I am to set things right. And now, out with it. What have I got exactly to repent? What more did I do than is done every day in the world out there? I am not a paragon. I could only act as I have seen others act."
"Then, from the point of view of comfort, your outlook on life leaves nothing to wish for?"
"Why should I rush headlong into discomfort?" he retorted, more intrepid than he really felt. "But to continue; you know my cousinship with her. I trust that you will not fling that up at me; and with regard to Rhaden, I was never on intimate terms with him. I knew him as a grumbling, cross-grained fellow, nothing more. So there can be no question of a breach of friendship. Later, when the affair got wind, and a challenge to fight was given me in the garden, everything was done correctly. He it was who desired that the seconds should not be initiated into the cause of the quarrel. His wife"s reputation must be saved at any cost I simply had to say "Yes." And this is how it is Ulrich rushed into matrimony in ignorance of what had really happened, and now I see the folly of it, and that is the mistake I so bitterly rue. Well, to proceed. The quarrel at cards had to be arranged as a blind, and just as little as he was to be blamed for not firing in the air, can I be blamed for shooting him down. For, you see, I was obliged to defend myself. I will admit that it all sounds very barbaric in black and white, but it is not my vocation to revolutionise morals--I leave that to the social democrats. I accepted my sentence and punishment, and with my period of exile in America I have done with the whole thing. So _basta_!"
He raised his fists as if relieved of some heavy weight. With this drastic explanation he hoped to break once for all the chain with which his sister had tried to bring his will into subjection to her own. But he could not evade that searching, hungry glance. He had learned to fear her, and felt that she meant him harm.
"If you will deliberately revel in evil thus," she said, "I must give you up as lost. But are you become so uncivilised and lawless that even the disgrace which your friend has suffered through you does not weigh on your conscience?"
"Be silent!" he shouted, jumping up. "You don"t wish to be reproached on that score, neither will I be reproached. The misfortune has happened--any step that I might take now would only increase it. I have given up intercourse with him. Do you think that was easy? Do you think I can ever be quit of the fear of what may befall him?"
"And still you say that all is over, as if it had never been?"
"I say it is bound to be so."
"Yet the consequences of your deed cry to Heaven, dear Leo, on every side."
"How cry to Heaven?"
"If you don"t know it, I must tell you. Your former mistress is again causing scandals without end. Your friend"s repute is in bad hands. Who knows if all the world is not jeering and laughing at him."
"Johanna!" he cried, with a feeling as if his heart were being sundered in pieces within his breast. "Johanna, you lie!"
But she went on, calm and hard as nails. "G.o.d knows, I live a very retired life, but the gossip has even penetrated over my threshold. And if you don"t believe me, you have only to make a few inquiries in the smoking-rooms of your friends and acquaintances. There, likely enough, stories are told; or go into Munsterberg, and see how our gilded youths exchange glances when Ulrich drives through the town in his yellow basket carriage. That is a signal for paying calls on the fair Felicitas, and she receives them all. Go to the post-office, and count the number of her male correspondents. You see, she has room in her heart for so many."
"Stop! Your hate verges on insanity," he said, and walked up and down the room.
She shrugged her shoulders. "If only you knew how far above hating I am! I don"t even say that she deceives him. I know her, she is such a coward, such a coward! She"ll promise every one what he wants, but she hasn"t the courage to keep her word."
"And does it, all this go on without his knowledge?" he stammered forth.
"I wish that it did," she responded. "Then at least people would, from fear of his horsewhip, have more caution. But she knows too well that she can trade on the loftiness of his nature, and so she plays her game quite openly under his very eyes."
With bent neck, and his breathing thick and laboured, he leant against the wall muttering inarticulate sounds. He could not grasp it. That he should be a dupe, an object of contempt ... the n.o.blest, the most refined of men! It was more than his thick honest head could take in.
Then fury flamed up in him.
"I wish I had her here between my fingers," he bellowed. "I would wring her neck! I would wring her neck!"
With his hands grappling the air, his nostrils dilating, and his eyes red, he raged about the room. It was well for pretty Felicitas that at that moment she was safely hidden from his sight.