Quarter of an hour pa.s.sed, when Ulrich, glowing from excitement, his long neck eagerly thrust forward, came out.
"Leo?"
"Well, old fellow."
"It was difficult, Leo, but she gives her consent."
"Thank you, a hundred times, Uli," he stammered, and blushed like a lying schoolboy.
"So far, she has only one end in view," Ulrich continued. "That is, to send you home humiliated and wretched. But you must see what you can do with her, my boy, and think of the fever I am in meanwhile."
Yes, he really was feverish. His hands trembled, and the blood throbbed in his temples.
He led the way, and Leo pushed quickly past him; secure already of victory, but as full of dread and shame as if he had been defeated. He found her stretched on a lounge, her face buried in the cushions. She appeared to have sunk down there after the mental excitement of the last quarter of an hour. A tea-gown of primrose-coloured, coa.r.s.e-fibred silk hung about her limbs in _negligee_ folds. His diamond flashed on the hand which she held out to him without changing her position.
"Shut the door," she whispered.
He obeyed.
Then she lifted her face for the first time. Her eyes were red from crying.
"How had she been able to manufacture tears for this farce?" he asked himself.
"Oh, I was so ashamed of myself," she murmured.
Ah! she had been ashamed; that would account for it. And he began to console her. He told her this horrible hour must be got over.... Later, of course, there would be no more double dealing; every action of theirs must pa.s.s above-board before Ulrich"s eyes.
"That was understood before," she exclaimed, offended that he had thought it necessary to remind her.
And in the midst of her distress she smiled at him--a coy, happy smile.
"Now he thinks that we----" she began. Her sentence did not end, but there was something in her broken words that made the blood mount hotly to his brow.
"That"s bad enough," he growled, and turned his back.
There was a silence. He drew out his watch, and studied the hands.
"I thank you, Leo, for coming to-day," she began again shyly, after a little while.
"Didn"t you expect me, then?" he asked.
"Oh, you know you might not have come," she responded with a sigh.
"Such a woman as I am."
"Such a woman as you are! What do you mean?"
"Well, I mean that it wouldn"t be surprising if people didn"t keep their word to me."
He felt a bitter resentment against this sort of self-abas.e.m.e.nt.
"I must beg you, Lizzie," he said, "to drop this false humility. You are the wife of Ulrich von Kletzingk. As such, you have the right to claim respect, the highest respect from me and every one else. And who doesn"t ..."
He broke off and raised his fists, so that she withdrew frightened into a corner of the lounge.
"Pray, for goodness" sake, don"t get so angry again," she whispered. "I am miserable enough."
"That is to be all over now," he said.
"What, my misery?" she asked with a disconsolate smile.
Then he began with vehement zeal to describe to her what he proposed the future should be. He had a double mission in her house. First, Ulrich"s happiness; secondly, her rehabilitation.
With his a.s.sistance she was to free herself from the oppressive consciousness of the old guilt, she was to learn to hold up her head again, and to get used to a sense of reconquered dignity, so that it was not to be conceived for a moment that the most impertinent dared approach her with anything less than what was due to her position.
"You paint Heaven to me," she murmured, and a tremulous radiance began to gleam in her eyes.
"I only paint what it is possible to realise," he answered. "When we open this door, Lizzie, all the old rottenness must be sloughed off. We shall begin a new life from that moment."
She pressed her handkerchief to her eyes, and exhaled over him a cloud of the perfume she habitually used. The discreet delicacy of the iris was overpowered by the sharp sweetness of the opoponax, so that, half-suffocated by the pungent odour of the atmosphere around her, he made for the window.
His glance wandered round the one-windowed apartment, which had once been his own putting-up quarters; it was now transformed, regardless of cost, into the luxurious nest of a fashionable woman of the world.
The walls were hung with blue brocade; small gilded chairs, with b.u.t.terfly-wings for backs, card-tables, tabourets and stools of every description, were dotted about, crouching on the Indian carpet like fabulous beasts. A gigantic fan of snow-white marabou feathers served as a screen for the stove. Bronzes and antique bric-a-brac figures, dainty and alluring, populated the cabinets; a marqueterie bookcase contained the mistress"s favourite volumes, bound in ivory-coloured vellum, and an old Venetian altar-cloth was draped in coquettish folds over it as a curtain. Above the writing-table there shone in Carrara marble the dreamy head of the Vatican Eros, outlined with a bluish tinge, for the light penetrated to it through a blue and gold embroidered gauze background, flooding the room one moment with a subdued duskiness, the next with vivid flashes of sunshine.
The whole was an interior commonly enough seen in European capitals, but something quite unheard of here in the remote "Hinterwald."
"He spoils you far too much," he said, with a kind of paternal smile, shaking his finger at her.
"His kindness weighs me to the earth," she replied, pressing her milk-white face against the cushions.
Again he looked at his watch. "Time is up," he said; "we mustn"t keep him waiting for nothing."
She lifted her hands in entreaty. "Five minutes more!" she begged.
"Why?"
"I am so afraid."
"Of _him_?"
She was silent.
"Don"t be a coward, Lizzie!" he exhorted her.
"And it is so peaceful here, so harmonious. It"s like being in a great wide forest. One dares at last breathe freely."
"Breathe away, then, and have done with it. One--two--and three," he counted, with the handle of the door in his hand.
Then he tore open the folding-doors.