The girls had made a slide on the snowy surface of the carp pond, and it spanned it like a narrow dark ribbon from bank to bank. Absently Leo slid along the slide, and considered himself lucky that he got to the other side without a fall. He recalled the sultry afternoon on which he had smoked his cigar here, stretched out on the seat, and had awaited with perfect calm the interview with his sister. The seat was now cushioned with snow, on which the footmarks of birds had made a star-like pattern. He felt inclined to throw himself down there again in spite of the snow, and try to recover the equable frame of mind that he had been in then.
"Ah, but she won"t get off so well this time," he thought, and he made his way along the overgrown path that led to the dower house.
She stood at the window waiting for him. As he entered the room, she turned round and, biting her lips, gave him a cold gla.s.sy stare. She had aged still more since he had last seen her, and seemed more gaunt and wasted. The flesh on her throat hung in folds, and the sharp line of pain from mouth to chin completely marred the oval of her face. The greyish side light which fell upon her gave a chalk-like hue to her complexion peculiar to people who are fitting themselves for the next world by ascetic exercises, and to those who have imposed on themselves some great mental strain.
"So this is where you prefer to dwell," he said, and looked round him.
He saw the white crucifix in its corner, with the _prie Dieu_ in front of it, and heavy pieces of furniture on which the fading daylight lay unbecomingly. The odour of poor children which the scholars had left behind them almost suffocated him, and with it was mingled the smell of dried gra.s.ses and mouldy hymn-books.
"Please sit down," Johanna said, without offering him her hand.
There was a weary, sad, almost tearful sound in her voice which was new to him. Also the manner in which she went to the sofa and slowly sank amongst the cushions seemed the action of one physically weak and broken in spirit.
"I have asked you to come here," she began, "so that you shall know G.o.d"s decision with regard to us. For what is about to happen is the judgment of G.o.d. I have no will in the matter, except to do His bequest. But you shall not be able to reproach me with having dealt this blow from behind in an underhand way."
Of course she was threatening him; he had expected nothing else.
"Well, what is it now?" he inquired, suppressing his rising antagonism.
"What do you want of me, and will it cost me much? You pious folks have your own prices, I know."
His scoffing raillery had no effect upon her.
"Look here, Leo," she said, in a still more tired and subdued voice, "I am sorry for you. I would have given much to be able to save you and all of us, for you have involved us all in your ruin. But there is no contending against G.o.d"s law, and He has spoken. The child is dead. Do you know why the child died?"
"Leave the child out of it," he murmured. "What has the child to do with you?"
"That I will tell you, Leo," she replied, stretching her languid arm towards the crucifix. "On that spot she sentenced the child to death; and she did it for your sake."
He felt as if some one had struck him with open hand on the forehead.
He tried to speak, but his thoughts were in a whirl. Only a strangled laugh rose from his throat.
Was this embittered sister of charity in league with the devil, that she could divine human secrets and see into the future? For a moment a deathlike stillness reigned in the oppressive, over-heated room, which was filled now with the shadows of falling dusk. Johanna kept her eyes fixed stonily on the dark corner where the crucifix stood out in luminous relief, like a witness of the crime.
"On that spot," Johanna went on, "she knelt and took her oath, and I believed her, for one doesn"t swear falsely on the head of one"s own child. And you were both warned. I let you take the sacrament together, so that you both should be quite honest in your good resolutions. Then I saw how wild you became, and I felt anxious. And the child was still alive, nothing had happened; "but G.o.d will speak in His own good time,"
I thought. And day after day I sat and waited for the child to die.
Then it did die, and I knew what I wanted to know. It is useless for you to defend yourself, or deny anything, Leo; G.o.d has spoken, and I believe G.o.d before _you_."
He boiled with inarticulate wrath, scarcely knowing what words he could use to lash her with.
"What n.o.ble conduct! What sublimely n.o.ble conduct," he snarled, "to sit and wait like a cat watching for a mouse, all eager expectancy to hear of the death of an innocent child!"
"There is nothing left for me to live for," she said, with a moan. "No one wants me; I am quite superfluous--quite."
"It doesn"t seem like it," he scoffed. "Why have you summoned me to come to you? Speak out. What is the blow you are holding up your sleeve?"
"Blow!" replied his sister. "Don"t call it that. Say rather benefit--benefit for us all. I have kept silent from one year"s end to another, and have staked everything upon it--youth, happiness, peace of mind! But now I must speak--G.o.d wills it so. G.o.d directs that I shall tell Ulrich all, so that his house may be purified again, and his eyes opened to what sort of woman his wife is, and what sort of man his friend."
He had sprung to his feet, and his hands groped towards her. For an instant his insensate fury blinded him. "Put an end to her, so that she can do no more mischief," something said within him. "Kill her rather than let her betray you."
His eyes wandered over the walls. He saw a bouquet of dusty pampas gra.s.s in a blue china jar on a bracket, a good shepherd smiling sweetly down on the lamb in his arms, and other religious lithograph prints.
Slowly he collected himself.
"When do you propose to carry out your intentions?" he inquired hoa.r.s.ely.
"So soon as it is necessary," she answered.
"When will it be necessary?" he eagerly questioned her again. "Ulrich is away. From Konigsberg he will be going to Berlin. He can"t be back before March. So till then you will have to be patient."
"I can urge him to come home," she replied in a low tone, with a tearful smile.
"That you shall not do," he cried, seizing hold of her roughly.
The room spun round. Again he saw nothing but the blood-red vapour of his fury, and through it a pair of widely opened eyes staring up at him in agonised terror. He felt a lean throat yielding to the pressure of his fingers. At that moment his sister was nothing more to him than an insect, a moth shying at the light, that could be crushed to powder in his grasp.
"You will hold your tongue," he hissed, "or I"ll throttle you."
He tried to pull her up, but with a sharp hollow bang her head struck against the corner of the sofa. An expression of acute pain pa.s.sed over her face, and she sank in a kneeling att.i.tude on to the floor. Then he half regained his senses. He let go of her throat, and propped her head against the cushion. And then he tore about the room, his eyes searching in desperation every corner, as if there must be some solution concealed there as to how he was to save himself and Ulrich.
The crucifix floated weirdly white in the gathering shadows. He saw the good shepherd smile, and the dusty gra.s.ses seemed to tremble.
"How can I save myself, how can I save myself?" he cried inwardly. And he felt as if the hatchet which the shadow of evil had held over his head for so many months was about to fall. But at the sight of his sister lying motionless on the ground, with her head resting against the sofa, he began to feel ashamed.
"Get up, Johanna," he begged. "It is true that I would like to kill you, but I don"t want to ill-treat you."
He held out a hand to help her rise. She rejected his offer, and with difficulty seated herself again in her former position.
"Poor Leo!" she said, and there was a note of compa.s.sion in her tired voice.
"Yes, indeed poor Leo, poor Leo!" he exclaimed, planting himself before her in his consternation. "You can pity me, but you won"t hesitate, nevertheless, to ruin me."
"You are ruined already," she muttered.
"And if I am, whose fault is it but yours and that cur of a priest?
I"ll be even with him too. You want to speak now, when neither G.o.d nor devil can do anything. But why did you not speak out at the time that Ulrich was going to take the insane step of marrying? You were the only person in the world who might have prevented the blunder. Why did you keep your mouth shut then, eh?"
She glanced at him from under her lids in furtive distress. Then a shudder swept the angular shoulders, on which her dress hung in ill-cut folds.
"I have repented. Oh! how I have repented everything--everything!" she murmured.
"Repented or no, that is not the question. When I asked you in the summer, it was the same. You answered by evasion. I say that if you have a clear conscience, you would have answered me then, and would answer me now."
"Oh, don"t torment me!" she implored, in growing anxiety, and leant far back in the corner of the sofa. And on Leo repeating his demand even more emphatically, she burst into hysterical weeping. Motionless she sat there, with the tears streaming in rivulets over her hollow cheeks.
He had never seen her look so yielding and so defenceless, and in the midst of his wrath and misery a gleam of chivalrous pity stirred within him, and he began involuntarily to speak to her in gentler tones.
"Listen, Johanna. I came here hating you very sorely, G.o.d knows. A little more, and I might have---- But you are not what you were, for all your threats. You and I are both poor bruised and broken creatures, so we may as well be frank with each other. Come, tell me what I wish to know, before it is too late."
Her tears were quenched, and she looked at him in utter mystification at the unexpected softness in his manner. So accustomed was she to regard him in the light of some wild beast, that she could hardly grasp that he meant to be kind. Gradually her eyes recovered their fixed and gla.s.sy expression, and she nodded her bead mysteriously towards the crucifix in the corner. "Look at Him," she said--"near, quite near."