"Then I saw plainly how much I had been to blame. I ought never to have offered my hand to a healthy young creature, made in every fibre for love and pleasure; I, a fragile unsound subject, hardly capable of dragging through life alone. I hope that she will be happy now. I do not love her. I ceased to care for her the day I knew---- But we won"t speak of the boy. Still, no one shall cast a stone at her."
Leo breathed more freely. Ulrich evidently did not regret her, and this shadow no longer lay between them.
"To pa.s.s on to ourselves," said Ulrich, leaning back in his chair with a gesture denoting mental fatigue. His features lost their expression of strained severity, and as his mouth opened two lines of pain shot up into his sunken cheeks.
"Another bad quarter of an hour," Leo thought, whose hopes of a happy issue were now high again, "and then we shall be on quite the old footing."
"Do you remember, my dear boy," Ulrich went on, with his eyes fixed distressfully on vacancy, "the day of your return, when we sat and drank together at the Prussian Crown? You said to me then that my marriage would cost us our friendship. I wouldn"t believe you at the time, but now I see that you were a thousand times right."
"How do you mean right?" stammered Leo, feeling a cold shiver of anxiety run through him.
"You mustn"t reproach me, dear boy. I am punishing myself more than I punish you. I love you as much as ever I did. I would pour out my heart"s blood for you--but I can"t a.s.sociate with you any more."
"Ulrich!" cried Leo; "then you haven"t forgiven me after all?"
Ulrich looked pained. "What do you call forgiving?" he said. "The one woman in the world, whom I as your friend had no right to touch, I made my wife. So I think we are quits. If it had come to shooting between us that day, and you had sent me the same way as her first husband, I would have died stroking and blessing your hand, dear boy. And then you talk of forgiving!"
Leo had staggered to his feet. He stretched out his hand as if he would seize and hold his friend fast before his soul slipped out of his grasp for ever.
"What you propose is madness," he exclaimed.
"No, dear boy. I should like to explain it all thoroughly to you. I have rehea.r.s.ed a long speech, but I cannot somehow exactly recall it now. G.o.d knows it was my firm intention to let the past lie buried. But I can"t alter my nature, and you know how I take things to heart, and when I do, must speak of them. But leaving me out of the question. You take life differently, less seriously. Yet how could you endure to come in and out here, when the very walls speak to you of the past? I noticed just now how you glanced at that door. It seemed to you that she must be coming through it. I have done with her, and so, it is to be hoped, have you--but, all the same, her ghost fills this place, and you feel it as much as I do."
"With time that would wear off," Leo murmured, becoming more and more dispirited.
"I doubt it," replied Ulrich. "It could never wear off with us. We should have had to be brought up differently, born of different parents, and with other blood pumped into our veins. As we are, our sense of honour, our manliness, would constantly be in revolt. Day by day we should become more discomfited, till at last we should end by laying at each other"s door our loss of self-respect. No, that shall not be. It would be too great a strain on our old friendship. Think of our two fathers. They were fond of each other, G.o.d knows. But if what has happened to us had happened to them, they would have both cut their throats without asking who was to blame and who wasn"t. Say, am I not right?"
Leo was silent, and thought to himself, "Thus he casts me off."
It seemed to him that all the new purpose and strength that he had built up within him, all the tenderness and truth were falling in ruins. Nothingness stretched before him.
"The best thing I can do, then," he said sadly, "is to pack my bundle as quickly as may be and go back to America."
Ulrich came and laid his hand on his shoulder. "No, you won"t do that, dear boy," he said. "Look over there across the stream. There lie your acres; your fields full of flourishing rye; the turnips waiting to be transplanted; even the wheat springing above the soil. And now G.o.d"s blessed gift of rain has come to make all green and fruitful. You are responsible for every tiny growth, so don"t talk of running away to waste and rot where you can do no good and reap no harvest."
"If you give me up," said Leo, bitterly, "nothing is any good."
"But I am not going to give you up. I shall watch over you and yours from afar, and rejoice in all that gives you joy. I shall count the ears of corn in your fields, and your children I will cherish in my heart as if they were my own."
"My children?" muttered Leo.
Ulrich smiled. "Do you imagine I haven"t kept my eyes open?" he asked.
"I don"t know whether you feel yet that you have come through the furnace of what has been, sufficiently cleansed.... But take my advice and don"t keep the dear girl waiting too long. Be happy; you have good cause; for _you_ it is spring, inside and out."
Leo felt tears start to his eyes. He turned away, and put his hands over his face.
"And what about you, Ulrich?" he asked, controlling his emotion.
A gleam of patient hopelessness shot over the tired sallow face, like the presage of a tranquil death.
"Oh, I," he said; "I have not much more to live for. You mustn"t worry about me. I have done what I could, and I accept as a special grace what is left to me. Now, give me your hand. My most earnest, heartfelt thanks are yours. Good-bye." For a moment they lay in each other"s arms. "Be brave, old fellow," urged Ulrich. "After all, we have only reached the point at which we stood the day you came home."
"Once more, forgive me," Leo half whispered, as if ashamed of the request; and then he rushed to the door.
The soft rain was still falling. A warm wind swept it over the landscape in silvery showers, and from between the banks of cloud a faint golden light shone down on the fragrant earth. Wild ducks quacked as they wallowed in the slime of the pond. In the branches of the blossoming hawthorns, finches and tomt.i.ts chased each other, singing and chirruping. The whole of Nature seemed in the humour for jesting.
As if coming from an open grave, Leo faced life again in its changed aspect, and his heart was very sore. There dawned on his mind a sense of the utter uselessness of struggling against the fate which governed so inexorably the human race. His brain was too tired to reason it out clearly, but the bare idea overawed him. Then something began to rise up in revolt within him against the destiny to which he had submitted, without even a show of resistance, and against the prolonging of the paralysing influence of his old sin. The sacrifice to which he had consented with such weak humility would hang that sin round his neck like a millstone for evermore.
There was his boat, receiving for the last time the hospitality of the white sands of Uhlenfelde. For the last time his strong arms pushed it out into the stream. The last time! The pebbles crunched under the grinding keel, and its nose ploughed gaily into the sparkling ripples.
Was it really the last time that his foot would touch Uhlenfelde soil?
Half hesitating, he jumped into the boat and fixed the oars, with an exclamation of anger. What he had agreed to was absurd--nay, worse, it was a positive crime, a crime against himself and against his friend.
And then, when in mid-current he turned to take a farewell look at Uhlenfelde, he saw at one of the turret windows Ulrich"s face. It was unmistakable, framed in its light, scanty goat"s beard, and with its great, hollow eyes. His heart leapt. It would seem as if Ulrich had mounted to the tower with the purpose of beaconing him back.
"I"m coming, I"m coming!" he cried jubilantly, and with a frantic pull began to turn the boat round.
But no, Ulrich made no sign; on the contrary, he drew back quickly, as if he did not wish to be seen.
Disappointed, Leo rowed on, yet he felt distinctly happier. At the sight of his friend, in his great, shy, compa.s.sionate love, watching him, half hidden by the curtains, there came back to Leo, in a sudden revulsion of feeling, all his new-born strength and energy, which he had felt recently thrilling through body and soul; the old glorious, mighty, unquenchable confidence in conquest, which had been his inheritance and had ruled his life from the beginning, till a woman had shamefully filched it from him.
He jerked the oars out of his hands, drew himself erect, and stretching his clenched fists towards Ulrich, he called out laughingly across the water--
"I"ll win you back yet--see if I don"t!"
The glimmer of a face vanished from the window opposite. But Leo sat down in the boat again, and guided it swiftly to the Halewitz sh.o.r.e--high festival in his heart.
THE END
_THIRD EDITION_
REGINA; OR, THE SINS OF THE FATHERS. By Hermann Sudermann. Translated by Beatrice Marshall.
Crown 8vo. Price 6s.
_THE TIMES_.--"Sudermann is one of the most masterly of contemporary novelists, and it was high time that he should be presented to the English public. "Der Katzensteg," though far from the latest, is perhaps the most powerful of his novels, and the publisher has been well advised in selecting it. As for the translation, it is so admirably done that as we read we forget we are reading a translation."
_DAILY NEWS_.--"To Beatrice Marshall we owe a skilful and spirited translation of Hermann Sudermann"s great novel.... The story palpitates with the pa.s.sion of patriotism, of revenge, of love and hate.... The book is a strong book, and not written for babes. It gives us an insight into the patriotic pa.s.sion that drives men to commit actions as savage and ign.o.ble as it inspires them to the highest heroism. The appeal of the book lies in the development of that wonderful love-story between the two unhappy outcasts weighted with the sins of the father.
To those who cannot read the story in German, we recommend this translation of a masterpiece."