CHAPTER XXIV
“My Lady’s Glory.”
“Königsallée, No. 3,” wrote Adelaide to me, “is the house which has been taken for us. We shall be there on Tuesday evening.”
I accepted this communication in my own sense, and did not go to meet Adelaide, nor visit her that evening, but wrote a card, saying I would come on the following morning. I had seen the house which had been taken for Sir Peter and Lady Le Marchant – a large, gloomy-looking house, with a tragedy attached to it, which had stood empty ever since I had come to Elberthal.
Up to the fashionable Königsallée, under the naked chestnut avenue, and past the great long Caserne and Exerzierplatz – a way on which I did not as a rule intrude my ancient and poverty-stricken garments, I went on the morning after Adelaide’s arrival. Lady Le Marchant had not yet left her room, but if I were Miss Wedderburn I was to be taken to her immediately. Then I was taken upstairs, and had time to remark upon the contrast between my sister’s surroundings and my own, before I was delivered over to a lady’s-maid – French in nationality – who opened a door and announced me as Mlle. Veddairebairne. I had a rapid, dim impression that it was quite the chamber of a grande dame, in the midst of which stood my lady herself, having slowly risen as I came in.
“At last you have condescended to come,” said the old proud, curt voice.
“How are you, Adelaide?” said I, originally, feeling that any display of emotion would be unwelcome and inappropriate, and moreover, feeling any desire to indulge in the same suddenly evaporate.
She took my hand loosely, gave me a little chilly kiss on the cheek, and then held me off at arms’-length to look at me.
I did not speak. I could think of nothing agreeable to say. The only words that rose to my lips were, “How very ill you look!” and I wisely concluded not to say them. She was very beautiful, and looked prouder and more imperious than ever. But she was changed. I could not tell what it was. I could find no name for the subtle alteration; ere long I knew only too well what it was. Then, I only knew that she was different from what she had been, and different in a way that aroused tenfold all my vague forebodings.
She was wasted too – had gone, for her, quite thin; and the repressed restlessness of her eyes made a disagreeable impression upon me. Was she perhaps wasted with passion and wicked thoughts? She looked as if it would not have taken much to bring the smoldering fire into a blaze of full fury – as if fire and not blood ran in her veins.
She was in a loose silk dressing-gown, which fell in long folds about her stately figure. Her thick black hair was twisted into a knot about her head. She was surrounded on all sides with rich and costly things. All the old severe simplicity of style had vanished – it seemed as if she had gratified every passing fantastic wish or whim of her restless, reckless spirit, and the result was a curious medley of the ugly, grotesque, ludicrous and beautiful – a feverish dream of Cleopatra-like luxury, in the midst of which she stood, as beautiful and sinuous as a serpent, and looking as if she could be, upon occasion, as poisonous as the same.
She looked me over from head to foot with piercing eyes, and then said half scornfully, half enviously:
“How well a stagnant life seems to suit some people! Now you – you are immensely improved – unspeakably improved. You have grown into a pretty woman – more than a pretty woman. I shouldn’t have thought a few months could make such an alteration in any one.”
Her words struck me as a kind of satire upon herself.
“I might say the same to you,” said I, constrainedly. “I think you are very much altered.”
Indeed I felt strangely ill at ease with the beautiful creature who, I kept trying to convince myself, was my sister Adelaide, but who seemed further apart from me than ever. But the old sense of fascination which she had been wont to exercise over me returned again in all or in more than its primitive strength.
“I want to talk to you,” said she, forcing me into a deep easy-chair. “I have millions of things to ask you. Take off your hat and mantle. You must stay all day. Heavens! how shabby you are! I never saw anything so worn out – and yet your dress suits you, and you look nice in it.” (She sighed deeply.) “Nothing suits me now. Formerly I looked well in everything. I should have looked well in rags, and people would have turned to look after me. Now, whatever I put on makes me look hideous.”
“Nonsense!”
“It does – And I am glad of it,” she added, closing her lips as if she closed in some bitter joy.
“I wish you would tell me why you have come here,” I inquired, innocently. “I was so astonished. It was the last place I should have thought of your coming to.”
“Naturally. But you see Sir Peter adores me so that he hastens to gratify my smallest wish. I expressed a desire one day to see you, and two days afterward we were en route. He said I should have my wish. Sisterly love was a beautiful thing, and he felt it his duty to encourage it.”
I looked at her, and could not decide whether she were in jest or earnest. If she were in jest, it was but a sorry kind of joke – if in earnest, she chose a disagreeably flippant manner of expressing herself.
“Sir Peter has great faith in annoying and thwarting me,” she went on. “He has been looking better and more cheerful ever since we left Rome.”
“But Adelaide – if you wished to leave Rome – ”
“But I did not wish to leave Rome. I wished to stay – so we came away, you know.”
The suppressed rage and hatred in her tone made me feel uncomfortable. I avoided speaking, but I could not altogether avoid looking at her. Our eyes met, and Adelaide burst into a peal of harsh laughter.
“Oh, your face, May! It is a study! I had a particular objection to coming to Elberthal, therefore Sir Peter instantly experienced a particular desire to come. When you are married you will understand these things. I was almost enjoying myself in Rome; I suppose Sir Peter was afraid that familiarity might bring dislike, or that if we stayed too long I might feel it dull. This is a gay, lively place, I believe – we came here, and for aught I know we are going to stay here.”
She laughed again, and I sat aghast. I had been miserable about Adelaide’s marriage, but I had very greatly trusted in what she had prognosticated about being able to do what she liked with him. I began now to think that there must have been some miscalculation – that she had mistaken the metal and found it not quite so ductile as she had expected. I knew enough of her to be aware that I was probably the first person to whom she had spoken in such a manner, and that not even to me would she have so spoken unless some strong feeling had prompted her to it. This made me still more uneasy. She held so fast by the fine polish of the outside of the cup and platter. Very likely the world in general supposed that she and Sir Peter were a model couple.
“I am glad you are here,” she pursued. “It is a relief to have some one else than Arkwright to speak to.”
“Who is Arkwright?”
“Sir Peter’s secretary – a very good sort of boy. He knows all about our domestic bliss and other concerns – because he can’t help. Sir Peter tells him – ”
A hand on the door-handle outside. A pause ere the persons came in, for Sir Peter’s voice was audible, giving directions to some one, probably the secretary of whom Adelaide had spoken. She started violently; the color fled from her face; pale dismay painted itself for a moment upon her lips, but only for a moment. In the next she was outwardly herself again. But the hand trembled which passed her handkerchief over her lips.
The door was fully opened, and Sir Peter came in.
Yes; that was the same face, the same pent-house of ragged eyebrow over the cold and snaky eye beneath, the same wolfish mouth and permanent hungry smile. But he looked better, stouter, stronger; more cheerful. It seemed as if my lady’s society had done him a world of good, and acted as a kind of elixir of life.
I observed Adelaide. As he came in her eyes dropped; her hand closed tightly over the handkerchief she held, crushing it together in her grasp; she held her breath; then, recovered, she faced him.
“Heyday! Whom have we here?” he asked, in a voice which time and a residence in hearing of the language of music had not mollified. “Whom have we here? Your dress-maker, my lady? Have you had to send for a dress-maker already? Ha! what? Your sister? Impossible! Miss May, I am delighted to see you again! Are you very well? You look a little – a – shabby, one might almost say, my dear – a little seedy, hey?”
I had no answer ready for this winning greeting.
“Rather like my lady before she was my lady,” he continued, pleasantly, as his eyes roved over the room, over its furniture, over us.
There was power – a horrible kind of strength and vitality in that figure – a crushing impression of his potency to make one miserable, conveyed in the strong, rasping voice. Quite a different Sir Peter from my erstwhile wooer. He was a masculine, strong, planning creature, whose force of will was able to crush that of my sister as easily as her forefinger might crush a troublesome midge. He was not blind or driveling; he could reason, plot, argue, concoct a systematic plan for revenge, and work it out fully and in detail; he was able at once to grasp the broadest bearing and the minute details of a position, and to act upon their intimations with crushing accuracy. He was calm, decided, keen, and all in a certain small, bounded, positive way which made him all the more efficient as a ruling factor in this social sphere, where small, bounded, positive strength, without keen sympathies save in the one direction – self – and without idea of generosity, save with regard to its own merits, pays better than a higher kind of strength – better than the strength of Joan of Arc, or St. Stephen, or Christ.
This was the real Sir Peter, and before the revelation I stood aghast. And that look in Adelaide’s eyes, that tone in her voice, that restrained spring in her movements, would have been rebellion, revolution, but in the act of breaking forth it became – fear. She had been outwitted, most thoroughly and completely. She had got a jailer and a prison. She feared the former, and every tradition of her life bade her remain in the latter.
Sir Peter, pleasantly exhilarated by my confusion and my lady’s sullen silence, proceeded with an agreeable smile:
“Are you never coming down-stairs, madame? I have been deprived long enough of the delights of your society. Come down! I want you to read to me.”
“I am engaged, as you may see,” she answered in a low voice of opposition.
“Then the engagement must be deferred. There is a great deal of reading to do. There is the ‘Times’ for a week.”
“I hate the ‘Times,’ and I don’t understand it.”
“So much the more reason why you should learn to do so. In half an hour,” said Sir Peter, consulting his watch, “I shall be ready, or say in quarter of an hour.”
“Absurd! I can not be ready in quarter of an hour. Where is Mr. Arkwright?”
“What is Mr. Arkwright to you, my dear? You may be sure that Mr. Arkwright’s time is not being wasted. If his mamma knew what he was doing she would be quite satisfied – oh, quite. In quarter of an hour.”
He was leaving the room, but paused at the door, with a suspicious look.
“Miss May, it is a pity for you to go away. It will do you good to see your sister, I am sure. Pray spend the day with us. Now, my lady, waste no more time.”
With that he finally departed. Adelaide’s face was white, but she did not address me. She rang for her maid.
“Dress my hair, Toinette, and do it as quickly as possible. Is my dress ready?” was all she said.
“Mais oui, madame.”
“Quick!” she repeated. “You have only quarter of an hour.”
Despite the suppressed cries, expostulations, and announcements that it was impossible, Adelaide was dressed in quarter of an hour.
“You will stay, May?” said she; and I knew it was only the presence of Toinette which restrained her from urgently imploring me to stay.
I remained, though not all day; only until it was time to go and have my lesson from von Francius. During my stay, however, I had ample opportunity to observe how things were.
Sir Peter appeared to have lighted upon a congenial occupation somewhat late in life, or perhaps previous practice had made him an adept in it. His time was fully occupied in carrying out a series of experiments upon his wife’s pride, with a view to humble and bring it to the ground. If he did not fully succeed in that, he succeeded in making her hate him as scarcely ever was man hated before.
They had now been married some two or three months, and had forsworn all semblance of a pretense at unity or concord. She thwarted him as much as she could, and defied him as far as she dared. He played round and round his victim, springing upon her at last, with some look, or word, or hint, or smile, which meant something – I know not what – that cowed her.
Oh, it was a pleasant household! – a cheerful, amiable scene of connubial love, in which this fair woman of two-and-twenty found herself, with every prospect of its continuing for an indefinite number of years; for the Le Marchants were a long-lived family, and Sir Peter ailed nothing.
CHAPTER XXV
“Wenn Menschen aus einander gehen,
So sagen sie, Auf Wiedersehen!
Auf Wiedersehen!”
Eugen had said, “Very soon – it may be weeks, it may be days,” and had begged me not to inquire further into the matter. Seeing his anguish, I had refrained; but when two or three days had passed, and nothing was done or said, I began to hope that the parting might not be deferred even a few weeks; for I believe the father suffered, and with him the child, enough each day to wipe out years of transgression.
It was impossible to hide from Sigmund that some great grief threatened, or had already descended upon his father, and therefore upon him. The child’s sympathy with the man’s nature, with every mood and feeling – I had almost said his intuitive understanding of his father’s very thoughts, was too keen and intense to be hoodwinked or turned aside. He did not behave like other children, of course —versteht sich, as Eugen said to me with a dreary smile. He did not hang about his father’s neck, imploring to hear what was the matter; he did not weep or wail, or make complaints. After that first moment of uncontrollable pain and anxiety, when he had gone into the room whose door was closed upon him, and in which Eugen had not told him all that was coming, he displayed no violent emotion; but he did what was to Eugen and me much more heart-breaking – brooded silently; grew every day wanner and thinner, and spent long intervals in watching his father, with eyes which nothing could divert and nothing deceive. If Eugen tried to be cheerful, to put on a little gayety of demeanor which he did not feel in his heart, Sigmund made no answer to it, but continued to look with the same solemn, large and mournful gaze.
His father’s grief was eating into his own young heart. He asked not what it was; but both Eugen and I knew that in time, if it went on long enough, he would die of it. The picture, “Innocence Dying of Blood-stain,” which Hawthorne has suggested to us, may have its prototypes and counterparts in unsuspected places. Here was one. Nor did Sigmund, as some others, children both of larger and smaller growth, might have done, turn to me and ask me to tell him the meaning of the sad change which had crept silently and darkly into our lives. He outspartaned the Spartan in many ways. His father had not chosen to tell him; he would die rather than ask the meaning of the silence.
One night – when some three days had passed since the letter had come – as Eugen and I sat alone, it struck me that I heard a weary turning over in the little bed in the next room, and a stifled sob coming distinctly to my ears. I lifted my head. Eugen had heard too; he was looking, with an expression of pain and indecision, toward the door. With a vast effort – the greatest my regard for him had yet made – I took it upon myself, laid my hand on his arm, and coercing him again into the chair from which he had half risen, whispered:
“I will tell him. You can not. Nicht wahr?”
A look was the only, but a very sufficient answer.
I went into the inner room and closed the door. A dim whiteness of moonlight struggled through the shutters, and very, very faintly showed me the outline of the child who was dear to me. Stooping down beside him, I asked if he were awake.
“Ja, ich wache,” he replied, in a patient, resigned kind of small voice.
“Why dost thou not sleep, Sigmund? Art thou not well?”
“No, I am not well,” he answered; but with an expression of double meaning. “Mir ist’s nicht wohl.”
“What ails thee?”
“If you know what ails him, you know what ails me.”
“Do you not know yourself?” I asked.
“No,” said Sigmund, with a short sob. “He says he can not tell me.”
I slipped upon my knees beside the little bed, and paused a moment. I am not ashamed to say that I prayed to something which in my mind existed outside all earthly things – perhaps to the “Freude” which Schiller sung and Beethoven composed to – for help in the hardest task of my life.
“Can not tell me.” No wonder he could not tell that soft-eyed, clinging warmth; that subtle mixture of fire and softness, spirit and gentleness – that spirit which in the years of trouble they had passed together had grown part of his very nature – that they must part! No wonder that the father, upon whom the child built his every idea of what was great and good, beautiful, right and true in every shape and form, could not say, “You shall not stay with me; you shall be thrust forth to strangers; and, moreover, I will not see you nor speak to you, nor shall you hear my name; and this I will do without telling you why” – that he could not say this – what had the man been who could have said it?
As I knelt in the darkness by Sigmund’s little bed, and felt his pillow wet with his silent tears, and his hot cheek touching my hand, I knew it all. I believe I felt for once as a man who has begotten a child and must hurt it, repulse it, part from it, feels.
“No, my child, he can not tell thee, because he loves thee so dearly,” said I. “But I can tell thee; I have his leave to tell thee, Sigmund.”
“Friedel?”
“Thou art a very little boy, but thou art not like other boys; thy father is not just like other fathers.”
“I know it.”
“He is very sad.”
“Yes.”
“And his life which he has to live will be a sad one.”
The child began to weep again. I had to pause. How was I to open my lips to instruct this baby upon the fearful, profound abyss of a subject – the evil and the sorrow that are in the world – how, how force those little tender, bare feet, from the soft grass on to the rough up-hill path all strewed with stones, and all rugged with ups and downs? It was horribly cruel.
“Life is very sad sometimes, mein Sigmund.”
“Is it?”
“Yes. Some people, too, are much sadder than others. I think thy father is one of those people. Perhaps thou art to be another.”
“What my father is I will be,” said he, softly; and I thought that it was another and a holier version of Eugen’s words to me, wrung out of the inner bitterness of his heart. “The sins of the fathers shall be visited upon the children, even unto the third and fourth generation, whether they deserve it or not.” The child, who knew nothing of the ancient saying, merely said with love and satisfaction swelling his voice to fullness, “What my father is, I will be.”
“Couldst thou give up something very dear for his sake?”
“What a queer question!” said Sigmund. “I want nothing when I am with him.”
“Ei! mein kind! Thou dost not know what I mean. What is the greatest joy of thy life? To be near thy father and see him, hear his voice, and touch him, and feel him near thee; nicht?”
“Yes,” said he, in a scarcely audible whisper.
There was a pause, during which I was racking my brains to think of some way of introducing the rest without shocking him too much, when suddenly he said, in a clear, low voice:
“That is it. He would never let me leave him, and he would never leave me.”
Silence again for a few moments, which seemed to deepen some sneaking shadow in the boy’s mind, for he repeated through clinched teeth, and in a voice which fought hard against conviction, “Never, never, never!”
“Sigmund – never of his own will. But remember what I said, that he is sad, and there is something in his life which makes him not only unable to do what he likes, but obliged to do exactly what he does not like – what he most hates and fears – to – to part from thee.”
“Nein, nein, nein!” said he. “Who can make him do anything he does not wish? Who can take me away from him?”
“I do not know. I only know that it must be so. There is no escaping from it, and no getting out of it. It is horrible, but it is so. Sometimes, Sigmund, there are things in the world like this.”
“The world must be a very cruel place,” he said, as if first struck with that fact.
“Now dost thou understand, Sigmund, why he did not speak? Couldst thou have told him such a thing?”
“Where is he?”
“There, in the next room, and very sad for thee.”
Sigmund, before I knew what he was thinking of, was out of bed and had opened the door. I saw that Eugen looked up, saw the child standing in the door-way, sprung up, and Sigmund bounded to meet him. A cry as of a great terror came from the child. Self-restraint, so long maintained, broke down; he cried in a loud, frightened voice:
“Mein Vater, Friedel says I must leave thee!” and burst into a storm of sobs and crying such as I had never before known him yield to. Eugen folded him in his arms, laid his head upon his breast, and clasping him very closely to him, paced about the room with him in silence, until the first fit of grief was over. I, from the dark room, watched them in a kind of languor, for I was weary, as though I had gone through some physical struggle.
They passed to and fro like some moving dream. Bit by bit the child learned from his father’s lips the pitiless truth, down to the last bitter drop; that the parting was to be complete, and they were not to see each other.
“But never, never?” asked Sigmund, in a voice of terror and pain mingled.
“When thou art a man that will depend upon thyself,” said Eugen. “Thou wilt have to choose.”
“Choose what?”
“Whether thou wilt see me again.”
“When I am a man may I choose?” he asked, raising his head with sudden animation.
“Yes; I shall see to that.”
“Oh, very well. I have chosen now,” said Sigmund, and the thought gave him visible joy and relief.
Eugen kissed him passionately. Blessed ignorance of the hardening influences of the coming years! Blessed tenderness of heart and singleness of affection which could see no possibility that circumstances might make the acquaintance of a now loved and adored superior being appear undesirable! And blessed sanguineness of five years old, which could bridge the gulf between then and manhood, and cry, Auf wiedersehen!
During the next few days more letters were exchanged. Eugen received one which he answered. Part of the answer he showed to me, and it ran thus:
“I consent to this, but only upon one condition, which is that when my son is eighteen years old, you tell him all, and give him his choice whether he see me again or not. My word is given not to interfere in the matter, and I can trust yours when you promise that it shall be as I stipulate. I want your answer upon this point, which is very simple, and the single condition I make. It is, however, one which I can not and will not waive.”
“Thirteen years, Eugen,” said I.
“Yes; in thirteen years I shall be forty-three.”
“You will let me know what the answer to that is,” I went on.
He nodded. By return of post the answer came.
“It is ‘yes,’” said he, and paused. “The day after to-morrow he is to go.”
“Not alone, surely?”
“No; some one will come for him.”
I heard some of the instructions he gave his boy.
“There is one man where you are going, whom I wish you to obey as you would me, Sigmund,” he told him.
“Is he like thee?”
“No; much better and wiser than I am. But, remember, he never commands twice. Thou must not question and delay as thou dost with thy weak-minded old father. He is the master in the place thou art going to.”
“Is it far from here?”
“Not exceedingly far.”
“Hast thou been there?”
“Oh, yes,” said Eugen, in a peculiar tone, “often.”
“What must I call this man?” inquired Sigmund.
“He will tell thee that. Do thou obey him and endeavor to do what he wishes, and so thou mayst know thou art best pleasing me.”
“And when I am a man I can choose to see thee again. But where wilt thou be?”
“When the time comes thou wilt soon find me if it is necessary – And thy music,” pursued Eugen. “Remember that in all troubles that may come to thee, and whatever thou mayst pass through, there is one great, beautiful goddess who abides above the troubles of men, and is often most beautiful in the hearts that are most troubled. Remember – whom?”
“Beethoven,” was the prompt reply.
“Just so. And hold fast to the service of the goddess Music, the most beautiful thing in the world.”
“And thou art a musician,” said Sigmund, with a little laugh, as if it “understood itself” that his father should naturally be a priest of “the most beautiful thing in the world.”
I hurry over that short time before the parting came. Eugen said to me:
“They are sending for him – an old servant. I am not afraid to trust him with him.”
And one morning he came – the old servant. Sigmund happened at the moment not to be in the sitting-room; Eugen and I were. There was a knock, and in answer to our Herein! there entered an elderly man of soldierly appearance, with a grizzled mustache, and stiff, military bearing; he was dressed in a very plain, but very handsome livery, and on entering the room and seeing Eugen, he paused just within the door, and saluted with a look of deep respect; nor did he attempt to advance further. Eugen had turned very pale.
It struck me that he might have something to say to this messenger of fate, and with some words to that effect I rose to leave them together. Eugen laid his hand upon my arm.
“Sit still, Friedhelm.” And turning to the man, he added: “How were all when you left, Heinrich?”
“Well, Herr Gr – ”
“Courvoisier.”
“All were well, mein Herr.”
“Wait a short time,” said he.
A silent inclination on the part of the man. Eugen went into the inner room where Sigmund was, and closed the door. There was silence. How long did it endure? What was passing there? What throes of parting? What grief not to be spoken or described?
Meanwhile the elderly man-servant remained in his sentinel attitude, and with fixed expressionless countenance, within the door-way. Was the time long to him, or short?
At last the door opened, and Sigmund came out alone. God help us all! It is terrible to see such an expression upon a child’s soft face. White and set and worn as if with years of suffering was the beautiful little face. The elderly man started, surprised from his impassiveness, as the child came into the room. An irrepressible flash of emotion crossed his face; he made a step forward. Sigmund seemed as if he did not see us. He was making a mechanical way to the door, when I interrupted him.
“Sigmund, do not forget thy old Friedhelm!” I cried, clasping him in my arms, and kissing his little pale face, thinking of the day, three years ago, when his father had brought him wrapped up in the plaid on that wet afternoon, and my heart had gone out to him.
“Lieber Friedhelm!” he said, returning my embrace, “Love my father when I – am gone. And —auf – auf – wiedersehen!”
He loosed his arms from round my neck and went up to the man, saying:
“I am ready.”
The large horny hand clasped round the small delicate one. The servant-man turned, and with a stiff, respectful bow to me, led Sigmund from the room. The door closed after him – he was gone. The light of two lonely lives was put out. Was our darling right or wrong in that persistent auf wiedersehen of his?