II.
One day Marguerite entered his room with the announcement that some one wished to see him.
At first he made no reply. He lay stretched on a low couch with the immobility of a corpse and his upper eyelids met the lower in two fine pencilled lines like the eyes of the dead. His hair and beard, framing skin of deathly pallor, were also lifeless. His beautifully shaped right hand, thin almost to the point of transparency, rested limply on his coverlet.
Marguerite repeated: “Albert, there is some one who wants to see you.”
His figure suddenly stirred as if convulsed.
“I suppose another countryman to view my remains and then go back to Germany and lie about me!” A bitter smile appeared on his bloodless lips as he uttered these words with an irritable sneer. “I am sick of all visitors. They come here out of curiosity. The swine! What stories they have fabricated about me. I want friends, not visitors. And friends come only when one has something to give them!” He emitted a sigh. “Why should they come?” he soon added more bitterly. “Who wants to see misery!”
“This is a woman, Albert. She says she comes from Vienna——”
“From Vienna—she is perhaps bringing me word that the director of the Royal theatre is to present one of my tragedies—he has promised me. Send her in.”
The next instant the corner of his mouth twitched, the crease between his eyes flattened, and digging his right elbow into the downy pillow underneath him, he raised his right side to a half-sitting posture and leaned against the prop of pillows at his head. A panting sigh betrayed the great effort of raising himself.
Presently a girl of about twenty-two stepped in, and as she caught sight of the half-blind, half-paralyzed figure her breathing almost stopped. For a bare second she halted as if she meant to retreat, but her blue eyes filled with tears and she whispered. “Bon jour.”
“Guten Morgen,” he replied in German and extended his withered right hand. “So you have come from Vienna,” he added without releasing her hand. “Do you know my friend Loeb?”
The young woman stood speechless, leaning over the couch, realizing for the first time that unless he lifted the paralyzed lid of his right eye he saw nothing. Tears overflowed her eyes.
“I have not come direct from Vienna,” she faltered—“I haven’t been there for some time, but—but I wanted some excuse to cross your threshold—I lisped your songs before I could lisp my prayers—they were my breviary—you have taught me the meaning of the beauty of life——”
Albert nodded his head as she uttered the last flattering words, a smile of great satisfaction appeared on his face. The speaker’s girlish voice attracted him; it was like a voice from his young life, the days of love-making in Gunsdorf, Bonn and Goettingen. And the voice was such a relief to him! He was tired of all the voices around him—of the jabbering speech of his nurses, and of his wife—good souls all, but God! what voices! It was years since he had heard a pleasing voice.
“Never mind why you came here,” he struck in, smiling, “I am happy that you are here. Sit down and tell me who you are.”
She moved a chair nearer the couch and sat down.
“I can hardly tell you who I am—” she was nervously plucking at the edges of the roll of music in her hands, her eyes filled with tears, rested pitifully on the face that spoke of a thousand sufferings. To her it was the face of the Christ—the suffering face of the Man of Sorrows; the beard and the superfine, bloodless lips and the nose and the closed eyes and the strange smile—there was something of the expression of Eli, Eli, lamah Zabachtani in that face.
“Come nearer, let me see what you look like.”
She moved her chair closer to the couch, and raising the right eyelid with the tips of his fingers, he held it for a moment and looked at the visitor, who hesitated to tell her name. He scented romance. The sweet tantalization of youth was again in his blood. He was eager, pursuing, impatient. The glimpse of her made him still more eager. He took in at a glance her roguish blue eyes, so appealing yet so shrewd, her light-brown hair, her slender figure—the slenderness, without the suggestion of meagerness that always attracted him.
He pressed her for information about herself. She fenced cleverly. She did not mean to tell him her history—she had never told her history to any one.
“I’ll tell you the truth,” she was saying, trying to divert his mind from her person. “I learned that your secretary had gone and since French and German are almost equally my mother tongue, I thought I might be of service to you.”
“No, no,” he shook his head, laughing, “one can no more have two mother tongues than one can have two mothers. You are a Swabian—you can’t hide it from me. I can tell a Swabian accent—I can never forget Hegel’s accent and manner of pronouncing certain words—and a sweet Swabian woman’s face.—Now, since I have paid you a compliment we are friends, so you must tell me who you are.”
There was a moment’s silence. The visitor’s blue eyes shifted from side to side, her inner indecision was betrayed in her mobile features.
“I once spent a whole day talking about you with a perfect stranger, a man who happened to be a friend and admirer of yours—he thought I had fallen in love with him.” She gave a roguish little laugh.
“Who was he?” There was boyish inquisitiveness in his voice.
“Heinrich Metzger.”
“So you are the Butterfly!” Albert exclaimed.
“Yes, I am the Butterfly,” she returned, laughing. “What did Herr Metzger tell you about me?” She halted and a blush spread over her cheeks. “I know; he told you he had met me on a train going from Paris to Havre, and that I had fallen in love with him at first sight. Herr Metzger thinks he is quite irresistible.”
Albert laughed cheerfully. No man is displeased at hearing a pretty woman ridicule another man, even when the other happens to be a friend. However, he protested.
“Metzger is a handsome fellow—a very fine chap—quite a lady-killer.”
“What else did he tell you?”
“Let me see. He was quite impressed with the mystery of your flitting existence. You wouldn’t give him your name but you gave him your ring on which there was a seal with the emblem of a butterfly—and you did fly away. The next time he met you on the Strand in London, but you wouldn’t recognize him. And then he found you in Paris. He thought you were a mysterious person. He wished he were a novelist instead of a poet. He could have written an interesting story about you.”
The girl laughed.
“In order to write the novel he would have to know the mystery,” she said, her smiling face quickly changing to that of sadness, “and he still knows nothing about me. He doesn’t even know my first name. O, yes, he thinks my name is Margot.” Again she emitted a light-hearted laugh. “He evidently doesn’t know the meaning of Margot in French. I had talked so much and so recklessly that day that I thought Margot a fitting name for myself. I was a regular margot—a real chatterbox—that day—and all because we talked about you and he said he had just visited you——”
Albert extended his hand. She let her hand rest in his and gazed intensely at his face, which was now flushed and full of animation.
“I never hoped, I never dreamed, I’d come so close to you, the poet of my dreams,” she murmured without withdrawing her hand from his.
“Do tell me who you are,” he begged.
“For the present call me Butterfly,” she said, rising. “I’ll call again—if you’ll let me.”
He was clinging to her hand.
“You must come again!” he addressed her du (thou) familiarly. “You must!” he pressed her hand affectionately. “You shall be the last ray of sunshine in my dark life. Ah, why didn’t you come before? My life of late has been so dreary!”
There were tears in his voice. Tears gathered in her eyes, too. Then a moment of silence. From the next room came the jarring laughter of his wife. The parrot was repeating au revoir again and again. From outside, through the open door over the balcony, came the noise of the street, the rattle of carriages, the jangling of a hurdy-gurdy——
“Au revoir,” she whispered.
He was still clinging to her hand, speechlessly. Bending over him she kissed his forehead and rushed out of the house.