CHAPTER XV
The big railway station's grimy glass roof was pierced by the peaceful golden light of a June Sabbath morning. Beneath the three bold archways that led into the open air such masses of blue ether seemed to be concentrated that, as the trains passed under them, it was like being precipitated into a sun-drenched sea. Ribbons from girls' smart hats fluttered against the Sunday coats of their swains, each of whom appeared to think himself an indispensable master of the revels. Athletic and boating clubs were represented in the crowd, smoking clubs and music societies, and one warehouse's whole staff of clerks was there.
Through the excited holiday throng a quiet, happy pair, looking round them cautiously and keeping at a judicious distance from each other, so that it might be doubted whether they were together, made their way to a carriage in the front part of the train. Lilly walked ahead, and again and again she saw the faces of people coming towards her grow rigid with an almost solemn awe as they regarded her--a mute homage to which she was used, but which had never filled her with so much satisfaction as to-day, when she was followed by the only man in the world in whose eyes she cared to be pleasing.
In his honour she was dressed entirely in festive white, a linen coat and skirt, a soft lawn blouse, and a wide straw hat draped with a white lace veil which shaded her brow, and beneath which her burnished brown hair projected in great glossy waves. On her arm she carried a white woollen shawl as a protection against the chilly night air, for it had been agreed between them that they were not to worry about catching certain trains home, but were to stay in the country till they were tired of it.
They sat opposite each other in the corner seats of a third-class compartment, without speaking. Together they were travelling into an undiscovered land. "Trust yourself to my guidance," he had said, "and I will give you a surprise. We are going on a voyage of discovery. I am not in the least certain where the place is; if I were, it wouldn't be a voyage of discovery."
This sensation of being led like a little child was a new and exquisite joy. After an hour's journey, when the carriage had emptied, he signed to her to get out.
"Where are we?" she asked.
"Does that matter?" he rejoined.
He was right. What did it matter?
She did not even look to see what the name of the station was, and they walked out of it into the main street of a bare little country town. On the front of the yellow houses the sunlight lay like a soothing hand. The low doors of the shops were locked, and half of the poor goods displayed in the windows was covered by a sheet to show that it was Sunday. Organ-notes sounded round street corners like sighing winds. A turkey-cock came strutting consequentially from under a gateway and gobbled at them; and then there were no more organ-notes ...
Houses were gradually left behind. A whiff of ripening grain came from the fields, but the pungent fragrance of the yellow lupins outscented it. All round them were meadows carpeted with white and pink tufts of clover, and, beyond, dark firs rose on the slopes of sandy hills.
The road was shadeless, but they tramped along it gaily, and little columns of silvery dust whirled in front of them. He knew everything, and nothing escaped his keenly observant eye. He pointed out a wild rabbit flicking the white underpart of its tail impertinently as it scampered away with comical self-importance. Every moment there was something fresh to look at.
Since her married days at Lischnitz Castle, Lilly had never seen the spring blossom forth in the pure open country.
"Ah! if then I had had him for my guide," she thought, "all would have been different."
As they entered the warm shade of the pine-woods, a squirrel ran almost over their feet and darted a few feet up a tree, where it paused and sat motionless, as if turned to stone.
They looked at each other, both thinking of the moment that had first brought them together.
Lilly went close up to the little animal, but he did not stir.
"I feel as if I were on enchanted ground," she said; "if he began to talk to us I shouldn't be surprised."
She threw herself down, with a sigh of content, on the grey cushiony moss.
He followed her example. Shading their eyes with their hands, they lay on their backs and blinked at the sunshine flickering down on them through the branches. They had nearly forgotten the squirrel, when suddenly, close above them, he made a whistling sound, and then scuttled for his life further up the tree to the topmost branches.
The scared little fellow had been staring at them all the time, not daring to move until now.
"Do you see?" Konrad said. "As long as our human language sounds in their ears, they'll take care to have nothing to do with us."
"All the same, we are bewitched here," she said, laughing. "I've never before lain so luxuriously on the moss and had the sun shine on me so; have you?"
"Yes, once," he answered. "I remember it quite well."
"When did you, and where?" she demanded instantly, jealous of any moment of happiness in his life that she had not created for him.
"Oh, there's not much to tell about it," he said. "It was at Ravello, perched like a gull's nest high up on the rocks above the sea, not far from Amalfi--just about there is a fairy-land of magic country. Picture old Moorish palaces half deserted and half lived in; marble courtyards shut in by trellises; ruined fountains, with myrtle and laurel growing in profusion, and little white climbing-roses trailing over every nook and cranny. There was one place I would have given anything to get inside ... It was a small mysterious gallery standing out against the deep blue sky like a web of silver filigree. So once when there was no one about--only a handful of olive-gatherers live in the neighbourhood--I behaved like a schoolboy, and climbed the great iron gate as high as a house, bar by bar, up one side and down on the other."
"Oh, how splendid!" cried Lilly.
"Yes. I got inside. And when I had examined all the gorgeous details with a professional eye, I threw myself full length on the warm stone steps, and let the sun bake me through; just in the same position as we are lying in here now under these Brandenburg pines. And--would you believe it?--the little bluish-green lizards that you are so fond of came and slowly and cautiously crawled all over me."
"Oh, how heavenly!" cried Lilly in rapture.
"And while I lay there, with the old marble fountain making music in my ears, I fell fast asleep. But I had better have left going to sleep alone, because there's a risk of getting sunstroke even in mid-winter. I should in all probability have been a victim, if some tourists hadn't come and thrown sticks and stones at me. Everything looked red and swam before my eyes. To climb back over the gate was out of the question. The key had to be fetched from the Sindaco, and subsequently I had to appear before him and give an account of myself. But, thank goodness, they didn't lock me up for trespassing, because all the witnesses tapped their foreheads and said 'è matto'--'he's mad.'"
"Never mind," she laughed. "You at least got your way, and saw the inside of the forbidden garden. Many people have to be satisfied with standing outside and looking through the railings."
"That's a pleasure that may be ours to-day," he remarked. And she had to restrain her curiosity.
"It doesn't hurt, at any rate," he went on, "to practise now and then standing outside. For God knows that generally the happiness we happen to be craning our necks to reach is a forbidden garden."
Lilly gazed at him in alarm. What did he mean by that? Then their eyes met in shy understanding. The disquieting expectancy to which she was afraid to give a name crept over her suddenly like an ague.
"Let us go on," she said, springing to her feet, and she walked on rapidly without looking round to see if he followed.
The woods grew clearer. They came to a little swampy coppice where silver birches shot up their slender trunks gaily from mossy pedestals.
The hot midday air stirred in tiny wavelets. Somewhere not far off church-bells were ringing, but no farmstead was in sight, and suddenly they found themselves at diverging paths without knowing which direction to take.
"A decision is called for," he said, and strained his ears for a moment in the quarter whence the sound of church-bells came.
"I wish with all my heart," he added, "that there was a bell ringing thus to guide me on my road in life." And he turned to the right.
Then he told her that he was standing figuratively at cross-roads. He had been offered a post which, considering how young he was, ought not to be scoffed at; but before accepting he was bound to consider whether it would interfere with the progress of his life's work.
"It's a very good post, I suppose?" Lilly asked proudly. If he had been appointed minister of the fine arts or Emperor of China she would not have thought it in the least extraordinary. But he seemed disinclined to say more.
"I would rather talk to you about it when it's settled one way or the other," he replied. And she was perforce satisfied.
Red-tiled roofs appeared above the bushes, and the mirror-like surface of a lake made a shining line against the horizon.
"Is that where we're going?" asked Lilly.
"It may be," he answered.
"Oh, don't be so mysterious," she scolded him in fun. "I've been very good in not asking questions. But now I really must insist on your telling me what your programme is."
"Yes, when we've got there," he laughed. "I know you, and don't want to make you jealous before the right moment."
Could it be that there was another woman in the case?
Another woman? She did not betray her emotion, but as they walked on she felt quite faint--partly from hunger and partly from mental distress. The lake now lay before them in its early summer beauty, with its greenish-grey girdle of reeds and rushes, and lights and shadows flitting across it.
A little distance from the bank, on a shrubby slope, was the inn, with "Logierhotel" printed on its signboard. It was one of those orange-brick monstrosities built in the barbarous palatial-barn style. But round it three or four ancient lime-trees spread their wide shady branches, and they seated themselves on a white bench beneath them, their mood harmonising with the scene.
To their left the lake stretched away into the hazy distance; on their right, beyond the reeds and sedges of the shore, was a tiny village with moss-green thatched roofs, and a stumpy, storm-beaten spire half hidden among reeds and bushes. And close to them, not a hundred steps from where they sat in the shade of the limes, there rose the wooded slopes and mighty tree-tops of an ancestral park, from the interior of which they caught the gleam of pillars, bridges, and white, vine-clad balustrades. Very likely that was the forbidden garden, outside the gates of which they were to stand to-day. How charming! how mysterious!
Anglers came up from the lake, scarlet of face and panting with thirst, and these apparently were the only guests at the inn besides themselves, for the Sunday stream of excursionists had not yet begun to flow in the direction of this quiet nook.
The bill of fare which the landlady, equipped with all the wiles she had acquired in the capital, smilingly handed to them presented a dazzling abundance of good things. It was too bad that they all came together. Lilly was asked to choose, but declined. Thoughts of the strange woman who was certainly in the case depressed her. And she only saw the laughing world, which threw its early summer gifts at their feet so bountifully, through a mist of suppressed tears.
"Here we are at last," she said, sighing. "So you may as well confess: what sort of woman is she?"
He laughed heartily. "So you've guessed, have you, that it is a woman?"
"If not, why should I be jealous?"
"I must admit you have every cause. I never set eyes on anything more beautiful; the only pity is, that she is marble."
Oh! then that's all it was!
"I am and always shall be a silly," she said, laughing from relief, and he kissed her hand in contrition.
While they were waiting for the fish which they had ordered, he told her the story of how they came to be making their present pilgrimage.
He had one day, during his sojourn in Rome, seen in the window of an art-dealer's shop the antique cast of a woman's head, much damaged, but of such inspiring and sombre beauty that he went again and again day after day to feast his eyes upon it. And one morning he found the owner of the shop and a German gentleman standing in the doorway engaged in a lively conversation, which, however, did not progress, as neither of them understood what the other was talking about. He offered his services as interpreter, and to his chagrin learned that the subject of discussion was his favourite bust, which the German, a courteous and cultivated country gentleman, wished to purchase. Setting aside his own feelings, Konrad assisted in concluding the bargain on the Baron's behalf, and had received an invitation from him to visit his house on returning to Germany, in order that he might see the marble bust adorning his park, and convince himself that its new surroundings were not unworthy of its beauty.
"Oh! so the garden isn't forbidden after all?" cried Lilly, holding out her arms ecstatically towards the green mysterious barriers. "We may just walk straight in."
Konrad's face became thoughtful. "It's not so simple as that," he said, "for how should I introduce you? You are not my wife.... Only between ourselves you are my sister, and we are too young to trump up any other plausible relationship."
A sudden bitterness welled up within her. Once more she felt despised and rejected, ostracised from honourable society.
"You should have left me at home," she broke out. "I am only an encumbrance to you."
"Ah, Lilly," he said, "what do I really care about marble busts? I would rather stand behind the fence with you than have the run of the whole park without you."
She caressed his hand, as it hung by his side, mollified and grateful. And then at last the carp came.
Two hours later they were pacing along a seemingly endless wall, half as high again as a man, with no break in it to peep through. "Not till they came to the corner of the park where the wall ended did they find a less impenetrable, high, moss-grown fence, which ran along to the right. Now through the gaps they could get a view of the interior. Venerable plane-branches formed arches over shady nooks, with groups of oaks and limes between. The open grassy lawns were banked with rhododendrons, the blossoms of which looked like violet eyes. On a knoll in the background, a little round temple with Tuscan columns and a shining green roof looked solemnly out of its dark surrounding cypresses.
"She must be in there," Konrad said. But the little temple was empty, so they prosecuted their search further afield. Not a single opening in the foliage escaped their vigilance. Here and there statues gleamed, a Ceres, a Satyr playing on his flute, and in a cypress thicket they caught a glimpse of a shrine of the Virgin, but nowhere did they see a sign of the strange, beautiful woman's head they were looking for.
They went on. A stream ran out from the park across the road, spanned by a rough plank such as is to be met with in any country lane. But a hundred paces away, inside the park, was another snow-white glistening bridge, throwing its graceful arch boldly over the water.
"The Venetian bridges are like that," he said.
"Across such a bridge the gods entered Walhalla," she sighed.
They stood still and conjured up the joy of crossing that bridge. But still they could not get on the track of the marble bust.
Beyond the plank bridge, where the village began, the park receded some way from the lane. A row of Weymouth pines flanked the inner side of the fence. The quaint village street was gay with Sunday festivities. Dancing was going on to the accompaniment of piano and fiddles, and somewhere bowls were rolling merrily; but they passed without taking any notice of these things, for all their interest was still centred on the forbidden garden. Every moment it drew them with more compelling charms. Crumbling gate-posts were half-hidden among the village lime-trees, and the palings were so rotten they hardly held together. At this spot the foliage on the inner side was quite impenetrable to the eye. Trunk was garlanded to trunk by growths of clematis and ivy, and lilac and spiræa bushes were massed underneath. It looked as if the master of the garden had, in addition to a stone wall, drawn a living one around his demesne to hedge in himself and his family in happy seclusion.
For a long time they walked on without being rewarded by another glimpse of the inside of the park. Then unexpectedly they came to an old three-cornered gateway which, with its vases and pillars, its cracked belfry and lacework of latticed railings, was half buried in blossoming acacias.
Here at last they got an uninterrupted view of the inside of the park. A straight avenue of pines led in solemn dignity up to the castle, but even at this favourable standpoint nothing of its architecture was revealed to their gaze. Trees and bushes hid it from view. The only bit of stone-work their eager eyes discerned was a flight of steps on the columns of which marble nymphs raised aloft their snow-white wings.
"Isn't that lovely?" Lilly murmured with a sigh; and thrusting her face through the iron bars, she whimpered and begged playfully to be let in.
"That is exactly how I stood, outside the gate at Ravello," he said. "Now you know what it is like."
As he said this, it struck her that the sensation of being shut out somewhere was familiar to her too. She knew as well as he did what it was like. But where was it that cold iron had pressed her cheeks before?
Ah! now she recollected. Had she not many a time stood without the latticed door which barred the staircase to the private part of Liebert & Dehnicke's warehouse? That pretentious, proud, forbidding laurel-flanked ascent, which her unholy feet might never tread?
It, too, was a forbidden garden. Forbidden gardens abounded everywhere, it seemed!
"I think we had better give it up," she said softly; "it only makes our hearts ache."
So hand-in-hand they wandered back along the path they had come, close to the fence, and talked persistently of other things. And yet their eyes still lingered longingly in the neighbourhood of the park, and the aspiration they both felt, but did not express for fear of hinting reproaches, gilded everything with a fairy-tale glamour.
Evening came. Violet mists hung over the meadows, and the copper-coloured trunks of the pines glowed like torches. The deeper the setting sun sank into the reeds and rushes, the more the lake lost its cool, blue, silvery sheen, and took on a network of ruddy gold. It looked now as if it bore on its face the sparkling fulfilment of all earthly promises.
Neither of them could tolerate being on shore any longer.
A boat lay at anchor by the hotel's bathing pavilion, where in the cool of the evening happy bathers were splashing, and they hired it for a mere song. Konrad took the oars and Lilly seated herself at the stern. All kinds of water-flowers rose with a swish lightly to the surface as the boat cut through a carpet of sedges. Mingled with the young green of the sprouting reeds were the brown battered remnants of last year's growth; stately bulrushes bordered the banks, and the water flag planted her golden tents between them. Like huge dense walls of purple, the park's wealth of timber rose high against the sky.
When Lilly pointed this out, Konrad shook his head and said: "It's no good thinking any more about it." But, nevertheless, he kept casting glances in that direction.
Lilly had scarcely ever been in a boat, and soon gave up steering as a bad job. She spread her shawl at the bottom of the boat and made herself a comfortable soft nest, into which she retired.
Crouched at Konrad's feet, she lay there with her back against the seat in the stern. And thus, her eyes dreamily fixed on blue space, she began to build castles in the air about her future, devising plans by which, with a bound, she was to swing herself back into the midst of respectability.
She would give music lessons--she was good enough for beginners--and with the proceeds prepare herself for the stage, for which she had a decided talent.... Or perhaps it would be wiser to go in for science, to train her mind so that it might not lag behind his. She must be intellectual enough to deserve his friendship so long as he desired her to be his friend. Or--so that no harm should happen to anyone else--she would go abroad and teach German, and come back a new and regenerated woman at his summons. Or ... Ah! what? Or ... or ... lie and dream, and drain the happiness of the hour to the dregs. Exposure and death--one must entail the other--would come time enough....
The sun went down, melting into a blood-red haze. Nearness and distance were now veiled in violet mists. The whole globe seemed to be diluted into light and air, the reeds alone, with their slender black stems latticing the evening afterglow, retained an earthly corporeal form.
The foliage of the park gradually melted into a dark undefined mass. More than ever did it now seem to be a forbidden garden, filled with thrills and mysteries, sinking for ever into the unattainable.
As the boat glided along the edge of the reeds, it suddenly drifted near a blue bay, which cut like a wedge into the land on the park side, so far in that it was impossible to see where it ended. For a moment Konrad rested on his oars motionless, then he sprang to his feet with a cry of delight.
"What is it?" she asked.
"You remember we saw a stream flowing out of the park on the village side?"
"Of course I do."
"It must have flowed in somewhere, mustn't it?"
"Why, yes."
He pointed with his hand to the gleaming bay's narrowing tip.
"There's the place!"
"And do you really think that at last we have ..." She dared not suggest it.
"If we like, we can in this boat traverse the whole unexplored region by water."
In her childlike jubilation she jumped up with an exclamation, and simply fell on his neck as if it was a natural thing to do, and they had never made any platonic vows.
Slowly the boat drifted on with the current--between meadows lined with weeping willows, where the evening mist hung like white scarves. Peasants' cottages stood near, with fishing-nets spread out over the fences. Then, at a bend in the stream, a dark gateway of foliage opened like a huge vault in front of them.
"Oh, goodness!" cried Lilly.
"Hush!" he whispered, in pretended awe. "Now we must be as quiet as mice, or we shall get turned out for trespassing, after all."
And the dip of his oars became so stealthy that it might have been taken for the splash of a leaping fish.
Thus they rowed under the triumphal arch of leaves which thickly interlaced overhead. It was pitch dark close around them, though here and there from the right bank came an occasional gleam of summer twilight. Lamplights, too, twinkled in the distance, and they could catch the hum of voices, the clink of glasses, and now and then a stray chord struck on the piano. The foliage parted, and an unimpeded view of the castle lay before them. It was a wide, two-storeyed, box-like structure, its ponderous simplicity dating from a period when the grandees of Brandenburg still possessed little sense of the artistic. But on the stone steps gleamed the marble nymphs that had greeted them in the afternoon, and beyond their white bodies one saw on the terrace itself a long table, round which was gathered, in the flickering lamplight, a chattering, laughing party, passing gaily with song and wine the intoxicating summer evening.
"And he might be sitting there too," thought Lilly, "if I were not hanging like a millstone about his neck," and she felt almost as if she must apologise to him.
They drifted quickly by on the current, and like the vision of a moment the banquet vanished from their sight. They passed the brightly lighted windows of the castle kitchen and offices, where servants flitted to and fro like ministering spirits, and glided again into silence and darkness. To their right, at the back of the house with its countless windows, was a grass plot bordered with old statues and ivy-draped urns; on their left everything was plunged in shadow. Here was an avenue of century-old limes running along the bank of the stream, every ray of light extinguished in its dark depths.
Maybe somewhere near here stood the marble head they longed to find. Lilly's eyes searched every corner furtively, as if she scrupled to deprive him of the joy of discovery.
The arched bridge, which they had admired earlier in the day, now gleamed at them again out of the dusk. It evidently did not lead to Walhalla, but to an islet of spiræa and hemp bushes, under the branches of which a pair of swans were roosting. At the sound of the oars they awoke, and with flapping wings pursued the boat, opening their beaks for bread.
"Swans! the one touch that was wanted to make everything perfect!" Lilly exclaimed jubilantly. "I wish I had some crumbs to give them."
She turned her head to look after the swans, and her neck rested against his knees.
"May I stay like this?" she asked a little nervously.
"Yes, if it's comfortable," he answered; and there was a caressing yielding in his tone that sent a warm glow through her limbs.
She took off her hat, not to crush it, and laid it on the seat in the stern. Now her head was free to lean too against him lightly, and in sweet anxiety she felt his hand rest for a moment tenderly on her hair. Yet he was silent and preoccupied, as if some burden were weighing on his mind, which he could not throw off. And again she felt as she had often felt before, as if a veil hung between him and herself--a veil that seldom lifted, and obscured from her the true characteristics of his nature, much as she clung to him in loving intimacy.
Oh, if only he would be merry!
The park came to an end, and the red after-glow, no longer hidden by walls of foliage, flamed in full glory over them. The spell threatened to be broken. The world of magic became almost ordinary.
"Come, let us turn round," she begged softly.
And they turned the boat's head and rowed again into the dreamy bliss of semi-darkness.
But now he had to strike out with a will, because they were rowing against the current, and he could not prevent his oars from splashing audibly in the water.
"We shan't get off. They will catch us now!" he said.
"Oh, but they are far too happy," she replied, "to be down on other happy people."
"Yes, it looks almost like an enchanted castle; but--who knows? it may be a snare and a delusion."
"Why should it be?"
"Ah, God knows!... Bleeding wounds can be hidden under flowers, and the beauty with which a man may surround himself is often deceptive."
This scepticism displeased her.
"They must be happy!" she cried; "they who have given us so much to-day must have enough for themselves too."
"It, doesn't follow, darling," he answered. "It's possible to make a rich man of a beggar, and to be as poor as a church mouse one's self."
"Are we beggars, then?" she asked, raising herself gently up to him.
"No, by Jove! we are not beggars;" and he drew a deep breath.
There was a silence, and then it seemed as if something warm and damp was falling on her forehead.
He was actually crying--crying for joy!
Did she deserve it? She, Lilly Czepanek, who ... And to hide her own tears she withdrew into herself. It was more than she could bear. She would have liked to sob and cry and kiss his hands, but instead she was obliged to clench her hands, and stuff her gloves between her teeth so that he should not notice her agitation. It was like an intervention of Providence that, as they once more drifted close by the castle, the sound of a woman's voice singing should fall on their ears.
What was the song? Ah! out of "Tristan." She had never heard it in the theatre, but she was sure it could be nothing but "Tristan."
She raised her head interrogatively, and Konrad, stooping, whispered in her ear, "Isolde's 'Liebestod.'" He quickly ran the boat ashore at the darkest spot on the bank, for not a note must be lost. On the terrace above, laughter and chatter were silenced. Only the nightingale in the lime-boughs was undisturbed, and mingled its sweet rhapsody with the exultant death-agony of the woman who, more than any other creation of God or man, teaches us that the will not to be is the most triumphant manifestation of being.
Lilly trembled from head to foot. She stretched her hands behind her to reach his. She could not help holding on to him. If she had not held on to him she must have sunk into space. Not till she felt his warm fingers between hers did she become calmer.
The last note died away; the grand arpeggios of the Nachspiel melted into silence. There was no clapping or applause of any kind. That lively party up there on the terrace were evidently impressed, and realised what was due to the singer.
Konrad, with a silent pressure, let go her hands and went back to the oars. She did not demur. The forbidden garden vanished, vanished utterly.
The dusk of early night now lay on the meadows. Not a sound was to be heard far or near. Yet the world seemed to echo with the melody of harp and the sound of song.
"And we've never seen your marble beauty," murmured Lilly, stroking his knees. "Yet I keep thinking that was her voice."
"And I, too," he burst out passionately. "She wasn't singing for those good people up there at all, but for us--for us alone."
"Ah! I wish I could sing it like her!"
"Try, at any rate."
She sang a few passages here and there. But she could not connect them, and, what was more, something else rose and forced its way imperiously into her memory.
With that grandest and most exquisite inspiration of the great master mingled, unbidden, her own poor "Song of Songs." And she sang out into the profound silence:
"Tell me, O thou whom my soul loveth, where thou feedest, where thou makest thy flock to rest at noon: for why should I be as one that turneth aside ..."
She paused.
"What is that?" he asked. "I don't know it at all."
"That is my 'Song of Songs,'" she replied, drawing a deep breath.
Never before had she mentioned its name to a living soul.
"Your 'Song of Song'?" he asked in astonishment.
And what lay before her was as clear as daylight; she would perhaps never have such a chance again. This was the moment to lay bare the secret of her youth to him.
"Put down the oars and listen, I am going to confide something to you. You may think it quite silly and ridiculous, but to me it has always been sacred."
Speechless, he shipped his oars,
"You must come and sit beside me, so that I can see your face."
His eye swept the water with a searching glance. The boat was again drifting serenely on the mirror-like bosom of the lake, which seemed to have gathered on its ripples all the throbbing blue and purple shadows of the summer night. There was not the slightest sign of danger ahead, so he obediently did as she wished.
They crouched close together at the bottom of the little craft, with their heads propped against the seat that Konrad had occupied for so long, and she told her story. She related how the legacy her poor runaway father had left behind exercised a powerful influence on her at all periods in her life.... If the years of her girlhood had been full of it, later it even attained a higher and more mysterious significance. It became, as it were, a symbol of all her efforts and actions. When her life became a whirl of useless frivolity then it was silent--sometimes for years together--but whenever her soul had an uplifting, whenever her pursuits and ideals accorded, then it came to life again. It outsang all that was low and unlovely in the world. From disgrace and wickedness outwardly it had not been able to protect her altogether, but it had at least kept her free within, and susceptible to the advent of one for whom she had unconsciously waited. And now that this one of all others had really come, she felt that the hour of fulfilment, both for herself and for her "Song of Songs," had sounded. Now it seemed that it must go forth into all the world to touch and conquer every heart and to bring its creator and herself glory and redemption.
So she talked herself into such a state of exalted enthusiasm that she became unmindful of time and place, and everything but the one thought that she still had more of what was best and purest within her to lay at his feet. But she had said as much as she could say, more than she could ever have believed she would confide to any human being, more than till this hour she had known of herself. He now held her noblest, truest self in the hollow of his hand, to do with it what he listed. All that was lax and impure, all that had brought ruin into her heart and life, was gone. She need no longer trouble herself about it.
While she had been telling him this wonderful tale, she would have liked to see what effect it had upon him, but had not trusted herself to glance at his face. Now, however, that it was finished, she ventured to turn in his direction, and became aware that his eye rested on her with a curiously confused and wild expression, such as she had never noticed in him before; for, as a rule, he kept his emotions at a distance with, as it were, fisticuffs. Her heart began to beat loudly, and the unrest of expectation to which she could give no name became so strong that she nearly ran to the other end of the boat to control it and prevent herself suffocating.
Then she saw him shut his eyes and throw his head back against the sharp edge of the seat. "You will hurt yourself," she whispered; and, instead of fleeing from him as she wanted to do, she placed her arm to serve as a cushion between his neck and the seat.
Now he lay on her breast and breathed heavily.
"Shall I sing you some more out of it?" she asked, bending over him tenderly.
"Yes, yes, please," he murmured.
And she sang, in a half-coaxing voice, as if she were singing lullabies, all those arias which, since the day her poor mother's mind had sunk into eternal night, had never been heard by any human ear. "The lily of the valleys" and "The rose of Sharon" she sang, and that other lyric in which all the sounds and magic of spring were mingled:
"For, lo, the winter is past ... the flowers appear on the earth ... and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land."
So she went on singing, more and more. When she sometimes paused and asked if he had heard enough, he only shook his head and pressed closer to his soft pillow.
Once she glanced round and saw that they were moored in the reeds, and that it was now completely night. But why should she mind that? Somehow or other they would manage to get home.
She was drawing to the end. There were only "Set me as a seal upon thine heart," "How beautiful are thy feet with shoes, O prince's daughter," to come; and, above all, the verse which began with words so singularly appropriate to this day's adventures: "Come, my beloved, let us go forth into the field." But when she came to the lines:
"Let us see if the vine flourish, whether the tender grape appear, and the pomegranates bud forth: there will I give thee ..."
her breath failed her and she could not go on.
"Why have you stopped singing?" she heard him ask.
There was a buzzing of bees and a ringing of bells in her ears.
"Be brave!" a voice shouted within her; "be brave, or you will lose him for ever."
But at that moment she felt two trembling lips seeking hers, and then it was all over with thoughts of being brave.
Midnight was long past when the boat at last put in to the shore. The bathing pavilion was dark and deserted, but in the hotel lights still glimmered.
In extreme trepidation they rang the bell.
"There's always a room ready here for belated young married couples," said the deferential, smiling landlady reassuringly.