CHAPTER XXI
Fear, the same unreasoning fear that had taken possession of Lilly during her engagement, consumed her again. It paralysed her spine, bound her arms, and made her knees shake and the veins in her neck throb. It wrapped her brain in a blank impenetrable darkness. But after the first meetings were over and nothing occurred to excite the smallest gleam of suspicion, her fear died down, leaving behind it an ever-ready watchfulness, a tension at all times on the lookout for awkward questions, a warily assumed innocence by which to avoid pitfalls.
Extraordinary to relate, the colonel saw nothing. He who was the most jealous and suspicious of husbands, utterly devoid of illusions, was for once blind. He even swallowed the headache myth, and came to sit on her bed in half-playful, half-cynical sympathy to help Fräulein von Schwertfeger change the compresses, which she prepared with over-zealous attentiveness. To submit to this woman's caresses taxed her heavily, for behind them was a furtive pair of eyes that strove to look harmless, yet could not disguise their insatiable curiosity.
As anxiety with regard to her husband gradually lulled itself to sleep, the more wakeful did it become in the case of the self-sacrificing female friend, who at any moment might assume the rôle of a full-fledged enemy and traitor.
Lilly dared not cry till night, when she was alone, and then she would spring out of bed to wash away traces of her tears, only to cry herself to sleep after all.
It was not remorse that she felt, nor shame, nor yearning love, but simply an unfathomable loneliness, a dismayed facing of the question "What next?"
Would it be confession and retirement into a convent, or elopement and suicide?--events which in Frau Asmussen's old novels had been the quite ordinary sequel to such a misdeed.
A week went by. Her headache was well. She had been up again quite a long time, but hadn't seen him. Not a vestige of him was to be seen when, with the doors of her room bolted, she rushed on to the balcony to look across at his quarters.
The colonel kept urging her to resume her rides. The exercise would do her good, and Herr von Prell was ready to escort her.
By the time Saturday came she felt she must give in, for they would be forced to meet the next day at dinner. The horses were stamping before the door. Now the moment of meeting, which she had been anticipating with trembling fears, had come, and confronted her like a new danger. But when she had beheld her friend swagger over the terrace in his high, polished riding-boots, pale and haggard, bowing like a doll on wires to show his hypocritical respect, something in her grew rigid; a feeling came over her that this young man was an utter stranger to whom she was going to speak for the first time.
The next moment they rode out of the gate together. The colonel had gone to the stables, but Fräulein von Schwertfeger stood with clasped hands looking after them.
The road across the fields was like a morass from the standing pools of rain, and squelched under the horses' hoofs. A chill breeze stirred the young autumn wheat. Beyond the ragged twigs of the birches was a faint yellow glow, in which a watery-looking sun was sinking. Everything looked fatigued and sad; even the winter crops seemed to think it had been hardly worth while to sow them.
They trotted on side by side in silence; every minute seemed an hour.
"Surely he must speak at last," she thought, biting her lips till they bled, as she rose in the saddle.
He kept his eyes fixed with an unfaltering gaze on the road, and only moved his right hand now and again to adjust his reins.
"He'll begin again before long with his 'gracious baronesses,'" she thought bitterly, and felt ashamed of herself and him in anticipation.
At length it was she who broke silence.
"Do walk your horse!" she implored, nearly crying.
"Of course we will, comrade," he said, reining in his chestnut.
"Comrade! Comrade!" she echoed derisively, and sought his eyes with a passionate glance. "We've made a nice mess of our comradeship!"
He shrugged his shoulders, the gesture with which he always met a scolding, and did not answer.
"I wish you would say something!" she cried, quite beside herself.
"What do you want me to say?" he asked, making a movement as if he were going to scratch his head reflectively. "It's a nasty affair--we admit that," and he repeated, pondering to himself, "nasty affair, nasty affair!"
"And is that all you have to say?" she exclaimed.
"My gracious friend," he replied, "I am little, and my heart is little in proportion. It's hardly an adequate platform whereon to parade great anguish of soul!"
"Who is talking about anguish of soul!" she cried. "What is to become of us? That is what I want to know."
"Directly I inherit an unencumbered ancestral manor," he replied, with a gesture that denoted invitation, "containing house, stable, horses and carriages, and other animate and inanimate necessaries, I shall permit myself the honour of asking your husband for your hand."
She could no longer control her despair.
"If you continue to make your insulting jokes," she almost screamed, bursting into tears, "I'll ride straight away from you now, and break my neck."
"Rather a difficult thing to accomplish on that sober nag of yours," was his cool reply.
She was at a loss what to retort and so let her tears fall silently.
At last he adopted a different tone.
"Be sensible for a change, my child, to please me," he said. "All I meant to do was to clear your soul of superfluous tragedy. As soon as you put a bright face on the matter I'll give it practical consideration; I promise you."
She wiped the tears from her eyes with the gauntlet of her riding-glove and forthwith smiled obediently.
"That's all right," he said with approval. "Not in vain did the poet sing:
'O weine selten, weine schwer.
Wer Tränen hat, hat auch Malheur.'
Well, now, I'll tell you a fairy tale. We two pretty orphan children were just planted down here in this enchanted castle for each other. We were obliged to come together here, even if long ago we had not been two hearts united somewhere else. The colonel, as a matter of fact, wedded us from the first. The only pity is that your marriage contract with him did not make provision for the circumstances. But there it is, and we have no choice but to resort to some secret arrangement between ourselves. Don't you see, dearest child, we are both tacking the same way on life's ocean. The risks you and I have to run are one and the same. So buck up, and let's go it! We are poor vagabonds, anyhow."
"Thank you, I am not a vagabond!" Lilly flared up. "I have my pride and my honour to maintain, and even if I have sinned, I know how to die for my sins."
"Dying is not so easy," he remarked; "generally the opportunity is lacking, and then when it comes one funks it."
She felt her old burning desire to protect him from his own low estimate of himself.
"You don't mean what you say!" she cried. "You are amongst the boldest and bravest of men, and would face death for the sake of your honour, I know. And if you liked you might have the whole world at your feet. I shall never cease to remind you of that. I have not sacrificed myself for you for nothing. I will interest myself in you till you get back your faith in yourself, till you feel you are once more on the upward path. I will share all your trials and temptations, and stand between you and evil. What am I here for except for your sake--yours?"
At that moment her enthusiasm for him was so great that she could gladly have thrown herself under the hoofs of his horse, and when she compared this with her feelings when they had first met that day, she could hardly comprehend how it was that he had appeared to her in so alienated and repulsive a light.
"You are a most emotional creature," he said; "it is a good thing that the creepers hide your balcony so effectually."
"What do you mean to imply by that?" she faltered, in shocked foreboding.
"And the ladder luckily is still in its place," he went on, "ready to be used. The creepers might break this time and no one would notice anything amiss, not even the Schwertfeger, eh?"
His light eyelashes blinked at her persuasively.
She did not know which way to look, she felt so dreadfully ashamed.
"Never, never will I have anything to do with you again!" she cried. "I swear by all the saints I never will! I should loathe myself if I did, and despise you with all my heart and soul!" She finished with an exclamation of disgust.
He merely shrugged his shoulders. "A pity," he said; "it would have been a splendid opportunity ..."
He came to dinner the next day the picture of all the virtues in his frock-coat and black cravat. He bowed and scraped, pursed his lips, and was so absurdly deferential that he seemed afraid to take his cup of Mocha coffee from her hand. Fräulein von Schwertfeger's eyes wandered watchfully and inquiringly from one to the other.
Late that Sunday night, after the colonel had gone into town, and Fräulein von Schwertfeger retired early to her room, Lilly was sitting on her bed brushing her hair in her night attire, when she became aware of a soft rattling sound at the window. It sounded as if a branch were being blown by the autumn wind against the shutters, only that it occurred regularly at intervals, growing weaker and stronger, but always persistent. Seized with fright, she first thought of going down to Fräulein von Schwertfeger. But, recollecting herself in time, she threw on a dressing-gown, and cautiously opened the window and a bit of the outside shutter.
For a moment she saw nothing. It was a starless night, and the bailiff's house opposite seemed plunged in darkness; then it dawned on her that something like a rod was oscillating close to the shutter. She opened it a little further--and recognised the pea-shooter!
Then she knew what it was.
Springing backwards she drew the bolt, flung herself into bed, and stopped up her ears with her fingers. But every time she drew them out to listen she heard that persistent regular rattle, which had now become almost an unblushing knock.
The watchman who patrolled yard and park every hour had only to see the ladder leaning against the balcony, and all would be lost. Anxiety deprived her of her senses. Trembling like an aspen-leaf in every limb, she ran into her dressing-room again, where there was no light, opened the balcony door slowly and noiselessly a finger's depth, and whispered through the crack into the darkness: "Go away at once, and never attempt such a thing again." But when she tried to close the door again it wouldn't shut. She listened, but nothing was to be seen or heard. Then she groped with her hands and found the obstacle. It was the inevitable pea-shooter. She moaned aloud, buried her face, and the next moment was lying half-fainting in his arms.
After this evening she was completely in his power, defenceless, and without a will of her own--a victim of his every wish and whim.
It couldn't be called happiness or even ecstasy. That followed later, when she had overcome her horror of their monstrous conduct and fear of discovery was deadened by nothing happening to disturb them, and she could revel in a defiant sense of security. Then it became a blissful skating over awful abysses--a delirium of the senses full of intangible joys--a beatific offering of herself to a lacerating scourge, an alternative ebullition of self-scorn and degradation and blasphemous prayer.
She began to laugh again--not that old silly childlike laughter which till recently had dominated her frivolous nature. No, it was a mocking exultant laughter, the laughter of a hunted thief when, behind the back of his pursuer, he drags his hard-won booty into a place of safety.
There was a feeling of justification in it too. "I am only doing what my destiny ordains," she would tell herself. "I am coming into the heritage promised me by fate, that the old man has cheated me of for so long."
There was something more that scored over everything, and almost gave a sanctity and purity to this arrant deception, and this was the reflection that their intercourse meant salvation to him. He would learn to despise vulgar and shameful intrigues under the spell of this elevating passion, and on the wings of a woman's redeeming love he would rise into the pure ether where the spirits of great men and heroes dwell.
She drugged her conscience ever anew with these delusions, and when he lay in her arms at their secret rendezvous, gave expression to them in a whisper, for walls were thin, and it was as well not to speak too loud.
He laughed and kissed the words from her lips, and when she grew uneasy and begged for pledges of constancy, he swore by all his stars to be true.
Fräulein von Schwertfeger's visits to Lilly's room now never lasted later than eleven. At about this hour he was permitted to come; at half-past one he had to be gone. Of course, this was only on nights when the colonel went to town. The train service made it impossible for him to return before two, and, besides, the clatter of approaching carriage wheels could be heard as a warning on the courtyard paving-stones. Before his departure Walter had to smoke a cigarette to clear the room of the odour which he brought with him of stable and leather. For sometimes the colonel, if wine made him talkative, would look in on Lilly as he went to bed, and even come and sit by her for a little, regaling her with the latest "good stories" from Berlin, that he had heard in the Casino. She for her part pretended to be very sleepy, would yawn and purr like a kitten, and often in confidence of safety actually fall asleep in the middle of a laugh.
If only there had been no Fräulein von Schwertfeger! Not that she had noticed anything--the terrors of such a contingency were not to be contemplated. But her restless comings and goings, the almost nervous eagerness with which she spied round her, gave quite enough food for anxiety. She began to look haggard and pale, only the flesh round her mouth, like her sharp-tipped nose, was a deep red. It looked almost as if she drank, but if she did it was in secret, for at table she hardly touched wine.
"I don't mind what she does," thought Lilly, "as long as she doesn't play the spy on me as she did on Käte."
Sometimes it struck Lilly rather forcibly that she herself was now not much better than the poor girl who had been sent away from the castle in disgrace.