VI
Leo stayed alone with his mother. The morning sunlight danced on the coffee table's snowy damask, the silver hot-water kettle hummed and hissed, and the smoke from Leo's cigar rose lightly in transparent rings to the ceiling.
"I don't know how it is," said the old lady, sighing and stroking back the wavy grey hair from her forehead, "it may be wrong of me, but I can't be as happy this morning as I ought to be. First it is one thing and then another."
"Never mind, little mother," he said; "it will soon be all right. My goods have certainly been squandered.... No, no, I don't blame you for it. If any one's to blame, I am. What did I keep away so long for? Ulrich wrote strongly enough. But I was an ass and would not heed. There's time yet, thank God! I have not unlearnt the way to work, as that shrewish little girl hinted just now."
"You are unjust to her," the mother said, defending Hertha hotly. "One should not take everything young girls say too literally. You should look into their hearts instead. And this young heart, Leo, I know for a fact, is full of you--you alone and no other."
"How do I come to be so honoured?" he asked with a laugh.
She made an arch grimace and laid her hand caressingly on his.
"You know what her position is? When Johanna's husband died--I don't want to say anything against him--his soul may rest in peace--but----"
"It is all the same to me," Leo interrupted. "But I must say that I should like to get a glimpse of Johanna herself."
His mother appeared distressed and painfully moved. "Wait a little longer," she said hesitatingly; "she will come down soon."
"Now then, out with it!" he commanded. "Directly I ask after her, you evade the question. Ulrich, too, threw out hints, and she herself is avoiding me. The matter must be cleared up instantly."
"She avoids everybody," complained his mother, with tears in her eyes. "Johanna is quite altered, you would scarcely know her. I should never have thought it possible any nature could have become so gloomy. You know, my dear boy, that I am not irreligious myself. I believe in God and the Lord Jesus, and that I shall meet your father again in an eternal world. Most firmly do I believe it."
"Yes, mother dear, I know you do," Leo answered, bending his lips over her hand. A child-like joyousness dwelt in her simple heart which kept all doubt miles away.
"But you see," she went on, "Johanna goes to an extreme, which makes one almost anxious. She has had an altar put up by her bed, and a marble crucifix hangs on the wall, as if she were a Catholic. I have found her before it often, fallen asleep in her clothes, when I have gone into her room in the morning. She has given up all society. She doesn't come down when there are guests here, and we ourselves often don't see her all day long. Then she has started a school for infants; old Lange is getting feeble, so it relieves him. She sings and prays with the little ones, and in winter she makes soup for them. And that is the only intercourse she has with any one."
"How long has this been going on?" he asked, frowning.
"It is nearly two years now," his mother answered. "Yes, it was when the girls left school and came home. I sent Elly there because it was Hertha's school, and I wanted the girls to become friends, and thought it would be nice to have Hertha in the house to make her home with us."
"Why have you taken up this Hertha?" he asked. "Your interest in the girl seems to me rather suspicious."
The old lady flushed like a maiden of sixteen. And as she looked up at him with her merry eyes full of truth and candour, she said almost apologetically--
"Leo dear, you know."
"No, really I don't," he answered, laughing.
Then she began to divulge her plans to him in detail. Hertha's maternal fortune was enormous, not by any means to be underrated; and there was only one drawback to the property she owned, and that was its being in Poland. Her mother before her marriage had fallen out with the family, and had to go to law with her own brother for her possessions. Through that all intercourse between Hertha and her Polish relations had been cut off. The only person to be consulted on the bestowal of her hand was her guardian, the old Judge Wessel.
"I have never met the old gentleman," she continued, "but we write to each other twice a year the most friendly letters. So there is nothing to fear from that quarter. I assure you, Leo, that you have only to raise your little finger, and the richest heiress in the country will be your wife."
She paused triumphantly. But instead of answering, he whistled his favourite Mexican air "Paloma" and smiled into vacancy.
His mother was hurt. "I have taken so much trouble to arrange it," she said. "It has cost me thousands of sleepless nights, and you don't even repay me with 'thank you.'"
"It takes two people to make a marriage, my mother," he replied. "I am an elderly good-for-nothing. I have been a vagabond, absentee landlord, and I am packed full of sins up to my throat. And she--she is a child."
"Next spring she will be seventeen," was the answer.
"Well, then, I say 'thank you,'" he said standing up, "and when I am out of the hole I am in at present, we will, perhaps, return to the subject."
The mother strongly objected. He would thus give her time to lose her heart to some foolish youth, who would fill her head with nonsense. Had she not been specially designed for him? Didn't she rave about him, and dream about him before she had even seen him? Was she, now that he had come back, to be repulsed and slighted?
"But perhaps she doesn't attract you," she went on in an anxious tone. "Or there is some one else--some one you have fallen in love with away, or even secretly married? Are you going to bring a creole here as your wife, or one of those ladies who knock about the world in search of adventures? I tell you, Leo, that if you do, I shall take to my bed and die."
He did his best to reassure her. He had come home as free as when he went away, and had done once for all with affairs of the heart.
She wiped her eyes, but the tears would well forth afresh.
"Oh, my boy, my boy!" she sobbed, and stroked his hand with trembling fingers.
"What is the matter?" he asked gently.
But he knew well enough. Since the day he received his sentence he had not seen her face to face, and in this moment her mother's heart was living through again the world of sorrow which her son's wildness had once created for her.
"Stop crying, mother," he implored.
"Ah! what have I not suffered for your sake?" she wailed. "Why did you go and shoot Rhaden dead? Rhaden, who was an intimate friends of ours, and Felicitas's husband besides, so a kind of relation."
He reminded her that it was Rhaden and no other who had challenged him.
"But couldn't you have shot in the air?" she inquired. "It is so often done."
"You don't understand, dear," he answered. "If I had been brought home dead, you would have had even a greater trial to bear on my account. Rhaden, you know, never jested."
She knew, indeed, that his aim was unerring, and realised for the first time the danger which had hovered over her son. She patted his cheeks, full of anxiety, as if even to-day she might be robbed of him.
"You are right; you are right!" she murmured, "I told Felicitas so when she accepted him. He was always a cruel, revengeful character."
"Don't abuse him, mother," he said seriously. "He is dead--and when we have had it out once for all, let us leave this ugly story alone for ever. It has cost every one concerned a good slice of their life's happiness. It is time that we buried it."
She wiped the tears out of the corners of her eyes and looked once more placid content.
"I may talk of Felicitas, I suppose?" she asked.
"Why not?" he said undecidedly, and examined his tobacco-stained finger-nails.
"What do you think of that marriage?" she broke forth. "Fancy Uli? Who would have thought of such a thing?"
"Well, why shouldn't he marry?"
"But it was so extraordinary. He,--your best friend."
"He has my blessing." Leo spoke abruptly, and was in haste to get on to another topic. "How comes it," he asked, "that your intercourse with Felicitas is entirely over? My--my misfortune with Rhaden was not the reason?"
"Oh no, not in the least," she replied. "When you were gone we associated the same as before, for we said to ourselves that we poor women oughtn't to suffer more than was necessary for the men's sake. It told upon us all heavily. I won't speak of myself. Johanna appeared in deep mourning, for she had just buried her husband. Lizzie was so desolate and in need of help, and so we comforted each other. It was not till Lizzie's engagement to Ulrich began to be talked about, that there was an estrangement. I don't know exactly why--for we all congratulated her. But just before the wedding, she and Johanna quarrelled. The reason has never come out, for you know how Johanna can be as silent as the grave. The day it happened Felicitas drove away, deadly pale, without saying good-bye, and has never been here since. Johanna vowed that she would rather die than go to the wedding, and prayed me not to go. And when any one begs me not to do a thing ... well you know----"
"Yes, I know, mummy," he said, and caressed her hair compassionately.
She had always given in to his strong-willed sister. There was silence. He bit at the ends of his beard and meditated.
"Oh, rubbish!" he exclaimed on a sudden, and jumped to his feet. "Be courageous and repent nothing. That is the whole secret of life."
"What do you mean, my son?" his mother asked nervously.
For answer, he kissed her on the forehead and seized his cap. But at this moment the door opened and a tall, nun-like figure, dressed in unrelieved black, stood on the threshold.
He glanced at her quickly, then recoiled. Could this be Johanna? Her beauty, her youth--what had become of them?
Motionless, and without showing a sign of pleasure, she stood before him, and did not even stretch out her hand to him.
"Johanna!" he cried, and was going to embrace her.
But she only offered him her forehead to kiss slowly and unwillingly as if performing a great sacrifice, and it seemed to him that she shuddered under the touch of his lips.
This was the reception his pet sister, his childhood's companion, chose to give him after a separation of six years.
He tried with his ready humour to master the situation. "I have gone through a lot, Hannah, since I saw you last," he said laughing. "I have been received in various odd ways in different parts of the globe. With bullets, with poisoned arrows, with rotten eggs, with sour mare's milk, and I don't know what else. But such a welcome as this is altogether novel in my experience."
Her blue-rimmed, melancholy eyes, sunk deeply in her thin haggard face, gazed at him gloomily and searchingly.
"You have been away a long time," she said, and sat down.
"Yes; that is true."
"And you have kept your splendid health and spirits."
"Yes; I have kept in capital health, thank you."
There was a pause. He regarded her more and more as a stranger. A grim, inscrutable stoniness seemed to have frozen her nature. She had evidently nursed and cultivated an old grief with an egoism that had become fanatical. And then, as he recalled all the vanished splendour of her beauty, and looked at the emaciated throat and angular shoulders which made the flatness of her bust the more apparent, pity and his old love for her gained the upper hand. What must she have suffered to have so changed in appearance?
"We can't go on like this, Hannah," he said. "If I have done anything to displease you, speak out and let us make it up."
For a moment a kindlier glance shot from her eyes. But he fancied it meant that she pitied him, and so he was not reassured.
However, he did not wish to rely on conjecture. He would try and put things on the old hearty footing between them.
"Look here!" he said, "it is plain that your soul is cherishing some old grudge. You and I always held to one another. Can't you feel the old confidence in me again? Tell me what your trouble is, and see if I can't heal the wound."
"It seems to me that you stand in greater need of healing than I do," she answered, without taking her sphinx-like eyes off him.
"How so?" he asked, and plunged his hands into his trouser-pockets, stretching his legs wide apart as he planted himself in front of her.
"I have often asked myself, Leo, what sort of man you would come back. I hoped you might appear before us serious and subdued, a little burdened by the consciousness of what you had brought upon yourself and us. Often enough I have prayed God that it might be so. But instead you are--are---- Aye, what you are any one can see with half an eye."
"Well, what am I?" he asked, hardening into an attitude of scoffing amusement.
"I can only hope, for your own sake," she went on, "that your conduct is not real, but a mask, that behind there is something more than one would suppose from your plump, happy face. But if you are not acting and deceiving us, if in reality you are so thoroughly satisfied with yourself, then, dear Leo, it would have been better if our mother had never borne you."
"But, Johanna!" their mother exclaimed, running between them in horror.
"Leave her alone, mummy," he said. "You see she is over-strung. You prepared me for it yourself."
"Have patience with her," the mother entreated softly.
"I have, haven't I?" he laughed. "If I hadn't learnt by this time to put up with a few feminine vagaries, I should indeed be incorrigible. I am not so thin-skinned, and when you choose, my dear sister, to adopt a more reasonable tone towards me we shall be friends again. Does that suit you, eh?"
She looked at him and did not speak.
He flung out of the room and the door banged behind him. He stood for a moment in the outer hall and drew a deep breath. His sister's immovable, sphinx-like glance had oppressed him like a nightmare. A vague suspicion began to dawn within him, but he struggled against it.
"Now for work!" he exclaimed, and he shook his fists in the air.