XXXIII
The sad news reached Leo in a note which Ulrich despatched the same night from the station at Münsterberg.
"Felicitas," it said, "suffers so intensely that it was impossible to take her with me; her uncontrolled grief might also be bad for the child. So if you feel that you can and still care to do anything, please help her."
That was a hard thrust--"if you still care."
Leo was terribly upset, and a dull gnawing self-reproach made him feel as if he were to blame for the turn events had taken. He steeled himself to write a long letter to Felicitas, in which, under the pretext of ordinary sympathy, he put his time and his person at her disposal, and offered to share her sorrow as brother and friend. He awaited her answer, fearful that she might accept. But he need not have been afraid. Her note contained only a few words of entreaty to him to stay away.
"For God's sake, don't come," she wrote. "I can only pray and weep night and day. You are the last person I wish to see." Whereupon he asked his mother to take compassion on the heartbroken mistress of Uhlenfelde. The good old lady, deeply pitiful, set out at once on her mission, but Felicitas refused to see her.
Four days full of awful suspense went by. Leo sent a messenger twice daily to Uhlenfelde to inquire, and he brought back tidings gleaned from old Minna that the telegrams from Wiesbaden still gave hope, but the case was a grave one. The gracious mistress was confined to her bed and prayed. The doctor from Münsterberg visited her every day. The hours between one piece of news and the next seemed an eternity. Leo didn't know what else to do, but shoulder his gun and stride aimlessly over the snowy fields. He passed the time by oracular questionings as to whether the child would live or die. He counted the poplars by the road-side, the hares running across the furrows, and the buttons on his shooting-jacket. He counted the number of breaths he must draw before he reached a certain spot, the sunbeams that pierced the dusky undergrowth of the fir woods, and the cries of the ravens that echoed through the silent forest--a monotonous game with varied results. He made vows, too, that were the next moment forgotten. Now and then he was demoniacally jubilant, and sent a whoop over the meadows and was startled at the echo of his own voice. In the evenings he turned into the Prussian Crown for distraction, and drank in the company of its frequenters enormous quantities of grog and red wine, with two cognacs in between. The two cognacs went by the name of "a pair of flannel trousers." There he found his old friends--Hans von Sembritzky, who had drunk heavily since his marriage; the elder Otzen, a melancholic, shy personage by day, but at night, after the second bottle, a wild singer of comic songs; Herr von Stolt, always on the scent of women, and hoping, through associating with Leo, to approach Felicitas once more.
Nothing had leaked out here of the misfortune which had befallen Uhlenfelde. Even Ulrich's sudden departure had called for no remark, because, as one of the social magnates of the district, his absences were frequent. The only person who knew was Dr. Senftleben, who attended Felicitas. This taciturn old bachelor, who enjoyed the reputation of being a cynic, and was much feared in consequence, was in the habit of devouring his supper in a corner of the Prussian Crown, and going away without saying good night to any one.
Leo, however, ventured to speak to him one night, and asked what was the matter with Felicitas.
"Nothing," answered the doctor, and seized his hat.
"But she is in bed, and you see her every day."
"She has what you call 'anxious' fever, Herr von Sellenthin. She is taking morphine in raspberry syrup--plenty of raspberry, but no bromide; that is too depressing. Good evening, Herr von Sellenthin."
On the morning of the fifth day, when Leo was dressing, Lizzie's old factotum rushed in upon him, sobbing and wringing her hands.
"What has happened, Minna?"
"Misfortune upon misfortune! Paulchen is dead, the gnädige Frau has taken poison in her despair, and, though still alive, is unconscious. The doctor has been sent for, but for God's sake come, gnädiger Herr, for everything is topsy-turvy, and I don't know what to do."
Leo felt as if cold water were running down his back, and he reeled against the wall.
"It can't be true, it can't be true," was his first thought. Then he said to himself, "You must put on your boots;" and he went about the simple task with a feeling as if in another minute he would lack the strength to accomplish it. Suddenly he burst into a loud derisive laugh, and the old woman crept into a corner, frightened at the sound.
After all it was only what was to be expected. It was fate. The child dead; Felicitas dying; Ulrich, with his weak heart, unable to bear the blow; and then it would be his own turn.
He glanced at the spot where his weapons hung. The bullet that would do the work was waiting for him. He stretched himself, and a murderous lust overcame him for a moment; then he finished his dressing, and, leaving the old woman panting behind, he tore across the snow-covered fields and over the frozen river to Uhlenfelde, and as he ran he asked himself, "Do I love her?" and the answer was, "No; love isn't like this. I am not even sorry for her. My guilt, if she dies, seems far worse than her death itself." But the child, and Ulrich--in thinking of them too, the hideous spectre of his own guilt reared itself, grimacing, before him.
Everything in the courtyard at Uhlenfelde was the same as usual, which surprised him. He expected, at least, that the barns would be on fire.
A two-horsed sleigh was waiting at the door. "Who is there?" he inquired of old Wilhelm, who, red and half frozen, touched his fur cap with his customary imperturbable air of deference.
"The doctor, gnädiger Herr."
Leo met him in the hall, hurrying, after the manner of busy doctors, to his conveyance.
"How is she, doctor?" he asked, detaining him.
"As well as can be expected," was the curt reply.
"What does that mean? That all danger is past?"
"It means that the baroness is simply suffering from an attack of bile, which I don't envy her."
"Hasn't she taken poison?"
"Poison! Humph! My dear sir, it depends on what you call poison. The baroness may have had the intention of taking her life, I dare say. But she went the wrong way about it. She drank her toothache drops, Herr von Sellenthin, a mixture of ether, alcohol, and oil, not exactly unpleasant to the taste, but one that few would be of sufficiently tough constitution not to feel some disagreeable effects from imbibing. Now she seems to have slept herself out, but will probably suffer a day or two yet from a disordered stomach. Good day to you, Herr von Sellenthin."
He got into the sleigh, bowed, and drove off.
Leo felt disgusted, and half disappointed; the most sacred spot in his heart seemed to have been rudely tampered with.
The tragedy had become something very like a farce. Still, the child, the dear child, was dead. There was no getting over that. The wrath which always flamed up within him against this woman, at moments when his will was weakest and most impotent to meet her, hardened into cold aversion. He could have strangled her on account of those toothache drops. Everything, even the desire to die, became in her hands a miserable petty fraud. But the child was dead, and could not be brought back to life.
He asked a maid-servant, who was apparently affected by the general alarm in the household, whether her mistress was visible. She answered shyly that she would go and see, and ran upstairs.
Meanwhile, old Minna, coughing and sobbing, came in at the front door, and asked, wringing her hands, if the gracious one was still alive.
Leo turned his back on her without deigning to answer, and she hobbled on up the stairs as fast as she could. He was alone, and it seemed a long time before any one came. He paced up and down between the pillars, where he and Ulrich as boys had played hide-and-seek, and he thought, "What shame have she and I brought on your house!" It would have come almost as a consolation if some one had hounded him with a horse-whip out at the door, the threshold of which his feet had desecrated.
Instead, old Minna returned with beaming eyes and champing jaws, and declared joyously that the gracious little mistress was better again, and the gracious little mistress wished to see him.
He clenched his teeth and followed the old woman upstairs. What he wanted to say to her he did not know; he was only aware of a dull desire to lay his fingers about her throat and choke her. So bitterly, at that moment, did he hate her.
Minna led him into her bedroom. He had not entered it since the days at Fichtkampen. A wave of the opoponax perfume met him as the door opened, and he found himself in a rosy gloaming, penetrated here and there by a ray of hard, cold daylight. He felt as if he were plunged into a warm scented bath, and a cover shut down upon him. He remained stationary by the door, and breathed quickly.
The old hag caught him by the sleeve and pulled him forward towards the bed where she lay. Her face was illumined by the light from the window, and her pillow gleamed round her like an aureole, while the rest of the bed was bathed in purple, semidarkness.
"She has arranged this mise en scène," he thought.
Her face had a waxen hue; there were dark rims round her eyes, which, from beneath their half-closed heavy lids, looked at him without recognition or intelligence. It seemed to him that the effects of her drug-taking had not entirely passed off.
He approached her bedside on tip-toe; the thawing snow fell from his boots and left little discoloured streams on the carpet.
"Felicitas?"
She raised her left hand and motioned to him to come nearer, and he dragged a chair close to the bed. There was a night-table standing beside it, with bottles and phials of every description; one was empty, and labelled, "Cure for toothache--Not to be taken." This admonition must have induced her to drink it.
"Felicitas?" he repeated.
Then she slowly raised her large dim eyes and stared at him, while a bitter smile played about her mouth.
"Felicitas, pull yourself together," he exhorted, feeling uneasy.
She stammered Paulchen's name, and looked into vacancy again. A reflection of death seemed to lie on this white face, rigid from anguish.
Leo would have sunk on his knees beside her, deeply moved and anxious, had not the doctor's words hardened and steeled him against her.
"Leo?" she whispered, without looking at him.
"What can I do for you?"
"Are you my friend?"
"Of course. You know that I am."
"Leo, I can't go on living. Leo, you must get me poison."
He took comfort from her words. After all, then, she had seriously wished to take her life. For that he thanked her from the bottom of his heart.
A quiver of pain passed over her drawn features, which the grief of the last few days had lengthened and pinched. Her face was now marked by lines, which made it look older, but gave it more character. This was not the pink-and-white laughing face of the syren who lured him on to the edge of a precipice, but the woe-struck face of a madonna who had endured and come through much tribulation.
And it was fitting that the partner of his guilt should be thus. He felt for the first time how thoroughly she belonged to him, and his hate gradually evaporated.
"Don't sin against yourself, Felicitas," he said, for the sake of saying something.
"Sin against myself!" she repeated, speaking in a low, hopeless monotone. "Oh, my God! As if there was anything worse for me to do! Could I sin more than I have done? My little Paul is dead, and I am still alive. I sentenced my child to death, and am allowed to live. Matricide; isn't that the most horrible of crimes? How can I go through life with such a burden of guilt weighing upon me? How can any one who cares for me wish me to do it?"
"Matricide!" he exclaimed in bewilderment. "What do you mean?"
"I know what I mean," she said, and smiled.
A cold shudder ran through him. This woman's brain must be unbalanced by grief; she was going out of her mind. Her fingers groped on the counterpane.
"Where is your hand?" she whispered. "Give me your hand. I implore you to give me your hand."
He stretched it towards her mechanically, and she grasped it in her hot moist palm.
"Lean down to me," she whispered on, "and I will tell you in your ear how it happened."
He inclined his head as she commanded, till it was close to her mouth.
"You remember that evening you came before Christmas?" she continued--"that was the hour when I sacrificed my boy's life to you. When we were warming ourselves at the furnace in the greenhouse, it was then that he died."
"You are talking deliriously, Felicitas!" he exclaimed, drawing himself erect.
"Hush!" she said, pulling him down to her again. "They may be listening at the door, and no one must know this but you and I. It was three days before Christmas. I was doing up his presents, and there wasn't much time. For I had sent him far, far away for your sake, and kept from Ulrich how unhappy he was at school; for your sake I did that too. But I wanted him to have his Christmas presents, but in the middle you came in. And then I forgot everything else. I thought no more about Christmas, or my child. My whole soul was filled with you. I wanted nothing else but to go away with you into some corner where no one could see us or hear us. And when you were gone, I was in a sort of mad ecstasy. I ran up and down stairs. I stood by the window looking towards Halewitz half the night through, and then I sat by the stove, and stared into the fire and thought, 'This is how he and I sat beside the furnace.' And at last when I came to my senses it was too late--too late."
"Why too late?" he asked hoarsely.
"Yesterday morning," she answered, "Ulrich's telegram came, and last night the letter. Everything is in the letter. It is somewhere in the room. Look for it."
He rose, with faltering steps, and with unsteady fingers fumbled about in search of the fatal letter. But he could not find it. He ransacked the whole apartment that lay before him in a mysterious twilight, with its luxurious appointments, its silken cushions and covers, its veiled mirrors and countless silver and ivory toilette articles. He wandered from one piece of furniture to another, and while he gazed in stupefied astonishment at all the glittering knickknacks, he asked himself what it was he was looking for. But a voice from the bed reminded him.
"Look in the dressing-room; it may be there."
Ah, the letter--of course, the letter. He opened the door to which she pointed, and found himself in a small room so brilliant and light that it hurt his eyes. The floor was of porcelain tiles, and he saw on the left a bath with steps leading down to it, on the right a marble table surrounded by a threefold full-length mirror, before which were strewn yet more articles of the toilette of crystal and tortoiseshell in every conceivable design.
"How he must hate all this show and luxury!" he thought. And then his glance wandered through a door standing wide open opposite him. He saw a plain camp-bedstead covered by a white crochet counterpane, with a deer-skin rug on the bare boards beside it. Photographs in dark frames were on the wall, and amongst them, staring at him with laughing eyes and plump cheeks, his own. He groaned aloud, and, putting his hands before his face, flew back into the perfumed, purple prison.
"Have you got the letter?" she asked.
"No."
"Did you look everywhere?"
"I don't know; I think so."
"Leo, what's the matter with you?"--her voice trembled with anxiety.
"The matter with me?" he cried. "Only this: I am ashamed of myself--ashamed! ashamed!" He drew himself up, and then flung himself down on his knees beside the bed. She raised herself on the pillows and laid her hand on his head, while her eyes filled with tears.
"My poor, poor boy," she said, "you are broken-hearted already, and yet you don't know nearly all."
"What more is there?" he asked, shaken with emotion.
"The letter says," she continued, "that all the others got their presents from parents and friends in time for the distribution. Only his table was empty. And he couldn't believe it--couldn't believe that his mother had forgotten him. And when the rest were playing round the Christmas-tree, he slipped out unseen, without hat or overcoat. He must go to the post-office, he said, to inquire whether mamma had sent nothing. Not the soldiers and the cannons, and the pocket inkstand, and all the things that he had wanted so badly, and which mamma had promised him? But he couldn't find the post-office, and ran on and on over the open fields in a snowstorm, without cap and overcoat, and because he could not believe that his mother had forsaken him (for your sake, Leo), he died--died."
She pressed her forehead against the bowed head of the kneeling man, sobbing bitterly, and clung to his shoulders. And so they cried together and would not be comforted. When at last they lifted their heads they looked into each other's eyes, astonished and questioning. Was he this man? Was she this woman? It seemed as if their common sorrow had made them new creatures, and linked them as one for all time in guilt and the wretched consequence of their sin. She smiled at him inconsolably, but at the same time she was almost happy.
"Lizzie, we are lost," he murmured.
"Yes, we are lost," she said, still smiling, and then he left her.