CHAPTER IX.
His way led him along the Dultplatz, past the beer-garden in which he had sat with his friends on his first Sunday in Munich. The music was playing as before, but the people sat about under the lanterns, that had just been lighted, in rather a sleepy and listless way, for the day showed as yet no sign of growing cooler.
Near the fence that separated the garden from the street, a Dachau peasant-family had taken possession of one of the tables, leaving only one end free. Their extraordinary, ugly costume attracted the attention of Felix as he went wandering by. But his gaze soon turned from their ridiculous dress and fixed on a slim girlish figure, closely wrapped in a dark shawl, who sat at the other end of the table, with a full glass and an empty plate before her, at which she seemed to have been staring for some time, with her head resting on her hands and her elbows planted on the table, as if utterly regardless of what was going on about her. Nothing could be seen of the face, but a little, white, short nose; her straw hat and a veil that hung half down over the little hands threw the rest into shadow. But the little nose, and the thick red hair, carelessly confined by a net, left not a moment's doubt in Felix's mind that this picture of solitary melancholy was no other than Red Zenz.
As he stepped softly up to her, touched her familiarly on the shoulder, and pronounced her name, she looked up with a frightened start, and, with eyes red from weeping, gazed into the face of the unexpected comforter, as if she took him for a ghost. But the moment she recognized him, she hastily wiped her eyes with the back of her little round hand, and smiled upon him with undisguised pleasure. He asked compassionately what it was that made her so heavy-hearted, and why she sat here all alone; and, drawing up a chair, he seated himself between one of the horrible young peasant-girls and the melancholy little Bacchante. Then she told him what the trouble was. "Black Pepi," her friend, the girl with whom she had been living, had suddenly "proved false" to her, because her (Pepi's) lover, a young surgeon, had declared red to be the most beautiful color. He afterward apologized for it by saying that, of course, with his profession, it was only natural that he should prefer the color of the blood to any other. But it had for some time past appeared to Pepi that her faithless lover paid rather more attention to her friend than was permissible in such a case; and so, after a very violent scene, she had not only broken off the friendship, but had given her notice that she could no longer share her quarters with her. Furthermore, inasmuch as Zenz was still owing rent for several months, she had seized upon the few things she had to hold as security, and had then driven her from the house with only the clothes she had on at the time.
"Only see," said the girl, lifting her dark shawl; "she did not even leave me a respectable dress: if it had not been for the shawl that the landlady lent me, I should have been ashamed to go across the street."
And it was really so; she wore a simple sack of striped cotton under her black covering, that she carefully wrapped about her again. But now it began to look as though she no longer troubled herself in the least about the adventure that had so recently made her weep. The pale little face that she turned toward her neighbor, brightly illuminated by the lantern, had even lost its expression of anger at this insulting treatment and betrayal of friendship, and beamed again with light-heartedness and irrepressible enjoyment.
"And what are you going to do, Zenz?"
"I don't know yet. I shall manage to find some place to stay at. I could go to the Rochus garden, or the Neusigl, where I lodged when I first came here; but the waiters there have keys to the doors, and I have found that it is not safe there. And anywhere else, where I am not known, they might think that I would not be able to pay for the room, and I really have no money but a few kreutzers. I should have to pawn the ring that I have from my poor dead mother. Well, the day is not over yet, and I can think the matter over again."
"To be sure," continued she, after a pause, during which Felix sat, as if in a dream, gazing at her red lips and her white teeth, that one could have counted when she spoke, "to be sure, I might fare well enough if I only would! So well, that that false black cat Pepi would envy me."
"If you only would, Zenz?"
"Yes, if I were willing to be wicked!" she added, in a low tone, and for a moment her face grew serious. But in the next instant she laughed merrily again, as if she would laugh away the flush that had suffused her face.
"Do you know an artist named Rossel?"
"Certainly. Edward Rossel. What of him?"
"He came to see me about a week ago. He said he had seen the figure that Herr Jansen modeled from me, and he said, if I would come to him and stand as a model, he would pay me three times as well for it."
"And why haven't you gone to him?"
"Hm!--because I didn't like him. I will not hire myself out in that way for the gentlemen, so that every one will know me and say: 'Aha! that is Red Zenz!' I am sorry enough that I stood to please Herr Jansen, although he is such a good gentleman. But now they know my address, and they think that is as much as to say that I will go and be a model for any one who wants me."
"Didn't you like Herr Rossel?"
"No. Not at all. He doesn't look in the least as if he were an artist, and wanted to study from a model. He made such big eyes--No! I sent him off with a flea in his ear. And then he went to Pepi to get her to persuade me. But she knows me. She went to him herself, for she thought he would just as soon have one as another. But he only gave her a gulden and sent her away again, saying that he had no time just then, and that he happened to particularly want red hair. Then she flew out again about red. I have heard though that Herr Rossel lives like a prince, and Pepi said that if I were not a fool--at that time she was not so down on me--I might make my fortune."
"But are you going to continue such a fool all your life long, Zenz?"
"I don't know," replied she, frankly. "Nobody is sure of herself when she is young and has plenty of time on her hands. But I think as long as I have my five senses about me--"
She hesitated.
"Well, Zenz?" he asked, taking one of her little hands, with its fingers' ends roughened by work, in one of his.
"So long," she said, quietly, "I will not do such a thing to please anyone whom I do not love."
"And how must the man look whom you could love? Only like Herr Jansen?"
She laughed. "Oh! no. He is so much older than I. I only like him in just the same way that I might have liked my father. He must be younger and very nice, and--"
She stopped abruptly, looked askance at him, a little coquettishly, and said: "But what nonsense we are talking! Won't you eat and drink something, or has the scarecrow next you there taken away all your appetite!"
She glanced disapprovingly at his neighbors, who looked, with their nodding cap-borders and strait-laced Sunday suits, for all the world like stuffed dolls, and did not understand a word of what had been said by the other two.
"Zenz," said Felix, without answering her; "do you know you could stop over night in my quarters just as well as not? I have two rooms: you could bolt the door between them if you should feel any fear of me, and each room has a separate entrance. What do you think about it?"
"You are only joking!" she hastily replied, without the slightest embarrassment; "you would never think of encumbering yourself with such a poor, ugly thing as I am."
"Ugly? I don't find you at all ugly, Zenz. And if you only cared to be a model for me, as you do for Herr Jansen--Do you know, he has kept me for weeks studying an old skeleton and a lay figure, and I am forgetting over such work the very sight of a human being."
She shook her head, laughed, and then said, becoming serious again:
"That was only meant in joke, of course. I am not so simple as to let myself be talked into believing that you are really a sculptor!"
"Well, just as you like, Zenz. I won't try to persuade you to do anything you don't like. Come, take some beer; a new cask has just been broached."
She drank eagerly out of his glass; and then a spirited overture was played which interrupted their conversation for a time. Even after this they talked entirely about other things. She told him about her former life in Salzburg, how strict her mother had been with her, how often she had known want, and how often of a Sunday she had sat quietly in her chamber and had wished she might be allowed, just for once, to join the merry, gayly-dressed throng outside, that she could only look at from a distance. No doubt her mother had really cared for her, but for all that she let her feel that her existence was an eternal reproach and burden to her. Of course she cried when she lost her mother, but her grief did not last long. The pleasure of feeling herself free soon dried her tears. Now, to be sure--all alone as she was, without a soul in all the wide world to trouble itself whether she lived or died--now, she sometimes felt that she would give up everything if she could only be back again at her mother's side.
"That is always the way," concluded she, with a nod of the head that looked droll enough in its seriousness, "one never has what one wants; and still, people say one ought to be contented. Sometimes I wish I were dead. And then again I feel as if I would like to promenade up and down the live-long summer through, wear beautiful dresses, live like a princess, and--"
"And be made love to by a prince--isn't it so?"
"Of course. Alone, one can have no happiness. What would be the use of my princess's dresses, unless I could drive some one perfectly crazy with them?"
He gazed so steadfastly in her eyes, that she suddenly blushed and was silent. The strange mixture of lightheartedness and melancholy in the poor child, of enjoyment of life and reserve, of secret love and introspective moralizing, attracted him more and more. Then, too, the night, the subdued light of the lanterns, and the stirring music, and his own loneliness of heart, and his seven-and-twenty years--
"Zenz," he whispered, bending over so near to her ear that his lips almost touched her neck, "if you would only care just a little bit for me, why shouldn't we fare just as well as if you really were a princess and I a prince?"
She did not answer. Her lips were parted, she breathed quickly, and her nostrils quivered, while her eyes were tightly shut, as if it were all a dream from which she did not wish to wake.
"We could lead a life like that in Paradise," continued he, gently stroking with his own the two little hands that she had laid side by side on the table. "We are both of us two stray children for whom no one cares. If we should stay at home a year and a day, and never let ourselves be seen, who would inquire what had become of us? All about us people live and love and think only about themselves! Why should not we think only of ourselves, too?"
"Go away from me!" answered she, in a low voice. "You are not in earnest. You think about me? Not even in your dreams. How can you care for me? Such a red-haired little monkey, as Black Pepi called me today!"
"Your hair is very pretty. I remember yet how pretty it made you look, when you let it hang loose over your blue cloak that morning in Herr Jansen's studio, when you ran away so fast. And now I will hold you tight by it. Come! I thought we were going? It begins to be cool; at least, I see that you are trembling."
"Not from cold!" she said, in a strange tone, as she stood up and wrapped her shawl tightly about her.
Then, without waiting for him to ask her, she took his arm and they left the garden.