CHAPTER XIV.
FELIX TO JANSEN.
"We parted so strangely, yesterday. Under the first shock of the blow I ran away as if I had been blind and mad. As if one could escape the mockery of hell in one's own breast! When I realized this, I turned back. I should have been glad to have surrendered myself to you--unconditionally--that very night. But you had already ridden away, and the others had chosen to leave the house and hurry off by the night train. Thus I am left here undisturbed, to come to my senses, and to write you a long letter--to which I can expect no answer.
"After all, what could you say to me? For we are parted again--we are separated, after all. And the case is so terribly clear, that it makes all explanation and discussion superfluous. Why, then, should I waste so much paper? and even go out of my way to give an explanation at which one scarcely knows whether he ought to laugh or weep?
"But I owe it to you--no, not to you; for, at bottom, I did not sin against you but against myself; and my confession, about which you will perhaps care little, is merely a relief to that self, which I hope you will grant me for the sake of our old friendship. I will try to be as brief as possible.
"You know how, just before my father died, I was sent to a watering-place; and how I twice passed through the city where you lived--the first time on my journey there, by way of Holland, where I had business to attend to; and then again on my return, when I was spurred on to the wildest haste by the news from home, and wanted to spare us both a mere shake of the hand between the steamer and the railroad, while in such a mood. In the interval between these two visits, you had married and become a father. I looked forward to becoming acquainted with your wife and child, but for that very reason I put off our meeting until a brighter time, and passed through Hamburg without suspecting----
"Still, in spite of all my anxiety as to how I should find my father, a painful recollection followed me. You know I had never been very straitlaced in my way of life or my adventures, and scarcely ever had paid for this frivolity even with remorse. I was always conscientious toward the conscientious, and unscrupulous toward the unscrupulous. I had never consciously or deliberately tried to disturb the peace of a single soul, and was above the level of the conventional bonnes fortunes one meets in his every-day path.
"But, not to make myself out better than I was, certain temptations were always powerful with me simply because of their adventurousness; and a decidedly insignificant Juliet might have seduced me into playing the Romeo, if the rope-ladder to her balcony had been a particularly breakneck one.
"Now, just before I came to Heligoland, various matters had united to put me in a bad humor; and, besides, my nerves were unstrung by wrong medical treatment, feverish work, and night-watching; and I troubled myself little more about the society of the resort than I did about the mussels and sea-weed on the beach.
"In an instant all this was changed. A stranger suddenly made her appearance--a young woman--who soon became the puzzle and the talk of the whole island. The stranger's list recorded her as Madame Jackson, of Cherbourg. She was without an escort, had rented rooms in a fisher's hut standing quite alone, and appeared to make it her chief aim to set all male and female tongues in motion by the oddity of her behavior.
"She appeared on the beach very early in the morning in a toilet that awakened the envy of all the ladies. It was not the costliness of the materials or of the ornaments, but the singular grace with which she knew how to wear and move in the plainest shawls and veils. Then, besides, her face could not fail to attract the notice of everybody, if only by its unusual contrasts. Her hair had a reddish-gold color, that literally shone in the sun when she let it fall freely down her shoulders; two delicate dark eyebrows curved over the softest blue eyes, that looked out upon the world as if they hadn't the slightest suspicion of the stir they were causing. A little black point-lace veil hung down over her forehead--however, I needn't describe her to you.
"Of course, the women insisted that her golden hair was dyed, and her eyebrows painted. Such a play of colors did not exist in Nature. But the men did not find it the less charming on that account.
"An old Englishman was the first who ventured to address her, as a countrywoman of his. She replied in the best of English, but so shortly, that this unsuccessful attempt frightened away all others of the same kind.
"However, she herself soon appeared to tire of the isolation which she had maintained for the first few days. She made advances to a Mecklenburg lady, who had accompanied her sick daughter to the seashore, and, under the pretext of sympathy, she struck up an acquaintance with her which she let drop again after a short time, evidently because it bored her. As she also spoke German, though with an English accent, several country noblemen from the Mark, who had fallen dead in love with her, ventured to speak to her. She treated them with cool condescension, and it was not long before a regular court had gathered about her, in which several young people with whom I had heretofore associated allowed themselves to be enrolled.
"They told me about the moods and whims of their lady, who was made up of ice and fire; of childish innocence and the most refined coquetry; of sentiment and wild audacity.
"The English coldness, and the soft, dove-like smile, with which she appeared in society, and the half-bored and half-ironical manner in which she accepted the homage of her admirers, were merely a mask. When she was alone with a person, an entirely different and much more adventurous character made its appearance; a seductive, melancholy, and yielding softness--which, however, changed at once into the harshest coldness the moment he who had been encouraged by it began to grow warmer, and attempted to seize the whole hand by means of the little finger she held out to him. She would thrust back any such deluded being into his place with the most cutting irony, and from that moment would treat him with pitiless disfavor, without quite setting him free.
"Several of my acquaintances had discovered this to their cost. They gave me such minute accounts of their disgraceful defeats that I recognized in this woman a type of those perfectly cold-blooded coquettes who are--to the credit of the sex be it said--but rarely met with. The aversion I had felt toward this sea-monster, from the very first moment I had set eyes on her, was only the more confirmed by this; but, at the same time, the thought sprang up in me that it might be a good work, a meritorious act toward the whole male population of the island, if I could succeed in catching this fisher of men in her own net.
"This purpose immediately became a fixed idea with me, actually as if my own honor were staked on the result. As I knew that I was absolutely proof against her charm, I proceeded to its execution without the faintest scruples. She had long regarded my reserve with amazement and anger; the consequence was that nothing was easier for me than to take advantage of the first chance meeting I could bring about, to conquer a place among her intimates.
"I will refrain from inflicting upon you, scene for scene, an account of the wretched comedy that now began. The fact that I had to do with a skillful opponent aroused my ambition, and stung into life all the dormant obstinacy of my character, so that, at the end of a week--for she, too, staked all her pride upon finally seeing me at her feet like all the others--we two stood confronting each other almost alone; her former circle of admirers had withdrawn discomfited.
"The great aim of my tactics was to represent myself as thoroughly blasé and unsusceptible, and to act as though I found the great charm of my intercourse with her merely in the fact that I had at last encountered a kindred nature, who, like me, had long since disclaimed, as a ridiculous delusion, the possession of any warmth of feeling. She accepted the rôle I assigned to her, but it never occurred to her for a moment to cease trying to tempt me out of mine. Occasional human emotions, into which I now and then allowed my calumniated heart to be betrayed, gave her some right to hope; and the freedom of a watering-place afforded a hundred opportunities for putting me to the test.
"Well, it turned out just as it could not help turning out. One evening we came home from a stormy sailing excursion, which had not been entirely free from danger, half wet through and hungry. The return trip had been delayed from the fact of the skipper's having been obliged to stop in the midst of the storm, to mend, as well as he could under the circumstances, a leak in his boat; the consequence was it was late when we reached her fisher's cottage. She herself seemed to have forgotten her enforced rôle for the moment, and appeared to have no other end in view than to refresh and warm me before dismissing me to my lodgings. While she went into her chamber and put on some dry garments, I was forced to stay in the front-room, which was itself little more than a small bedroom, and exchange my coat--which had been soaked through and through with the salt water--for a Turkish jacket she had selected from her wardrobe; and soon, the tea steaming on the table, the warmth of the fire--which was very grateful in spite of its being early fall--and, above all, the extraordinary manner in which we were dressed after the dangers we had escaped, threw us both into a reckless and merry mood such as I had never before experienced in her presence.
"But even now I was still very far from feeling anything like love, not even as much as I had sometimes felt in the most trivial of my adventures. In the midst of my sportive chat with this woman I felt at the bottom of my soul an unconquerable aversion toward her, indeed something almost like a secret horror of her--as if a presentiment were warning me who it was that sat opposite me. But a demon drove me on to play to the end of the rôle I had once undertaken, for, as I persuaded myself--mad fool that I was!--my honor was at stake! Never was a victory more dearly bought, never did a man who thought to triumph feel himself so lost and degraded in his own sight as I did in that hellish hour. Had I strangled this woman in a fit of blind passion, it would not have so degraded me as this impudent comedy.
"And the wretched woman felt that I could not, do what I would, carry out the rôle of a favored lover;--the suspicion dawned upon her in what light I must appear to myself and she to me. Horror, hate, and resentment toward me, and perhaps also shame and self-reproach, suddenly overpowered her with such force that she burst into a storm of tears; and when I, in compassionate surprise, attempted to approach her, she thrust me back with a violent gesture of disgust, and immediately afterward fell into a fainting-fit that seemed almost like death.
"That night I passed probably the most painful hours of my life, in awkward attempts to bring her back to consciousness. I did not dare to call for assistance for fear of compromising her. When at last she opened her eyes again I saw that the most forbearing thing I could do would be to leave her without saying farewell.
"I found no sleep that night. I cursed the hour in which I had seen this woman, my childish defiance and my profligate obstinacy. In vain I endeavored to comfort myself with the thought that I had pretended no deep feeling toward her, that I had received no more from her than I had returned. The feeling of abhorrence, disgust, and self-contempt would not be reasoned away--and now to-day I am almost tempted to believe there was something mysterious about the whole affair: an indefinite horror of the guilt toward my dearest friend, with which I had laden my soul.
"The following day I staid at home and saw no one. Not because I was afraid of meeting her again; for it never entered my thoughts that she would take a step across her threshold, lest she should encounter my gaze. In this respect, however, I found myself deceived. She actually made her appearance on the beach, about noon, as beautiful and unembarrassed as ever; they had asked her about me, and she had replied that she had seen nothing of me since we landed the night before. Perhaps I had caught a cold on the excursion!
"'Une femme est un diable!'
"But on the third day, when, after pondering on this profound saying, I issued forth again, anxious to see whether she would maintain her calmness in my presence too, I heard that she had gone away by the first steamer that morning--no one knew whither.
"This was my last day on the island. About noon I received the sad message that called me home. With the evening boat I left the scene of this vile farce, the bitter memory of which did not fade from my thoughts for long years afterward.
"It is true the days of mourning that awaited me at home, and then soon afterward the only true passion of my life, helped me to consign what had happened to the dim realm of the past--until it rose up before me this evening in all the horror of the present, and I was made to see that the penance I supposed I had satisfied by my separation from Irene was now demanded of me for the first time; and that the happiness of my whole life was to be the price of a guilt which I thought I had long since outlived.
"For as to this open confession, which would be sufficient, if produced before any court, to give you back the freedom you so long for--I know you too well not to feel sure that you will never make use of it. Therefore, you too will continue in chains, and I--how I should despise myself if, with this hellish laughter of Nemesis ringing in my ears, I should appear again before the dear girl I had so recently recovered, and should offer myself as a fitting husband, while you and Julie were obliged, by my guilt, to remain separated, at least before the world! The fact that I have to suffer more than I sinned does not in the least change the question.
"It has always been the custom of Divine justice to make use of different scales and different weights and measures, in exacting its dues. The sin that one man is scarcely made to expiate by a disagreeable hour costs another his own happiness and the happiness of all those dear to him!
"And now I have said all that I had to say. I shall refer Irene, to whom I have merely sent a short note, to you, in case she should insist upon learning the true reason why I am forced to leave her anew--and this time forever--without looking on her face again. Perhaps if I did I should not have the courage--and then I should be all the more contemptible in your eyes.
"It won't be long now before morning. Then I will saddle my horse, ride back to town, pack my trunks, and take good care that this letter does not come into your hands until there is no longer any danger that your magnanimity or your pity will attempt to restrain a man who can only recover his self-respect in exile.
"Farewell!--I do not dare to call you by the old familiar name. But since, from what I know of you, you will not cease, in spite of all that has happened, to cherish a warm feeling toward me, let me say, in conclusion, that you must not think of me as a despairing man who is ready to throw away his ruined life too cheaply. The sweets of life are, indeed, behind me; but much that is useful still lies open for me to do, so that I may atone to all mankind for the old crime I committed against an individual. Perhaps I may some time find out why it is that fate should have chosen me, from all the rest, to be punished with double measure for my sins. Felix."