What she had suffered!—the dear one. What they must help her to forget! To her, also, the hour would send it angels: she would wake to a new life.
He turned his eyes again to the rising sun, and his heart silently chanted its love and pride and sadness in the phrases of Beethoven, of Schubert and of Brahms, and from time to time, softly, he muttered to himself, this stout young German Jew with the red neck-tie and the strange round hat: "Süsses Kind! Unglückliches Kind! Oh—der schöne Tag!"
CHAPTER XLII
Madame Von Marwitz looked out from her fly at the ugly little wayside inn with its narrow lawn and its bands of early flowers. Trees rose round it, the moors of the forest stretched before. It was remote and very silent.
Here it was, she had learned at the station, some miles away, that the German lady and gentleman were staying, and the lady was said to be very ill. Madame von Marwitz's glance, as it rested upon the goal of her journey, had in it the look of vast, constructive power, as when, for the first time, it rested on a new piece of music, realized it, mastered it, possessed it, actual, in her mind, before her fingers gave it to the world. So, now, she realized and mastered and possessed the scene that was to be enacted.
She got out of the fly and told the man to carry in her box and dressing-case and then to wait. She opened the little gate, and as she did so, glancing up, she saw Franz Lippheim standing looking out at her from a ground-floor window. His gaze was stark in its astonishment. She returned it with a solemn smile. In another moment she had put the landlady aside with benign authority and was in the little sitting-room. "My Franz!" she exclaimed in German. "Thank God!" She threw her arms around his neck and burst into sobs.
Franz, holding a pipe extended in his hand, stood for a moment in silence his eyes still staring their innocent dismay over her shoulder. Then he said: "How have you come here, gnädige Frau?"
"Come, Franz!" Madame von Marwitz echoed, weeping: "Have I not been seeking my child for the last six days! Love such as mine is a torch that lights one's path! Come! Yes; I am come. I have found her! She is safe, and with my Franz!"
"But Karen is ill, very ill indeed," said Franz, speaking with some difficulty, locked as he was in the great woman's arms. "The doctor feared for her life three days ago. She has been delirious. And it is you, gnädige Frau, whom she fears;—you and her husband."