“Then not at all for you too?”—he laid his hand insistently upon her arm,—“not at all for you too?” he repeated.
She was silent.
“It was there in Lucerne,” he went on presently; “I knew it at first—the first time I see you; and when I found that it was you who had sent for me—I—I dared to hope that you too felt something, even then, even so at the very first. Have you never known that feeling?”—he exclaimed, his breath rising passionately, “has such storm never swept within you?—and you have no other life for a while but its longing,—no sleep but the stupid fatigue when one cannot think more? What has my existence been since that day on the Quai by the Vierwaldstattersee?—Je ne peux rien faire!—To the world I am dead.—There is perhaps no future for me because I have learned to love and have not learned to be loved.”
His voice broke utterly; he loosed her arm, walked apart once more, and was once more silent.
Then her agitation suddenly found voice and to her own intense horror she heard herself laughing—laughing a loud hysterical laughter, that resounded hideously and was beyond her own control.
“You are amused,” he exclaimed, and his mood took on a justifiable tone of outraged anger; “you laugh. You have made me like this and now you laugh. If you were suffering and I had made you so, I should be ashamed and sorry; but a woman laughs. You are as that other,” he continued, impetuously, “and it will be the same some time after. When she had made me wild, then she laughed. When I heard her laugh, I grew quite cold, I cared no more, never more. Then, when I cared no more, she learned to care, she grew to love, she wrote me many letters, she became most miserable; but for me nothing mattered. Because I could not care more.”
Her laughter continued spasmodically in spite of her struggles to check it. But between the paroxysms she gasped:
“I never tried—to make you love me. I never wanted you to come where I did—”
“But now that I am all yours,” he interrupted, “now that nothing is left for me, but you—” He paused. “What will I do now?” he added, asking the question with a simplicity at once boyish and heartrending.
She was silent; her laughter had ceased. He came close to her and took her hand again within his own. And then in the darkness beside him he suddenly heard the bursting misery of her sobs.