AWAY UNDER FIERY RAIN!
A damp, autumnal fog penetrated Clodwig's sick-room through the open windows, and lay in drops on the brow of the statue of Victory.
Still and desolate it was at Wolfsgarten: even Pranken had gone.
Bella sat in her room enveloped in her mourning weeds. She had black bracelets on her wrists, and had just been trying on her black gloves. She drew them off now, laid her hands together, and gazed with that terrible Medusa look into vacancy, into the future, into the great blank. "You are alone," said a voice within her; "you were always alone in yourself, in the world,—a solitary nature; lonely as wife, always alone."
Once more her cheeks flamed with sudden rage to think that any one, the veriest fool, could for an instant imagine that she had murdered her husband. Was it for this that she had so long crushed every impulse of her heart? Was the world after all not believe in her happiness? She went in imagination from house to house of the capital, and heard her name on all tongues.
The ticking of the clock reminded her of what Clodwig had once said, "The pendulum of our life vibrates between recollections of the past, and desires for the future."—"That was true of him, but not of me: I do not stand between recollection and desire: I want the present. I crave life, ardent life."
She rose, and was vexed that she could not resist going to her mirror; but once there she staid, and was still more vexed to see that her figure was not as slender as it used to be; and yet black makes one look slender. She seemed to have lost all her charms! Her thoughts went further: since he had to die before you, why could he not have died years ago, while you were still beautiful? She shuddered at the thought, but the next moment commended her own sincerity. Further spoke the voice within her, and, proudly raising her head, she said almost aloud to herself,—
"I care nothing for conventionality. What I may think a year hence, I will think now, to-day. What to me is the world's division of time? Thoughts that others would have a year hence, I permit myself to-day. Yes; you are a widow, who will be visited only from compassion,—a widow, with none to stand by her. And then this degrading suspicion! I can go to the capital; I can take a house. Oh, what a god-like destiny! I am myself a house, and shall be made lady president of a soup establishment, and shall have a select dozen of orphans in blue aprons come to my funeral. I have had enough of that sort of thing already. No! I cannot live alone. Shall I travel again, seek forgetfulness and fancied pleasure in landscapes, crowds, works of art, and then talk, laugh, play in society? I have proved it all vanity, emptiness. Prince Valerian could be won. Hut could I play the hypocrite again in a strange world, and charitably rejoice that the Russian peasants are, figuratively, to have their hair curled? The Wine-cavalier would be very complaisant, always making his bows, and paying his devotions: it is only manner to be seen, but then the manner is good, agreeable, and—false, the whole of it!
"No, no! I must away into conflict, into war, danger, distress; but life, mighty, all-absorbing life, I must have. I scorn the whole world; I hurl back in its face its honors, its caprices of philanthropy."
A horseman gallops into the court-yard, a tall figure in black. Is it not Sonnenkamp? What can he want?