As he spoke he opened the drawing-room door. Magelone passed him with an angry blush. How silly to take her words so seriously! Of course Johanna never said such things. The girl was growing positively disagreeable.
According to agreement, Johanna presented herself with her protégée at the forester's the next morning. Christine could not yet believe that she should see Red Jakob. "His sister will certainly prevent it," she kept saying.
But Johann Leopold's authority had successfully opposed the forester's wife. As soon as she saw Johanna and Christine approaching she sullenly withdrew, and contented herself with watching them through the chink of the door.
She did not see much. Johann Leopold went to meet the visitors. "Come, my child, Jakob is expecting you," he said, with a gentle kindness that aggravated Frau Kruger's ill humour. He had never spoken so to either her husband or herself. "Do not be afraid," he went on; "no one shall molest you. If any should try to do so, let me know." And he opened the door of the sick-room.
"Christine, have you come at last?" Jakob's voice called from the bed. With a cry the girl rushed to him, and Johann Leopold closed the door upon them. "Come, Johanna, we have nothing further to do here," he said, and together they left the house.
When the forester's wife looked from the window, they were walking down the forest-path. She smiled scornfully. "No one could persuade me," she thought, "that those two came up here for the sake of Jakob and Christine; but I'll see to it, they may depend upon it. If I could only hear what they are talking about! She looks up at him as if he were the Herr Pastor in the pulpit."
Their talk was strange enough,—it was rather a monologue of Johann Leopold's to which Johanna listened.
"Happy unfortunates!" he began, looking sadly abroad into space. "Even yesterday, when Jakob was weeping for his boy and crying out after Christine, I envied him. How such emotion must enlarge and strengthen the soul! Happiness or misery is of no moment, but an absorbing passion, that possesses and rules the entire man——Yet who experiences such? Only some half-savage like my poor Jakob. We superior beings, as we are called, with our boasted culture, pay for our position with doubt, hesitation, half-heartedness."
Johanna listened to him with pained surprise. How could he thus forget or ignore his own past, his love for his dead betrothed, which Aunt Thekla maintained he still cherished in his heart? She could not venture to remind him of it, however, and she said, after a pause, "I think you are mistaken; love is not influenced by rank or culture. Remember my mother."
He did not seem to hear her, but went on: "And naturally we are drawn on from year to year by half-desires, half-resolves; our goal seems to us not worthy of exertion to attain it. And if some caprice places what we desire within our reach, we scarcely know whether to grasp it and hold it fast, for to grasp it gives trouble, and to hold it fast calls for exertion."