At the Councillor's; or, A Nameless History

by E. Marlitt

In the afternoon Kitty sat at Henriette's bedside. The doctor had been summoned to an audience with the prince, and his aunt was absent to arrange some household matters; the two sisters were alone for the first time. Henriette's face fairly shone with the happiness she dared not speak in words: rest and silence had been prescribed for her. The doctor had strictly forbidden her to indulge again in the fervent expressions of delight which she had terrified him by uttering when he first told her all she asked to know. She obeyed him like a child, and had asked of him or of his aunt no further question; but now when his eye was no longer upon her, when the door had closed behind the careful old lady, she suddenly raised herself up among the pillows, and asked, in a hurried, eager whisper, "Where is Flora?"

"You know your grandmamma sends over every hour to tell you how she longs to be here, but that the visits of sympathy she is obliged to receive to-day have given her no chance to leave the villa."

"Oh, grandmamma!" the invalid repeated, peevishly, with an impatient movement of her head. "I am not asking for her; I am speaking of Flora." She clasped her hands and lifted them above her head. "Oh, Kitty, what a brilliant justification of Bruck this is! Thank God, I have lived to see it! If only he is not tempted to stop at the villa on his way home from the palace! Flora must meet him again for the first time here,—here by my bedside. I long to see her in the dust before him!"

"Do not excite yourself, Henriette," Kitty entreated, in a trembling voice.

"Oh, let me speak!" she rejoined, hurriedly. "If Bruck only knew how he tortures me with his injunction of silence! My stifled emotion almost chokes me. I feel as I did yesterday before I lost consciousness." She propped herself on her elbow and buried her hand in the masses of fair hair from which she had tossed away the muslin cap. "Do you remember how contemptuously Flora alluded to this journey from which he has returned so famous, calling it a 'pleasure-trip'?" she asked, looking up at her sister, with eyes gleaming with scorn and anger, while her voice fell into the same tone in which she had uttered the delirious fancies of the previous day, which had been the cause of such a terrible struggle. Kitty shuddered. "Do you remember how she sneered and laughed when Moritz came so near the truth in surmising that the doctor had been called to some patient in L——g? No: although she should entreat his pardon on her knees, she can hardly atone for such wicked folly, such unexampled arrogance. I should like to have one look now into the depths of her soul. Such a crushing mortification! She will scarcely be able to lift her eyes to him or to us when she first sees him."

Kitty had folded her hands in her lap, and her eyelashes drooped above her cheeks as if she were the guilty one. Her poor, passionately-moved sister had no idea that this first meeting never would take place, that Flora's foot would never more enter the "dreary barn." Neither she nor the rest knew that the false love had freed herself by a violent effort, that the symbol of the tie that had bound her—the "simple" golden circlet—lay in the depths of the river beneath the bridge, if the waves had not borne it far away.

"Do say something, Kitty," Henriette complained. "You must be cold-blooded indeed to be so calm in the midst of all this. It is true, you have had no chance to become intimately acquainted with the circumstances, and consequently you may not be able to view matters from a correct point of view. Bruck, for example, can scarcely interest you,—you see him too seldom, and have certainly not spoken ten words to him; but you have been a witness of Flora's detestable manoeuvres; you have heard the most heartless expressions from her lips. I should suppose that the sense of justice inherent in every healthy nature might inspire you with a desire, a thirst, to see the offender punished."

Kitty looked up with a strange gleam in her eyes. Certainly the blood was not cold that suddenly dyed crimson her forehead and checks, and even the round, snowy throat: it was so stirred that for one moment she forgot that she was sitting by an invalid's bedside, and that it was her duty as a conscientious nurse not to allow even the mention of any exciting subject. "And what then?" she asked, eagerly. "What if Flora should acknowledge with shame how wrong she has been? Could it really matter much to a man so insulted, so outraged? As you yourself say, Flora has openly testified her dislike of him. If he were made a prince, it could not transform this dislike to affection."

"Yes, it would do so instantly in a nature as vain and ambitious as Flora's," Henriette replied, in a tone of bitter scorn. "And Bruck? You will see how at her first advance he will ignore the past as if it had never been." She leaned back and closed her eyes for a moment. "Yes, yes; love is such a profound mystery!" she continued, in a half-whisper, to herself. "And he loves her still; how else explain his patient submission and long-suffering?" She opened her eyes, and there shone in their unearthly brilliancy a mixture of pain and irony. "Even although a demon looked at him from her eyes, and she should strike him with her hands, he would love her still, and kiss the hand raised against him." There was a heart-breaking smile upon the emaciated face, which she turned and buried in the pillow. After a short pause, she said, with firmness, "The change in her will make him happy, and therefore we, on our part, must do all we can to obliterate the memory of these last few miserable months."

Kitty said not a word. The sick girl was awaiting with intense impatience the moment that should see the man whom she idolized as her physician happy once more. How if Flora did not come,—if Henriette should learn at last that the false love had put an end, with her own hand, to what she said had been a long torture to her? "Then you will never mention our names again," Henriette had wailed to Bruck in her delirium of the previous day. The chaos of yesterday still reigned in Kitty's mind. Her conception of moral law was distinct and clear; she was still inexperienced enough to believe that rewards and punishments are just consequences of individual action; and here, in this strangely perverted world, she found it was eagerly desired that falsehood, treachery, and a systematic denial of duty should not only go unpunished, but should even be rewarded by rare good fortune. All pains were taken to breathe no syllable of the wrong done; the criminal must be petted, and thanked most humbly for a conversion which, if it really should occur, would not be the result of repentance, but the effect of a change of outward circumstances. And he whom she had so trampled beneath her feet,—would he take her instantly to his heart again if she condescended to return? Of course; he had never released her, even when she told him that she hated him, And Kitty glowed with indignation at the thought of the pitiable weakness which could induce a man to play so unmanly a part. She would have liked to drown in a passion of tears this knowledge which for a moment darkened all life, even the glorious sunny world of nature; but she suppressed all expression of the strange, sharp pain, and sat still, apparently more "cold-blooded" than ever. Weep? What was the whole miserable story to her? She had nothing to do with it, and nothing further to think about it, except with regard to some wedding-present for her sister, some costly piece of embroidery, which she must begin immediately if the marriage were to take place at Whitsuntide.