"Miss Forest--you--?"
"My Fritz! My Brother!" broke out Jane passionately, and fell on her knees by the bedside. She did not heed the pain of her wound, she did not feel it at this instant.
But the effect of this revelation was quite other than she had dreamed. The passionate excitement she had feared, did not come; Frederic lay there calm as before, and gazed at her, but there was something like anxiety, like timidity in his glance; he softly withdrew his hand from hers and turned his head away.
"Fritz--!" cried Jane surprised and shocked. "Will you not look at your sister? Do you doubt my words?"
A peculiar emotion, half pain, half bitterness, flitted over his face.
"No, I am only thinking how well it is I am about to die. If I lived you would be so ashamed of me!"
Jane shuddered,--the reproach was just. When she first came to the Rhine, if she had been obliged to embrace Fernow's servant as her brother, she would have been terribly ashamed of him. What a series of conflicts and sorrows, what a fearful sacrifice at the last had been necessary, to wrest this pride from her heart, and create room there for this sentiment which now solely ruled her being, this mighty, irresistible voice of nature! She did not merely know, she felt that this was her brother who lay before her, the only one of her blood and name, the only one who belonged to her through the holy ties of family; and all the sins which in her imperious pride she had committed against him and others, were punished tenfold at this moment. Her brother himself, at the instant of their reunion, had retained but one remembrance of her; he shrank timidly from her embrace.
Frederic interpreted her silence falsely; he misunderstood even the expression of her face.
"It would be so!" he said calmly but without the least bitterness! "You were never friendly to me, and the very first time I saw you,--I had taken such pains with all those flowers and that nosegay; you wouldn't have a single one of them, and nothing in my whole life ever caused me so much sorrow as you gave me then."
He was silent; but these simple words, with touching, pathetic sorrow, accomplished what all these struggles and tortures, what all this agony and despair had not availed to wring from Jane Forest. A hot stream of tears gushed from her eyes, and she buried her face in the pillows. In loud, heart-rending sobs broke at last the rigid pride with which she had hitherto looked down upon all not her equals in intellect and position; broke the icy strong hardness of her nature, and with it, that masculine strength of will her father had awakened and fostered in her. She wept now as a woman weeps in hopeless anguish and despair, when she sees all waver and fall into nothingness around her. Jane Forest had not been one to be bent--she must be broken.