At the end of the extended grounds of Odensburg, where they bordered on the wooded mountain, lay the "Rose Lake," a small sheet of water, that took its name from the water-roses, with which its surface was covered in summer. Now, indeed, none of the white blossoms had opened, only the whispering reeds and sedge-grass edged its shores; a huge beech-tree stretched its branches over it, with its foliage of fresh and tender green, and a dense thicket of blooming shrubbery fenced it in on all sides. It was a snug and quiet retreat, made, as it were, for solitary dreams.
Upon a bench beneath the beech-tree sat Maia, her hands full of flowers that she had plucked on her way, and now wanted to arrange. But this task was not accomplished, for by her sat Oscar von Wildenrod, who had accidentally sought the same spot, and managed to fascinate her so by his conversational powers, that she forgot flowers and everything else in her absorption.
He spoke of his travels at the North and South, there was hardly a land in Europe that he was not acquainted with, and he was a masterly narrator. His descriptions shaped themselves into pictures, in which landscapes, people and events came forth as though living before the listener. Maia followed him in his narrative with breathless sympathy, it all sounded so strange and unreal to her, whose world had hitherto been confined to the family circle.
"Oh! what have you not seen and experienced!" cried she admiringly. "What an entirely different sphere you moved in before you came to us at Odensburg!"
"Another, but not a better one," said Wildenrod earnestly. "It has, indeed, something blinding and intoxicating--this living in boundless freedom, with its perpetual change and fullness of impressions, and it blinded me, too, once upon a time, but that has long since past. There comes a day when one awakens from his intoxication, when one feels how hollow and empty and vain all this is, when one finds himself alone in that concourse of men and in that longed-for freedom--quite alone."
"But you have your sister!" Maia put in reproachfully.
"How long, though! In a few months she deserts me to belong to her husband, and I have a regular horror of going back to that empty and aimless existence. You have no idea, Maia, how I envy your father. He stands firmly and surely upon the foundation of his own labor and its results; to thousands he gives bread, and the blessings, love and admiration of all compass him about, and will follow him to the grave. When I sum up the results of my life--what is the remainder?"
Perplexed, almost shocked, Maia looked up at him who had uttered these bitter words. It was the first time that Wildenrod had adopted such a tone in her presence; she knew him as the brilliant man of the world, who, even when he approached her confidentially, always maintained the character of the elderly man, who conversed half-jocularly with the half-grown girl. To-day he spoke very differently, to-day he had let her have a glimpse of his inner life, and that overcame her shyness. "I have always thought that you were happy in that life, which seems lovely as a fairy-dream, when you tell about it," said she softly.
"Happy!" repeated he gloomily. "No, Maia, I have never been so, not for a day, nor for an hour."
"Yes, but--why did you lead that life so long?"