He stood before her, pale and eager, as though the verdict were to be one of life or death. Gabrielle listened in a sort of stupor to this passionate outbreak, which found but too ready an echo in her own heart. Raven was faithfully describing her own experience. She, too, had fought and wrestled with her love; she, too, had sought to fly from a power so strong that no escape was possible. Before the glowing lava-stream of words which burst with one great throe of Nature from the innermost heart of this man, usually so cold and so constrained, all the fairy fabrics vanished which a young girl's fancy had built up, all her childish conceptions of love and life; and with them went the foolish dream which she had once thought would fill her whole existence. It had been but a day-dream, a dim visionary foreshadowing of that which now took form and being. Gabrielle had awakened. She looked a genuine passion full in the face, and if she felt that so volcanic a nature, with its sombre depths and smouldering fires, was calculated to destroy rather than to bless, she no longer quaked before it. The thing she had hitherto called happiness paled and disappeared like some thin phantom before the fierce incandescent glow of this man's fervour.
The young girl made one last attempt to cling valiantly to the past.
"George ... he loves me--trusts me. He will be so utterly miserable, if I forsake him!"
"Do not speak his name!" cried Raven, his eye sparkling with furious enmity. "Do not remind me that this man alone stands between me and my felicity. Ill might betide him through it. Woe to him if he should try to hold you to your hasty promise! I should free you by fair means or by foul. What is this Winterfeld to you? What can you be to him? He may love you after his own fashion, but he would drag you down to a commonplace existence, and give you a commonplace affection, nothing more. If he loses you, he will overcome the pain of it; will seek consolation in his plans for advancement, in his work, in other ties. Such passionless natures do not know what despair is--nothing brings them out of their groove; they, steadily and dutifully, keep on their way. I"--here the Baron's tone sank to a lower diapason; the look of hate died out of his face, and his stern voice grew milder and milder, until at length it melted to a great softness--"I have never loved, have never known such sweet hopes or bright illusions. In the continual striving after power and greatness, I seem to have missed all real happiness, a thirst for which has now, so late, arisen within me. Now, in the autumn of my life, the veil is rent asunder, and I can see all that I have lost, lost without once tasting it. Has all chance of it gone from me for ever? Do you fear the gap of years which intervenes between us? I cannot bring you youth, my child. That is past; but the great passion of a man's mature soul is far stronger, more intense and more enduring than the fancy of any youthful enthusiast. It dies out only with his life. Say that you will be mine, and I will encompass you with love, will make you my idol. I will accept any challenge for your sake, and will come to you victorious from every struggle. All pain and sorrow shall be averted from your head; if really a storm is threatening, it shall not touch, shall not come nigh you; my arms are strong enough to protect the woman I love. You shall be the sunbeam to brighten my life, to brighten and to beautify it I have striven hard and achieved much, but no ray of happiness has gleamed upon me; and now that I have seen it shining in my path, I cannot close my eyes and shut it out. Gabrielle, be my wife, my joy, my one delight and treasure!"
A boundless tenderness was in his words. His stormy, fiery vehemence had melted gradually into tones of pathetic pleading, and he spoke in low tremulous accents, such as surely never yet had come from Arno Raven's lips; and as he pleaded, he clasped his arm tighter and tighter round the slender form at his side, and drew her gently, but irresistibly, towards him. Gabrielle yielded passively. Again, as once before by the murmuring spring, a trance had fallen upon her--a trance half sweet, half troubling, holding her senses in thrall--and again, as then, she let herself be drawn unresistingly out of the bright sunlight, wherein she had hitherto breathed, down, down into unknown depths. It seemed to her that she had no choice but to drift deeper and deeper, and that, with him, supported by his arm, it was blessedness enough so to drift, leaving all, all behind.
A knock at the door startled Gabrielle and the Baron, and brought them back to reality. It had, no doubt, been repeated several times without obtaining a response, for it was unusually loud and sharp, and struck like a clanging dissonance on the harmony of their short-lived happiness.
"What is it?" asked Raven, with a start. "I will not be disturbed now."
"I beg pardon, your Excellency," said the servant's voice without. "A courier has just arrived from the capital. He has orders to deliver his despatches to your Excellency in person, and asks to be admitted immediately."
The Baron slowly relaxed his hold on the young girl.
"Thus am I awakened from my love-dreams!" he said bitterly. "They cannot grant me even a quarter of an hour's respite. It would seem that love and dreams are forbidden fruit to me; that the thought of them even is forbidden me.--The courier must wait a few minutes," he added aloud. "I will send for him."