His voice was calm, although monotonous, but Hertha saw and felt how the man's entire nature was writhing beneath the wound which he thus ruthlessly tore open before her. She could best appreciate his pride,--pride that refused to bow even where he loved. She could estimate what this confession cost him, and, forgetting all else, yielding to the impulse of the moment, she exclaimed, "Good God! How terribly you must have suffered!"
Michael started and gazed at her inquiringly. It was the first time that he had heard her speak in this tone which came from her very soul, and vibrated with passionate sympathy, as if she felt his torture in every fibre of her frame. It was like the first glimmer of a bliss of which he had indeed sometimes dreamed, but from which he had turned with all the pride of a man resolved never to be the sport of a caprice. What he now saw and heard was no sport; it was an outburst of entire self-forgetfulness, of reckless frankness.
"Can you thus understand and feel for me?" he asked, and his heart beat high. "You, born and bred upon sunny heights of existence, with never a glimpse of the dark depths of human misery? Yes, I have suffered terribly, and I still suffer, when forced to connect the idea of disgrace with what should be sacred and dear to me--my father's memory."
Hertha stopped close to his side, and her voice fell on his ear soft and tender as a soothing touch upon a painful wound. "If you could not love your father, you had a mother,--her memory at least is stainless."
"Her memory! Yes. But she was a wretched woman, who had given up home and family to follow the man whom she loved, and by whom she believed herself beloved. She paid for her delusion with the misery of a lifetime, and it killed her."
"And her family knew this and permitted her thus to die?"
"Why not? It had been her free choice, She only expiated her fault. Can you not understand this, Countess Steinrück?"
The words were as bitter as ever. Hertha slowly raised her eyes to his,--there was nothing in them of the keen brilliancy that sometimes made their expression half demonic; their light now shone through tears.
"No, but I can understand how she could follow the man whom she loved, and could believe in him in spite of all the world, although her path lay through darkness and disgrace, and even led to ruin. I could have done this too."
"Hertha, what words are these from you to me?" Michael burst forth passionately, seizing her hand before she was aware and pressing it eagerly to his lips. This recalled the young Countess to herself, and she hastily tried to withdraw her hand.