He stood there in a condition of mental paralysis. The whole fabric of his thinking and feeling for months of intense emotional experience had instantly been annihilated, and he was left in the midst of a great void in his consciousness out of touching-reach of anything. There was no sharp pang, but just a bewildered numbness. A few filaments only of the romantic feeling for Ida that filled his mind a moment before still lingered, floating about it, unattached to anything, like vague neuralgic feelings in an amputated stump, as if to remind him of what had been there.
All this was as instantaneous as a galvanic shock the moment he had recognized—let us not say Ida, but this evidence that she was no more. It occurred to him that the woman, who stood staring, was in common politeness entitled to some explanation. He was in just that state of mind when, the only serious interest having suddenly dropped out of the life, the minor conventionalities loom up as peculiarly important and obligatory.
“You were Fraiilein Ida Werner, and lived at No.— ———strasse in 1866, nicht wahr?”
He spoke in a cold, dead tone, as if making a necessary but distasteful explanation to a stranger.
“Yes, truly,” replied the woman curiously; “but my name is now Frau Stein,” glancing at the children, who had been staring open-mouthed at the queer man.
“Do you remember Karl Randall? I am he.”
The most formal of old acquaintances could hardly have recalled himself in a more indifferent manner.
“Herr Gott im Himmel!” exclaimed the woman, with the liveliest surprise and interest “Karl! Is it possible? Yes, now I recognize you. Surely! surely!”
She clapped one hand to her bosom, and dropped on the bench to recover herself. Fleshy people, overcome by agitation, are rather disagreeable objects. Randall stood looking at her with a singular expression of aversion on his listless face. But, after panting a few times, the woman recovered her vivacity and began to ply him vigorously with exclamations and questions, beaming the while with delighted interest. He answered her like a schoolboy, too destitute of presence of mind to do otherwise than to yield passively to her impulse. But he made no inquiries whatever of her, and did not distantly allude to the reason of his presence in Germany. As he stood there looking at her, the real facts about that matter struck him as so absurd and incredible that he could not believe them himself.
Pretty soon he observed that she was becoming a little conscious in her air, and giving a slightly sentimental turn to the conversation. It was not for some time that he saw her drift, so utterly without connection in his mind were Ida and this comfortable matron before him; and when he did, a smile at the exquisite absurdity of the thing barely twitched the corners of his mouth, and ended in a sad, puzzled stare that rather put the other out of countenance.