VII.
The prospect of the journey to Frankfort filled Albert with boyish glee. He was not thinking of his career—he did not clearly think of anything—he was happy because of the prospective change in his life. He had often heard his father tell of his visits to that beautiful city—the “Weltstadt”, his father had called it—the city where kings were once crowned and where his king, the great Goethe, was born—of the wonderful Fair, of the Roemer, of the Zeil. Albert had never seen a large city and was restive with anticipation.
He was in high spirits. His mother had never seen him so animated, so boyishly happy. He romped and danced and sang like a joyous child. His excitement was so great that he could neither read nor write nor talk coherently. He paced up and down the house, rambled through the streets, restless with eagerness.
In the meanwhile the winter was drawing to a close. Hedwiga, alone in that overheated hovel, sat knitting and brooding and thinking of Albert. He was the first ray of sunshine in her desolate life. He had often spoken to her of things she did not understand but that made him even more alluring. Only at rare moments she caught flashes, like that of meeting clouds, and then darkness again. She had heard her aunt prattle about love which had always been meaningless to her. But Albert’s sweet amorous words she understood. When she looked at his half-closed eyes, at his dishevelled hair, at his sensitive lips, she became more restless—she often quivered—and craved his touch, and yet when his hands came in contact with her arms she trembled with shrinking fear—shrinking and yet yielding. After he had kissed her that afternoon, in the warm dusk of the hut, her fear was gone. She longed for his arrival, to be seized in his arms, to have his lips against hers. Even in his absence her lips quivered as she thought of him and her eyes closed. He had a peculiar way of placing the tips of his sensitive fingers upon her shoulders, barely touching them, as if he were fingering the strings of a violin, and gazing into her face pensively, almost mysteriously, and then letting his fingers glide over her thinly covered arms—sending a delicious shiver through her whole being—and slowly, creepingly, letting them slide until they reached her wrists, then her hands, then her moist fingers, which almost involuntarily, helplessly became entwined with his, her eyes staring blindly, upward, at his face. No one could whisper such sweet little secrets in her memory. The tears that often sprang to her eyes were never bitter; she felt happier when they came.
Her aunt had of late been alarmed about her. She seemed to have grown thinner, with a peculiar flush in her cheeks. When Aunt Graettel at first made some veiled reference to her health, she laughed merrily and said she had never felt as well as now. One day Aunt Graettel overheard a stifled cough and told her niece that it might be best to have that Zorn boy stop his visits and she forthwith prepared a concoction of herbs. Hedwiga shoved the tonic away with a fierceness the Witch had never suspected in her and said if Albert stopped coming she would throw herself into the river.
But Albert’s joy at the approach of his journey was so great that he failed to notice the peculiar lustre in the girl’s eyes. He was bubbling over with delight. Did she not think it was wonderful? He was going to the Weltstadt, where mere were theatres and picture galleries and a great library and cafés and grand boulevards and—and he stopped for want of words. Did she not think it was wonderful?
“And there are so many pretty girls in Frankfort?” she returned, with a sad smile and a strange glitter in her eyes.
No, he swore he was not thinking of girls. Besides, no one was as pretty as his Lorelei, his Hedwiga.
“You are not crying?”
He shrank back half a step and looked puzzled.