‘You do not act as though you loved her,’ said Frau von Sigmundskron coldly. Two days earlier it had seemed to her that in renouncing Hilda he was giving proof of a heroic devotion, and yet she was not really an inconsistent woman.
‘I mean to,’ answered Greif rather hotly. ‘If I refuse to marry her, it is because I love her too much to do her such an irreparable injury. I do not see how I could love her more. As for the rest, it has nothing to do with my love or hers. You are the only heir to Greifenstein after me, and when I die it will in any case be all yours, or Hilda’s. I can do nothing with so much, and you may as well have the benefit of what will be yours some day—perhaps very soon. Is that unreasonable? Does that offend you? If it does, let us say no more about it, and forgive me for having said as much.’
‘It would be better not to speak of the fortune,’ said the baroness, beginning to relent.
‘And you understand me—about Hilda?’
‘I cannot say that I do,’ replied Frau von Sigmundskron with all the obstinacy of a good woman thoroughly roused in what she believes to be a good cause. ‘You love her, and yet you are willing to make her miserably unhappy. The two facts do not agree.’
Greif suppressed a groan and looked at the trees before he answered. If she would only have left him alone, it would have been so much easier to do what he knew was right.
‘It is perhaps better that she should be unhappy for a time, now, while she is young, than regret her name when she has taken mine.’ His own words had a sententious sound in his ear and he felt that they were utterly inadequate, but he was fighting against heavy odds and did not know what to say.
‘I tell you that the child would die of a broken heart!’ exclaimed the baroness with the greatest conviction. ‘You say you love her, but you do not know her as I do. I suppose you will allow that it would be better that she should have moments of regret in a lifetime of happiness, than that she should die.’
She was certainly using strong language, but the time was passing rapidly and in the distance she could distinguish already the grey towers of Sigmundskron crowning the beetling crag. She was to be pardoned if she seemed to exaggerate Hilda’s danger, but she believed every word she spoke, and she was growing more and more nervous at every turn of the road.
‘If I believed that, if I even thought that were better for Hilda’s happiness—’