"From me, for one. Hermine has adjured me by sun, moon, and stars, to give her notice of the runaway as soon as he is found; and the tears were standing in her beautiful eyes, and Fräulein Duff laid her hand upon her shoulder and said, 'Seek faithfully, and thou wilt find!' I can assure you, George, it was a moving scene."
Paula smiled, but so kindly that her banter, if she was bantering me, did not wound me. On the contrary I was thankful to her, very thankful. I had considered over and over how I should tell her of my strange meeting with Hermine without embarrassment, and now under her kindly hands all was smooth and straight, which my clumsy fingers would have hopelessly entangled. I was grateful to her--very grateful.
And now Paula told me of Hermine, and how amiable and good she had been to her, and had spent the three days she had stayed in Berlin almost exclusively in her company, and had at once fallen in love with the picture at the exhibition--here Paula smiled again very slightly--and could not reconcile herself to leaving it, after she had bought it, for a whole month at the exhibition. She further related how the notice which Richard the Lion-heart had excited had already brought her new commissions, and that her Monk and Templar was already sold for a handsome sum to a Jewish banker; and how her studio had since been visited by very distinguished persons, indeed more frequently than was agreeable, and she had had to lock up her portfolios of sketches because they began unaccountably to disappear.
"You can judge," she went on, "how inexpressibly happy all this makes me. Not that I think myself entitled to be proud--I think that I well know my defects and how great they are--but it is a sweet consolation to me to be at ease about the future of my mother and brothers, and that the boys can now go boldly forward in the paths they have chosen, without being compelled anxiously to consider every step--all the boys, from the youngest to the oldest, is it not so, George?--from the youngest to the oldest."
She looked full into my eyes, and I very well understood what she meant.
"I do not anxiously consider every step, Paula," I said. "I know that I am in the right path; why should I then be anxious?"
"I have boundless confidence in you," replied Paula; "both in your clear-sightedness and your energy. I know that you will make your way; but one can make his way with greater or with less labor, and in longer or in shorter time; and your sister desires that her brother, who has been so cruelly cheated of so many years of his life, may lose no moment, and may encounter no obstacle which his sister can remove from his path."
"I thank you, Paula," I said; "from the whole depth of my soul I thank you; but you will not be angry with me for trusting that the hour may never come when you will have to work for me; for that I may ever be able to care for you and yours--this, my clearest hope and most cherished desire, I see that I must now renounce."
"How can you speak so?" said Paula, gently shaking her beautiful head. "True, I deserve it for my own wilfulness. You must consider me a foolish girl who allows herself to be dazzled by the false glitter of success. But believe me, it is not so. I know very well that I may be let fall just as quickly as I have been lifted, far above my desert. And then I may fall sick, or my invention may fail me: I cannot go on forever painting you and old Süssmilch; and a girl has so little opportunity to make well-grounded studies, and to extend the narrow circle of her experience. And then what would become of the boys, of me, of all of us, if we had not our eldest to look to?"
"You are jesting with me now, Paula."