"Prince Prora has just been most outrageously insulted by Lenz the actor!"
The gentleman hurried on.
I looked at Hermine: she had not heard it, she had fainted. I carried her down the stairs, placed her in a carriage and drove home, where she arrived in a rather weak state, but otherwise completely restored. I must not be uneasy about her, she said; and she had had a delightful evening, for which she thanked me a thousand times. And now she would go to bed, and I must positively go back to the theatre, that the prince should not think she kept me tied to her apron-string.
I pretended to yield to her wishes, and promised to go back. But in reality I had already determined to do this if possible. Suppose it were true, what the gentleman on the steps had told me! and how could I doubt it? Then the disaster which I had felt impending in the sultry atmosphere of the theatre, had come to pass. I remembered the scene in the Zehrendorf wood, so many years before, and how the boy preferred to die, to receiving a blow from my hands, of which there would have been no witness but the moon. Would the man feel differently? Would he not risk everything to avenge an insult offered him, the Prince of Prora, before the eyes of a crowd of spectators?
CHAPTER XXIII.
But I scarcely had quitted my house when I reflected that after what had happened, it was scarcely possible that the prince could still be in the theatre, and I turned my steps towards his palace. It was about nine o'clock; the evening was cold and raw, though we were at the beginning of March; the snow was blowing about in the wind and eddying around corners; pedestrians were hurrying along with pulled-up collars and bent heads; and I could not help remembering the evening a year before, when I saw the unhappy girl in the yellow light of the lamps at the door of the palace, which I now reached all out of breath. For the revenge which had then blazed in her dark eyes and breathed from her mouth, the revenge to which she had in vain endeavored to entice me, for this sweet, this terrible revenge she had found the right man at last.
I was possessed with the feeling that all this had to come so; that a destiny long-appointed, which neither I nor any one could baffle, had now reached its accomplishment. I asked myself--What brings me here? What do I mean to do? I could find no answer to this question; not even when I stood in the ante-chamber and besought the old servant, who had been called, to lead me at once to his master.
"I can admit no one," the old man replied.
He seemed greatly agitated, his voice trembled as he spoke, and his withered hand, which he raised as if to keep me off, trembled visibly.
At this moment the door leading to the room in which the prince had received me in the afternoon opened, and Count Schlachtensee came out and passed us with the same fixed look I had observed on him in the theatre. Evidently it was not pretence; he really did not see me. So what I had feared, was now rushing down. I could not restrain myself longer, and regardless of the old servant, rushed through the door through which the count had come, traversed a second large ante-chamber towards the inner room, through the open door of which I saw the prince sitting at a writing table.