Before Oswald could sufficiently recover from his boundless amazement at these strange words, to utter a single word, the young girl had already reached the courtyard below and was hurriedly walking through the rich parterres towards the château.
"What was that?" Oswald asked, trembling; "am I in a dream? Melitta has returned? And just now?--now? ha, ha, ha!"
It was a fearful laugh. Oswald started and looked around to see if anybody else had laughed, perhaps some grim demon enjoying his sufferings.
The letter was still in his hand. He felt as if to read it meant to lose Melitta entirely, and to cut the last tie that bound him to her. For a moment Helen appeared to him like a beautiful witch, who had come to tempt him.... If he should burn the letter without reading it? Might not then all come right? Might not Melitta remain his after all?
And while he was thinking this over, he had mechanically opened the letter and commenced reading it....
He had finished it.... he sat, his head resting in his hand, on the corner of the bench upon which he had sunk down unconsciously. Before him, on the green turf, bright lights and shadows were playing to and fro; in the thick foliage overhead the morning breeze was whispering, and birds were singing in subdued tones.... he saw it all, he heard it all, but he felt nothing, nothing but the one great fact, that if there ever had been a paradise for him on earth, he had been driven from that paradise forever.
CHAPTER XVII.
It was a few hours later. The baroness was sitting in her room, in her accustomed place near the open glass door. She had an embroidery in her lap; but her hands were idle, and only when steps were heard approaching the door, which opened upon the passage, she quickly took up her work and sewed a few stitches, letting it drop again in her lap when the steps had passed. This was several times repeated, for there was an active movement going on at the château. Everybody was more or less busy with preparations for the evening, and the economical baroness found it very difficult to sit still, doing nothing, when her presence was so necessary in kitchen and pantry. But she had sent a request to Miss Helen to come and see her when she had done with her practising, and she wanted her daughter to find her calm and disposed to enter into a friendly, though serious, conversation.
At least externally calm. For in her heart there was little peace. The trouble about the letter, it is true, seemed to be uncalled for. It had evidently not been carried back to Helen, and that was, for the moment, the main point. She felt at liberty to use all the arrows which she had gathered from the letter, without being afraid of their rebounding upon the archer. Nevertheless, the clever and courageous lady had never in her life so anxiously looked forward to a conversation with any one. And yet she had had many very serious interviews, as nearly the whole administration of the large estate was resting on her shoulders alone. She did not think very well of men generally, and valued each one according to the price for which he would probably give up his convictions. For the baroness believed that everybody had his price, a belief shared by everybody who, like herself, served the god Mammon with his whole heart, his whole soul, and his whole mind.
She would have liked to consider her daughter also under the general rule, of which she herself did not claim to be an exception, but she found it impossible. A secret voice, which she could not silence, told her: Helen will not sell her soul for thirty pieces of silver, nor for so many millions, nor for anything in the world. Another mother would have been delighted with such an idea; she would have respected her daughter as her better self, and worshipped her as her beau ideal. The baroness knew no such enthusiasm. The spirit that throned on her daughter's proud brow, and looked so great, so noble in her dark eyes--that spirit was to her a strange, unnatural, and hostile spirit. She had nothing in common with such thoughts. Helen was the child of her mind, but not of her heart. Helen had inherited the gentle disposition, and the honest upright character of her father the very qualities against which the baroness was, in truth, continually struggling. But she had, besides, the powerful intellect of her mother, and was thus enabled to protect the holy things of her heart with the sharp sword of the mind, without yet ever desecrating it by using it in a bad cause and this combination made her so irresistibly attractive to noble souls, so hateful to low and ignoble souls.