"I went that same evening on which we had met Giraldi at an entertainment at the French Ambassador's to my husband, and told him that I wished to return home--the next day. He had given no reason when he threw up his post and brought me here into this solitude, and I thought I might also keep silence on the reasons which took me from Rome and the world into solitude. Neither did he inquire. He had already seen--had, like all the world, perceived the extraordinary charm which was even more remarkable in the man who had ripened to such splendid maturity under a tropical sun, than in the fascinating youth of former days; he probably remembered what kind friends then no doubt had told him, and what in his pride and self-confidence he had certainly not believed. And now this confidence was not broken; but it was shaken. The past years, so empty and joyless, stood out before his startled eyes in a strange and suspicious light. All I had suffered and been deprived of must have come before him. But it was still not too late, in his eyes. I wished to do my duty apparently by flying from temptation. He accepted silently what in his opinion was a matter of course. We left the next morning, and went home.
"And now commenced a dark and fearful drama which I shudder to look upon, even now that the entangled threads have become clear before my eyes. We had curiously changed our parts. Whilst I, proud of the victory I had obtained over myself, held my head up and took a melancholy pleasure in the renunciation to which I doomed myself, he suffered more and more from the disquietude which had until now possessed me; he was tortured by longings after a happiness which I had resigned. He had married me because I was young, handsome, and brilliant; perhaps had also fancied at the time that he loved me, after his fashion. Now he loved me for the first time with all the passion of which he was capable, and which must be the more fatal to him, that he, to whom a calm bearing had always been the ideal of a gentleman, was ashamed of his passion, and would certainly give no expression to it; and, what was worse than all, he must see, or fancy he saw, that he was too late in treading the path which led to my heart--which perhaps even now would have led to it. It is so hard for a woman to shut her heart against the charm which the knowledge that she is loved sheds around her. I saw how he suffered. I suffered terribly under it; for I held it to be impossible that I could ever return his sentiments; yet I suffered with him, and pity is so near akin to love! If children had played around us, perhaps everything would have happened differently, and I truly believe that their gracious influence at this stage of our affairs would have brought about a happier ending. But as it was, the reckoning was not between father and mother, but always between man and wife, and childless marriages are only too fruitful a source of sorrowful home tragedies. And yet all would have gone, if not well, at least better in time, which gradually buries so many raging flames under its embers, had not my husband been taken possession of by an unlucky thought, which became a fixed idea. What had appeared to him, so long as he had not loved me, as a piece of wisdom and diplomatic reserve--namely, our leaving Rome--now appeared to him in the light of a shameful flight, a miserable cowardice, which he could never forgive himself, which I could never forgive him, and which, infatuated as he was, he now held to be the principal--the only reason, indeed--that I remained cold to him, whilst he was consumed with love. He could not, as usual, find any soothing, explanatory words for the agitated condition of his heart.
"I should be in the dark now as to this portion of my unhappy history had I not learnt the real circumstances from letters of your father, which my husband on his second departure from Rome left in his desk, and which afterwards were found by Giraldi and shown to me. It appeared from these letters that my husband confided everything to his friend, and had begged his advice especially with respect to the fatal plan with which he deluded himself. Your father advised most strongly against it; not that he doubted that I should be victorious in the struggle to which I was to be exposed--a Werben would always, and in all circumstances, do her duty--but because he took the whole thing for a romance, that might do very well in a French play, but was altogether out of place in the realities of German life, and particularly in the case of a German nobleman and his wife. If we had not found happiness in our marriage, he certainly deplored it with all his heart; but he knew of no other remedy than the determination not to depart from the good and right course; and should this means prove unavailing, there was nothing for a man to do but to accept in all humility the fate which he had assuredly prepared for himself, and bear it with dignity as inevitable. We were not sent on earth to be happy, but to do our duty.
"Oh, Elsa! with what sensations did I at that time read this letter, which I took to be the perfect expression of a mind which had forgotten all human emotions in the formalities of the service, and which revolted me the more as I had clung to him who could so write with true sisterly love, and believed myself beloved by him as by a brother. What terrible experiences were needed before I understood what great though bitter wisdom, and how much true love, was in these words!
"A second journey to Rome was announced to me, like all these resolutions, in the most courteous manner, but with a tacit assumption of my assent. It was not my fault that I also had meanwhile learnt to conceal my feelings. In the company of taciturn people even sympathetic minds become silenced at last, and then for ever. I saw beforehand what would happen--yes, I was determined that it should happen. I have not concealed from you the frivolous levity with which I approached the altar. The evil disposition of my young and half-corrupted heart had not been fulfilled. I had continued a better woman than I had believed myself--yes, I may say I had grown better in time. Now that all my honest efforts were fruitless, that I knew them to be slighted and misunderstood, that I saw fate insolently challenged by the man who should have been grateful to me for having preserved myself and him from it by such great sacrifices of my own heart--now I became worse than I had ever been--now I became truly bad. I scoffed in my inmost heart at the madman who strove to gather grapes from thorns; I secretly derided the vain fool who could imagine for a moment that he could prevail in the struggle with the noblest of mankind; I triumphed beforehand over his downfall.
"It is terrible to have to say all this to you; all the more terrible as it did not remain the mere fancy of a distorted imagination, but was all, all most horribly fulfilled."
Valerie, who sat crouched up on the sofa, hid her face shuddering in her hands. A cold shiver ran through her slender form. Elsa would willingly have begged her to leave off for that day, but she felt that she could not take the bitter cup from the lips of the unhappy woman, to whom it gave one drop of comfort that a sympathising human eye should at last look down into the depths of her misery.
She comforted her with tender words, gave her a glass of water, which the exhausted woman hastily drank with feverish lips, and then again seized Elsa's hand, which she had all along held tightly in hers, and went on with her sorrowful confession, whilst the storm howled without like a band of demons whose victim was trying to escape them from the gates of hell.
"Alas that I cannot relate further without offending your pure ears, as I have already troubled your pure mind. But it must be. What is bad cannot be expressed in good words; and from the moment when I again touched Rome's venerable soil everything in my life was for long, endless years soiled and tainted, until at last I looked almost with envy upon the poor women in the streets. I was in the hands of one who seemed to have risen from the bottomless pit to destroy both body and soul. And yet it was years and years before this knowledge began to dawn upon me; years before the abhorrence grew into secret rebellion, and if this rebellion expresses itself in action, as I hope and pray to God it may, it is you, you only, I have to thank. I owe it to the new life that I have drunk from your loving looks, to the courage with which your strong, noble love has inspired me, which without neglecting one single duty, has looked steadfastly through all impediments to its one lofty star. I owe it to my longing to win your love, to be worthy of it as far as lies within my power, as far as the deepest repentance may expiate the heaviest guilt. I might call it a sudden insanity that threw me into the arms of this terrible man, in other words, that brought me to my ruin; and many things conspired together, too, to dull my feelings and judgment; the long torture which I had borne, and borne in vain, the violence with which I had been torn from such a hard-won act of resignation, the madness of a passion which, after having so long been forcibly restrained, now overflowed all barriers; the unholy charm which guilt offers to an undisciplined mind! How many have fallen who had not such temptations! But that this insanity lasted so long! that I should have known I was mad! that I chose to be so! It all appears to me now like a dark dream, in spite of the golden sun of Italy which illuminated it, of the perfume of orange blossom which surrounded it, and of the gentle tides of the blue sea which flowed about it. My husband had, after a few months, given up the futile struggle; he had gone away, beaten, broken down, without even the strength to come to any decision, only giving me permission in writing to remain away as long as I pleased. Whether he hoped that this apparent magnanimity would touch me, or that his absence would appeal more strongly to my heart than his presence, that the separation would teach me what I might lose in him--what I had already lost--I do not know. I only know that I had nothing but scorn and derision for what I called his pitiful flight, without a shadow of pity for him, even if I thought of him at all, or of anything but of enjoying my freedom to its fullest extent. And had I wished to follow him, as I did not wish, I could not have done so. Even before he fled I was fettered to him from whom he fled, by the strongest chains by which a woman can be bound to the man of her choice. But what so often brings about a transformation in a woman's life, what leads even the most frivolous to reflection, and awakens in her nobler feelings, brought no repentance to me, even--terrible to say--no joy. I needed no pledge of his love; and it brought to him whose path I would have strewn with roses, only care and perplexity.
"He had had no trouble in convincing me that my condition must remain a profound secret to all the world. Our hope was that my husband would himself insist upon a divorce, and as we--thanks to the devilish ingenuity of that fearful man--had never openly violated public decorum, as my husband had gone of his own free will, he leaving me, not I him, the separation could only terminate in my--that is in our--favour. Our fates were now irrevocably joined.