This was the excuse which Miss Bear's friends made for the draconic laws of her institution; she was the responsible keeper of this precious but fragile ware, and who could wonder at the stern glance of her once perhaps beautiful eyes, and the crowd of wrinkles on her brow, which seemed to deepen and to multiply every year? Like so many among us, she was what she was, not because she wished to be so, but because she was forced to be so. It was her vocation to look stern, and to frown, as it is the vocation of others to smile forever, and to wear as smooth a face as they can produce. But as the greatest psychologist of our day has taught us that one may smile and smile forever, and yet be a very great rascal, so it is also possible to look like a chief inquisitor, and yet to have a truly womanly, gentle, and kindly heart.
Miss Amelia Bear was the living proof of such a possibility. Miss Amelia Bear had had a very hard time of it all her life long. She was the poor daughter of a poor village minister, and began at fourteen her thorny career as a governess in noble country families. In those days she was very pretty, and therefore exposed to many temptations; but her prudence and her cleverness had helped her to escape from all dangers, till she was old enough to be left alone, and to procure for herself a kind of independence by establishing a school upon the savings of long years and the presents she had occasionally received. Her honorable character was known to everybody; and this, and the experience she had gained in the field of education, justified such an enterprise, while her numerous relations to noble families promised almost certain success. She preferred the nobility, because the nobility preferred her; and she hesitated to accept girls of other families, because she was sure to lose or not to receive for one such boarder, six from the nobility.
Nevertheless she gave up the principle whenever a special case seemed to require an exception from the rule. Thus it had been with Sophie Roban. The privy councillor was the physician of the institution, and Miss Bear was under great obligations to him. Even her noble patrons, therefore, understood perfectly why she could not well refuse the widowed privy councillor, when he asked her to take for a few years a mother's place to his orphaned child.
Her relation to Sophie Roban was the best proof of the exaggeration which had given rise to so many fables about the dragon nature of Miss Bear. She had become a real mother to the motherless girl; she had guarded and protected her against every bodily and mental danger, not in order to earn her compensation honestly, nor for the sake of the reputation of her school, but because she loved the girl with her whole heart, as if she had been her own. Malicious people went so far as to say that she had not only raised but also spoiled the girl, and it could not be denied that Sophie--little Sophie, as the She Bear said--could dare what no other boarder, not even Emily von Breesen, who was at the same time there, and who passed for absolutely untamable, would ever have ventured to do. Sophie could interrupt Miss Bear in the most violent philippic against any wrong-doer who had done something especially horrible, e. g., cutting round holes in the curtains for the purpose of peeping at the people who passed by the house, and could fall upon her neck and say: Miss Mal, Miss Mal, I would not be so very angry if I were you! Sophie could at all times freely enter her study--that mysterious adytum to which the young ladies came with fear and trembling, and where the dispatches to their parents were prepared, and all their letters, coming and going, were subjected to rigorous scrutiny! Sophie could do what she chose.
These relations between teacher and pupil had ripened into a friendship of a peculiar nature after Sophie had left the school and become the presiding officer of her father's house. Miss Bear appreciated Sophie's good judgment, and did not disdain to consult the lady, young as she was, in critical cases; and what is more, she almost always followed the advice which her young friend gave, more in play than in good earnest, but always with perfect simplicity and impartiality. Such a case had occurred a few weeks ago, when the Baroness Grenwitz had expressed a wish to send her daughter Helen back for some time to the institution to finish her studies, especially in the sciences. Now such a step was remarkable enough in itself, as Miss Helen was coming straight from a well-known, superior school, in which she had spent four years; but it became still more embarrassing by the circumstance that the instructions which Miss Bear received from the baroness on one side, and from the baron on the other, differed essentially as to the degree of freedom to be granted the young lady. If Miss Bear obeyed the written instructions of the baroness, Helen was to be kept as a state prisoner, under latch and key; if she followed the requests made orally by the baron, when he brought, himself, his daughter to Grunwald, the young lady was to be left in absolute liberty. As both methods of education were equally incompatible with the system adopted in the school. Miss Bear was in great embarrassment, and turned, in her dilemma, to her young friend, to receive from her advice in this mysterious affair.
Fortunately Sophie had heard much from her betrothed about the state of things at Grenwitz, and what he had not explained she readily divined by the talent peculiar to all women of delicate feelings.
"They tried to marry Helen to a man unworthy of her," said the young lady, as she met her motherly friend soon after Helen's arrival in the mysterious adytum of her study, in order to confer with her about the Grenwitz affair, "and Helen has very properly refused to consent. In return, they have banished her for a time from her paternal home. You will surely not increase the hardship by being unnecessarily severe against the poor girl? Surely, Miss Mal, that would not be like you. Do what the father says: treat Helen not as a pupil--for that, she is too old; treat her as a young girl who has taken refuge with you from a tyrannical mother who ill-treats her, and from a father who is too weak to protect her. For that is, as far as I can see, the truth of the case."
When Sophie said so, she did, of course, not suspect Oswald's love for Helen, and Helen's love for Oswald, which, if known to her, would probably have made her speak somewhat differently; and afterwards, when Franz's reports about the catastrophe at Grenwitz, and many a word spoken by Helen herself, made her see more clearly this all-important point, she still did not change her advice, because she looked upon it as treason against a friend to tell others a secret of which she herself was not yet fully convinced. Helen, moreover, had become her friend in the meantime; at least she was most devotedly attached to the pretty girl, although she had reasons to doubt whether Helen, in her haughty pride and reserve, returned her love. It was mainly their common enthusiastic love for music which had brought the two young ladies so closely together. They soon found, not only that they shared this enthusiasm, but that they complemented each other in their knowledge of music as well as in their powers of execution. Sophie was the more learned; the mysteries of Thorough Bass--for Helen, a book with seven seals--were open to her; but Helen felt and appreciated music more fully. In comparison with Sophie, Helen was, on the other hand, a mere scholar on the piano, but she had a rich alto voice, as extensive as well trained, while Sophie said of herself that she had not a note in her throat.
Thus the two young ladies could play and sing by the hour, either in Helen's room at the institute, or more frequently in Sophie's parlor, without ever getting tired. Helen insisted that nobody had ever accompanied her as well as Sophie; and Sophie, that nothing had ever afforded her a greater musical enjoyment than Helen's sweet, melodious voice, full of deep feeling.
But, strange enough, although their souls met in the realm of music as kindred souls, and gave each other a sister's kiss, their tongues became silent as soon as they attempted to approach each other in human speech. Their conversation stopped frequently, and they had to turn again to music in order to fill a pause which threatened to become painful. Sometimes Sophie thought Helen was making a violent effort to break the charm which bound her in silence, but she never went in such moments beyond the first stammered sounds of intimacy, and the very next moment saw the young girl longing for friendship changed into the haughty lady of the world, calm in her self-satisfied repose, and unapproachable.