"She is a marble statue," said Sophie to her father, "in spite of her black hair, and her dark, brilliant eyes. You cannot get near to her. I believe she is secretly an Undine."
The privy councillor laughed.
"You may not be altogether wrong," he said; "for if the two entirely different elements, air and water, harbor also entirely different creatures, which cannot have real communion with each other, it is perfectly logical that different moral atmospheres, like that in which the nobles live and that in which we live, must also produce morally different beings, who can never become real friends with heart and soul. Have you formed any friendship, during the time you spent at Miss Bear's school, which has lasted beyond those years?"
"Yes, papa, with Miss Bear herself," answered Sophie, laughing.
"There you see," said the privy councillor, with his satirical smile, "one can become good friends with she bears even, but not with Undines."
Sophie was too young yet to be able to share the suspicions suggested to her father by his long life and ample experience. She explained Helen's reserve by her innate or acquired reluctance to come out of herself, and forgave her this shyness all the more readily as she was not quite free from it herself. She was herself generally looked upon as stern and cold, and many people declared openly that "she was not at all like other girls." "She cannot help it," she would say to herself, "and we ought not to expect to gather figs from thistles. Helen would be just the same to you if the Robans had been barons at the time of Charlemagne."
This view did greater honor to Sophie's head than to her worldly prudence, and she would have perhaps become a convert to her father's views, "that Undines can at least be intimate with Undines," if she had been able to look over Helen's shoulder on the afternoon of the third day after Oswald's arrival in Grunwald. Helen was writing to her friend, Miss Mary Burton (an Undine beyond doubt, for she belonged to an old and noble English family), and the delicate gold pen was flying fast over the paper. Helen wrote:
"This is the first time for a long, long time, dearest Mary, that I have the heart to answer your letters--for there is quite a pile lying before me. But I could not get the courage to write to you, who have now entered the great world, and have been presented at court--who are engaged, and about to become the wife of an English peer, that I, Helen von Grenwitz, to whom you prophesied such a brilliant future, have been sent back to boarding-school! sent to boarding-school, like a naughty girl; sent to boarding-school, like a gosling from the country! You wonder; you smile incredulously; you lisp your 'It is impossible!' and when you find at last that you have to believe my repeated assurances, you seize me with both your hands and cry: 'but, for God's sake, what does it mean? what can it be?' and you force me to tell you the whole story from the beginning. Well, I see no possibility to escape from the punishment, but you will find it natural that I shorten the pain as much as I can.
"Therefore, in short, if not for good:
"The relations with my mother, which I wrote to you before were so satisfactory, became worse and worse in consequence of my decided refusal to accept Felix as my husband, until an open rupture, which I had long seen coming, was inevitable. I have borne myself in the whole affair as I thought I owed it to myself and to you. It was a fierce battle, I assure you. To oppose my mother requires courage, and my father supported me but feebly, for he is feeble. Well! the battle is over; the dead are buried, and the wounds begin to heal. Yes, Mary! the dead. My Bruno, my pride, my knight, sans peur et sans reproche, my brother, my friend, my darling Bruno, is no more! He died fighting for me, and has breathed the last of his young, heroic soul in a kiss upon my lips. The fierce grief about this loss--for I only knew what he had been to me when I had him no longer--made me dull and indifferent to everything and everybody around me. As this boy loved me, no one on earth ever can and will love me again. I was light and air to him; I was meat and drink to him; I was waking and sleeping--I was life itself to him. How often have I laughed at him when he told me so, with glowing cheeks and bright eyes and trembling lips! And I said, 'Come, Bruno, none of your extravagancies! none of your fables! you are a little fool!' Now I would give many a year of my life if I could but hear it once more from his proud lips. A suspicion, which I cannot shake off, tells me that I would have found in Bruno and with Bruno all the happiness that this earth can afford; and that in losing him I have lost every prospect of happiness here below. You smile; you think: a boy! but I tell you, you did not know Bruno.