Ah! so that was it. Now he knew all. In that hour his life's budding joys and hopes were withered like the blossoms of a tree struck by lightning in May. How intolerable were these memories of darkest hours of silent torture-hours in which he was oppressed with a sense of crime, and when shame literally consumed him!
It was some time before the news of the betrayal was openly spoken about in Königsberg. Months passed before the first signs that it had become known manifested themselves, and during these months his whole character underwent a complete change.
His glance became shifty and uneasy, his colour often forsook him. Shy and awkward he withdrew himself more and more from society, and frequented none of his old haunts. He would start and tremble at every word unexpectedly addressed to him. Then came days when the masters at the gymnasium began to look askance at him, and the pupils to shun him--days in which his aunt kept her room to escape his morning greeting, and the family sat in conclave behind closed doors, when the servants began to set his orders at defiance, and from time to time spat on the ground as they passed his door.
So he watched it creeping on, nearer and nearer, the cold, clammy monster, that, snake-like, was to bind his limbs and freeze the blood in his veins. He watched its wriggling progress, heard the gloating hiss of its approach, and defenceless, paralysed, he stared it stonily in the face, lacking the courage to cry out, or even to moan.
He had lost Helene too. Not through any fault of hers. She had still allowed him to go on pulling the institution bell on Fridays as if nothing had happened, and had been friendly as ever, and had even tried to distract his thoughts from the painful subject on which they incessantly brooded, with mild little jokes. But was it because he was himself so altered that he could only see the rest of the world through a distorting mist of shame, or had she really, since that day of the revelation, adopted a tone of pitying compassion towards him? Anyhow, he became more and more embarrassed in her presence, and dared not meet her eye.
One day, instead of Helene, the old schoolmistress received him alone. She curtseyed and grinned as usual, and assured him, a hundred times at least, that she was his humblest servant; but what she proceeded to unfold seemed to Boleslav the last straw. Her dear nephew, the Herr Pastor, she stuttered, thought it best that the intimacy between his daughter and the young nobleman should terminate, and in order that there should be no further temptation to continue it, had decided to remove her instantly from the town of Königsberg. A note sealed with blue sealing-wax contained Helene's farewell:--
"Dear, Dear Boleslav,--My father commands me to give up my friendship with you. I must obey him. Good-bye. I shall always be fond of you----always. I swear it. Your
"Helene."
Six hastily scribbled lines! Were these to be his food and drink through a life of longing and renunciation? Yet had he any right to expect more? Had she not promised to be true, and to hold to him though everyone else had cast him off? From that time forward she became for him transfigured and a saint. Her face became more than ever identified in his imagination with that of the Madonna he had seen in the Cathedral, and whenever he pictured her he beheld her adorned with an aureole, and surrounded by lilies and roses.
Had it not been for his extreme youth, energy and self-reliance might possibly have helped him over the abyss of enervating grief; but a habit of childlike respect, a latent instinct of veneration, put the idea of asking his father to explain what had happened, much less of calling him to account for it, out of the question. It was his unexpected appearance on the scene that at last roused in him a spirit of revolt.