She looked tenderly at the yellow-stained sheet into which the rest was fitted. She was no longer vexed with her "Song of Songs," and did not despise it, as on that ill-fated morning when she had hunted it up again; the morning on which she had gone out to break her vow to Konrad.
Now once more it was a dear, precious possession, not a guide, philosopher, and friend, not a miracle-working sacred relic, but just an old keepsake which we treasure and water with our tears because it is a bit of our own life.
And a bit of our own blood!
For there were still those dark stains on the paper. Her blood had fallen on it when she set forth on life's journey, and now that the journey was ending the deep waters should wash the blood-stains away.
With the score lying in her lap, she looked beyond it into the sorrowful past. It seemed to her as if mists were lifting and curtains were being drawn aside, and she saw the path that she had trodden winding backwards at her feet, like a clearly defined boundary.
She had been weak and often stupid. Her own interests and the main chance she had never considered. Every man who had entered her life had been able to do what he liked with her. Not once had she barred her soul, shown fight, or exercised to the full the sovereignty of her beauty. She had only been eager to oblige and to love and be kind to everyone. In reward, she had been hunted and bullied and dragged through the mud all her life long. Even the one man who had respected her had gone away without saying good-bye.
"But I've never hated anybody," she thought. "And no matter what I have suffered, or how I have transgressed, I have always been able to feel there was something in me out of the common, and this at the last seems as if it had been a gift from Heaven."
Did it not really seem as if this "Song of Songs," which now lay before her, defaced, stained, and rotted, like her own career, had been all along blessing and absolving her the presiding genius she had believed it to be as a child, and fancied it afterwards during the rapture of her abandonment to her love for Konrad?
"Yes, you shall come too," she said. "You shall die when I die."
And she carefully wrapped the battered papers together. Then she found the letters, and read them through two or three times, but without taking in what she read.