Having thus discharged a brotherly duty, Leo began to be depressed with a sense of his own superfluity and complete aloofness from everybody around him. He felt shame-stricken and paralysed. A dull fury smouldered in his heart, which changed its aspect every minute. Now it was ready to break out and commit murder, then it sank into an impotent, passive, gnawing grief.
Suddenly a light was thrown on what ailed him, and he knew that this poison in his veins meant jealousy. At the discovery he laughed loud and bitterly. As it happened, the sound fell on a silence, and he looked round, horrified at what he had done, to see a row of astounded faces staring at him. He now became conscious for the first time where he was. He was sitting at the beer-table in the hall in the midst of friends and good neighbours, with whom he had scarcely exchanged three words since his home-coming.
They now all fell upon him. He must not continue to withdraw himself from their society, they urged, and live the life of a recluse and hermit. What cares he had brought with him from the other side of the Atlantic they would help to dispel. While they talked to him thus, he let his glance wander anxiously from one face to the other. How many men there were troubling themselves about his welfare, men who had the right to give him their well-meant tactless advice. And yet how they had all become strangers to him; and how easy it was to forget that they had sat on the same form with him in school, and taken part in his early escapades. Fate had laid a gulf between him and them, from the other side of which he saw their features looming indistinctly as if from behind a mist.
"What do you want me to do?" he asked them, when they had all done speaking at once.
He ought to come out of his misanthropic shell, they declared. Send his megrims to the devil; take his right place in the society of the neighbourhood, and perhaps look out for a wife.
"Don't talk to me of women!" he said roughly.
Then Hans von Sembritzky, sturdy, stout old Hans, who of all the boon companions of his youth, remained most congenial to him, came out with a suggestion. He described in glowing terms the social evenings which took place two or three times a week at the Prussian Crown, when landed proprietors, officers, and civilians foregathered to smoke, drink, retail gossip, and tell "good stories." He would be in his element amongst them, if only he would come.
He promised to make a note of the invitation. And then, to obliterate the impression of that mad unguarded laugh, he made a supreme effort to talk, and monopolized the conversation. He related some of his adventures "on the other side," and pictures of his life there passed in procession before his excited brain like a recent dream.
A large circle of admiring listeners, among whom were ladies, collected round him and hung on his lips. He was charmed at his own success; and his imagination became more and more inflamed. He bubbled over with humorous anecdote and pointed allusion. And while his voice echoed continuously in his ears, his amazement at what he was doing grew.
Faces became mere white specks. He saw nothing distinctly but the yellow-flowered carpet, the copper hanging-lamp, and decanters of red wine. And all the time beneath his triumph a voice kept crying, "It's useless, useless!" For she had cheated him, played with him, he who had sacrificed honour, friendship, his life's happiness and hope, everything for her.