The tragedy had become something very like a farce. Still, the child, the dear child, was dead. There was no getting over that. The wrath which always flamed up within him against this woman, at moments when his will was weakest and most impotent to meet her, hardened into cold aversion. He could have strangled her on account of those toothache drops. Everything, even the desire to die, became in her hands a miserable petty fraud. But the child was dead, and could not be brought back to life.
He asked a maid-servant, who was apparently affected by the general alarm in the household, whether her mistress was visible. She answered shyly that she would go and see, and ran upstairs.
Meanwhile, old Minna, coughing and sobbing, came in at the front door, and asked, wringing her hands, if the gracious one was still alive.
Leo turned his back on her without deigning to answer, and she hobbled on up the stairs as fast as she could. He was alone, and it seemed a long time before any one came. He paced up and down between the pillars, where he and Ulrich as boys had played hide-and-seek, and he thought, "What shame have she and I brought on your house!" It would have come almost as a consolation if some one had hounded him with a horse-whip out at the door, the threshold of which his feet had desecrated.
Instead, old Minna returned with beaming eyes and champing jaws, and declared joyously that the gracious little mistress was better again, and the gracious little mistress wished to see him.
He clenched his teeth and followed the old woman upstairs. What he wanted to say to her he did not know; he was only aware of a dull desire to lay his fingers about her throat and choke her. So bitterly, at that moment, did he hate her.
Minna led him into her bedroom. He had not entered it since the days at Fichtkampen. A wave of the opoponax perfume met him as the door opened, and he found himself in a rosy gloaming, penetrated here and there by a ray of hard, cold daylight. He felt as if he were plunged into a warm scented bath, and a cover shut down upon him. He remained stationary by the door, and breathed quickly.
The old hag caught him by the sleeve and pulled him forward towards the bed where she lay. Her face was illumined by the light from the window, and her pillow gleamed round her like an aureole, while the rest of the bed was bathed in purple, semidarkness.
"She has arranged this mise en scène," he thought.
Her face had a waxen hue; there were dark rims round her eyes, which, from beneath their half-closed heavy lids, looked at him without recognition or intelligence. It seemed to him that the effects of her drug-taking had not entirely passed off.