But still Johanna's image, blurred by tears, would not vanish. He had of old regarded her with a kind of proud respect, and had always esteemed it as a happy privilege when she had made him the confidant of her strange, introspective thoughts. And though he had delighted to hold up to ridicule the extravagant enthusiasm with which Ulrich, in his gymnasium days, had raved about the serious playmate, in his heart he too had thought her the most sublime of female creatures. And the day after the ceremony in the Temple of Friendship, when he and Ulrich had taken their vow to be friends for life, they had secretly rowed Johanna over to the Island, that she, as a kind of priestess, might sanctify what to them was more sacred than anything else in the world.
He let these pictures of an intimate brother-and-sister affection pass before him, half-awake, half-dreaming, till three jangling strokes from the castle tower roused him into a sitting position.
Johanna's apartments were on the first floor, close to the desolate drawing-room suite. No one answered his knocks and he walked in. A big bare room met his eye. It was in semi-darkness, owing to the closed shutters, and polished tables and stiff chairs were apparently arranged at regular intervals along the walls, on which hung, as large as life, pictures of scriptural subjects and black-letter alphabets. An atmosphere of poverty and dirt, that abominable "poor-people's odour" so offensive to aristocratic nostrils, lingered in this room even on Sundays, and met him pungently as he entered it. This, then, was the widely known "ragged-school," which turned Halewitz day by day into a "kindergarten" institution for the poor. The room was empty; but through an opening in the folds of the partition he saw his sister in the next apartment, leaning, almost lying, back with closed eyes in an armchair. Quivering, bluish shafts of light zigzagged across the dusky floor. One of these fell on her sunken face, and brightly illumined the red-gold hair which she generally wore hidden under her black widow's veil.
He stood still and looked at her contemplatively. He studied the hollows on the haggard cheeks, the crow's-feet at the relaxed corners of the mouth, and that hard straight line running from chin to throat, the autumnal sign which no art can eradicate.
A shiver ran through him. What must her life have been since, as the young bride of a gay cavalier, she went out into the world, that she should have come back a faded wreck at little more than thirty years of age to bury herself alive in this living grave--a mere sister of charity, with no interest outside the wretched scrofulous children of the peasantry?
He pulled the portière aside. A curious scent of heliotrope and strong hartshorn was wafted towards him.
She had not heard his footstep till now, and slowly opened her tired eyes, which, directly she saw who it was, took on that fixed clairvoyant expression that had made them so terrible to him.
Some of his old youthful respect for her came back momentarily, so that he needed to give himself a slight reminder before he could resume his manner of easy defiance.
"I have come to talk seriously to you," he said, frowning, as he placed a chair not quite opposite her, so that the corner of the table was still between them.
She drew herself slowly erect, and pushed the leather cushion against which her head had been resting lower to support her back.