"What if any one should surprise us?" cried the old man, fearfully.
Robert shrugged his shoulders and pointed to the floor.
The old man was satisfied; they softly drew up their chairs within light of the lamp. After this nothing was audible but the rushing of the winter wind as it swept through the leafless lime-tops, and the monotonously hoarse voice of the reader, accompanied from time to time by the chorus of the funeral party--now swelling up loudly, now dying away to a whisper.
VI.
"Forgive me, sister, for invoking from the grave your transfigured shade. In remembrance of the deep love you bore me, of the warmth with which my heart beat for you, suffer it, if I attempt to expiate the guilt that weighs so heavily upon me, and whose yoke I must drag along with me to the end of my days! Let me once more live through all the love and kindness you bestowed upon me, and in the memory thereof forget the horrors of loneliness that, like the breath of your tomb, chill my very bones.
"What a fool, what a wicked creature I was, to feel lonely while you yet dwelt on earth! Your love was the very air that I breathed! Your smile was the sunshine that animated me, your comforting, exhorting words were like the voice of God within us, to which we hearken reverently without understanding. And how did I thank you, sister? I grew a stranger to you--in sorrow and misery I have to think of you, and the consciousness of guilt appals me when the soughing wind whispers your name in my ear. Between us there stands a wild phantom with flaming eyes--terrible and distorted, its hair encircled by snakes--stretching out its claw-like hands towards me, and separating me from you for ever. If it were no phantom, but flesh and blood, if what I committed were a sin, a crime, I would wrestle with it, I would overcome it with the last strength of my failing energy, or allow myself to be strangled in its bloody grip. But it is intangible, it melts away into empty air--a spectre that mocks me, a mist that clouds my reason, and by its poison is slowly destroying me. A wish!
"A wish--it is nothing more!
"I wonder if you recognised it? I wonder if it was reflected in your dying gaze? I wonder if at your bedside, when you, good, noble soul, gave up the last breath of a life that was all love, you saw this spectre--a spectre born of envy and ingratitude, which I--miserable creature--dragged into your pure habitation?
"If I had still my lisping childish beliefs, I would pour out the wretchedness of my soul before God, the Great and Merciful; but there is no one on earth or in heaven to take pity on me, none but your glorified image.
"Woe is me!--that, too, turns away from me. Weeping, it veils itself, when yonder demon approaches my soul! And yet, was it not human to feel as I did? Why are we not heavenly bodies, void of desire, pure and ethereal? Why are we born of dust, why do we cleave to dust, eat dust and return to dust when we have thrown off this great fraud of life? The great fraud of my life I will write down here--the fraud towards myself--towards you, and towards a third as well, who was pure and good--and who yet was the cause of it all.