“Yes, go right up,” said Daniel stiffly; “you can stay and listen if you wish to. I am going to play the Harzreise.”
“If I wish to? I almost have a right to; you promised me this long ago.”
“She thinks after all that I want to catch her,” he thought to himself. “It will be better for me to drop the whole business than to let the idea creep into her stupid skull that my composition is going to make propaganda for our private affairs.” With bowed head he ascended the stairs, M. Rivière and Eleanore following along behind. His ears were pricked to hear anything they might say about Paris; they talked about the weather.
As they entered the room Gertrude had the harp between her knees; but she was not playing. Her hands lay on the strings, her head was resting on the frame. “Why haven’t you lighted a lamp?” asked Daniel angrily.
She was terrified; she looked at him anxiously. The expression on her face made him conscious of many things that he had kept in the background of his thoughts during his everyday life: her unconditional surrender to him; the magnanimity and nobility of her heart, which was as dependent on his as the mercury in the thermometer is dependent on the atmosphere; her speechless resignation regarding a thousand little things in her life! her wellnigh supernatural ability to enter into the spirit and enjoyment of what he was doing, however much his mind might presume to write De profundis across his creations.
It was on this account that he recognised in her face a serious, far-away warning. At once cowardly and reverential, conscious of his guilt and yet feeling innocent, he went up to her and kissed her on the hair. She leaned her head on his breast, thus causing him to feel, though quite unaware of it herself, the whole weight of the burden she was placing on him.
He told her he was going to play. He said: “I have lost my picture again; I want to try to find it in others.”
Gertrude begged him, with a pale face, to be permitted to stay in the living room. She closed the door only partly.