Eberhard looked at her in astonishment; he was morose, too.
She continued: “It has been in me since my childhood; perhaps I was born with it, just as other people are born with a physical defect. It may be that I have been this way ever since a certain day in my life. It was an autumn evening in Pappenheim, where my aunt then lived. My sister Gertrude and I were walking in a great fruit garden; we came to a thorn hedge, and sitting by the hedge was an old woman. My father and mother were far away, and the old woman said to my sister, then about seven: Be on your guard against everything that sings and rings. To me she said: Be careful never to have a child. The next day the woman was found dead under the hedge. She was over ninety years old, and for more than fifty years she had peddled herbs in Altmühltal. I naturally had not the vaguest idea what she meant at the time by ‘having a child,’ but her remark stuck in my heart like an arrow. It grew up with me; it became a part of me. And when I learned what it meant, it was a picture by the side of the picture of death. Now you must not think that I have gone through life thus far filled with a feeling of despicable fear. Not at all. I simply have no desires. The idea does not attract me. If it ever does, many questions will I ask about life and death! I will laugh at the old woman under the hedge and do what I must.”
As she spoke these last words, her face took on a strangely chaste and fanciful expression. Eberhard could not take his eyes from her. “Ah, there are after all fairy creatures on this flat, stale, and unprofitable earth,” he thought, “enchanted princesses, mysterious Melusinas.” He smiled somewhat distrustfully—as a matter of habit. But from this moment his frank, open, wooing attachment to the girl was transformed into a consuming passion.
He was proud, and man enough to subdue his feelings. But he yearned more than ever, and was tortured by his yearnings to know something more than the vague knowledge he had at present about that glass case, that spirit-chest in which, so near and yet so far, this lovely creature lived, impervious to the touch of mortal hands and immune to the flames of love.
“You are rejecting me, then?” he asked.
“Well, it is at least advisable that for the time being we avoid each other’s presence.”
“Advisable for me, you think. And for the time being? How am I to interpret that?”
“Well, let us say for five years.”
“Why exactly five years? Why not twenty? Why not fifty? It would be all the same.”