Christian’s fright stung him to further speech. “She is an outcast, one of the despised and rejected. That is true; or rather, that is what she was. But it is not permitted us to pass judgment. An accident placed a photograph of you, wearing your pearls, in her possession; and perhaps she felt as though you stood before her in person, and there came over her a sudden sense of what it means to be an outcast and despised. You and she—perhaps the world should hold no such contrasts; and the pearls became to her confused and half-mad vision a symbol of compensation, of moral equilibrium. She will not keep the pearls, by the way, nor would I permit her to do so. I pledge myself that they shall be returned, if you will accept my mere word as a pledge. I shall return the pearls, and you yourself may set the date. Only please don’t disappoint me in my quandary.”
Frau Wahnschaffe took a deep breath, and her tone was harsh: “You foolish boy.”
Christian lowered his eyes.
“You foolish boy,” Frau Wahnschaffe repeated, and her lips trembled.
“Why do you say that?” Christian asked softly.
She arose, and beckoned him with a weary gesture. He followed her into her bed-chamber. She took a key out of a leather-case, and unlocked the steel door of the safe built into the wall. There were her jewels—diadems and clasps, bracelets, brooches, pins, rings and lavallières studded with precious stones. She grasped the rope of pearls, and, as she took it out, its end trailed, on the floor. The pearls were almost equal in magnificence and of uncommon size. Frau Wahnschaffe said: “These pearls, Christian, have meant more to me than such things usually do to a woman. Your father gave them to me when you were born. I always wore them in a spirit of thankfulness to God for the gift of you. I am not ashamed to confess that. They seemed, I thought, to form a circle within which you and I alone had being. I have neither touched them nor looked at them since you started on your strange wanderings, and I believe that the pearls themselves have sickened. They are so yellow, and some have lost their lustre. Did you seriously think I could deny you anything, no matter what it is? It is true that your ways are too strange for me now. My brain seems befogged when I try to grasp all that, and I feel blind and lame. Yet to-day some voice has spoken for you, and I would not lose that voice. So far I have heard only vain lamentations. My whole soul shudders, but I begin to see you again, and whatever you ask I must give you. You are to know that, and indeed, you must have known that or you would not have come. Take them!” She turned aside to hide the pain upon her face, and with outstretched arm held out to him the rope of pearls. “But your father must never know,” she murmured. “If you desire to return the pearls, bring them yourself if possible. I would not know for whom they are. Do with them as though they were your property.”
Property! Christian listened to the word, but it did not penetrate his consciousness. It fell and disappeared like a stone in water; for him it had lost all meaning. And he looked upon the pearls with surprise and indifference, as though they were a toy, and it were strange to talk and trouble so much about them. Their preciousness, the value which amounted to millions, was no longer a living fact of consciousness to him, but like a dim memory of something heard long ago. Therefore he did not feel the burden of his mother’s trust and his possession. The way in which he tucked the pearls into a case his mother had found, had something so carelessly business-like, and his word of thanks so obvious a formality, that it was clear he had forgotten the obstacles to his errand which he had felt so keenly a little while before.
He remained with his mother for another hour. But he spoke little, and the environment, the splendour of the room, the air of the house, the solemnity and sloth, the emptiness and aloofness, all this seemed to disquiet him. Frau Wahnschaffe was unconscious of that. She talked and became silent, and in her eyes flickered the fear over the passing of her hour. When Christian arose to bid her farewell, her face became ashen, and she controlled herself with extreme difficulty. But when she was alone she reeled a little, and grasped for support one of the carven columns of her bed and gave a cry. Then suddenly she smiled.
Perhaps it was a delusion that caused her to smile; perhaps it was a flash of insight like lightning in a dark sky.