“I meant no harm, and I can see no harm in it,” said he.
“Very well; but I do. I hate it. So shake hands, and let there be an end of it. I wish now that I had spoken out at first. There’s a dirtiness, to my mind, in the idea of speculating about a person with whom you are intimate, in a way that you wouldn’t like him to hear.”
“Well, if you will have it so,” said he; but there was not the usual look of open satisfaction upon his face. He did not mention the subject to me again, but I caught him looking now and then earnestly at Eugen, as if he wished to ask him something. Then I knew that in my anxiety to avoid gossiping about the friend whose secrets were sacred to me, I had made a mistake. I ought to have made Karl tell me whether he had heard anything specific about him or against him, and so judge the extent of the mischief done.
It needed but little thought on my part to refer Karl’s suspicions and vague rumors to the agency of Anna Sartorius. Lately I had begun to observe this young lady more closely. She was a tall, dark, plain girl, with large, defiant-looking eyes, and a bitter mouth; when she smiled there was nothing genial in the smile. When she spoke, her voice had a certain harsh flavor; her laugh was hard and mocking—as if she laughed at, not with, people. There was something rather striking in her appearance, but little pleasing. She looked at odds with the world, or with her lot in it, or with her present circumstances, or something. I was satisfied that she knew something of Eugen, though, when I once pointed her out to him and asked if he knew her, he looked at her, and after a moment’s look, as if he remembered, shook his head, saying:
“There is something a little familiar to me in her face, but I am sure that I have never seen her—most assuredly never spoken to her.”
Yet I had often seen her look at him long and earnestly, usually with a certain peculiar smile, and with her head a little to one side as if she examined some curiosity or lusus naturæ. I was too little curious myself to know Eugen’s past to speculate much about it; but I was quite sure that there was some link between him and that dark, bitter, sarcastic-looking girl, Anna Sartorius.
CHAPTER XXXII.
“Didst thou, or didst thou not? Just tell me, friend!
Not that my conscience may be satisfied,
I never for a moment doubted thee—
But that I may have wherewithal in hand
To turn against them when they point at thee:
A whip to flog them with—a rock to crush—
Thy word—thy simple downright ‘No, I did not.’
* * * * * * *
Why! How!
What’s this? He does not, will not speak. Oh, God!
Nay, raise thy head and look me in the eyes!
Canst not? What is this thing?”
It was the last concert of the season, and the end of April, when evenings were growing pleasantly long and the air balmy. Those last concerts, and the last nights of the opera, which closed at the end of April, until September, were always crowded. That night I remember we had Liszt’s “Prometheus,” and a great violinist had been announced as coming to enrapture the audience with the performance of a Concerto of Beethoven’s.