‘Thank you,’ said she, holding up a little sketching-board, ‘the present professional opportunity is too good to be missed. I am going to sketch the Dom, if my going out alone will not be thought rude. I can find my way to the Market Square, and I will come back here in plenty of time, so I beg that no one will be in any trouble about me.’
‘Don’t go far away from here, as I may join you later, when the others have made up their minds,’ said the countess, in the blandest of voices.
‘Very well,’ said Sara, smiling, and, with a slight salute to the rest of the company, she took her way out of the house. Falkenberg had not said a word either for or against her resolution to go out alone.
She left the garden, pausing once again to contemplate with a peculiar pleasure the old grey gateway, and to read over the inscription, which seemed now to have a new meaning for her.
‘Mein Genügen,’ she thought. ‘Yes, I should fancy that that man would make a “contentment” wherever he goes. There is the harmony of a strong soul at peace with itself and the world, in all he says and does. But I wonder he is not married. I could imagine some woman being very much in love with him; and if he loved her, he would most assuredly make her happy. Well, Carla says that with the exception of her husband and herself, the nicest people are not married.’
She smiled as she remembered that saying, and, looking up, found herself again in the centre of the Marktplatz, which was empty of all human life.
The afternoon was hot, and the sun shone bakingly upon the round stones which paved the square. A drowsy calm hung over everything. Sara, pausing, looked around her, trying to choose some vantage-ground from which to sketch the Dom. She perceived that to the left of it, immediately under its wall, there were steps leading into a kind of small retired square, which looked shady and cool. Not a good position from which to make her sketch, but it was inviting. The ardour for work had left her. Ever since last night she had been longing intensely to be alone. She bent her steps towards the spot, ascended the low, broad flight of stone stairs, and found herself in a square, shady, gravelled space, in the midst of which rose a heavy, tasteless-looking stone monument, something between an ambitious tombstone and a grovelling obelisk. She walked up to it and looked at it. It bore a long list of names, and an inscription to the effect that the town of Lahnburg raised this humble Denkmal to the memory of those of her sons who had died fighting for Kaiser und Vaterland, in 1870-71. There were the regiments to which the deceased had belonged, their ages, and the names of the engagements in which they had fallen—Sedan, Metz, Saarbrück, etc. And below all, Auf Wiedersehen! Sara read it all, strangely moved by its homely simplicity, the confident expression of belief in a meeting again, and touched by the profound peace of this quiet Ruheplatz—so fitting for those brave hearts. At one side of the square there was a low wall, and some seats before it, on one of which she seated herself, and found that it commanded a glorious view of the low-lying country through which there the Lahn flows. The great, cool shadow of the cathedral was cast over her, while beneath her eyes the fertile land lay spread under a quivering veil of golden sun-pierced mist.
It was a feast for eye and heart. The artist soul of the woman drank in all the broad, calm, peaceful beauty of it, and her eyes dwelt lovingly upon every exquisite curve of distant hill, on every silver link in the windings of the placid river. She put her hand upon her sketch-book—opened it; even took her pencil in her hand; then laid it down again, with a restless sigh breaking from her lips. She felt the need of being alone, and yet, now that she was alone, she dreaded to acknowledge her own state of mind to herself. Her thoughts were vague and disconnected. There was a prevailing sensation that the old life no longer satisfied her. She knew that between her and her rejoicing fulness of contentment in her art, a barrier had arisen. A third thought now always intruded between herself and her purpose. She could handle no pencil, take up no book, behold no beautiful thing, form no plans for the future, without the influence of Jerome Wellfield making itself overpoweringly felt. At times—at this moment, even—she almost resented this new feeling; longed for freedom, and revolted at finding her soul enslaved. She felt a tremor sometimes—the unspoken question tormented her, ‘What if this passion be all wrong, instead of all right? What if it paralyse, instead of expanding, my nature? If it so absorb me that I can forget others—forget, for one moment, my highest aims—then it is surely wrong. A love that is pure and true ought to make one more unselfish, ought to make one love better and more largely and liberally everything and every person about one. Is it so with me?’
Some such thought as this was agitating her mind this afternoon. She was striving to be reasonable, to keep her head steady in the midst of her heart’s wild storm—piteously striving, while the tyrant sentiment shook her with ruthless hand; while between her and the wholesome outside nature, came the beautiful face which now haunted her thoughts so doggedly, and beyond the twitter of the hopping birds about and above her, sounded that voice to which every fibre had thrilled, every sense had responded, last night. A lark suddenly rose, fluttering aloft, pouring out a full-hearted song—such a flood of trilling ecstasy as must have nearly burst his little throat. She heard it, and it troubled her; it interrupted the memory of that other song, in such weird contrast to this one, which Jerome had sung:
‘In dreams I saw thy face,