‘That was always my idea of him. Won’t his wife and children be rather badly off?’
‘I am afraid they will. But Frau Goldmark is rather a stirring little woman. Something will be contrived for them, I doubt not.’
‘Are you going? This has been a short lesson.’
‘It has,’ he answered with the same ambiguous little fold in his forehead. ‘You have not supplied me with much material to teach upon this time. You must work, my dear child—work while it is to-day,’ he added earnestly. ‘Bear my words in mind. Work while it is to-day, and let nothing interfere, or you will have to repent your idleness in dust and ashes.’
With which, not waiting for any reply, he left her.
Sara looked after him dreamily. ‘What does he mean?’ she speculated. ‘But I know. He finds a change in me; and I am changed, even to myself. Sometimes I think the old spirit has completely left me, and yet how can that be? It will all come right again, I suppose. But I wish—I wish it might be soon.’
She sighed as she put down her palette, and sat down before her easel in the chair which Wilhelmi had lately occupied, and, amid the profound stillness of the quiet afternoon, let her thoughts wander off there where now they were for ever straying. She was too much under the influence of her love for Wellfield to be able to reflect whether that influence were a good or a bad one. That said, all is said; it contains her mental history for the past two months, and accounts for the depression which stole over Wilhelmi’s face and into his keen eyes as he saw her; it accounts too for the nameless paralysis which had stolen the cunning from her right hand, and from her soul the ardent zeal for her art. She was Sara Ford still, but Sara Ford metamorphosed. Wilhelmi sorrowfully told himself one day that there was now more life and spirit in the water-colour sketches which die Kleine, as he called Avice Wellfield, made, than in those of his dearest pupil, of which but lately he had been so proud.
‘I am certain it’s some wretched love affair!’ he muttered, as he strode abstractedly away from the Jägerstrasse towards his own house. ‘Good heavens! to think of that woman’s talent being palsied by some wretched sentimental Schwärmerei; it is horrible. Why is not genius created senseless, sexless, sentimentless? But then, of course, it could never appeal to sense, and sex, and sentiment, as it must if it is to be an influence. It is a thousand pities, it is lamentable. And Falkenberg wrote of her in what might for him be called enthusiastic strains. I wish there were some way of saving her. I wish the man would play false, or that some shock would rouse her from this apathy!’
It may here be casually observed that Professor Wilhelmi cherished a conviction that he understood woman, and could account for and cure all her vagaries, had he but the power placed in his hands. It was a delusion broken every day by the conduct of his own wife and daughter, to whom, in all matters outside his art, he was a slave, but he lived in it still, and would live in it till he died.
Meantime the Indian summer dawned, and flamed itself out here too, as well as at Wellfield. September went out, and October was ushered in with unusual mildness and glory. It was a sight to gladden the eyes of an artist, even the low flat country which at Elberthal stretches for unbroken miles on either side the broad Rhine. For there were glorious sunsets, colouring river, and field, and town, with strange glorified lights, and at that sunset-time in the Hofgarten, the yellow golden beams shone in a glowing, dazzling mist through the autumn trees, and flooded every twig, every stick and stone, with mellow radiance. At that time the stalls of the old women at the street corners were piled high with grapes, and plums, and russet pears, which fruits were to be purchased for almost nothing. At that time it was good to sail down the river to Kaiserswerth, or up the stream to Neuss, and to return at sunset, and watch the pomp of it glorifying the majestic river. There was no striking beauty of crag or waterfall, of castled Drachenfels or magic Loreley, but there were the great plains stretching Hollandwards, dressed in their autumn garments; the broad expanse of water sweeping by, strong and untroubled; the busy humming town behind, with its throb of varied life, its many interests, its treasures of art and joy, its music and melody, inseparable from all true German life.