To him it seems even more lovely, even more living, than the girl herself; his eyes are simply held spellbound to the beautiful vision.
Konsul Steen glances absently in the same direction, and then, with a very eloquent gesture, places himself between Kasper and his daughter.
“Have you already forgotten your duties in life, which your parents, honest people, I have no doubt, taught you? What did you say your father was?”
“I’m a foundling,” says the boy, with dignity, enjoying his master’s embarrassment.
Afterwards, standing out in the passage, he remembers only that one question and answer. But, most of all, Clara’s portrait is burned deep into his brain. Many a time he steals a peep at it through the keyhole. Even in the golden days when Clara’s living self would place her hand in his and follow him adventuring through the gloomy cellars, or over mountains of sacks to the topmost opening of the loft, telling him her troubles and her joys, and listening to all his confessions, with her firm, commanding, and yet so innocent eyes fixed on his—even then the painting did not lose its halo. And throughout the many years of struggle, it lived on in his joy and his anguish, mostly in anguish, it is true, for there was certainly nothing merely amusing when it rose up like life before his mental vision, in all its smiling, merciless beauty, rendering his agony tenfold worse. Egholm had spoken to several people about that same thing, among them the doctor at the hospital where he had once been a patient for some time. The doctor knew that sort of thing very well; it was what was called an obsession. Well and good—but was that any explanation, after all? No; it was rather something mysterious, something of the nature of magic, that had come into his life from the time he married Anna.
Anna—yes....
He writhed and twisted in his bed, as if he were on a spit. His heart pumped audibly and irregularly.
To begin with, she had opened the door, letting out all the warmth, and made him nervous with all the things she strewed about the floor.
Then there had been that trouble about the dark-room, which had driven him out of his senses with its insistence.