Each time that Otto von Sydow had broken the thread of his discourse in hopes that Goswyn would assent to his view of the situation, he had been disappointed. His brother was persistently mute.
Otto's footsteps sounded louder, his breath came more heavily; Goswyn, who knew him thoroughly, saw that he was struggling against an access of rage. For a while he maintained a silence like his brother's; then, pausing, he addressed Goswyn directly: "Do you find anything to blame in my allowing my wife to drive home alone with a cousin who is not well, and who may thereby be saved a fit of illness,--a cousin, too, with whom her relations have always been those of a sister?"
Goswyn shrugged his shoulders. "Since you ask me, I must speak the truth," he replied. "On this particular evening I think it would have been wiser for you to drive home tête-à-tête with your wife than to let her go with young Nimbsch."
Otto's breathing became still more audible; he stamped his foot, and, before Goswyn could look round, had turned off into a side-street with a sullen "good-night."
He was greatly to be pitied: he had hoped that Goswyn would comfort him, but Goswyn had not comforted him.
"He never understood her, and therefore never liked her," he muttered between his teeth. "He is the worst Philistine of all."
And then he recalled Goswyn's persistent opposition to his marriage with the Princess Dorothea, how passionately--for Goswyn, calm as he seemed, could be passionate--he had entreated his brother not to propose to her. "A blind man could see how unfitted you are for each other: you will be each other's ruin!" he had said. The words rang in his ears now with vivid distinctness.
It was about two o'clock in the morning: the streets were dim, deserted. At intervals of a hundred steps the reddish lights of the street-lamps were reflected from the brown muddy surface of the asphalt. From time to time a carriage casting two bluish rays of light before it shot past Otto with an unnaturally loud rattle in the dull silence. The windows of the houses were all dark and quiet, except where from one open building came the muffled notes of some light popular airs: it was a cheap kind of music-hall. Involuntarily Sydow listened: something in the faint melody commanded his attention. They were playing the music of the very song his wife had sung but now.
His wretchedness was intolerable; his limbs seemed weighed down with fatigue. "Pshaw! it is this confounded thaw," he said to himself. In his ears rang the words, "You are utterly unfitted for each other." What if Goswyn had been right, after all?
Good God! No one could have resisted her.