Yes, she had indeed relied upon him; he looked after everything, without any words, without annoying her with restlessness, quietly, simply, and as if it could not have been otherwise.
And what had she done for him in return for all his care and consideration? She had kept his home in order, had treated him with more or less friendliness, had never flirted in the least with any other man, and had presented him with a charming child.
But no; she had not even presented him with it: she had jealously kept it for herself, had grudged him every caress which the boy bestowed upon his father; she had spoiled the child in order that she might hold the first place in his heart. Yet, oddly enough, in spite of all her indulgence the boy was fonder of his fiery, irritable, good-humoured, but strict papa whose nod he obeyed, than of herself, whom the young gentleman could wind around his finger. She confessed this to herself, not without bitterness.
When, the previous autumn, Erlach Court had come to her by inheritance from a grand-uncle, she was filled with a desire to break off all connection with an army life. Without the slightest consideration for her husband, she had left him and forced him for her sake to adopt an existence that was contrary to all his habits and tastes. The moonbeam still penetrated into her room: it grew brighter and brighter, and at last lit up the most secluded corner of her heart.
"Until you see me stifling in the mire, like poor Franz Meineck, console yourself with the conviction that you have done your duty by me."
Again and again the words echoed through her soul.
"I have done my duty by him," she repeated to herself, with the obstinacy with which we are wont to clutch a self-illusion that threatens to vanish. "I have done my duty."
Suddenly she trembles from head to foot, and, hiding her face in the pillow, she bursts into tears.
The boundless egotism, in all its petty childishness, which has informed her intercourse with her husband flashes upon her conscience.
How is it that she has never perceived that he has long since ceased to perform his part of their agreement? Little tokens of affection full of a timid poetry hitherto heedlessly overlooked now occur to her. Why had she not understood them? Why had she never felt a spark of love for him? Her cheeks burn. She had continually reproached her husband with never being done with his illusions, and she---- In a secret drawer of her writing-table there is at this very moment, shrivelled and faded, a gardenia which she has never been able to bring herself to destroy. She springs up, lights a candle, hastens to her writing-table, finds the ugly brown relic,--and burns it. When she lies down in bed again the admonitory moonbeam has vanished, but through the cold black of the winter night filters the first weak shimmer of the dawn. The dreamy ding-dong of a church bell among the mountains ringing for early mass has the peaceful sound of a sacred morning serenade as it floats into her room.