Julie was silent. After some time she said, suddenly:
"It is true he has eyes such as I have never before seen in a man. One can read in those eyes that he is not happy; all his genius cannot make him glad. Don't you find it so, too? Wonderfully lonely eyes! Like a man who has lived long, years in a desert, and has seen no living soul--nothing but earth and sun. Do you know anything of his life?"
"No. He himself never speaks of it. Nor do any of the others know what he may not have gone through before he came to Munich. That was about five years ago. But now, if you will just sit still a moment longer--so!--it's only for the reflection in the left eye, and the retouching about the mouth."
Then the painting went on for another hour in silence.
CHAPTER III.
On the outskirts of the "English Garden" there lies, among other pleasure-resorts of its class, the so-called "Garden of Paradise." In the midst of a grove stands a large, stately building, at the laying of whose corner-stone no one would have ventured to predict that it would some day become a place of refuge for so mixed a company. Here, on summer days, merry and thirsty folk are wont to gather round the tables and benches, while a band plays from a covered platform. But the large hall on the ground floor of the house is generally used for dancing, while the lower side-wings are opened for spectators and for couples that are resting from the waltz.
It was eleven o'clock at night, A thunderstorm, that had gathered toward evening, had prevented the advertised garden-concert from taking place. When the storm had scattered again after a few harmless thunderclaps, the seats filled up very slowly; and the beer-drawer at the open booth among the trees had plenty of time to doze between the stray mugs that were handed in to him to be filled. For this reason the garden had been closed earlier than usual; and when it struck eleven the house lay as still and deserted as though there were not a living being within.
And yet the long hall in the left wing, which was reached from the garden by a few steps, was, if not actually as light as day, at all events sufficiently illuminated by a dozen lamps along the wall. In the rear, where at this time scarcely any one passed through the deserted street, the upper, semicircular part of the windows was left open for the sake of ventilation, while the lower part remained tightly closed. Dark figures approached along the street, singly, or in groups of two or three just as they chanced to come together, and entered the house by the back door. On the side toward the English Garden everything remained as dark and lifeless as was ever an old wall behind which counterfeiters ply their trade in dimly-lighted cellars.
The interior of the hall was, when seen by daylight, not altogether unornamented. The inspired hand of some house-painter had covered the wall spaces between the windows with bold landscape conceptions al fresco, where were to be seen, amid fabulous castles, cities, river-gorges, and wooded ravines, blue wanderers strolling about in green hats, and horsemen careering on chargers of very questionable anatomy, followed by dogs that belonged to no known race. In the dazzling blue sky above these outgrowths of a cheery decorator's fantasy, sometimes through a tree-top or the slanting pinnacle of a robber-castle, a society of carpenters' apprentices, which met here once a week, had driven large nails that they might hang up symmetrically their various diplomas, decorated with pictures and mottoes, and dotted with little balls.
But, on the night of which we speak, all this splendor had disappeared behind a thick veil of growing plants. Tall evergreen bushes stood between the windows, and stretched their slender branches to the roof, so that the squalid walls seemed transformed into a tropical garden. A long, narrow table, with green, big-bellied flagons, occupied the middle of the room, and in a corner was a cask, about the polished tap of which hung a wreath of roses, while on a little table near by stood baskets with white rolls and a few plates of fruit.