At the foot of his bed stood a cabinet in which he preserved all kinds of relics, diaries, letters--mementos of his lost love. He thrust in his hand at random, and drew out a portfolio containing all Irene's letters, from the first unimportant notes, in which she sent him some communication from her uncle--her uncle had an aversion to pen and ink, and was very glad to make use of his niece as a secretary--to the sheets on which the fate of his life stood written.
He lit a lamp and spread out before him this chronicle of the happiest years of his youth. Thus he sat with his back to the door of the sitting-room, now reading, and now mechanically taking up one sheet after the other. What could they tell him that was new? And yet these fine, slender letters reminded him of the hand that had written them. He had never seen any other hand that had expressed so much character, so much delicacy and firmness, so much flexibility and noble repose. He had often teased Irene about this, by telling her that he would undertake to decide from the appearance of her hands whether she was glad or sad, laughing or crying. The handwriting, too, was a very correct expression of her impulsive and self-controlled inner nature. Now, as he picked out here and there some particular sheet and glanced over it again, the whole past rose up so vividly before him that he felt as if he must suffocate in the close, lonely, sad atmosphere that surrounded him; as if he were lying in his grave, and a voice arose from these pages and repeated to him the history of his own life, that now lay ruined and shattered for ever more.
"Your dear, long letter from Mexico," she wrote, "I gave to uncle to read. He is always teasing me, because I assert that the letters of two lovers are written to be read by two pairs of eyes only. It was not possible, he declared, that an epistle of sixteen closely-written pages, like your last, could be a mere love-letter; no human being could stand such a thing, and we no longer lived, thank God, in that paradise of letter-writers--the time of Werther. So I showed him the Mexican letter, and he gave it back to me with one of his most comical faces. He declared he had never before come across such a lover; here he was giving a detailed description of a charming young girl, passing from one handsome woman to another, as if he could think of nothing that would give greater pleasure to his far-off sweetheart. That was certainly rather the opposite of a love-letter; but if I was content to make the acquaintance of all these Paquitas, Chatitas, and Mariquitas, he would not begrudge me the pleasure, and congratulated me upon my slight disposition to jealousy, which, to be sure, was a very useful trait for me to have in the case of a traveler of this sort.
"I laughed, and he went off to his club, shaking his head.
"But then I grew very serious, and looked into my own heart and tried to make out why it was that I really did not feel the faintest spark of jealousy. Perhaps because there is room for nothing in my heart but my love for you; neither for conceit, nor fear, nor desires, nor doubt. I have never stopped to consider why it was that we two should have loved one another. It was so; I felt that even more strongly than I did my own existence. And for that very reason it seems to me inconceivable that it can ever be any different. For you do not love me because I am the most beautiful, the wisest, the wittiest, or the most lovable person that you have ever seen, but because I am I the one person, with all that I have and all that I lack, that you will never find a second time. So, though you may find many beyond the sea who are more charming, more attractive, more brilliant, you will never find me again; and because I know that, I can, when evening comes, lay your sixteen-page letter from over the ocean under my pillow, and very quietly go to sleep and dream of you, without feeling any desire to snatch you, with poison and dagger, from the attractions of some olive-colored Creole.
"For I know, dearest love--vain as it may sound, and little store as I set by my few talents and attractions--that I alone can make you happy as no other can; not so happy that you will never have a wish unfulfilled; that I shall appear to you at all times the crown and jewel of all wives, and you the chosen favorite of fortune; but as happy as it is possible for one human being to make another, so happy will I make you and you make me; and because we can never comprehend this, but ask ourselves each day why it should be so, therefore our happiness shall have no end, and no phenomenon of beauty, grace, or wit, that ever crosses your path, will be capable of disturbing this happiness.
"My old Christel would raise her eyebrows very ominously at this point, and would repeat 'unjustified, entirely unjustified!' But I cannot help it; as a rule I am timid and skeptical about anything good that is promised to me. But when I think of our love, I overflow with boldness and confidence. What harm can fortune do us? Is not our love itself fortune? What tricks of fate ought we to fear, when we hear this fate, the most important and the greatest of all, within us?
"You will not feel tempted to translate this letter for the benefit of your Spanish lady friends. They would only pity you for having a sweetheart who would write you about such serious matters. Ah! and yet my whole heart laughs when I think that they are so serious with us!"
In a later letter, that had been addressed to Paris, she wrote:
"Yesterday, I was at court again, and to-day I thank heaven that I managed to bear it, and that the headache which was caused by its tiresomeness is only a moderate one. This undoubtedly proceeds from the fact that I sat at supper next to the embassador for ----, who has been in India, and who described to me, in great detail and for the third time, the burning of a widow that he had once been present at. (They say that he always tells the gentlemen a similar story about a tiger-hunt.) For this reason it happened that I could think a great deal about you, and when I can do that I am always happy. My darling, have you yet learned to put a good face on a bad matter? To howl with the wolves? To do homage to 'his serene highness your sovereign prince,' without letting your own sovereignty come out too plainly? I am afraid that, inasmuch as they don't dance the bolero here at the court balls, and as the whole tempo of our life is an andante maestoso, you will soon grow impatient with all this again, and give umbrage to some of the best and best-intentioned people in the world. No one can understand your feeling better than I do; only to think that your poor sweetheart, whom you have always teased about her good breeding and her respect for conventional forms, is looked upon by the society of this city as a very emancipated individual, or, at all events, is notorious for being a tête forte! The reason of this is, that I generally am quite dumb in the midst of all tiresome talk and whispered gossip; but if the conversation happens to turn upon anything deeper, upon affairs of real human interest and not merely upon court events, then I express my true opinion, without troubling myself to care whether it falls in with the court tone or not. And the good people look on this as very pronounced, and not at all good form for a young lady.