FELIX TO JANSEN.
"We parted so strangely, yesterday. Under the first shock of the blow I ran away as if I had been blind and mad. As if one could escape the mockery of hell in one's own breast! When I realized this, I turned back. I should have been glad to have surrendered myself to you--unconditionally--that very night. But you had already ridden away, and the others had chosen to leave the house and hurry off by the night train. Thus I am left here undisturbed, to come to my senses, and to write you a long letter--to which I can expect no answer.
"After all, what could you say to me? For we are parted again--we are separated, after all. And the case is so terribly clear, that it makes all explanation and discussion superfluous. Why, then, should I waste so much paper? and even go out of my way to give an explanation at which one scarcely knows whether he ought to laugh or weep?
"But I owe it to you--no, not to you; for, at bottom, I did not sin against you but against myself; and my confession, about which you will perhaps care little, is merely a relief to that self, which I hope you will grant me for the sake of our old friendship. I will try to be as brief as possible.
"You know how, just before my father died, I was sent to a watering-place; and how I twice passed through the city where you lived--the first time on my journey there, by way of Holland, where I had business to attend to; and then again on my return, when I was spurred on to the wildest haste by the news from home, and wanted to spare us both a mere shake of the hand between the steamer and the railroad, while in such a mood. In the interval between these two visits, you had married and become a father. I looked forward to becoming acquainted with your wife and child, but for that very reason I put off our meeting until a brighter time, and passed through Hamburg without suspecting----
"Still, in spite of all my anxiety as to how I should find my father, a painful recollection followed me. You know I had never been very straitlaced in my way of life or my adventures, and scarcely ever had paid for this frivolity even with remorse. I was always conscientious toward the conscientious, and unscrupulous toward the unscrupulous. I had never consciously or deliberately tried to disturb the peace of a single soul, and was above the level of the conventional bonnes fortunes one meets in his every-day path.
"But, not to make myself out better than I was, certain temptations were always powerful with me simply because of their adventurousness; and a decidedly insignificant Juliet might have seduced me into playing the Romeo, if the rope-ladder to her balcony had been a particularly breakneck one.
"Now, just before I came to Heligoland, various matters had united to put me in a bad humor; and, besides, my nerves were unstrung by wrong medical treatment, feverish work, and night-watching; and I troubled myself little more about the society of the resort than I did about the mussels and sea-weed on the beach.
"In an instant all this was changed. A stranger suddenly made her appearance--a young woman--who soon became the puzzle and the talk of the whole island. The stranger's list recorded her as Madame Jackson, of Cherbourg. She was without an escort, had rented rooms in a fisher's hut standing quite alone, and appeared to make it her chief aim to set all male and female tongues in motion by the oddity of her behavior.
"She appeared on the beach very early in the morning in a toilet that awakened the envy of all the ladies. It was not the costliness of the materials or of the ornaments, but the singular grace with which she knew how to wear and move in the plainest shawls and veils. Then, besides, her face could not fail to attract the notice of everybody, if only by its unusual contrasts. Her hair had a reddish-gold color, that literally shone in the sun when she let it fall freely down her shoulders; two delicate dark eyebrows curved over the softest blue eyes, that looked out upon the world as if they hadn't the slightest suspicion of the stir they were causing. A little black point-lace veil hung down over her forehead--however, I needn't describe her to you.