"You're right! Yes indeed, I'm a fool. What could bring her here. But that's the cross I bear every moment. If a carriage rattles by--a door opens--ah! Nature, which made me a philosopher, failed to provide one essential--a suitable dose of the famous ataraxia."
"That's unfortunately true," replied Mohr, shrugging his shoulders. "But your clever wife is right--the plant grows out of doors among the mountains and by the streams. But I too am not wholly insensible, and most earnestly beseech you not to seize me so convulsively, at least before I've breakfasted. We'll attend to this matter at the first stopping place, and then I'll sing you the old Eichendorff traveler's song, which Christiane has set to a very pretty air:
"'Through fields and rows of beech trees,
Now singing, anon still,
How joyous he, who leaves his home
To wander at his will.'"
CHAPTER V.
Meantime Leah, absorbed in grief, was still sitting at the window, from which in the pale morning light she had waved a farewell to her departing husband. As soon as he had disappeared, all the suppressed anguish of the last few days had found vent in a flood of tears, but without relief to the poor aching heart. When the torrent was at last exhausted, she only gazed the more hopelessly into vacancy with burning eyes, as if staring into a grey, impenetrable mist, from which no familiar form emerged, no loving voice reached her ear. The week that Edwin was to be absent, now seemed to her like a respite. During that time she might groan in anguish and weep to her heart's content. When he returned, he should find her what she had always been to him--his brave friend, his faithful comrade, to whom his inmost soul was revealed, even if a passion for a strange woman, the very root of which had seemed to have been destroyed, now flourished luxuriantly anew. True, how could he know that she herself was only a weak woman, who felt all her wise thoughts and heroic reason vanishing in a boundless longing for his love!
A strange reserve, or perhaps pride because he had never asked, had prevented her from telling him this.
But he needed passionate love--in her terror this had now become evident to her. The cooler his head was, the more vehemently his heart demanded boundless, self-forgetful folly, a love higher than reason. He had now found it--in the magic castle, where the old demon had resumed its sway over him. The enchantress herself had cast aside her black art to practise a more powerful and irresistible one--to throw herself into his arms in the guise of a poor helpless woman saying: "I am yours; do with me as you will." And was he to disdain all this and reply: "You come too late?"--Well, he had said so. He knew what he owed to duty. But to accept this martyrdom, to hold a man by an iron chain, against which every instinct of his blood rebelled--a feverish chill ran through her frame at the thought.
True, she might stake passion against passion, and see which would conquer, hers that was really no tamer and narrower than any ever offered by a woman to the man she loved, or the capricious one of this stranger, who now when it was too late, wanted to throw away a lost life, to regain her happiness in her saviour. But her pride rebelled against this also. Had he ever missed her passionate love? Could he believe, now that she had so long denied it utterance, that it was really true and genuine, not an ebullition of jealous pain, rather than the outburst of one of the hidden powers of nature?
But amid all this tumult of thoughts, one emotion was ever absent from her mind--no feeling of anger toward the two persons who now made her suffer so bitterly, stirred in her soul. The woman who had no scruple in making her life desolate, in wresting from her, her only happiness, of whom she knew nothing, except that she had bewitched her beloved husband and yet had not satisfied his heart--what did she this stranger? And Edwin--had he deceived her? Did he not suffer most bitterly, because he esteemed and honored her too highly to make even an attempt to delude her about his condition?
But the very fact of his remaining loving, affectionate and honest to her, and continuing to give her a brotherly share in his fate was unendurable. She could not suffer it longer, for it mocked her heart, whose inmost depths were overflowing with passionate love. Yet she did not know how to change it, what to say to him, when he should return with his wound nearly healed to place himself in her sisterly care--lest some day, by accident the wound should begin to bleed again and perhaps endanger his life. But did she not also owe something to herself and the child she bore under her heart? Could she suffer the poor thing to be greeted by its father with a joy only prompted by a sense of duty, and perhaps--who knows--secretly regarded as a new link in the oppressive chain that must be worn with the best possible grace? At this thought, the mother's blood in her rebelled with such fierce indignation and wrath, that for a moment an odious shadow darkened even Edwin's image. But the next instant she shrank from her own impetuosity, and with all the power of her will repelled the hostile feeling.