“Perhaps you ought to go,” says Frederick. “She may soon be home. What should I do if she wanted to beat you, I who am lying here sick and weak, who grow dizzy if I get up out of bed. Perhaps you ought to go.”
“I’m not afraid,” says Magda.
For she wants to show unmistakably that she loves him and that she will gladly suffer for her love’s sake.
Only when twilight comes does she kiss him for the last time and steal out of the house. She stops a minute in the courtyard and looks up at the window of the room where he is lying with her almond blossoms and violets on the bed-cover. When she turns to the little room in the wing of the court, she stands face to face with Mrs. Wetzmann, and she utters a little scream.
There is no living human being in the courtyard, none but these two. Round about stand the walls, staring at them in the darkness with empty, black windows, and the old linden trembles in its corner.
“You’ve been up there!” says the sweeper’s wife.
As a child I always believed that she smiled when she said this, and that her teeth shone as white in the darkness as those of her husband’s prentices.
“Yes, I have been with him,” Magda may perhaps have answered, defiant and erect even in her chalk-pale terror.
What happened then? No one really knows, but probably there was a desperate pursuit round the courtyard. At the foot of the old linden the girl tripped and fell. She dared not call for help, for fear the invalid might hear; and besides, who would have helped her? Her mother was away at work. The infuriated woman was above her—she had meanwhile got hold of a weapon, a broomstick or something of the sort,—and blow followed blow. A couple of half-strangled screams from a throat constricted by the dread of death, and then nothing more.
A couple of prentices who had just come home stood down in the dark doorway and looked on; they did not move a finger to help the girl. Perhaps they did not dare; perhaps, too, they were led by a faint hope of seeing their mistress carried off in a police wagon some day.