Thereupon she gave him the locket, after having opened it with a quick pressure and sobbing aloud, hid her face.
Blanden went up to the light that was burning low into its socket, and cast a gloomy flickering dense shadow upon the half-effaced letters. Already he doubted whether he should be able to decipher them here, but Kätchen came to his assistance, saying in a hollow voice--
"I will be your light; I know what stands there, I have read it many thousand times--
"'I do not desire to live any longer--love my mother!
"'Eva.'"
Blanden was struck to his heart; he had imagined this connection, but now that he saw it in black and white, written with the trembling hand of death, so that all soothing doubt had become impossible for evermore; that these half-faded characters, as did the Mene Tekel of Belshazzar, announced to him in fire how Eva had merely sought death because he had loved her mother, he was terribly shaken, as with a new unexpected blow. He felt as though a hurricane whirled up all the withered leaves of his life and dashed them into his face.
He struggled for composure, one hand propped upon the window-ledge in the wet snow, the other covering his eyes.
There was a long pause. Kätchen still lay upon her knees; in her face an expression of silent beatitude--he had spoken kindly and lovingly to her. All the more was she alarmed when Blanden suddenly sprang upon her in violent anger and dragged her up roughly.
"And this message from the dead you have withheld from me for years, not from idiotcy, not from mental stupidity--I see through you now. It was all pretence or deceit, who can tell; or else such God-forsaken creatures have a cursed instinct that is as cunning as much vaunted reason. You would not save Eva, merely because I loved her. You did not give me her words of farewell, because they urged me to love her mother; you only gave me these lines now when her mother is also dead! I was to love nothing in the world excepting yourself! Rather would I tarry at the North Pole with senseless seals than with such a creature as you! Certainly, they, too, possess the power to kill men! Away, out of my sight, you horror!"
And he dashed her from him, so that she fell upon her straw couch.