“There!” was her first thought, “he did want to plunder me. He wanted my money and nothing else.” And she felt confirmed in all her old morbid suspicions. There were only cheats and crooks in the whole world and Levy was one of the worst of them.
But at the same time the last shreds of the veil of charity were torn from her feelings. She knew now that she had loved him; that she still loved him in spite of all; that she would never be rid of an aching pain in her heart.
That was the climax of a mute and humiliating drama in which love fought a hopeless fight against mean fear. Hedvig remained with her poor gold.
Yes, she clung convulsively to the money for which she had sacrificed all. She could not transact any new business herself but, strange to say, and in spite of her distrust, she allowed all Levy’s investments stand. But she collected her papers, pondered and calculated. Down in the vaults of the bank and at home in her villa she sat and counted and counted. Like the hermit with his rosary she sat mumbling, letting one figure after the other slip between her fingers.
Levy’s letter accompanying the bill she did not answer. Perhaps it was her timid unwillingness to reveal anything. Perhaps it was a secret hope that he would call himself.
In the end Mr. Levy had to take proceedings to get his money.
Hedvig no longer drove out to Percy’s grave. The shadow game was over. She no longer needed the dead to protect her against the living. And though she now more and more rarely went outside the house she no longer glanced at Percy’s collections. It was really a strange whim of fate that just such a being as she should steal about in that big house, built as a home of Art.
On a sultry and still summer evening Hedvig rose with smarting eyes and throbbing temples from her papers in the bedroom. She had an idea that people stared at her down at the bank and she had therefore brought everything home: shares, mortgages, title deeds, deposit receipts, bank-books and bundles of notes. And now it was difficult in the evenings because she did not dare to light the light from fear of being seen from the outside through the chinks in the blinds. She sat over her papers till the figures swam together in a grey mist and there was a pricking sensation in her eyes. Then she crept to the door to see that the towel was hanging over the keyhole, so that none of the servants should peep in. Then she stole slowly, stopping all the time to listen, towards the big built-in wardrobe where she had found a good hiding place behind an old carved chest. When her treasure was hidden, she noiselessly opened a window and looked out to see if anybody moved.
Hedvig stood long in the window. The evening was sultry and heavy. Far below the firs lay a woolly darkness. Above, a few faint scattered stars hung in a sky to which the reflections of the neighbouring town imparted a reddish, ominous hue. Against this background she presently distinguished the quick shadowy flight of the bats round the eaves, the soft flutter of the moths, the flight of the spiders with their long helplessly suspended legs, all the mysterious fluttering and hovering things out in the big witches’-kitchen of the damp, warm summer night.