Gently Fränzchen led the poor little French girl upstairs and beckoned to Hans to follow, while the servants put their heads together, sneered and shrugged their shoulders.
For the first time Hans entered the room which Franziska occupied in her uncle's house and his heart trembled much as he crossed the threshold.
It was like a dream. The moaning wind outside the windows, the rustling and creaking of the trees, was not all this just as it had been when, at the Post-horn in Windheim, Fränzchen's sweet face first appeared out of the darkness, and, for the first time, Lieutenant Rudolf Götz called Dr. Moses Freudenstein a scoundrel?
What a long time lay between the present anxious evening and that one!
Who was the pale, haggard stranger in the cheap, shabby dress and shawl? How came she here, in this house? What had she to do with Fränzchen and what house was this?
Where was the friend of his youth? Where was Moses Freudenstein of Kröppel Street?
It was, as if the weird, pitiless, cold wind outside gave an answer to all these questions.
"Woe to you, struggle as you may, ours is the triumph! Ours is the triumph over spring, over youth, over faithfulness and innocence. Transitoriness and egoism are your masters! Struggle as you may, it gives us joy to watch you struggle! The only faithfulness, innocence, eternity is in—us!"
And again darkness looked threateningly in at the window as if it had swallowed up every other light and as if, of all the brightness and brilliance in the world, Fränzchen's little lamp alone were left. Hans Unwirrsch stood in the narrow circle of light shed by this lamp with the feeling that here alone there was still refuge in every distress, satisfaction for all hunger, comfort for all pain. He scarcely dared to breathe.
An open book and some sewing lay on the table;—Fränzchen had just risen from that chair and now the strange, abandoned young woman sat there,—it could not be reality, it must be a delusion, one of the feverish delusions that had visited him lately.