He caught her in his arms and kissed her, and she took his caress as she might have done a brother’s. The placid tenderness of her manner chilled him.
“Alba! my wife! You are glad to see me back again!” he said, still holding her close to him and looking into her eyes for some answering sigh, some flash of the old coy, shrinking fondness; but they looked back into his limpid, calm, passionless as a dove’s. She smiled and lifted up her face to kiss him. He bent down to receive it, but that proffered kiss was like the iron entering into his soul. The Alba whom he had left was not here; she had gone, he knew not whither, and in her place another being had come—a shadow of the woman who had loved him with all a woman’s tenderness. He sat down beside her and related the history of his life since they had parted, all he had suffered for her sake, and how light he held the suffering now that the reward was his; and she listened calmly, and spoke her gratitude with a gentle humility that was very touching. Then they were silent for a while, Alba apparently not caring to speak, Hermann longing to do so, but not daring to say what his mind was full of. At last Alba broke the spell.
“You know that I was dead,” she said; “I should be in heaven now, if mother had not called me back.”
“My darling! I will make a heaven for you on earth.”
“I once thought that was possible. I thought that heaven could give me nothing better than your love; but now I know that all the love of earth is but a shadow, a mockery compared to the love of heaven. It is nothing, nothing beside it! O Hermann! when we talk of happiness we are like blind fools. We don’t know what happiness means.”
“Alba! you have ceased to love me, or you would not speak so!”
“I love you as well as ever—nay, better than I did before; but, O Hermann! I should have loved you so infinitely better up in heaven. If you knew what the life of love is there!”
She clasped her hands, and her dark eyes shone with a supernatural light, as if the brightness of glory, invisible to him, were reflected there.
“You will tell me about it, darling, but not now,” he said, a terrible dread seizing him. “I want you to think of me a little now, and not so much of heaven. We must fix our wedding-day; it shall be soon, shall it not? There is no need for any delay.”
“No, there is no need,” she repeated. Then, after a pause, she said, looking calmly into his face: “Hermann, why should we not wait to wed one another in heaven?”