“The sunshine of her soul is inspiring, and fills me with gladness too,” exclaimed Conrad inwardly. “She does not turn to look at me; she goes right on, filled with the joy of her work. Oh! have I not found here the being whom I have been so vainly seeking?”
After admiring the young artist a few minutes he continued his way along the gallery. But his mind was too occupied with the living picture which he had just seen to care a jot for anything else, and all the rest of the day this vision of beauty haunted him.
At three o’clock the Pinakothek is closed; and at this hour Walburga betook herself to her humble but cosey home in Fingergasse,[[43]] where, summoning her friend, Moida Hofer, who lodged with her, and who kept an old curiosity shop in the same street, the two sallied forth for a stroll in the English Garden.[[44]] They were fast friends, these girls, having been many years together, and never were they so happy as in each other’s company. And now, while they wandered through this delightful park, they talked about their school-days, and rejoiced that not yet a day of parting had come.
“Well, as for me, I shall never marry, you know,” spoke Walburga.
“Oh! yes, you will,” the other smilingly answered. Yet in her heart Moida believed that what Walburga said might be true. Her dearest friend was born with an affliction, a weighty cross—one which likely enough would prove a barrier to marriage. Moida, however, had no such cross, and already she had a devoted lover, whose name was Ulrich, and who, moreover, was the brother of Walburga.
Ulrich was uncommonly handsome and the last representative of the ancient and noble family of Von Loewenstein. But he was poor, and far off seemed the day when he should make Moida his bride. The latter, however, was patient. She built for herself no castles in the air; she was one of those practical souls, full of common sense, which is the genius of everyday life, and nobody had ever heard her utter a sigh. “Sometime or other our honeymoon will come,” she would tell her betrothed; “therefore, much as I love you, my Ulrich, I’ll not die of impatience.”
It would have been hard to find two young women more unlike in temperament as well as looks than Moida and Walburga; and perhaps ’tis why they dwelt in such harmony together. Miss Hofer, instead of being tall like her friend, was short and plump, with a little sprightly nose turning upward toward the sky, and she had a somewhat broad mouth. But there was a pretty dimple in her chin—a very pretty dimple; just the place for a kiss to hide itself—and she had lovely blue eyes, and such a fund of mirth and humor that it was impossible ever to be sad in her company. Of painting Moida knew absolutely nothing. But she was glad that she was not an artist; “for if I were,” she would say, “how could I find time to attend to my curiosity-shop and keep our little household in order? Ulrich is an artist, and so are you, Walburga; and we must not all three be making mountains and heads.”
“No, indeed. And I don’t know what I should do without you,” spoke Walburga, as they sauntered along the gravelled path by the lake. “You can’t tell how much I lean upon you. I really believe I am better since I took your advice about the skull.”
Walburga, who was of a nature inclined to melancholy, had for more than a year kept a skull in her bed-room, and before it she was wont to meditate sometimes for hours, until the ugly thing stole away the bloom from her cheek and drew a black mark under each of her eyes. Her appetite, too, began to fail; and ’twere not easy to say what might have happened if she had been living alone. But one morning, while she was plunged in one of her reveries before this death’s head, Moida approached, and, after kneeling beside her and saying a prayer—for Moida was a good girl, and quite as pious as Walburga, only in a different way—she reverently took the skull in her hands and said: “Now, dear friend, I think ’tis time to put this aside. ’Tis making a ghost of you. It has honeycombed you with scruples, and I am sure that your father-confessor would approve of the reformation which I am going to inaugurate. Therefore take one more good look at this eyeless, grinning object ere it disappears from your sight for ever.”
These bold words so astonished Walburga that for about a minute she could not reply, and she turned to Moida with an expression which might have deterred anybody with less spirit and determination from proceeding further. But Moida—who, let us here remark, was a descendant of Andreas Hofer, the Tyrolese patriot—was not in the least frightened by the other’s flashing eyes.