"Indeed?" Freyer with difficulty suppressed his rising wrath. "This, too!"
"Yes, how can you expect me to come gladly, when I always encounter scenes like these? How often, when I could at last escape from the thousand demands of society, and hurried hither with a soul thirsting for love, have you repulsed me with your perpetual reproaches which you make only because you have no idea of my relations and the claims of the fashionable world. So, at last, when I longed to come here to my husband and my child, dread of the unpleasant scenes which shadow your image, held me back, and I preferred to conjure before me at home the Freyer whom I once loved and always should love, if you did not yourself destroy the noble image. With that Freyer I have sweet intercourse by my lonely fireside--with him I obtain comfort and peace, if I avoid this Freyer with his petty sensitiveness, his constant readiness to take umbrage." A mournful smile illumined her face as she approached him; "You see that when I think of the Freyer of whom I have just spoken--the Freyer of my imagination--my heart overflows and my eyes grow dim! Do you no longer know that Freyer? Can you not tell me where I shall find him again if I seek him very, very earnestly?"
Freyer opened his arms and pointed to his heart: "Here, here, you can find him, if you desire--come, my beloved, loved beyond all things earthly, come to the heart which is only sick and sensitive from longing for you."
In blissful forgetfulness she threw herself upon his breast, completely overwhelmed by another wave of the old illusion, losing herself entirely in his ardent embrace.
"Oh, my dear wife!" he murmured in her ear, "I know that I am irritable and unjust! But you do not suspect the torment to which you condemn me. Banished from your presence, far from my home, torn from my native soil, and not yet rooted in yours. What life is this? My untrained reason is not capable of creating a philosophy which could solve this mystery. Why must these things be? I am married, yet not married. I am your husband, yet you are not my wife. I have committed no crime, yet am a prisoner, am not a dishonored man--yet am a despised one who must conceal himself in order not to bring shame upon his wife!
"So the years passed and life flits by!" You come often, but--I might almost say only to make me taste once more the joys of the heaven from which I am banished.
"Ah, it is more cruel than all the tortures of bell, for the condemned souls are not occasionally transferred to Heaven only to be again thrust forth and suffer a thousandfold. Even the avenging God is not so pitiless."
The countess, overwhelmed by this heavy charge, let her head sink upon her husband's breast.
"See, my wife," he continued in a gentle, subdued tone, whose magic filled her heart with that mournful pleasure with which we listen to a beautiful dirge even beside the corpse of the object of our dearest love. "In your circles people probably have sufficient self-control to suppress a great sorrow. I know that I only weary and annoy you by my constant complaints, and that you will at last prefer to avoid me entirely rather than expose yourself to them!
"I know this--yet I cannot do otherwise. I was not trained to dissimulation--self-control, as you call it--I cannot laugh when my heart is bleeding or utter sweet words when my soul is full of bitterness. I do not understand what compulsion could prevent you, a free, rich woman, from coming to the husband whom you love, and I cannot believe that you could not come if you longed to do so--that is why I so often doubt your love.