The countess had spoken with cutting sharpness and bitterness; it seemed as if the knife she turned against the man she loved must be piercing her own heart.
Freyer's breath came heavily, but no sound betrayed the anguish of the wound he had received. But the child, as if feeling, even in its sleep, that its mother was about to sunder, with a fatal blow, the chord of life uniting her to the father and itself, quivered in pain and flung its little hands into the air, as though to protect the mysterious bond whose filaments ran through its heart also.
"See, the child feels our strife and suffers from it!" said Freyer, and the unutterable pain in the words swept away all hardness, all defiance. The mother, with tearful eyes, sank down beside the bed of the suffering child--languishing under the discord between her and its father like a tender blossom beneath the warfare of the elements. "My child!" she said in a choking voice, "how thin your little hands have grown! What does this mean?"
She pressed the boy's transparent little hands to her lips and when she looked up again two wonderful dark eyes were gazing at her from the child's pale face. Yes, those were the eyes of the infant Redeemer of the World in the picture of the Sistine Madonna, the eyes which mirror the foreboding of the misery of a world. It was the expression of Freyer's, but spiritualized, and as single sunbeams dance upon a dark flood, it seemed as if golden rays from his mother's sparkling orbs had leaped into his.
What a marvellous child! The mother's delicate beauty, blended with the deep earnestness of the father, steeped in the loveliness and transfiguration of Raphael. And she could wound the father of this boy with cruel words? She could scorn the wonderful soul of Freyer, which gazed at her in mute reproach from the eyes of the child, because the woe of the Redeemer had impressed upon it indelible traces; disdain it beside the bed of this boy, this pledge of a love whose supernatural power transformed the man into a god, to rest for a moment in a divine embrace? "Mother!" murmured the boy softly, as if in a waking dream; but Madeleine von Wildenau felt with rapture that he meant her, not Josepha. Then he closed his eyes again and slept on.
Kneeling at the son's bedside, she held out her hand to the father; it seemed as if a trembling ray of light entered her soul, reflected from the moment when he had formerly approached her in all the radiance of his power and beauty.
"And we should not love each other?" she said, while binning tears flowed down her cheeks. Freyer drew her from, the child's couch, clasping her in a close embrace. "My dove!" He could say no more, grief and love stifled his voice.
She threw her arms around his neck, as she had done when she made her penitent confession with such irresistible grace that he would have pardoned every mortal sin. "Forgive me, Joseph," she said softly, in order not to wake the boy who, even in sleep, turned his little head toward his parents, as a flower sways toward the sun. "I am a poor, weak woman; I myself suffer unutterably under the separation from you and the child; if you knew how I often feel--a rock would pity me! It is a miserable condition--nothing is mine, neither you, my son, nor my wealth, unless I sacrifice one for the other, and that I cannot resolve to do. Ah, have compassion, on my weakness. It is woman's way to bear the most unendurable condition rather than form an energetic resolve which might change it. I know that the right course would be for me to find courage to renounce the world and say: 'I am married, I will resign, as my husband's will requires, the Wildenau fortune; I will retire from the stage as a beggar--I will starve and work for my daily bread.' I often think how beautiful and noble this would be, and that perhaps we might be happy so--happier than we are now--if it were only done! But when I seriously face the thought, I feel that I cannot do it."
"Yet you told me in Ammergau," cried Freyer, "that it was only on your father's account that you could not acknowledge the marriage. Your father is now a paralytic, half-foolish old man, who cannot live long, then this reason will be removed."
"Yes, when we married it was he who prevented me from announcing it; I wished to do so, and it would have been easy. But if I state the fact now, after having been secretly married eight years, during which I have illegally retained the property, I shall stamp myself a cheat. Take me to the summit of the Kofel and bid me leap down its thousand feet of cliff--I cannot, were it to purchase my eternal salvation. Hurl me down--I care not--but do not expect me voluntarily to take the plunge, it is impossible. Unless God sends an angel to bear me over the chasm on its wings, all pleading will be futile."