There she stood, like Aphrodite, risen from the foam of the sea, and--she smiled bitterly--she could not even raise herself from the mire into which a single error had lured her. Then she was again overwhelmed by an unspeakable consciousness of misery, her disgrace, which made all her splendor seem a mockery. She was on the point of stripping off the glittering robe when the duke was announced. It was too late to change.
She hurried into the boudoir to meet him--floating in like a roseate cloud.
"How beautiful!" exclaimed the duke, admiringly; "you look like a bride! It must be some joyful cause which brought you back here so soon and made you send for me."
"On the contrary, Duke--a bride of misfortune--a penitent who would fain varnish the ugliness of her guilt in her friend's eyes by outward beauty."
"H'm! That would be at any rate a useless deed, Madeleine; for beautiful as you are, I do not love you for your beauty's sake. Nor is it for your virtues--you never aspired to be a saint, not even in Ammergau, where you least succeeded! What I love is the whole grand woman with all her faults, who seems to have been created for me, in spite of the obstacles reared between us by temperament and circumstances. The latter are accidents which may prevent our union, but which cannot deprive me of my share in you, the part which I alone understand, and which I shall love when I see you before me as a white-haired matron, weary of life--perhaps then for the first time."
Emotion stifled the countess' words. She drew him down upon a chair by her side and sank feebly upon the cushions of her divan.
"Oh, how cold your hands are!" said the duke, gazing with loving anxiety into her eyes. "You alarm me. Spite of your rosy glimmer, you are pale as your own pearls. And now pearls in your eyes too? Madeleine--my poor tortured Madeleine--what has happened?"
"Oh, Duke--help, advise me--or all is lost. The Wildenaus have discovered my secret. Josepha, that half-crazy girl from Ammergau, has betrayed me!"
"So that is her gratitude for the life you saved." The duke nodded as if by no means surprised. "It was to be expected from that sort of person. Why did you preserve the fool?"
"I could not let her leap into the water."