"Ernestine, you are unjust. You have long known my views concerning the position of woman, and you cannot expect that I should be false to my most sacred convictions at what is the most important moment of my life."
"And yet you require this of me?"
"A woman's convictions, Ernestine, are always dependent upon her feelings in such matters. And where feeling is concerned, the stronger must always conquer the weaker. Hitherto you have been moved only by the wrongs of your sex,--they are all that you have known anything of. When you love, you will learn to know its joys, and be all the more ready to resign your vain championship for your husband's sake."
"Do you think so?" asked Ernestine with unaccustomed irony.
"I hope so. It is our only chance for happiness. I am true to you, and tell you beforehand what I look for from you. I will not influence your decision by flattery or false acquiescence. It must be formed in full view of the duties it imposes upon you, or it will be worthless. You may think this a rude fashion to be wooed in, and perhaps you are right. But I will not win my wife by those arts which woman's vanity has made such powerful aids to the lover. I will not owe my wife to a weakness,--and vanity certainly is a weakness. Your love for me must be all strength. I would have you great indeed when you give yourself to me,--and when is a woman greater than when she conquers her pride and herself for love's sake? In her self-conquest she accomplishes what heroes, who have subdued nations, have found too hard a task, for it requires the greatest human effort. It is true, the world will not shout applause,--deeds truly great often shun the eyes of the multitude: in the renunciation of all acknowledgment there is a joy known only to a few. Within quiet convent walls, past which the stream of human life flows heedlessly, many a victory over self has been attained that was never rewarded by a single earthly laurel. What awaits the end of the painful contest? The grave! But I ask of you, Ernestine, far less of sacrifice, and surely there is a reward to reap in bestowing perfect happiness upon one who loves you. Do you hesitate? Is the struggle not ended? Can your royal soul not cast aside the self-imposed chains of false ambition? Oh, Ernestine, do not let me implore you further; say only one word,--to whom will you belong,--to your uncle, or to me?"
"To myself, for no human being can belong to any other!" And her look at Johannes was almost one of aversion. "Yes, now I see that you are your mother's' son. I see her stern features, I hear her voice of remonstrance, and I see myself between you,--a creature without will,--no longer capable of independent thought or feeling, still less of rendering any service to the world. Am I to cast aside like a garment what has been the guiding hope of my life,--my dream by night and day,--and go to your mother begging for forgiveness and indulgence, excusing myself like a child, and promising future improvement, that I may humbly receive from her cold lips the kiss of condescending pardon? Again and again, No! What right has your mother to regard me as a criminal, and to attempt to improve me? Whom have I injured? What law of propriety have I infringed, that she should treat me like some noxious thing in the world? I have lived in calm retirement, asking for no happiness but that of labour. Why should she insist upon thrusting another kind of happiness upon me, and blame me for not considering it as such? Did I seek her out? Was it not against my will, and only in accordance with your earnest entreaties, that I accompanied you to her house? Why should she drive me from it like an intruder, and impose upon me conditions of a return that I did not desire? Oh, if you, noble and true as I once thought you, had loved me, not as you thought I ought to be, but as I am, with all my faults and eccentricities, I would have striven for your sake to become the most perfect woman in the world. And if you had said to me, 'Be my companion,--I will help you to vindicate the honour of your sex, whatever is sacred to you shall be so to me also,'--if you had thus acknowledged my individuality, and had intrusted your happiness, your honour, to my keeping, without other warranty than the dictates of your own heart, I would have bowed in reverence to a love so powerful,--I would gladly have sacrificed my freedom to you,--to please you, I would have performed the hardest task of all--humiliated myself before your haughty mother! But when you come to me thus,--only her echo,--when you make it the foundation of our happiness that I should be what she chooses, and try to assure yourself at the outset that I will submit to all your requirements, that you may run no risk from such a self-willed creature,--all this shows me that she has separated us utterly. I have lost you, and all that you have given me is the knowledge that I have no place in this world, and that I am miserable!"
Johannes stood pale and mute before her, but his pure conscience shone in his steady eyes. Ernestine did not venture to look at him. With trembling hands she plucked to pieces a twig that she had just broken from a bush at her side.
"After this we can be nothing more to each other," he began; and it seemed as if every word fell from his lips into her heart like molten lead. He took breath, as if after some violent physical exertion, and then continued: "I do not answer the accusations with which you have overwhelmed my mother and myself. They grieve me for your sake. They are unworthy of your nobler self. I have treated you as I was compelled to do by my sense of honour. I have told you what was, according to my profoundest convictions, indispensable to the happiness of marriage. That you refuse,--that you can refuse me the sacrifice I ask of you,--proves to me that you do not love me. This is what separates us. And I pray you to remember that, as I sacredly believe, it is the duty of a man to convince himself that the woman whom he seeks to marry is fitted to be the mother of his children; and your heart is not yet open to the wide, self-forgetting affection that can alone suffice to enable a woman to undertake the hard duties of a wife and mother. Will it ever be thus open? Who can tell? Another may one day reap in joy what I have sown in pain. I do not reproach you,--how could I?" He laid his hand upon her head, his eyes were for one moment suffused. As he looked at her, grief had the mastery, and he was silent. She was crushed beneath his gaze, her artificial composure forsook her, a cry escaped her lips. She now first began to perceive what she had done, and her heart shrunk from the burden that she had laid upon it, although she did not as yet dream of its weight.
Johannes gently smoothed her hair from her brow. Her agitation restored his self-control.
"You are kind, Ernestine,--you see how you have hurt me, and you are sorry for me. It is the way with women. This little weakness does you honour in my eyes. I pray you be composed. I am quite calm again." He would have withdrawn his hand, but she held it fast and looked up at him with those eyes of sad entreaty that had worked such magic upon him when she was a child.