"Do not utterly forsake me!" she whispered in half-stifled accents.
"No, as truly as I trust my God will not forsake me, I will not forsake you. I will not shun you like a coward, who, to make renunciation easy and to learn forgetfulness, turns his back upon the good he cannot attain. You need a friend who can protect you, placed as you are with regard to your uncle and the world. This friend I will be to you, until you find a worthier. Do not fear that you will hear another word of love, or of regret. I will conquer my grief alone. My one care shall be for your happiness. Farewell, and when you have need of me send for me." He pressed her hands once more, and turned away without another word.
Ernestine looked after him as he receded from her gaze. She looked and looked until he turned a corner and vanished. Then she sank on her knees and cried in an outburst of anguish, "Have I really had the strength to do this?"
She must have remained thus some time beneath the shade of the trees, when the sound of carriage-wheels approaching startled her to consciousness. It was her uncle. He stopped the vehicle and descended from it.
"You can take out the horses," he said to the coachman. "I shall not drive to town." The man turned and drove home again.
Leuthold stood mute before Ernestine, piercing her soul with his penetrating glance. He had learned from Frau Willmers everything that had occurred the day before, but nothing of the intercourse that had previously taken place between Ernestine and Johannes. Scarcely a week had passed, and had his ward already escaped him--fled with an utter stranger? The thing was impossible. Ernestine was no coward,--a crowd of drunken peasants could never have driven the shy girl into the arms of the first stranger whom she met. She must have previously known her magnanimous champion. He interrogated the other servants, but they one and all hated him and were devoted to Frau Willmers. They all declared their entire ignorance,--"the Fräulein must have met the gentleman at the school-house,--he was often there."
This was enough to prove to Leuthold that the ground was unsteady beneath his feet, and for a moment he succumbed under the weight of this new anxiety. Was it possible to guard a woman more strictly, to seclude her more utterly, than he had guarded and secluded Ernestine? And yet--yet in this heart, that he thought long since dead, impulses were strong that would seek and find expression in spite of every precaution that he might take. And all this at a moment when he was battling for life and death with a peril which required younger and more unbroken energies than his own!
It was too much; a presentiment seized him that fate had decreed his ruin. But he collected himself once more, and took counsel with himself, as was his custom in all emergencies. As we turn to Heaven when all around us seems dark, so he turned in his direst need to his own understanding and will, that had hitherto sufficed him.
Allowing himself but brief refreshment after all his anxiety and alarm, he ordered the carriage and set out for town to bring home his ward. But, to his great surprise and delight, he found her thus near home, evidently weary and disconsolate.
"Aha, like the mermaid in your beloved fable, you have been trying your fortunes among mankind, away from your cool, clear, native element," he said to himself with a smile. "They liked you well, I doubt not, at first sight, but you have not gained much, for they soon discovered that you were half fish and not fit to live with them!"