"If not, you would only be miserable."
The tone in which the words were uttered caused Grete to look up suddenly in her companion's face. She saw nothing there but the inwardly-reflecting eyes, the beautiful, pale, dark complexion, and the placid sweetness of the unkissed lips.
"In England, Grete, I am an actress. They say that an actress must never reflect, that she lives for immediate gratification, that she educates impulses, and that she cannot pause, and regard her position, and criticise herself. If I cease to feel any pleasure in immediate gratifications, if I feel ill at ease and dissatisfied with myself, and fancy that the stage would no longer give me any pleasure—must I cease to be an actress?"
"Is mademoiselle in earnest?"
Grete Halm could not believe that her companion was an actress. Had she ever seen, even in Carlsruhe itself, an actress with such a noble air, with such a face, and such a manner?
"I am in earnest, Grete. I have been an actress all my life; I feel as if I were one no longer."
"What has changed you, mademoiselle, may I be permitted to ask?"
"I do not know myself, Grete. But I have turned an old woman since I came to the Black Forest; and I shall go back to England with a sort of fear, as if I had never been there before."
Since she came to the Black Forest. For a moment a suspicion crossed Grete's mind that she must be miserable through loving some one; but so completely had she been imbued with the idea of her companion being some mysteriously beautiful and noble creature, who could not be moved by the meaner loves and thoughts of a girl like herself, that she at once dismissed the supposition. Perhaps, she thought, the shock of severely injuring her friend still affected her, and had induced a temporary despondency. Grete therefore resolved, in her direct way, to be as amusing as possible; and she never tired of directing her companion's attention to the beautiful and wonderful things they saw on their way—the scarlet grasshoppers which rattled their wings among the warm grass, the brilliantly-coloured beetles, the picturesque crucifixes by the wayside, or the simultaneous splash of a lot of tiny fish among the reeds as some savage pike made a rush at them from the deeper water.
In process of time they left the soft blue breadth of the lake behind them, and found themselves in the valley leading up to the Feldberg. Grete struck an independent zigzag course up the hill's side, clambering up rocky slopes, cutting through patches of forest, and so on, until they found themselves on the high mountain-road loading to their destination. Nothing was to be seen of the carriage; and so they went on alone, into the silence of the tall pines, while the valley beneath them gradually grew wider, and the horizon beyond grew more and more distant. Now they were really in the Black Forest of the old romances—not the low-lying districts, where the trees are of modern growth, but up in the rocky wilderness, where the magnificent trunks were encrusted and coated with lichens of immemorial age—where the spongy yellow-green moss, here and there of a dull crimson, would let a man sink to the waist—where the wild profusion of underwood was rank and strong with the heat of the sun and the moisture of innumerable streams trickling down their rocky channels in the hillside—where the yellow light, falling between the splendid stems of the trees, glimmered away down the narrow avenues, and seemed to conjure up strange forms and faces out of the still brushwood and the fantastic grey lichens which hung everywhere around. Several times a cock capercailzie, with two or three hens under his protection, would rise with a prodigious noise and disappear in the green darkness overhead; occasionally a mountain-hare flew past; and Grete, with an inherited interest, pointed out to her friend the tiny footmarks of the deer on the sand of the rough and winding road.