A Noble Name; or, Dönninghausen. Claire von Glümer
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future," he rejoined. "You know I could not make any engagements last summer, – I am not yet well. It seems to me very undesirable to burden ourselves with unnecessary care."
"And it seems to me undesirable, sordid, degrading, to be always counting the cost," exclaimed Helena. "Without freedom of action the artist cannot exist."
"It is that very freedom which I wish to secure," Roderich said gravely. "At your urgent entreaty, and by Commerzienrath Schmidt's advice, I speculated with our entire fortune, as you know, and lost it. Therefore we must begin afresh, and economize. Therefore, dear Helena, no more of these costly entertainments."
She shrugged her shoulders impatiently. "Dear Roderich," she said, "to-night's festival is my affair; it is my birthday present to you – "
"Child, you cannot count the cost," he interrupted her; "your salary scarcely suffices to provide your wardrobe."
"'Tis little enough!" said Helena. "You might long ago have used your influence to procure me a better position. Instead of which, you always take sides with the Kronberg against me."
"No, I do not," he replied. "I wrote to the manager only yesterday that I would renew my present engagement with him only upon condition that the Kronberg were not allowed to usurp any of your parts."
Helena threw her arms around him. "Oh, you darling, did you really?" she cried in glee. "You do not know how you delight me. They wanted to persuade me that you cared for the Kronberg."
"Helena!" he said reproachfully. "Since I have known you there has been but one woman for me in the world."
His words hurt Johanna; she tried to release herself, that she might leave the room, but Lisbeth in her sleep held her fast.
Helena had taken her husband's arm and paced the room to and fro with him. She had doffed her lace overdress, and looked wonderfully lovely in the close-fitting blue silk with bare neck and arms. "Why do you always find fault with me, you bad fellow?" she said, looking up at him with an exultant smile. "I live only for you – to fulfil your wishes. I have economized; I have even dismissed my own maid, contenting myself with Johanna's services."
"She really seems fit for little else," he replied. "How miserably she acquitted herself in her small part! You ought not to have allowed her to take it."
"What could I do?" Helena asked. "She insisted upon making the attempt, and I as her step-mother – "
"Poor Johanna!" Roderich interrupted her; "as devoid of talent as her mother, and as ugly as myself!"
"Oh, Roderich, you! The most glorious Egmont, – the most enchanting Leicester!"
"But a very ugly man!" he said, with the brilliant smile that was all his own, and that really made his plain face handsome. "What you admire comes from within; there seems to be some kind of a flame there that flickers interestingly. But this is denied to poor Johanna. And then – you must see that the Graces have denied her their gifts; the greatest misfortune for a woman. You have managed that they should bestow them all upon your little daughter."
He kissed her hand. Johanna could endure it no longer; by a hasty effort she released herself from her sleeping sister's arm, and stepped noiselessly out of the room into the corridor, at the end of which was her own chamber.
She groped her way to the arm-chair beside the window, sank into it, and gazed into the darkness without. How gay and hopeful she had been while dressing in this room a few short hours before, and how forlorn and discouraged she had now returned to it! 'As devoid of talent as her mother, and as ugly as myself,' had been the words spoken by a voice whose utterances she believed implicitly; and then again, 'the Graces have denied her their gifts; the greatest misfortune for a woman.' Bitterness, such as she had never before known, possessed her. What had she done to be thus disinherited from the beginning, deprived of all claim to love and happiness?
Suddenly a joyous thrill drove the blood to her heart. It was not so, she was not disinherited. Little more than twenty-four hours had passed since the most truthful of men had said to her in effect, 'You were my ideal; ugly and awkward as you are, I saw in you the embodiment of all loveliness.' If he saw it in her no longer, it was because of a mistake, – a misunderstanding. She would prove to him that she had lost nothing of value, that she was still worthy the love of former days.
Why should she do this? She did not love Ludwig. No, no, she did not love him. Only in contrast with her father's cruel verdict did she find pleasure in his words of yesterday, and the impetuous throbbing of her heart was but the result of the various emotions that had besieged it during the past few hours.
If she only had not undergone that one experience! To stand there and not be mistress of her motions; to will to speak, and not be able to give to her words the meaning she desired; to be stared at by all those unsympathetic eyes, to be conscious of exciting contemptuous pity. 'Devoid of talent as her mother, and ugly as myself,' rang in her ears again.
She would rid herself of this torment. And she arose, lit a candle, and then first perceived a letter lying upon her table.
"From Ludwig," she thought; and she was right; his large clear handwriting stared at her from the envelope, and covered three sides of a sheet of paper which enclosed several others. Johanna seated herself at the table and read:
"Dear Johanna, – The enclosed letter, which my mother found among the papers left her by your mother, was sent to me by the former in her last illness. She wrote to me telling me to do with it what seemed best to me; she had never been able to bring herself to disturb your happiness in your reunion with your father after so many years.
"I might assert that the same consideration has hitherto prevented me from imparting to you the wishes of your dying mother, but I will be as frank with you as I am with myself. I withheld the letter because I hoped even without its aid to be able to withdraw you from surroundings unworthy of you. I thought that a word from me would suffice to restore you to the home that was your own so long. I hesitated – made cowardly and selfish as we always are by the desires of our hearts – to erect any barrier between you, a grandchild of the Dönninghausens, and your old friends.
"But now I have convinced myself that the old friends are of no avail to counteract new and unworthy influences; therefore let a voice from the grave speak to you.
"If you should heed it, and have any need either of my pen or of my personal aid, pray command me. I shall be at my father's, where I have certain scientific work to do, throughout the coming winter.
"Twice to-day I have been to your door, but each time I turned away. What could it avail me to see you again where you are? Farewell, and let me hear from you soon.
"L. W."
To Johanna the tone of this letter seemed icy cold. Experience is needed to detect intensity of emotion beneath exterior and perhaps hardly-won composure. With a trembling hand she opened her mother's letter. What could she, gentle and loving as she had always been, require of her daughter so hard that her foster-mother had been unwilling to impart it to her? Johanna gazed at the delicate handwriting, its uncertain characters betraying the mortal weariness that had possessed the writer. The touching figure of her dying mother rose vividly in her memory, and with increasing emotion she read what follows, – in all of which she distinctly felt the quickened feverish throb of the poor invalid's heart.
"Lindenbad, August 19, 1864.
"My dear Louise, – A few hours ago you left me, and in a few hours you will come again, faithful friend that you are, to ask how I have passed the night. Ah, Louise! it begins so distressingly, with such throbbing pulses and wandering thoughts, that I would flee from myself to you as to some shrine of the Madonna.
"If I was at first inclined to regard as a piece of good luck the chance which brought me an old school-mate in the wife of the physician of this place, I soon learned to bless the Providence which conducted me hither. Dear, kind friend! How you have cheered and encouraged me through these weary days of sickness and suffering! They would have been cheerless without you.
"Cheerless in every respect, dear Louise; for I hardly need to tell you that my soul suffers more than my failing body, because it does not share the weary longing of the latter for death.