Part 14 (1/2)
”What is this?” said Oldenburg, seizing his head with both his hands.
”Am I dreaming? Is this my head? Are these my hands? Am I Oldenburg?
Are you Melitta? You, who are shedding tears, because I, Oldenburg, do not understand you, or will not understand you?”
”You shall understand me,” said Melitta, drying her tears, with an impetuosity very unusual in her. ”You have seen me so often weak and irresolute in our intercourse, that you do not think me any longer capable of forming a resolution. And yet I have the strength to do so; and that I have it, I owe to you, Adalbert. During the sickness of my child you have spoken to me, and I have not closed my heart to your voice. I have heard it very distinctly during the long, anxious night hours which I spent watching and weeping by the bedside of my child.
Then I have asked my child's pardon with silent, burning tears, that I could ever forget being a mother. Then I have vowed to myself that I would never, never forget it again. Then I have----”
She was silent; burning shame flooded her cheeks with deep glowing blushes; but she made a great effort and said,
”Then I have abjured a pa.s.sion which humiliates me in my own eyes, in my child's eyes, and, Adalbert, in yours.”
”Stop, Melitta! stop!” cried Oldenburg, rising suddenly. ”You are beside yourself! You are not alone! You are in the presence of another person--of a man who loves you, Melitta. He does not want to hear what you ought to say to no one but to yourself.”
”Let me finish, Adalbert! I trust in your goodness, as I trust in your strength. I have not told you all yet; not even all the vows I have made by the bedside of my sick child. I have often thought of your child, then, and that a most terrible fate has robbed you of the love of your child as well as of the love of her whom you love. And then I vowed that, if I cannot make you as happy as you deserve to be; if much, far too much, has happened which parts you and me forever; I can yet help you bear your fate, as far as in me lies. I will try to reconcile you to life, and live for you as far as I am able.”
Melitta had, while she said these words, risen from the sofa. She stood before him with deep-red cheeks and beaming eyes.
Oldenburg had heard her with breathless excitement, with an emotion which grew stronger and deeper with every word. His eyes flashed, his bosom heaved, he pressed his hands upon his heart, which felt as if it would burst with unspeakable bliss.
When Melitta's last word had dropped from her lips he approached her, knelt down before her, and said, with a voice deep and firm, like the sound of an iron s.h.i.+eld,
”And now hear my vow, Melitta! As surely as I have loved you ever since I can think, as surely as the night of my life has been lighted up but by a single star, as surely as I have wandered about restlessly and aimlessly in the vast desert of life, only because I despaired that that star could ever s.h.i.+ne down upon me benignly--so surely will I, from this moment, strive to attain the highest aim of man with all the power I may possess. I will lay aside all little weaknesses and all my cowardice; I will try to make up for the time which I have lost in inactivity. And as sure as my heart is at this moment overflowing with a happiness which words cannot describe, so surely will I seek neither rest nor repose till you love me as I love you--till you are mine. Do you near, Melitta--till you are my wife!”
He had risen, too.
”And now, Melitta,” he cried, and his words sounded like shouts of joy, ”farewell! I cannot bear it any longer under this roof; the whole, wide world has become too narrow for me. Farewell! farewell! till we meet again!”
He embraced Melitta impetuously, and kissed her on her brow. Then he hastily left the room.
Melitta had remained standing in the middle of the room, as if she were petrified. She had not had the strength to keep Oldenburg back, nor to return his farewell. She placed her hand upon her beating temples.
”What have I done? What have I said?” she asked herself. And the voice of her heart answered: ”Nothing you need be ashamed of, before yourself or before your child.”
She hastened into the adjoining room. She bent over the sleeping boy; she kissed him amid burning tears.
Then she heard the rolling of a carriage, which rapidly drove away from the door of the hotel.
”That is he!” she said, listening; and then, pressing her face in the cus.h.i.+ons, ”Farewell! farewell! till we meet again!”
CHAPTER X.
While this interview between Melitta and Oldenburg was taking place at the Kurhaus, and, as by the blow of a charmed wand, the barriers fell which had seemed to be destined to part two good hearts forever, there had been sitting in the room on the right hand--which ”was occupied by a traveller who would surely not stay beyond the next morning”--this very traveller quite near the door which led from one room to the other, supporting his feverish head with his hands, and suffering in his lacerated heart unspeakable anguish.
Oswald had returned, on his way from the asylum, along the river, almost as in a dream; for when he left Berger at the gate of the inst.i.tution, the parting with him and the last terrible words of the unfortunate man had quite overwhelmed him, and kept him from every effort of thinking calmly.
His brains and his heart were a perfect chaos, filled with all that he had heard and seen since his arrival in Fichtenau on the preceding evening--with all the impressions which he had so suddenly received, all the thoughts that had been stirred up, all the pa.s.sions that had been unchained. He had a dim presentiment that such a state of mind must in the end lead to insanity, if it were not already itself a kind of insanity.
Ought he not to turn back and knock at the gate behind which Berger had disappeared? Was not that house, with its high prison-walls, the best refuge for hearts that were as weary of the world as his was? Or still better, ought he not to throw himself over the railing into the river below, where it rushed, deep and silent, between the steep, high banks, gliding noiselessly along like a serpent? Would he not be sure thus to cool his heated brow forever, and to silence the hammering pulsations in his temples for all eternity? How could he hope ever to find an issue into rosy light from a labyrinth in which so n.o.ble, so lofty a mind as Berger's had lost its way irretrievably? Was not Berger far superior to him in strength of mind, as well as in n.o.bility of soul?
And yet, and yet--”that I may fully measure the depth of this wretchedness, that I may touch with my own hands the incredible,” the poor man had said, when he fell into the arms of the rope-dancer. Was that, then, the last conclusion of wisdom? The high-minded idealist saw himself excelled by the rude slave of sensuality in courage of life and joyousness of life! The pupil of Plato acknowledged a drunken clown as his master! The man who, like the youth of Sas, had striven all his life only after truth, fraternized with a coa.r.s.e story-teller, a charlatan, who defied all rules, of probability even, and lived merrily and cheerfully on the credulity of others, as the swallow lives on midges. As old Lear in the tempestuous night on the heath tears the royal mantle from his shoulders, so as to have no advantage over poor Tom, the ”poor bare-backed animal, whose belly cries for two red herrings,” so Berger also had laid aside the philosopher's cloak, that did not warm him half as well as the rope-dancer's bare vulgarity.