The Eichhofs Part 31

Bernhard stood beside her, profoundly agitated. Perfect silence reigned in the room, which was broken at last by the physician's entreaty to Thea to remember how much she needed care, and how overwrought she was.

She shook her head, and begged to be left alone with the child.

"It is best to let her have her way," the doctor said.

Bernhard once more stooped over her. "Thea!" he whispered. She waved him off, and he left the room silently with the others. He saw that she was determined to allow him no share in her grief. "And yet this grief is the only, the last bond between us," he thought.

Through all these days Thea was so touching and yet so dignified in her sorrow, that Bernhard knew, as he had never known before, how truly she, and she alone, was the only woman whom he could ever love. In spite of her suffering she found time to attend to his lightest wish.

He felt himself surrounded by her love, and yet he met with the same gentle but firm repulse whenever he sought to approach her. His sorrow for his child was scarcely more keen than his sorrow for the loss of his wife. For that he had lost her was now clearer to him than ever; and yet, strangely enough, he doubted more strongly every day whether the cause of this loss was what he had hitherto supposed it to be. When he saw her performing her duties so quietly, bearing her pain so proudly and yet with such true womanliness, it seemed to him impossible that she could ever have been other than proud and womanly. He began to scrutinize himself and his conduct towards her, and to have doubts whether the fault were not, after all, his own. But then he thought of Lothar's death, of her refusal to answer his question, and of the total change in her manner towards him from that time. Would she have agreed to the letter he had written her then, if she were not guilty? Would she not have eagerly sought an explanation with him had she been innocent, instead of mutely avoiding it as she had done?

This was the state of affairs when, a few days after the child's funeral, Thea entered his room. Since Lothar's death she had never done so, and Bernhard, therefore, received her with surprise, and almost with alarm; for he instantly saw by her face that the coming hour would be decisive for them both. She seated herself in the armchair he placed for her, and looked down at her hands, which were clasped in her lap.

There was no ring upon them.

It went to Bernhard's heart to observe that she had laid aside her betrothal-ring, and yet he knew that so it must be.

He had not the courage to begin the conversation, and, after a pause, she said, in a low tone, "I am come to remind you of that letter,--of the letter in which you expressed your views of our relation to each other. Our child is dead----" Her voice was choked for an instant, but she went on: "There is nothing now to unite us. I propose going to Schonthal to-morrow."

He sat opposite her, his head leaning on his hand. "Can you not stay, then?" he asked, gently.

She rose proudly, her self-possession entirely recovered. "No," she cried, "I will not be endured out of pity!"

Bernhard rose in his turn, and looked her full in the face. "Pity?" he repeated. "What do you mean, Thea?"

"I mean that you are sorry for me, that you think it will be hard for me to leave the place where my child lies in his grave, the house in which he was born. But I have borne heavier griefs, and I can bear that too; and, although I know that your happiness does not depend alone upon _your_ freedom, I am too proud to remain where I am only endured!"

He stared at her as if she were some phantom. "For G.o.d's sake, Thea, tell me what you mean," he cried.

The expression of his face bewildered her. She paused again for a moment.

Then he took her hand, and said, in a voice vibrating with emotion, "This is perhaps the last time that we shall stand thus face to face,--our last conversation. Thea, will you not answer truly and frankly one question?"

"I have always been true," she replied, gazing past him as into s.p.a.ce.

"Tell me, then, do you believe the cause that separates us to exist in me? Do you believe that I desire our separation? and is there no reason _known only to yourself_, no memory in _your_ soul, to keep us asunder?"

She covered her eyes with her hand, as if dazzled by a sudden light. A slight tremor pa.s.sed through her frame, and a delicate flush coloured the pale, resigned face. Bernhard gazed at her in breathless eagerness; but, even before she spoke, he was overpowered by the conviction that this woman could not be false; that he had been the victim of an illusion.

"I have no such memory," said Thea, helplessly dropping her clasped hands before her. "Nothing in this world except yourself could ever separate me from you. I thought----"

Before she could utter another word she was clasped in his arms. "Thea!

my own Thea! what useless misery we have caused each other!"

She extricated herself in utter bewilderment from his embrace.

"And do you still love me, then?" she asked.

"More deeply and truly than on our marriage-day," he said, fervently.

"And Julutta Wronsky----"

"Ah, dearest child, let me tell you all. I will confess everything to you,--all the doubts that have so tortured me."

She looked at him in amazement. "Doubts?" she repeated.

"Yes, my darling; foolish doubts. I know them to be so now, but they were terrible. Do you remember refusing me any explanation with regard to Lothar? Then I----"

"Ah, poor Lothar! I, too, have something to tell you, Bernhard."

She nestled close to him, and he told her of his adventures with Julutta Wronsky. He did not even suppress the account of the fleeting emotion of that moment when he thought he loved her; he told her all; and she listened to him, without doubt, without reproach, with the entire confidence of a woman who loves.

"We have both been blind," she said; "but only when we doubted of each other's love did we learn how valueless life was to us without it. Oh, Bernhard, how wretched we have been!"

"And how blest we are once more,--each living in the other's heart!"

"Oh, why is our child not with us?" Thea cried.

He kissed the tears from her eyes. "He has been our guardian angel, my darling," he said. "He has reunited us; for who can say how long we should have been estranged from each other without this sorrow?"

Late in the afternoon of this day Thea carried a bunch of white roses to the little chapel; Bernhard was with her, and as they entered he took one of the fragrant rosebuds from her hand and laid it on Lothar's coffin.

"_Requiescat in pace_," he whispered softly.

Hand in hand they stood before their child's coffin, one in their sorrow, one in their love. The last rays of the setting sun streamed through the stained gla.s.s of the window and played upon the wreaths and palm branches, and when Bernhard and Thea left the chapel, forest and field lay before them bathed in the red gold of sunset, and they walked hand in hand through the nodding gra.s.ses and bright flowers of the little grave-yard towards a new life in the old home.

CONCLUSION.

Years have flown by. A stock company has taken in hand the railway in which Bernhard was so much interested, and there is a station at R----, where the express-train from Warschau is just arriving.

A man with a dark sunburned face is leaning out of a coupe window, looking eagerly across the platform towards the town and the poplar avenue leading to Eichhof. Then he scans those who are leaving and those who are entering the train, and a shadow of melancholy clouds his brow.

"Strangers, all strangers!" he murmurs. "How changed it is! The same place, and yet so different; and no one here to recognize me."

Just then a gentleman with a full gray beard came hurriedly from the waiting-room. The signal for departure sounded, and the porter opened the coupe door in great haste, and the gray-bearded individual took his seat beside our traveller. The two men scanned each other for an instant, and then he of the sunburned face said, "If I am not mistaken, chance has led two old acquaintances into the same railway-carriage.

Are you not Herr Superintendent Bergmann from Eichhof?"

"Most certainly; and I think I call to mind----"

"Ah!" laughed the stranger, "I see you do not know who I am. The sun on the Bulgarian battlefields has tanned me past recognition. Do you not remember Lieutenant Werner, Lothar Eichhof's comrade?"

"Ah! Lieutenant Werner, forgive me. But you are Colonel Werner now, I hear, with a breast covered with orders. The newspapers have kept us advised with regard to you. How much my Count will be interested to hear of this meeting! We have all rejoiced in your advancement."

Werner shook his head. "Advancements are for the most part the work of chance," he said; "but, in spite of some terrible experiences, these last years have been the most interesting of my life. I could write books, let me tell you; indeed, I will not promise not to write them.

But let us leave the Turks and Russians, of whom I have latterly seen quite enough, and let me hear something of my old friends and acquaintances. First, how goes everything at Eichhof?"