Withered Leaves Volume Ii Part 5

"You would conceal it from me--he is your enemy! Therefore you were so afraid, when you saw him--therefore he grew so pale at sight of you!

Has he done anything to injure you; has he offended you deeply? Oh, he shall come and beg for forgiveness, upon his knees he shall lie before you; I promise it! So much power my wishes still possess over him--oh, yes, he loves me still; how could his love have vanished in one night!

I will tell him that whosoever has offended my mother has no right to my love, that he must first win it by atonement and her pardon. I am still his little forest-fairy; he is still within my magic spell; when my little flower bells ring, let him struggle as he may, he must obey me! But when he comes and renounces his enmity and entreats you for pardon, little mother, then you will grant it him, will you not, perfectly, entirely, without any remains of the old ill-feeling?"

"You are dreaming," said Frau Salden, while she stared with a confused gaze at her daughter's countenance, and stroked her hair with a loving hand.

"You doubt that I still retain my power over him? Oh, I may look very ugly today, quite spoiled with tears; I am not always so, little mother, he knows that I have my good days, too. He thought me good-looking yonder upon the weeping willow-hill! Oh, heavens! The weeping willows bent down over our young love whispering misfortune, but you will talk to one another, of course! Everything will yet turn out well! Oh, those days were so beautiful, so ethereally beautiful!

Have mercy, my mother! If it costs you one word to bring them back again, then speak that word; even if it be hard for you. I may acknowledge that great happiness for me depends upon it; control your anger!"

Frau Salden looked at her child with intense emotion.

"It is not that--if it only were so! Nothing would be too hard for me--no word, no deed--if I could found your happiness by them! But that power is not given to me; therefore we are both unhappy! But now go to sleep, my Eva! I am well; I will get up; but you have not closed an eye! How pale you look--where are the roses which yesterday bloomed so freshly in your cheeks? Go to sleep, only for a few hours--it will bring peace, rest, and courage! Who could endure life without sleep? It would be an uninterrupted agony; all pictures would score their burning impress in our brains. Sleep shrouds them beneath the softening veil, and we can confound them with our dreams."

"No, mother! that I can never do! If it were all but a dream my soul would still bleed to death from it."

Frau Salden had risen from her bed; she felt really better; only the internal conflict still remained imprinted in her features.

With unenvious pleasure, Eva contemplated her mother, as she sat before the mirror, in order to arrange her hair flowing down abundantly; she thought herself less beautiful, less bountifully endowed by Nature, than was the mother over whom years had pa.s.sed tracelessly away; could she compete with that splendid figure, with that n.o.bility, those decided movements, that charm of her fully-developed form?

She could not help it; she must fold her mother to her heart with words of glowing flattery.

Frau Salden struggled gently against the love of a child, for whom she had just prepared the greatest anguish of its life.

"Go to sleep, Eva," repeated she, with motherly anxiety.

"Sleep--it would be best! I cannot conceive that I could look with waking eyes at the people before whom I stood yesterday in such utter abas.e.m.e.nt. It would be impossible for me to show myself here to the gaping crowd. I must away, away from here; but I cannot part from you with this enigma unsolved. Mother! I implore you, give me certainty--I have courage to bear all."

"And you do not ask if I have courage to confess all?"

"Mother!" cried Eva, doubting and questioning, with the terror of presentiment.

"If it were so easy to lift the veil, should I not have raised it long since? If any happiness, any comfort could arise from it, should I hesitate with such a disclosure?"

"I would have the truth, mother--the truth! In positive certainty I shall recover my strength of mind, which is paralysed in this gnawing doubt."

Frau Salden rose from her toilet; the morning sun shone straight upon her face, she covered it with her hands; then she turned round, but a burning colour rested upon her features, and an internal tremor shook her form as if with ague.

"I belong to that community which was scattered by the law of the country; one of the rules of that sect demands full confession of our sins, by thought, word, or deed! It was often hard for us to make this confession before the Saints and Pure ones, and not to conceal aught of that which stirred our inmost souls; often have I stood there hesitating and seeking to veil that which I dared not confess, until the implacable word compelled me to acknowledge the whole truth without any fraudulent disguise; yet, what was that confession compared with the one of to-day--compared with the one by which the mother must ruin her daughter's happiness?"

"With clasped hands Eva looked imploringly at her mother.

"Well, then, bury your head in my lap; do not look at me; believe that it is the Angel of Judgment who speaks, who holds the rattling scales high above your head."

Eva knelt down before her mother, and leaned her head in her mother's lap.

"I do not hate Herr von Blanden--never have hated him--but I have loved him."

Noiselessly Eva slid down at her mother's feet. Only after some little time she recovered her senses in her parent's arms.

"I have loved him," repeated the mother, "and that is worse, far worse!"

"And you love him still?" asked Eva, "and you are angry with me that I would rob you of him? but he--how could he--"

"Listen to me, my child! We were both members of a devout community, misjudged by the world; this brought us closer together. A decision in council of the Superiors destined me for his spiritual bride!"

"Spiritual bride!--oh, my G.o.d!"

"That in our circle is deemed a bond, which is bound for all eternity!"

"And is not every bride a spiritual one, and every bond united for everlasting endurance?"

"The secret understanding of such matters is only revealed to the elect! But the mutual delights of devotion, the strengthening of the Divine Will in us, with the increasing danger of probation, all these exercises did not find us so strong as the faith and the prayers of the community required! Earthly affection took possession of our hearts. I offered weak resistance to his tempestuous pa.s.sion. Let the dreadful word suffice you--I loved him."

Eva suppressed a loud cry, with lips firmly pressed together, and buried her head deeper in the folds of the dress.

"I was doubly guilty, because the holy work had led us to d.a.m.nation.

The penance inflicted for such impiety was lighter than I feared, because the superior leader of our community, blessed with especial powers of enlightenment, undertook to sanctify me, and I could soon stand purified from that sin. Now only the heavy punishment comes upon me, crus.h.i.+ngly, annihilatingly. Too mild was the work of that atonement. Heaven has rejected it. I feel it, and now it dooms me to the full weight of its wrath. In deepest degradation I must humble myself before my own daughter, in order to destroy the happiness of whose life the spectre hand of that unholy, blissful hour is stretched forth from out the past. Forgive me, my beloved child!"

Eva rose pale, dissolved in tears, and put out her hand, as if in repudiation.

"I have nothing to forgive you, mother! I do not exalt myself so impiously as to wish to sit in judgment upon you. I could not but love you even unto death.--and you are not guilty! Oh, no--that you are not!"

"Guilty towards you," said Frau Salden, wringing her hands.

"None know what the future may bring," replied Eva; "it cannot be foretold. Human destiny is like a fleeting cloud: now it gleams in the full light of the sun at its mid-day height, or in the varying colours of its declining hour; then it flows down in tears. Many die in the bloom of youth; death is a doom; there is a death, too, for the heart.

It comes, one knows not whence. It is not our fault. Mother, be calm!

We have the same eyes, the same heart; must we not also have the same love?"

Eva looked out of the window, unwonted sublimity lay in her demeanour.

"Look; how the waves roll, and break upon the sh.o.r.e! Each one bears the rays of the same sun within it; now they spring exultingly in whirling foam, then die away upon the desolate strand! Mother, we are both wretched!"

And she hastened back and clasped Frau Salden to her heart, who gazed in fear at her daughter's excited manner.

"But no!" cried Eva suddenly, "what did I say of you? It is quite different for you, quite different. A question has long been hovering upon my lips; why, then, did you not become man and wife, if you loved one another? I must ask, I must; I can no longer endure the obscurity which o'ershadows everything! Life must be transparent for me, transparent--even if, like gla.s.s, it should break within my hands."

Frau Salden pressed her hand upon her heart; "We parted, he no longer shared my faith! In that faith only I could live!"

"Oh, mother, you will, you shall still be happy!"

"I cannot, now! Too much has happened since I submitted to the decree of sanctification, that must have appeared to him like doing wrong. He measures with a worldly measure--therefore, I am not worthy of him!"

"I will away to him, will entreat him, if still a particle of love for me--"

"Stay, stay, my child; never, never!"

"He shall make you happy, you! You have a prior right to him. Then I will forget everything myself, then, when you are, I will be happy."

"Foolish child! And if the past were dead; the daughter's lover to marry the mother, that is impossible, it would challenge all the scorn that in society lies ever watching for its prey. And he shall not become the victim of such scorn."