Withered Leaves Volume Ii Part 22

It was half-witted Ktchen--he had recognised her at once.

"What brings you here? What do you want here in this tempest?"

"Beautiful Eva's mother is buried; I want what you do!"

"And what do you want of me?"

"Have had a little note for you, for a long, long time--now I can give it to you. Eva wrote it upon the ocean."

"Mad woman--and now, for the first time, you speak of it to me?"

"To others I would not show it, and to you I could not give it sooner.

I am staying with Mother Hecht, the herbalist; you will find me there every evening."

And she kissed his hands once more, and the following moment had disappeared amongst the whirling snow.

The tempest became so violent that Blanden was obliged to take refuge in the dead-house, where he found several partic.i.p.ators in the funeral who had also fled thither; amongst them a Gerichtsrath whom he knew.

The former had never belonged to the pious community, but, as legal a.s.sistant, had often imparted advice to Frau von Salden, and had also conducted the case inst.i.tuted against half-witted Ktchen. He gave information to Blanden which possessed great interest for the latter.

Since Eva's death, Pauline had constantly been ailing, and succ.u.mbed to a consumptive disorder.

As to Ktchen--the prosecution in which Blanden was called as a witness--although she persisted in the most obstinate silence, no proof of her guilt could be obtained; she had been handed over to the supervision of an inst.i.tution in which mentally disordered and weak persons were looked after by the State. The medical man had p.r.o.nounced her dull, obtuse demeanour not to proceed from any malady of the brain, but to be partially the consequences of the defective bringing up by her tyrannical parents, partially to be connected with her physical development. In fact, after the expiration of a year an unmistakable alteration had taken place in her; she had commenced to speak more naturally, indeed, more distinctly and coherently, so that the medical man could release her from his establishment.

Blanden inquired why Pauline had returned to the town.

He learned that she had been obliged to sell her estate, and also that she had sought consolation amongst her friends; in the country solitude she had been verging on despair.

The storm, meanwhile, had somewhat abated; Blanden relinquished his visit to the singer, and hastened to his house, so as to be able to indulge in those thoughts and emotions which besieged him after the occurrence in the churchyard. He was in a mood in which life no longer seemed worth living; the ruin of youth and beauty filled him with deep melancholy, and the connection between human destinies, by means of which a load of guilt suddenly struck an innocent person, occasioned painful reflections. To him it appeared enviable thus to be buried beneath the snow, to repose in wintry earth.

But if he would not cast himself amongst the dead, he must extinguish the candles in the sable-draped mourning chamber of his soul, beside the sarcophagus of past love, and step forth once more into the day of life.

On the following afternoon he visited Giulia--he found her alone; her obsequious friend left the room. The Signora looked pale and sad; the colouring of her features, which can only be designated by the Italian word _morbidezza_, looked almost sickly. Her eyes, however, shone joyously as Blanden entered, but when he would have folded her in his arms she stepped back in decided refusal.

"The lady of the Lago Maggiore and Signora Bollini are not the same persons. The former appeared in a dream, which the intoxicated rapture of the south begets, the latter appears in the sober north, so well-known that the newspapers speak of her. Here, in this world of citizens, one dreams no more! That we are acquainted with the same secret only gives us the right of friends.h.i.+p, and in token of it I offer you my hand."

She uttered it all deliberately, but yet in a cordial tone.

"Indeed," replied Blanden, whom the Signora had completely won by these words, "it is folly to wish to bind ourselves to a past that is divided from us by the flood of time. With time we too have changed, and often that has become utterly strange to us which formerly had such irresistible dominion over us. I honour your sentiments, Signora! The claim upon love must always be conquered anew, at least grant me the hope that we may succeed."

"I cannot but fear that without the magic of the south, the prize would not reward the trouble undertaken in earnest. What am I to you here, where my name can be read at every street corner?"

"The magic of art, Signora, can everywhere produce an _Isola bella_ with its peep into enchanting distance."

"The magic of art! Oh, how rude, everyday life sweeps it away! Attend an operatic rehearsal, listen to the confused cries of the manager, the conductor, the bars of music constantly broken off; the musical howls of the chorus; visit the theatrical wardrobe, and look at the tinsel out of which the artistic work of our beauty is created for an evening's performance; listen to the criticising comments of our colleagues behind the scenes; you will be in doubt where you should seek the magic of art."

"Still it does exist, and before its power disappears the ponderous apparatus by which it must be called into life."

"Certainly in the emotions of creative and sensitive minds it bears an enduring life. But when the magic forsakes us, who should be the representatives of art? Is there a greater pain than the sensation of one's own uselessness, and in addition, when it is unmerited, when it was formerly foreign to us? A singer whose voice becomes weaker, who from day to day becomes more conscious of its decay, is more fitted for elegiac reflections than a crumbling ruin, around which ivy climbs."

"You speak, dear friend, of matters which it is to be hoped you do not know from personal experience?"

"Yet I do know them by experience. I tell it you in confidence; before the world I must seek to conceal it, my fame may be able to disguise for some time longer what is unavoidable--a good name has illimitable credit. But my enemies are already beginning to destroy it. A spiteful reporter in Riga made exaggerated allusions to the deterioration of my voice, and a local newspaper here, which bears the impress of Herr Spiegeler's intellect, hastened to print a copy of that criticism."

Blanden shrugged his shoulders contemptuously.

"You are mistaken if you estimate lightly this intentional undermining of a well-earned renown. It cannot be accurately shown out of what atoms an artist's fame gradually rises, nor how they are wafted into a whole, just as easily can it be blown into pieces! How quickly the colours glow in a gay, s.h.i.+mmering structure of clouds; fame, too, is but effulgence, and suddenly dead night comes to relieve its light.

Singers, both men and women, are condemned before all others to outlive their fame."

"Nor do they receive it freshly in their hands at first."

"Oh, no, it withers for them--in their hands! Read the article which Spiegeler has to-day had printed upon my 'Somnambula,' such an article is a blight upon every blossom of renown. They are all tiny half-concealed pieces of malice, but they hit one's heart. Public opinion is easily led, to-morrow already I shall stand before hundreds who no longer believe in me. Ah fame! How paralysing is the sensation of being given up to the crowd's want of faith."

"All great artists have been exposed to such attacks."

"But not all have overcome them successfully! How many talents and geniuses have been destroyed by the indifference of the public, whose enthusiasm was nipped in the bud often by means of personal animosity on the part of the critic; often by their distorted comprehension! Only those are numbered in the history of art who bore away the prize, not the others who with equal courage and equal strength, undertook the race of life, but succ.u.mbed beneath the obstacles which often chance, but still more often wicked will, cast into their path. But for him who so labours without pleasure in a career of art, it is greater torture than all else that men do against their will, for what is art without enthusiasm, and enthusiasm is only augmented pleasure, which lays hold of men so that they may pour out upon others some of their own overflowing abundance."

"Is enthusiasm then dependent upon the approval of the many? Is it not the artist's voluntary devotion to his ideal?"

"It is dependent upon his happy mood, because to produce the beautiful is bliss and a favour of destiny. Read this condemnation, must not every glad emotion be crushed by it? I have irritated the critic, this is his revenge!"

Blanden was obliged to confess that this criticism of Spiegeler was a collection of flowers of the most pointed epigrams, that it was spiteful, and in its way annihilating.

"Even two years ago," continued Giulia, "I should more easily have risen above this scorn; at that time I was sure of my voice and my success, now it is different--"

"Two years ago! And was not then Signora Giulia secretly at my castle during my absence?"

"I do not deny it! Curiosity prompted me to become acquainted with my friend's home."

"And did you not enchant all the rooms of my castle with leaves of recollection and golden sayings?"

"It was a pardonable wish to awaken the recollections of a mysterious meeting by the traces which an equally mysterious visitor left behind."

"Not the charm of mystery brought us together at that time, it pressed its seal upon our happy meeting."

"Not in recollections does happiness lie, but in oblivion; I know no other now."

"You are melancholy, Signora! Shall you then retire from the stage?"

"Oh, you do not know," broke from Giulia, "with what heavy chains I am bound to the galley! Others may remain constant to it from fear of want. I should fall a victim to much greater misery. Behind the stage-scenery of my life stands a spectre, a fearful spectre, ready to step forth at any moment. If I renounce the glory of the stage, I fall completely into that spectre's gruesome power."

"I should have the courage to hazard a conflict with that ghost."

"That conflict would not bring me redemption. Oh, how I long for rest!"

Giulia's features a.s.sumed an expression of most intense exhaustion; she sank upon the sofa and hid her face in her hands.

Lieutenant Buschmann was announced.

"Count upon my help," said Blanden, "when and wheresoever you may need it. This knightly duty I owe to the gracious lady of the magic lake, and shall fulfil it as faithfully as ever knight served his lady."