“Hopeless grief is passionless.”
It was the anniversary of one of the great victories achieved by Germany
in the war of 1870, and Berlin had scarcely known a day so filled with
noise, and glitter, and color, and esprit as this day had been.
The Baroness Von Eulaw, the beautiful American, was more sought for than
ever, and the too arduous round of social duties and engagements were
beginning to tell upon her delicate constitution. Cards had been
received by the baron and his wife for a reception at the palace, and
such an invitation could scarcely be overlooked, especially as no
entertainment seemed acknowledged by her friends to be complete without
the presence of the baroness. Therefore, retiring a little earlier this
evening than was usual from her own drawing rooms, the baroness was well
advanced with her toilette when she discovered letters which the footman
had left upon her table during her absence, and among them one bearing
the postmark of Tucson, Arizona, and addressed in a well-known hand.
She felt too excited to trust herself farther, and, before tearing the
envelope, she sent her maid with a message of her sudden indisposition,
which she begged the baron to deliver in person to the emperor, and
asked, furthermore, not to be disturbed.
It was all one to the baron at this hour, and though he speedily
departed for the imperial palace, it is doubtful whether the high
officials in waiting deemed it advisable to admit him to the imperial
presence.
Dismissing her servants, the baroness was left alone for the night. Then
she turned to her dressing-table and stood while opening the letters,
glancing hurriedly at their contents, all but one, and this she turned
over many times. What was the burden of its mission, and what did it
contain? Finally her trembling fingers picked absently at the envelope,
as if she had forgotton how to proceed. She might be unafraid, for there
was his own handwriting before her.
With this thought a thrill went through her heart, and with a sudden
motion she tore the envelope quite apart, and her own photograph fell to
the floor. She did not stoop for it, for her eyes were fixed upon the
page. Slowly she read word by word, lingering over the last, and cutting
it away from its context, as if fearful that another word should
overwhelm her reason.
She finished, and an awful silence fell upon her. She could hear her
heart beat against her rich corsage, and her breath crackled as it came
through her dry lips. What was the purport of that letter? She had
already forgotten. Something surely had left a heavy pain at her heart.
Just as slowly she read it through again.
Then he was not dead—or, stay, he might be, for did he not say
“probably,” not “possibly”? Then, still standing before the
dressing-table, she leaned forward, and, putting her face close to the
mirror, she muttered, looking into her own deep eyes the while, “Great
God! what did I do?” For a full moment she stood thus, then, lifting the
powder-puff from the jeweled case, she mechanically swept her cheeks and
brow and sat down. Then she caught the letter and read it again, this
time more clearly and calmly, “the probable fatal termination,” and
again, “until the day after you became the Baroness Von Eulaw.”
She looked at her toilette. What was she doing bejeweled and brocaded
that night? Where were the sackcloth and ashes she had earned? She arose
and pulled the diamonds from their places, and the beautiful robe from
her lovely shoulders, and put on a gown of creamy plush, bordered with
some dark, rich fur, and, slowly tying the cords, her eyes fell upon the
picture at her feet.
She took it between her fingers as if it were a dead thing, and thought
at the moment that it weighed a pound at the least. And this was Ellen
Thornton! Then she thought how old-fashioned her dress looked, and for a
moment she felt glad that she had gotten the picture back. Another
revulsion of feeling as she looked upon the torn envelope. What would
she not suffer for the hope, the uncertainty, she had clung to when she
tore that paper half an hour ago?
If only the doctors could have said “possibly,” not “probably;” perhaps
that was what they meant, and not “probably,” she repeated. Doctors are
so clumsy—especially some—and they do so exaggerate in order to magnify
the importance of their case, and for a moment she took unction in such
logic.
Suddenly a new thought took possession. The baron—“where did he come
in?” as he himself would have expressed it, and she half smiled at the
grotesqueness of the thought. Was she not married? and did she not owe
him allegiance as a woman of honor? If she had told him all that her
soul held in keeping for another, would he have made her the Baroness
Von Eulaw?—Very likely, but she was not prepared to believe it. She had
no right to hold him responsible for offenses against her while she was
holding perfidy to her heart, and she marveled that she had failed to
make this argument a shield against the shafts of her great sorrow and
her almost greater chagrin.
She would destroy both the letter and the picture, and put away all
thought of the unhappy occurrence. But, examining the picture again, she
discovered two little punctures just through the pupils of the shadowy
eyes, and she thought and queried for the cause of such an accident.
Finally she concluded that her old lover had made them inadvertently in
fastening the picture to his wall or mirror frame, and so, pressing her
lips warmly to the tiny wounds on the unconscious paper, where she
fancied his fingers had rested, she locked both the photo and letter in
her desk, and, just as daylight broke, long after the clanging of the
locks had ceased and the brightness was withdrawn, she braided her hair
as she had worn it so many years ago when the image was made, and, with
a long look in the mirror to find a trace of her old self, she turned
away to her couch, and disposed herself for an hour of sleep.
But the last among her sea of speculations was this: “I wonder who made
those pin-holes in my eyes!”