As soon as Gertrude could get up and go about, Eleanore accepted an
invitation from Martha Ruebsam to visit her aunt, Frau Seelenfromm, in
Altdorf. The visit was to last two weeks. Eleanore looked upon it as a
test that would determine whether she could do anything on her own
account now: whether she could get along without Daniel.
But she saw that she could no longer live without him. In the lonely
house she came to the conclusion that her love was great enough to
enable her to bear the monstrous burden fate had been trying to impose
upon her. She saw that neither flight nor concealment nor anything else
could save her, could save Daniel, could give back to Gertrude what she
had lost, what had been taken from her.
There were times, to be sure, when she asked herself whether it was all
true and real; whether it could be possible. She walked in darkness
surrounded by demons. Her being was plunged into the deepest and
strangest bewilderment; confusion enveloped her; there was sorrow in the
effort she made to avert the inexorable.
But in one of her sleepless nights she thought she was covering Daniel's
mind with a flame of fire; she thought she heard his voice calling out
to her with a power she had never known before.
No one she had ever seen was so vivacious, so alive as he. Her
slumbering fancy had awakened at the sound of his voice and the feel of
his warm breath. She felt that people owed him a great deal; and since
they did not seem inclined to pay their debts, it was her duty to make
restitution to Daniel for their neglect.
She could not survey the ways of his art: the musician in him made
neither a strange nor a special appeal to her. She grasped and felt only
him himself; to her he was Daniel. She grasped and felt only the man who
was born to do lofty, the loftiest, deeds and who passed by the base and
evil in men in silence; who knew that he had been chosen but was obliged
to renounce the privilege of ruling; who was always in full armour,
ready to defend a threatened sanctuary.
Of such a man, of such a knight and warrior, she had dreamt even when a
child. For although she looked at things and circumstances with the eyes
of truth, her soul had always been full of secret dreams and visions.
Back of her unceasing and unfading activity the genii of romanticism had
been spinning their bright-coloured threads; it was they that had formed
the glass case in which she had lived for so long, impervious to the
touch of mortal hand, immune to the flames of love.
The morning following that night she explained to her friend that she
was going home. Martha tried in vain to get her to stay: she was almost
ill with longing.
Martha let her go; she had the very saddest of thoughts concerning
Eleanore's future; for the unhappy incidents of that unhappy home had
reached Martha's sensitive ears. She did not worry because of moral
principles; she was not that kind of a woman. She worried over Eleanore
out of genuine affection: it pained her to know that she could no longer
admire Eleanore.
X
In the meanwhile Daniel had told his wife that a child of his was living
with his mother in Eschenbach, and that he had known nothing about it
until Eleanore took him over there. He told her the child's name and how
old it was and who its mother was, and gave her a detailed description
of that celebrated New Year's Night on which he had embraced the maid.
He told her how he had stood out in front of her house that night and
longed for her with all his senses, and how he felt, when he looked at
little Eva, as if Providence had only seemed to use the body of a
strange woman, and that Eva was in reality Gertrude's own child.