On the outskirts of Halewitz Park, half hidden in the shrubs, there
stood a lonely, grey, one-storied house, the five windows of which were
surrounded by stucco spirals and flourishes, which gave it an air of
incongruous frivolity. The front looked out on a field path, while the
gable and back walls were buried in the greenery of the park.
No sound of what was going on in the courtyard of the great house
penetrated here, only from time to time a plough or a harvest waggon
passed on its way home, and the melodious shout of a half-childish
woman's voice, the joyous barking of a playful dog echoing it, came
through the thicket. Every morning, at an early hour, a troop of
poorly, though neatly clad children, bare-headed and barefooted, aged
from three to seven, assembled at the gate, the little ones holding the
hands of their elders, or in some cases led by their mothers--wretched,
prematurely faded creatures, bowed to the earth with the double burden
of work in the fields and child-bearing.
At seven o'clock the iron gate opened, and the children streamed into
the pleasance, climbed the steps, and disappeared into the house.
Almost directly afterwards the shrill chorus of children's voices was
to be heard by passers-by on the road, led by a deep, slightly cracked
woman's alto.
When the dinner-bell sounded from the other side of the park, the door
opened again, and the little troop came out and trotted towards the
village.
Then all was quiet again around the lonely house, only an anaemic
servant girl moved now and then backwards and forwards between the
cellar stairs and the front door. Not till after the vesper hour did
footsteps, light yet energetic, sound from the direction of the park,
breaking through the undergrowth to cut off the curves of the pathway.
It was Hertha, come to pay her daily visit to her stepmother. The
relations between mother and daughter had never been very intimate. The
gloom that had overshadowed Johanna's temperament, her sybilline air,
the atmosphere of incense and carbolic with which she was surrounded,
all combined to repel the child with her craving for light and joy, and
to make a close affection between her and her stepmother impossible.
Yet, in her innermost heart, she cherished a sentiment of gratitude
towards her as the benefactress who had opened a new world of love to
her, the homeless one, by introducing her into her parental house.
Hertha would have considered it her duty to accompany the Countess
Prachwitz when, after the explanation with her brother, she had retired
to the dower-house; but her stepmother had herself opposed the plan,
saying she would rather be alone with her God. Since which it had been
the rule for Hertha to spend an hour with her every day, an hour in
which, according to her lights, Johanna made a point of ministering to
the madcap child's soul.
Hertha had to read bulky devotional books, into whose dreary waste of
prayers a fervid hymn flamed up here and there like a bonfire on a
rainy day.
In the middle of such an improving hour was it that mother and daughter
were sitting together at the open window, the outside blinds of which
were let down, so that a dim green dusk was all that was reflected
within, of the brilliant sunlight without. Hertha read in a monotonous
voice (which was a little husky from a too prolonged swim the day
before) the good old formulas by which for centuries men in their
direst need have found their spiritual daily bread. In the happy
irresponsibility of her sixteen years, she did not let them disturb
her. Indeed, the God to whom she prayed for the man she loved earnestly
every night. Who spoke to her comfortingly out of the rustling leaves
and wrathfully in the rush of the storm, was on the whole a stranger to
her.
While the reading was going on, there was a knock. It was some one who
knocked softly and timidly once, and then after a pause, as if
gathering the necessary strength, a second time.
The countess was greatly put out at the interruption, so strictly
forbidden at this hour of the afternoon.
"Go and see who it is, and send them away," she said.
Hertha went and opened the door, and found herself standing opposite
the daintily clad figure of a young and beautiful woman, deadly pale,
who looked at her with great imploring eyes; with difficulty she
collected herself sufficiently to ask what she wanted.
But scarcely had the unknown's trembling lips mentioned her mother's
name, than there was a cry behind her. The countess had torn the handle
of the door out of her grasp, and said in a hoarse voice--
"Felicitas, _you_?"
The strange woman covered her pale sweet face dumbly with both hands.
And at the same moment Hertha felt herself pushed violently out into
the passage. The key turned twice in the lock. The lady had gone in
with her mother, and she was alone in the dusk.
And then she ran, driven by a secret dismay, down the shaky steps,
through shrubs and bushes, by woodland path and lawn, past the
garden-house and pond, to where joyous laughter rang down from the
terrace with a reassuring sound.
The two whilom girl-friends confronted each other. The one, humble and
supplicating, leaned against the door as if she hardly dared set one
foot before the other, a cowering, crushed penitent, yet triumphant in
personal charm, radiantly beautiful in her slender youthfulness of
figure and the grace of her movements. The other stood erect,
triumphantly sure of victory, filled with a sense of her high principle
and stainless morality, supreme in the realm of self-torturing virtue,
invulnerable in suffering, and proof against temptation, but at the
same time faded and withered, with the hard lines of perpetual
renunciation round her mouth, with lean throat and hollow cheek, and
the smouldering fire of unattained wishes in her sunken eyes, a
conqueror, but also a defeated woman. Johanna was the first to break
silence.
"Have you considered what will be the consequences of taking this
step?" she asked.
Felicitas bowed her head still lower.
Johanna did not accept this gesture as an answer. "You seem to have a
short memory," she burst forth contemptuously.
"I have thought it all over, and remember everything," Felicitas
breathed.
"Then you are prepared for your husband's eyes being opened to what you
are, to-morrow?"
For the first time Felicitas gave her a direct look, touching,
hopeless, yet withal collected.
"Why wait till to-morrow?" she said, in the same low tone. "He is
here."
A faint colour spread over Johanna's face. "Here! do you mean in this
house?"
"No; over at the castle."
"What for? It is a long time since he was there."
"I asked him to come, Johanna."
The two women looked at each other for a while in silence, one full of
suspicion, the other of seraphic resignation. Then Johanna drew a step
nearer.
"Felicitas, you are playing a dangerous game," she said.
"I want to end it, Johanna."
"And that is why you have brought him?"
"I thought I would make it simple for you, Johanna."