The Undying Past Part 78

"Felicitas, pull yourself together," he exhorted, feeling uneasy.

She stammered Paulchen's name, and looked into vacancy again. A reflection of death seemed to lie on this white face, rigid from anguish.

Leo would have sunk on his knees beside her, deeply moved and anxious, had not the doctor's words hardened and steeled him against her.

"Leo?" she whispered, without looking at him.

"What can I do for you?"

"Are you my friend?"

"Of course. You know that I am."

"Leo, I can't go on living. Leo, you must get me poison."

He took comfort from her words. After all, then, she had seriously wished to take her life. For that he thanked her from the bottom of his heart.

A quiver of pain pa.s.sed over her drawn features, which the grief of the last few days had lengthened and pinched. Her face was now marked by lines, which made it look older, but gave it more character. This was not the pink-and-white laughing face of the syren who lured him on to the edge of a precipice, but the woe-struck face of a madonna who had endured and come through much tribulation.

And it was fitting that the partner of his guilt should be thus. He felt for the first time how thoroughly she belonged to him, and his hate gradually evaporated.

"Don't sin against yourself, Felicitas," he said, for the sake of saying something.

"Sin against myself!" she repeated, speaking in a low, hopeless monotone. "Oh, my G.o.d! As if there was anything worse for me to do!

Could I sin more than I have done? My little Paul is dead, and I am still alive. I sentenced my child to death, and am allowed to live.

Matricide; isn't that the most horrible of crimes? How can I go through life with such a burden of guilt weighing upon me? How can any one who cares for me wish me to do it?"

"Matricide!" he exclaimed in bewilderment. "What do you mean?"

"I know what I mean," she said, and smiled.

A cold shudder ran through him. This woman's brain must be unbalanced by grief; she was going out of her mind. Her fingers groped on the counterpane.

"Where is your hand?" she whispered. "Give me your hand. I implore you to give me your hand."

He stretched it towards her mechanically, and she grasped it in her hot moist palm.

"Lean down to me," she whispered on, "and I will tell you in your ear how it happened."

He inclined his head as she commanded, till it was close to her mouth.

"You remember that evening you came before Christmas?" she continued--"that was the hour when I sacrificed my boy's life to you.

When we were warming ourselves at the furnace in the greenhouse, it was then that he died."

"You are talking deliriously, Felicitas!" he exclaimed, drawing himself erect.

"Hus.h.!.+" she said, pulling him down to her again. "They may be listening at the door, and no one must know this but you and I. It was three days before Christmas. I was doing up his presents, and there wasn't much time. For I had sent him far, far away for your sake, and kept from Ulrich how unhappy he was at school; for your sake I did that too. But I wanted him to have his Christmas presents, but in the middle you came in. And then I forgot everything else. I thought no more about Christmas, or my child. My whole soul was filled with you. I wanted nothing else but to go away with you into some corner where no one could see us or hear us. And when you were gone, I was in a sort of mad ecstasy. I ran up and down stairs. I stood by the window looking towards Halewitz half the night through, and then I sat by the stove, and stared into the fire and thought, 'This is how he and I sat beside the furnace.' And at last when I came to my senses it was too late--too late."

"Why too late?" he asked hoa.r.s.ely.

"Yesterday morning," she answered, "Ulrich's telegram came, and last night the letter. Everything is in the letter. It is somewhere in the room. Look for it."

He rose, with faltering steps, and with unsteady fingers fumbled about in search of the fatal letter. But he could not find it. He ransacked the whole apartment that lay before him in a mysterious twilight, with its luxurious appointments, its silken cus.h.i.+ons and covers, its veiled mirrors and countless silver and ivory toilette articles. He wandered from one piece of furniture to another, and while he gazed in stupefied astonishment at all the glittering knickknacks, he asked himself what it was he was looking for. But a voice from the bed reminded him.

"Look in the dressing-room; it may be there."

Ah, the letter--of course, the letter. He opened the door to which she pointed, and found himself in a small room so brilliant and light that it hurt his eyes. The floor was of porcelain tiles, and he saw on the left a bath with steps leading down to it, on the right a marble table surrounded by a threefold full-length mirror, before which were strewn yet more articles of the toilette of crystal and tortoisesh.e.l.l in every conceivable design.

"How _he_ must hate all this show and luxury!" he thought. And then his glance wandered through a door standing wide open opposite him. He saw a plain camp-bedstead covered by a white crochet counterpane, with a deer-skin rug on the bare boards beside it. Photographs in dark frames were on the wall, and amongst them, staring at him with laughing eyes and plump cheeks, his own. He groaned aloud, and, putting his hands before his face, flew back into the perfumed, purple prison.

"Have you got the letter?" she asked.

"No."

"Did you look everywhere?"

"I don't know; I think so."

"Leo, what's the matter with you?"--her voice trembled with anxiety.

"The matter with me?" he cried. "Only this: I am ashamed of myself--ashamed! ashamed!" He drew himself up, and then flung himself down on his knees beside the bed. She raised herself on the pillows and laid her hand on his head, while her eyes filled with tears.

"My poor, poor boy," she said, "you are broken-hearted already, and yet you don't know nearly all."

"What more is there?" he asked, shaken with emotion.

"The letter says," she continued, "that all the others got their presents from parents and friends in time for the distribution. Only his table was empty. And he couldn't believe it--couldn't believe that his mother had forgotten him. And when the rest were playing round the Christmas-tree, he slipped out unseen, without hat or overcoat. He must go to the post-office, he said, to inquire whether mamma had sent nothing. Not the soldiers and the cannons, and the pocket inkstand, and all the things that he had wanted so badly, and which mamma had promised him? But he couldn't find the post-office, and ran on and on over the open fields in a snowstorm, _without cap and overcoat_, and because he could not believe that his mother had forsaken him (for your sake, Leo), he died--died."

She pressed her forehead against the bowed head of the kneeling man, sobbing bitterly, and clung to his shoulders. And so they cried together and would not be comforted. When at last they lifted their heads they looked into each other's eyes, astonished and questioning.

Was he this man? Was she this woman? It seemed as if their common sorrow had made them new creatures, and linked them as one for all time in guilt and the wretched consequence of their sin. She smiled at him inconsolably, but at the same time she was almost happy.

"Lizzie, we are lost," he murmured.

"Yes, we are lost," she said, still smiling, and then he left her.

x.x.xIV

On the first Sunday of the New Year, Ulrich alighted at the station at Munsterberg, after seeing the grave close over his step-son. He had decided, after long consideration, to have the boy buried in the place where he died, and if his wife felt herself equal to the strain, to have the body removed later to be interred in the family vault of the Rhadens at Fichtkampen.

Felicitas had not spared him any of the details of her despair, illness, and attempted suicide, and had painted all in the darkest colours. She had too much to conceal to be able to express her grief simply and sincerely. The task lay before her of excusing herself, as far as was possible, of any blame in her child's death, and of presenting the whole unhappy affair to Ulrich and the world and to herself, tricked out in the guise of romance.

Above all, it had never occurred to her to spare her husband. The letters she had written him from her bed with a feverish hand were full of endless laments that they had ever sent the boy so far away to school, which strengthened the pangs of remorse that already tortured his sensitive soul.

With the instinct of self-preservation, she had tried to shunt the responsibility for what had happened on Ulrich's shoulders, in the same way as she had blamed Leo as an accomplice, so that Ulrich's easily disturbed conscience began to accuse him of being the cause of all the misery.