Partners Part 13

"Is that true? Have you really seen it? She has wept?"

Frida looked with unmeasured surprise at his beaming face.

"And you are glad of it. Can you really blame her if she has a mistaken opinion of you when you have caused that mistake? Can you be so revengeful as to torment her for it?"

"Oh! the wisdom of sixteen years!" cried Gustave, bursting into irrepressible laughter. "You will defend your friend against me, will you?--against me? You are indeed very wise for your years, my little Frida, but of such things you understand nothing, and, indeed, it is not necessary. You can still wait a couple of years. But now tell me all about it! When did Jessie weep? What did she cry for? How do you know that the tears concerned me? Tell me, tell me, or I shall die of impatience!"

His face indeed betrayed the highest excitement, and he seemed actually to devour the words from the girl's lips. Frida seemed certainly to know nothing of such things, for she looked astonished to the last degree, but yielded at last to his urgency.

"Jessie asked me seriously a short time ago if I would really entrust my whole future to such an egoist as you. I defended you, awkwardly enough, as I dared not betray you, and was obliged to submit to all the reproaches heaped on you."

"And then?" asked Gustave breathlessly, "and then?"

"Then, in the midst of the conversation, Jessie suddenly burst into tears, and cried--'You are blind, Frida; you persist in your blindness, and yet I have only your happiness in view! You don't know what dreadful pain it gives me to have to place this man in such a light before you, or what I would give if he stood as pure and high in my eyes as in yours!' And then she rushed away and locked herself in her room. But I know that she cried for hours."

"That is incomparable, heavenly news!" cried Gustave, in fullest delight. "Child, you do not know how cleverly you have observed. Come, I must give you a kiss for it!"

And with that he seized the girl in his arms and kissed her heartily on both cheeks.

CHAPTER VIII.

A shadow fell on the entrance of the arbour--there stood Sandow, who had returned to fetch his forgotten pocket-book, and thus became a witness of the scene.

For a moment he stood speechless and motionless, then he approached and cried, with the greatest indignation--

"Gustave!--Miss Palm!"

The girl started violently, even Gustave turned pale as he released her. The catastrophe which at any price he would yet delay, had burst, he saw that at a glance; now he must stand firm.

"What is all this?" asked Sandow, measuring his brother with blazing eyes. "How dare you treat thus a young girl under the shelter of my house, and you, Miss Palm, how could you permit such conduct? It could not be agreeable to you? And yet there seems already a thorough understanding!"

Frida made no attempt to reply to the bitter reproaches heaped upon her. She looked at Gustave as if she expected him to defend her. He had already collected himself, and said impressively to his brother--

"Listen to me, you are in error, and I will explain all to you."

"It needs no explanation," interrupted Sandow. "I have seen what you have been guilty of, and you will not try to deny the evidence of my own eyes. I always thought you frivolous, but not so dishonourable, but that you have, almost under the eyes of Jessie, your promised bride"--

"Frank, stop there!" cried Gustave, with such determination that Sandow, although trembling with rage, was silent. "I cannot allow this, my self-sacrifice will not go so far as that. Frida, come to me. You see that we must speak. He must learn the truth."

Frida obeyed. She came to his side, and he laid his arm protectingly round her. Sandow looked bewildered from one to the other. The affair was unintelligible to him, he had clearly no presentiment of the truth.

"You wrong me by your accusations," said Gustave, "and you wrong Frida too. If I kissed her I had a right to do so. She has been my charge from her earliest youth. The poor forsaken child was neglected by everyone who ought to have protected and sheltered her. I was the only one who recognised the right of kindred. I have used that right, and can support my actions by it."

It was astonis.h.i.+ng how deeply earnest the voice of the irrepressible jester had become. At the first words a terrible presentiment seemed to seize Sandow. Every tinge of colour left his face, he became paler and paler, and with his eyes fixed on Frida, he repeated in a tuneless and mechanical voice--

"Your right of kindred? What--what do you mean?"

Gustave raised the head of the girl, which leant on his shoulder, and turned the face full towards his brother.

"If you have not yet guessed, then read it in this face, perhaps it will now be clear to you. What likeness is it that you have remembered there. I have certainly deceived you, been forced to deceive you since you thrust every possibility of an understanding from you. Then I seized the only means, and brought Frida to you. I thought you would by degrees learn to comprehend the feeling which warmed your half-frozen heart, I thought it must at last dawn upon you, that the stranger who attracted you so powerfully had a right to your love. That is now impossible, the discovery has come too suddenly and unexpectedly, but look at those features, they are your own. For long years you have suffered under a dark and gloomy illusion, and have punished a guiltless child for the guilt of the mother. You awake at last and open your arms to her--to your own, your neglected child."

A long oppressive silence followed these words. Sandow staggered, and for a moment it seemed as if he would give way altogether, but he stood upright. His face worked terribly, and his breast rose and fell quickly with the gasping breath, but he spoke no word.

"Come, Frida!" said Gustave gently, "come to your father, you see he waits for you."

He drew her forwards and would have led her to her father, but he had now regained his power of speech. He made a movement as if to thrust her from him, and hoa.r.s.e and roughly cried--

"Back! So easy a victory you need not expect. Now I see through the whole comedy."

"Comedy!" repeated Gustave, deeply hurt. "Frank, in such a moment can you speak thus."

"And what else is it?" broke out Sandow. "What else do you call that miserable jugglery which you have carried on behind by back? So, for weeks past I have been surrounded in my own house, with lies and deceit. And even Jessie has joined you; without her help it would have been impossible. All have conspired against me. You," he turned to Frida as if he would pour all his rage and scorn upon her devoted head, but he encountered the girl's eyes, and the words died on his lips.

He was silent for some moments, and then continued with the bitterest contempt--

"No doubt they described to you in very enticing colours the benefit of having a father from whom you might inherit wealth, and who could give you a brilliant position in life. That is why you have stolen into my house with lies. But what I swore when I left Europe that I stand by. I have no child, will have none, were the law ten times to adjudge me one. Go back over the sea to whence you came. I will not be the victim of deceit."

"That is what I feared," said Gustave, half aloud. "Frida," he stepped quickly to her, "now you must rouse the feelings of a father. You see he will not listen to me; to you he must, and will listen. Speak, then, at all events open your lips, do you not feel what hangs on this moment?"

But Frida spoke not, and did not open her lips, which were convulsively pressed together. She was deadly pale, and in her face was the same expression of hard, settled obstinacy which disfigured her father's countenance.

"Let me alone, Uncle Gustave," she replied, "I cannot entreat now, and if my life depended on it, I could not. I will only tell my father I am innocent of the 'deceit' with which he reproaches me."

The delicate form was suddenly drawn up to its full height, the dark eyes blazed, and the deeply injured feelings burst forth, pa.s.sionately overflowing all bounds, like a stream which can no longer be controlled.

"You need not repulse me so harshly, I should have gone in the moment when it became clear to me that the one thing I sought here--my father's heart--was denied me. I have never known a parent's love. My mother was estranged from me, of my father I only knew that he lived on this side the Atlantic, and had cast me off because he hated my mother.

I came against my will, because I neither knew nor loved you. I only feared you. I came because my uncle said that you were lonely and embittered, and in spite of your wealth had no happiness in life; that you needed love, and that I alone could give it to you. By those means he forced me to follow him, in spite of my opposition, and by those means has he ever prevented me when I begged to return home. But now he will not wish to detain me, and if he did, I would tear myself away.

Keep your wealth, father, that which you think has brought me to you.

It has brought no blessing to you; I knew it long ago, and hear it again in your words. If you were poor and desolate I would try to love you, now I cannot. I will leave you within the hour!"

The unmeasured violence with which these words were spoken, or rather with which they rushed from Frida's lips had something terrible in it, but it also betrayed something which produced a more powerful effect than all the prayers and pet.i.tions could have done--the resemblance between the father and the daughter.

In the ordinary course of life the resemblance between the girl of sixteen and the already grey-haired man might have disappeared, or only have been remarkable occasionally; here, in the moment of highest excitement, it found such overwhelming, such convincing expression, that every doubt vanished on the spot.

Sandow must have seen it whether he would or not. Those were his eyes, which flamed before him, that was his voice which rang in his ears, that was his own dark, unbending obstinacy which now turned against himself. Trait by trait he saw himself reproduced in his daughter. The voice of blood and nature spoke so loud and convincingly that even the long treasured illusion of the father began to yield.

Frida turned to her uncle.

"In an hour I shall be ready to start! Forgive me, Uncle Gustave, that I have so badly carried out all your teaching, that I have rendered useless all your self-sacrifice, but I cannot do otherwise!"

She threw herself wildly on his breast, but only for a moment, then she tore herself away, fled past her father, and rushed like a hunted thing through the garden towards the house.

As Sandow saw his daughter in his brother's arms, he made a movement as if to tear her away, but his hand fell powerless by his side, and he sank as if crushed upon a seat, and buried his face in his hands.