In Paradise. Paul Heyse

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СКАЧАТЬ than once been busy with the audacious man who had dared this theft of her beauty--ay, that he had even entered more than once into her secret poems. She had not given much more thought to this than to the other subjects she had touched on in her diary: merely that she had made one more acquaintance, and that of a man who could scarcely be said to have an everyday face, and to whom all the others in his circle conceded the first rank without a moment's jealousy. But was it not a singular coincidence that, at the very time when she was attempting to describe the impression that he had made upon her, he should be engaged in moulding the image of her own features?

      She rose thoughtfully to go to her writing-desk. She was obliged to pass by the glass, and she stood before it for a while earnestly contemplating her reflection, with the same sort of curiosity she would have shown had she never seen herself before, but had just had her attention drawn to herself by some third person. But, at the moment, she was not at all pleased with her appearance. The face of the Eve seemed to her fancy a thousand times more beautiful; he himself would be forced to admit this if he should see her and compare her, face to face, with his work. "Ten years ago," she said to herself, with a shake of the head, "I may, perhaps, have looked like that. Oh, for the beautiful lost years!"

      For all this she began to arrange her hair in the same way that he had arranged it in the statue, and she found this style of coiffure, in a plain knot, charmingly becoming to her. She blushed at this, and turned away. And now her heart beat still louder, as she drew forth from the desk the book containing her confessions, and read over the last pages. "I really believe I was in a fair way of falling in love with him," she said aloud, when she had reached the end. "And he--he looked upon me as he would upon any good model that chanced to fall in his way; studied my face, so that he might steal it from me, and ruthlessly insulted every womanly feeling I have. If I had been anything more to him, if he had even taken a deep interest in me, he would never have had the heart to make such a display of me, he would never have subjected me to such ideas!--Oh, it is shameful! I will never, never forgive him that!"

      A passionate feeling of pain, like the anger and indignation that had overwhelmed her in the first moment of the discovery, once more flamed within her. She threw the book into the drawer and hastily locked it up. Then she paced up and down through her entire suite of rooms, and struggled to calm her mood again.

      But it was not so easy as she had expected. For the first time she failed to understand the voices that were speaking in her heart, nor could she silence them. A feeling had come over this mature, firm nature, such as seldom takes possession of any but the young in the time of their earliest development; that oppressing sense of delight that is almost akin to pain, that threatens to burst the heart, and that makes the thought of dying and passing quietly away so grateful as if death were nothing but a gentle sinking into some unfelt deep that is brimming over with flowers.

      Her anger had suddenly passed away. She tried hard, as soon as she was conscious of this, to picture to herself her insulter in the most repulsive shape. Not succeeding in that, she made an attempt to be angry with herself, to reproach herself for her womanish weakness, in being frivolous enough to feel flattered by this robbery. But she succeeded little better than before; one thing only stood before her mind, that he and she were in the world together, and that they had both thought of one another at the same moment.

      The door opened softly; the old servant stepped in and announced that Mr. Jansen wished to pay his respects.

CHAPTER VII.

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      Of course he had come to apologize. Angelica must have urged the necessity of his doing so very strongly indeed: must have depicted to him in pretty glowing colors the anger of her deeply insulted friend, to judge from the fact of his knocking at her door but two hours after. Her first thought was to refuse to see him. But then, what if he should be disposed to treat the matter altogether too lightly; what if he thought to appease her by some jesting or even gallant apology? Well, she would soon let him know with whom he had to deal, and that he could not escape so easily. Had she not been called "the girl without a heart," and was she not at this moment without friend or protector, forced to rely entirely upon her native dignity, which had just been so audaciously insulted?

      "If the gentleman would have the goodness--I should be very glad to see him--very glad!"

      She stood in the middle of the room as he entered. Her beautiful face had struggled hard to assume its coldest and haughtiest expression. But with the first look that she cast upon the visitor, the armor of ice that she had fastened about her bosom melted away.

      For, in fact, a very different man from the one she had expected stood before her. Where was the confident smile that sought to make the matter appear in the light of a jest, or even of an act of homage? Where the confidence with which the famous master reckons upon absolution for the sin of having made an unknown beauty immortal?

      It was true, he did not appear quite like a penitent malefactor. Erect, and with a scarcely perceptible inclination of the head, he saluted her, and his eyes did not avoid hers; on the contrary, they even dwelt upon her features with so gloomy a fire that she involuntarily lowered her eyelids, and asked herself in secret whether she was not the guilty one after all, since this man appeared before her so sad and melancholy.

      "Gnädiges Fräulein," he said, "I have given you reason to be very angry with me. I merely come to inform you that the cause of your displeasure is already removed. If you were willing to visit my atelier again--which, unfortunately, I must doubt--you would see in the place where your own features confronted you this morning nothing but a shapeless mass."

      "You have--you really ought to have--"

      "I have done at once what I owed to you, in order that you might not form a wrong opinion of me. Sooner or later I should have had to do it in any case--even though no one had urged me to it. I wish sincerely that you would believe me when I say this--though I scarcely dare to hope so, since you do not know me--and are perhaps still too angry with me not to--not to believe me capable of any piece of discourtesy."

      "I?--I confess--I have until now thought neither well nor ill of--"

      She did not complete the sentence--she felt that she blushed, as she tried to assure him of her complete indifference--three steps from the drawer where her confessions were lying.

      "I know it," continued he; and his dark glance wandered over the dimly-lighted room. "I am so perfectly indifferent to you, that it must, after all, be very easy for you to pardon something that cannot have awakened any very strong personal feeling in your mind. One who is entirely unknown to us cannot insult us. When he has taken back again that with which he has wounded us, it is as if nothing had happened. And so I might perhaps take my leave of you, gnädiges Fräulein, with the renewed assurance of my sincere regret that I have unconsciously offended you."

      She made a scarcely perceptible motion toward the sofa, as if she would invite him to be seated. He was much too occupied with his own thoughts to pay any attention to it.

      "Perhaps it is folly," continued he, after a pause--"perhaps more than that--wrong, if I intrude any longer, and give you an explanation for which you have no desire, and which will perhaps strike you disagreeably, since it turns upon something that cannot but be a matter of perfect indifference to you: not much more interesting than if you should hear there had been a thunderstorm at a place forty miles away, and that the lightning had struck a tree. Still--now that I have acknowledged my wrong and have done all in my power to make it good again--I owe it to myself not to permit you to take a worse view of me than I have really deserved. When, before a court of justice, one can put forth the plea of mental irresponsibility, it is considered the most important of all mitigating circumstances. СКАЧАТЬ