“This night is fearfully long. If the poor sufferer could only sleep! but she lies there with her eyes open. I pass constantly the space of half-an-hour motionless by her bedside; and then I slip off to this sheet of paper, and write a few words, and then back again to her. In this way it has come to four o’clock. I have just heard the four strokes pealing from all the clock towers—it strikes one as so cold, so unfeeling, that time is striding on steadily and unerringly through all eternity, while at this very moment for one warmly-loved being time must stop—for all eternity. But by how much the colder, the more unfeeling, the universe seems to our pain, by so much the more longingly do we fly back to another human heart which we believe is beating in unison with our feelings. And therefore it is that this white sheet of paper, which the physician left lying on the table when he wrote his prescription, attracted me, and therefore it is that I send you this letter.
“Seven o’clock. It is over.
“ ‘Farewell, my dear boy.’ Those were her last words. Then she closed her eyes and slept. Sleep soundly, my dear mother. In tears I kiss your dear hands.
I still keep this letter. How frayed and discoloured the sheet looks now! It is not only the twenty-five years that have elapsed which have caused this decay, but also the tears and kisses with which I covered the beloved writing: “In deadly sorrow.” Yes, but “shouting for joy” was what I felt also when I read it. Though there was no word of love in it, yet no letter could give plainer proof that the writer loved the recipient, and no one else. That at such a moment, at the deathbed of his mother, he longed to pour out his grief into the heart, not of the princess, but into mine, must surely stifle every jealous doubt.
I sent on the same day a funeral wreath of a hundred large white camelias, with a single half-blown red rose in it. Would he understand that the pale scentless flowers belonged to the departed as a symbol of mourning, and the little rose—to himself?
V
Conrad Althaus’s Suit to Lilly—The Easter Foot-Washing—I Meet Tilling Again and Receive Him at My Own House—A Disappointing Interview—Tilling Announces His Departure from Vienna—A Conversation About War—I Invite Him to a Last Interview, Which Is Interrupted by My Father—A Ride in the Prater—We Understand Each Other at Last.
Three weeks had passed.
Conrad Althaus had proposed for my sister Lilly, and met with a refusal. But he did not take the matter much to heart, and remained a zealous visitor at our house, and hovered about us in the drawing-rooms of our society. I expressed to him once my admiration for his unshaken fidelity to his slavery.
“I am very glad,” I said, “that you are not angry; but it is a proof to me that your feeling for Lilly was not so ardent after all as you pretend, for rejected love is wont to be angry and resentful.”
“You are mistaken, my respected Mrs. Cousin; I love Lilly to distraction. At first I believed that my heart belonged to you, but you held yourself so aloof and were so cold that I stifled my budding passion in good time; and then for a time I was interested in Rosa; but at last I fixed my affection on Lilly, and to this affection I will now remain true to the end of my life.”
“Oh, that is very like you!”
“Lilly or no one!”
“But as she will not have you, my poor Conrad?”
“Do you think I am the first who has been met by a refusal, and has gone back to the same lady a second and a third time, and has been accepted at the fourth offer, just to stop his importunity? Lilly has not fallen in love with me, which is a matter not easily to be accounted for, but is still a fact. That under these circumstances she should have resisted the temptation, which for so many maidens is irresistible, to become a wife, and would not accept an offer which in a worldly point of view would be a desirable one, that seems to me most good in her, and I am more in love with her than ever. Gradually my devotion will touch her and awaken a return of love, and then, dearest Martha, you will become my sister-in-law. I hope you will not go against me?”
“I? Oh no! On the contrary, your system of perseverance pleases me. With time and the exhibition of tenderness one can always succeed in ‘wooing and winning,’ as the English call it. But as to minnen und gewinnen,5 our young gentlemen seem hardly disposed to take the necessary trouble. They want not to strive after and gain their happiness, but to pluck it without any trouble, like some wayside flower.”
In a fortnight Tilling was back in Vienna, as I heard, and yet he did not come to my house. I could not,
