She was to see the stranger again on Monday. “I am asking your neighbour at the supper-table next Monday for another sitting with our medium,” the old Councillor had said to her with a mischievous smile. “He must make up for lost time, because he was called away unexpectedly. But if he did not see the medium asleep, at any rate he found Countess Told awake!”
“All right! I shall be pleased to meet him again,” she had answered in a friendly and noncommittal tone.
The door of the cell closed behind her, and she saw a figure seated on a stool, but it did not turn round. “Well?” it said growlingly.
“Good morning,” said the Countess.
The dancer turned round slowly. When she at length faced the Countess, the latter uttered a little cry, and with well-feigned astonishment hastened to Cara, exclaiming, “What, you here, my dear! But we know each other! What a strange coincidence!”
She began chattering at once, as if quite oblivious of Cara’s sullen mood. “Just imagine, they actually caught us all—at Schramm’s—the most noted resort of them all! I can tell you there was a fine to-do, my dear. One man sobbed, another tried to jump out of the window, and you know they are all shut up tight! Somebody sat down and wailed, ‘Oh my wife, my four children, I am disgraced forever!’ There was a tremendous fluttering in the dovecot. I could not slip away in time, and so they got me too! Tell me what is the best thing for me to do? There’s nothing wrong in entering a gaming-house, and I have never once played!”
But Cara only eyed her gloomily.
“Do say something. Is there anything the matter?” pleaded the Countess.
“The matter is that I want you to leave me alone,” answered the other. “Was the young gentleman with the fair sandy beard there?”
“The one who played against Basch, you mean? No, he wasn’t there. I have never seen him since that night.”
“Was the old Professor there?”
“No, I didn’t see him either.”
“Then you needn’t tell me any more about it; it doesn’t interest me. The whole world isn’t worth a pin. I am miserable, for I am forsaken and betrayed. There’s no interest left in life for me. I am lost and undone, and no one troubles any more about me than if I were a frozen field-mouse. What dirty dogs they are!”
Suddenly she sprang from her stool and seized the Countess by the shoulders. “You were with the rest of us. I want to drum it into your head,” she continued with increasing vehemence, “that there never was anybody so treacherously betrayed as I have been. And there was no reason for doing it, for I was an artiste, a well-known and admired artiste, and here I am now, forsaken and betrayed! Cast aside like a squeezed-out orange!”
“Why did he forsake you?” asked the Countess shyly. In her own mind she seemed but a simple child in the presence of this wild and passionate personality. Yes, he had forsaken her, left her forever, she reflected, and she shuddered at the thought. And now he was dead. At the moment she felt doubtful of the enterprise she had undertaken. “He is dead,” she said in a low voice which vibrated.
“Who?” cried Cara.
“Your friend … Hull!” answered the Countess, preparing to enter sympathetically into the girl’s feelings, the image of Wenk growing yet fainter in her subconscious mind.
But the other exclaimed passionately, “What are you saying? The man I mean is not dead; he is alive, and yet I sit here in prison. Yonder in the town outside he stands, strong as a tower, firm as a rock, I tell you! How can a puny thing like you know what he was? All others were as dirt beneath his feet, and their faithlessness too small a trifle to consider! Hull is dead, but what does that matter? Who cares an atom about him? But that other, the master, the lord, he lives there in the free air, where there is light and love and life … where he might bear to have me lying at his feet, like a rug that only serves to warm his toes. He is the great man, the lord, the master! He is a bear, a lion, a royal Bengal tiger, do you hear? He does not belong to this cold and frosty land; he comes from Bengal, from paradise, from a place I shall never see again! And I—I—am left to linger in this dungeon!”
Suddenly she said, quite calmly and seriously, “Tell me, do you think there are men whose will is so strong that they can break down even these walls when they know how passionately I desire it?”
“There are no such men outside, but within us there are!” answered the Countess, carried away by the vehemence of that passionate storm of feeling which had so lately broken over her. How contemptible it was of her, she thought, to have desired to outwit a human being. She felt mean in her own estimation, and casting all projects and promises to the winds, she began to glow in the presence of this strange personality like the spark of an electric current. “Yes, they are to be found in us!” she repeated.
“He! he! the conqueror!” sang Cara, with a sound of passion in her tone, and in the Countess’s heart, too, there sprang up, like a marble image, the form of the man she had met a few evenings before. On her heart this image was sculptured, and she allowed its impress to recur again and again and remain there.
“Do you love him?” she asked the dancer.
But the other answered, as if brushing away an unconsidered trifle, “I … love? I adore him!”
“I do not love him!” hastily asseverated the Countess, pursuing the mental image she had conjured up. “But yet he is great, superhuman. He is a world in himself. In the midst of this tame
