“I am delighted to offer a humble theme to so lofty an artistic imagination as undoubtedly inspires Fräulein von Wallbach,” answered Giraldi.
“I think we must be going,” said Frau von Wallbach, with an absent look at the ceiling.
“Good heavens! !” cried Carla, starting up; “how time flies in such interesting company!”
The company dispersed; Giraldi, who had gone with them to the door, came back slowly, his head raised, his dark eyes gleaming with triumph, and a smile of contempt curling his lip. Suddenly, in the centre of the room, he stood still, and for a moment his face grew dark as night, but the next he was smiling again, and with a smile he asked:
“Is that the look of a victor after the battle?” Valerie had sunk back, with closed eyes, utterly exhausted in her chair, believing that he had left the room. At the first sound of his voice she started.
“Which you have won!”
“For you!”
He bent down to her as he had done before and raised her hand to his lips.
“My lady’s hand is cold, however warm I know her heart to be. The noise of the battle is not fit for her sensitive nerves. We must take care that she retires betimes to a quieter spot, where she may await the end in peace.”
“What do you mean?” asked Valerie with a smile, though a shudder ran through her.
“It is a plan which has just taken shape in my mind, and which—but no, not now, when you need repose! not now; tomorrow, perhaps, when these eyes may shine more boldly, when the blood will run more warmly in this dear hand—the day after tomorrow—there is no hurry; you know that Gregorio Giraldi does not make his plans for a day.”
“I know it,” answered Valerie.
He now really left the room; Valerie listened, she heard his door shut, she was alone. She rose trembling limbs and tottered to the chair in which Elsa had sat, and there fell upon her knees, pressing her forehead against the back.
“And Thou knowest it, Almighty God! Thou hast sent me Thy angel, in token of Thy grace and mercy. I will trust in Thee faithfully. Thou wilt not suffer that this tyrant shall destroy Thy beautiful world.”
VI
Autumn had come, and was boisterously asserting his authority; the weather was dark and gloomy, even in Reinhold’s eyes. “The gloomiest and darkest I ever experienced,” he said each morning to himself as the same spectacle always presented itself when he opened his window: dark, lowering clouds, trees swaying to and fro, from whose branches blustering winds were stripping the brown leaves and whirling them through the moist, foggy atmosphere across the roofs of the workshops, which looked so drenched and miserable that one would only have expected tombstones to be made there.
“And yet I have got through darker and gloomier days without losing heart,” philosophised Reinhold further; “it is not the weather out of doors, it is that whichever way I turn I see people in need and trouble, as if I were on board a ship that must sink shortly and could do nothing to save it, but must sit with my hands before me, and look on idly at the catastrophe.”
Reinhold could do nothing; of that he had only too soon convinced himself ever since that terrible morning when the General had come to his room, and in the deepest agitation, which even his iron strength could hardly master, had informed him of the conversation he had just had with Herr Schmidt, and its miserable results.
“I made every advance to your uncle,” said the General, “which was possible to a man of honour. I offered to him and to your family the reparation which, at least in the eyes of the world, would put everything straight, and would secure to the young people the possibility of that happiness which they have so recklessly pursued. If they will find it in this way, God only knows, but that is their affair, and must be theirs. What I feel about it, what hopes I bury here, what a sacrifice I make of my personal convictions, is a matter that lies between my God and me. May God guide your uncle’s heart, that he may put his trust in Him, as I do, in the inward conviction that our own wisdom will not help us here. I have come to you, my dear Schmidt, to say all this to you, not that I wish that you should try to influence your uncle; according to my judgment of him, that would be labour lost; but because I cannot endure the thought of being wrongly judged by a man whom we all think so highly of, and who, besides, is connected with me as a brother soldier, even if only for a short time.”
Reinhold had, notwithstanding, followed the impulse of his heart, and attempted the impossible. He had been, for the first time since they had been together, harshly repulsed by his uncle, and had been forced to own to himself that neither he nor any other man could persuade the fiery-tempered old man to retract a decision once made “because he must.” But when Aunt Rikchen, unable to rest from fear of the terrible something in the air which yet she could not comprehend, found Ferdinanda an hour later lying senseless on the floor of her studio; when the unfortunate girl was raving in high fever, and the family doctor came and went with anxious looks, and soon returned in company with a colleague, and in the evening the two were joined by a third physician, who seemed no less helpless before this strange seizure—then, when Reinhold’s first words, “It will kill her!” seemed likely to be so terribly soon fulfilled, he bethought himself of the General’s fervent prayer that God might guide his uncle’s heart, and sought his uncle, who had not left his room again since the
