“You will not lose my love,” said Elsa, “whatever you may confide to me, that I swear to you!”
“Do not swear it; you cannot. See, I feel even now, how your dear hands tremble, how your whole body shakes, how you are struggling to keep calm, and as yet you have heard nothing.”
“How can I be calm when you are so terribly excited?” answered Elsa. “Look, aunt, I have long felt that something lies between you and me, something more than the unhappy family dissensions, so far as I know them—a secret which you have not ventured to tell me. I have often and often longed to beg you to tell me all, but have never had the courage to do so, though I have reproached myself for not having done it. But lately it has seemed to me that you have been more reserved towards me than at first, and that has made me still more anxious. And I also had a secret on my mind, and did not venture to confess my love to you, notwithstanding that every hour I spend with you only makes me more certain that you—you above all others—would be just in the position to set aside the prejudice with which even my dear father is surrounded. Shall I confess it to you? Your relations with—with Signor Giraldi, however much you must have suffered and still must suffer from them—have seemed to me on this account to be comforting and encouraging. Whether you approve of my love or not, you will at least understand it, will be able to sympathise with what you must once have felt yourself, that one may love a man for himself alone, because one sees in him the ideal of all that appears to oneself to be worth loving. And now chance, if it is not wrong to speak of chance here, has snatched my secret from me. Take courage! Have confidence. Tell me all. You say it is the right moment, and it certainly is so. It must not be let slip. And now, dear aunt, rise up, and if I really am, as you said the first moment we met and now repeat again—your guardian angel, let me prove it—let me prove that in the midst of the happiness of my love for the best and noblest of men, I have the strength to free you, to restore to you the peace and joy for which your soul pines.”
With gentle violence Elsa raised up her aunt, whose head had sunk upon her bosom, dried the tears on the lovely pale face, which seemed already somewhat calmer and more composed, threw her arms round her and made her lie down on the sofa, reseating herself on the stool by her side, after she had put the lamp out of the way on the console.
“I can only confess by the light of your dear eyes,” said Valerie. “From any other my secret would creep back into my heart.”
Outside the storm raged and thundered against the old castle, in long, unequal gusts, and whistled and howled round the walls, between the gables, as if wild with fury at meeting with resistance, and at this resistance defying its omnipotence.
“So will he rage,” said Valerie, shuddering, “when he comes tomorrow and demands his victim, and she does not and will not follow him, if he does his worst, even if he annihilates her.
“Yes, Elsa, he is coming tomorrow; I found the letter when we came in. The diabolical scheme is ripe, which is to be the destruction of you, Ottomar—all of you. I myself only partly know this scheme. Hard as his heart is, he has yet discovered that my heart has gone from him—how much, how entirely, he does not know, he does not even suspect, or she whom he once loved as well as he is capable of loving, and who so passionately loved him, would certainly no longer be alive. Yes, my dearest Elsa, I must begin with this terrible confession, or you would not understand the worse things that remain for me to tell. You would look upon me as the most degraded of our sex; even your loving heart could not absolve me—if indeed it ever can do so!
“I loved him with an infinite, unholy love, the fiend, who to this day entraps all who come under his pernicious influence, and whom you must have known in the beauty and lustre of his youth, to conceive how even good women found it hard to resist his fascinations.
“I was not absolutely bad, but neither was I good—not in my heart at least, which longed eagerly for fuller joy; nor was my imagination so pure as not to be allured and captivated by the world and its glory. I may have been so unhappily constituted by nature, or the frivolity and luxury of the court life to which I was so early introduced may have corrupted my young heart, I do not know, but so it was that my heart and imagination were alike undisciplined and uncontrolled. How otherwise could it have been that the bride, whose wedding was to take place in a few weeks, fell desperately in love in one moment with a man whom she saw for the first time, and against whom, moreover, even her dulled conscience warned her, and that, in spite of all and of the utter hopelessness of this passion which she could not tear from her heart and—shame and misery!—with this passion for a stranger in her heart, she stood with her betrothed, in God’s sight, before the altar, to plight him that troth which she had already broken in her heart, and which, indeed, she had already more than half resolved to break in reality.
“Do you shudder, my poor darling? I can tell you she had friends who
