“You are quite decided, then, to break completely with—er—the man concerned? You wrote me to that effect.”
“I am,” she said firmly. “It is not the man I was engaged to,” she added, after a pause.
“Thank God!” he burst out, so relieved that Jenny could not help smiling a little.
“Well, you know, Jenny, he was not worth reproducing—not by you anyway. I saw in the papers recently that he has got his doctor’s degree. Well, it might have been worse—I was afraid. …”
“It is his father,” she said abruptly.
Heggen came to a dead stop. She fell to crying desperately, and he put his arm round her and laid his hand to her cheek while she went on sobbing with her head on his shoulder.
Standing so, she began to tell him all about it. Once she looked up at his face; it was pale and haggard; and she started crying again. When she stopped, he lifted her head, looking at her:
“My God, Jenny—what you must have suffered! I cannot realize it.”
They walked back to the village in silence.
“Come with me to Berlin,” he said suddenly. “I cannot bear to think of you here alone and brooding over this.”
“I have almost given up thinking,” she said, tired.
“Oh, it’s too awful!” he burst out, with such violence that she came to a sudden stop. “Always the best of you that get let in for this kind of thing, and we have no idea of what you have to go through. It is dreadful!”
Heggen stayed three days. Jenny could not explain why, but she felt much better after his visit. The unbearable feeling of humiliation was gone; she was able to face her confinement with more composure and confidence.
Mrs. Schlessinger went about smiling slyly in spite of Jenny’s declaration that the gentleman was her cousin.
He had offered to send her some of his books, and at Christmas a whole case arrived, besides flowers and chocolates. Every week he wrote her a long letter about all manner of trifles, enclosing cuttings from Norwegian papers. In January he came up for her birthday and stayed two days, leaving behind some of the latest Norwegian books. Shortly after his last visit she fell ill. She was poorly, worried, and sleepless during the remaining weeks. She had never busied her thoughts with the actual confinement or been anxious about it before, but, feeling always wretched now, she was seized by a sudden dread of what she had to go through, and when the time came she was quite worn out with insomnia and anxiety.
It was a nasty case. Jenny was more dead than alive when the doctor, who had been sent for from Warnemünde, at last held her son in his hands.
VI
Jenny’s son lived six weeks—exactly forty-four days and a half, she said bitterly to herself, thinking again and again of the short time she had felt really happy.
She did not cry for the first days after his death, but she could not leave the dead child, and sat moaning deep down in her throat and taking it in her arms to caress it:
“Darling little boy—mother’s pretty little boy, you must not go—I cannot let you go. Can’t you see I want you so?”
The child was tiny and feeble at birth, but Jenny and Mrs. Schlessinger had both thought he was thriving and making good progress. Then one morning he fell ill, and by midday it was all over.
After the funeral she started to cry, and could not stop; for weeks afterwards she sobbed unceasingly night and day. She fell ill herself too; inflammation of the breasts developed, and Mrs. Schlessinger had to send for the doctor, who performed an operation. The despair of her soul, together with the pains of her body, gave her many a dreadful, delirious night.
Mrs. Schlessinger slept in the adjoining room, and on hearing her cries of agony, rushed in and sat down by the bed, comforting her, stroking her thin, clammy hands with her own fat, warm ones, and coaxing and lecturing her a little. It was God’s will, and was probably much better for the boy and for her too—still so young as she was. Mrs. Schlessinger had lost two children herself—little Bertha when she was two years old, and Wilhelm at fourteen, such a dear boy too—yet they were born in wedlock and should have been the support and comfort of her old age. But this little one would only have been a chain round the feet of the Fräulein who was so young and pretty. He had been very dear and sweet, the little angel, and it was very hard. …
Mrs. Schlessinger had lost her husband too, and many of the young ladies who had stayed in her house had seen their little ones die; some of them had been pleased, others had put their babies out to nurse at once so as to get rid of them. It was not nice, of course, but what could one do? Some had cried and wailed as Jenny did, but they got over it in time, and married and settled down happily afterwards. But a despair like Fräulein’s she had never yet witnessed.
Mrs. Schlessinger suspected in her heart that her patient’s despair was caused to a great extent by the departure of the cousin first to Dresden and then to Italy just about the time the boy died. But that is exactly what they always did—the men.
The memory of those maddening, agonizing nights was ever afterwards associated with the picture of Mrs. Schlessinger sitting on the stool by her bed while the light rays from the lamp were refracted in the tears dropping from her small, kind eyes on to her round red cheeks. And her mouth, which did not stop talking for a second, her little
