"If the gentleman would have the goodness--I should be very glad to see him--very glad!"
She stood in the middle of the room as he entered. Her beautiful face had struggled hard to assume its coldest and haughtiest expression. But with the first look that she cast upon the visitor, the armor of ice that she had fastened about her bosom melted away.
For, in fact, a very different man from the one she had expected stood before her. Where was the confident smile that sought to make the matter appear in the light of a jest, or even of an act of homage? Where the confidence with which the famous master reckons upon absolution for the sin of having made an unknown beauty immortal?
It was true, he did not appear quite like a penitent malefactor. Erect, and with a scarcely perceptible inclination of the head, he saluted her, and his eyes did not avoid hers; on the contrary, they even dwelt upon her features with so gloomy a fire that she involuntarily lowered her eyelids, and asked herself in secret whether she was not the guilty one after all, since this man appeared before her so sad and melancholy.
"Gnädiges Fräulein," he said, "I have given you reason to be very angry with me. I merely come to inform you that the cause of your displeasure is already removed. If you were willing to visit my atelier again--which, unfortunately, I must doubt--you would see in the place where your own features confronted you this morning nothing but a shapeless mass."
"You have--you really ought to have--"
"I have done at once what I owed to you, in order that you might not form a wrong opinion of me. Sooner or later I should have had to do it in any case--even though no one had urged me to it. I wish sincerely that you would believe me when I say this--though I scarcely dare to hope so, since you do not know me--and are perhaps still too angry with me not to--not to believe me capable of any piece of discourtesy."
"I?--I confess--I have until now thought neither well nor ill of--"
She did not complete the sentence--she felt that she blushed, as she tried to assure him of her complete indifference--three steps from the drawer where her confessions were lying.
"I know it," continued he; and his dark glance wandered over the dimly-lighted room. "I am so perfectly indifferent to you, that it must, after all, be very easy for you to pardon something that cannot have awakened any very strong personal feeling in your mind. One who is entirely unknown to us cannot insult us. When he has taken back again that with which he has wounded us, it is as if nothing had happened. And so I might perhaps take my leave of you, gnädiges Fräulein, with the renewed assurance of my sincere regret that I have unconsciously offended you."
She made a scarcely perceptible motion toward the sofa, as if she would invite him to be seated. He was much too occupied with his own thoughts to pay any attention to it.
"Perhaps it is folly," continued he, after a pause--"perhaps more than that--wrong, if I intrude any longer, and give you an explanation for which you have no desire, and which will perhaps strike you disagreeably, since it turns upon something that cannot but be a matter of perfect indifference to you: not much more interesting than if you should hear there had been a thunderstorm at a place forty miles away, and that the lightning had struck a tree. Still--now that I have acknowledged my wrong and have done all in my power to make it good again--I owe it to myself not to permit you to take a worse view of me than I have really deserved. When, before a court of justice, one can put forth the plea of mental irresponsibility, it is considered the most important of all mitigating circumstances. Now this is just the case in which I find myself placed in regard to you. I can plead, as an excuse for the insane thought of giving your features to my Eve, the fact that since I first saw you I have actually been insane; that waking or dreaming no other face floated before me except yours; that I have gone about as if in a fever, and that I knew no better way of dealing with my hopeless passion than by striving, shut up alone in my workshop, to reproduce your face--and wretchedly enough did I succeed!"
He made a movement as though he were about to leave her; but once again he remained where he was, and appeared to be struggling painfully for words.
"You are silent, Fräulein," he continued. "I know you think it very strange that I should endeavor to atone for a great and almost unpardonable act of audacity, by committing a still greater one. Perhaps you will not believe me, or will consider me a raving madman for betraying to you, after so short an acquaintance, a passion that has carried me beyond all bounds of propriety and decorum. But you would judge differently, if you knew in what dreariness and isolation of heart I have passed the five years since I came to Munich; that not an hour's happiness has been vouchsafed to me; that no womanly being capable of awakening a single deeper thought has come near me. It is true I have not thought it worth my while to seek for such companionship. I have deluded myself with the idea that I missed nothing, that my heart and feelings did not hunger and thirst--until you suddenly crossed my path--and then this sudden vision of beauty and grace, coming as it did after long loneliness, brought about an intoxication that has completely robbed me of my senses.
"I doubt whether this explanation will be clear to you. I know nothing more of you than your enthusiastic friend, our good Angelica, has told us. Perhaps you may never have had any experience yourself that would lead you to believe that a passion which bursts so suddenly upon reasonable men could be found anywhere but in a fairy tale. Enough, I thought I owed it to myself to tell you of this fact, merely as a singular instance that need trouble you no farther. And now, permit me to take my leave. I--I should really have nothing more to tell you, and as for you--I find it no more than right that you should prefer to reply only by silence to such singular and extraordinary disclosures."
"No," she cried suddenly, as he already had his hand upon the door-knob; "it is not so right as you think, for one to tell all that he has upon his heart, while the other only accepts it all, and gives no confidence in return. To be sure, I know very well--I must attribute much of what you have confided to me to the easily-excited fantasy of an artist. Nevertheless, I am not so vain as not to imagine that in the course of five years you have never encountered a face fairer and more blooming than this of mine, that I have now borne about with me for full thirty-one. And for that reason I am almost forced to believe that there really is a secret bond of fate that quickly draws two human beings together in an altogether inexplicable way. For see--" she continued, covered with a confusion that only made her more beautiful, as she opened the drawer of her writing-desk and drew forth her diary--"I, too, although I perhaps knew less of you than you of me--I, too, have often had you with me in my thoughts--and since you have destroyed again the image that you took from me without my knowledge, ought not I also to destroy those pages in which you are spoken of--"
She made a gesture as if she were about to tear out the pages. In an instant he had sprung to her side and had seized firm hold of her hand.
"Julie!" he cried, as if beside himself; "is it true--is it possible? Your thoughts were with me?--and in these pages--I beseech you, let me have but one look--only let me see one line, so that I shall not think that you have invented all this in order to give me comfort, and to relieve me from my shame--"
"Shame!" she whispered. "But cannot you see that in spite of my thirty-one years I am trembling like a child detected in some naughtiness? Must I really read aloud to you out of this book what you--what you might long ago have guessed from my silence--if you had not been trembling so yourself?"
The last words died away on her lips. The book slipped from her hands and fell on the carpet, where it lay without his bending to pick it up.
A kind of stupor had come over him. He seized both her hands and clasped them so tightly that it pained her; but the pain did her good. His face was so near hers that she could see every muscle