Only a Girl Part 80

"Stay, Kathchen," said Ernestine, "I will go up to Herr Leonhardt myself and see what he is doing."

And she took Father Leonhardt's arm, and with him ascended the narrow staircase.

Walter sprang up, with flushed cheeks, when Ernestine and his father entered his room.

"Have you come all the way up here?" he exclaimed, "you, before whom I stand humbly as a mere pupil,--revering you almost as the very personification of Science?"

"Do not speak thus, Walter,--you do not know what you are saying. I have, through much pain, obtained the victory over self, and will content myself with my lot as a woman, but I am weak, and such speeches might easily arouse again within me the demon of ambition. Yon mean it kindly, but, now that I stand on the borders of the realm I have forsaken, I must not listen to any voice recalling me to that dear old home. I have come to take leave of you. Your father will tell you wherefore and whither I am going."

"Oh, Fraulein Ernestine, are you going away? and are you going to give up your studies too?"

"I must resign them, Walter, or at least all scientific pursuits. My knowledge must be to me now a means of support, and in these days it can serve me only in the position of a governess. I must content myself with teaching in a girls' school. Men do not want women for professors, and no man wants a professor for a wife. The world is not what I dreamed,--there is no place in it for a woman's efforts, and I am too weak to create one for myself."

"What a shame it is," said Walter, "that such a woman should need to create a place for herself! she should be placed upon a pedestal and wors.h.i.+pped, if only for the sake of such a mind in such a body."

Leonhardt laid his hand in warning upon the boy's arm.

"Father, I must speak," he went on. "I must give some relief to the indignation that fills me at the idea of such a nature's being condemned to contend in the world for the bare means of subsistence."

Ernestine hid her face in her hands, and sighed heavily.

Leonhardt shook his head disapprovingly at his son. "It is not kind, Walter, to make the sacrifice harder than it need be. Ernestine is and always must be n.o.ble, and never was she n.o.bler than in her present resolution. We cannot change the world, Walter, and Ernestine is a woman,--she must submit."

"Yes, submit!" she repeated, and there was a keener pain in her accents.

"Fraulein Ernestine," Walter implored her, "forgive me if I have revived buried griefs. I meant well,--I cannot tell you what pain it gives me to see you giving up what is so dear to you, and for me your going is like the departure of his muse to the poet,--the vanis.h.i.+ng of his saint to the rapt devotee."

"Walter," Ernestine said gravely, "your words tempt me sorely, but, I hope, for the last time. I will resist them, and when you are older you will know why I do so. You are very young, Walter. It is not long, scarcely six weeks, since I was so too. In this short time I have grown older by six years, and the world and mankind are changed in my eyes,--I must struggle now for the simple means of subsistence."

She went to the bookshelves, on which the bright rays of the sun were just falling. "Yes, dear old Darwin, your famous name still s.h.i.+nes brightly upon me. I now begin to understand you and to appreciate the sublime import of your teachings."

She held out her hand to Walter, with tears in her eyes. "Thank you for the opportunity of trying my strength for one moment. It has been a melancholy satisfaction. A bright future is before you; if I have contributed in a degree to the realization of your hopes in life, I will descend cheerfully from the heights I dreamed of,--I have not lived in vain. I must go."

She looked around the room. Wherever her glance fell, it rested upon some of her books or instruments. "Keep all these things for me, Walter,--perhaps I may reclaim them at some future day." Again tears filled her eyes. She knew she was never again to possess, what had been so long the sole joy of her life, the companions of her labours. "No, let them go. I release from my service the spirits prisoned in these instruments that have brought the stars near to me and revealed the hidden mysteries of the earth to my asking eyes. They can serve me no longer,--I must return to the every-day world,--the spell is broken,--knowledge and sight are mine no longer."

She left the room noiselessly, and her old friend followed her.

A quarter of an hour later, the carriage rolled away from the school-house towards the castle, and the Leonhardts, father and son, stood on the threshold, the one gazing after the distant carriage, the other listening intently to the last sound of its wheels.

Ernestine, sunk in thought, was leaning back in the vehicle, when she suddenly called to the coachman to stop. They were just pa.s.sing the church.

"Stay here and wait for me," she said to Gretchen. "I must go in here for a moment."

She got out, and went to the door, which stood ajar. Her hand lingered on the latch. What impelled her thus irresistibly to enter this poor little village church?--Memory! Like a painted curtain, all the events, thoughts, experiences, of the last ten years were hung around the low portal. Again she stood before the church-door of her northern home, a trembling, longing, doubting, despairing child. "Enter, and learn to kneel," the same voice within that spoke then was speaking now. And she entered, softly and timidly. It was empty and quiet,--the people were all at their work. The floor between the benches was strewn with green box twigs from the last holiday, and the atmosphere was filled with the odour of incense. Through the painted window the sun threw many-coloured rays upon a picture of the Virgin. A swallow, scared from his summer's nest in the dome, flew circling above Ernestine's head, like the dove of the Holy Spirit. Ernestine slowly pa.s.sed the quiet confessionals, where so many sorrow-laden hearts had unburdened themselves of their weight of woe and received forgiveness in the name of the Lord. She thought with compa.s.sion of the c.u.mbrous formalities that separated these wandering souls from their hope and trust.

"Straight to Him," breathed the voice within, and she pa.s.sed with quickened steps over the soft, leaf-strewn floor, directly to the altar. Was it the same at which she had knelt and wept ten years before? Whether it were or not. He was the same Divine One whose image looked down from the cross, touching her heart now as it had touched it then. She knew now that she had but completed a circle, and had come back to the point at which she had been ten years before.

And she extended her arms and fell upon her knees. "Father," she cried, "I have come back,--receive me! ah, receive me!"

CHAPTER XI.

"GIVE US THIS DAY OUR DAILY BREAD."

"What a hard winter we are having!" said Ernestine to herself, looking thoughtfully out through the dim panes of the little window by which she was sitting, upon the roofs of the houses that bounded her prospect. They were covered with snow, that lay thick also on the outside window-sill. She sat with her hands wrapped in her cotton ap.r.o.n. "Well, I wanted to know everything,--why not poverty, and hunger, and cold,--the mighty foes with which humanity is always contending? I could philosophize excellently well upon abstinence in a warm room, by a well-spread table, and am I to shrink now? No, no! no living soul shall ever hear me ask for help."

She stood up, and walked firmly to and fro.

The room was a gloomy garret, a kind of kitchen,--at all events, there was a cooking-stove in it, and a cupboard containing articles of crockery. The floor was paved with stone.

Ernestine's feet were bitter cold. "I wonder what o'clock it is," she thought. "The postman ought to be here soon. It is terrible to have nothing to mark the time."

She listened to catch the striking of a church-clock--going to the window and letting her eyes wander over the white roofs in search of a distant tower. There was no sun visible through the snowy air. It was a genuine winter's day.

At a window just opposite, a little boy breathed upon the frosty pane and made two round peep-holes, through which a pair of blue eyes beamed at her. She nodded to them--she knew the pretty child well. The little head behind the peep-holes nodded in its turn. She thought of Little Kay and her northern winter. Then the snow before the window rose like white clouds hiding the prospect, and, gradually taking a human shape clothed in wide flowing robes, that began to sparkle and glitter as if strewn with diamonds, and a veil of frozen gossamer fluttered in the air. And beneath the veil there looked at her through the window a white face, with fixed transparent eyes like crystal, and upon the beautiful brow was a diadem of icicles made of the tears of all who had perished in the ice and snow since the world was made, and of all who starve and freeze in winter-time,--a diadem richer in pearls than that of any earthly monarch. The mighty form had on one arm a s.h.i.+eld,--but it was a plate of the ice upon which had been wrecked the s.h.i.+ps that sought to penetrate the inhospitable kingdom of the Snow-queen around the north pole. With the other hand she was leading away the little boy from over the way,--she longed for some coral to adorn her colourless robes, for a few drops of warm human blood. It was the Snow-queen of the fairy-dreams of Ernestine's childhood. But she was more majestic and gloomy than formerly, and she spoke other words to her now:

"I know you,--you never feared me as you do now that you have no warm roof, no firm walls, to protect you from my icy breath. But I will not harm you,--you belong to those who believe in the future of my dominion, who know that in thousands and thousands of years it must spread over the whole world, when all this swarming life will have pa.s.sed to other spheres. Then my time will come,--there will be quiet, eternal icy quiet, here below,--and I will laugh at the old extinguished sun, glimmering like a burnt-out coal and envying me my diamond palace which he can no longer melt away."

Thus spoke the Snow-queen to the dreaming woman of science, and there was a cold pain at her heart,--sorrow for the end of Being here below, sorrow at "the judgment-day of an eternal glacial period," as Du Bois has it.

The Snow-queen had vanished, and Little Kay with her,--a thick snow-storm hid from view the path that she had taken.

Slowly and weakly, as if the clock were frozen and could thaw only by degrees, twelve o'clock struck from the church-tower.

Ernestine did not hear it. She sat with her head leaning against the window. The voice of the Snow-queen sounded in her ears, "Open your eyes, and see!"

And she opened her eyes, and saw across billions of years. The sun, its fires only dimly burning, hung, a b.l.o.o.d.y disk in the skies, heavy brooding clouds were tinged with dull red, and twilight rested over the cold earth. Upon its hardened surface only a few wretched imbruted creatures crawled, seeking to sustain life upon the scanty remains of a decaying vegetation.

Sadly Ernestine closed her eyes upon the painful picture.

But she was again commanded to look abroad. Centuries swept on, and all grew darker and colder. The red disk faded, and all colour with it.

Ernestine marked it all vanish in a dull gray. Weary with fruitless struggle, the last remains of organic life lay down in eternal rest.

It was night at last. Still the earthly sphere performed its appointed circuit around the charred ma.s.s that was once its sun. But the mighty firmament was clear and cloudless,--the lifeless earth exhaled no mists to obscure the light of the distant stars, which revealed to Ernestine immeasurable depths and immense heights of frozen seas and oceans amid eternal repose,--the world was only a gigantic memorial of things that were.

"But where, and in what guise, are the transformed forces of this spent world now lingering?" asked Ernestine. "Nothing in the great Universe is lost."

"Ah! good heavens I here you are sitting dreaming in this cold kitchen!" suddenly said a clear, bright voice. "No fire on the hearth,--no dinner made; or, let me see,--yes,--but how? Burnt to a cinder. My dear Ernestine, what have you been doing?"

Ernestine had sprang up, and was staring at the speaker as if she had come from another world.

Gretchen, for she it was, laid aside a couple of schoolbooks that she had under her arm, threw off her cloak and hood, and busied herself with the neglected soup. "I understand,--first you kindled a huge fire, and then never thought of it again. The soup is not skimmed, and the beef is burned, and yet half raw. Yon cannot have looked at it for at least an hour."

"It is such a pity that we had to sell my watch," Ernestine excused herself. "I never know now how the time goes."

"Nonsense!" said Gretchen, "you can surely tell without a watch whether the soup boils and the fire burns or not. Only try, and all will go right. You have often proved that you can really cook quite well if you will only take pains. But I cannot trust you with soup and beef again,--you forget everything when once you begin to dream."