A Woman's Will Part 55

"And you have a letter from him to-day?" he asked, after a while.

"I have a letter from him almost every day."

He looked down at her with an air of genuine astonishment.

"What can a man of seventy say in a letter almost every day?" he asked.

"He can say a great deal. He wants me to marry him!"

He laughed aloud, and then exclaimed gayly:

"What a great lady you will be! and how nice you will look in your mourning!" and then he threw his cigarette away and laughed afresh.

His laughter was so infectious that she laughed also.

"He writes me how happy I would be with him," she continued merrily; "and he is very positive about it, too. How can he think that I would really wish to marry him?"

"He can think it very well from the newspapers of your land. Is he not a marquis? If I did not love you, I should always have surprise to think that you are an American, and will not let me make you a great lady."

She ignored this speech in its entirety.

"To think," she pursued, "that one cannot travel in a daughterly way with a gentleman of seventy without--"

"Yes," he interrupted, "but that is why it is best not to travel in the charge of gentlemen. One is always so liable to be disagreeably urged to become a marchioness."

She a.s.sented with a thoughtful nod.

"I don't answer all his letters," she said; "I burn them."

"Poor marquis!"

"They are good letters of their kind; but there are a whole lot of things which it does not pay to write to a widow. You can fool a girl, but a widow always knows."

"Does a widow always know?"

"Oh, dear me; yes."

"Then why did you not save the poor marquis his pain?"

"I never dreamed of his feeling that way. How could I? I only thought he was delightful. And always, even the first day at Madame de S----'s, when he said adieu he would kiss my hands in the most adorable Louis XIV. kind of a way."

"And all the while it was in his heart a plot to marry you. You see!"

"Men are so queer," she reflected; "I cannot see why that old gentleman should have wanted to marry me."

"I can," said Von Ibn, dryly; "I can see quite well."

The marquis as a topic of conversation seemed at an end. They were in the h.e.l.lerstra.s.se, going towards the river, and the heaviness which the Isar always cast over her fell down about her spirits.

"Oh, I _cannot_ believe that in forty-eight hours I shall be gone!" she exclaimed suddenly.

"Do not go," he said, tightening his hold upon her arm again; "stay with me."

"I must go," she declared. "I couldn't stay with you, anyway," she added, in a tone of unintended mournfulness.

His mood altered, and the light of a street lamp showed that every tinge of gayety had fled his face.

"You have no will of your own," he said with acerbity; "that Jack has it all. I find you so very weak."

She raised her eyes to his and they looked strangely at one another. The moon was above them, full and beautiful, and the Isar rapids were murmuring their far cry.

"We shall return over the Ludwigsbrucke," he said, and they went down the incline in silence.

She thought vaguely, "I am here now, and _he_ is here! How will it be when I am gone and we are separated forever?" But her brain refused to comprehend--only her heart felt the warmth of his touch upon her sleeve.

So they came down to the bridge, which abuts on an island and accommodates the tram pa.s.sing from the Ostbahnhof to the Marien Platz.

The Isarthor rose up grimly between the city lights and their view.

Above was the golden moon. Behind, the black outlines of the suburb which they had just quitted.

"Let us stop here," he proposed, pausing by the bridge rail, and she stayed her steps in obedience.

It was nearly nine o'clock, and the pa.s.sers-by were few. They had the bridge quite to themselves; the water running beneath murmured gently, but did not interrupt even their unvoiced thoughts.

The man took out his _etui_ and lit another cigarette, sinking his sombre gaze meanwhile deep into the stream below. His companion leaned upon the stone parapet.

And then he sighed most heavily.

"It is the autumn," he said; "all the summer is over. _Tout est fini!_"

There was a profound melancholy in his voice which threw a band of iron about her throat and choked all power of speech out of her. "How little I know last May of what this summer brings," he continued; "I have believe that all summers were to come alike to me."

A tram approached and crossed behind them with a mighty rumble. When all was still he spoke again, and the tone of his voice was childishly wistful.

"I did not know, there in Lucerne, before you came, how happy I might be. You are not so wonderful, but to me you are now a need, like air which I must breathe to live."

There was an anguish underlying his words which set her heart to aching intolerably.

"Oh," she gasped helplessly, "let us walk on! Let us go home! I cannot bear to hear all that again."

She turned to go, but he caught her hand in his.

"I must speak," he said forcefully, though in the lowest possible tones; "it is perhaps the tenth time, but it is certainly the last time. Will you not think once more again of it all, and say here now that you love me?"

He held her hand so tightly that it was impossible for her to withdraw it. She looked up in his face, and the moon showed each the unfeigned feeling of the other.

"You don't know about marriage," she told him with white lips and laboring breath. "One may be very unhappy alone, and there is always the strength to bear, but when you are married and unhappiness comes, there is always that other unhappiness chained to you like a clog, shutting out all joy in the present, all hope in the future; and nothing can help you, and you can help nothing." She stopped and put her hand to her bosom. "Only death can help!" she cried, in a voice as if a physical torture had its grip upon her; "and it is so awful when death alone can help!" She looked at the ground and then up at him. "Oh," she sighed miserably, "how can I dare to go where I may come to that pa.s.s again?

Don't ask that of me."

He turned his face away from her and she felt his fingers loosen, little by little, their clasp upon her arm. Then he loosed her altogether, left her side, moved away a s.p.a.ce, and stood, his head bowed, his eyes bent upon the water. There was a fearful horror of hopelessness in his att.i.tude.