Dreamers of the Ghetto Part 50

In honor of the _fiances_--for such they openly avowed themselves, Geneva and Helene's family being sufficiently distant to be temporarily forgotten--the American Consul at Berne gave a charming dinner. There was a gallant old Frenchman, a honey-tongued Italian, a pervasive air of complimentary congratulation. Helene returned to her hotel, thrilling with pleasure and happy auguries. The night was soft and warm. Before undressing she leaned out of the window of her room on the ground floor, and gazed upon the eternal glaciers, sparkling like silver under the full moon. Through every sense she drank in the mystery and perfume of the night, till her spirit seemed at one with the stars and the mountains. Suddenly she felt two mighty arms clasped about her. La.s.salle stood outside. Her heart throbbed violently.

"Hus.h.!.+" he said, "don't be frightened. I will stay outside here, good and quiet, till you are tired and say, 'Lie down, sir!' Then I will go!"

"My gentle Romeo!" she whispered, and bent her fragrant lips to meet his--the divine kiss of G.o.d and G.o.ddess in the divine night. "My Ferdinand!" she breathed. "If we should be parted after all. I tremble to think of it. My father will never consent."

"He shall consent. And you don't even need his consent. You are of age."

"Then take me now, dear heart. I am yours--your creature, your thing.

Fly away with me, my beautiful eagle, to Paris, to Egypt, where you will. Let us be happy Bohemians. We do not need the world. We have ourselves, and the moonlight, and the mountains."

She was maddening to-night, his _enfant du diable_. But he kept a last desperate grip upon his common sense. What would his friends say if he involved Helene in the scandal of an elopement? What would Holthoff say, what Baron Korff? Surely this was not the conduct that would commend itself to the chivalry and n.o.bility of Berlin! And besides, how could his political career survive a new scandal? He was already sufficiently hampered by his old connection with the Countess, and not even a public acquittal and twenty years had sufficed to lay that accusation of instigating the stealing of a casket of papers from her husband's mistress, which was perhaps the worst legacy of the great Hatzfeldt case. No, he must win his bride honorably: the sanct.i.ties and dignities of wedlock were seductive to the Bohemian in love.

"We shall have ourselves and the world, too," he urged gently. "Let us enter our realm with the six white horses, not in a coach with drawn blinds. Your father shall give you to me, I tell you, in the eye of day. What, am I an advertis.e.m.e.nt canva.s.ser to be shown the door? Shall my darling not have as honorable nuptials as her father's wife. Shall the Elect of the People confess that a petty diplomatist didn't consider him good enough for a son-in-law? Think how Bismarck would chuckle. After all I have said to him!"

Her confidence came back. Yes, one might build one's house on the rock of such a Will! "What have you said to him?"

He laughed softly. "I've let slip a secret, little girl."

"Tell me."

"Incredible! That baby with her little fingers,"--he seized them--"with her fairy paws, she plunges boldly into my most precious secrets, into my heart's casket, picks out the costliest jewel, and asks for it."

"Well, do you like him? Is he an intellectual spirit?"

"Hum! If he is, we are not. He is iron, and of iron we make steel, and of steel pretty weapons; but one can make nothing but weapons. I prefer gold. Gold like my darling's hair"--he caressed it--"like my own magic power over men. You shall see, darling, how your gold and mine will triumph."

"But you also are always speaking of arms, of blood, of battles; and Revolutions are scarcely forged without arms and iron."

"Child, child," he answered, drawing her golden locks to his lips, "why do you wish to learn all in this beautiful starry night? The conquests of thousands of years, the results of profound studies, you ask for as for toys. To speak of battles, to call to arms, is by no means the same thing as to sabre one's fellow, one's brother, with icy heart and bloodstained hand. Don't you understand, sly little thing, of what arms I speak, of the golden weapons of the spirit, eloquence, the love of humanity, the effort to raise to manly dignity the poor, the unfortunate, the workers. Above all, I mean--Will. These n.o.ble weapons, these truly golden weapons, I count higher and more useful than the rusted swords of Mediaevalism."

Her eyes filled with tears. She felt herself upborne on waves of religious emotion towards those s.h.i.+ning stars. The temptation was over.

"Good-night, my love," she said humbly.

He drew her face to his in pa.s.sionate farewell, and seemed as if he would never let her go. When her window closed he strode towards the glaciers.

An adventure next day came to show the conquered Helena that her spiritual giant was no less king of men physically. At the American Consul's dinner an expedition on the Niessen had been arranged. But as the party was returning at nightfall across the fields, and laughing over La.s.salle's sprightly anecdotes, suddenly a dozen diabolical gnomes burst upon them with savage roars and incomprehensible inarticulate jabberings, and began striking at hazard with their short, solid cudgels, almost ere the startled picnickers could recognize in these b.e.s.t.i.a.l creatures, with their enormously swollen heads and horrible hanging goitres, the afflicted idiot peasants of the valley. The gallant Frenchman and the honey-tongued Italian screamed with the women, and made even less play with umbrellas and straps; but La.s.salle fell like a thunderbolt with his Robespierre stick upon the whole band of cretins, and reduced them to howls and bloodstained tears. It was only then that La.s.salle was able to extract from them that the party had trampled over the hay in their fields, and that they demanded compensation. Being given money, they departed, growling and waving their cudgels. When the excursionists looked at one another they found themselves all in rags, and La.s.salle's face disfigured by two heavy blows. Helene ran to him with a cry.

"You are wounded, bruised!"

"No, only one of the towers of the Bastille," he said, ruefully surveying the stick; "the brutes have dinted it."

"And there are people who call him coward because he won't fight duels," thought Helene adoringly.

XIII

The drama s.h.i.+fted to Geneva, where heroine preceded hero by a few hours, charged to be silent till her parents had personally experienced La.s.salle's fascinations. He had scarcely taken possession of his room in the Pension Bovet when a maidservant brought in a letter from Helene, and ere he had time to do more than break the envelope, Helene herself burst in.

"Take me away, take me away," she cried hysterically.

He flew to support her.

"What has happened?"

"I cannot bear it. I cannot fight them. Save me, my king, my master.

Let us fly across the frontier--to Paris." She clung to him wildly.

Sternness gathered on his brow.

"Then you have disobeyed me!" he said. "Why?"

"I have written you," she sobbed.

He laid her gently on the bed, and ran his eye through the long, hysteric letter.

Unhappy coincidence! At Helene's arrival, her whole family had met her joyously at the railway station, overbr.i.m.m.i.n.g with the happy news that her little sister, Marguerite, had just been proposed to by Count Kayserling.

Helene had thought this a heaven-sent opportunity of breaking her own happiness to her radiant mother, foolishly forgetting that the Count Kayserling would be the last man in the world to endure a Jew and a demagogue as a brother-in-law. Terrible scenes had followed--the mother's tears, the father's thunders, the general family wail and supplication, sisters trembling for their prospects, brothers antic.i.p.ating the sneers of club-land. What! exchange Prince Janko for a thief!

Cross-examined by La.s.salle, Helene admitted her mother was not so furious as her father, and had even, weeping on her bosom, promised to try and smooth the Baron down. But she knew that was impossible--her father considered nothing but his egoistic plans. And so, when the dinner-bell was sounding, informed with a mad courage by the thought of her hero's proximity, she had flown to him.

La.s.salle felt that the test-moment of his life had come, and the man of action must rise to it. He scribbled three telegrams--one to his mother, one to his sister, Frau Friedland, and one to the Countess, asking all to come at once.

"You must have a chaperon," he interjected. "And till one of the three arrives, who is there here?"

She sobbed out the address of Madame Rognon. La.s.salle opened the door to hand over the telegrams, and saw the woman who had brought Helene's letter lingering uneasily, and he had the unhappiest yet not least characteristic inspiration of his life. "These to the telegraph office," he said aloud, and in a whisper: "Tell the Baroness von Donniges that we shall be at Madame Rognon's."

For, with lightning rapidity, his brain had worked out a subtle piece of heroic comedy. He would restore Helene to her mother, he would play the grand seigneur, the spotless Bayard, he, the Jew, the thief, the demagogue, the Don Juan; his chivalry would shame this little diplomatist. In no case could they refuse him the girl, she was too hopelessly compromised. All the Pension had seen her--the mother would be shrewd enough to understand that. She must allow the renunciation to remain merely verbal, but the words would sound how magnificent!

The scene was duly played. The bewildered Helene, whom he left in the dark, confused by the unexpected appearance of her mother, was thrown into the last stage of dazed distress by being recklessly restored to the maternal bosom. He kissed her good-bye, and she vanished from his sight for ever.

XIV

For he had reckoned without his Janko, always at hand to cover up a scandal. The Will he had breathed into Helene had been exhausted in the one supreme effort of her life. Sucked up again into the family egotism, kept for weeks under a _regime_ of terror and intercepted letters, hurried away from Geneva; chagrined and outraged, too, by her lover's incomprehensible repudiation of her, which only success could have excused, and which therefore became more unpardonable as day followed day without rescue from a giant, proved merely windbag; she fell back with compunction into the tender keeping of the ever-waiting Janko. The one letter her father permitted her to send formally announced her eternal love and devotion for her former _fiance_.

Profitless to tell the story of how the stricken giant, raving in outer darkness, this Polyphemus who had gouged out his own eye, this Hercules self-invested in the poisoned robe of Nessus, moved heaven and earth to see her again. It was an earthquake, a tornado, a nightmare. He had frenzies of tears, his nights were sleepless reviews of his folly in throwing her away, and vain phantasms of her eyes and lips. He poured out torrents of telegrams and letters, in which cries of torture mingled with minute legal instructions. The correspondence of the Working-Men's Union alone was neglected. He pressed everybody and anybody into his feverish service--musicians, artists, soldiers, antiquarians, aristocrats. Would not Wagner induce the King of Bavaria to speak to von Donniges? Would not the Catholic Bishop Ketteler help him?--he would become a Catholic. And ever present an insane belief in the reality of her faithlessness, mockingly accompanied by a terribly lucid recognition of the instability of character that made it certain. The "No"--her first word to him at their first meeting--resounded in his ears, prophetically ominous. The sunrise, hidden by rain and mist, added its symbolic gloom. But he felt her lips on his in the marvellous moonlight; a thousand times she clung to him crying, "Take me away!" And now she was to be another's. She refused even to see him. Incredible! Monstrous! If he could only get an interview with her face to face. Then they would see if she was resisting him of her own free will or under pressure illegal for an adult. It was impossible his will-power over her should fail.

Helene evidently thought so too. By fair means and foul, by spies and lawyers and friendly agents, La.s.salle's frenzied energy had penetrated through every defence to the inmost entrenchment where she sat cowering. He had exacted the father's consent to an interview. Only Helene's own consent was wanting. His friend Colonel Rustow brought the sick Hercules the account of her refusal--a refusal which made ridiculous his moving of mountains.

"But surely you owe La.s.salle some satisfaction," he had protested.

"To what? To his wounded vanity?"

It was the last straw.

"Harlot!" cried La.s.salle, and as in a volcanic jet, hurled her from his burning heart.