hesitated, and stood undecided, holding the doorhandle. Then, following an impulse, he turned and sat down again. "Madeleine, tell me—I wouldn't ask anyone but you—what sort of a fellow IS this Schilsky?"
"What sort of a fellow?" She laughed sarcastically. "To be quite truthful, Maurice, the best fiddler the Con. has turned out for years."
"Now you're joking again. As if I didn't know that. Everyone says the same."
"You want his moral character? Well, I'll be equally candid. Or, at least, I'll give you my opinion of him. It's another superlative. Just as I consider him the best violinist, I also hold him to be the greatest scamp in the place—and I've no objection to use a stronger word if you like. I wouldn't take his hand, no, not if he offered it to me. The last time he was in this room, about six months ago, he—well, let us say he borrowed, without a word to me, five or six marks that were lying loose on the writing-table. Yes, it's a fact," she repeated, complacently eyeing Maurice's dismay. "Otherwise?—oh, otherwise, he was born, I think, with a silver spoon in his mouth. He has one piece of luck after another. Zeppelin discovered him ten years ago, on a concert-tour—his father is a smith in Warsaw—and brought him to Leipzig. He was a prodigy, then, and a rich Jewish banker took him up, and paid for his education; and when he washed his hands of him in disgust, Schaefele's wife—Schaefele is head of the HANDELVEREIN, you know—adopted him as a son—some people say as more than a son, for, though she was nearly forty, she was perfectly crazy over him, and behaved as foolishly as any of the dozens of silly girls who have lost their hearts to him."
"I suppose they are engaged," said Maurice after a pause, speaking out of his own thoughts.
"Do you?" she asked with mild humour. "I really never asked them.—But this is just another example of his good fortune. When he has worn out every one else's patience, through his dishonest extravagance, he picks up a rich wife, who is not averse to supporting him before marriage."
Maurice looked at her reproachfully. "I wonder you care to repeat such gossip."
"It's not gossip, Maurice. Every one knows it. Louise makes no mystery of her doings—doesn't care that much what people say. While as for him—well, it's enough to know it's Schilsky. The thing is an open secret. Listen, now, and I'll tell you how it began—just to let you judge for yourself what kind of a girl you have to deal with in Louise, and how Schilsky behaves when he wants a thing, and whether such a pair think a formal engagement necessary to their happiness. When Louise came here, a year and a half ago, Schilsky was away somewhere with Zeppelin, and didn't get back till a couple of months afterwards. As I said, I knew Louise pretty well at that time; she had got herself into trouble with—but that's neither here nor there. Well, my lord returns—he himself tells how it happened. It was a Thursday evening, and a Radius Commemoration was going on at the Con. He went in late, and stood at the back of the hall. Louise was there, too, just before him, and, from the first minute he saw her, he couldn't take his eyes off her—others who were by say, too, he seemed perfectly fascinated. No one can stare as rudely as Schilsky, and he ended by making her so uncomfortable that she couldn't bear it any longer, and went out of the hall. He after her, and it didn't take him an hour to find out all about her. The next evening, at an ABEND, they were both there again it was just like Louise to go!—and the same thing was repeated. She left again before it was over, he followed, and this time found her in one of the side corridors; and there—mind you, without a single word having passed between them!—he took her in his arms and kissed her, kissed her soundly, half a dozen times—though they had never once spoken to each other: he boasts of it to this day. That same evening——"
"Don't, Madeleine—please, don't say any more! I don't care to hear it," broke in Maurice. He had flushed to the roots of his hair, at some points of resemblance to his own case, then grown pale again, and now he waved his arm meaninglessly in the air. "He is a scoundrel, a—a——" But he recognised that he could not condemn one without the other, and stopped short.
"My dear boy, if I don't tell you, other people will. And at least you know I mean well by you. Besides," she went on, not without a touch of malice as she eyed him sitting there, spoiling the leaves of a book. "Besides, I may as well show you, how you have to treat Louise, if you want to make an impression on her. You call him a scoundrel, but what of her? Believe me, Maurice," she said more seriously, "Louise is not a whit too good for him; they were made for each other. And of course he will marry her eventually, for the sake of her, money "—here she paused and looked deliberately at him—"if not for her own."
This time there was no mistaking the meaning of her words.
"Madeleine!"
He rose from his seat with such force that the table tilted.
But Madeleine did not falter. "I told you already, you know, that Louise doesn't care what is said about her. As soon as this unfortunate affair began, she threw up the rooms she was in at the time, and moved nearer the TALSTRASSE—where he lives. Rumour has it also that she provided herself with an accommodating landlady, who can be blind and deaf when necessary."
"How CAN you repeat such atrocious scandal?"
He stared at her, in incredulous dismay. Her words were so many arrows, the points of which remained sticking in him.
She shrugged her shoulders. "Your not believing it doesn't affect the truth of the story, Maurice. It was the talk of the place when it happened. And you may despise rumour as you will, my experience is, a report never springs up that hasn't some basis of fact to go on—however small."
He choked back, with an effort, the eloquent words that came to his lips; of what use was it to make himself still more ridiculous in her eyes? His hat had fallen to the floor; he picked it up, and brushed it on his sleeve, without knowing what he did. "Oh, well, of course, if you think that," he said as coolly as he was able, "nothing I could say would make any difference. Every one is free to his opinions, I suppose. But, all the same, I must say, Madeleine"—he grew hot in spite of himself. "You have been her friend, you say; you have known her intimately; and yet just because she … she cares for this fellow in such a way that she sets caring for him above being cautious—why, not one woman in a thousand would have the courage for that sort of thing! It needs courage, not to mind what people—no, what your friends imagine, and how falsely they interpret what you do. Besides, one has only to look at her to see how absurd it is. That face and—I don't know her, Madeleine; I've never spoken to her, and never may, yet I am absolutely certain that what is said about her isn't true. So certain that—But after all, if this is what you think about … about it, then all I have to say is, we had better not discuss the subject again. It does no good, and we should never be of the same opinion."
Not without embarrassment, now that he had said his say, he turned to the door. But Madeleine was not in the least angry. She gave him her hand, and said, with a smile, yet gravely, too: "Agreed, Maurice! We will not speak of Louise again."
V.
He shunned Madeleine for days after this. He was morose and unhappy, and brooded darkly over the baseness of wagging tongues. For the first time in his life he had come into touch with slander, that invisible Hydra, and straightway it seized upon the one person to whom he was not indifferent. In this mood it was a relief to him that certain three windows in the BRUDERSTRASSE remained closed and shuttered; with the load of malicious gossip fresh on his mind, he chose rather not to see her; he must first accustom himself to it, as to the scar left by a wound.
He did not, of course, believe what Madeleine, with her infernal frankness,
