stopped again. His friend's silence seemed to check his utterance. For a time nothing was to be heard around them but the splashing of the little fountain, and from the window above them the notes of the battle-painter's flute, every little while dying dismally away.
Suddenly the sculptor stood still.
"And does your fiancée agree to this project?"
"My fiancée? What in the world puts that question into your head?"
"Because, although I never answered your letters, I remember them all very well. Is it possible that you too do not remember what you wrote me three years ago, under the seal of the deepest--"
"So I did do it then!" cried the young man with a short, abrupt laugh. "So I did chatter, did I? I assure you, my dear Hans, I was myself doubtful how far I had initiated you--you, the only one before whom I ever lifted even a corner of the veil from this veiled picture. After awhile--as you sent no congratulations--I began to persuade myself that I had kept a quiet tongue in my head, even with you; and, in truth, that would have been the best thing to do. Then I should have escaped the full confession that it is hard enough for me to make--and after all, it is perfectly superfluous. For how shall I--who am no poet, and who am besides an interested party in the transaction--how shall I describe the persons concerned so that you will understand how it all came about--how it was partly the fault of both--and yet how both are innocent, after all?
"But if you must have it, let it be so--as briefly as possible.
"I came back, then, to my native town, to pay the last honors to my good old father. You know what an unhomelike home I had always found it. The capital of a third-class Duodezstaat--thank your good star that you have no idea what it means. My father before me had suffered under the absurd despotism of this court-etiquette, this endlessly-branching, complicated, spun-out primeval jungle of dry genealogical trees--under these ridiculous traditions of a worm-eaten bureaucracy. He was a man of quite another type--a sturdy, stately country noble, of the most exclusive and most independent spirit; and since the death of my mother--who could not of course withdraw herself so entirely from her family connections--he had lived on our own estate, altogether apart from 'society.' Then came his death; and I--looked upon askance even as a boy because of my likeness to my father, and almost given up as far as a career at court or in politics was concerned--I believe no cock would have crowed at it, if I had once for all acknowledged that I was my father's true heir in this respect also, and had forever turned my back on the spot where I was cradled. But, much as I felt inclined to do so, it fell out otherwise."
He put his hand into his pocket and took out a little memorandum-book.
"You shall have the romance in an illustrated edition," he said, with a rather forced attempt at jesting. "See, it was this little person's fault that I thought for a while it was really my calling to be a useful citizen--chamberlain to his Highness--by and by master of the hunt--court marshal--heaven knows what all. Is not that a face that could persuade one of anything, and could turn a head that never sat very firmly? And that is only a commonplace photograph, and three years old; and besides, in these three years the wicked child has learned all manner of witches' arts; and the eyes that here in the photograph look so still and fixed--half curious, half timid, as if they were looking at a theatre-curtain that would not go up--I can tell you, my dear boy, they look into the world now with such a queenly confidence and dignity that it fairly--but that is no part of our present talk. And at that time, when the misfortune happened and I lost my heart to the child, the little thing was hardly more than a schoolgirl, just sixteen years old; and shy, silent and unformed as a young bird. We had known each other since we were children--she is some sort of a cousin, seventeen times removed--just as all good families with us are related in some way. I had not the least idea, however, of visiting her, until her uncle, with whom she lived--her parents died when she was very young--until this jovial gentleman came to make me a visit of condolence. Of course I had to return it, and it was on this occasion that I first saw the slender, pale, large-eyed child, with her exquisite, tight-shut red lips and her ravishing, tiny little ears.
"Soon afterward I went away again, and only after a year had passed--after the infernal examination that I would not shirk, in spite of my freedom, lest it should seem as though I were afraid of it--only then, when she was seventeen years old, did I see her again. While I was away, a recollection of her had come back to me from time to time; suddenly, in the midst of altogether different things, I had seen something flitting before me that resembled nothing but her slight and somewhat spare figure, about which there was one trait that always seemed to me especially charming--that though she was perhaps not quite tall enough, her little form was always so haughty and erect and so delicately and perfectly balanced on its slender pedestal. Sometimes, too, her eyes met me in a fairly ghost-like fashion, when I was among my comrades or alone out of doors. And yet I had never exchanged ten words with her.
"And now, when I found her again, a year older and suddenly developed into a young woman--no, Hans, you need not fear that I am shamelessly going to put our whole love-story at your mercy, here in the bright morning sunlight. Enough to say that it had fared much the same with her, as far as my worthy self was concerned, as with me in respect to her. We saw that we were meant for one another, as people say--without ever thinking how much is meant by the words.
"Well! everything would have been well enough; the match seemed as bien assortie as could possibly have been wished even in such an aristocratic and cosmopolitan capital as ours. If we had only married at once, on the spur of the moment, we should have been just the people--she with her seventeen years, and I with my three or four-and-twenty--to be altogether suited to one another, and, as time went on, to so round off the very perceptible and serious corners and sharpnesses of our two temperaments, that finally it would have been a thoroughly happy marriage. But, unfortunately, Irene's mother had married at seventeen, and attributed her lifelong invalidism--for she was a delicate creature and always remained so--to this early marriage. When she died--still very young--she charged her husband solemnly that he should not let their only daughter marry before she was twenty; and the uncle, who afterward filled a father's place to my sweetheart, considered himself absolutely bound by this inherited pledge. I must wait patiently, therefore, for three whole years. And as he was a bachelor, and his niece had no chaperon to call upon but a former servant, I was required to pledge myself to avoid all companionship with my betrothed during this long probation, and only to carry on my courtship by letter; so that every temptation to seek to shorten the time of waiting might be put a stop to once for all.
"You can imagine what my feelings were when the old gentleman told me all this. To decree a three years' banishment just because we should give him trouble--because he hated responsibility, and because he believed, as an old hand at love-making, that this was the best way to protect lovers against themselves! But, jovial as his manner was, he was an uncompromising egotist where his own quiet and comfort were concerned. And I was too stubborn and too proud to make any supplications, and too sure of myself and my sweetheart to fear the length of the interval; which did not seem to me at first glance so intolerable as I often felt it afterward--in sighs and misery.
"My sweetheart, too, threw back her little head and said: 'Yes, we will wait.'--Afterward, it is true, when it came to our last parting, she fell out of my arms as though she were dead, and I thought she would never open her eyes again. Even now I don't know how I succeeded, in spite of it all, in tearing myself away.
"And this three years' separation itself! If I had only been a man of sense--that is, if I had been another than myself--I should have settled down somewhere in Germany, and taken up some task at which I could have worked myself tired--to fight down my unprofitable lover's-melancholy. Why could not I devote my three years to making myself a perfect agriculturist, or a prominent jurist, or a politician, or something that is of some use in the world? To make one's self so completely master of some department of life or knowledge that one knows every square foot of it is rather an absurd and commonplace consolation, to be sure; but it is
