A Woman's Will - Anne Warner (english novels for students txt) 📗

to love, she wrote me many letters, she became most miserable; but for me nothing mattered. Because I could not care more.”

Her laughter continued spasmodically in spite of her struggles to check it. But between the paroxysms she gasped:

“I never tried--to make you love me. I never wanted you to come where I did--”

“But now that I am all yours,” he interrupted, “now that nothing is left for me, but you--” He paused. “What will I do now?” he added, asking the question with a simplicity at once boyish and heartrending.

She was silent; her laughter had ceased. He came close to her and took her hand again within his own. And then in the darkness beside him he suddenly heard the bursting misery of her sobs.

“You weep,” he cried.

“No,” she whispered faintly, “no.”

“You weep,” he repeated slowly, and gathered her warmly and closely within his arms.

“What is it necessary that we suffer?” he asked her softly. “Let us cease struggling, let us be only happy,” and then he bent his head so that his cheek touched hers, and waited for the words of her answer. “Your heart is very near mine,” he whispered to her silence, “let it stay near mine, let it rest mine.” Still she was silent. “_N’est-ce pas?_” he asked, pressing her closer yet.

To her, at that instant, the darkness was flashing with strange lights, the silence was roaring in thunder, the trees charging and whirling in giant combat. Her head was suddenly light and then suddenly heavy; her breath strangled her and then failed altogether. She swayed from side to side, her head fell backward, and Von Ibn had it borne upon him, that instead of being in love she had fainted.

“_Qu’est-ce que vous avez?_” he cried, as he felt her reeling, and then he knew; and knowing, recognized the fact that he was alone in the depths of the rain-soaked forest, with a helpless woman on his hands, and that the situation was infinitely more novel than amusing.

He was obliged to let his umbrella fall in order that he might raise her in his arms; and when she was so raised he felt a poignant wonder as to what to do with her next. He had no idea which direction to take, for the night was now night in good earnest, and the Englischergarten is so large that one may walk for two hours and a half without passing its limits. He felt uncertain as to just where they had entered it, the common ingress not being from Schwabing, and also uncertain as to just how far towards the centre they had penetrated. A pale, young moon peeped up above the tree-tops; he looked at the moon and then at Rosina, and they both appeared unnecessarily weak and inadequate to the urgent necessities of the moment.

“She should be laid on her back and have water thrown upon her face,” he murmured to himself in French, and then he felt his boots sinking deeply into the mud, and recognized the impracticability of that means of resuscitation at this particular moment.

“Why did I ever pray that I might hold her in my arms?” he thought in German. “_Mein Gott_, what shall I do?”

Failing all other remedies, he shook her hard, and her eyes flew open on some wax-doll-like principle. She gave him a look of complete unrecognition, and closed them with a sigh.

“You must not faint once more,” he cried, anxiously; “you cannot, you know.”

Something like physical despair swept over him as he felt her tremble and sway again.

“What can I do?” he cried, shaking her very hard indeed, “we are far from all. I cannot leave you to get a carriage, I cannot take you--”

“I don’t care what you do,” she murmured, with the usual complete resignation of the swooning, always so exasperating to those who care for them. He felt desperately that she was telling the truth.

There was a sound in the wilderness beyond, a sound that thrilled him with hope and fear at the same instant. The developments of a sound may under some circumstances prove one’s salvation or destruction. He riveted his eyes anxiously in the direction from whence the echo of a horse’s feet splashing through the mud was now drawing nearer each second.

“If it prove the Prinz Regent himself,” he said decidedly, “he must take us in.”

It proved to be, not a royal coach, but a mere ordinary cab, than which nothing more welcome had ever crossed his vision in all his life before. He hailed the cabman, and the cabman stopped in the greatest possible astonishment, and was good enough to descend in the mud and open the door. He asked no questions--cabmen never do--but took the address, mounted to his seat, and put his horse to a rounder trot in the direction of the city.

Rosina leaned back in her corner and shook as if she had the ague. Her hands and feet were icy cold; Von Ibn took her hands in his and feared that she was ill, or going to be so.

“What did make you like that?” he asked, as the wheels dashed the mud-spatters up against the windows; “was it that I distress you, yes?”

“Yes,” she sighed.

Then he kissed her hands.

“Forgive me,” he said, contritely, “I have not meant it so. There in the trees, when you were unconscious, I did not kiss you, I did not touch even your hair,--not thirty men in all Germany had been so good as that. You see what I try to be for you.”

He was leaning over her, the blood seemed to be boiling up into her ears. She put up her hand:

“If you speak so,” she said, “I shall faint again; I get dizzy when you talk to me in that way.”

“But if I kiss you only once,” he whispered.

“No--no--no,” she reiterated, and raised her hand and pushed his lips away with it.

“_En effet vous n’êtes pas du tout gentille_,” he cried, in violent anger, for his moods knew no shading in their transposition from one to another; “you are cold and without heart. How long do you think that I stood there in the wet and hold you back from the mud, and now you will do nothing for me; and you were quite heavy too, and--oh, _mon Dieu_!” he exclaimed sharply, interrupting himself, “my umbrella!”

“Have you lost it?”

“Have I lost it? Naturally I have let it fall to upraise you, and now I have leave it there.”

“I will give you another,” she said pacifically.

“Another,” he commented scornfully; “do you think that I have no other?” Then his weathercock cast of mind whirled again: “I do not want an umbrella,” he said more forcefully, “I want a kiss.”

“I thought that you were distressed over losing it.”

“Not at all; I have already very many others. But a kiss from you I have never yet.”

He seized her hand again, and tearing off the glove with a haste that demolished two buttonholes, pressed the bare cold fingers to his lips and eyes and forehead.

“Oh, I do love you!” he cried in a fresh storm of feeling. “You _must_ love me, because my much _must_ make of you a little.”

Then he kissed her hand many times more, stopping his rapid caresses to gaze upon her with that curious, burning glow firing the sombreness of his eyes the while he held her wrist against the fever of his face.

“If I obeyed myself,” he said hoarsely, “how I would hold you and kiss you. _Je vous embrasserais tellement!_”

She wondered why she was not distressed and alarmed. Instead the awe at her own emotion that had come upon her spirit in the wood was with her again. Something like strength seemed rising within her, and what it rose against was--strangely enough--not him, but herself. She was conscious of a sympathy for him in place of any fear for herself.

She looked from the window and saw that they were now rolling rapidly through the brightly lighted streets, and a glimpse of the Hof told her that the end was but five minutes further on.

“You answer not,” he said, insistently; “you must say me some word.”

“Oh, what can I say?” she cried helplessly.

“Say that you love me.”

“But I do not.”

Then he loosed her hand and ground his teeth.

“Decidedly you are queer,” he said bitterly; “it is there in your eyes and you will to deny it. You are senseless,--_vous n’avez pas de c½ur!_ I am always a fool to go on as I go.”

She turned her eyes upon him.

“_Je ne suis pas pour vous_,” she said gently and very, very sadly; “_mais je ne suis pour personne non plus_,” she added, and there was a tone in her voice that he had never heard before. His temper faded instantly.

“You think of me with kindness, always,--_n’est-ce pas_?” he said, returning her look.

Their eyes rested steadily upon each other for a little space. Then he exclaimed:

“You do love me,” and started to seize her in his arms forgetful of lights, streets, passers-by, and all other good reasons for self-restraint.

But just then the cab stopped before the door of No. 6, the cabman descended.

There was no further question as to _les convenances_.


Chapter Twelve

“BUDA-PESTH.

“DEAR ROSINA,--If you’re laid up I might just as well take a week more in this direction. Plenty to see, I find, and lots of jolly company lying around loose. I’ll get back about the twelfth and we’ll plan to skip then as fast as we can. Keep on writing Poste Restante, Buda, and I’ll have them forward. Don’t try to fool me any by being too sick to sail. I’ve got to go the nineteenth and you must too.

“Lovingly, “JACK.”

She sat in the little salon the night of October fifth and read the above affectionate epistle which the postman had brought to keep her company, because every one else in the house was gone to the famous concert of the famous pianist.

She could not go; that little episode in the Englischergarten and all the attendant agitation had put her in bed for three days and rendered her quite unable to go out for two or three more. She had been obliged to write Jack that she was ill, with the above results, and she read his answer with the sensation that life was long, the future empty, and none of its vistas worth contemplating. Her heart ached dully--it was forever aching dully these days, and she--

There was a tap at the door. Europe has no open-door policy, be it known; all doors are always shut. Even those of _pension_ salons.

She looked up, and saw him coming in, his violin case in his hand. Then life and its vistas underwent a great transformation, because he smiled upon her and, putting the case down carefully, came eagerly to kiss her hand.

“_Vous allez bien ce soir?_” he asked pleasantly, standing before her chair and looking down into her face.

“Oh, I am