In Paradise. Paul HeyseЧитать онлайн книгу.
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 better, after all, than an objectless activity, a love nourished on prison-fare, and a longing for freedom that at last makes one look upon mere change as something desirable.
"Even then I thought of my old Dædalus. I was on the very point of falling upon you in your studio, and, for want of a smooth, girlish cheek to caress, of trying my hand on a soft bit of clay. Just then I chanced upon an opportunity to go to England; there I stayed until I was ripe for America; and he who once sets foot in the New World, and hasn't left any very pressing business behind him in the Old, can get rid of a few years of his life without knowing exactly how he has done it. It is enough to tell you that I had already reached Rio, traveling by way of San Francisco and Mexico, when I said to myself one day that if I did not want to prolong my exile voluntarily, and so appear to my betrothed in rather a bad light, I must take the next steamer that sailed for Havre, in order to land at last, after all this wandering over the wide world, in the harbor of my wedded bliss.
"I had written regularly to my betrothed every month--beautiful diary-like love-letters--and had received with equal regularity letters from her, which, to speak honestly, had now and then irritated me greatly; so that we had already had (on paper) all manner of misunderstandings, tiffs, quarrels, and reconciliations. I considered that all this belonged of right to a well-conducted three-years' engagement, and did not take it too much to heart when my well-bred, rather provincial little sweetheart, who had grown up in the atmosphere of the petty capital, occasionally gave her vagabond fiancé a little moral lesson. Perhaps I was wrong, and certainly I was foolish, always to report my varied adventures with absolute candor. There were no very serious matters among them; and the few cases of real human weaknesses and sins I kept to myself--shut up in a sincerely remorseful heart. But she found fault even with the tone of my 'sketches from two hemispheres.' Good heavens! it is easily comprehensible that the poor child, living as she did among such absurd surroundings, could not have much taste for a free life out in the world! Thrown entirely on herself, watched over by a hundred eyes in a narrow, starched, formal society--I once wrote to her that she was only so serious beyond her years because she had had to fill, as it were, a mother's place to herself, and be her own governess and duenna. And, besides all this, there was her uncle's frightful example--for she could not long remain ignorant of his habit of compensating himself for outward respectability by private orgies at his bachelor clubs and petits soupers.
"Only let the three years be over, I thought to myself, and we will soon weed out the tares that have sprung up between our roses. But I did not know the vigor of the ground in which all this bad crop had grown up. Nor did I know how much the years between seventeen and twenty signified in such a girl's life.
"At last, then, I arrived at home, and found--but, no!" He checked himself abruptly, and made a sharp cut at the air with his cane. "Why should I bore you with a detailed story of a domestic comedy that has only a decidedly unfavorable likeness to 'Much Ado about Nothing,' and,