A Noble Name; or, Dönninghausen

"You have placed me in a strange position," he began, after a pause, in a low, stern tone. "I certainly ought to be grateful to you for my birthday fête; but I must at the same time reiterate, and that most decidedly, that we cannot give such extravagant entertainments. We are so much in debt – "

"Dear Roderich," she interrupted him, "one benefit and it will all be paid."

"But, Helena, I cannot reckon upon the future," he rejoined. "You know I could not make any engagements last summer, – I am not yet well. It seems to me very undesirable to burden ourselves with unnecessary care."

"And it seems to me undesirable, sordid, degrading, to be always counting the cost," exclaimed Helena. "Without freedom of action the artist cannot exist."

"It is that very freedom which I wish to secure," Roderich said gravely. "At your urgent entreaty, and by Commerzienrath Schmidt's advice, I speculated with our entire fortune, as you know, and lost it. Therefore we must begin afresh, and economize. Therefore, dear Helena, no more of these costly entertainments."

She shrugged her shoulders impatiently. "Dear Roderich," she said, "to-night's festival is my affair; it is my birthday present to you – "

"Child, you cannot count the cost," he interrupted her; "your salary scarcely suffices to provide your wardrobe."

"'Tis little enough!" said Helena. "You might long ago have used your influence to procure me a better position. Instead of which, you always take sides with the Kronberg against me."

"No, I do not," he replied. "I wrote to the manager only yesterday that I would renew my present engagement with him only upon condition that the Kronberg were not allowed to usurp any of your parts."

Helena threw her arms around him. "Oh, you darling, did you really?" she cried in glee. "You do not know how you delight me. They wanted to persuade me that you cared for the Kronberg."

"Helena!" he said reproachfully. "Since I have known you there has been but one woman for me in the world."

His words hurt Johanna; she tried to release herself, that she might leave the room, but Lisbeth in her sleep held her fast.

Helena had taken her husband's arm and paced the room to and fro with him. She had doffed her lace overdress, and looked wonderfully lovely in the close-fitting blue silk with bare neck and arms. "Why do you always find fault with me, you bad fellow?" she said, looking up at him with an exultant smile. "I live only for you – to fulfil your wishes. I have economized; I have even dismissed my own maid, contenting myself with Johanna's services."

"She really seems fit for little else," he replied. "How miserably she acquitted herself in her small part! You ought not to have allowed her to take it."

"What could I do?" Helena asked. "She insisted upon making the attempt, and I as her step-mother – "

"Poor Johanna!" Roderich interrupted her; "as devoid of talent as her mother, and as ugly as myself!"

"Oh, Roderich, you! The most glorious Egmont, – the most enchanting Leicester!"

"But a very ugly man!" he said, with the brilliant smile that was all his own, and that really made his plain face handsome. "What you admire comes from within; there seems to be some kind of a flame there that flickers interestingly. But this is denied to poor Johanna. And then – you must see that the Graces have denied her their gifts; the greatest misfortune for a woman. You have managed that they should bestow them all upon your little daughter."

He kissed her hand. Johanna could endure it no longer; by a hasty effort she released herself from her sleeping sister's arm, and stepped noiselessly out of the room into the corridor, at the end of which was her own chamber.

She groped her way to the arm-chair beside the window, sank into it, and gazed into the darkness without. How gay and hopeful she had been while dressing in this room a few short hours before, and how forlorn and discouraged she had now returned to it! 'As devoid of talent as her mother, and as ugly as myself,' had been the words spoken by a voice whose utterances she believed implicitly; and then again, 'the Graces have denied her their gifts; the greatest misfortune for a woman.' Bitterness, such as she had never before known, possessed her. What had she done to be thus disinherited from the beginning, deprived of all claim to love and happiness?

Suddenly a joyous thrill drove the blood to her heart. It was not so, she was not disinherited. Little more than twenty-four hours had passed since the most truthful of men had said to her in effect, 'You were my ideal; ugly and awkward as you are, I saw in you the embodiment of all loveliness.' If he saw it in her no longer, it was because of a mistake, – a misunderstanding. She would prove to him that she had lost nothing of value, that she was still worthy the love of former days.

Why should she do this? She did not love Ludwig. No, no, she did not love him. Only in contrast with her father's cruel verdict did she find pleasure in his words of yesterday, and the impetuous throbbing of her heart was but the result of the various emotions that had besieged it during the past few hours.

If she only had not undergone that one experience! To stand there and not be mistress of her motions; to will to speak, and not be able to give to her words the meaning she desired; to be stared at by all those unsympathetic eyes, to be conscious of exciting contemptuous pity. 'Devoid of talent as her mother, and ugly as myself,' rang in her ears again.

She would rid herself of this torment. And she arose, lit a candle, and then first perceived a letter lying upon her table.

"From Ludwig," she thought; and she was right; his large clear handwriting stared at her from the envelope, and covered three sides of a sheet of paper which enclosed several others. Johanna seated herself at the table and read:

"Dear Johanna, – The enclosed letter, which my mother found among the papers left her by your mother, was sent to me by the former in her last illness. She wrote to me telling me to do with it what seemed best to me; she had never been able to bring herself to disturb your happiness in your reunion with your father after so many years.

"I might assert that the same consideration has hitherto prevented me from imparting to you the wishes of your dying mother, but I will be as frank with you as I am with myself. I withheld the letter because I hoped even without its aid to be able to withdraw you from surroundings unworthy of you. I thought that a word from me would suffice to restore you to the home that was your own so long. I hesitated – made cowardly and selfish as we always are by the desires of our hearts – to erect any barrier between you, a grandchild of the Dönninghausens, and your old friends.

"But now I have convinced myself that the old friends are of no avail to counteract new and unworthy influences; therefore let a voice from the grave speak to you.

"If you should heed it, and have any need either of my pen or of my personal aid, pray command me. I shall be at my father's, where I have certain scientific work to do, throughout the coming winter.

"Twice to-day I have been to your door, but each time I turned away. What could it avail me to see you again where you are? Farewell, and let me hear from you soon.

"L. W."

To Johanna the tone of this letter seemed icy cold. Experience is needed to detect intensity of emotion beneath exterior and perhaps hardly-won composure. With a trembling hand she opened her mother's letter. What could she, gentle and loving as she had always been, require of her daughter so hard that her foster-mother had been unwilling to impart it to her? Johanna gazed at the delicate handwriting, its uncertain characters betraying the mortal weariness that had possessed the writer. The touching figure of her dying mother rose vividly in her memory, and with increasing emotion she read what follows, – in all of which she distinctly felt the quickened feverish throb of the poor invalid's heart.

"Lindenbad, August 19, 1864.

"My dear Louise, – A few hours ago you left me, and in a few hours you will come again, faithful friend that you are, to ask how I have passed the night. Ah, Louise! it begins so distressingly, with such throbbing pulses and wandering thoughts, that I would flee from myself to you as to some shrine of the Madonna.

"If I was at first inclined to regard as a piece of good luck the chance which brought me an old school-mate in the wife of the physician of this place, I soon learned to bless the Providence which conducted me hither. Dear, kind friend! How you have cheered and encouraged me through these weary days of sickness and suffering! They would have been cheerless without you.

"Cheerless in every respect, dear Louise; for I hardly need to tell you that my soul suffers more than my failing body, because it does not share the weary longing of the latter for death. My poor soul clings to life, thirsting for the love and happiness of former days, – vanished now forever.

"Would Roderich feel some pity if he knew how vital within me is still the memory of every word of his, – the very tone in which each word was uttered? Ah, Louise! those words, those tones, possessed the power to create thrones and altars, and transformed the fortunate creature for whom they were spoken into a queen, a goddess: he constituted her such.

"I was his from the first moment that I saw him. I was with my parents in Berlin, where he was playing. I saw him first in 'Torquato Tasso,' and then at a ball at the French ambassador's. He asked to be presented to me. I stood before him trembling, and when he held out his hand to me I was his slave for life. There was no longer any question of will or choice, nothing but a blessed necessity. I could not but resign everything for him, – home, parents, brothers, family, rank, and wealth. He was still only a beginner in his art. My enthusiasm, my devotion, flattered him; my intelligence fired his genius; my beauty intoxicated his senses. Yes, there were years when I made him happy, in which I filled his heart and his imagination.

'Though 'tis torture, yet that timeCan never be forgot.'

"In the first year of our marriage Johanna was born. I announced her birth to my parents, and hoped, from my mother at least, for a kind word. Instead of this I saw the notice of her death in the papers. Two years later God sent me a son, but he lived only a few hours, and my life was in danger for months, while I was confined for years to my room. That was the beginning of my unhappiness. Roderich was still so young, – he had married when only twenty-three. He needed change and excitement to counterbalance his close application to the duties of his profession. Often, when in the flush of some fresh triumph he would come to my room to make me a partaker in his delight, both doctor and nurse would caution him not to fatigue me. He was obliged to walk on tiptoe, to sit in semi-darkness, to speak in a whisper. All this he could not endure. He went, and I was left alone, – more and more alone, of course, as time passed on.

"August 22.

"I could not write more. This pain in my heart has debarred me from all exertion for the last few days, during which you, dear Louise, have been, as always, my stay and comfort. Let these lines thank you for your kindness when my lips can do so no longer.

"I know how near the end is now, and the consciousness fills me with a despair beyond words. To vanish – to be forgotten – to leave to others what was once my own —

"But I did not mean to speak of myself. My last thought and care are for my poor Johanna, who will so soon be orphaned. If it is possible, Louise, let my child stay with you. I will write to Roderich and entreat him to send the child to some school here in your neighbourhood. Then give her that home in your heart which she loses in mine. Her father hardly knows her, and will hardly miss her, as she on her part will scarcely miss him. On the other hand, she is warmly attached to you and to your children, and in your house she will find the pure domestic atmosphere which can never be hers in her father's. Hard though it be to say it, it must be said: the thought of leaving my child in the hands of the woman who has robbed me of Roderich's love poisons my last hours, and will leave me no rest in the grave. Johanna must not love that woman, must not owe her anything. I am sure you understand this feeling, even although you do not approve of it.

"Later.

"More bad days and nights, – how many I do not know; and through them all this terrible anxiety about Johanna's future. If you cannot grant my request and keep her yourself, then, I entreat you, see that she takes refuge with my people. They will receive her kindly. Three years ago, when Roderich's passion for this actress became notorious, my father wrote to me asking me to come to him with my child. His only condition was my legal separation from Roderich and the dropping of the name which he so hated. I could not bring myself to consent to this; but twice since then, when my two brothers died, I wrote to my father, now quite desolate, and each time he answered me and made me the same proposal. He will certainly receive my orphan child kindly.

"Understand me aright, dear Louise. I would rather know Johanna at home with you than anywhere else. In your home-circle her youth would be gayer and simpler. Only if you cannot adopt her, send her to my father, to the Freiherr Johann von Dönninghausen, Dönninghausen on the Harz, or write to him and commend my child to her grandfather's heart.

"The morning dawns. Perhaps when the phantoms of the night flee I can sleep —

'To die – to sleep!To sleep! perchance to dream, ay, there's the rub,For in that sleep of death what dreams may come.'

"Did you ever hear Roderich utter those words? They ring in my ears now as if I had just heard him say them. I must hear him say them once more. No, no, – I cannot die."

Here the letter ended. Death had come suddenly and painlessly. Johanna remembered the peaceful smile upon her mother's beautiful face as she lay in her coffin. She kissed the last lines written by her dear hand, and her heart overflowed with tenderness.

The impression made upon her by the letter, however, was far other than Ludwig seemed to expect it would produce. Not for a moment did it alter Johanna's love for her father. On the contrary, its passionate pain seemed to justify her feeling for him. Weary unto death, and tortured with jealousy, her mother had turned to him in love and longing, and her last words were the utterance of a desire to see him once more.

"This is love," Johanna said to herself, – "the only true love, – that of which it stands written, 'beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things. Love never faileth.' Whoever can merely say as Ludwig does, 'I loved you so long as you thought and felt thus and so,' has never really loved."

Even her mother's desire that she should go to her grandfather did not disturb Johanna. The letter said expressly, 'Her father hardly knows her, and will hardly miss her.' Now that he knew her and loved her, her mother would not, Johanna was convinced, wish her to leave him. Only if her father should come to consider her a burden, or if her lack of talent should estrange him from her, or if her step-mother's dislike of her should lead to misunderstandings, could it be her duty to leave her father's roof.

But it was useless to pursue such reflections as these. If her step-mother did not like her, her father's love and her little sister's devotion more than indemnified her. To attach to herself the lovely little creature who before her sister's arrival had spent all her time with the servants, to make good the deficiencies in the little girl's training, these were tasks after Johanna's own heart, and in them she could find abundant content; if she applied herself to these and restrained her thoughts and desires from wandering in other realms, she could surely be once more for Ludwig what she had been formerly.

She sat with clasped hands gazing into the flame of the candle. The little watering-place in the Thüringian forest, so long her home, rose vividly in her memory. There stood the vine-wreathed cottage of the resident physician, where Ludwig would dwell as his father's successor; the garden, with its dwarf fruit-trees, vegetable patch, and flower-beds; the hawthorn arbour by the hedge, with the vista of the chestnut avenue, along which the guests at the baths used to saunter; the little stream with its grassy banks; and, enclosing all, the wooded heights, a fitting frame for the lovely peaceful picture.

"But it would be no life for me," Johanna said to herself. "Why not? Why cannot I be content with what has satisfied thousands? Why am I possessed by this desire for – I know not what – for giving shape and expression to something? Is it not vanity, or ambition, or self-conceit?"

She was more than ever conscious of the loneliness in which she had lived since the death of her foster-mother, who had been her refuge in all doubt and distress, while her husband, Uncle Werner, as Johanna called him, had ministered only to the physical ailments of his family. She had found but little sympathy from Mathilde, Ludwig's sister, whose nature was cold and narrow; even Ludwig, sensitive as he was, had not understood her. But her father, – he must have known such times of doubt and uncertainty, – he might help her.

"I will pluck up courage and tell him everything to-morrow," she said to herself. Then, calmed and quieted by this resolve, she betook herself to bed and to sleep.

CHAPTER III

A CRISIS

Johanna could not carry her resolve into execution. The following morning she was busy until late in replacing by order the disarray produced by the birthday fête, and when her father, who had gone out meanwhile, returned, he hurried past her with so gloomy an expression that she did not venture to follow him to his room.

At dinner she learned the cause of his troubled mood. He had quarrelled with the manager because the latter would persist in giving various of Helena's youthful parts to her rival, Fräulein Kronberg.

"Of course I cannot withdraw my stipulations," Roderich added, "and therefore cannot renew my contract, favourable as its conditions were for me."

"You can get another anywhere else quite as favourable, and even more so," said Helena.

"But not the accessories which I have here," Roderich declared. "Not the intelligent public, nor the charming mise-en-scène which makes each separate performance a work of art."

"That is no affair of yours," said Helena. "Each for himself, and God for us all. And as for the public, I can't see that it is especially intelligent. Wherever else you go you receive more applause than you get here, and so do I."

"Applause!" he repeated, with an impatient shrug. "Dear Helena, there is a kind of applause that makes me blush with mortification; but from your point of view you can hardly understand this."

How gladly would Johanna have assured him that she understood him perfectly! But while she was struggling with her natural shyness, Helena exclaimed, "If you think so meanly of me, pray do not proclaim it before other people; it is more than I can bear."

Roderich changed colour. "To accuse me of unkindness just when I am sacrificing all my plans for your sake is rather hard!" he said. And, rising from table, he left the room suddenly, slamming the door noisily behind him.

Lisbeth, terrified, began to cry, the others were amazed. Never before had he allowed himself to be so carried away by temper.

"He must be ill," said Johanna.

"Nonsense! he is out of temper," said Helena, "and he shall not hear a kind word from me until he begs my pardon."

Johanna was right. In half an hour Friedrich announced that the Herr had one of his attacks of headache, and could see no one.

On such days there seemed to be a spell upon the entire household. Every voice was lowered, every footfall was as light as possible, and Friedrich muffled the bell upon the landing.

This time, Johanna learned from Friedrich, the pain was not so intense as usual, but it did not pass away at the end of twenty-four hours. When, in spite of it, Roderich went to rehearsal the next day, he returned more ill than ever. The third day fever set in, and the physician ordered him to bed.

Helena had not forgiven the scene at table.

"It surely is not very bad, doctor," she said, as she accompanied the physician from the room. "I am just ordering a magnificent costume for Desdemona. Othello comes out next week; you must have him well by that time."

"We will hope for the best," the old man said, as he took his leave. Johanna, who overheard his words, was startled. She knew from Dr. Werner what these words signified in a physician's mouth. Whilst Helena carelessly returned to her costume, Johanna waited with a throbbing heart at her father's door until the servant made his appearance.

"Pray ask papa, Friedrich, whether I may not come in," she said.

The sick man heard her. "Come!" he called. His voice, usually so full and sonorous, sounded muffled, and his face was still more changed: it was colourless, and looked pinched and wan upon the pillow.

Johanna went to his bedside, with difficulty suppressing all signs of emotion. "Papa," she entreated, "let me stay with you. You have Friedrich, it is true, but I know better than he how to nurse an invalid."

For a while he gazed at her as if he scarcely understood her words. "Yes, stay with me," he said; "I think I am really very ill, and you are more careful, quieter, stronger – "

He did not finish the sentence, but she understood what he meant.

"Ah, thank you!" she said, kissing his burning hand.

He drew his daughter closer to him. "My dear, good child!" he said, pressing his feverish lips to her forehead. She did not dream that it was a farewell caress.

The disease progressed rapidly, and was pronounced by the physician the next day to be a nervous fever. He was quite content with Johanna's calm, careful treatment of his patient, but he begged Helena, who could not control her agitation, to spare her own delicate health for the sake of her child, and to be as little as possible in the sick-room. She sighed and submitted.

But, indeed, neither she nor any one else could have disturbed the sick man after a few days had passed; he lay in a state of entire unconsciousness.

The whole city was interested in the artist's condition; the inquiries after his health were countless; the door was besieged by friends and acquaintances. He had always been a kind, ungrudging comrade to his fellow-actors, and now when he could no longer excite their envy, they remembered his own freedom from it, and did all in their power to testify their esteem and friendship for him.

For Helena it was a kind of consolation to receive their visits; her nature was of those for which distraction is possible. After she had with many tears given an account of the sick man's state, she would listen with interest to theatrical gossip, and forget for a while her own sorrow. It overcame her, indeed, with redoubled violence when she was once more alone. Often, when she had been laughing with a visitor at some jest, Johanna would find her in a state of most pitiable distress.

"He is going to die, I know he is; such happiness as ours was too great for this world of misery," she would declare, sobbing as if her heart would break; or she would cry out as if bereft of her senses, "O God, you cannot take him from me! He must be spared for me and for his art."

She was most helpless and hopeless in the sick-room, where she would throw herself on her knees by Roderich's bedside, cover his hand with kisses, and exhaust every passionate term of endearment, nearly fainting when there was no response from her unconscious husband. But if one of the physicians or a friend wished to speak to her, she would arise, and, with a look of anguish as she left the room, involuntarily adjust artistically the soft folds of her white cachemire peignoir.

Johanna was too young and unsophisticated to appreciate her step-mother. She did her injustice when she accused her of heartlessness, and she added to her own burden by a daily increasing dislike for Helena.

But she could not help it. The sleep of exhaustion, which now and then overcame her, was all the rest and forgetfulness that she had. If she forced herself to talk with little Lisbeth, she had to struggle continually with rising tears, and when she heard others speaking of the events of the day, she could hardly comprehend how the affairs of the world could pursue their usual course outside of the sick-room. That was her realm, and her father's death seemed to her the end of all things.