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If he made up his mind to go home, the thought occurred to him at once that Frau Hadebusch would prevent him from going into Eleanore’s room. He felt like lying down on the pavement and waiting until some one came and told him how Eleanore was getting along. It struck one just as he came home. The maid from the first floor and the maid from the second were standing on the stairs.
Nevertheless, just as if he had other eyes than those with which he saw earthly things, he noticed that Eleanore’s hands and lips were trembling, that with each succeeding second she grew paler, that she cast a distrustful glance first at her father, then at her sister, and then at Daniel, and that she finally, as if overcome with a feeling of exhaustion, slipped away from her place by the table lamp, stole into a corner, and sat down on the hassock.
She had appreciated at once and without difficulty the complete range of Gertrude’s renunciation. “What difference does it make about you?” replied Gertrude harshly; “what are you getting excited about?” This question made Eleanore’s ideas of order and duty quake and totter. She looked at her sister with incredulous eyes and in perfect silence.
The Rüdiger sisters, all but bursting with curiosity to know what Eleanore had in mind, could draw nothing from her other than that she was going to take Meta away and that Meta was agreed. It was Eleanore’s intention to take the pregnant girl to Daniel’s mother at Eschenbach. She knew of the dissension between Daniel and his mother.
She was sitting at the open window of her attic room knitting. She got up and looked into the face of the beautiful girl without saying a word. Eleanore was moved on seeing the tall, youthful figure, and yet it was quite impossible for her to subdue a feeling of horror. At Eleanore’s very first words, Meta began to sob.
She studied the time-table, and wrote a postcard to Meta telling her to be at the station at eight o’clock in the morning. Jordan approved of Eleanore’s outing, though he warned her against bandits and cold drinks. Gertrude was not wholly without suspicion. She had a feeling that something was wrong, that these unspoken words referred to Daniel, for she was always thinking about him.
It was not in Eleanore’s nature to submit to a misfortune without first having made every possible effort to evade it. She wrote for from fourteen to sixteen hours a day, with the result that she had finished all that was asked of her long before her time was really up. Then she looked around for a better paying position; it was in vain.
He felt he was not merely punishing and passing final judgment on his own tormentor and persecutor, but on the hidden enemy of humanity, the arch-criminal of the age, the destroyer of all noble seed. And yet the exalted outburst of Herr Carovius had precisely the effect that Eberhard had least expected. His confidence in Eleanore’s innocence had been shaken.
Jasmina had not the shadow of a desire to perform; her sisters were equally disinclined to listen. “It is not right,” the three kept saying, when they heard of Eleanore’s visits. “It is not right.” Even Meta the maid was of the opinion that her calls were highly unconventional. As Daniel played on and merely nodded to her, Eleanore’s eyes fell on the mask of Zingarella.
“I have often thought about it in quiet hours; it gave me the same feeling of satisfaction that I have in a chemical experiment, when the reactions of the various elements take place as they should: what Eleanore says is your word; what you feel is Eleanore’s law.” He is seeing ghosts, cried Daniel, he is tangling up the threads of my life. What does he mean? Why does he do it?
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