Chapter XI

Mr. Ogden, deeply moved, went to his rooms.

She, the cause of it all, sat at the window with a book in her hands without reading it. There was a look in the woman's face that amazed him, a hard, cold look, that he had never seen there before while the sunbeams fell on her bewitching features and on the green leaves still in her hair.

"I want to leave the place at once," she said without looking at him.

"That poor man's face seems to haunt you, dear tender-hearted girlie," he replied with an outburst of tenderness, taking her in his arms and kissing the handsome face he loved so dearly.

It was a fortunate thing that he was blissfully ignorant of her relation to the dead man.

Gathering up courage--seeing that no suspicion had entered his mind--she raised her beautiful eyes to his languidly.

"Yes, you are right, dear, I cannot stand such horrible things ... it shocks me," she answered with her accustomed dissimulation in tone and action.

Although she was a great adept in the art of hypocrisy and dissimulation, she could not altogether hide the uneasiness which had taken possession of her. A strange expression came into her eyes, an expression he had never seen there. He looked at her and was puzzled. What was it? What brought the change about? He could not tell.

She turned suddenly and looked out of the window with a stony face, in order to hide, to subdue,--what? Did she conjure up a sinful vision of her own life? No, she would not give in, but she was startled to perceive something within her she did not reckon with: a voice wanted to be heard, no matter how hard she tried to subdue it. It was the voice of motherhood--that feeling seemed to be not quite dead in the heart of the shameless woman. It was Nature's revenge! She had to listen to the voice of Nature, or was it conscience, slowly awakening to life?

Ah! Who would or could fathom the heart of an unscrupulous coquette?

"Had he any family?" she asked, indifferently, avoiding his inquisitive gaze.

"Yes, I think he has a child, here is the address," he replied. "I think it must be with someone he knew, poor unfortunate man. And he gave me this in order to look up his orphan child." A mournful compassion soon stole into his eyes.

"He could not speak any more, but the pitiful glance of the dying man's face told me as much, and I am going to Dresden and see whether I can do anything for his child," he added, looking deeply moved out of the window. She gazed at him with puzzled eyes. "God! if he had an inkling whose child that is!" she thought, remorsefully recoiling a step with downcast eyes and tightened lips.

Finally summoning up courage enough, she said, hesitatingly, as if fearing any comment:

"Yes, ... let us stop there on our way to Switzerland."

He wanted to stay until the funeral of the poor lecturer was over, but she would not hear of it. She looked at him with frightened eyes when he made the suggestion.

"I cannot stand such scenes," she replied with quivering lips.

"Well, well! Then we'll go, my sensitive little girlie. That accident seemed to have upset your nervous system," he said with a smile, kissing her tenderly and gazing fondly at her troubled face.

On the following morning they took their departure for Dresden, leaving some money for the funeral expenses in the hands of the hotel keeper.

Instinctively he felt like doing something for the man he had robbed of his happiness without knowing it.

But the unscrupulous coquette loved nobody but herself, knew it, felt it, though without any remorse, that she had betrayed his deep devotion and undying love so shamefully, fearing, in her deceitfulness, only one thing--detection.

The following day a simple hearse, containing the corpse of the poor humorist whose life ended so tragically, went up a lonely hill where the grave diggers had just finished their gloomy work. The coffin was lowered and the grave covered with mother earth. No mourners stood around shedding tears.

The song of a mocking-bird rang from the downy cradle of myrtle blossoms--as a funeral dirge--and a whip-poor-will answered from a cedar in the neighboring woods.

When the night train going to Dresden, rushed by, the little white cross indicating his resting place, looked like a bleached hand of a skeleton shining out with a ghostly radiance across the silent, gloomy plain.

Through the fleecy vapors floating around the lonely hill one with clairvoyant eye may see at midnights the vacillating horde of the tiny gnomes from the Traunstein with downcast torches repeating whisperingly the sad tale, and pointing at the grave, in which the body of the dead humorist, betrayed of his life's happiness, crumbles to dust.

THE ARTIST