“No, I cannot touch your hand, Herr Reineke. We must not meet again,” he said, grimly.
“As you wish, Herr Ehrenstein. I am sorry for you, but, as you see, I have not much cause for self-congratulation for myself.”
Rudolph said nothing, and flung away from him.
In the little salon he found Inarime alone, with her head bent down upon the table over her folded arms.
“You love that man, Fraulein?” he asked in German, which she spoke more fluently than French.
“I do,” she said, simply, hardly troubled by the impertinence of the question.
“I do not understand you, Herr Ehrenstein.”
Did she even hear him, as she stared out with that intense look strained beyond her prison through the bright streets traversed by Gustav?
“I, too, love you, Fraulein. I would die for you. You have taken from me my rest, my happiness, my self-respect. Everything I yield to you--honour, manhood, independence. Gladly will I accept slavery at your bidding. I care for nothing but you. Is there no hope for me? Your father will approve my suit.--_He_ is banished.”
Inarime gazed scorn and loathing upon him. There were hardly words strong enough with which to reject such an offer, so made and at such a time.
“Leave me, Herr Ehrenstein. You force me abruptly to terminate my stay under your uncle’s roof.”
She turned her back upon him, and when he broke out into fierce and incoherent apologies, she swept past him out of the room.
There was no hope for it. Harmony fled the Austrian Embassy. It had already been bruited that young Ehrenstein was inconveniently demanded by a bloodthirsty warrior, whose sister he had jilted in a scandalous way. The report reached Selaka’s ear, and he looked askance upon the perfidious youth. At first the baron dismissed the affair with a laugh, then, upon scandal mounting higher, and taking a shriller tone, he questioned Rudolph, and being a gentleman, expressed himself in very strong terms upon the young reprobate’s conduct.
Rudolph had sulked and fretted and made everybody around him only a degree less uncomfortable than himself. Twice he had started to go to Andromache and confess the full extent of his iniquity, but he had not had the courage to face the ordeal. If she should cry, or reproach him, or meet him with sad silence! it would be equally unbearable, and there would be nothing left for him but to go away and cut his throat. What was the good of anything? Life was a blunder, a fret, a torment. Without any evil in him, kindly, pure, sweet natured, here was he involved in a mesh of inextricable troubles, behaving to a dear and innocent child like an arrant villain. And all the while his heart bled for her, and in any moment left him by the haunting thought of Inarime, he was pursued by the soft pain of Andromache’s pretty eyes.