Here she hesitated and her eyes met his with distrustful keenness as she asked in an altered tone:
“And you? Have not you returned to the false doctrines with which your boyish head was bewildered in the school of poetry?”
“I confided to you then,” he exclaimed, deeply hurt, “the solemn vow I made to my poor mother ere she closed her eyes in death.”
“Then that obstacle is removed,” Barbara answered in a more gentle tone, “but I will not take back even a single word of what I have said about other matters. I am not like the rest of the girls. My father--Holy Virgin!--how much too late he was born! Among the Crusaders this fearless hero, whom the pepper-bags here jeer at as a ‘Turkey gobbler,’ would have been sure of every honour. How ill-suited he is for any mercantile business, on the other hand, he has unfortunately proved. Wherever he attempted anything, disappointment followed disappointment. To fight in Tunis against the crescent, he let our flourishing lumber trade go to ruin! And my mother! How young I was when her dead body was borne out of the house, yet I can still see the haughty woman--whose image I am said to be--in her trailing velvet robe, with plumes waving amid the curls arranged in a towering mass upon her head. She was dressed in that way when the men came to sell our house in the Kramgasse at auction. She must have been one of the women under whose management, as a matter of course, the household is neglected.”
“How can you talk so about your own mother?” Wolf interrupted in a somewhat reproachful tone.
“Because we are not here to flatter the dead or to speak falsely to each other, but to understand how matters are between us,” she answered gravely. “How you are constituted is best known to yourself, but it seems to me that while far away you have formed a totally false opinion of me, whom you placed upon the throne of your heart, and I wish to correct it, that you may not plunge into misfortune like a deluded simpleton and drag me with you. Where, as in my case, so many things are different from what the good and humble would desire them to be, it is not very pleasant to open one’s whole heart to another, and there is no one else in the world for whom I would do it. Perhaps I shall not succeed at all, for often enough I am incomprehensible to myself. I shall understand myself most speedily if I bring before my mind my father’s and my mother’s nature, and recall the ancient saying that young birds sing like the old ones. My father--I love him in spite of all his eccentricities and weaknesses. Dear me! he needs me so much, and would be miserable without me. Though he is a head taller than you, he has remained a child.”