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COLLECTION OF FOREIGN AUTHORS,

No. XII.

IN PARADISE.

VOL. I.

VOLUMES ALREADY PUBLISHED:

I. SAMUEL BROHL AND COMPANY. A Novel. From the French of Victor Cherbuliez. 1 vol., 16mo. Paper cover, 60 cents; cloth, $1.00.

II. GERARD'S MARRIAGE. A Novel. From the French of André Theuriet. Paper cover, 50 cents; cloth, 75 cents.

III. SPIRITE. A Fantasy. From the French of Théophile Gautier. Paper cover, 50 cents; cloth, 75 cents.

IV. THE TOWER OF PERCEMONT. From the French of George Sand. Paper cover, 50 cents; cloth, 75 cents.

V. META HOLDENIS. A Novel. From the French of Victor Cherbuliez. Paper cover, 50 cents; cloth, 75 cents.

VI. ROMANCES OF THE EAST. From the French of Comte de Gobineau. Paper cover, 60 cents; cloth, $1.00.

VII. RENEE AND FRANZ (Le Bleuet). From the French of Gustave Haller. Paper cover, 50 cents; cloth, 75 cents.

VIII. MADAME GOSSELIN. From the French of Louis Ulbach. Paper cover, 60 cents; cloth, $1.00.

IX. THE GODSON OF A MARQUIS. From the French of André Theuriet. Paper cover, 50 cents; cloth, 75 cents.

X. ARIADNE. From the French of Henry Greville. Paper cover, 50 cents; cloth, 75 cents.

XI. SAFAR-HADGI; or, Russ and Turcoman. From the French of Prince Lubomirski. Paper cover, 60 cents; cloth, $1.00.

XII. IN PARADISE. From the German of Paul Heyse. 2 vols. Per vol., paper cover, 60 cents; doth, $1.00.

IN

PARADISE

A NOVEL

FROM THE GERMAN OF

PAUL HEYSE

VOL. I

NEW YORK
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY

549 AND 551 BROADWAY
1878

_**_*It has been decided to omit from this translation the poems which are scattered through the novel in the German. A few trifling changes in certain passages have been made necessary by this omission; and the translator has in two or three cases very slightly condensed the text.

COPYRIGHT BY

D. APPLETON AND COMPANY,
1878.

IN PARADISE.

BOOK I.

CHAPTER I.

It was a Sunday in the midsummer of 1869.

The air, cleared by a thunderstorm the night before, was still tremulous with that soft, invigorating warmth which, farther south, makes breathing such an easy matter, but which, north of the Alps, seldom outlasts the early morning. And yet the bells, that sounded from the Munich Frauenkirche far across the Theresienwiese, and the field where stands the great statue of Bavaria, were already ringing for high mass. Here, outside the city, there seemed to be no human ear to listen. The great bronze maiden stood there in the deepest solitude, holding her wreath above her head, and with a mazed and dreamy look, as though she might be thinking whether this were not an opportune moment to step down from her granite pedestal, and to wander at will through the town, that to-day raised its towers and roofs like a city of the dead above the bare green plain. Now and then a bird flew out of the little grove behind the Ruhmes-halle, and fluttered about the shoulders of the giant maiden, or rested for a moment on the mane of the lion that sat lazily listening, pressed close to the knee of his great mistress. But away in the city the bells rang on. The air grew drowsy with the steadily increasing heat, with the hum and the vibration of the distant ringing, and the strong fragrance that rose from the meadow, which had been mown the day before. At last the bells ceased; and now not a sound was to be heard, save that there came from a house in one of the outer streets the sound of a flute, played by fits and starts, as though the player stopped for breath between the passages, or as though he forgot his notes in other thoughts.

The window, from which this singular music sounded into the summer air, opened from the upper story of a house that stood some distance back from the street--a house of a kind of which there are many in this western suburb. They are generally entirely unornamented, boxlike buildings, windowless except on the northern side, and there pierced by great quadrangular openings, supplied with all manner of arrangements for admitting the steadiest possible light from above. In summer one never sees above them the little cloud of smoke that betrays a domestic hearth, and no profane smell of cooking meets the visitor upon the threshold--as in most other Munich houses. From the open windows floats only a light, invisible odor of tobacco-smoke, agreeably mingled with the invigorating fragrance of varnishes, oils, and turpentine--which shows that here only the holy fire of art is fed, and that here, upon silent altars (three-legged easels and sculptors' pedestals) are offered sacrifices that cannot even shelter the priests that offer them from the pangs of hunger.

The house of which we speak turned its windowless southern side toward a little yard, in which lay scattered marble and sandstone blocks of different sizes. The four studio-windows of the northern side looked into a carefully-tended, narrow garden, that sheltered them from all disagreeable reflected lights. Around a little, slender, drowsily-splashing fountain in the middle bloomed a glorious wealth of roses; and the neighboring flower-beds, filled with all kinds of garden-stuff, were enclosed in thick borders of mignonette. Here the smell of oil and turpentine just referred to could not penetrate, especially as only the two upper studios were those of painters; while in the lower story, as could be seen by the blocks of stone in the yard, a sculptor carried on his art.

Artists--enjoying, as they do, a perpetual holiday mood over their work--are not wont to be supporters of a regular celebration of the Sabbath. Those who are so must be such as in the course of years have come to devote themselves--as not a few do in a so-called "art-city"--to the mere business-like manufacture of pictures for "art-clubs," or of parlor statuettes; and so are privileged to take their rest on the seventh day, among the other customs of solid citizens. They, "thank God, no longer feel obliged" to be industrious, and to work even on a holiday.

But the dwellers in this little house were not of such a type.

On the ground-floor all possible panes in the windows had been opened, to let as much as possible of the glowing air stream into the sunless room; and perhaps, too, to tempt in the fragrance of the flowers, or the notes of the flute that sounded from the window overhead. A flock of sparrows, that seemed accustomed to make themselves at home in the place, availed themselves of the opportunity to whirr in and out of the garden, to flutter, chattering and scolding, about among the ivy-vines with which one wall of the studio was thickly covered, and to hunt through every corner for neglected crusts of bread. With all this, however, they seemed well-bred enough to make no other trouble but their noise--though the busts and clay models, that stood about the room on boards and scaffoldings, showed many traces of their visits. On the damp cloth, in which a large group that stood in the middle of the great room was carefully wrapped, in order to keep the fresh clay from drying, sat an old and rather decrepit-looking sparrow, who still looked about him with an air of considerable dignity--evidently the chief of this wild army, to whom the pleasant coolness of his seat seemed to make it an agreeable one. He took no part in the fluttering and chatter of the younger company, but fixed his attention with critical gravity upon the artist in the gray blouse, who had moved his modeling-table close to the window, and was busy in finishing from a living model the statue of a dancing Bacchante.

The model was a young girl, hardly eighteen years old, who stood on a little platform opposite the sculptor, and, with her arms thrown up and backward, held fast by a rod that hung from the ceiling--for the statue held a tambourine in the hands flung upward with such abandon, and the pose was none of the most comfortable. Still, the girl had borne it a good half hour already without complaining or asking for a rest. Although she had to hold her head far back, with its loosened auburn hair that fell below her waist, yet she followed with intense curiosity--her little eyes almost closed the while, so that the long golden-blond lashes lay upon her cheeks--every movement of the artist, every one of his critical and comparing glances. It seemed to flatter her beyond measure that her youthful beauty should be the subject of such conscientious study; and in this satisfaction to her vanity she forgot fatigue. And indeed she was of unusually slender and graceful form; and from the rough brown calico dress that was tightly fastened about her waist there sprung, like a fair flower from a coarse husk, a girlish figure of as perfect whiteness and delicacy as though the poor child had no other occupation but to care for her complexion. Her face was not exactly beautiful; a rather flat nose with broad nostrils projected above the large, half-opened mouth. But in the ill-formed jaws, that gave to the face something wild and almost like an animal, shone perfect and beautiful teeth; and a merry, innocent, childlike smile enlivened the full lips and the otherwise rather expressionless eyes. The complexion of her face, too, was of a brilliant, transparent white, spotted here and there by a few little freckles, of which there were two or three also on her neck and breast. It was comical to see how she herself shared in the study of her own beauty, as she found such serious attention given to it by another; and, as she saw her girlish self treated with such respect, she seemed to forget every trace of anything like coquetry, such as might otherwise have entered into the matter.

"You must be tired, Zenz," said the sculptor. "Don't you want to rest awhile?"

She shook her auburn hair with a laugh. "It is so cool here," she answered without stirring. "You don't feel your own weight at all in the open air like this--and besides, there's the sweet smell of the mignonette in the garden. I believe I could stand this way till night."

"So much the better. I was just going to ask you if you were not cold, and didn't want a shawl over your shoulders. I don't need them now; I am just doing the arms."

He went seriously and quietly on with his work. In his plain face, framed in smooth blond hair streaked with gray, the only features that struck one at first glance were the eyes, that shone with an unusual force and fire. When he fixed them upon a certain point, it seemed as though they took complete possession of what they saw, and made themselves completely master of it. And yet there could be nothing more quiet or less inquiring in expression than these same eyes.

"Who is that playing the flute up stairs?" asked the girl. "The first time I was here, a week ago to-day, it was perfectly still up there; but to-day it goes tramp, tramp, every few minutes, and somebody plays, and then it stops again for a little while."

"A friend of mine has his studio just over us," answered the sculptor; "a battle-painter, Herr Rosenbusch. If he can't make his work go to please him, he takes up his flute and walks up and down like that, and plays, and buries himself in thought. And then he stops in front of his easel and looks at his picture; and so goes on until he hits upon what he is after. But what are you laughing at, Zenz?"

"Only at his name. Rosenbusch![^[1]] And paints battles!--Is he a Jew?"

"I don't think so. But now if you want to rest a little while--your neck must be perfectly stiff by this time."

She let go the rod at once, and sprang down from the bench. While he was polishing with his modeling-tool the portion he had just finished, she stood close by him, her arms crossed behind her with a lightness peculiar to her figure, and looked closely at the beautiful statue, which within the last hour had made such obvious progress. But only in the upper half; for the active hips and limbs of the dancer, only hidden by her long, flowing hair, were only very roughly outlined.

"Are you satisfied, child?" asked the artist. "But then I can only, at the best, work it out in marble for you, and you are really a better bit for a painter. That snow-white skin and flaming mane of yours--if you had lived two thousand years ago, when they made statues of gold and ivory, you would have been just in your proper place."

"Gold and ivory?" she repeated, thoughtfully. "Those must have been rich people! However, I am satisfied for my part with the beautiful white marble--like the young gentleman there behind, that you didn't finish."

"Do you like him? It was a long while ago that I began that bust. Isn't it fine, how the small, firm, round head springs from the broad shoulders? It's a pity that I only sketched out the face; you would have liked that too."

"Are you going to make my portrait too, there in the clay? I mean, so that it will be just like me--so that my friends will say at once 'That is Red Zenz?'"

"That depends. I could use your little nose and your small, sharp-cut ears well enough. But you know, child, I had quite another wish; and, if you will fulfill that, I'll make the face so that no human being will ever dream that Red Zenz was my model. Have you thought it over--what I asked you a week ago?"

He did not look at her as he spoke, but kept on diligently smoothing and kneading the soft clay.

She made as though she had not heard his question, and turned on her heel, wrapping her thick hair about her like a cloak, and went over to a corner of the studio, where a great black Newfoundland dog, with a white breast, was lying on a straw mat with his head between his fore paws, and growling lightly in his sleep. The girl bent down to him and began to scratch his head softly--of which he took no other notice than an instant's opening of his eyes, dim with old age.

"He isn't very gallant," said the girl, laughing. "One of my girl friends has a little terrier, and when I stroke him he is perfectly wild with joy, and I have to look out that he doesn't lick my face and neck and hands all over with his little pink tongue. But this fellow is as reverend as a grandfather. What is his name?"

"Homo."

"Homo? What a queer name! What does it mean?"

"It is Latin, and means 'man.' Years ago the old boy showed so much human reason, just as his master seemed on the point of losing his head, that it was decided to rechristen him. Since then he has never brought shame upon his name. So you see, child, in what good company you are. If I am hardly as old as a grandfather yet, I am almost old enough to be your father. And I thought these two sittings would have convinced you that you were perfectly safe with me--that I shall faithfully keep what I promised you. And that is the reason--"

"No, no, no, no!" cried she, jumping suddenly up and whirling around, and shaking her head so violently that her hair flew about her like a wheel of fire. "What makes you speak of that again, Herr Jansen? You take me for a silly, thoughtless kind of girl, no doubt--and think that in time I shan't be able to refuse you anything. But you are very much mistaken. It is true, I don't mind doing some foolish things; and standing about for you here like this doesn't seem to me anything wrong or disgraceful. Why, at a ball last winter where we had made up the flowers, and so they let us look in through the dressing-room, the fine ladies appeared before gentlemen in a very different way from the way I am standing and walking about here; and there were a great many officers there--not even artists, like you, that only look artistically at a bare neck and shoulders. But, if I will do that for you, you mustn't ask anything more. It is true, my friend, when I told her, did not think anything of it--and she could come with me. But that is decided--it would make me so that I never could look anybody straight in the face again. No--no--no! I will not do it--now or ever!"

"You are right, child," interrupted the sculptor, breaking in on her excited words and, suddenly changing the form of his speech into the more familiar "thou." "Nobody need know of it, and, if it is disagreeable to you, I will not speak of it again. And yet--it's a pity! I could make the figure from a single mould, so to speak; and in half the time that I shall have to spend now in looking about for something that will suit."

She made no answer, but of her own accord mounted upon the bench, and leaned back again, hanging from the rod.

"Is that right?" she asked. "Am I standing just as I did before?"

He only nodded, without looking up at her.

"What makes you cross with me?" she asked, after a while. "I cannot help it because I am not like my friend. To be sure, she has had a great deal more experience than I. And then she has been in love more than once."

"Have you never had a sweetheart, Zenz?"

"No; a real sweetheart, such as one would go through the fire for--never! My red hair didn't have very good fortune out in Salzburg, where I have generally lived. And, besides, I was too ugly. One of them said I had a dog's face. It has only been within the last year, when I have suddenly shot up a little, and grown a little stouter, that the gentlemen have sometimes run after me; and with one of them--a right nice young fellow--I had a kind of a flirtation. But he was so silly that he tired me; and so it hadn't gone far between us when one fine day he fell sick and died. And it was only then that I found I couldn't have loved him so very, very much; for I didn't even cry about him. Since then I have taken good care not to make a fool of myself again. Men are bad; everybody says that that knows anything. As for me, if I liked one--if I really liked him, 'von Herzen, mit Schmerzen'--"

"Well, Zenz, what would you do?"

She was silent for a moment, and then suddenly let her arms fall close by her sides. It seemed as though a chill ran over her soft skin; she shook herself, and shrugged her white shoulders.

"What would I do?" she repeated, as though to herself. "Everything he wanted! And so it is better as it is--much better."

"You are a good girl, Zenz," he muttered, nodding his head slowly. "Come, there is my hand; shake hands, and I promise you now that there never shall be a word again between us of what you are not willing to hear."

CHAPTER II.

She was just about to lay her round, white little hand in his, which was rough and muddy from kneading the clay, when a knock at the door caused them both to look up and listen.

The janitor called out through the key-hole that a strange gentleman wished to speak with Herr Jansen. When he heard that the sculptor had a model sitting to him at the moment, he had asked the janitor to take in his card. With this the janitor pushed the card through a narrow hole in the door made for the purpose.

The sculptor, grumbling, went toward the threshold and picked up the card. "Felix, Freiherr von Weiblingen." He shook his head thoughtfully. Suddenly he uttered an exclamation of joy. Under the printed name was written, with a pencil, "Icarus."

"A good friend of yours?" queried the girl.

He made no answer, but threw down his modeling-tool hastily, hurriedly wiped his hands on a towel, and hastened to the door again. As he opened it, he turned around.

"Stay here, Zenz," he said. "Amuse yourself for a while; there is a book of pictures; and, if you should be hungry, you will find something in the cupboard. I will lock the door behind me."

In the hall outside there was no one but the janitor, with his bent, long-shaped head, that looked very much like the head of a horse, especially when he spoke; then he moved his under-jaw, as though he had a bit between his great, yellow teeth.

He was a most serviceable old fellow, who had grown gray in the service of art, and had a more delicate judgment than many a professor. He was a thorough expert in preparing a canvas; and occupied his leisure in studying the chemistry of colors.

"Where are the gentlemen, Fridolin?" asked the sculptor.

"There is only one. He is walking in the yard. A very handsome young gentleman. You can see in his face the look of the 'Baron' that is on his card. He said--"

But the sculptor had hurried by him, and had rushed down the steps that led into the yard. "Felix!" he cried, "is it you or your ghost?"

"I am inclined to think it is both, and a heart in addition," replied the person addressed, grasping the hand that the sculptor held out to him. "Come, old fellow, I can't see why we should be ashamed to fall on each other's necks, here under God's free heaven. I have had to get on for years without my best and dearest old Dædalus--"

He did not finish his sentence. The sculptor had pressed him so heartily to his breast that it fairly took away his breath.

Then suddenly he loosened his grasp, and, stepping back a pace, cast a critical glance over the slight figure of his friend.

"Still just the same," he said, as though to himself; "but we must get those Samson-like locks under the shears. You don't know your strongest point, my dear boy, when you bury your round head in such a thicket. And your full beard must come off. However, all that will come with time. Tell me what has conjured you forth out of your primeval forests into our tame art-city?"

He grasped the young man's arm, and led him around the house into the little garden. Both were silent, and seemed to avoid looking at one another, as though they had begun to feel ashamed of the extravagant affection with which they had marked their reunion.

At the extreme end of the garden was an arbor overgrown with honeysuckle; at its entrance stood sentry two potbellied Cupids in the rococco style, with little queues and all that--both of them painted sky-blue from head to foot.

"It's easy to see whom one is visiting," said Felix, laughing. "'His pig-tail hangs behind him,' or have you had it cut off?" Then, without waiting for an answer: "But tell me, old fellow, how have you had the heart to leave your poor Icarus all these terribly long years without a sign of life on your part? Haven't any of the six or eight letters I have written you--the last only a year ago from Chicago--"

The sculptor had turned away and buried his face in a bunch of full-blown roses. He turned suddenly toward his friend, and said, with a quick, lowering glance: "A sign of life! How do you know that I have lived these terribly long years? But let us drop all that. Come and sit down here in the arbor, and now unpack your budget. A circumnavigator like you must have brought all manner of things with you that are entertaining and wonderful to dusty stay-at-homes like us. When you went away from Kiel, we did not either of us think the earth would turn so often before we looked each other in the face again."

"What shall I tell you?" asked the young man, and his delicate brow contracted, "If my letters reached you, you have not lost the thread of my story. As for all the details that belong to it, you knew me well enough in my first university days, in those old times at Kiel, to imagine how I went on afterward in Heidelberg and Leipsic, till I got an older head under my corps-student's cap. It is true, I soon grew tired of the ridiculous corps business; but, for the mere sake of not seeming to play the renegade, I kept on with the old associations even more shamelessly than before. My three years passed away, and a fourth beside; I was fully three-and-twenty when I went back into my dear, dull, little home, and passed my examination to enter the civil service. How I managed to get on so long without giving you a call, Heaven knows! As early as the second year after our separation, I was very near you. I had a trifling reminder of a pistol-duel with a Russian, here in my left shoulder, and had to go to a watering-place for my health. In Heligoland I heard that you had moved to Hamburg. I needn't say that I designed to call upon you on my way back. But, suddenly, a sad message called me home abruptly. My poor old father had had an apoplectic stroke, and I found him dead. Then there was all the dreary necessary business, and, after it all--. But why must we spoil our first pleasant hour with all these old stories? My dear Hans, if you had a notion how good it is to be sitting here again by your side, to smell these roses, and imagine that my life is beginning all over again--a new life in a better world, free from all fetters and--. But, by-the-way, you have married, I hear? An actress, was it not? Where did she come from? I heard in Heligoland--"

The sculptor suddenly rose. "You find me as you left me," he said, his face darkening quickly; "what is past, let us let it rest. Come out of the arbor; it is suffocatingly hot under those thick vines."

He went toward the little fountain, held his hands under the slender stream, and passed them over his brow. Then, for the first time, he turned to Felix again. His face was once more composed and bright.

"And now tell me what has brought you here, and how long you are going to stay with me."

"As long as you will have me--for ever and ever--in infinitum if you will!"

"You are joking. Don't do that, my dear boy. I am so utterly alone here, in spite of a plenty of good comrades with whom I can share everything except my most intimate thoughts, that the thought of beginning our old life again seems far too happy to me to be only made a jest of."

"But it is my most serious earnest, dear old Hans. I am going to stay here with you, if you have nothing against it, in your most intimate daily companionship; and, if some day you strike your tent and wander away somewhere else, I will go too. In one word, I have put my whole past career behind me, and broken up all my old associations, so that I may begin, as I said, my whole life over again, and not be anything but what I care most to be--a free man; not make myself anything but what I have always secretly longed to be, an artist, as good or as bad a one as mother Nature will let me."

He poured forth these words hurriedly, and with downcast face, and as he talked drew a light circle in the nearest flower-bed with his cane. It was only after a pause, and when his friend made no reply, that he raised his eyes and met, with some embarrassment, the quiet gaze fixed upon him.

"You don't seem quite able to accept this change in my life all at once, Hans? Others besides you have had the same feeling--the person most concerned in it, for instance. That I have become a conceited ass, and fancy that because I used to be extravagantly fond of modeling all manner of absurdities in clay, and cutting caricatures of my friends in meerschaum--this I hope you will not believe. But why I can't get beyond the condition of a dilettante, if I only am serious about it, and think of and do nothing else but study my A, B, C, under a good master--I beg of you, my dear Dædalus, don't pull such a disheartening face! Don't look so sadly at the lost youth--as I probably seem to you; or at least smile ironically, so as to rouse my anger and wound my amour propre a little! But by the eternal gods--what is there after all so horribly fatal in this decision? That it hasn't occurred to me till after twenty-seven years? That is bad, I admit, but not a proof that it is hopeless. Think of your own half-countryman, Asmus Carstens, or of--well, I won't give you a whole chapter of artists' biographies. And besides, when I am altogether independent and have burnt my ships behind me--"

He stopped again. His friend's silence seemed to check his utterance. For a time nothing was to be heard around them but the splashing of the little fountain, and from the window above them the notes of the battle-painter's flute, every little while dying dismally away.

Suddenly the sculptor stood still.

"And does your fiancée agree to this project?"

"My fiancée? What in the world puts that question into your head?"

"Because, although I never answered your letters, I remember them all very well. Is it possible that you too do not remember what you wrote me three years ago, under the seal of the deepest--"

"So I did do it then!" cried the young man with a short, abrupt laugh. "So I did chatter, did I? I assure you, my dear Hans, I was myself doubtful how far I had initiated you--you, the only one before whom I ever lifted even a corner of the veil from this veiled picture. After awhile--as you sent no congratulations--I began to persuade myself that I had kept a quiet tongue in my head, even with you; and, in truth, that would have been the best thing to do. Then I should have escaped the full confession that it is hard enough for me to make--and after all, it is perfectly superfluous. For how shall I--who am no poet, and who am besides an interested party in the transaction--how shall I describe the persons concerned so that you will understand how it all came about--how it was partly the fault of both--and yet how both are innocent, after all?

"But if you must have it, let it be so--as briefly as possible.

"I came back, then, to my native town, to pay the last honors to my good old father. You know what an unhomelike home I had always found it. The capital of a third-class Duodezstaat--thank your good star that you have no idea what it means. My father before me had suffered under the absurd despotism of this court-etiquette, this endlessly-branching, complicated, spun-out primeval jungle of dry genealogical trees--under these ridiculous traditions of a worm-eaten bureaucracy. He was a man of quite another type--a sturdy, stately country noble, of the most exclusive and most independent spirit; and since the death of my mother--who could not of course withdraw herself so entirely from her family connections--he had lived on our own estate, altogether apart from 'society.' Then came his death; and I--looked upon askance even as a boy because of my likeness to my father, and almost given up as far as a career at court or in politics was concerned--I believe no cock would have crowed at it, if I had once for all acknowledged that I was my father's true heir in this respect also, and had forever turned my back on the spot where I was cradled. But, much as I felt inclined to do so, it fell out otherwise."

He put his hand into his pocket and took out a little memorandum-book.

"You shall have the romance in an illustrated edition," he said, with a rather forced attempt at jesting. "See, it was this little person's fault that I thought for a while it was really my calling to be a useful citizen--chamberlain to his Highness--by and by master of the hunt--court marshal--heaven knows what all. Is not that a face that could persuade one of anything, and could turn a head that never sat very firmly? And that is only a commonplace photograph, and three years old; and besides, in these three years the wicked child has learned all manner of witches' arts; and the eyes that here in the photograph look so still and fixed--half curious, half timid, as if they were looking at a theatre-curtain that would not go up--I can tell you, my dear boy, they look into the world now with such a queenly confidence and dignity that it fairly--but that is no part of our present talk. And at that time, when the misfortune happened and I lost my heart to the child, the little thing was hardly more than a schoolgirl, just sixteen years old; and shy, silent and unformed as a young bird. We had known each other since we were children--she is some sort of a cousin, seventeen times removed--just as all good families with us are related in some way. I had not the least idea, however, of visiting her, until her uncle, with whom she lived--her parents died when she was very young--until this jovial gentleman came to make me a visit of condolence. Of course I had to return it, and it was on this occasion that I first saw the slender, pale, large-eyed child, with her exquisite, tight-shut red lips and her ravishing, tiny little ears.

"Soon afterward I went away again, and only after a year had passed--after the infernal examination that I would not shirk, in spite of my freedom, lest it should seem as though I were afraid of it--only then, when she was seventeen years old, did I see her again. While I was away, a recollection of her had come back to me from time to time; suddenly, in the midst of altogether different things, I had seen something flitting before me that resembled nothing but her slight and somewhat spare figure, about which there was one trait that always seemed to me especially charming--that though she was perhaps not quite tall enough, her little form was always so haughty and erect and so delicately and perfectly balanced on its slender pedestal. Sometimes, too, her eyes met me in a fairly ghost-like fashion, when I was among my comrades or alone out of doors. And yet I had never exchanged ten words with her.

"And now, when I found her again, a year older and suddenly developed into a young woman--no, Hans, you need not fear that I am shamelessly going to put our whole love-story at your mercy, here in the bright morning sunlight. Enough to say that it had fared much the same with her, as far as my worthy self was concerned, as with me in respect to her. We saw that we were meant for one another, as people say--without ever thinking how much is meant by the words.

"Well! everything would have been well enough; the match seemed as bien assortie as could possibly have been wished even in such an aristocratic and cosmopolitan capital as ours. If we had only married at once, on the spur of the moment, we should have been just the people--she with her seventeen years, and I with my three or four-and-twenty--to be altogether suited to one another, and, as time went on, to so round off the very perceptible and serious corners and sharpnesses of our two temperaments, that finally it would have been a thoroughly happy marriage. But, unfortunately, Irene's mother had married at seventeen, and attributed her lifelong invalidism--for she was a delicate creature and always remained so--to this early marriage. When she died--still very young--she charged her husband solemnly that he should not let their only daughter marry before she was twenty; and the uncle, who afterward filled a father's place to my sweetheart, considered himself absolutely bound by this inherited pledge. I must wait patiently, therefore, for three whole years. And as he was a bachelor, and his niece had no chaperon to call upon but a former servant, I was required to pledge myself to avoid all companionship with my betrothed during this long probation, and only to carry on my courtship by letter; so that every temptation to seek to shorten the time of waiting might be put a stop to once for all.

"You can imagine what my feelings were when the old gentleman told me all this. To decree a three years' banishment just because we should give him trouble--because he hated responsibility, and because he believed, as an old hand at love-making, that this was the best way to protect lovers against themselves! But, jovial as his manner was, he was an uncompromising egotist where his own quiet and comfort were concerned. And I was too stubborn and too proud to make any supplications, and too sure of myself and my sweetheart to fear the length of the interval; which did not seem to me at first glance so intolerable as I often felt it afterward--in sighs and misery.

"My sweetheart, too, threw back her little head and said: 'Yes, we will wait.'--Afterward, it is true, when it came to our last parting, she fell out of my arms as though she were dead, and I thought she would never open her eyes again. Even now I don't know how I succeeded, in spite of it all, in tearing myself away.

"And this three years' separation itself! If I had only been a man of sense--that is, if I had been another than myself--I should have settled down somewhere in Germany, and taken up some task at which I could have worked myself tired--to fight down my unprofitable lover's-melancholy. Why could not I devote my three years to making myself a perfect agriculturist, or a prominent jurist, or a politician, or something that is of some use in the world? To make one's self so completely master of some department of life or knowledge that one knows every square foot of it is rather an absurd and commonplace consolation, to be sure; but it is better, after all, than an objectless activity, a love nourished on prison-fare, and a longing for freedom that at last makes one look upon mere change as something desirable.

"Even then I thought of my old Dædalus. I was on the very point of falling upon you in your studio, and, for want of a smooth, girlish cheek to caress, of trying my hand on a soft bit of clay. Just then I chanced upon an opportunity to go to England; there I stayed until I was ripe for America; and he who once sets foot in the New World, and hasn't left any very pressing business behind him in the Old, can get rid of a few years of his life without knowing exactly how he has done it. It is enough to tell you that I had already reached Rio, traveling by way of San Francisco and Mexico, when I said to myself one day that if I did not want to prolong my exile voluntarily, and so appear to my betrothed in rather a bad light, I must take the next steamer that sailed for Havre, in order to land at last, after all this wandering over the wide world, in the harbor of my wedded bliss.

"I had written regularly to my betrothed every month--beautiful diary-like love-letters--and had received with equal regularity letters from her, which, to speak honestly, had now and then irritated me greatly; so that we had already had (on paper) all manner of misunderstandings, tiffs, quarrels, and reconciliations. I considered that all this belonged of right to a well-conducted three-years' engagement, and did not take it too much to heart when my well-bred, rather provincial little sweetheart, who had grown up in the atmosphere of the petty capital, occasionally gave her vagabond fiancé a little moral lesson. Perhaps I was wrong, and certainly I was foolish, always to report my varied adventures with absolute candor. There were no very serious matters among them; and the few cases of real human weaknesses and sins I kept to myself--shut up in a sincerely remorseful heart. But she found fault even with the tone of my 'sketches from two hemispheres.' Good heavens! it is easily comprehensible that the poor child, living as she did among such absurd surroundings, could not have much taste for a free life out in the world! Thrown entirely on herself, watched over by a hundred eyes in a narrow, starched, formal society--I once wrote to her that she was only so serious beyond her years because she had had to fill, as it were, a mother's place to herself, and be her own governess and duenna. And, besides all this, there was her uncle's frightful example--for she could not long remain ignorant of his habit of compensating himself for outward respectability by private orgies at his bachelor clubs and petits soupers.

"Only let the three years be over, I thought to myself, and we will soon weed out the tares that have sprung up between our roses. But I did not know the vigor of the ground in which all this bad crop had grown up. Nor did I know how much the years between seventeen and twenty signified in such a girl's life.

"At last, then, I arrived at home, and found--but, no!" He checked himself abruptly, and made a sharp cut at the air with his cane. "Why should I bore you with a detailed story of a domestic comedy that has only a decidedly unfavorable likeness to 'Much Ado about Nothing,' and, instead of ending with the reconciliation between Benedict and Beatrice, finished with a ridiculous eternal separation? For isn't it almost as laughable as lamentable that two lovers, who for three whole years, the world over, have been extravagantly fond of one another, should count the days till they could fall again on one another's necks, and then should not be able to get on together for six weeks? And all this only because--as old Goethe says--man strives for liberty, woman for morality; and because the said moral law seems to the man a wretched slavery, while the unhappy young woman thinks even a very moderate freedom immoral! Ah, my dear old Hans, what did I not endure in those six weeks!--and more especially because I was thoroughly dissatisfied with myself. After our altogether fruitless (and therefore all the more obstinate) discussions of these questions, in which I poured out my bitterest scorn upon her court-etiquette, her kid-gloved prejudices, her duenna-like code of morals, while she put my baseless principles to shame with a maidenly pride and firmness that I could have kissed her for--always after these discussions I used to say to myself, in the quiet of my chamber, that I was a mad fool to upset matters as I did. With a little diplomacy, a little delicate tact, and patient hypocrisy, I could have thoroughly gained my end; could have borne the stupid ban of society until my marriage; and then, when we were alone together, could have gradually developed my little wife out of her doll-like state of servitude, and rejoiced to see her spread her wings in freedom.

"But it was odd: as often as I appeared before her with the best resolves in the world--the war began again. You must not imagine that she fairly entered the lists, challenged me, and herself brought up our old points of conflict. But it was precisely her quiet reserve, her obvious good intention to be cautious with the reckless scapegrace, and to leave his reform to time--it was all this that overthrew my finest diplomatic projects. I would begin to joke, then to chaff, then to hurl the most fearful insults against people and customs that seemed fairly holy to her--and so it went on, day after day, until there came one day that fairly 'forced the bottom out of the cask'--a wretched, wretched day!"

He paused a moment, and fixed his eyes gloomily upon the ground.

"There's no help for it!" he said, at last. "It must come out. Once in my life I did something that humiliated me in my own eyes. I committed a sin against my own sense of honor--a base act, for which I never can forgive myself, although a court of honor in matters of gallantry--chosen from among my own equals, mind you--would probably have let me off with a slight penance, if not scot-free altogether. You know what I think of what is called sin; there is no absolute moral code; what brands one forever is only a little spot upon another--all according to the delicacy and sensitiveness of the skin. Even conscience is a product of culture, and the categorical imperative is a pure fiction. What a brutal blackguard of a soldier permits himself in plundering a captured town, and feels his conscience untroubled, would dishonor his officer to all eternity. But I am not going to theorize; suffice it to say that that inner harmony with one's self, on which everything depends, was utterly destroyed in me by this act. From the way in which it haunted me, you can conceive how, in a moment of weakness, I confessed the whole story to Irene's uncle, little consolation as I could get from the absolution of so very odd a saint. I saw how little, when he utterly failed to understand how I could take the matter so to heart, especially as it had taken place a considerable time before my engagement. I instantly repented most bitterly that I had confided in him; and his promise, never by a single syllable to recur to it, reassured me but little.

"I was right. He forgot it himself; and one unhappy day he began, in the very presence of his niece--we had just been speaking of all manner of far more innocent adventures, and even these she would not let pass--he began to refer to that wretched story. Something must have come into my face that instantly gave my sweetheart an idea that this reference meant something beyond the common. Her uncle, too, began to stammer, and made a clumsy attempt to change the subject. That made the matter worse. Irene stopped talking, and soon after left the room. The uncle, good-natured as usual, cursed his own loquacity again and again; but, naturally, that did not help things. When I saw my little one again, she asked me to what his words referred. I was too proud to lie to her; I confessed that I carried about with me the memory of something that I wished to conceal from myself--how much more from her! With that she grew silent again. But on the evening of that day, when I was a second time alone with her, she told me that she must know the whole. I could not have done anything that she could not forgive me; but she felt that she could not live by my side when there was such a secret between us.

"Perhaps a wiser man might have invented some story, and so have avoided a greater evil. There is such a thing as a necessary lie. But I held to the belief that every man is alone responsible for his acts; that I should add a second sin to the first if I burdened the pure soul of my darling with such a confidence; and so I remained unshaken, though I knew her too well not to know how much was at stake.

"On the next morning I received her parting letter--a letter that for the first time showed me all that I was losing.

"But I had gone too far to turn back. I answered that I would wait until she changed her opinions; that in the mean time I should look upon myself as bound to her; but she was, of course, entirely free.

"That was a week ago. I reflected that of course it would be necessary to leave at once those places where she might meet me. In putting my house in order for an indefinite absence, I came upon a package of visiting-cards in one of my mother's cupboards that had on them the name of her brother, my godfather, Felix von Weiblingen. It occurred to me as a good idea that, under this name, I might for a while (incognito) breathe the same air with my oldest friend, and at the same time attain the goal of my dearest wishes--to begin a new life. There is nothing in me of the ordinary numbered and classified type of 'man with a calling,' and, even with the best wife in the world, I never should have been able to busy myself quietly on my estate with bringing up children, making brandy, and fox-hunting. It is better, then, that I should use this involuntary opportunity to dispose of myself as I choose, in trying whether I can't really make a life of my own. If in time she should bring herself to my way of thinking, she would then find a fait accompli that she would have to accept.

"It will be no shame to me in your eyes if I don't at once find my spirits so entirely in order that I can go rushing into a mastery of the fine arts by lightning express. I have reached the door of your studio but slowly, and by very short stages--but this very slowness has done me good. You see before you a thoroughly sensible man, who is determined to submit to fate without a grumble. If you will only take me into die Mache, it will not be long before the wings of your faithful Icarus will grow again, to lift him above all this wretched world of Philistinism and its foolish love-affairs."

CHAPTER III.

The sculptor had listened to this long confession in silence. And even now, when Felix ended, and began to pull to pieces a sprig of mignonette as carefully as though he were trying to count the stamens in the little blossoms, he betrayed neither by word nor look any opinion of what he had just heard.

"I find that you have made great progress in your old art of expressing yourself by silence," said the young man at length, with a somewhat forced lightness of tone. "Do you remember how I used to be able to tell from the degree, and, so to speak, from the pitch of your silence, just what you were thinking of my nonsense? I can tell in the same way now: you think my decision to become an artist is a mere absurdity. You used to tell me that I was not fit either for science or art--that I was an homme d'action. But there's no help for it now: if it is a wrong road--why, I am in it once for all and mean to follow it to the end. So speak out, and tell me candidly whether I must look up another master, or whether the lion will endure the company of the puppy in his cage--as he used to before he himself was a full-grown king of the desert?"

"What shall I say to you, my dear boy?" replied the sculptor, in his quiet, rather slow manner. "The thing is a matter of course. I need not say to you, well as you know me, that I can hardly base any very exalted hopes upon an art-apprentice who takes up his task somewhat as a man might marry a woman with whom he had not been especially in love, but who now, when his real sweetheart has given him the mitten, is a good enough last resort; that the future career of an art adopted thus out of spite, as it were, seems to me very doubtful. But then, too, I know you well enough to be sure that all the Phidiases and Michael Angelos in the world couldn't make you break your resolution, and that, if I should lock my door against you, you would be just the fellow to bind yourself out as an apprentice to the first of my colleagues you might chance upon. And then--to be honest--it is such a pleasure to me to have you back again at all, that out of pure selfishness I can't make any objection if your energy, instead of taking hold of real life, chooses to spend itself on a harmless bit of clay. For the rest--let us speak of it another time--or not at all, whichever pleases you better. In such matters we take no counsel, after all, but that of our own souls; and if this isn't always the best for us--why, we are sovereigns of ourselves, and have it in our own power to save or ruin ourselves according to our natures. Here is my hand, then. You can begin to-morrow, if you like, your apprenticeship as a kneader of clay and chipper of stone--and your baronial ancestors can turn in their graves at it as they please."

"Chaff away, dear old Hans!" cried the young man, joyously. "Now I'll stake my head that I will become a famous artist just to have the laugh on you! I will work from morning till night with a true malicious pleasure, grinding and fretting till the dilettante skin is rubbed off and something better appears below it. And you shall see that I have not spent these seven years altogether in lounging. If you will run through my sketch-books from both continents--but apropos, what have you been doing in the mean while? Is it not a shame that I haven't been able to keep track of your progress toward immortality, even by a wretched photograph? And here I have been running on for an hour over my own adventures, while the most glorious wonders of the world are waiting for me over yonder!"

He strode quickly across the yard, to which they had come back while they were talking, and entered the house.

"You will repent this haste, rash boy!" Jansen called after him, while an odd smile played about his lips. "You will indeed wonder over much that you see--but the wonders of the world that you dream of--they are still in this narrow room" (he pointed to his forehead), "and even there they are not always in the best light!"

With these words he unlocked one of the two lower doors, and let Felix pass in.

It was a second studio, adjoining that in which he had worked during the morning; a room precisely like the other, its walls painted in the same stone-color, and its great square window half draped in the same fashion. And yet no one would have believed that the same spirit ruled here that had created the dancing Bacchante in the next atelier.

On slender pedestals stood a multitude of figures, most of them of half life-size, such as are used for the decoration of Catholic churches, chapels and cemeteries. Some of them were just begun, some were almost finished works; and in all could be clearly recognized the hands of the pupils who had their execution in charge--sometimes more and sometimes less skillfully imitating the little original models, barely six inches high, that stood on small shelves beside the copies. While the latter were neatly cut in sandstone or in the cheaper marbles--and a few in wood, decorated with all manner of painting and gilding--the little models were in plaster, and spotted and nicked by constant use. Yet these doll-like little madonnas, saints and apostles, and praying and playing angels in their heavy draperies, had a certain odd and now and then almost caricatured life-likeness--so great that not all of its charm was lost, even in the dry copies made by the assistants. They had something of the same element of humor that Ariosto gives to his personages--which by no means lose in life or force because their author has lost his own simple faith in them.

"Allow me to ask," said Felix, after looking about blankly for a moment, "into whose room you have brought me? And is your good friend who practises this pious art hidden somewhere close by, so that one must be cautious in his criticisms?"

"You needn't be in the least disturbed, my dear fellow; the lord and master of this worshipful company stands before you."

"You, yourself? Dædalus with a saint's halo! The preacher in the wilderness of modern art actually at the foot of the cross! Before I believe that, I shall have to take the cowl myself, and declare poor naked Beauty to be an invention of the devil!"

The sculptor cast down his eyes for a moment.

"Yes, my dear fellow," he said, "this is what we have come to in our art-desert. You ask me for beauty, and I offer you clothes-racks with dolls'-heads! As long ago as when we were in Kiel, I had to learn that the world of to-day will have nothing to do with true art. You know how hard I found it to turn these stones of mine into bread. It was still worse when I moved to Hamburg, and there--" he checked himself suddenly, and turned away; "well, living is more expensive there, and I began to be older and less easily satisfied; and, when I could no longer support myself in the place--it was the wretched trading city's fault, I thought--I packed up my best models and sketches and came here, to the much-praised land of art, the 'Athens on the Iser,' of which so much is said and sung. You will soon learn how it is here. I won't begin as soon as you have crossed the threshold to sweep all the disagreeable things in the house out of the corners for you. I will only say that the Munich Philistine isn't a hair better than those on the Jungfernstieg or in our old Holstein. After I had managed, with great difficulty, to keep myself alive here for a year, and had hardly earned enough in the service of pure beauty to keep life in my body, I found that such misery was enough to make a man turn Catholic--and, as this spectacle shows, I did turn so, half-and-half. It wasn't so easy as it may seem to you here--to my shame! Besides a trace of conscience, which was always reminding me that

'Man, after all, has higher goals to seek

Than simply feeding seven times a week;'

besides my own humiliation before myself and a few of my good colleagues, I was hampered by a real lack of skill. It needs a good deal to take all the manliness out of one's self, so that one can fit himself to all the miserable complications, the twisted deformities and tameness of our modern civilization. But it only depends, after all, on one's capability of getting the humor out of the thing. The idea that I, an unmitigated pagan, should establish a manufactory of images of saints, struck me as so indescribably rich that one fine day I actually set to work to model a Saint Sebastian, in which task my knowledge of anatomy stood me in good stead. But, even here, I soon found that it is only 'clothes that make the man.' It was only when I betook myself to making draperies, trains, and sleeves, that the result took on the true devotional air such as the public is accustomed to and desires. And, since then, I have grown prosperous so fast that now I employ eight or ten assistants; and, if it goes on, I shall some day bid farewell to temporal affairs, in the odor of sanctity and as rich as----." (He named a colleague who enjoyed a continued rush of business.)

"Yes, my dear Icarus," continued he, still more laughingly, as Felix made no reply to these revelations, "you would not have believed it all, I know, when in the first fire of youth we rode our proud hobbies, and called every man a low fool who, in art or life, proved faithless to his ideals by a straw's breadth. But the mill of every-day life rubs off much that a man believed was bound to him as with iron--like a very part of himself. And here you have an example, worth your deep consideration, of that celebrated 'liberty' you think to find here. If I allow myself the liberty of doing what I cannot give up, I must, at the same time, make up my mind to work at absurdities with which my heart has no sympathy. In order to be an artist, such as I wish to be, I am compelled to make Nuremberg toys and to display them in the market-places. But, after all--behind my own back, as it were--I continue quietly to be my own master. Let thy troubled heart take courage, beloved son! thy old Dædalus hasn't even yet become quite so utterly bad as these trade-wares show him. I think you will give me back your esteem if I lead you now out of my holy into my profane atelier--out of my tailor's-shop into my paradise!"

CHAPTER IV.

With these words he opened the little door that separated the two studios and passed in, followed by Felix.

"You will find an old acquaintance again," he said. "I wonder whether friend Homo still remembers you. He has certainly had time to grow old and dull."

The dog was still lying in front of the old sofa, on the straw mat, and seemed to have slept quietly on, although the girl had seated herself near him and had buried both feet in his thick coat as in a rug. Evidently the old dog thought it not disagreeable, but rather pleasant than otherwise, to be rubbed and trampled on by the little shoes. At all events he uttered a comfortable growl from time to time, like a purring cat.

To the girl herself the time had seemed very long. At first, when she heard voices out in the garden, she had climbed upon a chair close to the window, and, pulling her skirt over her bare shoulders that she might not be seen by any chance passer-by, had peeped out curiously through the roses. The strange young man, who spoke so long and seriously with Jansen, had taken her fancy greatly, with his tall, slender figure, his small head above the broad shoulders, and the fiery glance of his brown eyes, that wandered absently about. She had seen directly that he must be somebody of distinction. But, when he disappeared with Jansen into the arbor, her post at the window grew uncomfortable. She climbed slowly and thoughtfully down, stationed herself before a little looking-glass on the wall, and looked attentively at her own youthful figure, which only seemed to her anything especially remarkable now that an artist copied from it. Only to-day she was even less satisfied than usual with her face, and tried whether it could not be improved if she screwed up her mouth as much as possible, drew in her nostrils, and opened her eyes very wide. She was vexed because she could not make herself as beautiful as the plaster-heads that stood above her on the brackets. But suddenly she had to laugh at the horribly distorted face she made; her old high spirits came back; she thrust out her tongue at her reflection in the glass, and was pleased to see how pretty and red it looked between her glittering white teeth. Then she shook her thick red hair and went singing, and patting her shoulders in time with the tune, up and down the room, so that the sparrows were frightened and fluttered out at the window. Then she stood still for a long while and looked at the casts and clay models around her on the walls; and seemed especially interested in the half-finished marble bust. It reminded her again of the stranger outside in the arbor, whose head sprung just so from his stately shoulders. Finally she tired of this also; and besides, she began to feel a little hungry. She found in the cupboard, behind her in the corner to which the sculptor had directed her, a few rolls and an opened bottle of red wine. There was all sorts of rubbish besides in the cupboard; a masquerader's costume, pieces of gold-stamped leather tapestry, of blue and red silk and brocade, with large flowers in their patterns, and a saint's halo, cut out of paper and painted with beautiful golden rays--that might have done service for a tableau vivant, or some other profane purpose. The idle girl seized upon this last, fastened it on her head with the two ribbons still attached to it, and went again before the looking-glass, where she smiled and made faces at her own reflection. Then she took a piece of blue damask out of the pile of things, and threw it like a cloak over her white shoulders. Her hair flowed freely over it, so that at a distance, when one did not see her uncovered neck, she looked like a mediæval madonna, who had stepped out of her frame and had wandered into some merry company. The girl thought herself very beautiful, and quite worthy of reverence in this disguise, and secretly congratulated herself on the surprise and admiration of the sculptor, when he should find her so dressed. That she might await his return more comfortably, she had seated herself on the sofa, put a glass of wine on a chair beside her, and begun to eat a roll. She had come across a portfolio of photographs of celebrated pictures, and had laid it open in her lap, resting her feet on the dog's back; and so she had sat now a full half-hour, absorbed in looking at the pictures (which she found generally very ugly), when the little door opened and Jansen again entered the room.

At the same moment she started as though shot up by a spring--so rudely that the old dog, giving a low howl and shaking himself, also scrambled up from his sleep.

She had seen the young stranger enter behind the sculptor; and now she stood in the middle of the atelier, drawing the little blue silk flag as tightly as she could across her breast, her eyes flaming with anger, and her whole body trembling with excitement.

"You need not be afraid, my child," said the sculptor, "this gentleman is also an artist. Good Heavens! How magnificently you have dressed yourself! The halo becomes you excellently. Turn round a little--"

She shook her head violently.

"Let me go! I will never come again!" she said half aloud. "You haven't kept your word to me! Oh! it is shameful!"

"But, Zenz--"

"No, never again! You have deceived me. You know very well what you promised me, and yet--"

"But if you would only listen! I assure you solemnly--"

Shaking her head and blushing crimson, she ran to the chair where she had laid her waist and her straw hat, seized them hurriedly, and shot like an arrow through the little side-door into the second studio.

The sculptor tried to follow her, but had to turn back at the bolted door. Vexed and annoyed, he turned again to Felix, who had let the girl pass almost unnoticed in the demonstrative recognition he received from the dog. The powerful animal had come leaping toward him with all the liveliness of his younger days, had rested his heavy paws on his old friend's breast, barking hoarsely the while, and seemed unwilling to let him go again.

"Do you really know me still, true old soul?" cried the young man, patting the dog's great head, and looking with real emotion into the faithful old fellow's large eyes, already grown a little dim.--"See, Hans, with what empressement he receives me! But what have I done to vex the little girl? Is it the custom here in your blessed land of free art for models to set themselves up as examples of propriety?"

"This is rather a peculiar case," answered Jansen, with some vexation. "It was only after long hesitation that she did me the favor to stand as a model at all; and I shall be hard put to it now to make the shy thing so tame again. She has neither father nor mother--at least, so she says. I used often to meet her on her way to an artificial-flower factory, where she works hard to support, herself. Her figure attracted me; and the little pert-nosed thing did not look as though her ideas were very rigidly conventional. But she would have nothing to say to it, although, as I look older than I am, I have made much shyer people trust me. Finally, though, my last resort helped me here, as it had before."

"Your last resort?"

"Yes; the remark that, after all, the matter really was not worth so much trouble as I had given to it; and perhaps, on the whole, she was wise in only wishing to show her figure with the aid of dress. This was too much for the vain little creature, and she consented to come as a model--but no one but myself must ever enter the studio. I thoughtlessly broke this agreement to-day in admitting you."

Felix stepped before the statue of the Bacchante.

"Unless you have greatly flattered her, you are to be congratulated on finding so good a one," he said. "And, as far as I have been able to see in to-day's wanderings through the town, you must have every reason to be satisfied with most of the figures you can find here."

Jansen did not answer. He seemed to be absorbed in gazing at his friend, who happened to be standing at the moment in a most favorable light. Then, muttering to himself, he went over to the cupboard in which the girl had been rummaging, searched a while in its compartments, and at last came back to Felix, hiding behind him a great pair of shears. The young man still stood absorbed in admiration of the Bacchante.

"Before we do anything else, my dear boy," said the sculptor, "you must allow me to crop this hair of yours into a more rational shape. Sit down there on that stool. In less than five minutes we shall have it all arranged; and that neck of yours, that looks like the neck of the Borghese Gladiator--the very best point about you--will be got out of all this thicket."

At first Felix laughingly refused; but finally he submitted; and his friend's skillful hand cropped his long hair, and trimmed his full beard more closely.

"There!" said Jansen. "Now a man needn't be ashamed to be seen with you. And, as a reward for this submission, I will show you something that until now very few mortal eyes have had the privilege of seeing."

He approached the great veiled group in the middle of the studio, and began cautiously to unwrap the damp cloths in which the work was everywhere enveloped.

The figure of a youth appeared, of more than mortal strength and stature, lying stretched upon the ground in an attitude of perfect and natural grace and beauty. Sleep seemed to have just left his eyes; for he lay with his head a little raised, leaning upon his right arm, and passing the left across his forehead as though to clear away the mists of some deep dream. Before him--or behind him, as it appeared to the spectator--knelt upon one knee a youthful female figure, bending over him in a posture of innocent wonder. This figure was much less advanced toward completion than that of its male companion--there being, indeed, scarcely anything left to do on the latter excepting a little delicate work upon the luxuriant hair and the hands and feet. And yet, though the lines of the woman's figure were still almost in the rough, and her beautiful form seemed only the fruit of a few days' labor, the modeling of the whole was so broad and strong, the bend of the neck and the posture of the arms were so expressive, that no one could fail to catch the full force of the whole, even from the unfinished work, and to see that the two figures were worthy of one another, and of equal birth.

Felix uttered an exclamation of delight. Then, for a full quarter of an hour, he stood motionless before the mighty group, and seemed altogether to forget the sculptor in his work.

At length the dog, which came beside him and began again to lick his hand, aroused him from his reverie.

"The old-time Hans still lives!" he cried, turning to Jansen. "And more than that--this is for the first time the complete, genuine Dædalus, who has thoroughly learned to use his wings. Listen, old boy; it is gradually dawning upon me that I must have been altogether mad and absurd when I introduced myself to you as a kind of fellow-artist!"

"You shall go to the art-club to-morrow, and gather new courage when you see some of your other colleagues," said Jansen, dryly. "However, I am glad the thing pleases you. You remember how I used to dwell on the germ of the idea of this work years ago. The First Man face to face with the First Woman--hardly daring as yet to actually touch the being who for the first time makes his human existence full and complete; while she--more mature already, as a woman is, and having had time while he slept to recover from her first surprise--feels herself drawn by a strange and joyful yearning to him who is to be her lord, and to call forth for the first time her true woman's nature. It is a subject that stirs one to the core; it touches all that is deep and sacred in a man's fancy; and yet it is not impossible to reproduce it with the means our art affords. I have made more than one study of it, and yet not satisfied myself. It was only this spring, when I realized one day, to my horror, how this wretched business next door--this money-getting and trying to please priests and women--was threatening to demoralize me, that for three weeks I never set foot in my saint-factory, but locked myself in here and expanded my soul again with this work. I know that I am only doing it for myself and for a little group of true friends, as restless as I am. Where could I put such a thing as that nowadays? True Art is homeless and without a place to lay her head. A dancing Bacchante is sure to find a lover in some rich man who will put her in some niche in his salon, and think when he looks at her of the ballet-girls who have been his associates. But Adam and Eve, before their fall, in all their rude and vigorous strength, with the fragrance of the fresh earth lingering, as it were, about them--they are as useless for a decoration as they would be for the altar of a chapel. Even their heroic proportions would pass for brutal! But, after all, they are my old favorites; and, if they please me, to whom does it matter?"

Felix did not answer. He was again absorbed in gazing at the group.

"A good friend of mine, whose acquaintance you will soon make, by the way," continued the sculptor, "one Schnetz, who likes to play the Thersites, advised me to put a fusilier's uniform on Adam, and make Eve into a sister of charity, with a medicine-glass and spoon in her hand. Then the group would perhaps be adopted to ornament the pediment of some hospital. His satire on the present condition of our art was so true that I had almost a mind to try it for a joke. My first man and woman, without an inkling of all the ills of our pestilential century, enthroned over the door of a lazaretto--what do you say to that as a piece of colossal humor?"

"Only finish it, Hans!" cried the younger man. "Dream out your dream, and I will vouch for it that, however stupidly and sleepily men are plodding on, this lightning-stroke of genius will dash the scales from their eyes! Why haven't you made more progress with your Eve?"

"Because I have never yet found a model; and because I will not botch my work by mere patching together of my own recollections, or by the last resort of borrowing from the Venus of Milo. Ah, my dear fellow--the fine figures you think you saw in the streets to-day--psha! you'll soon think otherwise. The German corset-makers, the school-room benches, and the miserable food we live on, may possibly leave enough of dear old Nature for me to make a laughing-doll out of, like my dancer there; but a future mother of mankind, untouched as yet by any breath of want or degradation, and fresh from the hand of her Creator--what do you think our professional models would say to that--or the seamstresses or flower-girls that money or persuasion can induce to enter the service of art? If it were a Roman, now, or a Greek, or any untamed child of Nature who had grown up under a happier heaven than ours! And that is what makes the ground here fairly burn under my feet--and if they were not fettered with leaden fetters--"

He suddenly checked himself, and a dark shadow passed across his face; but Felix shrunk from the effort to draw from him by a question any confidence beyond what Jansen offered willingly.

At this moment the clock in a neighboring tower struck twelve; and for a few moments the bells for mid-day service filled the pause that had interrupted the talk of the two friends.

The sculptor began to wrap up the group again, after he had given it a thorough sprinkling. And then, while Felix examined in silence the other sculptures, many of which were familiar, he went to a wash-stand in a corner, where he washed the traces of the clay from his hands and face, and exchanged his working-blouse for a light summer-coat.

"And now," said he, as he finished his toilette--"now you shall go with me to our high mass--one that we never miss on Sundays. At the stroke of twelve we working-bees forsake our hives, and swarm to that great flower-garden, the Pinakothek, to gather our store of wax and honey for the whole week. Do you hear the door slam above us? That is my neighbor in the upper story--a right good fellow, by the name of Maximilian Rosenbusch, but called 'Rosebud' for short by his friends. An excellent youngster, not in the least cut out by Nature for a desperado--but rather inclined, on the contrary, to all the more delicate pursuits of the muses. He is suspected of being secretly engaged on a volume of 'Poems to Spring,' and you could have heard his flute up-stairs an hour ago. But at the same time he paints the most tremendous battle-pieces--generally in Wallenstein or Swedish costume--battles of the bloodiest sort, and where there is no quarter. In the studio next to his lives a Fräulein, a thoroughly estimable woman, and by no means a despicable artist. Among her friends she goes by the name of Angelica, but her real name is Minna Engelken. This good creature--but there they come now down the stairs. You can make their acquaintance at once."

CHAPTER V.

It was certainly an odd pair that they found waiting in the yard. The battle-painter, an animated young fellow, with a clear, bright, rosy complexion, wore an enormous gray felt hat, with a small cock's-feather in the band; and an abundant red beard, that looked as queerly against his pink-and-white face as though a girl had tied a false beard round her chin, in the attempt to disguise herself as a brigand. Looking at the face closely, there was a decidedly spirited and manly look in the clear blue eyes, while a merry laugh lurked constantly about the mobile mouth. Beside him, his companion--though she was apparently still under thirty--seemed almost as though she might be his mother, there was such a weighty seriousness and prompt decision in her movements. She had one of those faces in which one never sees whether they are pretty or ugly; her mouth was a little large, perhaps; her eyes were bright and full of life, and her figure was rather short and thickset. She wore her hair cut short under a simple Leghorn hat; but in the rest of her dress there was nothing especially conspicuous.

Jansen introduced Felix, and a few commonplaces were exchanged. After her first glance at him, Angelica whispered something to the sculptor that evidently related to the stately figure of his friend, and its likeness to the bust she had seen in his studio. Then all four strolled along the Schwanthalerstrasse, followed by the dog, which kept close behind Felix, and from time to time rubbed its nose against his hand.

They stopped before a pretty one-story house in the suburb, standing in the middle of a neatly-kept garden. Rosenbusch took his flute out of his pocket, and played the beginning of the air "Bei Männern, welche Liebe fühlen." But nothing stirred in the house, although the upper windows were only closed with blinds, and every note rang out far and clear in the hot noonday air.

"Fat Rossel is either asleep or else he pretends he is, so as to shirk our high mass again," said the painter, putting up his flute. "I think we had better go on."

"Andiamo!" said Angelica, nodding. (She had once passed a year in Italy, and certain everyday Italian phrases had a way of slipping involuntarily from her lips every minute or two.)

The conversation, as they strolled on, was not exactly animated. Jansen seemed to be lost in thought; long silences were a habit of his, and, especially when there were several people about him, he could remain for hours apparently without the least interest in what was going on. And then, if something that was said happened to kindle a spark in him, his eloquence seemed all the more surprising. Felix knew him well, and made no attempt to disturb his abstracted mood. He looked about him as he walked, and tried to recognize the streets that he had first strolled through, long before, in one of his vacation journeys. Nor did Rosenbusch seem to be in a particularly talkative frame of mind; and only Angelica, who had a way of assuming a certain chaffing tone toward him, and besides was out of humor because, as she said, she had got "into a blind alley" with one of her pictures, kept up a fire of little sarcasms and ridicule against her neighbor. She even adopted the familiarity of calling him by his nickname, but not without putting a "Herr" before it.

"Do you know, Herr Rosebud, when you're composing a picture, you ought to repeat your poems instead of playing the flute? I know it would inspire you a great deal more, and your neighbors would suffer less. Now, to-day, for instance, I put some carmine on a whole group of children I was painting, and spoiled it, just because that everlasting adagio of yours had made me so sentimental."

"Why didn't you pound on the door, then, my honored friend, as we agreed, and then I would have 'ceased my cruel sport?'"

"If it hadn't been Sunday, and I hadn't said to myself it will soon be twelve o'clock, and then he'll stop anyhow--. But see that sweet little girl in the carriage--the one with the blue hat, next to the young man--it's a bridal couple, surely! What eyes she has! And how she laughs, and throws herself back in the carriage like a thoughtless child!"

She had stopped in the street in her ecstasy, and impulsively imitated the gesture of the girl who was driving by, bending back and crossing her arms behind her head. The friends stood still and laughed.

"I must beg of you, Angelica, calm your enthusiasm," growled Rosenbusch; "you forget that not only God and your artistic friends are looking at you, but profane eyes also, that can't imagine what you are driving at with your rather reckless studies of posture."

"You are right," said the little painter, casting a scared glance about her, but somewhat relieved to find that the street was deserted. "It's a silly habit of mine, that I have fought against from a child. My parents gave up taking me to the theatre because they said I always went through too many contortions over what I saw. But, when anything excites me, I always forget my best resolutions to maintain my composure and dignity. When you come to see my studio, baron," she said, turning to Felix, "I hope you will bear me witness that I know how to keep within bounds on canvas at least."

"It is comical," she continued, as no one answered, "what singular neighbors we are. Here Rosebud, who looks so gentle and innocent, as if he could not kill a fly, wades ankle-deep in blood every day, and isn't happy unless, like a new Hotspur, he can kill at least fourteen Pappenheimer cuirassiers with oil in a morning. And I--whose best friends have to confess that the Graces didn't stand beside my cradle--I bother myself over fragrant flower-pieces and laughing children's faces, and then read in the reviews that I should do well to take up subjects that have more body to them!"

So she ran on for a while, without sparing herself or her companions in her jokes--yet without the least rudeness or old-maidish bitterness in her talk. A certain element of womanly coquetry showed now and then in her frank, honest speeches--an attempt to caricature herself and her faults and follies, so that she might be taken, after all, at a little higher value than her own exaggerations gave her credit for. But even this was done so good-naturedly that any gallant speeches that her companions might try to make were generally smothered in laughter. Felix was greatly attracted by her cleverness and droll good-humor; and, as he showed clearly how they amused him, her mood grew all the merrier, and one jest followed another so that the long walk seemed very short to all of them, and they stood at the door of the Pinakothek before they realized that they had come so far.

"And here, Baron, we must bid one another good-by for the present," said the painter. "You must know that in this art-temple of ours we behave like good Catholics in their churches. Each kneels before a different altar; I before St. Huysum and Rachel Ruysch; Herr Rosebud before his Wouvermans; Herr Jansen before Saints Peter and Paul; and Homo stays outside, in silent converse with the stone lions on the steps. I hope I shall soon have the pleasure of seeing you in my studio. Don't let yourself be alarmed by these two malicious gentlemen with the idea that I shall try to capture you for a sitter. I must paint your portrait some time, of course--it is a fate you cannot escape; but my brush is by no means so presumptuous as these wicked men will try to represent it. When you are a little more at home among us, perhaps; but now--good-by!"

She nodded to the others, and disappeared into a side hall, into which Rosenbusch also retreated, after a short stay among the old German masters.

"We don't enforce this separation very rigidly, of course," said Jansen, smiling. "But we have found out that when we all go together we cannot bring ourselves into a really proper mood for study; we neither learn nor enjoy. At best, we only get into a discussion of technical points--problems of color and secrets of the palette, which are especially unimportant to me, as I make no use of that kind of thing."

"But why do not you prefer to hold your Sunday solemnities before the Medusa or the Barberini Faun?" said Felix.

"Because I know the Glyptothek by heart. And besides, I do not believe that what we ought to look at in the works of the great masters is the purely artistic side, if we want to profit by their study. Every one who has passed his apprenticeship has his own ideas and prejudices and obstinacies on those points. What we ought to get from them are characteristics; force, refinement, and contempt for small means used to small ends. But these I can learn just as well from a symphony of Beethoven as from a noble building--from a gallery of paintings as from a tragedy of Shakespeare; and then next day I can turn them to account in my own work. And it is just these things that Rubens gives me better than any other here--Rubens, whose works fill this whole room. As soon as I come near him, he makes me forget all the photographic pettiness, the fashionable rubbish and 'art-association' absurdities of our own day."

"Tell me yourself," he continued, pointing to the walls of the Rubens room, "do not you too feel as though you were in your tropical wildernesses again, where Nature hardly knows how to restrain her overflowing vigor, and where all that moves or grows seems fairly intoxicated with its own abounding strength? Here, no one dreams that there is an everyday, prosaic life outside, that presses all created things into its service--men serving the State, women mere family beasts of burden, horses harnessed to the plough--and only suffers untamed animals to exist in its midst when they are on show in zoölogical gardens or fair-booths. Here the whole glorious creation swarms unadorned and vigorous as on the seventh day after chaos; and all that we conceal and pamper in our dapper civilization appears here in all innocence in the open light of day. Look at this brown, lusty peasant and this beautiful woman--these sleeping nymphs watched by the satyrs--this glorious throng of the blessed and the damned--all this unveiled humanity is living and acting for itself alone, and never dreams whether prudish and pedantic fools are looking on and taking umbrage at it. You know that nothing is really good or bad in itself; it is only the power of thinking about it that makes it so. And these creatures have never troubled themselves with thinking. They are enjoying life fully and overflowingly--like the fat little satyr's wife above there, nursing her twins--or they are absorbed in the sharp struggle for existence. Look at this lion-hunt! Horace Vernet, who wielded no unskillful brush, has painted one too. But just there you can see the contrast between great art and petty art. Here everything is mingled in a raging turmoil, so that there is not a hand's breadth between--here is the very instant of highest conflict, the climax of struggle and defense, fury and death--every muscle strained to its utmost, and everything in such deadly yet triumphant earnest that one trembles and yet is filled with the spirit of victory. For all true strength is full of a certain triumphant joy. But the French picture is like a tableau in a circus, where, in spite of all the grimacing and posturing, there is no real struggle à l'outrance, And look at the purely artistic side; here all the outlines are so melted into one another, so lost in each other in spite of the strongest contrasts, that they necessarily lead the eye into a network from which it cannot escape, where it never has an opportunity to wish for anything else, or indeed to think that anything else is possible. A skillful modern artist, going to work with his patchwork of knowledge on the various subjects, could not possibly produce such a work. You will always find holes and gaps--stiff triangles and hexagons between the legs of the horses, and the figures kept apart as nicely and neatly as though they were going to be packed up in their cases again after it was all over."

He stood a good half hour before the lion-hunt, looking at it as though for the first time. And then, as though tearing himself away with difficulty, he took Felix by the arm and said, "You know I am no mere fanatical doctrinaire. Nobody can have more respect for the other great artists of the golden age. But still it always seems to me as though I did not find, even in the greatest and most immortal of them, a true balance between art and Nature. There is always an excess of technical aim over unaffected seeing and feeling--an excess of 'can' over 'must.' Even with Raphael (whom, it is true, they say one doesn't really know until one has seen his work in Rome), I feel a too great excess of the purely spiritual and abstract over the sensuous. And with the glorious Titian and the Venetians, this paradisaic naturalness, this effortless flow of beauty from an exhaustless soil, this breathing forth of pure and unadulterated force and freedom, is only found in their greatest moments; while this man, like the immortal gods, seems never to have known an hour of poverty or insufficiency."

He talked on in this fashion for some time, as though to pour out his heart before his friend. But just as they were standing before the little picture of Rubens and his beautiful young wife in the garden, walking beside a bed of tulips, they heard Angelica's voice behind them.

"I cannot help it, gentlemen; you must tear yourselves away from this well-fed domestic happiness and these tedious box-hedges, and come with me. I have something to show you that is quite as much a masterpiece of its kind. Please have confidence in my artistic eye for this once, and come quickly, before the miracle disappears again."

"What is this beautiful thing you have discovered, Fräulein?" asked Felix, laughing, "that instantly vanishes again if one is not immediately on the watch?"

"Something that is alive--but hardly according to your taste, as I imagine it," answered the painter. "But our master there--"

"A beautiful woman?"

"Ah! and what a woman! I have followed her about like a young Don Juan ever since we have been here, and looked askance at her as I stood before the pictures. She seems to be a little near-sighted--at least she half shuts her eyelids when she looks intently at anything; and she looks at the upper row of pictures through a lorgnette. A blonde--and a face, I tell you--and a figure!--just what you call Portament, Jansen--the kind of thing that grows much oftener in Trastevere than among our German oaks."

"And why don't you give me credit, too, for enough taste to do this lady justice?" asked Felix.

"Because--well, because you are a trifle young, and--thus far at least--you are not an artist. This beauty of mine is far from being conspicuous or attracting attention--like everything really great. I will wager, Baron, that you find my enthusiasm exaggerated. These polished checks and temples, and the poise of the head on the neck and the neck on the shoulders, and the whole figure--neither too full nor too slender--but hush! I believe she is standing over there at this moment! Yes, it is she--the one in the raw silk, with the broad, somewhat antiquated straw-hat set back upon her head--doesn't it look almost like a halo? Well, Jansen? Do say something! Generally you are so extraordinarily prompt in picking flaws in my ideals."

Jansen had paused, and had coolly turned his quiet, clear gaze upon the lady, who stood, entirely unsuspicious of scrutiny, a few alcoves away from them, and turned her full face toward the observing party. Angelica had not said too much. Her figure was of rare grace and majesty, as her light summer-dress showed its beautiful outlines clearly against the dark background; her head, thrown back a little, hardly moved upon the slender, graceful neck, and her hat allowed its form to be all the more distinctly seen, as she wore her soft, light hair simply parted, and falling in a few curls upon her shoulders. Her face was not striking at first glance; quiet, steel-gray eyes, concealing their brilliancy behind the slightly closed lids; a mouth not exactly full or rosy, but of the most beautiful form and full of character; and a chin and neck worthy of an antique statue. She seemed so completely absorbed in the study of the gallery that she did not look up as the friends approached her. It was only when they entered the alcove, and Angelica began to express her wild admiration (quite secretly, she imagined, but really loud enough to be plainly audible), that the stranger suddenly noticed them. With a slight blush, she drew about her shoulders the white shawl that had hung carelessly about her waist--as though to shield her from these curious eyes--cast an annoyed glance at the whispering painter, and left the alcove.

"See how she moves--a queenly walk!" cried Angelica, looking after her. "But alas! I have driven her away. I like that in her, too, that she is too refined to let herself be stared at. Quant' è bella! But do say something, Jansen! Have you suddenly turned into a statue, or has the enchantment worked too strongly?"

"You may be right, Angelica," said the sculptor, smiling. "I have met this kind of phenomenal being here now and then; and, as they were always strangers (for you never see a native of Munich in the Pinakothek), looking at them was always but a fleeting joy, and I could only gaze after them as they went. So now I have grown cautious. You know 'a burnt child--'"

"Nonsense!" exclaimed the artist. "This divine being may be a stranger, of course, but no one studies the pictures so closely who is looking at them for the first and last time, only to carry out the instructions of her Baedeker. What's to prevent our watching her again? And, even if I lose all to-morrow forenoon over it, and let my group of children dry into the canvas, I must study this exquisite creature once more, and at leisure. There--there she is again! Rosebud is just passing her, and starts back as if he had met the Bella di Tiziano in person! See how he stares after her! He has taste, after all, in spite of his old Swedes."

And now the little battle-painter came hurrying up to his friends, and began to tell them what a discovery he had made. Angelica laughed.

"You come too late, Herr von Rosebud! I am the one to whom belongs the fame of having discovered this comet! But do you know what I have in mind, gentlemen? As none of you seem to be inclined to follow up this adventure, I, as the least suspicious of us four, will take it upon myself to pursue our beauty, and see if I can discover where she lives and who she is. If she stays here but a week, she shall be painted. I have sworn it! And whichever of you is particularly good shall come to the last sitting; and Herr Rosebud hereby receives permission to play her a serenade under my window. Addio, signori! To-morrow you shall hear how the matter turns out."

She nodded hurriedly to the friends, and followed the stranger, who had in the mean time passed through the rooms, and was now preparing to leave the gallery.

"I'll wager she does it!" said Rosenbusch. "An astoundingly resolute woman that, and absolutely not to be stopped when an enthusiasm seizes her! This time she really has made a devilish remarkable discovery; but you know what wonderful beauties she has tried to talk up to us before--eh, Jansen? She has a positive mania for admiration, and, when she is possessed by it, she is not very fastidious in her choice of subjects. 'The sea rages, and will have its sacrifice!'"

The sculptor did not answer. He strolled along beside the others for a while, silent and abstracted. Then he suddenly said: "Let us go! It seems as though the art-sense had suddenly disappeared or died out in me. Such a perfect piece of living Nature puts to shame all illusions of color, so that even the great masters seem like bunglers beside it."

CHAPTER VI.

Meanwhile the beautiful unknown had slowly descended the steps of the Pinakothek, and turned in the direction of the Obelisk, clearly unconscious of the fact that twenty paces behind her an enthusiastic artist was upon her track, never losing sight of her for an instant.

And, indeed, it was a rare refreshment to the eye to look upon this beautiful figure as it passed along. If one may talk of a "silent music of form," here everything was legato, while the little artist was in a perpetual staccato movement. The stranger moved as though she stepped on an elastic ground, and seemed not to mind the walk in the least, in spite of the oppressive mid-day heat. She looked neither to the right nor left; in her hands, on which she wore half-gloves of black net, she held a large green fan, which she opened now and then to protect her face against the sun.

Her worshiper grew more enthusiastic with every moment, and gave utterance to her feelings in muttered monologue, sprinkled, according to her fashion, with Italian interjections.

At length she saw the subject of her admiration turn to the left, and go into a neat house on the Briennerstrasse. Here, she knew, there were furnished rooms to let; so the stranger must have arranged for a considerable stay in Munich. But how to get at her? To ring at every bell in the two stories, and ask if a beautiful woman in yellow silk lived there, did not seem very practicable. And did she live here, after all? Might she not be only making a visit?

The painter was just debating whether she should walk up and down before the house like a sentry, when a window opened in the corner-room on the ground-floor, before which lay a little garden with its tall shrubs looking dry and dusty in the mid-day sun, and the beauty leaned out to shut the blind. She had taken off her hat, and her hair was a little disordered, which wonderfully added to her beauty. Without hesitating a moment, Angelica marched through the little path past the garden, and entered the vestibule.

Her ring was answered by a very old servant with a white, soldierly-looking mustache, and dressed in a long, silver-buttoned livery-coat that reached to his knees. He eyed the visitor suspiciously, took her card, on which there was nothing but "Minna Engelken," and came back at once, indicating by a silent nod that his mistress would receive her.

As Angelica entered the stranger was standing in the middle of the room, in the midst of the warm, greenish light that came through the closed blinds. She had hastily put up her hair again, but without special care; and now she greeted her visitor somewhat coldly, with a scarcely perceptible nod of her exquisite head.

"First of all, I must introduce myself a little more fully than the very obscure name on my card can have done," began the artist, without the slightest trace of embarrassment. (She had begun immediately upon her entrance to study the head, as though at a regular sitting.) "I am a painter; that is the sole excuse I have for my intrusion upon you. I met you a short time ago at the Pinakothek. It can hardly be a novelty to you to have people stop when you go by, or even follow you. But that a person should intrude into your very house does seem a little too much. My honored Fräulein, or should I call you Madame?" (the stranger shook her head slightly) "I do not know whether you, too, have a prejudice against women-artists? If you have, I shall certainly appear to you in a very bad light. And it is true, I must say that this meddling with brushes and colors doesn't particularly become many of my colleagues. Although the nine Muses are women, our sex easily get by association with them an unwomanly touch that is not by any means to their advantage.--Oh, please keep that position just an instant; the three-quarters face is especially effective in this light! Yes, it is true, Fräulein, I myself know women-artists who think it is prosaic to put on a clean collar or darn a stocking. And yet--"

"If you would only be kind enough to tell me the motive of your visit--"

"I was just coming to that. I had really a double motive. First, to beg your pardon if I drove you away from the gallery by my persistent staring. You see, my dear Fräulein--oh, please bend your head a little--so! If you could only see how capital that is--that chiar' oscuro--and what glorious hair you have! I see you think I am fairly crazy, treating you like a model in the first ten minutes! But so much the better; you will know at once what we are coming to. I am really, you must know, not quite responsible for my actions when I see anything that greatly delights me; and however lacking my talents may be in the power to produce anything beautiful from mere imagination, I have attained a real mastery in the discovery, the enjoyment, and admiration of true living beauty. The moment I saw you afar off--no, you must not turn away, dear Fräulein. How can you help it, and what sin is it, if an honest artist-soul--of your own sex, too--expresses its delight in and admiration for your beauty? It seems petty to me, the way that many people keep such a gift of God hidden--or pretend to. There are some little doll-like faces, it is true, whose chief charm lies in the fact that they always seem to be ashamed of their own prettiness. But you, Fräulein--such a classic head--please turn for once fully round toward the light--a pure Palma Vecchio, I tell you--"

The Fräulein could not help smiling, and, although she blushed, permitting this singular, unrestrained, formless admiration. "I confess," she said, "that I have been such a recluse for years, only busied with the care of an invalid, that I have quite fallen out of practice in listening to such flatteries and wearing the fitting expression when I hear them. And besides, in spite of hard and sad experience, I am still young and foolish enough not to take offense at the pleasure you seem to take in my personal appearance. But if you would only tell me--you spoke of a double motive."

"Thank you a thousand times, dear, dear Fräulein!" cried the painter, excitedly. "Every word you say confirms me in the opinion I formed at the first glance--that you would be as good and amiable in character as you were beautiful in face and figure. And you give me courage to come out at once with my other petition: I should be the happiest person under the sun, if I might paint your portrait.--Please don't be alarmed," she added, hurriedly. "The agony is brief--I am no torturer. If you have not more time to spare, I will paint you alla prima--at most three or four sittings--you shall not be able to complain of me. Of course I can't ask that you will let me have the picture; but you will allow me to have a little sketch for a study and a souvenir?--The great picture--"

"A large portrait, then?"

"Only a three-quarters length, but of course life-size. It would be a sin and a shame to put such a head and such a figure on a canvas the size of a tea-tray. But my dear, best Fräulein, tell me you will have the heavenly goodness to visit my studio--the street and number are on my card--and look at my things, and sit to me only if--if you yourself take pleasure in them; for I would not for anything have you think you were making a sacrifice for the benefit of a mere dauber."

"My dear Fräulein, I really do not know what--"

"Perhaps you haven't time at this moment? Perhaps you are an artist yourself? The careful way in which you studied the pictures in the Pinakothek--"

"Unfortunately I have not the smallest natural talent," answered the Fräulein, smiling; "but only a little taste and a strong yearning toward everything beautiful and artistic; and this is the reason why I have come to Munich--as I am quite alone in the world. It is still uncertain how long I shall stay here. But if I can really give you pleasure by doing so--I rely upon it, of course, that it shall be entirely a matter between ourselves if I sit to you. And in return, you shall initiate me into the secrets of your art, which to a lay observer must always remain closed, no matter of how good intentions he may be, unless he is given the right introduction."

"Brava! bravissima!" cried the delighted painter. "Heaven reward you a thousand times for your great kindness; and I will see to it that you shall not repent it. My dear, dear Fräulein, when you know me a little more intimately you will see that you have to do with an honest woman who has a grateful heart, and against whom no one of her friends can utter a reproach."

In the wildest delight she took her leave of the beautiful face--which, in spite of all this worship, had preserved a rather cool expression--and, as though she feared the promise might possibly be retracted on further reflection, she hurried from the room.

When she reached the street, she stood still for a moment, fairly out of breath, tied her loosened hat-strings more firmly under her chin, and gleefully rubbed her hands. "What eyes they'll make!" she said to herself. "How they will envy me! But then what makes them such shy, silly Philistines? It's true, to make such a conquest in a moment, one must not be a man, but just such an utterly harmless old maid as I!"

CHAPTER VII.

The friends turned their steps toward a beer-garden on the Dultplatz, where, at this time of day--between two and three o'clock--it was pretty quiet in spite of its being Sunday. The noonday guests had finished with their dinners long ago, and the afternoon concert had not yet begun. Instead of it three sleepy fiddlers, an elderly harp-player, and a jovial clarinet were playing on a platform in the middle of the garden. Of these musicians the clarinet-player alone still defied the drowsy influences of the siesta hour, attempting, by wild and desperate runs, to rouse the nodding quartette. On the benches in the shade of the tall ash-trees there sat a very mixed company, for in Munich the differences between the classes is far less marked than in any of the other large German cities; and among the rest, at the smallest tables, were numerous pairs of lovers who, lulled into a state of dreamy comfort by plentiful eating and drinking, rested their heads on one another's shoulders, held each other's hands and abandoned themselves freely to their feelings. Yet no one seemed to take offense at this; on the contrary, it seemed to belong to the place as much as the gnats that swarmed in the air. The three late arrivals seated themselves in one of the most secluded corners and proceeded to do justice to the viands which the waitress, who treated Jansen with conspicuous respect, had put aside for them. It was anything but a sumptuous meal, but the taste for the pleasures of the table seemed to be so little developed in the sculptor that it never occurred to him to celebrate the reunion with his friend by a bottle of wine. Felix knew this and overlooked it. Still, he had hoped to find him more animated and communicative after their long separation; and now he could not help noticing how he sat at his side, preoccupied and speaking only in monosyllables, intent only upon feeding Homo, who swallowed the big mouthfuls that were given him with grave decorum.

In the mean time, there joined the group a fourth person, for whom the battle-painter seemed to have looked from the beginning. He was a slim young man, pale and with curly black hair, whose manner at once announced him to be an actor. He wore, over one eye, a black silk shade, that made his paleness still more conspicuous, and the sharp lines above his expressive mouth gave evidence of some hardly suppressed suffering. Rosenbusch introduced him as his neighbor, Herr Elfinger, formerly a member of the ---- court-theatre, now a clerk in one of the Munich banking-houses. The manner in which Jansen also welcomed him showed that he was one of the intimates of this circle. He bore himself with such easy cheerfulness and enlivened the conversation in such an agreeable way that Felix felt very much drawn toward him, and even Jansen brightened up and took part in the lively chat.

But suddenly the sculptor stood up, looked at his watch, cast a glance over the picket fence that separated the garden from the sunny square, and said, coloring slightly: "I must leave you now, old boy. My friends here will bear me witness that nothing is to be done with me on Sunday afternoons. At such times I have to go my own ways and to fulfill certain duties, which, to-day in particular, I could only escape with the greatest difficulty. I hope you will excuse me."

"He has to turn back into a sea monster one day in seven, like Melusine," laughed Rosenbusch. "We are used to that."

Felix looked up in surprise. "Don't let me disturb you, old boy," he said. "Besides, I still have to find a lodging. Where are you quartered? Perhaps I could find a place in your neighborhood--"

"I am not going home now and I should hardly recommend the neighborhood where I live," the sculptor interrupted, with such a frown that it put an end to all further questioning. "You will find me in my studio again tomorrow. Good-by for to-day and good luck to you. Come, Homo!"

He nodded to his friends without giving them his hand, pulled his hat down over his eyes, and left the garden with his faithful dog.

They saw him stride with rapid steps across the square and approach a two-horse fiacre that stood on the other side, not far from the gate, apparently waiting for him on the shady side of the street. Then, as he stepped in they could plainly see that there was some one sitting inside; there was a glimpse of a woman's bright-colored dress, and a child's little hand thrust a sunshade out the window. Except this, all the windows were shut, notwithstanding the great heat; and, as the mysterious vehicle rolled rapidly away, the friends who had been looking after it turned to one another with wonder in their eyes.

"He appears to have a family," said Felix. "Why doesn't he say anything to anybody about it? Even to me, his oldest friend, he has never uttered a word about his projected or perhaps actual marriage, about which there was a rumor some six years ago. I thought the whole matter had either fallen through or else turned out unhappily. But now he seems, after all, not to be alone. Do you know anything about his private circumstances?"

"Nothing whatever," answered the painter. "None of us have ever set foot across his threshold; and, the moment any one asks where he lodges, he grows as snappish as a bear, just as you saw him a few minutes ago. As for women, he will have nothing to do with them, that can be seen plainly enough from all he does. Whether, in spite of all this, he has a household of his own, can't be discovered. He once cut dead a prying fellow who followed him one night to see where he kept himself."

"I think," said Elfinger, "that the pleasure we get from his society six days in the week is so great that we might at least leave him to himself on the seventh. But now let us help the Baron look for rooms, and debate how we can best show him the city this evening."

When, toward midnight, Felix left the beer-cellar, where he had been for several hours enjoying the evening air, and returned to his lodgings--a suite of pleasant rooms overlooking flower-gardens and the quiet streets beyond--a singular feeling of depression suddenly came over him. He had now attained what he cared more for than for anything else. No one could enjoy more perfect freedom than he. No one could begin life afresh more untrammeled by social forms. Then, too, the cheerful, lively city, with its gay life, the free and easy artists' society into which he had entered--all this had corresponded with his wish and expectations, and promised him compensation for many a ruined hope. It was the only atmosphere that seemed suited to him, the only surroundings among which he could find again, even in the Old World, something of that unrestrained freedom that he had enjoyed so much beyond the ocean. And when, notwithstanding all this, he went to bed with a heavy sigh and waited long for sleep in vain--why was it?

CHAPTER VIII.

On the following morning, Felix brought a whole armful of his sketch-books to Jansen. The latter seemed to look through them with interest, and listened patiently to the accounts of the adventures, of which many of them were hasty illustrations, but he did not utter a single word in regard to any artistic worth which the sketches might possess.

When the last page had been turned, and Jansen, with a quiet "hm!" had begun to pile up the books and tablets in a little tower, Felix was forced to ask whether he had not made some progress after all.

"Progress? Why, that depends upon the way you look at it."

"And how do you look at it, old fellow?"

"I?--Hm! I look at it from a geographical point of view."

"You are very good. I understand perfectly."

"Don't be angry, my dear fellow, but understand me rightly. I mean, on the path of dilettantism, on which you have been wandering up to this date, all progress must necessarily be deceptive, even though, outwardly, you have circumnavigated the world; for, after all, all your efforts move in a circle. I am very sorry for it, though."

"For what?"

"That you really want to take up art in earnest. You might have remained such an enviable dilettante, for you have all the necessary qualifications to an uncommon degree."

"And they are?"

"Self-confidence, time, and money. No, don't be angry. I am truly serious when I say this to you, and of course it would be needless for me to assure you that I mean well when I say it. Seriously: these traveling sketches of yours are done so skillfully that any of the illustrated papers might consider themselves lucky if they had such special artists. And yet I wish, since you are determined to be an artist, that they were not half so skillful."

"If it is nothing more than that, a remedy can easily be found. You will soon see how much talent I have for unskillfulness, when you give me something to model."

The sculptor shook his head gently. "It is not the hands," he said. "It is the mind that has already attained a very respectable maturity and facility in you; only, unfortunately, in a wrong direction. For the truth is, my dear fellow, the very things that please you best, and have probably most impressed unprofessional persons, the dash and readiness, the so-called artist's touch, those are the very things that stand most in the way of your getting back into the right track. It is just as if, instead of learning to write in the ordinary way, one should begin with stenography. He never in all his life will have a good handwriting. For the spirit of dilettantism, take it for all in all, is, like that of stenography, in the art of abbreviation; in substituting a symbol for the form, just as in the other case we substitute one for the letter, so that in the course of time all real feelings--yes, the very want of and appreciation of the rightly-developed natural form--are hopelessly lost. Why is it then that the dilettanti attain their end so much more quickly than the true artists? Because, with this system of abbreviation, they steer straight for those results which seem to them of the most importance: resemblance, spirit, elegance of execution. For that reason they are often marvelously skillful in mastering the proportions of a face, for instance, and setting it off by a few dots and strokes so that everybody cries: 'Oh! how like! how speaking! and how quickly done!' The true artist knows that the length of time spent in the production is by no means a measure of excellence; and as he has not only a general sense of proportion, but also a feeling for the true form itself, he does not rest until he has done it full justice--until, so to speak, he has worked outward from the very core of that the exterior of which his eyes have already taken in and fully comprehended. However," he went on after a short pause, during which he unwound the wet cloths from his Bacchante, "you are at liberty to believe that all this is merely my personal opinion and nothing more than exaggerated estimate of what constitutes true art. In ordinary life the artist is distinguished from the dilettante only by the fact that the former follows the thing as a calling, and the latter only for his own amusement. According to this, you would be an artist from the moment you cast aside the baron, the statesman or jurist, the homme d'action, that you have in you, and regularly devoted a certain number of hours of the day to dirtying your fingers with clay. If you stick to it persistently, it would be very hard lines indeed if, in the course of several years, you should not possess the necessary mechanical skill just as well as any one else. Even to become an academic professor need not be an unattainable aim of your ambition. And if, in spite of all that, I should still continue, in my heart, to look upon you as a born dilettante, you could smile down upon me graciously, and heap coals of fire upon my head by proposing me as an honorary member of your academy. Ah! my dear boy, I tell you, if you should make a close examination of many of our most famous great men, you would bring to light little else than a disguised and beautiful dilettantism, made up of humbug, elegant trappings, and perhaps a few so-called ideas. I know painters who dash off a hand or a foot, a horse's head or an oak-tree, with as unerring an audacity as--well, as a thorough stenographer will bring a two hours' speech into the compass of an octavo page. But Lord have mercy upon them, for they have long since ceased to know what they do; and as the dear public has an even coarser sense, a still blunter natural feeling, and even more respect for appearances--why, it's all just as it should be, and no one can complain that he has been cheated."

For some time after this speech silence reigned in the studio. There were heard only the fluttering of the sparrows, the heavy breathing of Homo, for the old fellow was already enjoying his morning nap again, and, in the saint-factory near by, the clatter and scraping and picking of seven or eight chisels in the hands of the assistants who were hard at work.

"Thank you, Dædalus," said Felix, at last. "Upon the whole you are perfectly right, and I think it very kind of you to try and scare me off so thoroughly. But, with your permission, I intend to hold to my intentions until I have been made wise by my own experience. If, a year from this time, you preach me the same sermon, you shall see how penitently I will beat my breast and become converted from all my sins. But now, first give me something to sin with. Look here, my coat is already off, and I have nothing more to do but to roll up my shirt-sleeves."

"So be it, then!" replied Jansen, with a good-natured smile. "Not as God wills, but as you wish--here!"

He went to the large closet and took out a skull, which he laid on a little table near the window. At the same time he wheeled a modeling-bench out of the corner, placed it before the table, and pointed, without speaking, to a big lump of clay that lay moist and shiny in a tub.

"Are we to study phrenology?" laughed Felix, rather nervously, for a suspicion began to dawn upon him.

"No, my dear fellow, but we must take pains to make as exact a copy as possible of this round mass of bones.... We shall have plenty of time for the flesh when we have first mastered the skeleton."

"I am to model a whole skeleton?"

"Bone for bone, down to the big toe. In this way we combine an anatomical course with practice in modeling forms. Yes, my dear fellow," he smilingly continued, as he perceived the horrified expression of his pupil; "if you thought to begin your apprenticeship with the soft, white flesh of a woman, you have greatly deceived yourself. However, since you have already done quite enough preparatory studying in this field--"

He suddenly broke off. On the landing, outside, they heard a pleasant feminine voice say:

"Is this the way to Fräulein Minna Engelken's studio?"

"If you will kindly give yourself the trouble to mount a flight higher," responded the hoarse bass of the janitor. "The door to the right--the name is on the sign. The Fräulein has been there for the last two hours."

"Thanks."

At the first sound of the voice Jansen had hurried to the door; he now opened it a little and peeped out. Then he came back to Felix, and, with his face slightly flushed, went silently to work.

"Who was the lady?" asked Felix, though he felt no particular curiosity on the subject.

"The stranger we saw yesterday. Strange! when I heard that unknown voice her face suddenly came up before my eyes again."

Felix said nothing. He had gone up to the modeling-bench, had begun to work at a great ball of clay about as large as the skull, and appeared to be completely absorbed in his task.

But they had scarcely been working on in this way, side by side and in silence, for more than a quarter of an hour when some one knocked softly on the door and Rosenbusch entered, looking excited, merry, and full of mischief.

He nodded to the friends, stepped close up to them and said, with an air of mysterious importance: "Do you know who is up-stairs? The lady of the Pinakothek! Angelica is painting her picture--she has succeeded--an incredibly resolute woman that! And can keep a secret like the devil! Now just conceive of it; I discovered her early this morning clearing up her studio, as though the queen had given notice of a visit. For that matter it always does look damned elegant and neat up there--flowers in whichever direction you turn, and a hothouse fragrance that makes you sick. But, to-day, it is a positive show-room! 'What the devil is this, Angelica?' said I; 'is to-day your birthday, or are you going to get engaged, or are you painting a Russian princess?'--for I had long forgotten all about the affair of yesterday. But she, turning round the old yellow-silk cushion on the armchair so as to present the side which had the fewest spots--she scarcely looked at me, and said: 'Go and get to work, Herr von Rosebud'--that is what she always calls me when she is cross--'I am not at home to you, to-day!' In this way she morally turned me out of doors without farther ceremony, and, I must confess, I rather like it in her; energy, fearlessness, the courage of one's opinions, are always fine, even in a woman. So I withdrew, wondering, and was already at work laying on my colors when I heard some one coming up the stairs. Yes, I was right, she was going to Angelica; and as the wall between us is not very thick, and they did not at first take the precaution to lower their voices, I discovered the whole mystery--that it is our beauty of yesterday, that she is going to have her picture painted, and that her first name is Julie. And now I appeal to you, friends and companions in art, are we men or cowardly poltroons? Are we to suffer this vixen to carry away such a prize from under our very noses, and to withhold such a paragon of beauty from us under our own roof? Or shall we rush up as one man, and, in the name of art, lay siege to the door of this obdurate sister, and compel her, by force or persuasion, to open to us?"

"I would advise you, Rosenbusch, to go quietly upstairs again and wreak your martial ardor on the battle of Lützen," Jansen answered, without the slightest approach to a smile. "But, if your excitement will not let you work, convey your homage to the lady through the wall by means of your flute. Perhaps they will invite you to come round and declaim some of your verses."

"Wretched scoffer!" cried the battle-painter. "I thought to render you a service by bringing you this news. But you are of the earth, earthy, and are incapable of soaring to any height of enthusiasm. Well, God be with you! I see that I am not understood down here!"

He rushed out of the door, and, sure enough, they soon afterward heard the flute pouring out its most melting passages.

This language, however, did not seem to be understood in the next room. Angelica's room remained tight shut, and when it was opened, a few hours after, soft steps came down the stairs, and the listeners below were led to conclude that the sitting was over.

In the mean while dinner-time had come, and the assistants in the adjoining room had stopped work and left the studio. Jansen, too--although, as a rule, he seldom made a pause before two o'clock--now laid down his modeling-tool.