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Max–Or His Picture
by
“It is very queer, Max,” she said, “that in my old age men should want to marry me. But I like you best.”
Only the day before, she had said that; and she had said, “I am happy, Max. Isn’t it strange! But I am.” Only yesterday–and now there was nothing. The Max that she had grown to love, with the gradual, imperceptible advance of affection, sweet to her shy nature–that Max had never been. No doubt all the while, over in Germany, a stout and phlegmatic German landlord had been caring for his vineyards and playing the war lord in the landwehr and living very comfortably with the doughfaced German girl whose hair was lighter than her complexion, whom the countess wanted him to marry; a man as unlike the high-souled knight of her fancy as–as she, herself, was unlike the girl’s image! Worst of all was her own weak, false behavior. “No,” she cried, in an access of bitterness, “the worst is that I can’t feel that the worst; I can only feel I have lost him, for ever! I don’t seem to mind that I have lost myself!”
Now she began to pace the room, trying to think clearly. Was it her duty to tell Florence the story and let her tell the girls? The red-hot agony of the idea seemed to her excited conscience an intimation that it was her duty from which she shrank because she was a selfish, hysterical, dishonorable coward. Horrible as such abasement would be, if it were her duty, she could do it; what she could not, what she would not do, was to tear the veil from that pure and mystical passion which had been the flower of her heart. “Not if it cost me my soul,” she said, with the frozen quiet of despair; “it is awful, but I can’t do it!” One thing did remain; she could remove the picture. That false witness of what had never been should go. No eyes should ever fall on it again. It should never deceive more. She walked toward it firmly. She lifted her hand–and it fell. “I can’t!” she moaned. “I’ll do it to-morrow.” She could not remember, in years, so weak a compromise offered her conscience.
But she felt a sense of respite, almost relief, once having decided, and she recovered her composure enough to go to her chamber and bathe her eyes. While she was thus engaged she heard a knock. “It is he,” she said quietly; “well, the sooner the better.”
It was he; he had come earlier than he expected, he explained; he was most grateful for Miss Wing’s kind message. He looked like his uncle, as the members of a family will look alike. He was not so tall; he was not so handsome. Perhaps most people would call him more graceful. And his English was faultless; he must have spoken it from his childhood. In the midst of his first sentences, before they had permitted him to take a chair, his eyes traveled past Miss Wing’s face. She perceived that he saw the picture; she knew that she grew pale; but, to her amazement, a calm like the calm which had wrapped her senses on the day of her finding the picture, closed about her again. “I beg pardon?” said he.
“Yes, that is Count von Butler’s portrait,” said she, in a clear voice, without emotion. He was not so composed. “Then it was you,” he said. Following her example, he took a chair and looked earnestly at the pictured face. “When Miss Raimund spoke of you so warmly, I noticed that the name was the same, and I determined to inquire, but it seemed to me unlikely. Yet it is. Miss Wing, I have a message to you, from my uncle.”
She noticed that there were gold motes in the air; and his pleasant, blond face seemed to wander through them; the room was full of sunlight.