must dedicate all my strength to an arduous work."
"Are you writing another learned work?" asked Jane in a slightly ironical tone.
"A scientific one," returned the professor with an emphasis that equalled the irony.
Jane's lips curled in derision.
"You think perhaps, Miss Forest, that this is both a thankless and fruitless effort," he said, with some bitterness.
She shrugged her shoulders. "I must confess that I have none too great reverence for book-learning, and that I cannot at all comprehend how one can lay his whole life, a free-will offering upon the altar of science, and write books which, like yours, Professor Fernow, are of interest only to the learned, and which to the rest of mankind, must always remain dead, fruitless and valueless."
This was another specimen of Jane's horrible frankness, which had so often thrown her uncle into despair; but the professor seemed neither surprised nor wounded. He fixed his large melancholy eyes on the young lady's face. She already half regretted having begun the conversation, for if she could better hold her ground before these eyes than at that first interview, they still called forth that torturing, anxious sensation she could not control.
"And who tells you, Miss Forest, that I do it of my own free will?" he asked in a peculiarly emphatic tone.
"Well, one does not allow himself to be forced into such a direction," replied Jane.
"But supposing a homeless, orphaned child, thrown out upon life alone, falls into the hands of a learned man who knows and loves nothing in the wide world but science?–As a boy I was chained to the book-table, as a youth I was restlessly impelled onward, to exert my capabilities to the utmost, until at last the goal was reached. Whatever I in youth possessed of health or poetry, was irretrievably lost in this process, but he whom this useless book-learning has cost such sacrifices, is bound to it by indissoluble ties for the rest of his life. For this, I have sacrificed every other longing, and every hope."
There lay a sort of despairing resignation in these words, and the melancholy glance into Jane's face which accompanied them, awoke in her a feeling of resentment against the professor, and against herself. Why could she not remain calm under this glance? Surely if anything could have lowered this man in her eyes it was the confession he had just made. And so, not even from conviction or from inspiration, but from habit, from a vague sentiment of duty, he was working himself to death! To Jane's energetic nature, this passive endurance and persistence in a half-enforced calling, appeared supremely pitiable. The man who did not possess the strength and courage to rise to his proper place in life, might just as well sink into nothingness as a bookworm!
With a hasty excited movement, the professor had turned away from her, and Jane too soon found herself gazing upon the landscape now all aglow with the last beams of the setting sun. The roseate halo transfigured earth and sky; the blue mountains in their clear, transparent outlines caught a new lustre from the rosy light which enwrapt all the towns and villages lying at the mountain's base; which flashed and flamed in the green and golden waters of the Rhine as they flowed on calm and majestic, far out into the illuminated plain, where against the western horizon, distant and scarce discernible, like a giant mist-picture, the mighty dome towered upward, the pride and crown of the old Rhenish stream.
The reflection of this same fiery glow lay upon the gray, weather-beaten stones of the old castle, upon the dark ivy which had woven around it its thick green meshes, while the wild, luxuriant vines hanging over the abyss, fluttered to and fro in the evening wind; and it lay also upon the faces of the two up yonder.
Jane was for some minutes so lost in gazing at the wonderful illumination, that she had not remarked the professor standing close by her side, and now, she was almost frightened at the sound of his voice.
"Can our Rhine also win a moment's admiration from you?" he asked in a tone of peculiar satisfaction.
"From me?" The thought suddenly occurred to Jane that he might have divined something of the weakness of which she had been guilty in this respect. She had certainly always retained a mastery over her features, it could be only supposition; but the supposition vexed her.
"From me?" she repeated, in an icy tone. "You may be partly right, Professor Fernow, I find some very charming features in this landscape, although upon the whole, it seems to me rather narrow and poor."
"Narrow! poor!" repeated the professor as if he had not rightly understood, while his glance, incredulous and questioning, rested upon her face.
"Yes, I certainly call it so!" declared Jane with a tone of haughty superiority and a touch of vexation. "To one who, like me, has lived upon the shores of the great Mississippi, who has seen the magnificence of Niagara, who knows the majesty of vast prairies and primeval forests, this German landscape can appear but narrow and poor."
The professor's face flushed–a sign that he was beginning to be angry.
"If you measure a landscape by space, you are right, Miss Forest. We are apt to employ other standards, which might perhaps seem petty to you; but I assure you that your landscapes would appear to us supremely empty and desolate; that we should think them tame or dead."
"Ah! Do you know them so intimately?"
"I do."
"I really wonder, Professor Fernow," said Jane with cutting irony, "that, without having seen our landscapes, you are able to give so positive a verdict in regard to them. You appear to think our Mississippi region a desert, but you should at least know from your books, that the life which rules there is infinitely richer and grander than by your Rhine."
"An every-day life!" cried the professor growing still more excited; "a hive of bees in a restless struggle for success, a life directed but to the present moment! Your giant river, Miss Forest, with its thousand steamers, with its thriving populous cities and luxuriant shores, can never give you what the smallest wave of the Rhine brings in enticing murmurs to us all; the spell of the past, the history of nations, the poesy of centuries."
"To us"–here the professor suddenly and unconsciously dropped the English in which he had been speaking, for his native German–"to us, this chimes and echoes through a thousand songs and legends, it is wafted to us in every rustle of the forest, it speaks to us in the voiceless silence of every rocky cliff. From our mountains, from our castles, the mighty forms of the past descend; in our cities, the old races rise again in their pristine might and splendor; our cathedrals, memorials of imperishable magnificence and power, tower heavenward; the Loreley entices and beckons us down beneath its green waves, in whose deepest depths, sparkles and glitters the Niebelungen horde,–all this lives, and enchants us in and around our Rhine, Miss Forest, and this certainly, no–stranger can understand."
Jane had listened, first in surprise, then in wonder, but at last in utter consternation. What had all at once come over this man. He stood before her erect and tall, his face almost transfigured by an inner light, his eyes glowing with excitement. She listened to the deep, fervid tones of his voice, she yielded to the spell of his eloquence, where word crowded upon word, picture upon picture, and it seemed to her as if here also a misty veil had been riven, and she caught a glimpse out into infinite space–gleaming with golden light. The chrysalis had suddenly fallen from the pale, suffering form, which so long under a ban, now came forth into its true light, and soared to its true place.
Jane Forest was not woman enough to remain long under such an infatuation, without exerting all her strength to break from it. Her whole inner being rose in arms; the whole pride and obstinacy of her nature arrayed themselves against this power, which for some moments had held her in willess control, against this influence that had so oppressed her. She must break the spell, cost what it would, and with quick determination, she grasped after the first weapon that stood at her command–remorseless irony.
"I did not know you were a poet, Professor Fernow!" she said, mockingly.
The professor shuddered, as if a shrill discord had met his ear; the flush in his face died out, his eyes fell to the ground.
"A poet?--I?" he said in a half-stifled voice.
"What you have just been saying did not sound at all like prose."
Fernow