“She was seated on a grave. After she left, I went to the place; but it
was a new-made grave. There was no stone up. I asked the sexton about
her. He said he supposed she was the daughter of the woman buried there
last Thursday week. I knew it was Lilith.”
“Her mother dead!” said Lottchen, musingly. Then he thought with
himself--“She will be going there again, then!” But he took care that
this ghost-thought should wander unembodied. “But how did you know her,
Heinrich? You never saw her before.”
“How do you come to be over head and ears in love with her, Lottchen,
and you haven’t seen her at all?” interposed Richter.
“Will you or will you not go to the devil?” rejoined Lottchen, with a
comic crescendo; to which the other replied with a laugh.
“No one could miss knowing her,” said Heinrich.
“Is she so very like, then?”
“It is always herself, her very self.”
A fresh flask of wine, turning out to be not up to the mark, brought the
current of conversation against itself; not much to the dissatisfaction
of Lottchen, who had already resolved to be in the churchyard of St.
Stephen’s at sun-down the following day, in the hope that he too might
be favoured with a vision of Lilith.
This resolution he carried out. Seated in a porch of the church, not
knowing in what direction to look for the apparition he hoped to see,
and desirous as well of not seeming to be on the watch for one, he was
gazing at the fallen rose-leaves of the sunset, withering away upon the
sky; when, glancing aside by an involuntary movement, he saw a woman
seated upon a new-made grave, not many yards from where he sat, with her
face buried in her hands, and apparently weeping bitterly. Karl was in
the shadow of the porch, and could see her perfectly, without much
danger of being discovered by her; so he sat and watched her. She raised
her head for a moment, and the rose-flush of the west fell over it,
shining on the tears with which it was wet, and giving the whole a bloom
which did not belong to it, for it was always pale, and now pale as
death. It was indeed the face of Lilith, the most celebrated beauty of
Prague.
Again she buried her face in her hands; and Karl sat with a strange
feeling of helplessness, which grew as he sat; and the longing to help
her whom he could not help, drew his heart towards her with a trembling
reverence which was quite new to him. She wept on. The western roses
withered slowly away, and the clouds blended with the sky, and the stars
gathered like drops of glory sinking through the vault of night, and the
trees about the churchyard grew black, and Lilith almost vanished in the
wide darkness. At length she lifted her head, and seeing the night
around her, gave a little broken cry of dismay. The minutes had swept
over her head, not through her mind, and she did not know that the dark
had come.
Hearing her cry, Karl rose and approached her. She heard his footsteps,
and started to her feet. Karl spoke--
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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