om. He kissed her good-bye, and she vanished from his
sight for ever.

XIV

For he had reckoned without his Janko, always at hand to cover up a
scandal. The Will he had breathed into Helene had been exhausted in
the one supreme effort of her life. Sucked up again into the family
egotism, kept for weeks under a _regime_ of terror and intercepted
letters, hurried away from Geneva; chagrined and outraged, too, by her
lover's incomprehensible repudiation of her, which only success could
have excused, and which therefore became more unpardonable as day
followed day without rescue from a giant, proved merely windbag; she
fell back with compunction into the tender keeping of the ever-waiting
Janko. The one letter her father permitted her to send formally
announced her eternal love and devotion for her former _fiance_.
Profitless to tell the story of how the stricken giant, raving in
outer darkness, this Polyphemus who had gouged out his own eye, this
Hercules self-invested in the poisoned robe of Nessus, moved heaven
and earth to see her again. It was an earthquake, a tornado, a
nightmare. He had frenzies of tears, his nights were sleepless reviews
of his folly in throwing her away, and vain phantasms of her eyes and
lips. He poured out torrents of telegrams and letters, in which cries
of torture mingled with minute legal instructions. The correspondence
of the Working-Men's Union alone was neglected. He pressed everybody
and anybody into his feverish service--musicians, artists, soldiers,
antiquarians, aristocrats. Would not Wagner induce the King of Bavaria
to speak to von Doenniges? Would not the Catholic Bishop Ketteler help
him?--he would become a Catholic. And ever present an insane belief in
the reality of her faithlessness, mockingly accompanied by a terribly
lucid recognition of the instability of character that made it
certain. The "No"--her first word to him at their first
meeting--resounded in his ears, prophetically ominous. The sunrise,
hidden by rain and mist, added its symbolic gloom. But he felt her
lips on his in the marvellous moonlight; a thousand times she clung to
him crying, "Take me away!" And now she was to be another's. She
refused even to see him. Incredible! Monstrous! If he could only get
an interview with her face to face. Then they would see if she was
resisting him of her own free will or under pressure illegal for an
adult. It was impossible his will-power over her should fail.

Helene ev