The Cold Embrace | Page 3

a metaphysician--grief, true grief, is not for such
as he. His first thought is flight--flight anywhere out of that accursed
city--anywhere far from the brink of that hideous river--anywhere away
from remorse--anywhere to forget.
* * * He is miles on the road that leads away from Brunswick before he
knows that he has walked a step.
It is only when his dog lies down panting at his feet that he feels how
exhausted he is himself, and sits down upon a bank to rest. How the
landscape spins round and round before his dazzled eyes, while his
morning's sketch of the two fishermen and the canvas-covered bier
glares redly at him out of the twilight.
At last, after sitting a long time by the roadside, idly playing with his
dog, idly smoking, idly lounging, looking as any idle, light-hearted
travelling student might look, yet all the while acting over that
morning's scene in his burning brain a hundred times a minute; at last
he grows a little more composed, and tries presently to think of himself
as he is, apart from his cousin's suicide. Apart from that, he was no
worse off than he was yesterday. His genius was not gone; the money
he had earned at Florence still lined his pocket-book; he was his own
master, free to go whither he would.
And while he sits on the roadside, trying to separate himself from the
scene of that morning--trying to put away the image of the corpse
covered with the damp canvas sail--trying to think of what he should do
next, where he should go, to be farthest away from Brunswick and
remorse, the old diligence coming rumbling and jingling along. He
remembers it; it goes from Brunswick to Aix-la-Chapelle.

He whistles to the dog, shouts to the postillion to stop, and springs into
the coupe.
During the whole evening, through the long night, though he does not
once close his eyes, he never speaks a word; but when morning dawns,
and the other passengers awake and begin to talk to each other, he joins
in the conversation. He tells them that he is an artist, that he is going to
Cologne and to Antwerp to copy Rubenses, and the great picture by
Quentin Matsys, in the museum. He remembered afterwards that he
talked and laughed boisterously, and that when he was talking and
laughing loudest, a passenger, older and graver than the rest, opened
the window near him, and told him to put his head out. He remembered
the fresh air blowing in his face, the singing of the birds in his ears, and
the flat fields and roadside reeling before his eyes. He remembered this,
and then falling in a lifeless heap on the floor of the diligence.
It is a fever that keeps him for six long weeks on a bed at a hotel in
Aix-la-Chapelle.
He gets well, and, accompanied by his dog, starts on foot for Cologne.
By this time he is his former self once more. Again the blue smoke
from his short meerschaum curls upwards in the morning air--again he
sings some old university drinking song--again stops here and there,
meditating and sketching.
He is happy, and has forgotten his cousin--and so on to Cologne.
It is by the great cathedral he is standing, with his dog at his side. It is
night, the bells have just chimed the hour, and the clocks are striking
eleven; the moonlight shines full upon the magnificent pile, over which
the artist's eye wanders, absorbed in the beauty of form.
He is not thinking of his drowned cousin, for he has forgotten her and
is happy.
Suddenly some one, something from behind him, puts two cold arms
round his neck, and clasps its hands on his breast.

And yet there is no one behind him, for on the flags bathed in the broad
moonlight there are only two shadows, his own and his dog's. He turns
quickly round--there is no one--nothing to be seen in the broad square
but himself and his dog; and though he feels, he cannot see the cold
arms clasped round his neck.
It is not ghostly, this embrace, for it is palpable to the touch--it cannot
be real, for it is invisible.
He tries to throw off the cold caress. He clasps the hands in his own to
tear them asunder, and to cast them off his neck. He can feel the long
delicate fingers cold and wet beneath his touch, and on the third finger
of the left hand he can feel the ring which was his mother's--the golden
serpent--the ring which he has always said he would know among a
thousand by the touch alone. He knows it now!
His dead cousin's cold arms are round his neck--his dead cousin's