"MacDONALD, George - The Cruel Painter" - читать интересную книгу автора (MacDonald George)

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-
"Do not be frightened," he said. "Let me see you home. I will walk behind you."
"Who are you?" she rejoined.
"Karl Wolkenlicht."
"I have heard of you. Thank you. I can go home alone."
Yet, as if in a half-dreamy, half-unconscious mood, she accepted his offered
hand to lead her through the graves, and allowed him to walk beside her, till,
reaching the corner of a narrow street, she suddenly bade him good-night and
vanished. He thought it better not to follow her, so he returned her good-night
and went home.
How to see her again was his first thought the next day; as, in fact, how to see
her at all had been his first thought for many days. She went nowhere that ever