Part 39 (1/2)
The burgomaster stood mutely watching the scene, and neither of the three could decide which suffered most.
He gazed in speechless grief at the clasped hands of his sister and his friend. How often he had wished for this moment, and now--? What _parted_ alone united them, and what united, divided.
”Aye, Freyer has brought much misery upon us!” he said, with sullen resentment. ”I only hope that he will never set foot again upon the soil of his forefathers!”
”Oh, Brother, how can you speak so--you do not mean it. I know that his heart will draw him back here; he will seek his home again, and he shall find it. You will not thrust him from you when he returns from foreign lands sorrowing and repentant. G.o.d knows how earnestly I wish him happiness, but I do not believe that he will possess it. And as he will be loyal to us in his inmost soul, we will be true to him and prepare a resting place when the world has nailed his heart upon the cross. Shall we not, Ludwig?”
”Yes, by Heaven, we will!” faltered Ludwig, and his tears fell on the beautiful head of the girl, who still sat motionless, as if she must wait here for the lost one.
”Woman, behold thy son--son, behold thy mother!” stirred the air like a breath.
CHAPTER XVIII.
THE MARRIAGE.
On a wooded height, hidden in the heart of the forests of the Bavarian highlands, stood an ancient hunting castle, the property of the Wildenau family. A steep mountain path led up to it, and at its feet, like a stone sea, stretched the wide, dry bed of a river, a Griess, as it was called in that locality. Only a few persons knew the way; to the careless glance the path seemed wholly impa.s.sable.
Bare, rugged cliffs towered like a wall around the hunting castle on its mossy height, harmonizing in melancholy fas.h.i.+on with the white sea of stone below, which formed a harsh foreground to the dreary scene.
Ever and anon a stag emerged from the woods, crossing the Griess with elastic tread, the brown silhouette of its antlers sharply relieved against the colorless monotony of the landscape. The hind came forward from the opposite side, slowly, reluctantly, with nostrils vibrating.
The report of a rifle echoed from beyond the river bed, the antlers drooped, the royal creature fell upon its knees, then rolled over on its back; its huge antlers, flung backward in the death agony, were thrust deep down among the loose pebbles. The hind had fled, the poacher seized his prey--a slender rill of blood trickled noiselessly through the stones, then everything was once more silent and lifeless.
This was the hiding-place where, for seven years, Countess Wildenau had hidden the treasury filched from the cross--the rock sepulchre in which she intended to keep the G.o.d whom the world believed dead. Built close against the cliff, half concealed by an overhanging precipice, the castle seemed to be set in a niche. Shut out from the suns.h.i.+ne by the projecting crag which cast its shadow over it even at noonday, it was so cold and damp that the moisture trickled down the walls of the building, and, moreover, was surrounded by that strange atmosphere of wet moss and rotting mushrooms which awakens so strange a feeling when, after a hot walk, we pause to rest in the cool courtyard of some ruined castle, where our feet sink into wet ma.s.ses of mouldering brown leaves which for decades no busy hand has swept away. It seems as if the sun desired to a.s.sociate with human beings. Where no mortal eyes behold its rays, it ceases to s.h.i.+ne. It does not deem it worth while to penetrate the heaps of withered leaves, or the tangle of wild vines and bushes, or the veil of cobwebs and lime-dust which, in the course of time, acc.u.mulates in heaps in the masonry of a deserted dwelling.
As we see by a child's appearance whether or not it has a loving mother, so the aspect of a house reveals whether or not it is dear to its owner, and as a neglected child drags out a joyless existence, so a neglected house gradually becomes cold and inhospitable.
This was the case with the deserted little hunting seat. No foot had crossed its threshold within the memory of man. What could the Countess Wildenau do with it? It was so remote, so far from all the paths of travel, so hidden in the woods that it would not even afford a fine view. It stood as an outpost on the chart containing the location of the Wildenau estates. It had never entered the owner's mind to seek it out in this--far less in reality.
Every year an architect was sent there to superintend the most necessary repairs, because it was not fitting for a Wildenau to let one of these family castles go to ruin. This was all that was done to preserve the building. The garden gradually ran to waste, and became so blended with the forest that the boughs of the trees beat against the windows of the edifice and barred out like a green hedge the last straggling sunbeams. A castle for a Sleeping Beauty, but without the sleeping princess. Then Fate willed that a blissful secret in its owner's breast demanded just such a hiding-place in which to dream the strangest fantasy ever imagined by woman since Danae rested in the embrace of Jove.
Madeleine von Wildenau sought and found this forgotten spot in her chart, and, with the energy bestowed by the habit of being able to accomplish whatever we desire, she discovered a secret ford through the Griess, known only to a trustworthy old driver, and no one was aware of Countess Wildenau's residence when she vanished from society for days.
There were rumors of a romantic adventure or a religious ecstacy into which the Ammergau Pa.s.sion Play had transported her years before. She had set off upon her journey to the Promised Land directly after, and as no sea is so wide, no mountain so lofty, that gossip cannot find its way over them, it even made its way from the Holy Sepulchre to the drawing rooms of the capital.
A gentleman, an acquaintance of so-and-so, had gone to the Orient, and in Jerusalem, at the Holy Sepulchre, met a veiled lady, who was no other than Countess Wildenau. There would have been nothing specially remarkable in that. But at the lady's side knelt a gentleman who bore so remarkable a resemblance to the pictures of Christ that one might have believed it was the Risen Lord Himself who, dissatisfied with heaven, had returned repentant to His deserted resting-place.
How interesting! The imagination of society, thirsting for romance, naturally seized upon this bit of news with much eagerness.
Who could the gentleman with the head of Christ be, save the Ammergau Christ? This agreed with the sudden interruption of the Pa.s.sion Play that summer, on account of the illness of the Christ--as the people of Ammergau said, who perfectly understood how to keep their secrets from the outside world.
But as they committed the imprudence of occasionally sending their daughters to the city, one and another of these secrets of the community, more or less distorted, escaped through the dressing-rooms of the mistresses of these Ammergau maids.
Thus here and there a flickering ray fell upon the Ammergau catastrophe: The Christ was not ill--he had vanished--run away--with a lady of high rank. What a scandal! Then lo! one day Countess Wildenau appeared--after a journey of three years in the east--somewhat absentminded, a little disposed to a.s.sume religious airs, but without any genuine piety. Religion is not to be obtained by an indulgence of religious-erotic rapture with its sweet delusions--it can be obtained only by the hard labor of daily self-sacrifice, of which a nature like Madeleine von Wildenau's has no knowledge.
So she returned, somewhat changed--yet only so far as that her own ego, which the world did not know, was even more potential than before.
But she came alone! Where had she left her pallid Christ? All inquiries were futile. What could be said? There was no proof of anything--and besides; proven or not--what charge would have overthrown Countess Wildenau? That would have been an achievement for which even her foes lacked perseverance?
It is very amusing when a person's moral ruin can be effected by a word carelessly uttered! But when the labor of producing proof is a.s.sociated with it, people grow good-natured from sheer indolence--let the victim go, and seek an easier prey.