Fritz and Eric Part 12

"Going to the war" had lost all its excitement for him, the carnage of the past months and the sorrowful scenes he had witnessed having fairly satiated him with "glory" and all the horrors which follow in its train.

Now, he was fairly hungering for home, and the quiet of the old household at Lubeck with his "little mother" and Lorischen--not forgetting Mouser, to make home more homelike and enjoyable, for Fritz thought how he would have to teach Gelert, who had likewise escaped scathless throughout the remainder of the campaign in the north of France, to be on friendly terms with the old nurse's pet cat.

He was thinking of some one else too; for, lately, the letters of Madaleine had stopped, although she had previously corresponded with him regularly. He could not make out the reason for her silence. One despatch might certainly have been lost in transmission through the field post; but for three or four--as would have been the case if she had responded in due course to his effusions, which were written off to Darmstadt each week without fail--to miss on the journey, was simply impossible!

Some treachery must be at work; or else, Madaleine was ill; or, she had changed her mind towards him.

Which of these reasons caused her silence?

It was probably, he thought, the former which he had to thank for his anxiety; and the cause, he was certain, was the baroness. What blessings he heaped on her devoted head!

It was in this frame of mind that Fritz awaited the end of the war.

CHAPTER ELEVEN.

A PLEASANT SURPRISE!

That winter was the dullest ever known in the little household of the Gulden Stra.s.se, and the coldest experienced for years in Lubeck--quiet town of cold winters, situated as it is on the sh.o.r.es of the ice-bound Baltic!

It was such bitter, inclement weather, with the thermometer going down to zero and the snow freezing as it fell, that neither Madame Dort nor old Lorischen went out of the house more than they could help; and, as for Mouser, he lived and slept and miaow-wowed in close neighbourhood to the stove in the parlour, not even the temptation of cream inducing him to leave the protection of its enjoyable warmth. For him, the mice might ravage the cupboards below the staircase, his whilom happy hunting-ground, at their own sweet will; and the birds, rendered tame by their privations, invade the sanct.i.ty of the balcony and the window- sills, whereon at another season their lives would not be worth a moment's purchase. He heeded them not now, nor did he, as of yore, resent the intrusion of Burgher Jans' terrier, when that predatory animal came prowling within the widow's tenement in company with his master, who had not entirely ceased his periodic visits, in spite of "the cold shoulder" invariably turned to him by Lorischen. Mouser wasn't going to inconvenience himself for the best dog in Christendom; so, on the advent of the terrier, he merely hopped from the front of the stove to the top, where he frizzled his feet and fizzed at his enemy, without risking the danger of catching an influenza, as he might otherwise have done if he had sought refuge elsewhere out in the cold.

Aye, for it was cold; and many was the time, when, rubbing their tingling fingers, both the widow and Lorischen pitied the hardships to which poor Fritz was exposed in the field, almost feeling angry and ashamed at themselves for being comfortable when he had to endure so much--as they knew from all the accounts published in the newspapers of the sufferings which the invading armies had to put up with, although Fritz himself made light of his physical grievances.

At Christmas-tide they were sad enough at his absence, with the memory of the lost Eric also to make that merry-making time for others doubly miserable to them; but, on the dawn of the new year, their hopes began to brighten with the receipt of every fresh piece of news from France concerning the progress of the war.

"The end cannot be far off now," they said to one another in mutual consolation, so as to cheer up each other's drooping spirits. "Surely the campaign cannot last much longer!"

The last Sunday in the month came, and on this day Madame Dort and Lorischen went to the Marien Kirche to service.

Previously they had been in the habit of attending the Dom Kirche, from the fact of Eric's liking to see, first as a child and afterwards as a growing boy, the great astronomical clock whose queer-looking eyes rolled so very curiously with the swing of the pendulum backwards and forwards each second; but, now, they went to the other house of G.o.d for a different reason. It, too, had an eccentric clock, distinguished for a procession of figures of the saints, which jerked themselves into notice each hour above the dial; still it was not that which attracted the widow there. The church was filled with large monumental figures with white, outstretching wings, that hovered out into prominence above the carvings of the old oak screens, black with age. These figures appeared as if soaring up to the roof of the chancel; and Madame Dort had a fancy, morbid it might have been, that she could pray better there, surrounded as it were by guardian angels, whose protection she invoked on behalf of her boy lost at sea, and that other, yet alive, who was "in danger, necessity," and possibly "tribulation!"

After she and Lorischen had returned home from the Marien Kirche, the day pa.s.sed quietly and melancholy away; but the next morning broke more cheerfully.

It was the 30th of January, 1871. Both the lone women at the little house in the Gulden Stra.s.se remembered that fact well; for, on the morrow, the month from which they had expected such good tidings would be up, and if they heard nothing before its close they must needs despair.

Seeing that the morning broke bright and cheerily, with the sun shining down through the frost-laden air, making the snow on the roofs look crisper and causing the icicles from the eaves to glitter in its scintillating rays, Lorischen determined to go to market, especially as she had not been outside the doorway, except to go to church, since the previous week.

She had not much to buy, it is true; but then she might have a gossip with the neighbours and hear some news, perhaps--who knows?

Anything might have happened without the knowledge of herself or her mistress, as no one, not even Burgher Jans, had been to visit them for ever so long!

Clad, therefore, in her thick cloak and warm boots, with her wide, red- knitted woollen shawl over her head and portly market-basket on arm, Lorischen sallied out like the dove from the ark, hoping perchance to bring back with her an olive branch of comfort; while the widow sat herself down by the stove in the parlour with her needle, st.i.tching away at some new shirts she was engaged on to renew Fritz's wardrobe when he came back. Seeing an opportunity for taking up a comfortable position, Mouser jumped up at once into her lap as soon as the old nurse had left the room, purring away with great complacency and watching in a lazy way the movements of her busy fingers, blinking sleepily the while at the glowing fire in front of him.

Lorischen had not been gone long when Madame Dort heard her bustling back up the staircase without. She knew the old nurse's step well; but, besides hers, she heard the tread of some one else, and then the noisy bark of a dog. A sort of altercation between two voices followed, in which the old nurse's angry accents were plainly perceptible; and next there seemed a hurried scuffle just without the parlour door, which suddenly burst open with a clatter, and two people entered the room.

They were Lorischen and Burgher Jans, who both tried to speak together, the result being a confused jangle of tongues from which Madame Dort could learn nothing.

"I say I was first!" squeaked the Burgher in a high treble key, which he always adopted when excited beyond his usual placid mode of utterance.

"And I say it was me!" retorted the old nurse in her gruff tones, which were much more like those of a man. "What right have you to try and supplant the servant of the house, who specially went out about it, you little meddlesome teetotum, I'd like to know, hey?"

"But I was first, I say! Madame Dort--"

"Don't listen to him, mistress," interposed Lorischen. "I've just--"

"There's news of--"

But, bang just then came Lorischen's market-basket against the side of the little man's head, knocking his hat off and stopping his speech abruptly; while the old nurse muttered savagely, "I wish it had been your little turnip-top of a head instead of your hat, that I do!"

"Good people! good people!" exclaimed Madame Dort, rising to her feet and dropping her needlework and Mouser--who rapidly jumped on to the top of the stove out of the reach of Burgher Jans' terrier, which, of course, had followed his master into the parlour and at once made a dart at the cat as he tumbled on to the floor from the widow's lap. "Pray do not make such a noise, and both speak at once! What is the matter that you are so eager to tell me--good news, I trust, Lorischen, or you would not have hurried back so soon?"

Madame Dort's voice trembled with anxiety, and tears of suspense stood in her eyes.

"There," said Lorischen triumphantly to the Burgher, who remained silent for the moment from the shock of the old nurse's attack. "You see for yourself that my mistress wishes me to tell her."

"Oh, what is it--what have you heard?" cried the widow plaintively. "Do not keep me in this agony any longer!"

And she sat down again nervously in her chair, gazing from one to the other in mute entreaty and looking as if she were going to faint.

"There now, see what you've done!" said Lorischen, hastening to Madame Dort's side. "I told you what it would be if you blurted it out like that!"

Burgher Jans' eyes grew quite wide with astonishment beneath the broad rims of his tortoise-sh.e.l.l spectacles, giving him more than ever the appearance of an owl.

"Peace, woman!" he exclaimed. "I--"

"Yes, that's it, dear mistress," interrupted the old nurse, half laughing, half crying, as she knelt down beside the widow's chair and put her arm round her caressingly. "There's peace proclaimed at last, and the dear young Herr will come home again to you now!"

"Peace?" repeated the widow, looking up with an anxious stare from one to the other.

"Yes, peace, most worthy lady," said Burgher Jans pompously in his ordinary bland voice; adding immediately afterwards for Lorischen's especial benefit--"and I was the first to tell you of it, after all."

"Never mind," replied that worthy, too much overpowered with emotion at the happiness of the widow to contest the point. "We both brought the glad tidings together. Madame, dearest mistress, you are glad, are you not?"

But Madame Dort was silent for the moment. Her eyes were closed, and her lips moving in earnest prayer of thankfulness to Him who had heard her prayers and granted the fervent wish of her heart at last.

"Is it really true?" she asked presently.

"Yes, well-born and most worthy lady," replied the little fat man, whom Lorischen now allowed to speak without further interruption. "Our Bismark signed an armistice with the French at Versailles on Sat.u.r.day by which Paris capitulates, the forts defending it being given over to our soldiers, and the starving city allowed to be reprovisioned by the good English, who have prepared ever so many train-loads of food to go in for the use of the population."

"Ah, those good English!" chimed in Lorischen.

"You have reason to say that, dearest maiden," continued the Burgher, bowing suavely to the old woman. "They subscribed, ah! more than a million thalers for this purpose in London."

"And I suppose the war will now cease?" said Madame Dort.

"Most certainly, worthy lady," replied Burgher Jans. "The armistice is to last for three weeks to enable the French to have an election of members to an a.s.sembly which will decide whether the contest shall go on any further; but there is no doubt, as their armies have all been defeated and their resources exhausted, that hostilities will not be again resumed. All parties are sick of fighting by this time!"