Hammer and Anvil Part 31

In a moment it is all over. For an instant he sees the horribly distorted face of Cat-Kaspar--he feels hands striving to wrench his hands from the man's throat, and then a black night swallows up all.

CHAPTER IV.

A black night which is but a long, long continuation of the dreadful dream, until at last it is broken by rare gleams of soft, dim light, at which the forms of fear grow faint and give way to more friendly shapes. These also melt into deep night, but it is not the old terrible gloom, but rather a blissful sinking into happy annihilation; and whenever I emerge from it the figures are clearer, so that I sometimes now succeed in distinguishing them from each other, whereas at first they melted indistinguishably into one another. Now I know that when the long gray moustache nods up and down before my face, there is always an honest, good-natured old mastiff there, who growls out of his deep chest; only I never get sight of the mastiff, and sometimes think that it is the long gray moustache itself that growls so. When the moustache is dark, I hear a soft voice, the sound of which is inexpressibly soothing to me, so that I cannot refrain from happy smiles, while when I hear the mastiff I would laugh aloud, only I have no body, but am a soap-bubble which floats out of the garret-window in my father's house, into the sunny air, until two spectacle-gla.s.ses which have no moustache, are reflected in it. These spectacle-gla.s.ses perplex me; for although they never have a moustache, they are sometimes blue, and then they are a woman; but when they are white they are a man and have a creaking voice, while the blue gla.s.ses have the softest voice--softer even than that of the dark moustache.

I cannot make out how all this is, and puzzle myself over it until I fall asleep, and when I awake some one is leaning over me who has a dark moustache and brown eyes, and exactly resembles some one that I know, although I cannot recall where and when I have seen him. But I feel both glad and sad at the sight of this unknown acquaintance, for it seems to me that I owe him boundless grat.i.tude for something--I know not what. And this feeling of grat.i.tude is so strong that I draw his hand, which he has laid upon mine, very slowly and softly, for I have little or no strength, to my lips, and close my eyes, from which happy tears are streaming. I have something to say, but cannot recall it, and fall to thinking it over, and when I again open my eyes the form is gone, and the room vacant and filled with a dim light, and I look around in surprise.

It is a moderately-large, two-windowed room; the white window-curtains are pulled down, and on them I can see the shadows of vine-branches waving to and fro. I watch the motion with delight; it is an image of my thoughts that float and waver thus without being able to fix themselves on any point. I look again into the room, and my eyes find an object on which they rest. It is a picture which hangs directly opposite to me on a plain light-gray wall; it represents a young and beautiful woman with a child in her arms. The eyes of the young mother, who is calm and almost sad, as though she were pondering over some wondrous mystery, are mild and gentle; while those of the boy, under his full brow, have a dignity beyond his years, and look out into the far distance with an air of majesty as if their glances comprehended the world.

I can scarcely turn my eyes from the picture. My admiration is pure and artless; I have no knowledge of the original; I do not know that it is an exquisite copy in crayons of the most celebrated painting of the Master of masters; I only know that never in my life have I seen anything so beautiful.

Under this picture hangs a little _etagere_ with two rows of neatly-bound books. Under the _etagere_ stands a bureau of antique form with bra.s.s handles, and on it lie drawing-materials, and, between two terra-cotta vases, a little work-basket with ends of red worsted hanging over its edge.

Between the windows and the bureau, evidently set on one side, is an easel, upon which is a drawing-board with the face inwards; and on the other side of the door a cottage piano, the upper part of which has a peculiar, lyre-shaped figure.

I do not know what it is that suddenly brings to my mind Constance von Zehren. Perhaps it is that the lyre-shaped instrument reminds me of a guitar; and indeed this must be the reason, for in nothing else does the room bear any resemblance to Constance's. As there all was neglect and confusion, here all is orderly and cheerful; no torn threadbare carpet covers the white floor upon which the windows throw squares of sunlight, and the shadows of the vine-branches play, but fainter than upon the curtains. No, I am not at Castle Zehren. In all that castle there was no apartment like this, so bright, so cheerful, so clean; and now I remember Castle Zehren is burnt down--to the very ground, some one told me--so I cannot be at Castle Zehren; but where am I, then?

I turn my eyes to the beautiful young mother of the picture, as if she could answer me; but looking at her, I forget what it was that I had intended to ask. I have only the feeling that one can sleep peacefully when such eyes are watching him; and I wonder that the fair boy does not rest his head upon the shoulder or the bosom of his mother, close his great thoughtful eyes, and sleep sweetly--oh! so sweetly!

The long sweet sleep wonderfully strengthens me. When I awake, I at once raise my head, rest myself upon my elbow, and stare with surprise at the brown furrowed face, the blue eyes, the great hooked nose, and the long gray moustache of Sergeant Sussmilch, who sits at my bed-side.

The old man, on his part, looks at me with no less surprise. Then a pleasant smile shoots from the moustache through a pair of the deepest furrows up to the blue eyes, where it stays and blinks and twinkles joyously. He brings three fingers of his right hand to his forehead, and says, "_Serviteur!_"

This comes so drolly from him that I have to laugh, for I can laugh now, and the old fellow laughs too, and says, "Had a good nap?"

"Splendid," I answer. "Have I been sleeping long?"

"Pretty well. To-morrow it will be eight weeks," he replies cheerily.

"Eight weeks," I repeated, mechanically; "that is a long time;" and thinking of this, I pa.s.s my hand over my head. My head was naturally covered with very thick, curly, soft auburn hair, inclining to red; but I now feel nothing but short bristles, as of a brush, a brush too in which time has made considerable ravages.

"This is very strange," I said.

"Soon grow," said the sergeant, encouragingly. "Shaved me bald as a turnip after this"--he pointed to a deep scar on his right temple, running up into his thick gray hair, and which I now noticed for the first time--"and yet I had a crop afterwards like a bear----"

"With seven senses," I added, and had to laugh at my own wit. It seems that I have a child's head on my broad shoulders.

The old man laughed heartily, then suddenly grew serious and said:

"Now keep still, and go to sleep again like a----"

He did not finish his favorite simile, apparently in fear lest he should set me to laughing again; but I laughed in spite of his precautions, and while doing so pulled up the sleeve of my shirt, which struck me as singularly loose. But it was not that the sleeve was wider, but my arm thinner; so thin that I could scarcely believe it to be mine.

"Soon get strong again," said the sergeant.

"I have been very sick, then?"

"Well," said he, "it was very near tattoo; but I always said: weeds won't die," and he rubbed his hands with satisfaction. "Talk enough now," he added, in a tone of authority. "Strict orders, when awake, to allow no discussion, and report fact; which shall be done forthwith."

The sergeant is about rising, but I take one of his brown hands and beg him to stay. I feel myself quite strong, I say; speaking does not fatigue me at all, and of course hearing does not; and I should like to hear how I came into this condition, who the persons are that have been about me, and whose faces I have seen floating through the mist of my dreams; and if there has not been a great good-natured mastiff that guarded me, and had a way of growling deeply.

The old man looks at me attentively, as if he thought all was not yet quite right under my bristly, half-bald skull, and that it was high time he made his report. He placed my hand upon the coverlid, and said, "So! so!" smoothes the pillow, and again says, "So! so!" so to please him I shut my eyes and hear how he rises softly and goes away on tiptoe; but the door has hardly closed behind him when I open my eyes again, and apply myself resolutely to the task of solving the questions which I had addressed to the old man.

As when we look down from a high mountain upon a sea of mist, we note bright points emerging, one by one--a sunlit corn-field, a cottage, a bit of road, a little lake with gra.s.sy sh.o.r.es, until at last the whole landscape lies plain before us, except a few spots over which gray wreaths of vapor still float, which more slowly than the rest roll up the ravines--just so before my mental vision dissolved the night of oblivion which during my illness had covered the recent events of my life. Now I again remembered that I was in prison and how I came there; that the old man with the gray moustache was not my friend and nurse, but my keeper; that I had had thoughts of killing him, if necessary, to gain my liberty; and so everything that had happened, up to that last frightful day; but that was confused and obscure--as confused and obscure as it has ever since remained in my memory to this hour. Dark and painful; but strange to say, this painful feeling was turned exclusively against myself. The hate, the bitterness, the rancor, the desperation, the frenzy--all the demons which had dwelt in my soul, were gone, as though an angel with flaming sword--perhaps the Angel of Death, who had hovered over me--had driven them away. Even the remains of pain melted away in thankfulness that the most fearful of all had been spared me--that I could look upon my white, wasted hands without a shudder.

As I lay here, pondering these things, and my eyes rested upon that fair young mother, who bore her boy so securely upon her strong, faithful arm, my hands involuntarily folded, and I thought of my own mother so early lost--far too early for me--and how all would have happened differently if she had ever encircled me with her protecting arms; if in my young sorrows and doubts I could have sought refuge, counsel, and consolation upon her faithful breast. And I thought too of my father, who was so lonely now, whose hopes I had so cruelly blighted, whose pride I had so deeply wounded; and I thought of him for the first time without animosity, with only a feeling of deepest pity for the poor old forsaken man.

"But he will live," I said to myself, "and I am not dead; and all shall be well again. No, not all. The lost past cannot be recalled; but the future still is mine, even in a prison."

In a prison. But was this a prison in which I was?--this pleasant room with windows barred only by nodding vine-branches; a room in which everything spoke of the peacefully cheerful life of its fair inhabitant.

How I came to this idea I do not know, but I could not rid myself of it; and there were the ends of red worsted hanging from the little work-basket. What had a workbasket to do in the room of a man?

I thought and thought, but could arrive at no conclusion; the streak of mist would not move. Indeed it rather widened and spread to a thin veil, which threatened gradually to envelope the whole prospect. I did not care; I had seen it once and knew that I should see it again; knew that I should hear the voices again which now fell faintly on my ear as if from a vast distance, among which I could distinguish the muttered growl of my faithful mastiff, and the soft voice that accompanied the eyes whose gentle light had shone through my darkness.

When I again awaked, it was really night, or at least so late that the little astral lamp by my bedside was already lighted, and by its feeble glimmer I saw some one sitting by my bed whom I did not recognize, as his head was hidden in his hand. But when I moved, and he raised his head and asked, "How are you now?" I knew him at once. The low gentle voice I would have recognized among a thousand. And now, strangely enough, without having to give a moment's thought to the matter, but just as if some one had told me everything in my sleep, I knew that the house in which I had been for the last eight weeks, and in which I had all this time been tended as carefully as if I had been one of the family, was the house of the superintendent, of the man who certainly not to-day for the first time was watching by my bed, and who spoke to me in a tone of affection, as might a kind father to his son.

Leaning over me, he had taken my hand while he went on speaking; but I could only half hear his words for another voice that cried out within me, loud and ever louder, in the words of Scripture: "I am not worthy!"

I could not silence this voice. "I am not worthy!" it continually cried, until at last I exclaimed aloud: "I am not worthy!"

"You are, my friend," said the soft voice; "I know that you are, even though you know it not yourself."

"No, no, I am not," I said, in great agitation. "You do not know whom you are caring for; you do not know whose hand you are holding in yours."

And now, following that irresistible impulse which urges every nature that is upright at heart to refuse at all hazards grat.i.tude which it is conscious of not deserving, I confessed my grievous fault; how I had been resolved to run every risk to gain my liberty; that I had not, it is true, invited the overtures of the ruffian, but nevertheless had permitted them; how I had known of the plot and of the hour when it was to be carried out, and that I did not know why in the last moment the courage to do my part in it had failed me so that I turned my hand against the man whom I had voluntarily admitted as my comrade, and whose accomplice I must necessarily consider myself.

The superintendent allowed me to speak to an end, only retaining with a gentle pressure my hand, whenever I attempted to withdraw it. When I ceased speaking, he said--and even now, after so many years, on awaking in the night, I fancy I hear his voice:

"My dear young friend, it is not what our fancies, intentions, desires, represent to us as possible or even necessary, not what we believe we can do or ought to do, not what we have resolved to do, but it is what at any given moment we really do, that makes us what we are. The coward believes himself a hero until the moment of trial convicts him of cowardice; the brave man fancies that he will prudently avoid all perils, and plunges headlong into danger as soon as a cry for help reaches his ear. You believed yourself capable of lifting your hand against a defenceless man, and when you saw him attacked by a murderer, you sprang to his a.s.sistance. And do not say that you did not know what you were doing; or if you really did not know, you were following the irresistible promptings of your nature, and were just at that moment your real self. I and mine will evermore see in you the man who saved my life at the peril of his own."

"You would make me out better than I really am," I murmured.

"Even were that so," he answered, "few have my opportunity for knowing that the surest, often the only way to make a man better, is to take him for better than he is. Would to heaven that this secret of my craft were always as easy of employment as with you. And if I can help, as I joyfully trust I can, in refining the n.o.ble metal of your nature from the dross with which it may yet be mingled; if I can help to enlighten you in regard to yourself, to light up the path of your life which lies but dark before you, and from which you believe you have--and perhaps really have--wandered; in a word, to make you what you can be, and therefore ought to be--that would be but dealing you out justice in return for the sharp injustice which has brought you here; and I might thus repay the debt of grat.i.tude which I owed you before you set foot in this house, let alone before you preserved for my children their father's life."

The soft light of the lamp fell upon his beautiful pale face, which seemed to beam upon me with mild radiance like a star out of the surrounding gloom; and his gentle voice came to my ear like the voice of some good spirit that in the stillness of the night speaks to some needy and stricken soul. I lay there without moving, without turning my eyes from him, and softly begged him to speak on.

"It is perhaps selfish in me to do so," he said, "if I now seize the moment when your soul awakes to fresh life, and is disposed to look with trusting child-like eyes upon the world it has regained, to teach you to know me, and, if possible, to love me, as I know and love you--I repeat it, not now for the first time. I knew you before you came here.

You look at me with surprise, and yet nothing could be more simple. I always deeply loved my eldest brother, although in reality we only pa.s.sed our childhood and boyhood together, and were then separated, never again to a.s.sociate, nor indeed even to see each other, for the last fourteen years. For, whatever the world and his pa.s.sions may have made of him, his was originally the fairest, n.o.blest, bravest soul that ever was bestowed upon man. You can imagine what a blow to me was the news of his death; with what painful care I strove to learn everything connected with his death and its cause; how eagerly I seized an opportunity that offered to read the reports of the trial in which the name and actions of my unfortunate brother figured so conspicuously, and in which you were yourself so unhappily involved. From these reports I first learned to know you, I have long been accustomed to inspect reports of this kind, and know how to read between the lines of the text. Never was this skill more necessary to me than in this case; for never has the juristic understanding--or rather imbecility--divested of all psychological insight, committed grosser wrong than in your case; never did the hand of a dauber produce from an easily-outlined, sun-clear, youthful face, a more hideous caricature in black upon black. In almost every feature with which the accusation furnished it, I thought I could perceive and prove exactly the contrary. And had it not been my dearly-loved brother whose fault you were to expiate--if the whole trial had been foreign to me, instead of touching me nearly, and in a thousand painful ways, I would have made your cause my own, and tried to save you, if in my power. But I could do nothing for you; I could only exert all my influence to have you brought here instead of to N., where it was originally intended to send you.

"You came, I saw you as I had pictured you to myself; I found you just as I had thought. There may have been some apparent difference, but that was not the youth who, to rescue my brother, had rushed upon ruin; who had given himself up to justice that men might not say his father was his accomplice; who during the trial had knowingly damaged his own cause by obstinately refusing all information implicating others; whose manly candor in all other points would have touched any heart but the shriveled heart of a man of acts and processes. This was a man who had been wronged under the forms of law, whose clear soul had been darkened by the gloom of a dungeon.

"It was worthy of you that you attempted no concealment of your feeling of hatred, that you proudly rejected what was offered you here, which others would have greedily seized. Let me be brief The malady that had been so long incubating, which nothing but your unusually strong const.i.tution was able to withstand so long, at last declared itself. In the frenzy of your disturbed mind you wished to show: 'This is what you have made out of me!' and the result showed that you had remained what you always were. You were carried away for dead from the place; a physician hastily called in gave some hope, but said that only the most unremitting care could save you. Where could you receive that care but here? Who could more faithfully watch over your life than he who owed you his own? What, in such a case, were to me the rules of the house, or the talk of men? We carried you into the first room, which happened to be the best for our purpose. We--that is, my wife, my daughter, who is older than her years, the faithful old Sussmilch, the physician, whom you will learn to love as he deserves, and myself--we have fought faithfully and bravely with the death that threatened you; and the women wept, and the men shook each other by the hand when your strong nature triumphed over its enemy, and the physician said to us--a week ago--'He is saved.' And now enough; perhaps too much for to-day. If from our conversation you have received the impression, and will bear it with you into your sleep, that you are among friends that love you, that is all I wish. I hear Sussmilch coming; I wanted to relieve him to-night, but he says he cannot leave his prisoner. And now good night and good rest."

He pa.s.sed his hand softly over my brow and eyes, and left the room. My soul was filled with his words. No man had ever spoken to me like this.