In the Year '13 Part 18

"And the French?" asked the Amtshauptmann.

"Oh, Herr Amtshauptmann, they were half-frozen and, when they wanted to fire, their guns would not go off because of the wet, and so they threw themselves in their rage upon us, who were innocently looking on; and gave Bank the shoemaker who lives in the Brandenburg road, a touch of the b.u.t.t-end of a musket between the shoulders, and then all of us made off and ran down the hill."

"My friend," cried the Amtshauptmann, "this Burmeister of ours _is_ a fellow; he is as quick as a gun."

But she for whom this speech was meant could not hear it. My mother lay back in her chair, crying bitterly. At the talk of shooting she had pressed the arm of the good Frau Amtshauptmann tightly, as if she were holding to it as a safeguard against the giddiness that came over her; but when at last it was certain that my father had got off safe and sound, the tears started from her eyes, she covered her face, and gave way to silent tears.

Were they tears of joy?--Who can tell?--Who can say where joy begins and sorrow ends? They are so wonderfully interwoven in the human heart; they are the warp and the woof, and happy is he who weaves them into a firm web. The tear which is born of sorrow has as much its woof of hope as the tear of joy its woof of fear. The past anguish about my father and the fear as to his future wove themselves into my mother's joyful feeling of thankfulness, and the tears which fell were not tears of pure joy. Does any tear of pure joy ever fall on this earth?

It had become quite quiet; an angel flew through the room--; for a short time only: angels do not stay long here below; I know it for I stood with my head against our tall brown clock and cried and listened to the ticking of the pendulum--a short time! I looked up: the old Amtshauptmann was looking out of the uppermost window at the grey heavens, my mother and the Frau Amtshauptmann were crying, Mamsell Westphalen too; she had taken Fritz Sahlmann by the hand, and at the last stroke of the angel's wing she said;--

"Go up to the Schloss, Fritz, and put on dry clothes; Hanchen can give you your Sunday suit."

"I will be off to Gulzow, Herr Amtshauptmann," said Luth, "and Tropner can go round to Pribbenow, and then we can't both miss the Herr Burmeister."

The Amtshauptmann nodded his head, walked up to my mother, against whose knees I had laid myself, and said,--"You and the boy, here, have good cause to thank G.o.d to-day, my friend."

CHAPTER XV.

How the Colonel was obliged to turn away at Fieka's words, and Fieka at Heinrich's. Why the Herr Rathsherr cursed all thin people; and the Miller wished he were a crow.

When Fieka and Heinrich arrived at the Windmill-hill, she looked round on all sides, and, in a few moments, caught sight of her father as he sat with his companions under the mill-shed.

"There's my father," said she to Heinrich.

"Well, then," he replied, "we'll turn up here to the right of the pa.s.s, towards the ploughed field. It will be hard work; but there's no getting through 'Breakneck.' We shall get to the mill this way, and you can speak to your father then."

"Stop," cried Fieka, "don't turn up to the right towards the mill; turn down to the left, away from it; I don't want to speak to him.--Look there now! He has seen us; he's making signs to us!"

"Fieka," said Heinrich, doing as she told him, "what are you doing this for? Why do you want to get out of your father's way?"

"Because I can't help him till I have given the Colonel the letter. Who knows, how the French might take it, if I spoke to him? There might be some dispute, and if we were taken before the Colonel so, it's not likely he would look on us with much favour. And then too, why should I be holding out hopes to my old father, when they are so far off? It's enough for the moment that he knows we are near him."

The cannon were now gradually got out of their bed of mud, and the procession began to move on once more. The prisoners were led along one side of the pa.s.s; and Heinrich drove along the other--as well as he could over old Nahmaker's ploughed field. Fieka looked out for the Colonel.

"I shall know him again when I see him," she said to Heinrich. "He has a kind face for all that it looked hard when he commanded them to take the Burmeister."

Thus talking, they pa.s.sed by the cannon and many a knot of French plodding heavily through the deep mud. At last, close to the sign of the "Bremsenkranz" they saw the Colonel on horseback slowly making his way onwards, side by side with some of his officers.--

"Drive on a little way past them, Heinrich," said Fieka, "and stop at the edge of the bank, and I will get down."

This was done. As the Colonel approached, Fieka stood in the foot-path in his way, advanced a couple of steps towards him and said--"Herr, I have a letter for you."

The Colonel stopped, took the letter, and looked at Fieka, rather astonished: "From whom is it, my child?"

"From our Herr Amtshauptmann Weber."

The Colonel broke the seal and read; his face gradually softened with pity; but when he had finished reading, he silently shook his head.

Fieka had watched him with the greatest anxiety; she read the answer to the letter in his face; and when he so sorrowfully shook his head, the tears started to her eyes: "Sir, it is my old father, and I am his only child," she cried.

She might have said anything in the world,--the finest speech or the most beautiful text from the Bible,--nothing would have made so deep an impression upon the strong man as these few words in the Platt-Deutsch tongue. He too had an old father and was his only child. His father lived in a high castle in Westphalia; but in loneliness,--discontented with his countrymen and his country. Time and the world had rolled many a stone between father and son, until a broad wall had grown up between them, above which it was only with difficulty that they could understand one another. Discord and dissension had arisen, and where _they_ are, conscience makes its voice heard in quiet hours. How often had this inner voice said to him: "It is your old father, and you are his only child!" Happiness and misery, the thunder of the cannon and the roar of battle had, indeed, at times been able to overpower it; but the wound in his heart always opened afresh like the indelible blood-stain reappearing on a room-floor. Now, for the first time, did he hear these words uttered by stranger lips,--for the first time in the language of his childhood. It seemed to him as if there were no longer any reproach contained in them; they were spoken so gently, they sounded as softly in his ears as if they were words of forgiveness; and, when he saw the poor girl standing there before him with her pale, anxious face, it was too much for him,--he was obliged to turn away, and it was some time before he could speak to her again. At last he recovered himself, and said to her with all the warmth of manner which such a moment calls forth: "My dear child, it is not in my power to set your father free; but he will be soon. You and your love to him shall not, however, have appealed to me in vain; you shall stay near him, and he can go in the waggon with you. And when we get to Brandenburg, come and speak to me again."

Thereupon he gave the necessary orders, and rode on with the other officers.

Heinrich now approached a little nearer with his waggon, jumped down, and asked: "How has it gone, Fieka?--But I need not ask you that. You look as if your heart were on your tongue; he has set your father free, has he not?" And he put his arm round her: "Come, Fieka, get up into the waggon, here's a lot of Frenchmen coming,--we must get out of their way."

"They won't hurt us," said Fieka, mounting higher up the bank and looking along the road. "He hasn't set him free, but he's promised that he will. I am to stay near father, and all the prisoners are to come in our waggon; and, Heinrich; you can go home now to the mill and help mother."

Heinrich made the reins fast to a willow-tree, and bent down to buckle some strap in the harness, and then patted and stroked the smooth glossy neck of the near side-horse.--

"You are right, Heinrich," said Fieka, "you do not like to leave your horses and waggon behind you; but old Inspector Brasig will take them back for you,--he will willingly do us that favour."

"Fieka, I was not thinking about the horses and waggon," said Heinrich, "I was thinking about you and what the old Herr Amtshauptmann said to me."

"What was that?" she asked.

"If I let a hair of your head be touched, I was never to dare appear before his eyes again. And, Fieka, I promised him I would stay by you at all times, and when I made him that promise," and he went up to her and took her hand in his, and looked earnestly into her eyes--"there were two present listening, though no one knew it, but I alone; Fieka, they were--G.o.d, and my own heart."

Fieka blushed red as a rose, but when he put his arm round her, she gently freed herself from his embrace and said--

"Not here, Heinrich!--Not to-day, Heinrich!--Good heavens, why there is my old father!"

So saying, she left him, and went to meet her father; and Heinrich stood there like a tree in the winter-time when the green leaves have all fallen off, and the birds no longer sing of love and joy in its branches. But when she turned round; came back to him again, cried: "Heinrich, Heinrich," and the tears welled up into her eyes; and then hastily set off again towards her father, leaf after leaf burst forth, and songs of joy and love sounded in the air, and spring arose in his heart, the Spring of Love,--the only Spring which can, through a whole lifetime, survive summer's heat, and autumn's storms and winter's cold;--can survive, if the Spring be real; the life true.

"Why, Fieka," cried old Miller Voss, "where do you come from?" And when Fieka threw herself on his neck, and told him all about it, with the tears standing in her eyes, the old man scolded her, and said that Heinrich could have come alone quite well, and these were affairs with which women should not meddle. But Rathsherr Herse declared that the Miller understood nothing whatever about such matters, and that Fieka's idea about the waggon was so good, he could not have thought of a better one himself; for his patent-leather boots had been made by Bank the shoemaker expressly for the Council-Chamber, and not for four miles of the Mecklenburg roads at this time of year. And when baker Witte heard of the basket of sausages and milk-rolls, he patted himself on the stomach and said that Fieka was his "dear G.o.d-child," and that though he was one of those people who carry a good provision-chest inside them, yet circ.u.mstances alter a case, and in weather like this "the best oven must sometimes have extra fuel."

The French sergeant had now brought the Colonel's orders to the guard, and the company mounted into the waggon, and made themselves as warm and comfortable as they could. My uncle Herse appropriated to himself the wraps intended for my father, because as his colleague he had the next best right to them; and he swore at lean-bodied people in general, and my father in particular. About height, he said, he would say nothing, for that was a thing which no one could give or take away from himself, but every reasonable man could in time obtain the proper amount of breadth.

"Look here, Meister Witte, this is supposed to be a coat for a full and well-grown man!" And so saying, he held up my Father's coat in the air, as a public spectacle.

"Herr Rathsherr," said baker Witte, "put your arms through the sleeves with the coat hind part before, so that the Burmeister's back-piece comes upon your breast; and here is another coat, which I'll hang over your back for you, and so we shall make one good coat out of two little ones; 'necessity is the mother of invention!'"

Well, this was done, and my uncle Herse looked like a fine fat oyster, sent on a long journey; behind and before he had a firm sh.e.l.l, but at the sides it gaped open from time to time. Baker Witte had got a silk cloak that had belonged to his late wife, and he put it on with the rabbit-skin lining outside, because he said the rain would spoil the silk, but it could not hurt the skin, for as far as he knew, rabbits always ran about with the furry side of their skin turned outwards.

The dressing-up of these two went on pretty quickly; but with the Miller it was a long affair, for when he heard that the great-coat with the seven capes which was intended for him, belonged to the Herr Amtshauptmann, he was first of all overwhelmed with respect and made bow after bow to it, as if the old gentleman were standing before him and wished him to enter first; and then he was overcome with feeling at the idea of the Amtshauptmann having thought of him in his trouble, and said he was not worthy of it; and when Fieka had got one sleeve on, the thought struck him that he might be taken for some one of high rank.

"And, neighbour," he turned to Witte, "supposing I were to begin to speak now, and the a.s.s's ears were to show above the seven capes!"

"Yes, neighbour," replied the baker, "you're right there; you can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear; but you _can_ hold your tongue;--or else speak High German. You can, you know."

"Yes, I can--after a fashion," said the Miller, and seated himself on the foremost sack.

They were now all seated except Heinrich.