The Alpine Fay Part 42

"You have no hope?" the latter asked, in an undertone.

"No, nothing can avail here. We must try to get him home; he may reach the house alive if he is carried with extreme caution. Fraulein von Thurgau, will you kindly go first and prepare his daughter, that the shock may not be too great? We must not conceal from her that her father is dying; he cannot possibly live until to-morrow."

Then he gave the necessary directions. A litter was hastily constructed, and the wounded man was laid upon it with infinite care.

Stout arms were ready to aid, and the sad procession slowly took its way towards the villa. Erna preceded it, and Reinsfeld, promising to follow immediately, turned his attention to the other wounded men who required his skill, although none of them were mortally injured.

"Waltenberg too stayed behind. He paused, hesitating and seeming engaged in an inward struggle, but when he saw the engineer-in-chief walk towards the Wolkenstein chasm he followed, and overtook him.

"Herr Elmhorst!"

Wolfgang turned; his face was unnaturally calm, and there was a hard ring in his voice as he said, "You come to remind me of my promise? I am at your service at any hour; my duties are at an end."

Ernst had entertained no such intention; he made a gesture of dissent: "I think neither of us is in the mood to pursue our quarrel at present.

I am sure that you, at least, are not fit for it."

Elmhorst pa.s.sed his hand across his brow; now when the terrible tension of his nerves had relaxed he first perceived how utterly exhausted he was.

"You are probably right," he said, with the same rigid, unnatural look.

"It comes from overwork. I have not slept for three nights; but a couple of hours' rest will restore me entirely, and, as I said, I am at your service."

Ernst silently gazed into the face of the man who had just lost his all; this forced calm did not mislead him. A reply was upon his lips, but he suppressed it, and his glance wandered to the spot where he had been thrown down in his flight. Just there one of the columns had fallen, and the iron part of it was buried deep in the earth. There he would have lain crushed and mangled but for the hand which had rescued him from destruction; perhaps he was not as unconscious as he seemed of whose the hand was.

"I must go and see how the president is," he said, hurriedly. "Dr.

Reinsfeld has promised to stay with us to-night, and we will send you word of what happens."

"Thanks," said Wolfgang, seeming both to hear and to speak merely mechanically: his thoughts were elsewhere; and when Waltenberg turned away, he slowly walked on to the place where the Wolkenstein bridge had stood.

The night that ensued was a terrible one for the family and household at the villa. Its master lay struggling with death, which seemed slow to come in the midst of such agony. Incapable of motion or of speech, but entirely conscious, he knew that the son of the former friend whom he had deceived and betrayed, condemning him to a life of poverty and hardship, while he himself enjoyed wealth and distinction as the fruits of his treachery, was unwearied in his efforts to minister to him, to soothe the death-bed from which he could not dismiss the dark messenger. Nothing could be more ready and unselfish than the aid afforded by Benno, and this very forgetfulness of self awakened the dying man's most pungent remorse. Face to face with death falsehood and deceit vanished, truth alone showed its inexorable countenance, and the effect was annihilating. The agonized struggle lasted, it is true, but for a single night, but in that time were compressed the torture of a lifetime and the penance of a lifetime.

When day at last dawned in mist and clouds, struggle and agony were at an end, and it was Benno Reinsfeld's hand that closed the dying man's eyes. Then he gently raised from her knees Alice, who was sobbing beside her father's body, and led her away. He spoke no word of love or hope to her,--it would have seemed like desecration to him in such a moment,--but the way in which he put his arm around her and supported her showed plainly that he now claimed his right, and that nothing could part them more. He never could have been a son to the man who had so wronged his father, but that would now be spared him if Alice should become his wife; the wealth also which had been the fruit of treachery had mainly vanished. All barriers between the lovers had fallen.

Erna also, when all was over, retired to her room. Alice did not need her: she had a better comforter beside her.

The girl sat pale and worn at the window, looking out into the gray, misty morning. Alien as her uncle had seemed to her, harshly as she had often judged him, the suffering of his last hours had obliterated every thought of him in her mind save that it was her mother's brother who lay dying.

Her thoughts now, however, were not with the dead, but with the living, with him who was perhaps standing in the dim dawn beside the ruins of his work. She knew what it had been to him, and felt the blow with him.

Erna would have given her life to be able to stand beside him now with words of consolation and encouragement, and instead she must know him alone in his despair. She paid no heed to Griff, who had crept up to her and laid his head in her lap with sorrowful sympathy in his brown eyes; she gazed out fixedly into the rolling mist.

The door opened softly; Waltenberg entered and slowly approached his betrothed, who, sunk in a revery, did not perceive him until he stood beside her and uttered her name.

When Waltenberg thus addressed her she started with an involuntary expression of terror and dislike, which did not escape him; his smile was bitterly sad.

"Are you so afraid of me? You must endure the intrusion, however, for I have something to say to you."

"Now? at this moment, when death has just crossed our threshold?"

"Precisely now; if I wait I may--lose courage to speak."

The words sounded so strange that Erna looked up, surprised. Her eyes encountered his, but did not find there the gleam which had so terrified her of late. In his dark look there glowed somewhat which was neither all love nor all hatred,--perhaps a combination of both,--she could not tell.

"Go on, then," she said, wearily. "I will listen."

He paused and looked fixedly at her, and at last said, with slow emphasis, "I come to bid you farewell."

"You are going? Now, before my uncle has been laid to rest?"

"Yes,--and never to return! You mistake me, Erna. This is no farewell for days or weeks; it means that we are parting forever."

"Parting?" The girl looked at him incredulously, only half comprehending his words; they came upon her too suddenly for her to grasp all their meaning.

"You evidently have no belief in my magnanimity," Ernst said, harshly.

"It is true that yesterday I could more easily have annihilated you both, you and your Wolfgang, than have given you back your troth. That is over. He has taught me how to subdue an enemy. Do you think I do not know whose hand it was that s.n.a.t.c.hed me from a terrible death yesterday? Without its aid I should have been crushed at the entrance of the bridge. You saw it,--I know that,--and will only the more worship your hero, whom you watched yesterday with an enthusiasm that transfigured you. This deed of his exalts him to an ideal hero in your eyes. What am I in them?"

"Yes, I saw it," Erna said, looking down, "but I did not think you recognized him, stunned as you were, and in the general confusion."

"A mortal enemy is always recognized, even while he is saving one's life. I tried to thank him yesterday, just after the catastrophe, but I could not bring my lips to frame words of grat.i.tude to that man; they would have choked me. Let him hear them from you. Tell him that I revoke my challenge, and that I release him from his promise, as I release you from yours. Now we are quits,--more than quits: I give him what is tenfold dearer to me than the life he saved for me."

Erna had grown very pale in the certainty of what she had long suspected: "You challenged him? That was the meaning of your interview?"

"Do you suppose that I could have borne to know him happy in your arms?" Waltenberg asked. "But for what happened yesterday I would have shot him down like a dog; and he promised to be at my service as soon as the Wolkenstein bridge was completed. Fate has released him from his promise."

The bitterness in his tone no longer affected Erna; she heard only the anguish in his voice, felt only what the renunciation was costing his pa.s.sionate nature. In gentle entreaty she laid her hand upon his arm: "Ernst, trust me, I know the full extent of the sacrifice you are making for me. You have loved me intensely----"

"Yes, and I was fool enough to fancy that pa.s.sion such as mine _must_ force you to love in return. I thought that if I carried you to another quarter of the globe, and put an ocean between you and Wolfgang Elmhorst, you would learn to forget, and to turn to the husband beside you. I have learned my error. I never could have torn that love from your heart; if I had killed him you would have loved him dead. Now, in his misery, your whole soul flies out to him. Go to him. I am no longer in your way. You are free!"

"Let us go together," Erna entreated, earnestly. "Offer him your hand in amity; you can, for you are now the generous one, the benefactor. It is you whom we have to thank."

He thrust aside her hand: "No, I never will meet that man again. If I should see him I could not answer for myself, all the fiends within me would break loose once more. You cannot dream what it has cost me to conjure them down; let them rest."

Erna did not venture to repeat her request; she comprehended that so pa.s.sionate a nature might renounce, but could not forgive. She bowed her head in mute acquiescence.

"Farewell!" said Ernst, still in the harsh, hostile tone which had characterized him throughout the interview. "Forget me. It will be easy at his side."

She looked up to him; her eyes filled with tears: "I never shall forget you, Ernst, never! But I shall always remember sadly that you left me in bitterness and hatred."

"In hatred?" he exclaimed, with an outburst of pa.s.sion, and suddenly Erna felt herself clasped in his arms, pressed to his heart, while his kisses were rained upon her hair, her brow, with the same wild intensity of tenderness which she had so dreaded and which had always failed to arouse in her the least return of his affection. This time there was in his caress something of the madness of despair. He tore himself away and was gone. The short, stormy dream of the love of his life was over forever!

Meanwhile, the day had fairly appeared. The rain had ceased in the night, and the wind was not so violent,--the wild uproar of nature had begun to subside.

The work of the previous day still went on, however, although, since the Wolkenstein bridge was gone, there was little more to save. This last blow had been the heaviest, although the entire railway had been incalculably injured; very few of the numerous bridges and structures were not in need of repairs, and, in view of the general destruction, the completion of the undertaking seemed impossible. Its author lay dead in his house, and the intended transfer of the railway to the company was of course impossible. How and when, if ever, others would come forward to carry out his schemes time alone could show.

Such were probably the thoughts occurring to the mind of the man standing alone on the brink of the Wolkenstein chasm and gazing down at the ruin below him. The autumn morning was very cold; in the valleys and depths wreaths of gray mist were curling, long trains of clouds hovered about the mountains, and a gloomy sky looked down upon the wet, sodden earth, which bore melancholy traces of the turmoil of the previous day. Uprooted and broken trees, fragments of rock, mud, and heaps of stones were everywhere to be seen, and in many a spot the traces could be perceived of the gallant struggle of man in his fight with the elements. The roar of the cataract was not so threatening as it had been, but it still filled the air as the water dashed from the height, and the wind had not yet left the dripping storm-tossed forests in peace.

In the Wolkenstein chasm alone there was a silence as of the grave. A gigantic glacier seemed to rest in its depths, its rigid whiteness broken by a chaotic ma.s.s of rock and earth. The avalanche which had begun on the crest of the Wolkenstein must have increased fearfully on its way, for it had prostrated the entire enclosed forest, hitherto regarded as a sure protection; pines a century old had been snapped like straws and had dragged with them into the abyss a portion of the mountain-side. And then the entire ma.s.s of ice and snow, of rocks and trunks of trees, its force augmented tenfold by the velocity of its fall, had hurled itself against the bridge and crushed it. No human structure could withstand such an onslaught.

It was some consolation to know this, but Wolfgang Elmhorst seemed to find no comfort in such reflections. He gazed dully down into the icy grave where all his schemes and hopes were lying, perhaps never to rise again. In the beginning, when the railway had first been planned, there had been objections made to the Wolkenstein bridge because of the cost of its erection. It had been proposed to avoid the chasm and to carry the line of railway by another less expensive but roundabout road.

Nordheim, however, who was attracted by the boldness of the scheme, contrived to overbear all opposition and to have his own way. In future there could be no thought, since economy would be especially necessary, of rebuilding the bridge, which, moreover, must be condemned as impossible, since it had fallen a prey to the elements just when it was about to astonish and delight all who beheld it, and to bring reputation and fame to its deviser.