The Chief Justice Part 13

"It will not strike others, but will she not herself guess the truth?"

"Why, she shall know all! I will tell her this very day. She is entirely devoted to me, brave and sterling, the best of women. Besides I have no choice. Intercourse with a good, sensible woman is of the most urgent necessity to my poor dear. But I have not resolved on this step simply for that reason. I shall need this faithful soul later on as well."

"I understand--after the term of imprisonment is at an end."

Sendlingen stood still and looked at his friend; it was the old look full of wretchedness and despair. "Yes!" he said unsteadily.

"Certainly, I had hardly thought of that. I do not indulge any extravagant hopes: I am prepared for anything, even for the worst. And just in this event Brigitta's help would be more than ever indispensable to me."

"If the worst were to happen?" asked Bergen "How am I to understand that?"

Sendlingen made no reply. Not until Berger repeated the question did he say, slowly and feebly: "Such things should not be talked about, not with anyone, not even with a best friend, not even with one's self.

Such a thing is not even dwelt upon in thought; it is done when it has to be done."

His look was fixed as he spoke, like a man gazing into a far distance or down into a deep abyss. Then his face became calm and resolved again. "One thing more," he said. "You have finished drawing up the appeal? May I read it? Forgive me, of course I have every confidence in you. But see! so much depends upon it for me, perhaps something might occur to me that would be of importance!"

"What need of asking?" interrupted Berger. "It would be doing me a service. We will go through the doc.u.ment together this very day."

When he called on his friend in the evening with this object, Fraulein Brigitta came out to see him. The old lady's eyes were red with crying, but her face was, as it were, lit up with a strong and n.o.ble emotion.

"I have already visited her," she whispered to Berger. "Oh believe me, she is an angel, a thousand times purer than are many who plume themselves or their virtue. I bade her be of good cheer, and then I told her much about his Lordship--who knows better how, who knows him better? She listened to me peacefully, crying quietly all the time and I had to cry too--. But all will come right; I am quite sure of it. If the G.o.d above us were to let these two creatures perish, _these_ two----"

Her voice broke with deep emotion. Berger silently pressed her hand and entered the study.

He found his friend calm and collected. Sendlingen no longer complained; no word, no look, betrayed the burden that oppressed his soul. He dispatched his business with Berger conscientiously and thoroughly, and as dispa.s.sionately as if it were a Law examination paper. More than that--when he came to a place where Berger, in the exaltation of the moment, had chosen too strong an expression, he always stopped him: "That won't do: we must find calmer and more temperate words!" And usually it was he too who found these calmer and more temperate words.

Down to the last word he maintained this clearness, this almost unnatural calm. Not until Berger had folded his paper and was putting it in his pocket did the consciousness of his misery seem to return.

Involuntarily he stretched forth his hand towards the paper.

"You want to refer to something again?" asked Berger.

"No!" His hand dropped listlessly. "Besides it is all labour in vain.

My lot is cast."

"Your lot?" cried Berger. "However much you may be bound up with the fate of your child, you must not say that!"

"_My_ lot, _only_ my lot!"

Berger observed the same peculiar look and tone he had before noticed when Sendlingen said that such things should not be spoken of even to one's self.... But this time Berger wanted to force him to an explanation. "You talk in riddles," he began; but he got no further, for, with a decision that made any further questions impossible, Sendlingen interrupted him:

"May I be spared the hour when you learn to know this riddle! Even you can have no better wish than this for me! Why vainly sound the lowest depths? Good night, George, and thanks a thousand, thousand times!"

CHAPTER IX.

Six weeks had elapsed since the dispatch of the appeal: Christmas was at the door. The days had come and gone quickly without bringing any fresh storm, any fresh danger, but certainly without dispelling even one of the clouds that hung threateningly over the heads of these two much-to-be-commiserated beings.

Berger was with Sendlingen daily, and daily his questioning look received the same answer; a mute shake of the head--the decision had not yet arrived. The Supreme Court had had the papers connected with the trial brought under its notice; beyond the announcement of this self-evident fact, not a line had come from Vienna. This silence was certainly no good sign, but it did not necessarily follow that it was a bad one. To be sure the lawyer examining the case, unless, from the first, he attributed no importance whatever to Berger's statements, should have demanded more detailed information from the Court at Bolosch, and all the more because Baron Dernegg's dissentient vote was recorded in the papers. Still, perhaps this silence was simply to be explained by the fact that he had not had an opportunity of going into the case.

Berger held fast to this consoling explanation, or at least pretended to do so, when the subject came up in conversation, which was seldom enough; he did not like to begin it, and Sendlingen equally avoided it.

It almost seemed to Berger as if his unhappy friend welcomed the delay in the decision, as if he gladly dragged on in a torture of uncertainty from day to day--anything so as not to look the dread horror in the face. And indeed Sendlingen every morning sighed with relief, when the moment of horrid suspense had gone by, when he had looked through the Vienna mail and found nothing. But this did not arise from the motive which Berger supposed, but from a better feeling. Sendlingen rejoiced in every hour of respite that gave his poor child more time to gather strength of soul and body.

The shattered health of Victorine mended visibly, day by day. The deathly pallor disappeared, her weakness lessened, the look of her eyes was clearer and steadier. The doctor observed it with glad astonishment and no little pride; he ascribed the improvement to his remedies, to the better nourishment and care which on his representations had been allotted her. When he boasted of it to his friend, Father Rohn, the good priest met him with as bantering a smile as his kind heart would allow; he knew better. If this poor child was blossoming again, the merit was entirely his. Had not the doctor himself said that she could only be saved by a change in her frame of mind? And had not this change really set in even more visibly than her physical improvement?

A new spirit had entered into Victorine. She no longer sat gazing in melancholy brooding, she no longer yearned for death, and when the priest sought to nourish in her the hope of pardon--in the sincerest conviction, for he looked upon the confirmation of the death-sentence as an impossibility--she nodded to him, touched and grateful. She seemed, now, to understand him when he told her that the repentance of a sinner and his after life of good works, were more pleasing to the good G.o.d above than his death. And when he once more led the conversation to the man who, in spite of everything, was her father and perhaps at this moment was suffering the bitterest anguish on her account, when he begged her not to harden her heart against the unknown, he had the happiness of hearing her say with fervour in her looks and voice: "I have forgiven him from the bottom of my heart. The thought of him has completely restored me! Perhaps G.o.d will grant me to be a good daughter to him some day!" So the words of comfort and the exhortations of the good priest had really not been in vain.

The true state of the case n.o.body even suspected; the secret was stringently kept. No doubt it struck many people and gave occasion to a variety of gossip, that Fraulein Brigitta visited the condemned prisoner almost daily, and the Chief Justice almost weekly, but a sufficient explanation was sought and found. Good-natured and inoffensive people thought that Victorine Lippert was a creature so much to be pitied, that these two n.o.ble characters were only following their natural instincts in according her a special pity; the malevolent adopted the crafty Hobinger's view, and talked of "favouritism"; the aristocratic betrayer and his mother the Countess, they said, had after all an uneasy conscience as to whether they had not behaved too harshly to the poor creature, and the representations they had made to their fellow-aristocrat, Baron von Sendlingen, had not been in vain.

Certainly this report could only be maintained in uninitiated circles; anyone who was intimately acquainted with the aristocratic society of the province knew well enough, that the Countess Riesner-Graskowitz was a.s.suredly the last person in the world to experience a single movement of pity for the condemned girl.

Be that as it might, Sendlingen behaved in this case as he had all his life behaved in any professional matter: humanely and kindly, but strictly according to the law and without over-stepping his duty by a hair's breadth. The better attention, the separate cell in the Infirmary, would certainly have been allotted to any one else about whom the doctor had made the same representations. When Father Rohn, moved by his sense of compa.s.sion, sought to obtain some insignificant favour that went beyond these lines--it had reference to some absolutely trifling regulation of the house--the Governor of the gaol was ready to grant it, but the Chief Justice rigidly set his face against the demand.

When Berger heard of this trivial incident, a heavy burden which he had been silently carrying for weeks, without daring to seek for certainty in a conversation on the subject, was rolled from his heart. He had put an interpretation on the mysterious words that Sendlingen had uttered the day after the trial, which had filled him with the profoundest sorrow,--more than that with terror. Now he saw his mistake: a man who so strictly obeyed his conscience in small matters where there was no fear of discovery, would a.s.suredly in any greater conflict between inclination and duty, hold fast unrelentingly to justice and honour.

He was soon to be strengthened in this view.

It was three days before Christmas-day when he once more entered his friend's chambers. He found him buried in the perusal of letters which, however, he now pushed from him.

"The mail from Vienna is not in yet," he said, "the train must have got blocked in the snow. But I have letters from Pfalicz. The Chief Justice of the Higher Court there, to whose position I am to succeed, asks whether it would not be possible for me to release him soon after the New Year, instead of at the end of February, as the Minister of Justice arranged. He is unwell, and ought to go South as soon as possible."

"Great Heavens!" cried Berger. "Why, we have forgotten all about that."

And indeed those stormy days and the succeeding weeks of silent, anxious suffering had hardly allowed him to think of Sendlingen's impending promotion and departure.

"I have not," replied Sendlingen, gloomily. "The thought that I had to go, has often enough weighed me down more heavily than all my other burdens. How gladly I would stay here now, even if they degraded me to--to the post of Governor of the prison! But I have now no option. I have definitely accepted the position at Pfalicz and I must enter upon it."

"And do you really think of departing at the New Year?"

"No, that would be beyond my duty. I should be glad to oblige the invalid, but as you know, I cannot. I shall stay till the end of February; the decision must have come by that time."

He again bent over a doc.u.ment that lay before him. Berger too, was silent, he went to the window and stared out into the grey dusk; it seemed as if the snow-storm would never cease.

There was a knock at the door; a clerk of the Court of Record entered.

"From the Supreme Court," he announced, laying a packet with a large seal on the table. "It has just arrived. Personally addressed to your lordship."

The clerk departed; Berger approached the table. When he saw how excited Sendlingen was, how long he remained gazing at the letter, he shook his head. "That cannot be the decision," he said. "It would not be addressed to you. It is some indifferent matter, a question of discipline, a pension."

Sendlingen nodded and broke the seal. But at the first glance a deathly pallor overspread his face, and the paper in his hands trembled so violently that he had to lay it on the table in order to read it to the end. "Read for yourself," he then muttered.

Berger glanced through the paper; he too felt his heart beat impetuously as he did so. It was certainly not the decision, only a brief charge, but its contents were almost equivalent to it.

The lawyers examining the appeal had, as Berger hoped, been struck by Baron Dernegg's dissentient vote and the motives for this. Dernegg was not of the opinion of his brother judges that this was a case of premeditated murder, maliciously planned months beforehand, but a deed done suddenly, in a paroxysm of despair, nay, most probably in a moment when the girl was not accountable for her actions. Against this more clement view, there certainly were the depositions of the Countess, and Victorine's attempts to conceal her condition. But on the other hand, her only _confidante_, the servant-girl, had deposed at the preliminary inquiry that Victorine had only made these attempts by her advice and with her help, and, moreover, with the sole object of staying in the house until the young Count should come to her aid. This testimony, however, she had withdrawn at the trial. Berger had chiefly based his appeal to nullify the trial, on the fact that the witness, in spite of this contradiction, had been put on her oath, and to the examining lawyer, also, this seemed a point of decisive importance. The Chief Justice was, therefore, commissioned to completely elucidate it by a fresh examination of the witness. Probably the charge had been directed to him personally because, as it stated, neither Herr von Werner nor any of the other judges who had been in favour of putting her on oath, could very well be entrusted with the inquiry. But if Sendlingen were actually too busy with other matters to conduct the examination, he might hand it over to the third Judge, Herr von Hoche.

"What will you do?" asked Berger. "The matter is of the gravest importance. That the girl gave false evidence at the trial, that this was her return for being taken back into the Countess' service, we know for a certainty. The only question is whether we can convict her of it.

An energetic Judge could without doubt do so, but will old Hoche, now over seventy, succeed? He is a good man, but his years weigh heavily upon him, he is dragging himself through his duties till the date of his retirement--four weeks hence--I fancy as best he can. And therefore once again--what will you do, Victor?"

"I don't know," he murmured. "Leave me alone. I must think it out by myself. Forgive me! my conscience alone can decide in such a matter.

Good-bye till this evening, George."