What the Swallow Sang Part 13

"I do not need your sympathy, do you hear? I have given you no right to pity me, neither you nor any one else. Why do you torture me?"

"I shall not torture you long, Cecilia; I have told you I am going."

"Why don't you go then? Why do you speak to me of such things? To me?

You will drive me mad, and--I won't go mad."

"This is madness, Cecilia," cried Gotthold pa.s.sionately. "If you do not love him--and you do not, you cannot--no divine, and certainly no human law, compels you to remain, to pine, to die in nameless misery. And he loves you no better than you do him."

"Did he tell you so?"

"Is it necessary?"

"On your honor, Gotthold, did he tell you so?"

"No, but--"

"And suppose he did love me, for all that, and--I loved him? How can you dare speak to me as you have spoken? How can you dare give me the lie by your silence, humiliate me so deeply in my own eyes! Is this your boasted friendship?"

Gotthold bent his head and turned away. Gretchen came to meet him.

"Where are you going, Uncle Gotthold?"

He raised the child in his arms, kissed her, put her on the ground, and went on.

"Why is Uncle Gotthold crying, mamma?" asked Gretchen, pulling her mother's dress. "Papa can't cry, can he, mamma?"

Cecilia made no reply; her wide tearless eyes were fixed on the spot where Gotthold had disappeared between the beeches.

"Forever," she murmured, "forever!"

CHAPTER XII.

When Gotthold reached the little wooden gate, which, shaded by a half-decayed linden-tree, afforded egress through the rough hedge on this side of the garden, he paused and glanced cautiously over the sunny fields towards the forest. He could not have endured to meet any one just now, perhaps be obliged to stop and answer a greeting or question. But he saw no one; all were in the great rye-field, where they had been toiling all day; the path to the forest was open.

The sun shone with a fierce burning glow, and the heated air quivered over the wheat, which was already beginning to ripen, and whose stout stalks were unstirred by the faintest breeze; countless cicadas chirped and buzzed noisily on both sides of the narrow path that wound through the fields; a large flock of wild pigeons circled at no very great height in the air, and as they wheeled with lightning-like speed, the moving cloud glittered in the rays of the setting sun against the clear blue sky like a shield of polished steel.

Gotthold saw all this, because he was accustomed to live with nature, and even felt the electricity that pervaded the atmosphere, but only as being perfectly in harmony with the conflict that oppressed his heart.

Shame had long since dried the burning tears grief had forced from his eyes; shame for having, by his want of self-control, produced this scene, in which, after eight long days of torture, he had finally played the undignified part of the third person, only to learn that she still loved this man, and her unhappiness consisted in the knowledge that she was not as much beloved by him as she desired to be. "On your honor, Gotthold, did he tell you so?" In what a despairing tone she had uttered the words! How the dread of hearing a "yes" had disfigured her beautiful face! "Is this your boasted friendship?" Yes, his friendship, with which he had been troublesome to her years before, with which he was troublesome now, only that he could no longer hide himself behind its mask as in those days, only that he no longer had the poor consolation of being able to slip away unnoticed and unperceived, as he had done that night.

He had lain here on the edge of the forest, under the great beech-tree, in the darkness of the night, and plucked up the moss, and cursed himself and the whole world because, by the pale light of the moon, he had seen two happy lovers. Now the sun glared broadly upon his couch of pain, as if it wished to show him how childish his grief had been, and that he should have reserved his despair for this hour. She had been happy! Gotthold tried to laugh, but the sound that came from his tortured breast was a cry, a dull moaning cry like that of a wounded animal. Even so had he wailed when he tottered along this very path through the sultry woods that night, and the trees danced around him in the dim moonlight like mocking spectres. Now they stood in brazen sun-steeped ranks, and seemed to say: What do we care for your self-created anguish, you fool!

And what do I care for your misery! said the sea, which, now as he emerged from the forest upon the bluff, stretched before him in a blackish-blue expanse, as if petrified in its unapproachable majesty.

He had seen it under this aspect once before, one afternoon when he had been wandering along the rocky cliffs of Anacapri, and it had given him the subject for one of his best paintings; but now he only bestowed a pa.s.sing thought upon it, as the memory of the cool forest shade and murmuring fountain by which he sat a short time before, flits through the burning brain of a sun-scorched wanderer on a dusty highway.

Below him in the little inlet, which had been toilsomely dug in the rocky sh.o.r.e, were the boats which belonged to the estate. During the last few days he had often used the smaller one to row to various places along the coast, and had the key of the chain by which it was fastened to the stake in his pocket.

Broader and broader grew the shadow which fell from the sh.o.r.e upon the sea and overtook Gotthold, as with powerful strokes he began to row across the wide bay, at whose extreme southern point stood the beach-house, now brightly illumined by the sunlight. But the shadow did not proceed from the sh.o.r.e, but a black wall of clouds which, of perfectly uniform breadth, rose slowly in the heavens, and whose sharp upper edge glowed and sparkled with a gloomy fire. It was a heavy thunderstorm from the land. Well, let it come! Gotthold longed to escape from the sultry atmosphere that brooded over his soul, and breathe freely once more in the strife of the elements. A fiery shaft quivered across the black wall of clouds, then a second, a third; and with marvellous speed the dark curtain rose higher and higher, extinguishing every gleam of light in sky and sh.o.r.e, and upon the sea, over which the wind now whistled in gusts, furrowing its mirror-like surface and soon lashing it into foaming surges.

Waves and wind turned Gotthold's little boat aside from its course and drove it, as if in sport, towards the sea, though now, clearly perceiving his danger, he tried to guide it to the sh.o.r.e. After a few strokes he realized that his only hope of deliverance was that the storm might pa.s.s as quickly as it had come.

But it seemed as if the fiends of darkness had heard his sacrilegious words and were now determined to have their victim. The black shadow spread farther and farther over the raging sea; only a few white sails still gleamed in the distant horizon, and now they also disappeared in the darkness; the waves dashed still higher, and the boat receded still faster from the sh.o.r.e, where already, even to Gotthold's keen eye, the white bluff and the dark forest that crowned it blended together in one gray line. There was no longer any doubt that the skiff would be driven into the open sea, unless, which might happen at any moment, some wave upset it; nay, it seemed a miracle that this had not already occurred.

Gotthold calmly did what he could to save himself; he carefully watched the rise and fall of every approaching wave and kept the boat's head to the wind, now with the right oar, now with the left, and anon making a powerful stroke with both. If it upset, all depended upon whether it sank immediately or floated on the surface. In the latter case his situation was not utterly desperate; he might perhaps be able to cling to it, and, if the wind veered, either be carried back to land, or rescued by some pa.s.sing ship; but if the boat sank, he was lost according to all human calculation. He could not put down the oars a moment to divest himself of his clothing, and not even so good a swimmer as himself could hope, fully clad, to swim for many hours in such a sea, especially as he already began to feel that his strength, carefully as he had husbanded it, was gradually beginning to fail.

Gradually at first, and then faster and faster. Hitherto he had executed the most complicated movements of the oars with perfect ease, but now they grew heavier and heavier in the stiffened hands, the benumbed arms. His breast grew more and more oppressed, his heart beat more and more painfully, his breathing changed to gasping, his throat seemed choked, his temples throbbed; come what would, he must rest a moment, take in the oars, and let the boat drift.

The little skiff instantly began to ship water; Gotthold had expected it. "It can't last much longer now," he said to himself, "and what does it matter? If you could live for her, it would be worth the trouble; but now--to whom do you die except yourself? Death cannot be so very painful. True, she will think: 'He tried to lose his life, and he might have spared me that.' It is very ungallant in me to drift ash.o.r.e a disfigured corpse, very ungallant and very stupid; but it is all of a piece, and surely a man cannot pay for a folly more dearly than with his life."

Thoughts crowded still more confusedly upon his bewildered brain as, utterly exhausted, he sat bending forward, staring at the oars, which he still clenched mechanically in his stiffened fingers, and the reeling edge of the boat, which was now sharply relieved against the grayish-black sky, and then buried a foot deep under the foaming crest of a breaking wave. Then he saw all this only as a background, from which her face appeared in perfect distinctness, no longer with the mouth quivering with pain and the cold Medusa eyes, but transfigured by a merry roguish smile, as it had always arisen before his memory from the precious days of youth, and as he had seen it lately for one moment.

Suddenly an infinite sorrow seized upon him that he must give up life without having lived, without being loved by her; the life which, if he was only permitted to go on loving her, was an inexpressible happiness; the life which did not belong to him, which he owed to her, and for which, for her sake, he would struggle till his latest breath.

The stiffened fingers again closed firmly around the handles of the oars; the benumbed arms moved and parried with powerful strokes the onset of the rushing waves; the wearied eyes gazed once more over the foaming waters for some hope of deliverance, and a joyful shout escaped his laboring breast when, as if summoned by some spell, a sail emerged from the watery mist with which the air was filled. The next moment it came shooting forward, a large vessel, with her larboard side so low in the water, that Gotthold saw the whole keel from bow to stern, and above the high bulwark nothing was visible except the head of the steersman, whose snow-white hair fluttered in the wind, and the upper part of the body of a young man on the bowsprit, who held a coil of rope in his hand. And now, like a serpent, the line fell directly across his boat. He seized it and wound it around him. Then came a powerful jerk; his boat, filled almost to the water's edge, reeled to and fro, and sank under his feet; but his hands were already clinging to the side of the larger vessel; two strong arms seized him under the shoulders, and the next moment he fell at the feet of Cousin Boslaf, who held out his left hand to him, while with the right he turned his helm by a powerful effort, to save his own boat from being swamped.

CHAPTER XIII.

The sea was still heaving after the thunder-storm of the afternoon, but the sun had cast a trembling light over the dark waves before it set.

The stars now gradually appeared in the blackish-blue vault of the heavens; Gotthold raised his eyes to them, and then gazed into the quiet countenance of the old man, by whose side he was seated upon a bench, sheltered by the thick walls of the beach-house. Through the window beside them gleamed the light of the lamp, which, ever since Cousin Boslaf had lived in the beach-house, had burned there night after night, and would now continue to burn on, even after his eyes were closed in death. It was for this object that he had taken the journey to Sundin--the first since he returned from Sweden, sixty-five years ago, and probably the last he would ever make in his life. It had cost him an effort to give up his hermit habits for days, and mingle with mankind once more. But it must be done; he dared not ask whether the road would be hard or easy for him. So he had sailed away, accompanied by young Carl Peters, the son of his old friend, and for six long days presented himself at the Herr Prasident's every morning, and was always sent away because the Herr Prasident was too busy to see him, as the valet said, who finally roughly forbade him to come again, just at the moment the former left his study, and, seeing the old man, asked him kindly who he was, and what he wanted. Then Cousin Boslaf told the friendly gentleman that his name was Bogislaf Wenhof, and he had been very intimate with Malte von Krissowitz, whose portrait was hanging on the wall, and who, if he was not mistaken, was the Prasident's great-grandfather, and then told him his desire. Malte von Krissowitz was one of the six young men who had officiated as judges during the contest between Bogislaf and Adolf Wenhof; the Prasident, when a very young man, had heard the famous story from his father, who had it from his grandfather, to whom his great-grandfather had related it; it seemed to him like a fairy tale that the hero of that story should be still alive, and the very old man who was sitting on the sofa beside him. He called his wife and daughter, introduced them to the old man, and insisted that he should stay to dinner. Everybody was most kind and friendly, and--what was most important--the Prasident, when he bade him farewell, gave him his word of honor that the good cause for which he pleaded should henceforth be his own.

"Within a few days," said Cousin Boslaf, "a beacon will be erected here before the house, on a high foundation of stone, whose light can be seen a mile farther than that of my lamp. Carl Peters is appointed keeper, and will live with me in the beach-house, which for the present will serve as a watch-house, and after my death is to become the property of the government. So this great care is removed from my mind.

I need say no longer, when I extinguish the lamp at daybreak: Will you be able to light it again this evening?"

The old man was silent; the Swedish banner flapped still more loudly upon the roof of the beach-house; the waves broke more heavily upon the rocky strand. Gotthold's eyes wandered with deep reverence over the figure at his side, the tall form of the silver-haired old man of ninety, whose heart still beat so warmly in his breast for all mankind--for the poor sailors whom he did not know, and who did not know him, of whom he knew nothing except that they were sailing yonder in the night, invisible even to his keen eyes, and so long as they saw the light kept away from the dangerous coast, as their fathers and grandfathers had taught them to do. The old man who lived only for others, whose whole existence was nothing but love for others, from whom he neither asked nor expected love or grat.i.tude, had to-day risked his own life to save him, who scarcely desired to be saved, to whom life seemed valueless because he loved and was not beloved in return.

What would the old man say to that? Would he, in the boundlessness of his unselfish love, even be able to understand such a selfish, egotistical pa.s.sion?

"That was my one anxiety," Cousin Boslaf began again; "the government has relieved me of it; I have one other which no one can remove."

"Does it concern her--Cecilia?" asked Gotthold with a beating heart.

"Yes," said the old man, "it does concern her, Ulrica's great-grandchild, who looks so like her ancestress, but is probably even more unhappy. She should never have been allowed to marry the man, if I had had my way; but they threw my advice to the winds; they have always done so."

A strange, terrible change had come over the old man. His tall form was bent as if all strength had left it; his deep voice, so firm a few moments before, quivered and trembled, when after a short pause, which Gotthold did not venture to interrupt, he continued:

"They have always done so. And so they have lost their fields, one after another, and their forests, one after another, and become tenants where they were once masters, and gone to ruin, one after another. I have let it pa.s.s, been forced to let it pa.s.s, and always thought: Now matters can't be worse--but the worst was still in store for me. They were all reckless and frivolous; but none were wicked, not one, and after all they were men who, if need be, could live honestly by the labor of their hands. Now, now, even the old name will die out with me; only one poor helpless woman is left, who has exchanged her name for that of a man who is a good-for-nothing fellow like his forefathers; the worthless wretch will drag her down to shame with him--her shame and mine!"

The old man's last words were scarcely audible; for he had buried his wrinkled face in his knotty hands. Gotthold laid his hand on his knee.

"How can you talk so, Cousin Boslaf!" said he, "how can you accuse yourself of a misfortune you have been unable to prevent; you, who have always been the good genius of the house!"

"The good genius of the house--great G.o.d!"