WHAT THE 'EXTRA BLATT' TOLD.
A few days after the Thuringians and others advanced from the
Moselle, the quiet family in the old Schloss of Frankenburg assembled
as usual at breakfast. The old butler had cut and aired the morning
papers--the _Staats Anzeiger_, the _Cologne Gazette_, the _Extra
Blatt_, and so forth, and laid them beside the Count. The two young
ladies were there in most becoming morning toilets, and there, too,
was the Herr Baron Grünthal. The hour was an unusual one for his
Excellency to be at Frankenburg, but he had been dining there the
evening before; a storm had come on, and, to the infinite annoyance
of Ernestine, he had accepted the Count's invitation to remain all
night.
With the single exception of absurd family pride and the consequent
tyranny over Ernestine, the general tenor of the Count's household
presented a fair example of German domestic life.
'The serious character of a people,' says the translator of
Schiller's poem 'The Glocke,' 'who begin the common business of
everyday life with prayer, who attach importance as well to the
manner of performing an action as to the action itself, the custom of
travelling, either in their own or in foreign countries, in the
interval between the completion of their education and their
settlement in life, the domestic manners, where great attention is
paid to the minutiæ of domestic economy,' are all, he maintains,
peculiar to the German people.
As southerns, the family of Frankenburg were more gay and lively in
manner than Germans usually are, for being nearer the Rhine they had
been for generations insensibly under French influences; yet they
were all German, to the heart's core.
Ernestine was looking crushed and pale. The self-conscious air that
a really beautiful girl usually possesses had nearly left her now;
while Herminia, happy in her love, and having but one anxiety--the
safety of Heinrich--looked bright and radiant as ever.
In a letter from Heinrich to her, Ernestine had been told the story
of the strangely coincident dreams; and to a romantic and
enthusiastic girl like her--one deeply imbued, too, with German
mysticism--the idea that she had thus communed and met, and might
again commune with and meet her lover in the spirit, was a source of
the purest joy. Every night she laid her head on the pillow in the
hope that her soul might fly to him; but as yet no more such visions
had come.
And this brave-hearted and handsome young Englishman--Carl, her own
Carl--he was risking wounds and death, enduring toil and suffering
for the Kaiser, for Germany, and for _her_; for well she knew that
Charlie Pierrepont identified her image with the Fatherland. Then
how cruel it was of the Countess to view him so, and to treat him as
she did; and again and again she asked in her heart--
'Is it a crime to love?'
But rank was the _joss_, the idol that was worshipped in Frankenburg.
However, she had Charlie's ring on her finger, and a curly lock of
his hair in a gold locket, reposing in the cleft of her white bosom,
all unknown to the Herr Baron, and to all, save Herminia, who could
now see the blue ribbon at which it hung encircling her slender neck;
and in her bosom, too, she had his last letter, a mere scrap, but
full of love and truth and great tenderness; and yet he wrote of pay
and poverty. Ob, how hard it was when youth alone should be money,
beauty, wealth, and everything.
'Ernestine, meine liebe,' the Countess would say from time to time,
'attend to the Herr Baron--assist him with your own pretty hands.
Dear girl! she is always so bright when you are here, Grünthal. She
must be doubly happy to see you this morning, after only leaving you
last night.'
But poor Ernestine looked anything but happy or bright either, and
the Baron, though a lover, was middle-aged; hence his raptures did
not spoil his appetite, and he made genuine German breakfast,
demolishing steaks, potatoes, rolls, eggs, and coffee, in the most
unromantic way in the world.
His hair was turning iron-grey, and on his pericranium was a bald
spot the size of a Prussian dollar. He limped a little in his
gait--there was no concealing that devilish gout--yet he looked
surprisingly young. He was attired in an elegant morning-coat with
pale-coloured trousers, a scarlet flower as well as a red ribbon at
his button-hole. His hair was brushed up into a stiff bristly
pyramid in front; but his face looked flabby now, and his coarse
moustache, like that of a walrus, overhung his mouth.
Though suspicious, as we have said elsewhere, concerning that visit
to the Dom Kirche, and the mistake about the colour of the marble of
Charlemagne's throne, he had not the slightest idea that he had a
rival so formidable as Charlie Pierrepont, or that he, Herr Baron
Grünthal, Oberdirector of the Consistory Court, could have any rival
at all!
Yet there was one thing he could not help remarking--that of all the
many handsome presents he had sent Ernestine, from Berlin and
elsewhere, not one was ever to be seen on her slender wrists, her
fairy-like hand, or round her delicate throat.
This surely boded ill for him as a lover! He found himself, however,
highly acceptable to her family, and the marriage once over, all that
was necessary would be sure to come after. Whenever he was present
or expected, the Countess always seemed, somehow, unusually large and
rustling, and on this morning was especially so, in white lace over
back moiré, with her high _toupée_--it was quite an evening costume
she had donned.
The meal was taken somewhat silently, for at times:
'When great events were on the gale,
And each hour brought a varying tale;'
and when newspaper correspondents were often fallacious and fallible,
the gazettes were unfolded with fear and trembling, and the arrival
of a telegram was quite sufficient to terrify the quiet household at
Frankenburg.
The Count and Baron, with spectacles on nose, had skimmed over the
papers, which contained nothing to alarm them in the way of friends'
names among the lists of killed and wounded in the action of the 14th
of August; but the Baron read aloud, with peculiar unction, some of
those barbarous reports and stories with which the French and German
papers then teemed of cruelties perpetrated on both sides. No one
knew then whether they were false or true; but they served to fan and
inflame the hatred of the adverse parties to fever heat.
The Baron read that many of the dead Arabs and Turcos at Freshweiler
were found with fragments of human flesh--torn from the German
wounded--between their jaws; that a Saxon officer, who had been
struck by a bullet, and taken shelter in the house of a peasant,
where he fainted from loss of blood, had his eyes torn out by a woman
armed with a fork. These and many other details of atrocities, which
actually found their way into the London papers, he read for the
edification of the ladies, while Ernestine and Herminia exchanged
glances of horror and commiseration, as much as to say how awful it
was to think that those they loved so dearly had to run the risk of
perils such as these!
Even the Countess forgot her Spitz pug, and a piece of mysterious
crochet, that seemed endless as the web of Penelope, while listening
to the news, and far away from her peaceful home her thoughts
followed her son, to where in the fields, the lanes, the valleys, and
pretty hamlets of Alsace and Lorraine, and in places then rendered
deserts, there lay in hundreds--yea, in thousands--the hopes of
families, the heads of homes, the source of many a broken heart!
Suddenly the Baron raised his voice, and a strange gleam passed over
his face.
'Der Teufel!' he exclaimed; 'here is the name of a friend of
yours--in the _Extra Blatt_?
'Of mine--who?' asked the Count.
'We regret to learn by a recent telegram from the seat of war that a
party of the 95th Thuringian Regiment met with a severe misfortune,
and lost two officers. Herr Lieutenant Pierrepont fell, it is
believed, mortally wounded----'
The Baron paused and changed colour; the Countess grew pale, but with
a smile of grim satisfaction on her lips; the Count said:
'Poor fellow--poor fellow!'
A low cry escaped Ernestine, who fell forward with her face on the
table, and her arms stretched upon it at full length; but this
emotion failed to avert the attention of the Baron, whose eyes, now
dilated, were fixed on the newspaper. He was very pale, and shook
his head slowly, as he said to the Count:
'Ach Gott--the worst is yet to come. Compose yourself, my dear
friend.'
'Read--read--it is the name of my son--my Heinrich, that you see,'
said the Countess, in a breathless voice.
'It is, madam. "Herr Lieutenant Pierrepont fell, it is believed,
mortally wounded----"'
'You read that already; what matters it to me?'
'"And the Herr Graf Von Frankenburg was taken prisoner, and _hanged
by the Francs Tireurs_!" Oh, my friends,' added the Baron, 'I
beseech you to suspend your grief for a time; it may all be some
terrible mistake, to be cleared up in the end.'
'We seem fated to have startling tidings here!' groaned the poor old
Count, as his wife flung herself in a passion of tears upon his
breast.