It began to darken in the low room; the needles of the old woman were
still clicking busily; the cuckoo clock in the corner was ticking
louder and louder in the deep silence, and Oswald was still sitting by
the open window, his head leaning on his hand, as in a dream.
The rolling of a vehicle which came up the village street aroused him.
A light open carriage, with two horses, stopped at the cottage door; a
man stepped out lightly and entered the room.
"Good evening," said a dear, rather decided voice. "Doctor Stein?--very
glad to make your acquaintance--my name is Braun. Bruno told me I would
find the Good Samaritan here--how is our patient?--ah, there in the
bed?--what do you say, my good woman, could you get us a light, while
Doctor Stein has the kindness to tell me all he knows about the case?"
Oswald described what he had seen as well as he could.
"I thought so," said Doctor Braun; "it is an attack of epilepsy. Has
your son ever had an attack before?" he asked the old woman, who was
coming back, protecting a thin tallow candle with her hand, so that
only a faint gleam fell upon her wrinkled face.
"He is not my son, and his wife was not my daughter," said Mother
Claus, placing the candle on a settee near the bed; "but his children
are my dear grandchildren."
The doctor cast a searching glance at the face of the old woman--and
then his eye turned to Oswald--but he kept the remark he was going to
make to himself, took the light, and examined the face of the sick man.
Oswald took the candle and said: "Please let me help you."
"Thank you," said the doctor, examining the patient
In the mean time Oswald looked more closely at the newcomer. He was a
man of from twenty-five to thirty, tall and rather thin, dressed in a
simple, comfortable, but elegant summer costume. His head was
remarkably well formed, and thickly covered with very dark hair, which
refused to curl, and stood like a kind of cap around the firm, somewhat
prominent forehead. The nose did not belong to any well-defined class,
but it was finely cut and full of expression; so was also the mouth,
with its lips sharply defined, and yet delicately formed, as we find
them in antique heads, especially in Mercuries, as if they might fully
part for the sake of a pleasant, intelligent word. A thick silky beard
covered chin and cheeks, harmonizing in color and feature with the
hair, and completing the manly fair character of the face. Oswald also
noticed, as the doctor was raising the eyelids of his patient, that his
hands were of almost womanly delicacy and beauty of form.
"It is as I thought," said Doctor Braun, rising; "an epileptic attack.
I can prescribe nothing; nature will help. For the present he must be
kept quiet. To-morrow he will be rather weak, but otherwise quite well
again."
"Then such attacks are not dangerous?" asked Oswald.
"They can become fatal," replied the doctor, "especially when the
patient is a hard drinker, as I presume is the case here. A radical
cure is not to be expected, at least not under these circumstances; it
is always long and tedious."
"I had made up my mind to spend part of the night here," said Oswald;
"but now, I suppose that is not necessary?"
"By no means! Rest, as I said, is all that is required. The man is a
widower?" he added, looking around in the room.
"Annie is dead," said Mother Claus; "but I'll take care of Jake. Old
people like myself don't need much sleep; we shall soon have time
enough to sleep. You can safely go home, young gentleman. You are very
good; I always said so. Good-by, doctor; many thanks for Jake, as he
can't thank you himself, and perhaps he wouldn't thank you even if he
could. Good-by, young master."
With these words she showed the two to the door and out of the house.
"Will you come with me a little way?" said the doctor, as they were
standing outside the door. "I shall go by Berkow, where I have to make
a call in the village, and you can get out whenever you wish. The
evening is really magnificent, and you are, at any rate, too late for
supper at Grenwitz, as I can tell you from best authority, for I have
taken supper there myself."
"You have taken supper there?" said Oswald, taking a seat in the
doctor's carriage; "did Bruno not find you at home?"
"The poor boy had his ride for nothing; for while he was racing at full
speed to my house, I was quietly enjoying myself at Grenwitz."
"And may I ask what brought you to Grenwitz?"
The doctor laughed. "_O tempora, o mores_--there you are! Mentor
protects and nurses other people's children and does not know that his
own Telemachus is lying dangerously ill at home."
"You are pleased to joke."
"Indeed I do; Malte is as well as a boy can be who wants to have no
lessons to-morrow. But he had taken a long walk and was tired; this
looked to the baron and the baroness like the beginning of typhus
fever, and as there was no sensible man present to raise his voice
against it, they sent at once for the unlucky man who enjoys the
unenviable privilege of having to account for all the nonsense that can
be found in people's heads--I mean the doctor. We had just finished
supper, which--as you know, or, to speak with the baroness, as you
ought to know--is always punctually served at eight o'clock, and I was
just stepping into my carriage when that jewel of a boy, Bruno, came at
full speed into the court-yard. You ought to have seen the horror of
the baron and the baroness! He told us in breathless haste that Jake
was about to die, and that Doctor Stein was by his bedside, and that I
must come instantly. But, _a propos_, what does it mean that the old
woman called you in that odd way, 'Young master?' I suppose I shall
have to call you Baron Stein hereafter?"
"What an idea!" laughed Oswald, who was very much pleased with the
manner of his new acquaintance. "No; I am as little of noble birth as
Mother Claus, who, I cannot imagine why, but probably misled by some
dim recollections of her early days, insists upon making me her young
master."
"She is a strange old woman," said the doctor. "Just see how
beautifully the moon rises there over the edge of the forest, and how
lightly the mist is resting on the meadows--a very strange woman!
I remember now that I have been struck by her before--she looks
like--well, like what?"
"Like an old, old woman from Grimm's Fairy Tales, who at the proper
time changes into a beautiful princess!"
"That is it--she has a wonderful fire in her deep-sunk eyes. She always
looks to me as if her old face was only a mask under which she hides a
youthful soul."
"So it is in reality," said Oswald, and he told the doctor the strange
conversation he had had with Mother Claus the day before on the heath,
and how her words had appeared to him as natural and truthful as the
song of the lark on the heath, and how little he had been pleased
afterwards with the sermon of the self-sufficient preacher.
"Yes indeed," said the doctor. "There is truth in Goethe's words: It
annoys men to find the truth so simple. They always try to make people
believe truth is a marvel, a great wonder, and therefore they adorn it
with all kinds of gay rags and fragments, and then carry it about in
procession; while such people, like our old woman, read only one
chapter in the great book of the universe, but they read it again and
again, for sixty, seventy years, till they know it by heart. And as the
whole book is but one great revelation, they learn in the end just as
much as the great crowd of partially learned men, who turn in restless
haste leaf after leaf, pick out a little here and a little there, and
are finally about as wise or as stupid as they were before."
"Yes indeed," said Oswald; "a striking proof of the justness of your
remark is, for instance, the Baroness Grenwitz. What has she not read!
German, French, English, and Swedish; sacred books and profane books;
the best and the worst books. To-day I find her reading Rousseau's
Confessions, to-morrow a catchpenny novel; to-day she studies
Schleiermacher's religious discourses, to-morrow she is deep in the
last horror by Dumas or Eugene Sue. In small matters she has good sense
enough, but as soon as you approach the higher mysteries of our life
here below, or as soon even as the question arises how a general
conclusion can be obtained from the mass of details, she begins to talk
nonsense, and produces such foolish aristocratic commonplace phrases
that my head swims."
"This tendency of the baroness, I should think, does not serve to make
your position in Grenwitz very pleasant?"
"Not exactly," replied Oswald, lightly; "but I try to weaken the
addition of wormwood by avoiding as much as I can the philosophical
effusions of the baroness, and by confining my intercourse with the
family generally to the least possible frequency."
"But with all consideration to your time and your disposition, might
you not have fixed these limits a little too narrow?" said the doctor,
knocking off the ashes of his cigar.
"How so?" asked Oswald, not without some surprise.
"You will pardon my indiscretion," said the other, turning more fully
towards Oswald, so as to look at him with his bright intelligent eyes.
"You know that physicians are condemned to play the disagreeable part
of confidential friends in the families in which they practise. At one
or the other point, everything in life is, after all, closely connected
with our body, and as we have the control of that part of our patients,
we gradually are made judges of everything, even of such things which
seem to belong before any other forum rather than that of the
physician. And even if there happens to be no connection whatever
between the two questions of soul and of body, the patient is very apt
to think: If you have told him so much you may just as well tell him a
little more. Thus the baroness could not help telling me to-day--I am
not going to flatter you or to annoy you, but only to give you a hint,
which you may follow or not, just as you like--that you, who possessed
such a very great gift to make yourself agreeable, and who could, if
you chose, be so perfectly at home in well-bred society, were rather
disposed to make no use of these talents. She regretted this all the
more, she added, as this reserve caused a great loss to Malte, who was
by nature a domestic boy and never so happy as in the family circle,
and who now could not enjoy the privileges which he would otherwise
derive from being in your society and becoming intimate with you."
"Is it not strange," said Oswald, after a short pause, "what
inapproachable beings some of us children of Adam are? What you have
just told me, I have told myself more than once. I have admonished
myself that having once agreed to sell my time and my talents
for the benefit of this family, I am bound to make all necessary
concessions--and yet, now that I hear you say the same thing, it wounds
my feelings.... But I beg to assure you that it is not you I blame, but
only myself, and that I am all the more pleased with myself because the
hint you are giving me with such kind intentions ought certainly not to
have disturbed me for a moment."
"I was sure," said the doctor, "that I had to do with a man who knows
how to separate the chaff from the grain; if I had not been sure of
that, you may be convinced I would not have spoken."
There followed another pause in the conversation of the two young
men; the doctor repented perhaps in silence having been led by his
good-nature to perform the ungrateful duty of giving advice unasked,
while Oswald pursued his thoughts, and seemed to forget entirely that
the pine-trees were swiftly gliding past him, and the doctor's swift
horses had nearly accomplished the distance between Grenwitz and
Berkow. He started in great surprise when he saw a light shining
through the branches to the right of the road. He knew it came from the
house of the forester at Berkow. On the other side a path led up to the
clearing in the forest, where Melitta's hermitage stood. At this very
place where they now were, the baron's carriage had been waiting for
him the day before.
"Pray let me get out here," he said hurriedly to the doctor. "I am
amazed to see that we are actually near Berkow. It is high time for me
to return."
The carriage stopped and Oswald got out.
"I hope," he said, shaking hands with the doctor, "that this has not
been the only distance nor the longest distance on the great road of
life on which we shall keep each other company."
"I hope and wish the same," replied the other. "It seems to me as if
our thoughts and feelings had much in common with each other, and to
meet thus a kindred nature is far too fortunate a thing to be easily
given up again. At all events, I shall soon be again in this
neighborhood. In the mean time, good-by."
The carriage rolled away; the sounds soon ceased to be heard; the light
in the forester's house disappeared--Oswald was alone amid darkness and
silence.
And at once Melitta's image appeared again before his mind's eye, and
swiftly glided before him along the narrow forest path on which he now
crept stealthily and silently like a poacher. Suddenly he found himself
on the clearing; he stopped, frightened as if lightning had fallen by
his side--there was a light in the window of the cottage! He had left
Melitta at the chateau, and she was here, not fifty yards from where he
stood--he had only to cross the meadow and to ascend a few steps--to
open a door. Oswald leant against the trunk of a beech-tree to calm his
wildly beating heart. And if anybody should see him here! If he should
recklessly endanger Melitta's reputation! Breathless he listened ...
the night was silent ... he heard nothing but those strange, mysterious
voices which are never heard in broad daylight, and which are born at
the break of night: a whispering and twittering up in the branches, a
rustling and rushing below in the dry leaves on the ground--the subdued
barking of a dog far out in a village. An owl came swiftly and silently
on its broad wings and nearly touched his face; it flew off like an
arrow. Otherwise all around still as the grave. But what is that? A
low, threatening growl, close to his ear? It was Melitta's gigantic
dog, who kept watch and guard at the entrance to the cottage. The
faithful guardian probably had discovered the presence of a stranger,
for he rose, jumped down the steps, and came bounding along, running
around the house like a shepherd's dog around his flock.
"Bonc[oe]ur?" called Oswald, as the animal came near him; "_ici!_"
The intelligent creature started at the well-known call, which he heard
so constantly from the lips of his mistress, and quickly recognizing
Oswald, he came rushing up to him and welcomed him by putting his huge
paws on his breast and his shoulders.
"Ah!" said Oswald, caressing the beautiful animal, "ah! you permit me
then to see your mistress? Come!"
Holding the dog by his long, curly hair, Oswald went across the meadow.
On the steps the noise of Bonc[oe]ur's paws deadened the sound of his
own light footsteps, and thus he crept along on the veranda which
surrounded the cottage till he came to the window. The window was open,
and through the Venetian ivy which had been trained over it Oswald
looked into the room. On the table stood a burning lamp, the globe of
which was covered with a red veil, so that the sacred image of Venus
looked, in the rosy light, as if it were alive. Melitta was sitting at
the foot of the statue near a table, turning her face toward Oswald.
She had an open book before her, but she was evidently not reading; the
delicate hand which supported her head was buried in the dark, abundant
hair, and she seemed to be buried in thought. An inexpressibly touching
expression, full of plaintive melancholy and of surpassing happiness,
lay on her chaste, childlike features. Oswald had to make a great
effort not to destroy the incomparably beautiful picture as it stood
before him in the frame of the small window. At last he whispered her
name.
Melitta raised her head, and fixing her large eyes fully upon the
window, she listened for a moment. But then she smiled sadly, as if she
wished to say: It was but a dream, and rested her head again in her
hand.
"Melitta--it is I."
This time she had not dreamt. She started up with a cry of joy, to the
door, to meet Oswald. She wound her arms around his neck, she felt his
burning lips again and again on her own; she laid her head on his
bosom; she looked through her tears up at him and said: "See, Oswald, I
was just thinking of you. I said to myself: If he loves you he will
come, he will surely be here to-day, and if he does not come, he does
not love you! Oswald, you do love me--don't you? Not as much as I love
you, but still, you love me a little, eh, Oswald?"
Speechless with emotion and happiness, Oswald embraced her again and
again.
"Melitta, you are inexpressibly good and beautiful--whoever loves you
must love you boundlessly."
Before the door of the hermitage, on a straw mat, his colossal head
between his forepaws, lies Bonc[oe]ur. The swift motion of his ears, as
soon as he hears a noise from the forest, shows he is keeping faithful
watch. He would tear any one to pieces who should dare to intrude upon
this temple of love.