While I was questioning the Abbess, my attention was drawn away from
the extravagantly whimsical Captain's lady. I will suppose that I or
the reader had married her; then we should certainly have thanked
heaven that we had screwed our brilliant ring on her ring-finger; and
yet, as one sees, we should have had every day to have a tussle with
her; so true it remains, that not the vices, but the whims of women
strew so much horse-dust and so many thorns in the nuptial couch, that
oftentimes Satan would be glad to lie there.
But for Gustavus, who carried so much, we should not have got out of
the Castle ten minutes ago. My reader pictures him to himself, quite
contrary to my expectation, and very falsely, namely, as being sad,
because he has quitted the earthly cradle of his childhood, his garden
of Adam and his evening mountain. How false! Another reader would
imagine him full of joy, because with children, to whom every change of
scene presents a new one, journeying is the creation of a new heaven
and a new earth, and because the fancies of a child are not as yet
gloomy ones. Scheerau must have seemed to his anticipation nothing less
than the city with long houses, wherein he had played with his sister.
Besides--which is a naturalization-act to all children--his play-house
had been put on board; even the starling, who, as an agitated hierarch,
sprang up and down in the Solomon's-Chapel-of-Ease, he held in his
jouncing lap. He pitied every corner of the Castle with all that was in
it, that it could not take passage with him; this whole shell of a
house seemed to him so narrow, so worn out, so faded out! People who
have traveled little look upon their familiar home at the moment of
departure, at that of arrival, and at other times, with three different
feelings; but for migrating locusts and birds of passage the high roads
and city streets are only the corridors between the apartments.
Half an hour before starting he seated himself on the empty coach-box,
with his legs wedged in among the baggage and in palpitating
expectation of the moment when the horses should make their first leap.
At last the carriage door was shut to and all rolled away, down the
mountain, across the common, on which the white, peeled tree that was
once more to be planted in the earth with red-painted flag and ribbon
streamers for the church-wake, grew quite despicable in the eyes of
Gustavus, who was just going to meet in Scheerau a hundred finer
May-poles and church fairs. But as he passed along by the _fruitful
region_ of his mountain, where such a harvest of joys had ripened for
him: Ah, then, from the funeral pile of dead afternoons, from the
tinkling herd that grazed on the summits, from an associate herd boy
with whom he had been no great friends, from the stone-built pen in
which he had folded his lamb, that now stood up there without a ribbon
and without any one to love him, and, finally, from the boundary-stone,
on which once his sweetheart, his beauty, sat knitting--from all this,
of course he turned his eyes away slowly, with many a long-lingering
backward glance. "Ah!" he thought, "who will give thee citron-cakes and
my little lamb crusts of bread? But I will send you over every day ever
so many things!"
It was a pure October morning, the mist lay folded up at the feet of
the heavens, the migrating summer still hovered with its blue pinions
high over the foliage and the flowers which had brought it, and gazed
with its broad and quietly warming sunny eye upon man, to whom it was
bidding farewell. Gustavus would fain get out of the carriage, in order
to wrap up the dew-sprinkled, fleeing summer, which, delicately woven,
overspread the earth like a human life, and take it along with him. But
thou, man! how often dost thou hang down over nature as a pestilential
and mephitic vapor!
For they could hardly have gone on a league, after which he already
began to take every village for Scheerau.... But I will first indicate
where it was. At Yssig he screamed out in the wood: "O now the black
arm yonder will reach in and take me out!" While the old man was still
wondering how the little one knew that a finger-post was coming, which
now actually pointed out from among the trees, all at once in behind
there a voice began to scream: "Oh! my eyes! my eyes!" The child and
the mother were petrified with terror; but the Captain leaped out from
or through the carriage, smashed the glasses and bounded into the
wood--and right upon a beautiful kneeling child, from whose lacerated
eyes ran tears and water. "Oh, don't do anything to me, I can never see
any more!" he said, and groped about him with his hands, in order to
strike away the lancet which lay at his knees. "Who has done this?"
said the Captain, with the softest voice, that broke with intense
compassion; but ere the child spoke, an old haggard beggar-woman
approached and said a beggar had darted into the thicket, who would
fain have blinded the child, in order to beg with it. But the child
clung with increasing convulsions to his hand, and said: "Oh, she will
cut me again!" The Captain guessed the knavery, broke off the nearest
branch, switched at the wretched woman's face with a rage that missed
its aim, and ran with the blind boy in his arms to the affrighted
carriage. It was a heart-rending spectacle, the innocent worm, with
fine features and movements, in rags, and with red and wrinkled eyes!