Eva's Story.
WITTEMBERG, _January_, 1525.
How little idea I had how the thought of Fritz was interwoven with all
my life! He says he knew only too well how the thoughts of me was bound
up with every hope and affection of his!
But he contended against it long. He said that conflict was far more
agonizing than all he suffered in the prison since. For many years he
thought it sin to think of me. I never thought it sin to think of him. I
was sure it was not, whatever my confessor might say. Because I had
always thanked God more than for anything else in the world, for all he
had been to me, and had taught me, and I felt so sure what I could thank
God for could not be wrong.
But now it is _duty_ to love him best. Of that I am quite sure. And
certainly it is not difficult. My only fear is that he will be
disappointed in me when he learns just what I am, day by day, with all
the halo of distance gone. And yet I am not really afraid. Love weaves
better glories than the mists of distance. And we do not expect miracles
from each other, or that life is to be a Paradise. Only the unutterable
comfort of being side by side in every conflict, trial, joy, and
supporting each other! If I can say "only" of that! For I do believe our
help will be mutual. Far weaker and less wise as I am than he is, with a
range of thought and experience so much narrower, and a force of purpose
so much feebler, I feel I have a kind of strength which may in some way,
at some times even help Fritz. And it is this which makes me see the
good of these separated years, in which otherwise I might have lost so
much. With him the whole world seems so much larger and higher to me,
and yet during these years, I do feel God has taught me something, and
it is a happiness to have a little more to bring him than I could have
had in my early girlhood.
It was for my sake, then, he made that vow of leaving us for ever!
And Aunt Cotta is so happy. On that evening when he returned, and we
three were left alone, she said, after a few minutes' silence--
"Children, let us all kneel down, and thank God that he has given me the
desire of my heart."
And afterwards she told us what she had always wished and planned for
Fritz and me, and how she had thought his abandoning of the world a
judgment for her sins; but how she was persuaded now that the curse
borne for us was something infinitely more than anything she could have
endured, and that it had been all borne, and nailed to the bitter cross,
and rent and blotted out for ever. And now, she said, she felt as if the
last shred of evil were gone, and her life were beginning again in
us--to be blessed and a blessing beyond her utmost dreams.
Fritz does not like to speak much of what he suffered in the prison of
that Dominican convent, and least of all to me; because, although I
repeat to myself, "It is over--over for ever!"--whenever I think of his
having been on the dreadful rack, it all seems present again.
He was on the point of escaping the very night they came and led him in
for examination in the torture-chamber. And after that, they carried him
back to prison, and seemed to have left him to die there. For two days
they sent him no food; but then the young monk who had first spoken to
him, and induced him to come to the convent, managed to steal to him
almost every day with food and water, and loving words of sympathy,
until his strength revived a little, and they escaped together through
the opening he had dug in the wall before the examination. But their
escape was soon discovered, and they had to hide in the caves and
recesses of the forest for many weeks before they could strike across
the country and find their way to Wittemberg at last.
But it is over now. And yet not over. He who suffered will never forget
the suffering faithfully borne for him. And the prison at the Dominican
convent will be a fountain of strength for his preaching among the
peasants in the Thuringian Forest. He will be able to say, "God can
sustain in all trials. He will not suffer you to be tempted above that
you are able to bear. _I know it, for I have proved it._" And I think
that will help him better to translate the Bible to the hearts of the
poor, than even the Greek and Hebrew he learned at Rome and Tuebingen.