Kuni remained under the spell of these delusions for many days and
nights. When she at last regained her senses, she was lying on a plain
couch in a long, whitewashed hall. The well-scoured floor was strewn
with sand and pine needles. Other beds stood beside hers. On one wall
hung a large wooden crucifix, painted with glaring colours; on the other
a touching picture of the Mater Dolorosa, with the swords in her heart,
looked down upon her.
Beside Kuni's pallet stood a Gray Sister and an elderly man, evidently a
physician. His long black robe, tall dark cap, and gold headed cane bore
witness to it. Bending forward, with eyeglasses on his prominent nose,
he gazed intently into her face.
Her return to consciousness seemed to please him, and he showed himself
to be a kind, experienced leech. With tireless solicitude he strove to
cure the numerous injuries which she had received, and she soon learned
through him and the nun, that she had fallen from the rope and escaped
death as if by a miracle. The triumphal arch under her, and the garlands
which decorated the wooden structure, had caught her before she touched
the pavement. True, her right leg was broken, and it had been necessary
to amputate her left foot in order to save her life. Many a wound and
slash on her breast and head also needed healing, and her greatest
ornament, her long, thick, dark hair, had been cut off.
Why had they called her, the ropedancer, back to a life which
henceforward could offer her nothing save want and cruel suffering? She
uttered this reproach to her preservers very indignantly; but as the
physician saw her eating a bunch of grapes with much enjoyment, he
asked if this pleasure did not suffice to make her rejoice over the
preservation of her existence. There were a thousand similar gifts
of God, which scarcely seemed worthy of notice, yet in the aggregate
outweighed a great sorrow which, moreover, habit daily diminished.
The Sister tried, by other arguments, to reconcile her to the life which
had been preserved, but the words her devout heart inspired and which
were intended for a pious soul, produced little influence upon the
neglected child of the highroad. Kuni felt most deeply the reference to
the sorely afflicted Mother of God. If such sorrow had been sent to the
noblest and purest of mortals, through whom God had deigned to give
his divine Son to the world, what grief could be too great for her, the
wandering vagabond? She often silently repeated this to herself; yet
only too frequently her impetuous heart rebelled against the misery
which she felt that she would encounter. But many weeks were to pass
before she recovered; a severe relapse again endangered her life.
During the first days of illness she had talked to Lienhard in her
fevered visions, called him by name, and warned him against the spiteful
elf who would ruin him. Frequently, too, oaths and horrible, coarse
imprecations, such as are heard only from the mouths of the vagrants
among whom she had grown to womanhood, fell from her burning lips. When
she improved, the leech asked in the jesting tone which elderly men are
fond of using to young women whose heart secrets they think they have
detected, what wrong her lover had done her. The Sister, nay, even the
abbess, wished to learn what she meant by the wicked witch whom she had
mentioned with such terrible curses during the ravings of the fever, but
she made no reply. In fact, she said very little, and her nurses thought
her a reserved creature with an obdurate nature; for she obstinately
rejected the consolations of religion.
Only to her confessor, a kind old priest, who knew how to discover the
best qualities in every one, did she open her heart so far as to reveal
that she loved the husband of another and had once wished evil, ay, the
very worst evil, to a neighbour. But since the sin had been committed
only in thought, the kindly guardian of her conscience was quickly
disposed to grant her absolution if, as a penance, she would repeat a
goodly number of paternosters and undertake a pilgrimage. If she had had
sound feet, she ought to have journeyed to Santiago di Compostella;
but, since her condition precluded this, a visit to Altotting in Bavaria
would suffice. But Kuni by no means desired any mitigation of
the penance. She silently resolved to undertake the pilgrimage to
Compostella, at the World's End,--[Cape Finisterre]--in distant Spain,
though she did not know how it would be possible to accomplish this with
her mutilated foot. Not even to her kind confessor did she reveal this
design. The girl who had relied upon herself from childhood, needed no
explanation, no confidante.
Therefore, during the long days and nights which she was obliged to
spend in bed, she pondered still more constantly upon her own past. That
she had been drawn and was still attracted to Lienhard with resistless
power, was true; yet whom, save herself, had this wounded or injured?
On the other hand, it had assuredly been a heavy sin that she had called
down such terrible curses upon the child. Still, even now she might have
had good reason to execrate the wearer of the wreath; for she alone, not
Lienhard, was the sole cause of her misfortune. Her prayer on the rope
that the saints would destroy the hated child, and the idea which then
occupied her mind, that she was really a grown maiden, whose elfin
delicacy of figure was due to her being one of the fays or elves
mentioned in the fairy tales, had made a deep impression upon her
memory.
Whenever she thought of that supplication she again felt the bitterness
she had tasted on the rope. Though she believed herself justified in
hating the little mischief-maker, the prayer uttered before her fall did
not burden her soul much less heavily than a crime. Suppose the Sister
was right, and that the saints heard every earnest petition?
She shuddered at the thought. The child was so young, so delicate.
Though she had caused her misfortune, the evil was not done
intentionally. Such thoughts often induced Kuni to clasp her hands and
pray to the saint not to fulfil the prayer she uttered at that time; but
she did not continue the petition long, a secret voice whispered that
every living creature--man and beast--felt the impulse to inflict a
similar pang on those who caused suffering, and that she, who believed
the whole world wicked, need not be better than the rest.
Meanwhile she longed more and more eagerly to know the name of the
little creature that had brought so much trouble upon her, and whether
she was still forcing herself between Lienhard and his beautiful wife.
As soon as she was able to talk again, she began her inquiries. The
Sister, who was entirely absorbed in her calling and never left the
scene of her wearisome toil, had little to tell; but the leech and the
priest, in reply to her questions concerning what had happened during
the period of her unconsciousness, informed her that the Emperor had
ordered that she should receive the most careful nursing, and had
bestowed a donation upon the convent for the purpose. He had thought
of her future, too. When she recovered, she would have the five heller
pounds which the generous sovereign had left for her as a partial
compensation for the injuries sustained while employing her rare skill
for the delight of the multitude and, above all, himself. A wealthy
Nuremberg Honourable, Lienhard Groland, a member of the Council, had
also interested himself in her and deposited the same amount with the
abbess, in case she should recover the use of her limbs and did not
prefer to spend the remainder of her life here, though only as a lay
sister. In that case he would be ready to defray the cost of admission.
"That the lofty convent walls might rise between him and the sight of
me!" Kuni said to herself at this information, with a bitter smile.
On the--other hand, her eyes filled with tears of genuine emotion
and sincere shame, when she learned from the leech that Herr Lienhard
Groland's lovely wife had come daily to the convent to inquire about
her, and had even honoured her couch with a visit several times. She
did not remain absent until one day, in the noble lady's presence, Kuni,
when her fever was fiercest, loaded the wearer of the wreath, whom her
delirium often brought before her as a nightmare, with the most savage
and blasphemous curses. The gracious young wife was overwhelmed with
horror, which had doubtless prevented her return, unless her absence was
due to departure from the city. Besides, she had committed the care of
inquiring about her convalescence to an aristocratic friend in Augsburg,
the wife of the learned city clerk, Doctor Peutinger, a member of the
famous Welser family of Augsburg. The latter had often inquired for her
in person, until the illness of her own dear child had kept her at home.
Yet, in spite of this, her housekeeper had appeared the day before to
inform the abbess that, if the injured girl should recover and wished
to lead a respectable life in future, she might be sure of a welcome
and easy duties in her own household. This surely ought to be a great
comfort to Kuni, the physician added; for she could no longer pursue
rope-dancing, and the Peutingers were lavishly endowed with worldly
goods and intellectual gifts, and, besides, were people of genuine
Christian spirit. The convent, too, would be ready to receive her--the
abbess had told him so--if Herr Groland, of Nuremberg, kept his promise
of paying her admission dues.
All these things awakened a new world of thoughts and feelings in
the convalescent. That they ought, above all, to have aroused sincere
gratitude, she felt keenly, yet she could not succeed in being
especially thankful. It would be doing Lienhard a favour, she repeated
to herself, if she should enter a convent, and she would rather have
sought shelter in a lion's den than under the Peutinger roof. She had
been informed the day before that the city clerk's wife was the mother
of the child upon whom she had called down misfortune and death.
The keeper of an Augsburg bath-house, who had burned herself with
boiling water, occupied the next bed. She was recovering, and was a
talkative woman, whose intrusive loquacity at first annoyed Kuni, nay,
when she could not silence it, caused her pain. But her conversation
soon revealed that she knew every stick and stone in her native city.
Kuni availed herself of this, and did not need to ask many questions to
learn everything that she desired to know about the little beggar-landed
elf.
She was Juliane, the young daughter of Herr Conrad Peutinger, the city
clerk--a girl of unusual cleverness, and a degree of learning never
before found in a child eleven years old. The bath-house keeper had many
wonderful stories to relate of her remarkable wisdom, with which even
highly educated men could not vie. In doing so, she blamed the father
and mother, who had been unnatural parents to the charming child; for
to make the marvel complete, and to gratify their own vanity, they had
taxed the little girl's mind with such foolish strenuousness that the
frail body suffered. She had heard this in her own bath-house from the
lips of the child's aunt and from other distinguished friends of the
Welsers and Peutingers. Unfortunately, these sensible women proved to
have been right; for soon after the close of the Reichstag, Juliane was
attacked by a lingering illness, from which rumour now asserted that
she would never recover. Some people even regarded the little girl's
sickness as a just punishment of God, to whom the constant devotion of
the father and his young daughter to the old pagans and their ungodly
writings must have given grave offence.
This news increased to the utmost the anxiety from which Kuni had long
suffered. Often as she thought of Lienhard, she remembered still more
frequently that it was she, who had prayed for sickness to visit the
child of a mother, who had so kindly offered her, the strolling player,
whom good women usually shunned, the shelter of her distinguished house.
The consciousness of owing a debt of gratitude to those, against whom
she had sinned so heavily, oppressed her. The kind proposal of the sick
child's mother seemed like a mockery. It was painful even to hear the
name of Peutinger.
Besides, the further she advanced toward recovery, the more unendurable
appeared the absence of liberty. The kind efforts of the abbess to
keep her in the cloister, and teach her to make herself useful there by
sewing, were unsuccessful; for she could not turn the spinning wheel
on account of her amputated foot, and she had neither inclination nor
patience for the finer branches of needlework.
Those who charged her with a lamentable lack of perseverance were right;
the linen which she began to hem fell into her lap only too soon.
When her eyes--which could see nothing here except a small walled
yard--closed while she was working, the others thought that she was
asleep; but her mind remained awake, though she had lowered her lids,
and it wandered restlessly over valleys rivers, and mountains through
the wide, wide world. She saw herself in imagination travelling along
the highway with nimble jugglers merry musicians, and other care-free
vagrant folk, instead of plying the needle. Even the whirling dust, the
rushing wind, and the refreshing rain outside seemed desirable compared
with the heavy convent air impregnated by a perpetual odour of lavender.
When at last, in the month of March, little Afra, the fair-haired niece
of the portress, brought her the first snowdrop, and Kuni saw a pair
of starlings enter the box on the budding linden before her window, she
could no longer bear her imprisonment in the convent.
Within these walls she must fade, perhaps die and return to dust. In
spite of all the warnings, representations, entreaties, and promises
of those who--she gratefully perceived it--meant well toward her, she
persisted in her desire to be dismissed, to live out of doors as she had
always done. At last they paid her what was due, but she accepted
only the Emperor's bounty, proudly refusing Lienhard Groland's money,
earnestly as she was urged to add it to the other and to the viaticum
bestowed by the nuns.