out, and while my former brethren in the faith were praying in God's
house, I sat alone in the deep forest, weeping hot bitter tears, tears
more agonizing than man had ever wept before! It was a lovely fresh
autumnal day, the rays of the sun pierced with deadened heat through
the tops of the trees tinted with the yellow hues of autumn, the birds
chirped cheerful songs, a soft mild wind breathed through the withering
arbour, the deepest peace had dominion around: in me seethed the
bitterest deadliest hatred.--I may have sat there for hours plunged in
the most melancholy brooding, when I suddenly started up: It flashed
across me, like bright lightning in a clear night, that I was not yet
lost. Thy loved image, Blume! appeared all at once in liveliest colours
before my soul. I still had thee! only thee in the wide world: but
still I had thee: what more could I want?" The sentence of Scripture
had branded me, my mother had betrayed me, my brethren had rejected
me,--but still I had thee, thee, Blume! thou who couldest make up to me
for all that, all of it, all. To thee I now transferred the whole
wealth of my undivided love! a nameless ardent longing after thee burnt
like wild fire in my soul; my love to thee had reached the height of
madness. Remembrance of thee had effaced the horrible warning of the
immediate past, had averted my gaze from the dark future--to live with
thee, Blume! in some remote corner of the world, so sweet a child, my
child!... "Blume," said Gabriel, suddenly breaking off with an accent of
the most passionate grief.---"Thou mightest have been my guardian
angel.... By thee, Blume, I might have been converted again.... Thou
hast dealt injuriously with me, thou hast not acted justly.--Blume, if
there is a God--hearest thou! I will not believe it, I dare not believe
it, but if there is, Blume! at thy hands will my soul be required!... I
hurried to Worms--how thy father rejected me with contumely, how I
learnt, that as soon as they had received the quickly circulated news,
they had instantly betrothed thee to thy father's nephew, thy cousin
Aaron,--all that you know.--What I suffered, that you did not know, no!
for the honour of humanity I will believe that you did not know it--I
insisted on speaking to you alone; I trusted that your father had lied,
that you would behave differently to the others, would have compassion
upon me, would love me! I waited wistfully for the feast of atonement:
I knew, that while the rest were praying in God's temple, you would
remain at home with your blind mother. On the afternoon of the festival
I crept into your house. Breathless I hurried through the well-known
passages and opened the door that led into your mother's room. She was
asleep, you were sitting by her bed and praying. I stood on the
threshold trembling like an aspen. I thought that with a cry of joy you
would throw yourself into my arms, kiss the tears from my eyelids, dry
the cold drops of anguish that fell from my forehead. 'Blume,' I cried,
'wilt fly with me? Wilt be my wife?' you were silent. 'You too Blume!'
I cried in inexpressible sorrow, and fell at your feet.... your bosom
panted, your lips moved, as though you would speak, but you did not
speak, your look fixed itself ghostlike upon me, as if I, innocent and
unfortunate, had escaped from hell! I wished to break the dull silence,
I sought for words, to move you, to melt the hard marble of thy heart;
but I suddenly felt myself seized from behind, your father, your
betrothed had returned home to enquire after your mother's health. A
wild fury disfigured their faces.... you heard how they insulted and
laughed me to scorn, you saw how they cast me forth, mercilessly,
pitylessly, as a mangy hound is expelled with kicks; yes you saw it,
but said nothing, you did not fall into their arms, ... you did not
stand trembling and wringing your hands.... 'Blume,' yelled Gabriel
shaking her fiercely by the arm, and a mad fury flashed from his eyes,
'why did you allow that horror to be perpetrated, tell me, woman! why?
Why did you give your hand to the man, who so fearfully and
undeservedly insulted me, an innocent man,--tell me, why? speak!'"
Blume sobbed violently, she folded her beautiful white hands, her lips
moved silently in fervent prayer.
"Blume!" said Gabriel, after a moment's pause, in a dull unsteady
voice. "If my deadly enemy, who bears an everlasting hatred to me, who
strives with hot desire to drink my heart's blood--if my deadly enemy
were to lay at my feet as I on that evening kneeled before thee, I who
am steadfast in hate, I who know no pity, should weep hot tears of
compassion--and I was not your enemy, I had loved you with a love as
infelt and holy as is permitted to a human soul, I would have given the
last drop of my heart's blood for one tear from your eyes,--and you, a
weak, mild, pitiful woman, would not weep that tear.... You stood there
dismayed, but did not keep off those furious one's.... What had I done
to you? What was my transgression? Had not I been, to my mother's last
breath, devout, noble, self-sacrificing?--Why did you solemnly inter
the guilty mother as a contrite penitent, and cast out the innocent
son? When I was cast forth from your house, Blume! when the last cable
of my hope snapped there:--then I swore in my soul, a fearful undying
vengeance: ... I love not men, I hate you Jews, but the most burning
hate that man, or perhaps hell is capable of, I bear against thy
mother, thy husband, and far beyond all in my heart against thee."
"Then slay me," cried Blume hastily, "and leave my husband, my mother,
leave all in peace! let the whole weight of your anger fall on my head,
slay me, Gabriel, but spare the others...."
The tiny sleeper on her arms awoke again and stretched its hands
smiling towards its mother. Blume shuddered and broke into loud
sobbing: "No, Gabriel, slay me not, let me live, see me at thy
feet,"--she cast herself upon her knees--"let me live, I supplicate not
for myself, by the Almighty God, not for my own sake;--but look at this
innocent babe, its father is far away, it has only its mother, could
you be responsible for depriving it of its mother? You do not know what
a mother feels for her child."
"Hush, Blume, and stand up!" cried Gabriel, pulling the kneeling woman
up from the ground, and the veins in his forehead swelled high: "are you
mad? Do you think I shall murder a defenceless woman? be composed, I
shall not slay thee.... That is not the revenge I shall take."
Both were silent. Blume opened the window, she looked whether a light
was still burning in the lecture-room, a faint glimmer shot from the
windows of the distant edifice, she felt relieved by the knowledge that
men were still awake there! A cold wind blew through the room, neither
Gabriel or Blume observed it, only the child shivered in its mother's
arms.
"You have suffered much," so Blume broke the long painful silence.
"You have fallen off from the faith of your fathers? You are ..., you
were...."
Blume knew not what she said, but this silence of the grave was mortal
to her, she was constrained to speak, and almost involuntarily emitted
these words from her lips.
"From the faith of my fathers!" re-echoed Gabriel; "you choose your
words well, each is a poisoned arrow and barbed--have I then forsaken
the faith of my fathers? Do I forsooth know my father? For ten years
have I sought him, and thee," he continued thoughtfully, "thee have I
found,--shall I ever discover him, whom perhaps--and supposing I did
find him," said Gabriel after a long silence, inwardly communing, and
rather as addressing himself, "would the voice of nature, as silly men
declare, conquer? Full of infinite love should I fling myself into my
father's arms, or should I be possessed with an unspeakable hatred
against the faithless traitor, who was perhaps wantoning in luxury,
when his child, loaded with insult and scorn, was cast out from the
threshold of that house that he had for twenty years called home! If he
proves such a man, if he has forgotten me, if he has never been mindful
of the unhappy one whom to his everlasting misery he tossed out into
the wide desolate world; if he proves like the mother, who even on her
death-bed betrayed her child, if he should prove such, and I do find
him, Blume: I shall gloriously conclude my wretched existence with a
parricide."
Blume shuddered. Gabriel threw himself into a chair and hid his face
with both hands.
"But if it is not so, supposing it otherwise," he began again after a
long pause, in the course of which the foaming billows of his wrath had
sunk, "if the apparition in my youth was a truth and no deception, if
his tears did indeed once bedew the face of his child, if my father has
been pining in infinite sorrow for his long lost son, if his heart has
been sighing after me with the same strange emotion as sometimes in
hours of quiet rises convulsively in the depths of my soul, if racked
by repentance and the stings of conscience he has been seeking me mad
with grief.... if I should find him thus, though he were the meanest on
earth, the wretchedest beggar to whom one flings a morsel of bread--and
stood before me in that condition--Blume! I have often declared, and
now repeat, by my troth, and knightly honour! I should fold him
lovingly in my arms.... and though it were the last moment of my life,
my last breath--my last, yea dying breath should be a loud Hallelujah."
Gabriel stopped suddenly, Blume too had for some time been listening.
Out of the bushes in a distant corner of the graveyard, on the gusts of
a favouring wind, sounds of lamentation came born to the ears of both
of them. Each for a time had accepted what was heard as a deception to
be accounted for by the fearful excitement of the moment; but the
sounds, at first dying away with a hollow echo, came nearer:
"My Son, my Son;" it rung now clearer and clearer in their ears, "my
much loved only child--where art thou? Come to me, thou dear one....
thou wert born in sin, but I love thee in spite of all! for in truth
you are my only son! Where can I find thee? could I find thee in
heaven, I would seek thee there; could I find thee far over the sea, I
would seek thee there.--Where art thou, thou that wert conceived in
sin, thou that art so near to my heart? approach me and let us crave
mercy at my father's grave, perhaps God will have compassion on me,
will pardon me!... Oh! if my son but lives and I may see him again:
then, then would I die!..."
The clock on a neighbouring tower tolled midnight, a wind sprung up,
and sighed over the wide desolate space of the graveyard.... the clang
of the clock, the rustling of the wind drowned the words which again
died away in the distance. Gabriel had become deadly pale. He stepped
to the window, and gazed for a long while down: but saw nothing. "It
was an illusion," he said softly, quickly recovering himself by a
wonderful mental effort--"my sharp glance detects nothing in the wide,
and snow-covered space--and the dead have no voice."
Blume shivered, she did not dare announce that she too had heard the
ghostly cry from the graveyard. Gabriel stared fixedly before him, sunk
in gloomy brooding. Blume tried to read his soul. She had never seen
him since that fateful day of the feast of atonement. He, who had once
loved her, who had once clung with the perfect fresh strength of youth
to his faith, to humanity, to his people, to justice, had become a
changed man. Branded by holy scripture, which human wisdom can never
quite interpret, betrayed by his mother whom he idolized, driven from
her presence, cast forth from the society of his brethren--his soul was
filled with hate. But even his hate she was unable to fathom. When he
had entered, she feared that he would rob her of her child, that he
would slay herself--that he would not do so, was now clear--but she
dared not yet be tranquil, for he had declared that he hated her, that
he would be revenged upon her. In pitiful sorrow she gazed motionless
at his lips, at every movement of which her blood again ran cold:
though his silence seemed to her yet more horrible. Once more one of
those long and oft-recurring pauses had intervened, that seemed to
Blume to last an eternity. Her unspeakable oppression was intensified
by the profound impression caused by the singular incident that had
just occurred, by astonishment at Gabriel who seemed by force of will
to have soon banished it from his soul.
"Gabriel," implored Blume, "I pray thee, speak, break this weird
silence, it is awful! say what thou wilt, go on with your story."
"Dost thou consider Blume! thy silence was once awful to me too....
once thou hadest no word of pity, no look of compassion for a poor
innocent martyr, and I languished for a word of love.--Had my
grandfather then still continued to live at Cologne perhaps.... I do
not know, but perhaps he, he alone, would have taken me to his arms.
But the fearful tidings, that branded his daughter, his grandson, gave
his name a prey to the scornful, and blighted his dearest hopes, threw
the old man on a bed of death. I arrived two days after his funeral at
Cologne. Every one shunned me, my misfortune was known to all my
brethren in the faith.
"I took possession, as heir, of my grandfather's immense property. I
was no longer attached by any tie to this life, all that I had loved, I
was constrained to hate, that which had once been true and holy to me,
now seemed to me lying and false, I was the unhappiest man on earth! I
broke with my whole past life, I would have none of it live on within
me, except the remembrance of my unmerited humiliation, that fanned the
hot flame of my revenge with undiminished fury.... I sought by some
overt act to prove that I had become a changed man. In the cathedral at
Aix-la-chapelle I abjured the old faith, and swore enmity in my heart
against all those that clave to it.... As I came out of the church a
crowd of people had assembled to gape at the new convert. I did not
lift my eyes; but felt that the odious looks of all were fixed upon me.
I hurried through the press, and sought to gain a side street that led
to my dwelling. The crowd that accompanied me fell off one by one, and
at last I heard the step of but one solitary person behind me, who
followed me obstinately to the door of my house. I did not look round,
but as I was about to step into the house, I felt myself seized by the
cloak. 'What do you want?' I asked of the importunate fellow, a beggar
in the dress of a poor Jew. 'Nothing,' replied he, with the wandering
gaze of madness, 'nothing, except to tell you, that you have done
wrong.... Thou hast forsaken thy Father in heaven.... and a good child
seeks his father, even though he has prepared sorrow for him.... There
is no greater grief than when father and son seek and cannot find one
another!...' The maniac ran quickly away: but his words, burnt into my
soul like kindled sparks.--I did not know my father! my mother had died
without naming his name.--The high reputation for virtue which she had
enjoyed during her lifetime, had not permitted the faintest doubt to
rest upon her, and even if I had ventured to induce my brethren to make
any revelations, my inquiries would have been vain. I had as yet been
too stunned to think of my unknown father; but now, with the wild
thirst for vengeance on you all, was associated a feeling, so singular,
so wonderful, that I can never describe it. At one moment I was
inflamed with unutterable hate against the unknown author of my days,
at another I felt myself more mildly disposed, and a profound longing
took possession of my torn heart. At one moment I believed myself
convinced that he had forgotten me, and revelled with undisturbed and
cheerful mind in earthly happiness, while his son succumbed before a
woeful affliction; at another I hoped that he, who had never betrayed
me, who had never for years enforced his paternal authority, had
omitted to do so by reason of his inextinguishable love for me. A
tormenting, frequently rapid succession of emotions took powerful hold
on my heart; but from that moment a desire was born within me to find
my father, were it to demand fearful reckoning of him, or were it to
fall reconciled into his fatherly arms!
"Three days later I received intelligence that they had wedded you to
your betrothed. You were in a great hurry, and your grandfather's death
could not deter you from your hasty resolution. Thou, my ardently
beloved adored bride, gavest thy hand to him who had disgracefully
mis-used me as I lay on my knees in supplication before thee!... The
marriage was solemnized at Worms, while I in Aix was languishing in
maddest grief!--My determination to be avenged remained firm and
immovable, but I was as yet too weak, too powerless to carry it into
effect!"
Gabriel ceased, pressed both hands to his burning forehead and went on,
after a long pause, passionlessly almost calmly.
"I was restless and changeable, I knew not whither to turn my steps,
nor what to set about. War was kindled in a part of Germany, but
I did not care about it, I was indifferent to it. I wandered in wild
fury from city to city, from village to village; and found nowhere
peace and rest. I was often forced to rise in the middle of the
night and travel further: an irresistible power seemed to urge me
on. One stormy winter's night I had arrived at a small town in the
district of Juliers, and intended to pass the night there: but
sleep fled my wearied eyes, about midnight I arose and had my
horse saddled. My servant resolutely refused to go on in the fearful
storm, people dissuaded me from continuing my journey, the roads were
unsafe.--Nothing could restrain me, some impulse drove me abroad!... I
may have ridden for two hours objectless, when I suddenly heard a
report of firearms. I rode in the direction whence the noise came, and
saw by the light of the full moon, that momentarily appeared through an
opening in the wind-riven clouds, a group of horsemen engaged at a
short distance in a fierce struggle. I almost involuntarily spurred my
horse to a swifter pace, and first held rein when close to the angry
fight. This was an unequal one. Five horsemen, manifestly the
aggressors, formed a half circle round a tall and knightly form.
Enveloped in a white mantle, his head protected by an open dragoon's
helmet, the man who was attacked was obliged at the moment of my
arrival to make head alone against the superior number, for his
attendant had fallen shortly before, wounded by a pistol-shot. I
remained for a moment an inactive spectator. Two corpses and two
masterless steeds on the side of the assailants proved beyond a doubt
that the White-mantle and his companion had made good use of their
fire-arms; but now that this last had been put hors-de-combat the other
was fully occupied in parrying the thrusts of the attacking party. The
moon threw its pale light on the White-mantle, who, with lips fast
pressed, flashing eye and steady hand covered himself against every
assault, and wielded his mighty sword with almost superhuman strength.
The weapons clashed, other wise there was a profound stillness. I
approached in rear of the assailants. When he who was sore pressed saw
me, a ray of hope seemed to flit over his pale noble features; but no
sound escaped his lips. My arrival altered the position of affairs. Two
of the horsemen wheeled round and presented their pistols at me.
'Brandenburgian or Imperialist?' they cried.--'It's all the same to
me,' was my honest answer. One of my interrogators now turned about,
and aimed steady and sure at the head of the White-mantle. At that
moment my full sympathy was aroused for the man whose life was
threatened.
"He was forsaken, alone against many:--without analysing my motive,
driven by some inner impulse without even knowing to what party he
belonged, I drew the pistols from my holster, and shot down the man who
had taken aim. 'Receive my thanks, Saviour in the hour of need, I will
never forget you,' cried White-mantle, raising himself, as if endued
with fresh strength, high in his saddle, and directing against one of
his surprised opponents a blow so mighty that he fell lifeless to the
ground. We were now two against three--the White-mantle was saved--with
a wonderful inimitable, caracole he placed his horse by my side. I had
not time to discharge my second pistol, for our opponents, well skilled
in arms, pressed us with redoubled impetuosity. I tore the sword from
my side and fought with that boundless untamed fury that filled my
heart. The hot fight did me good, I did not feel the blood, trickling
from my arm, but on a sudden out of the neighbouring thicket a ball
whistled by my ear, I fell wounded.... White-mantle supported me with
one arm, with the other still kept brandishing his mighty weapon. At
that instant I heard the tramp of horses, but closed my eyes and lost
consciousness. Eight days later when I recovered my senses I found
myself to my astonishment in a handsome apartment in Juliers.... I was
lying in bed--I learnt that the warrior, whose life I had saved, was
the Imperialist General, Count Ernest of Mannsfield, Margrave of
Castelnuovo and Bortigliere. Brandenburgian horsemen had laid in wait
for him, when he rashly enough, accompanied only by his lieutenant, had
set out on his way back to the city. The ball which had struck me, was
fired by some sharp-shooters from Neuberg, who had come to the aid of
the Brandenburgers: but the report of fire-arms had at the same instant
brought up some Imperial dragoons whose arrival had settled the small
skirmish in our favour. They told me that Mannsfield was ardently
desirous of offering his thanks to me for the unexpected help, and when
I declared that I now felt myself well and strong enough to receive his
visit, some moments afterwards he entered my room. Mannsfield was at
that time twenty years old. He was a tall powerful man; his
extraordinarily pale earnest face with pointed Spanish beard and
mustachios was framed with dark waving locks, his large eyes gazed
feelingly at me, he held out his hand. 'I thank thee, Brother,' he said
with emotion, and each of his words made a deep impression upon my poor
heart, void of love.--'Thou hast saved my life, I will never--may God
help me--forget thee! You were ignorant whom you succoured, you
offered--as a good soldier should--a saving hand, not to the Count
Mannsfield, not to the Imperial Marshal, no, to the man, to the hard
pressed worn-out unknown soldier! no oath bound you, what you did for
me had its source only in the free will of your noble soul....'
"Blume! you had all rejected me, I stood alone in the wide world, my
heart, that could love so warmly, so boundlessly, was desolate and
bleeding. Each word of Mannsfield's dropped balsam upon the wounds of
my soul: an emotion, so profound, as could only be excited in me at a
time when still credulous and undeceived, I dared live for a sweet
delusion, thrilled through me; my whole heart expanded to his words, I
pressed the hand of the noble soldier, and hot tears rolled from my
eyes. 'Now if you are strong enough, and talking does not try you,'
continued Mannsfield, 'let me learn the name of my saviour. What is thy
escutcheon, where is thy home?'