For very many years no connection had been maintained between the two
women who lived together in Nuremberg, and their nearest relative,
who was a half-brother of Madame Staubach's, a lawyer, living in
Cologne. This uncle of Linda's was a Roman Catholic, and had on this
account been shunned by Madame Staubach. Some slight intercourse
there had been on matters of business, and thus it had come to pass
that Linda knew the address of her uncle. But this was all that she
knew, and knowing this only, she had started for Cologne. The reader
will hardly require to be told that she had not gone in company with
him who a few weeks since had been her lover. The reader, perhaps,
will have understood Linda's character so thoroughly as to be
convinced that, though she had submitted to be dragged out of her
window by her lover, and carried away to Augsburg in the night,
still it was not probable that she should again be guilty of such
indiscretion as that. The lesson had not been in vain. If there be
any reader who does not know Linda's character better than it was
known to Herr Molk, or even to Tetchen, this story has been told
in vain. All alone she started, and all alone she made the entire
journey. Long as it was, there was no rest for her on the way. She
went by a cheap and slow train, and on she went through the long day
and the long night, and on through the long day again. She did not
suffer with the cold as she had suffered on that journey to Augsburg,
but the weariness of the hours was very great, and the continuation
of the motion oppressed her sorely. Then joined to this suffering was
the feeling that she was going to a strange world in which no one
would receive her kindly. She had money to take her to Cologne, but
she would have none to bring her back again. It seemed to her as she
went that there could be no prospect to her returning to a home which
she had disgraced so thoroughly.
At Mannheim she found that she was obliged to wait over four hours
before the boat started. She quitted the railway a little after
midnight, and she was told that she was to be on board before five
in the morning. The night was piercing cold, though never so cold
as had been that other night; and she was dismayed at the thought
of wandering about in that desolate town. Some one, however, had
compassion on her, and she was taken to a small inn, in which she
rested on a bed without removing her clothes. When she rose in the
morning, she walked down to the boat without a word of complaint, but
she found that her limbs were hardly able to carry her. An idea came
across her mind that if the people saw that she was ill they would
not take her upon the boat. She crawled on, and took her place among
the poorer passengers before the funnels. For a considerable time no
one noticed her, as she sat shivering in the cold morning air on a
damp bench. At last a market-woman going down to Mayence asked her a
question. Was she ill? Before they had reached Mayence she had told
her whole story to the market-woman. "May God temper the wind for
thee, my shorn lamb!" said the market-woman to Linda, as she left
her; "for it seems that thou hast been shorn very close." By this
time, with the assistance of the woman, she had found a place below
in which she could lie down, and there she remained till she learned
that the boat had reached Cologne. Some one in authority on board
the vessel had been told that she was ill; and as they had reached
Cologne also at night, she was allowed to remain on board till
the next morning. With the early dawn she was astir, and the full
daylight of the March morning was hardly perfect in the heavens when
she found herself standing before the door of a house in the city, to
which she had been brought as being the residence of her uncle.
She was now, in truth, so weak and ill that she could hardly stand.
Her clothes had not been off her back since she left Nuremberg, nor
had she come prepared with any change of raiment. A woman more
wretched, more disconsolate, on whose shoulders the troubles of
this world lay heavier, never stood at an honest man's door to beg
admittance. If only she might have died as she crawled through the
streets!
But there she was, and she must make some petition that the door
might be opened for her. She had come all the way from Nuremberg to
this spot, thinking it possible that in this spot alone she might
receive succour; and now she stood there, fearing to raise the
knocker on the door. She was a lamb indeed, whose fleece had been
shorn very close; and the shearing had been done all in the sacred
name of religion! It had been thought necessary that the vile desires
of her human heart should be crushed within her bosom, and the
crushing had brought her to this. She looked up in her desolation at
the front of the house. It was a white, large house, as belonging to
a moderately prosperous citizen, with two windows on each side of the
door, and five above, and then others again above them. But there
seemed to be no motion within it, nor was there any one stirring
along the street. Would it not be better, she thought, that she
should sit for a while and wait upon the door-step? Who has not known
that frame of mind in which any postponement of the thing dreaded is
acceptable?
But Linda's power of postponement was very short. She had hardly
sunk on to the step, when the door was opened, and the necessity for
explaining herself came upon her. Slowly and with pain she dragged
herself on to her feet, and told the suspicious servant, who stood
filling the aperture of the doorway, that her name was Linda Tressel,
and that she had come from Nuremberg. She had come from the house of
Madame Staubach at Nuremberg. Would the servant be kind enough to
tell Herr Gruener that Linda Tressel, from Madame Staubach's house in
Nuremberg, was at his door? She claimed no kindred then, feeling that
the woman might take such claim as a disgrace to her master. When she
was asked to call again later, she looked piteously into the woman's
face, and said that she feared she was too ill to walk away.
Before the morning was over she was in bed, and her uncle's wife was
at her bedside, and there had been fair-haired cousins in her room,
creeping in to gaze at her with their soft blue eyes, touching her
with their young soft hands, and calling her Cousin Linda with their
soft voices. It seemed to her that she could have died happily, so
happily, then, if only they might have been allowed to stand round
her bed, and still to whisper and still to touch her. But they had
been told that they might only just see their new cousin and then
depart,--because the new cousin was ill. The servant at the front
door had doubted her, as it is the duty of servants to doubt in such
cases; but her uncle had not doubted, and her uncle's wife, when she
heard the story, wept over her, and told her that she should be at
rest.
Linda told her story from the first to the last. She told
everything,--her hatred for the one man, her love for the other; her
journey to Augsburg. "Ah, dear, dear, dear," said aunt Gruener when
this was told to her. "I know how wicked I have been," said Linda,
sorrowing. "I do not say that you have been wicked, my dear, but you
have been unfortunate," said aunt Gruener. And then Linda went on to
tell her, as the day so much dreaded by her drew nearer and nearer,
as she came to be aware that, let her make what effort she would, she
could not bring herself to be the man's wife,--that the horror of it
was too powerful for her,--she resolved at the last moment that she
would seek the only other relative in the world of whom she knew even
the name. Her aunt Gruener thoroughly commended her for this, saying,
however, that it would have been much better that she should have
made the journey at some period earlier in her troubles. "Aunt
Charlotte does not seem to be a very nice sort of woman to live
with," said aunt Gruener. Then Linda, with what strength she could,
took Madame Staubach's part. "She always thought that she was doing
right," said Linda, solemnly. "Ah, that comes of her religion," said
aunt Gruener. "We think differently, my dear. Thank God, we have got
somebody to tell us what we ought to do and what we ought not to do."
Linda was not strong enough to argue the question, or to remind her
aunt that this somebody, too, might possibly be wrong.
Linda Tressel was now happier than she had remembered herself to
have been since she was a child, though ill, so that the doctor who
came to visit her could only shake his head and speak in whispers
to aunt Gruener. Linda herself, perceiving how it was with the
doctor,--knowing that there were whispers though she did not hear
them, and shakings of the head though she did not see them,--told her
aunt with a smile that she was contented to die. Her utmost hope, the
extent of her wishes, had been to escape from the extremity of misery
to which she had been doomed. She had thought often, she said, as she
had been making that journey, that her strength would not serve her
to reach the house of her relative. "God," she said, "had been very
good to her, and she was now contented to go."
Madame Staubach arrived at Cologne four days after her niece, and was
also welcomed at her brother's house. But the welcome accorded to
her was not that which had been given to Linda. "She has been driven
very nearly to death's door among you," said the one aunt to the
other. To Linda Madame Staubach was willing to own that she had been
wrong, but she could make no such acknowledgment to the wife of her
half-brother,--to a benighted Papist. "I have endeavoured to do my
duty by my niece," said Madame Staubach, "asking the Lord daily to
show me the way." "Pshaw!" said the other woman. "Your always asking
the way, and never knowing it, will end in her death. She will have
been murdered by your prayers." This was very terrible, but for
Linda's sake it was borne.
There was nothing of reproach either from Linda to her aunt or from
Madame Staubach to her niece, nor was the name of Peter Steinmarc
mentioned between them for many days. It was, indeed, mentioned but
once again by poor Linda Tressel. For some weeks, for nearly a month,
they all remained in the house of Herr Gruener, and then Linda was
removed to apartments in Cologne, in which all her earthly troubles
were brought to a close. She never saw Nuremberg again, or Tetchen,
who had been faithful at least to her, nor did she ever even ask the
fate of Ludovic Valcarm. His name Madame Staubach never dared to
mention; and Linda was silent, thinking always that it was a name of
offence. But when she had been told that she must die,--that her days
were indeed numbered, and that no return to Nuremberg was possible
for her,--she did speak a word of Peter Steinmarc. "Tell him, aunt
Charlotte, from me," she said, "that I prayed for him when I was
dying, and that I forgave him. You know, aunt Charlotte, it was
impossible that I should marry him. A woman must not marry a man whom
she does not love." Madame Staubach did not venture to say a word
in her own justification. She did not dare even to recur to the old
tenets of her fierce religion, while Linda still lived. She was
cowed, and contented herself with the offices of a nurse by the
sickbed of the dying girl. She had been told by her sister-in-law
that she had murdered her niece. Who can say what were the
accusations brought against her by the fury of her own conscience?
Every day the fair-haired cousins came to Linda's bedside, and
whispered to her with their soft voices, and looked at her with their
soft eyes, and touched her with their soft hands. Linda would kiss
their plump arms and lean her head against them, and would find a
very paradise of happiness in this late revelation of human love. As
she lay a-dying she must have known that the world had been very hard
to her, and that her aunt's teaching had indeed crushed her,--body as
well as spirit. But she made no complaint; and at last, when the full
summer had come, she died at Cologne in Madame Staubach's arms.
During those four months at Cologne the zeal of Madame Staubach's
religion had been quenched, and she had been unable to use her
fanaticism, even towards herself. But when she was alone in the
world the fury of her creed returned. "With faith you shall move a
mountain," she would say, "but without faith you cannot live." She
could never trust her own faith, for the mountain would not be moved.
A small tombstone in the Protestant burying-ground at Cologne tells
that Linda Tressel, of Nuremberg, died in that city on the 20th of
July 1863, and that she was buried in that spot.