depressed voice.
'To-day,' said the widow.
'To-day?' echoed Charlotte.
'That is why the beds are made. It is lucky for you ladies.'
'Very,' agreed Charlotte; and her voice was hollow.
'He died yesterday--an accident. I received the telegram only this
morning. It is a great misfortune for me. Will the ladies sup? I have
some provisions in the house sent on by the gentleman for his supper
to-night. He, poor soul, will never sup again.'
The widow, more moved by this last reflection than she had yet been,
sighed heavily. She then made the observation usual on such occasions
that it is a strange world, and that one is here to-day and gone
to-morrow--or rather, correcting herself, here yesterday and gone
to-day--and that the one thing certain was the _schönes Essen_ at that
moment on the shelves of the larder. Would the ladies not seize the
splendid opportunity and sup?
'No, no, we will not sup,' Charlotte cried with great decision. 'You
won't eat here to-night, will you?' she asked through the yellow
window-curtains, which made her look very pale. 'It is always horrid in
lodgings. Shall we go to that nice red-brick hotel we passed, where the
people were sitting under the big tree looking so happy?'
We went in silence to the red-brick hotel; and threading our way among
the crowded tables set out under a huge beech tree a few yards from the
water to the only empty one, we found ourselves sitting next to the
Harvey-Brownes.
'Dear Frau Nieberlein, how delightful to have you here again!' cried the
bishop's wife in tones of utmost cordiality, leaning across the little
space between the tables to press Charlotte's hand. 'Brosy has been
scouring the country on his bicycle trying to discover your retreat, and
was quite disconsolate at not finding you.'
Scouring the country in search of Charlotte! Heavens. And I who had
dropped straight on top of her in the waters of Thiessow without any
effort at all! Thus does Fortune withhold blessings from those who
clamour, and piles them unasked on the shrinking heads of the meek.
Brosy Harvey-Browne meanwhile, like a polite young man acquainted with
German customs, had got out of his chair and was waiting for Charlotte
to present him to me. 'Oh yes, my young philosopher,' I thought, not
without a faint regret, 'you are now to find out that your promising and
intellectual Fräulein isn't anything of the sort.'
'Pray present me,' said Brosy.
Charlotte did.
'Pray present me,' I said in my turn, bowing in the direction of the
bishop's wife.
Charlotte did.
At this ceremony the bishop's wife's face took on the look of one who
thinks there is really no need to make fresh acquaintances in breathless
hurries. It also wore the look of one who, while admitting a Nieberlein
within the range of her cordiality on account of the prestige of that
Nieberlein's famous husband, does not see why the Nieberlein's obscure
female relatives should be admitted too. So I was not admitted; and I
sat outside and studied the menu.
'How very strange,' observed Brosy in his beautifully correct German as
he dropped into a vacant chair at our table, 'that you should be related
to the Nieberleins.'
'One is always related to somebody,' I replied; and marvelled at my own
intelligence.
'And how odd that we should meet again here.'
'One is always meeting again on an island if it is small enough.'
This is a sample of my conversation with Brosy, weighty on my part with
solid truths, while our supper was being prepared and while Charlotte
answered his mother's questions as to where she had been, where she had
met me, how we were related, and who my husband was.
'Her husband is a farmer,' I heard Charlotte say in the dreary voice of
hopeless boredom.
'Oh, really. How interesting,' said Mrs. Harvey-Browne; and immediately
ceased to be interested.
The lights of Sassnitz twinkled on the other side of the bay. A steamer
came across the calm grey water, gaily decked out in coloured lights,
the throbbing of her paddle-wheels heard almost from the time she left
Sassnitz in the still evening air. Up and down the road between our
tables and the sea groups of bath-guests strolled--artless family
groups, papa and mamma arm in arm, and in front the daughter and the
admirer; knots of girls in the _backfisch_ stage, tittering and pushing
each other about; quiet maiden-ladies, placid after their supper, gently
praising, as they passed, the delights of a few weeks spent in the very
bosom of Nature, expatiating on her peace, her restfulness, and the
freshness of her vegetables. And with us, while the stars flashed
through the stirring beech leaves, Mrs. Harvey-Browne rhapsodised about
the great Nieberlein to the blank Charlotte, and Brosy tried to carry on
a reasonable conversation about things like souls with a woman who was
eating an omelette.
I was in an entirely different mood from the one of the afternoon at
Vilm, and it was a mood in which I like to be left alone. When it is on
me not all the beautiful young men in the world, looking like archangels
and wearing the loveliest linen, would be able to shake me out of it.
Brosy was apparently in exactly the same mood as he had been then. Was
it his perennially? Did he always want to talk about the Unknowable, and
the Unthinkable, and the Unspeakable? I am positive I did not look
intelligent this time, not only because I did not try to, but because I
was feeling profoundly stupid. And still he went on. There was only one
thing I really wanted to know, and that was why he was called Brosy.
While I ate my supper, and he talked, and his mother listened during the
pauses of her fitful conversation with Charlotte, I turned this over in
my mind. Why Brosy? His mother kept on saying it. To Charlotte her talk,
having done with Nieberlein, was all of Brosy. Was it in itself a
perfect name, or was it the short of something long, or did it come
under the heading Pet? Was he perhaps a twin, and his twin sister was
Rosy? In which case, if his parents were lovers of the neat, his own
name would be almost inevitable.
It was when our supper had been cleared away and he was remarking for
the second time--the first time he remarked it I had said 'What?',--that
ultimate religious ideas are merely symbols of the actual, not
cognitions of it, and his mother not well knowing what he meant but
afraid it must be something a bishop's son ought not to mean said with
gentle reproach, 'My dear Brosy,' that I took courage to inquire of him
'Why Brosy?'
'It is short for Ambrose,' he answered.
'He was christened after Ambrose,' said his mother,--' one of the Early
Fathers, as no doubt you know.'
But I did not know, because she spoke in German, for the sake, I
suppose, of making things easier for me, and she called the Early
Fathers _frühzeitige Väter_, so how could I know?
'_Frühzeitige Väter?_' I repeated dully; 'Who are they?'
The bishop's wife took the kindest view of it. 'Perhaps you do not have
them in the Lutheran Church,' she said; but she did not speak to me
again at all, turning her back on me quite this time, and wholly
concentrating her attention on the monosyllabic Charlotte.
'My mother,' Ambrose explained in subdued tones, 'meant to say
_Kirchenväter_.'
'I am sorry,' said I politely, 'that I was so dull.'
And then he went on with the paragraph--for to me it seemed as though he
spoke always in entire paragraphs instead of sentences--he had been
engaged upon when I interrupted him; and, for my refreshment, I caught
fragments of Mrs. Harvey-Browne's conversation in between.
'I have a message for you, dear Frau Nieberlein,' I heard her say,--'a
message from the bishop.'
'Yes?' said Charlotte, without warmth.
'We had letters from home to-day, and in his he mentions you.'
'Yes?' said Charlotte, ungratefully cold.
'"Tell her," he writes,--"tell her I have been reading her pamphlets."'
'Indeed?' said Charlotte, beginning to warm.
'It is not often that the bishop has time for reading, and it is quite
unusual for him to look at anything written by a woman, so that it is
really an honour he has paid you.'
'Of course it is,' said Charlotte, quite warmly.
'And he is an old man, dear Frau Nieberlein, of ripe experience, and
admirable wisdom, as no doubt you have heard, and I am sure you will
take what he says in good part.'
This sounded ominous, so Charlotte said nothing.
'"Tell her," he writes,--"tell her that I grieve for her."'
There was a pause. Then Charlotte said loftily, 'It is very good of
him.'
'And I can assure you the bishop never grieves without reason, or else
in such a large diocese he would always be doing it.'
Charlotte was silent.
'He begged me to tell you that he will pray for you.'
There was another pause. Then Charlotte said, 'Thank you.'
What else was she to say? What does one say in such a case? Our
governesses teach us how pleasant and amiable an adornment is
politeness, but not one of mine ever told me what I was to say when
confronted by an announcement that I was to be included in somebody's
prayers. If Charlotte, anxious to be polite, had said, 'Oh, please don't
let him trouble,' the bishop's wife would have been shocked. If she had
said what she felt, and wholly declined to be prayed for at all by
strange bishops, Mrs. Harvey-Browne would have been horrified. It is a
nice question; and it preoccupied me for the rest of the time we sat
there, and we sat there a very long time; for although Charlotte was
manifestly sorely tried by Mrs. Harvey-Browne I had great difficulty in
getting her away. Each time I suggested going back to our lodgings to
bed she made some excuse for staying where she was. Everybody else
seemed to have gone to bed, and even Ambrose, who had been bicycling all
day, had begun visibly to droop before I could persuade her to come
home. Slowly she walked along the silent sands, slowly she went into the
house, still more slowly into her bedroom; and then, just as Gertrud had
blessed me and blown out my candle in one breath, in she came with a
light, and remarking that she did not feel sleepy sat down on the foot
of my bed and began to talk.
She had on a white dressing-gown, and her hair fell loose about her
face, and she was very pale.
'I can't talk; I am much too sleepy,' I said, 'and you look dreadfully
tired.'
'My soul is tired--tired out utterly by that woman. I wanted to ask you
if you won't come away with me to-morrow.'
'I can't go away till I have explored these heavenly forests.'
'I can't stay here if I am to spend my time with that woman.'
'That woman? Oh Charlotte, don't call her such awful names. Try and
imagine her sensations if she heard you.'
'Why, I shouldn't care.'
'Oh hush,' I whispered, 'the windows are open--she might be just outside
on the beach. It gives me shivers only to think of it. Don't say it
again. Don't be such an audacious German. Think of Oxford--think of
venerable things like cathedral closes and bishops' palaces. Think of
the dignity and deference that surround Mrs. Harvey-Browne at home. And
won't you go to bed? You can't think how sleepy I am.'
'Will you come away with me to-morrow?'
'We'll talk it over in the morning. I'm not nearly awake enough now.'
Charlotte got up reluctantly and went to the door leading into her
bedroom. Then she came back and crossed over to the windows and peeped
out between the yellow curtains. 'It's bright moonlight,' she said, 'and
so quiet. The sea is like a pond. How clear the Sassnitz lights are.'
'Are they?' I murmured drowsily.
'Are you really going to leave your windows open? Any one can get in. We
are almost on a level with the beach.'
To this I made no answer; and my little travelling-clock on the table
gave point to my silence by chiming twelve.
Charlotte went away slowly, candle in hand. At her door she stopped and
looked back. 'It seems,' she said, 'that I have got that unfortunate
man's bed.'
So it was the Berlin gentleman who was making her restless.
'And you,' she went on, 'have got the one his daughter was to have had.'
'Is she alive?' I asked sleepily.
'Oh yes, she's alive.'
'Well, that was nice, anyway.'
'I believe you are frightened,' I murmured, as she still lingered.
'Frightened? What of?'
'The Berlin gentleman.'
'Absurd,' said Charlotte, and went away.
I was having a most cheerful dream in which I tried hard to remember the
exact words Herbert Spencer uses about effete beliefs that, in the
stole, still cling about the necks of priests, and, in gaiters, linger
round the legs of bishops, and was repeating the words about the bishops
in a rapture of enjoyment--and indeed it is a lovely sentence--when a
sudden pause of fear came into my dream, and I felt that some one beside
myself was in the room.
The dark to me has always been full of terrors. I can look back through
my memories and find past years studded with horrible black nights on
which I woke up and was afraid. Till I have lit a candle, how can I
remember that I do not believe in ghosts, and in nameless hideousnesses
infinitely more frightful than ghosts? But what courage is needed to sit
up in all the solid, pressing blackness, and stretch out one defenceless
hand into it to feel about for the matches, appalled by the echoing
noises the search produces, cold with fear that the hand may touch
something unknown and terrible. And so at Binz, dragged out of my
pleasant dream to night and loneliness, I could not move for a moment
for sheer extremity of fright. When I did, when I did put out a shaking
hand to feel for the matches, the dread of years became a reality--I
touched another hand. Now I think it was very wonderful of me not to
scream. I suppose I did not dare. I don't know how I managed it,
petrified as I was with terror, but the next thing that happened was
that I found myself under the bedclothes thinking things over. Whose
hand had I touched? And what was it doing on my table? It was a nasty,
cold hand, and it had clutched at mine as I tore it away. Oh--there it
was, coming after me--it was feeling its way along the
bedclothes--surely it was not real--it must be a nightmare--and that was
why no sound came when I tried to shriek for Charlotte--but what a
horrible nightmare--so very, very real--I could hear the hand sliding
along the sheet to the corner where I was huddling--oh, why had I come
to this frightful island? A gasp of helpless horror did get out, and
instantly Charlotte's voice whispered, 'Be quiet. Don't make a sound.
There's a man outside your window.'
At this my senses came back to me with a rush. 'You've nearly killed
me,' I whispered, filling the whisper with as much hot indignation as it
would hold. 'If my heart had had anything the matter with it I would
have died. Let me go--I want to light the candle. What does a man, a
real living man, matter?'
Charlotte held me tighter. 'Be quiet,' she whispered, in an agony, it
seemed, of fear. 'Be quiet--he isn't--he doesn't look--I don't think he
is alive.'
'_What?_' I whispered.
'Sh--sh--your window's open--he only need put his leg over the sill to
get in.'
'But if he isn't alive he can't put his leg over sills,' I whispered
back incredulously. 'He's some poor drowned sailor washed ashore.'
'Oh be _quiet!_' implored Charlotte, burying her face on my shoulder;
and having got over my own fright I marvelled at the abjectness of hers.
'Let me go. I want to look at him,' I said, trying to get away.
'Sh--sh--don't move--he'd hear--he is just outside----' And she clung to
me in terror.
'But how can he hear if he isn't alive? Let me go----'
'No--no--he's sitting there--just outside--he's been sitting there for
hours--and never moves--oh, it's that man!--I know it is--I knew he'd
come----'
'What man?'
'Oh the dreadful, dreadful Berlin man who died----'
'My dear Charlotte,' I expostulated, feeling now perfectly calm in the
presence of such a collapse. 'Let me go. I'll look through the curtains
so that he shall not see me, and I'll soon tell you if he's alive or
not. Do you suppose I don't know a live man when I see one?'
I wriggled out of her arms and crept with bare, silent feet to the
window, and cautiously moving the curtains a slit apart peeped through.
There certainly was a man outside, sitting on a rock exactly in front of
my window, with his face to the sea. Clouds were passing slowly across
the moon, and I waited for them to pass to see him more clearly. He
never moved. And when the light did fall on him it fell on a
well-clothed back with two shining buttons on it,--not the back of a
burglar, and surely not the back of a ghost. In all my varied imaginings
I had never yet imagined a ghost in buttons, and I refused to believe
that I saw one then.
Back I crept to the cowering Charlotte. 'It isn't anybody who's dead,' I
whispered cheerfully, 'and I think he wants to paddle.'
'Paddle?' echoed Charlotte sitting up, the word seeming to restore her
to her senses. 'Why should he want to paddle in the middle of the
night?'
'Well, why not? It's the only thing I can think of that makes you sit on
rocks.'
Charlotte was so much recovered and so much relieved at finding herself
recovered, that she gave a hysterical giggle. Instantly there was a
slight noise outside, and the shadow of a man appeared on the curtains.
We clung to each other in consternation.
'Hedwig,' whispered the man, pushing the curtains a little aside, and
peering into the darkness of the room; '_kleiner Schatz--endlich da?
Lässt mich so lange warten_----'
He waited, uncertain, trying to see in. Charlotte grasped the situation
quickest. 'Hedwig is not here,' she said with immense dignity, 'and you
should be ashamed of yourself, disturbing ladies in this manner. I must
request you to go away at once, and to give me your name and address so
that I may report you to the proper authorities. I shall not fail in my
duty, which will be to make an example of you.'
'That was admirably put,' I remarked, going across to the window and
shutting it, 'only he didn't stay to listen. Now we'll light the
candle.'
And looking out as I drew the curtains I saw the moonlight flash on
flying buttons.
'Who would have thought,' I observed to Charlotte, who was standing in
the middle of the room shaking with indignation,--'who would have
thought that that very demure little Hedwig would be the cause of a
night of terror for us?'
'Who could have imagined her so depraved?' said Charlotte wrathfully.
'Well, we don't know that she is.'
'Doesn't it look like it?'
'Poor little thing.'
'Poor little thing! What drivel is this?'
'Oh I don't know--we all want forgiving very badly, it seems to
me--Hedwig not more than you and I. And we want it so much more badly
than we want punishing, yet we are always getting punished and hardly
ever getting forgiven.'
'I don't know what you mean,' said Charlotte.
'It isn't very clear,' I admitted.
THE SIXTH DAY
THE JAGDSCHLOSS
She was asleep next morning when I looked into her bedroom, so I shut
the door softly, and charging Gertrud not to disturb her, went out for a
walk. It was not quite eight and people had not got away from their
coffee yet, so I had it to myself, the walk along the shore beneath the
beeches, beside the flashing morning sea. The path runs along for a
little close to the water at the foot of the steep beech-grown hill that
shuts the west winds out of Binz--a hill steep enough and high enough to
make him pant grievously who goes up it after dinner; then on the right
comes a deep narrow cutting running up into the woods, cut, it seems,
entirely out of smoothest, greenest moss, so completely are its sides
covered with it. Standing midway up this cutting in the soft gloom of
its green walls, with the branches of the beeches meeting far away
above, and down at the bottom the sheet of shining water, I found
absolutely the most silent bit of the world I have ever been in. The
silence was wonderful. There seemed positively to be no sound at all. No
sound came down from the beech leaves, and yet they were stirring; no
sound came up from the water, not a ripple, not a splash; I heard no
birds while I stood there, nor any hum of insects. It might have been
the entrance to some holy place, so strange and solemn was the quiet;
and looking from out of its shadows to the brightness shining at the
upper end where the sun was flooding the bracken with happy morning
radiance, I felt suddenly that my walk had ceased to be a common thing,
and that I was going up into the temple of God to pray.
I know no surer way of shaking off the dreary crust formed about the
soul by the trying to do one's duty or the patient enduring of having
somebody else's duty done to one, than going out alone, either at the
bright beginning of the day, when the earth is still unsoiled by the
feet of the strenuous and only God is abroad; or in the evening, when
the hush has come, out to the blessed stars, and looking up at them
wonder at the meanness of the day just past, at the worthlessness of the
things one has struggled for, at the folly of having been so angry, and
so restless, and so much afraid. Nothing focusses life more exactly than
a little while alone at night with the stars. What are perfunctory
bedroom prayers hurried through in an atmosphere of blankets, to this
deep abasement of the spirit before the majesty of heaven? And as a
consecration of what should be yet one more happy day, of what value are
those hasty morning devotions, disturbed by fears lest the coffee should
be getting cold and that person, present in every household, whose
property is always to reprove, be more than usually provoked, compared
to going out into the freshness of the new day and thanking God
deliberately under His own wide sky for having been so good to us? I
know that when I had done my open-air _Te Deum_ up there in the
sun-flooded space among the shimmering bracken I went on my way with a
lightheartedness never mine after indoor religious exercises. The forest
was so gay that morning, so sparkling, so full of busy, happy creatures,
it would have been a sorry heart that did not feel jolly in such
society. In that all-pervading wholesomeness there was no room for
repentance, no place for conscience-stricken beating of the breast; and
indeed I think we waste a terrible amount of time repenting. The healthy
attitude, the only reasonable one towards a fault made or a sin
committed is surely a vigorous shake of one's moral shoulders, vigorous
enough to shake it off and out of remembrance. The sin itself was a sad
waste of time and happiness, and absolutely no more should be wasted in
lugubriously reflecting on it. Shall we, poor human beings at such a
disadvantage from the first in the fight with Fate through the many
weaknesses and ailments of our bodies, load our souls as well with an
ever-growing burden of regret and penitence? Shall we let a weight of
vivid memories break our hearts? How are we to get on with our living if
we are continually dropping into sloughs of bitter and often unjust
self-reproach? Every morning comes the light, and a fresh chance of
doing better. Is it not the sheerest folly and ingratitude to let
yesterday spoil the God-given to-day?