Gotthold hurried restlessly through the forest with hasty steps, as if
he had not a moment to lose. But it was only the tumult of sore,
sorrowful thoughts, that drove him on and would not leave him, any more
than the swarm of flies which had entered the woods with him and
hovered about his head, now rising, now falling, now lingering behind,
now flitting on before.
"To think that I must always hear it, everywhere, and from all
tongues," he murmured, "as if I were responsible for it; as if it were
a reproach to me that she is not happy! Happy! Who is? Perhaps the
infallible people who can recite, their moral multiplication table
forward and backward like this Wollnow, the wise, self-righteous
Pharisee; or like good Jochen, to whom fifteen years more or less in
his Stine is of no consequence, provided a good maintenance is
guaranteed him. But on the other hand--am I happy? Are thousands and
thousands of others, who have scarcely a greater fault than that they
are men, men with hearts that feel and sympathize, suffer and
compassionate? A curse upon compassion and sympathy! They make us the
pitiful creatures we are. What are you rustling, venerable beeches,
which for centuries have strewn your withered leaves each Autumn over
the soil of this forest, only to shine forth again in Spring in the
full beauty of your green foliage? What are you murmuring, little
brook, as you carry your clear brown water to the sea as busily to-day
as when I played upon your bank, a merry boy, and thought it a heroic
deed to leap across you from shore to shore? Alas! in the rustling, the
murmur, I hear the same song that the swallow sang yesterday, the song
of the eternal youth of Nature, which is ever the same, always equally
strong, equally beautiful; and of the transitoriness, the frailty of
men, who prolong a sorrowful, yet greedy existence by fear and hope,
eat this shadowy food until death, and yet are happiest while their
hearts can still hope and fear, their hearts which can never again be
filled if once emptied, or if they fill and throb once more, fill with
contempt, throb with indignation, that they could ever have been so
foolish as to beat anxiously in blended hope and fear. Well, I no
longer hope, so I need not fear even the view that awaits me yonder."
From the broader, but completely neglected road that had hitherto
followed the course of the forest stream, and, turning to the right,
still pursued its windings deeper into the woods to the sea, a
foot-path branched off to the left and led upward, at first between the
trunks of huge trees, but gradually through more and more stunted
underbrush, which finally dwindled into heather and broom that covered
the whole crest of the hill to its highest point, where the men of
ancient times, in memory of one of their princes, had reared a huge
monument of massive blocks of stone, now covered with thick moss, and
partly buried in the earth. It was the spot from which Gotthold, with
an unsteady hand, had made the colored sketch he afterwards used for
the painting that hung in Frau Wollnow's room.
And now he stood there again, after ten long years--in, the shadow of
one of the blocks of stone which protected him from the burning rays of
the sun, while before him stretched the landscape with whose wondrous
beauty the boy's eyes had never been satiated. Ah! Time had not
obliterated a single charm; nay, it seemed as if the hour was expressly
adapted to show him the Paradise of his youth in all its magic.
The hour of noon! The brilliant sunlight bathed the tops of the
beeches, over which his eyes wandered to emerald meadows and golden
cornfields--the meadows and fields of Dollan, which lay like a quiet
sunny Eden among the shaded, wood-covered hills that enclosed it on all
sides. Amid the meadows and fields, relieved against the darker foliage
of the trees in the garden, appeared the straw thatched roofs of the
farm buildings, and the tiled roof of the long, low mansion-house, in
whose red gable he could distinctly perceive the tiny window of the
little room he had occupied with Curt whenever he went to Dollan. What
memories that little window evoked! It seemed as if his eyes were fixed
upon it by some magic spell, and could scarcely turn away either to the
right, where the hills opened and afforded a view of the blue sea upon
which the distant white sails glittered like stars, or to the left, to
glance over the wide brown moorland, upon which the lonely smithy stood
under an ancient oak, the only tree in the shadeless waste, above whose
verge towered other wood-crowned heights which closed the view on the
land side.
The hour of noon, the hour of the great Pan! Not the faintest breath
stirred the shining air; motionless were the dazzling white clouds upon
the steel blue vault of the heavens; motionless the tops of the trees,
the blossoming bushes, even the long blades of grass. Not a sound
disturbed the profound stillness; even the locust, which had chirped
among the stones of the giant's monument, was silent, perhaps terrified
by the brown serpent, which, with its head upraised and its round
glittering eyes fixed steadily upon Gotthold, lay motionless upon one
of the masses of rock a few paces off, with the rest of its scaly body
buried in a dense mass of heather. He had not noticed it before, and
now perceived it with a sort of shudder. It seemed as if the torpor
into which Nature had sunk had been embodied; as if the spirit of
loneliness and desolation had assumed a material form. Woe betide you
when the loneliness of yonder mansion with its neglected garden, the
desolation of this remote valley, so far away from all human society,
stares at you with those cold, cruel eyes; when you listen in the
stillness for a beloved voice, and hear only the blood seething in your
temples, and the heavy, anxious throbbing of your heart.
Avaunt, fiend, avaunt!
He raised his staff; the serpent disappeared; when he reached the rock
upon which it must have been lying, he could see nothing but the
swaying of the flowers through whose closely interwoven roots it was
gliding away.
Or was it only an illusion of his excited fancy, and did the flowers
bend to the soft breeze that now breathed through the hot air, growing
constantly stronger and stronger, so that a rustling and murmuring
arose in the forest behind him, the treetops at his feet began to
whisper, and at last the cool fresh wind from the sea blew over the
panting earth.
The spell was broken; Gotthold again looked at the landscape; but now
with the eye of the artist, who is seeking to obtain the best view of
his subject.
"I chose the morning light then, if one can call it choice; it was a
mistake and I must arrange the atmospheric effect artistically, but the
sun should be at a moderate height above the horizon, almost directly
over the smithy; that will be about six o'clock, and I can have what I
need until eight. I think it will prove a picture which might satisfy
others as well as yonder talkative lady."