Chapter 100
Intoxicated with the bliss of that flower of happiness which they had plucked from the edge of the abyss, they remarked now for the first time that Aunt Valerie had left them. Elsa, who had no secrets from her Reinhold, explained to him in a few words the poor thing's position, and that they had not now a moment to lose in starting on their disagreeable journey homewards.
"Not a moment!" cried Reinhold, rising; "I will give the necessary orders at once."
"They have already been given," said Valerie, who had heard the last words as she entered; "the carriage is at the door."
The noise of the wheels had been inaudible in the deep sand to the happy lovers, as had been also the approach of the rider, whom Aunt Valerie had seen from the window, and to receive whom she had left the room.
He was there; he ordered her to come! She knew it before she opened the letter which Francois handed to her. She had read the letter--in the little room to the left, standing at the open window, while Francois stood outside--and then the enclosure; and as she read the letter she had laughed aloud, and torn the paper into fragments, and thrown the fragments scornfully from the window, out into the storm which in a moment whirled them away.
"Madame laughs," said Francois, speaking French as he always did when he wished to be impressive; "but I can a.s.sure madame that it is no laughing matter, and that if madame is not back at the castle before six o'clock, something terrible will happen."
"I will come."
Francois bowed, swung himself into the saddle again, and--to the breathless astonishment of the village children who had been attracted by the unusual spectacle of a horseman--set spurs to his horse, and, with his head bowed almost to the saddle, dashed off, while Valerie begged Frau Rickmann to send for the carriage which had been put into the head pilot's barn up in the village, and then with a heavy heart went to separate the happy pair. But if she made up her mind to a last meeting with her dreaded, hated tyrant, it was only for the sake of those she loved, and for whom in the threatening catastrophe she would save whatever might still be possible to save! It would not be much--she knew his rapacity--but enough perhaps to secure her Elsa's future, to free poor Ottomar from his difficulties. And she smiled as she thought that even Elsa could believe she was thinking of herself in this matter, of her future!--Good G.o.d!
Elsa was ready at once, and Reinhold would not detain her by word or look. He would have dearly liked to go with her, but that was not to be thought of. He must not leave his post now for a single hour; at any moment duty might call upon him again.
And before Elsa had got her cloak on a pilot came in to bring news of the boat which had gone out at two o'clock after the steamer that had been signalled from Wissow Head, asking for a pilot. They had got out to sea in ten minutes and round the Head in half an hour; but the steamer was no longer there, and must meanwhile have doubled the Golmberg and got out to sea, as they had seen for themselves when they had pa.s.sed the Golmberg. On their way back--about half-past four--they had been alarmed at seeing so much surf on the dunes between the Head and the Golmberg, and had kept insh.o.r.e as much as possible, to make out if the sea had broken through there as the Captain had foretold. They could not make quite certain at first, just on account of the heavy sea; but when they went in closer still, so as to be sure, Clas Lachmund first, and then all the rest too, had seen two people on the White Dune, one of whom looked like a woman and had not moved, but the other--a man--had made signs to them. They could not reach them, however, try as they would, and might think themselves lucky that they got off again even, for they had run aground close by the White Dune, and had seen then for certain that the sea had broken in--north and south of the White Dune, and probably at other points too--for they could see nothing but water far inland. How far they could not say; the weather was too hazy. They must be in a bad way at Ahlbeck too; but they had not gone nearer in there, for the people there, with Wissow Head hard by, could be in no danger of losing their lives; but the two people on the White Dune would be in a very bad case if they could not be brought off before night.
"Who can the unfortunate people be?" asked Valerie.
"s.h.i.+pwrecked folk; what else could they be!" answered Reinhold.
"Good-bye, my Reinhold," said Elsa; and then clinging to him, half laughing, half crying: "Take six more men with you who know what they are about!"
"And you will pledge me your word," said Reinhold, "that the carriage shall not drive down from the village to the castle, if from the height above you cannot see the road absolutely clear through the hollow!"
The two ladies were gone, and Reinhold got ready for his second expedition. It was not exactly his duty, any more than the morning's work had been; only none of the men--not even the best of them--quite knew how to handle the new lifeboat.
Those two people on the dune, however--he had not liked to say so to Elsa--but they could not be s.h.i.+pwrecked people, for any vessel that had gone ash.o.r.e there would have been signalled long ago from Wissow Head.
They could not well be from Politz's farm either, though that was close by, for Frau Rickmann had told him when he went to change his clothes, that Politz had sent back word by the messenger he had despatched to him, that he would send little Ernst and his men with the live stock to Warnow; but he could not go away himself, neither could Marie, and still less his wife, who had been confined last night, of a boy. Things could not be so bad with them either.
But things were serious now--very serious--and even if the head pilot Bonsak had a little exaggerated, as he did sometimes in similar cases, there was danger any way; danger for poor Frau Politz, who was kept to the house by the most sacred of duties; greater danger still for the two of whom he asked to know nothing but that they were fellow-creatures who without him must perish.
CHAPTER X.
The large room at the Warnow Inn, filled with the smoke of bad tobacco and the odour of stale beer and spirits, was crowded with the noisy waggoners who had arrived that morning, and who had been joined in the course of the afternoon by
The landlord was so loud and eager in his talk, that he never noticed his wife come in and take the keys of the best rooms upstairs from the board on the door, while the maid took the two bra.s.s candlesticks from the cupboard, into which she put candles, and then lighted them and ran after her mistress. He only turned round when some one touched him on the shoulder and asked where he could put up his horses, the ostler said there was no more room.
"No more there is," said the landlord; "where do you come from?"
"From Neuenfahr; the gentlefolks I brought are upstairs now."
"Who are they?" asked the landlord. "Don't know; a young gentleman and a young lady; something out of the common I should think. I couldn't drive quick enough for 'em; but how's a man to drive fast in this weather? We came a foot's pace. Two horses or one made no difference. A one-horse carriage that was behind us might easily have got ahead. It must have been a Warnow trap, it turned to the right as we came to the village."
"Jochen Katzenow," said the landlord, "was at Neuenfahr this morning; he's got a devil of a horse! Well, come along; we'll see what can be done; but I don't think we can manage it."
The Neuenfahr man followed the landlord into the hall, where they encountered the gentleman whom he had brought, who took the landlord on one side and spoke to him in an under-tone.
"They won't have done in a hurry," thought the driver, and so went out, unharnessed his horses, and, leaving the carriage standing for the time, led them under the overhanging roof of a barn, where they would be sheltered at any rate from the worst of the storm. He had just spread some horse-cloths over the smoking animals when the gentleman left the house and came up to him.
"I shall probably not remain long here," said the gentleman; "perhaps not more than an hour, and then shall continue our journey."
"Where to, sir?"
"To Prora, or back to Neuenfahr; I do not know yet."
"It can't be done, sir."
"Why not?"
"The horses couldn't do it."
"I know better what horses can do; I will give you my orders by-and-by."
The Neuenfahr man was irritated at the imperious tone in which the gentleman spoke to him, but he did not venture to contradict him. The gentleman, who now wore a greatcoat with metal b.u.t.tons--during the drive he had worn a plain overcoat--turned up the collar as he pa.s.sed round the shed towards the street. The light from the tap-room fell full upon his face.
"Aha!" said the Neuenfahr man; "I thought as much. One doesn't forget these things, however long one has been in the reserve. Where the devil is the Lieutenant going to?"
Ottomar had obtained full directions from the landlord, and indeed the road which led straight down through the village could not be mistaken.
He walked slowly, and often stood still; sometimes because the storm which met him full would not allow him to continue, and sometimes because he had to try and recollect what he wanted to do at the castle.
His head was confused with the long drive in an open carriage through this fearful storm, and his heart felt dead within him; he felt as if he had not energy left to tell the villain to his face that he was a villain. Besides, it ought to be, it must be done in his aunt's presence, if the scoundrel were not to be able to deny everything afterwards, and entangle his aunt again in his web of lies as he had entangled them all. Or was it all an arranged plot between him and his aunt! It looked suspicious that she should have left the castle so early to-day, when he must have been expected to come to call the villain to account. She had gone with Elsa, it was true; but might not the affection which she seemed to bestow upon Elsa--in secret, like all the rest of these dark mysteries--be affection after the pattern of Giraldi's? Perhaps his aunt had undertaken to allure and befool Elsa as Giraldi had done by him; and they had both fallen into the snare, and the crafty fowlers were laughing at their foolish prey. Poor Elsa! who had also no doubt put her faith in these fair promises, and now would have to try how she could get on as the wife of a Superintendent of Pilots with a few hundred thalers, and her home in that miserable fis.h.i.+ng hamlet. "That was not what had been looked forward to for her, poor Elsa! That was to have been our inheritance, the castle by the sea, as we called it when we used to lay plans for our future; we were to live there together, you in one wing and I in the other; and when you married the prince and I the princess we were to draw lots which should have it to themselves; we could not continue together because of all the suite.
"And now, my dearest and best of sisters, you are far from me, waiting for your lover who is out in the storm, perhaps, to save the precious lives of a few herring-fishers; and I----"
At the spot where the road, leaving behind it the first houses in the village, turned downwards through a narrow gorge which led to the hollow whence it again began to rise towards the castle, he sat down upon a stone which projected from the extreme edge of the gorge towards the hollow, and was only held in its hazardous position by the roots of a magnificent fir-tree, which must once have stood much farther from the edge, and which now creaked and groaned as it bent backwards under the pressure of the gale, as if trying to avoid falling into the depths.
"There is no help for either of us," said Ottomar, "it has all crumbled away bit by bit; and we are hanging with our roots in the air. The stone that would gladly have held us up cannot do it; rather the reverse. And if there come one great storm, such as this, we must both fall. I wish to G.o.d we lay there, and that you would fall upon my head and kill me, and that the flood would come and wash us out to sea, and no one should know how we came to our end."
And she? She, whom he had just left in the miserable, dreary inn-room, she, whose kisses he still felt upon his lips, and who, as he went out at the door--thinking, no doubt, that he could not see her--threw herself upon the sofa, and leaning her head upon the back covered her face with her hands, weeping he was certain. For what? for her miserable fate that bound her to a man weaker than herself. She was strong, she would endure it all, come what would. But what could come for her? She had repeated to him a hundred times on the road, that he was not to trouble himself any more about that miserable money; that her father was far too proud to refuse her entreaty, the first she had made to him since she could remember, the last that she would ever make to him. And she had written to her father from Neuenfahr, where they had had to wait half an hour for the carriage. "The thing is done," she had said, as she stroked his hair from his forehead as a mother might have done to her boy, who had been playing truant from school.
She was the stronger; but then what did she lose? her father?--she seemed never to have really loved him; her comfortable life in her beautiful luxurious home?--what does a girl know of the things that make up her life!--her art? that she could carry with her everywhere; had she not said with a smile, "It will support us both." Of course!
she would have to support him now, the disgraced soldier!
The fir-tree, against which he leaned, creaked and groaned like some tormented creature; Ottomar could feel how the roots heaved and twisted, and the soil showered down the steep gorge, while in the branches the wind whistled and howled and crackled like grape-shot or musketry fire, and from the sea came a roar and thunder as if from an endless line of batteries, whose fire was incessantly kept up.
"It would have been so simple then," said Ottomar; "my father would have paid my few debts and would have been proud of me, instead of sending me a pistol now, as if I did not know as well as he that it is all over for Ottomar von Werben; and Elsa would have often and lovingly talked of her brother, who fell at Vionville. Dear Elsa, how I should like to see her once more!"
He had learned from the landlord that the carriage with the two ladies, if they returned this evening as the driver had told him, must pa.s.s this way, it being the only road still practicable; the shorter road through the lower ground was no longer pa.s.sable. Ottomar wondered what the man meant by the lower ground. The situation was so entirely different from what he had heard described; the sea seemed to be breaking immediately behind the castle, though in the wet, grey mist which was driving in his face he could no longer distinguish individual objects. The castle itself, which must surely be close under his feet, seemed to be a mile off; he could hardly have seen it sometimes, if lights had not been constantly flickering in the windows. In the indistinct ma.s.ses of building to the left of the castle, which must belong to the farm, lights also glimmered occasionally, s.h.i.+fting their places as if people were running about with lanterns; and once or twice he fancied that he heard men's voices and the lowing of cattle. It might be all a delusion of his senses, which were beginning to fail him, as he sat there unsheltered from the raging storm which was freezing the very marrow of his bones. He must go on, if he were not to die here like a straggler behind a hedge on the roadside.
And yet he remained; but through his bewildered brain wilder and more confused images chased each other. There was a Christmas-tree with lighted candles, and he and Elsa came to the door hand-in-hand, and their father and mother stood at the table, on which there were dolls for Elsa, and helmet and sword and sabretache for him, and he threw himself joyfully into his father's arms, who lifted him high in the air and kissed him. Then the Christmas-tree changed into a lofty pine, and the crest of the pine was a blazing chandelier, under which he was dancing with Carla, in defiance of the Count, who looked on with furious glances, while the double ba.s.s boomed, and the violins squeaked, and the dancing couples whirled in and out: Tettritz with Emilie von Fischbach, that tall Wartenberg with little Fraulein von Strummin. Then it was a bivouac fire with the trumpets sounding to the attack at Vionville, against the batteries which thundered in return, and he called laughingly to Tettritz and Wartenberg, "Now, gentlemen, a bullet through the heart, or the cross on the breast!" and set spurs to his charger, which dashed straight forward with a wild neigh. Ottomar started to his feet and looked round him in bewilderment. Where was he?
at his feet there foamed and hissed a broad eddying stream, and now he heard distinctly a horse neighing--close by him--in the hollow way, at the edge of which he stood, and below him was a carriage which was being backed by the resisting horses against the bank.
With one spring he was behind the carriage and helping the coachman to turn the snorting horses; there was just room left.