"You, or her."

There was a report. Regina, with a cry of pain, fell with her forehead against the edge of the bed, and at the same moment a great rumbling and crackling was heard from the opposite wall. The portrait of his beautiful grandmother had crashed to the ground.

He stared wildly round him, only just arriving at complete consciousness.

"Are you wounded?" he asked, laying his hand gently on the dark head.

"I--don't--know, _Herr_," and then she glided across the floor to her mattress.

He dressed himself and kindled a light. It now all appeared a confused nightmare.

Ah! but if she died, if he had killed her?

When he drew aside the curtain, he beheld her cowering and shivering in her corner, holding up the counterpane in her teeth. It was smeared with blood.

"For G.o.d's sake--show me. Where were you hit?" he cried.

She let the counterpane drop as far as her breast, and silently offered her naked shoulder for his inspection. Blood was streaming from it.

But the first glance satisfied him, the connoisseur in wounds, that it was a mere surface shot. It would heal of itself in a few days.

"Thank G.o.d! Thank G.o.d!"

She stared up at him absently with wide eyes.

"It is nothing," he stammered. "A scratch--nothing more."

She appeared not to hear what he said.

"Pull yourself together like a man. Not a word, not a look, must betray your real feelings."

With this self-exhortation he withdrew, and wearily put down the light on the table.

What now? Where should he go? To stay meant ruin and d.a.m.nation.

This very hour he must go away. Away! Somewhere, _any_where, so long as a barrier of his fellow-creatures separated him from her for evermore.

And in breathless haste he began to gather together papers that proved his father's guilt, as if they were the most precious possessions in the world.

CHAPTER XV

More than three months had pa.s.sed away since Boleslav von Schranden had turned his back on the inheritance of his fathers.

In the meantime spring had come. Moss, starred with anemones, grew amongst the short-bladed gra.s.s; the ditches were full of a luxuriant growth of bindweed and nettles; and at every breeze the boughs rained a shower of crumbling catkins. The plough left a trail of smooth, black furrows on the bosom of the awakening earth, and seed-cloths were already being put out to air.

It was the first spring for many and many a long year that had begun in peace, and of which there were hopes of its ending in peace.

Europe's evil genius was vanquished. Like Prometheus he lay chained to his barren sea-girt rock; and so the sword was hung up to rust, and the ploughshare and harrow resumed their sway.

What had taken place on the sh.o.r.es of the Mediterranean in the month of March, the inhabitants of quiet country towns and out-of-the-way moorland villages had as yet no suspicion. Not a breath had reached them of that interrupted quadrille at Prince Metternich's ball, of the fury and consternation of sovereigns and potentates; they knew nothing of foam-bespattered proscriptions issued against the escaped rebel, of re-arming and rumours of war.

The lark's carolling in the sky seemed a jocund invitation to resume labour in the fields, the womb of the earth opened with yearning for the crops from which it had fasted so long.

One day towards the end of April, a curious regiment was seen on the king's highroad approaching the county town of Wartenstein, which excited the wondering interest of all whom they pa.s.sed by the way.

It was not easy to decide at once whether they were soldiers or workmen. Most of them were armed, but side by side with the gun on their shoulders was a spade, and from the red bundles slung across their backs peeped whetstones and scythe-blades. Ten or twelve of them were mounted, but behind came as baggage a stream of rough waggons, composed of about twenty axle wheels, loaded with bursting sacks of corn and implements of every description. Altogether the regiment numbered about a hundred and fifty, marching in half military fashion in double file. It consisted of muscular youths, for the most part fair and of ruddy complexions, with thickset figures. Their faces were broad and bony, not German, and still less Polish, in type. They spoke a language unknown in the neighbourhood, and sang songs of which no one knew the tune. Notwithstanding, their leader was German, and so was the discipline which had trained their limbs and given to their movements a certain dignity of bearing.

At the head of the procession rode one to whom they looked up with awe and affection, and whose brief and not unfriendly words of command they obeyed with almost childlike zeal. It was Boleslav, who came with this little army to reconquer his own territory.

He had recruited it far away in the Lithuanian East, on the remotest border of the province, whither neither good nor evil reports of the name of Schranden had ever penetrated. During his five years' previous intercourse with this people, he had become intimately acquainted with their habits and customs, and took care to choose his pioneers from those who had been in the war, and become accustomed to the rigours of a soldier's life, but who were still unfamiliar enough with the German tongue to have their minds poisoned by the Schrandeners' gossip.

Now he had every hope that the fate of his father, who had failed to find either serf or labourer to bind himself to work for him, would not be his. And should the Schrandeners offer fight to these workpeople, as they had done to the Polish serfs whom his father had been obliged to call to his a.s.sistance, so much the worse for the Schrandeners; they would only be sent home with bleeding noses.

In proud self-reliance he looked coming events in the face. He would willingly have returned home earlier, only, to prosecute his enterprise on the scale it demanded, he was forced to wait till the time in which he could claim his aunt's legacy, and so have the necessary means at his disposal.

He had lived through hard times since that January night, when, to flee the coercion of his hot young blood, he had dashed out into the snow-clad, moon-illumined landscape, followed by the cries of the unhappy woman who could not understand what ailed him.

It was long before the furnace within him abated, and her beseeching, frightened eyes became dimmer in his memory. In Konigsberg, where he had gone direct from home, he had meditated obtaining, through boldly seeking a trial, that justice long denied to his house. But though the cross on his breast compelled the doors that had been shut on his father to open to him, the polite shrug of the shoulders with which the judges promised to see what could be done, and then coolly referred him to one Court of Appeal after another, taught him that the pa.s.sionate self-surrender he had dreamed of would be here ill-timed and out of place.

So he again packed up his father's correspondence, which of his own free will he had desired to make public in order to clear up every shadow of mystery, and felt he must keep it till a more favourable opportunity offered itself. Besides, he had destroyed too much that might have had a vindicating effect, and to court the risk of his own condemnation might after all be acting unfairly to his father's memory.

Contact with the outer world cooled and damped in a singular way his ardour; and the feverish tension of his emotions gradually relaxed, giving place to a more normal state of mind. He was confronted with reasoning instead of anathemas, courteous words instead of threats--and this worked a soothing and beneficial influence on his nature. He projected plans, and prepared himself with composure and deliberation for what the future might have in store for him.

At the same time the magic fascination the wild girl had exercised on him was becoming dimmer in his recollection. Every new face, every new thought, alienated him further from her. Gradually he ceased to reproach himself for having acted with merciless cruelty towards her, and the mastery she had acquired over his senses was now incomprehensible to him. Nevertheless, often when he sat alone at dusk in his private room at the hostelry, he saw those eyes again flashing soft fire, and felt her presence thrill through his veins. Then it seemed as if the scar, that furrowed horizontally his under lip, began to burn like an inflammatory record of that kiss, the only one that the lips of a woman had ever imprinted on his, for his shy and reserved manner had all his life repelled, and kept women at a distance. At such times his whole existence seemed compressed into that one moment's ecstasy. But of course this was only a freak, illusive reverie played his senses, which lamplight and work soon dispelled.

He had written to her once or twice in order to set her mind at rest on the subject of his sudden departure, or rather flight--had asked for an answer, and promised a speedy return.

Once he had had news of her--a letter written in bold characters and correctly expressed. After all these years of bondage, the lessons she had learnt in the old pastor's school still evidently stood her in good stead.

In prospect of his near approach to his home, he drew the sheet from his pocket, and read sitting in the saddle the lines, which, in spite of himself, he almost knew by heart.

"My dear Master,--Don't be anxious on my account. No one will do anything to me. They do not know down in the village that you are gone away, and they are frightened of the wolf-traps, for no one has told them that we cleared them away. Every night I see to the pistols and guns in case they should come; but they won't come. As for the wound, I have quite forgotten it. The grocer at Bockeldorf gave me some English sticking-plaster, and when it peeled off, it was entirely healed. The thaw and floods are now over, thank G.o.d. For several days I was obliged to go with very little food, because the water was too high on the meadows for me to wade through, and I would rather have died than go down to Herr Merckel. Ah! dear master, I am so glad that you are coming home soon; for I seem to have nothing to live for, when I have not you to wait upon. I climb up on the Cats' Bridge very often and wait for you there, so that when you come you shall not find it drawn up. Please don't come in the night, nor on Thursday before seven, because then I shall be going to Bockeldorf. The snow is all gone now, and the gra.s.s is beginning to get quite green. Yesterday I heard the swallows twittering in the nest they have built in the eaves; but I haven't seen them yet. Now and then I suffer from st.i.tch in my side, and giddiness, and I have not much appet.i.te. I believe it comes from being so much alone, which I cannot bear. But I don't know why I should tell you all this. Perhaps it is because you were always so kind to me. I can't help always remembering your great kindness to me.--Your _Hochgeboren's_ humble servant,

"Regina Hackelberg."

This letter had filled him with pleasure and satisfaction, for it showed on the one hand that she had very reasonably bowed to the inevitable, and that there was no cause for his anxiety; and on the other, that she still faithfully clung and belonged to him heart and soul. And glad as he might be to feel his blood purged of the unwholesome excitement with which she had inspired it, he could not help being pleased at this proof of her remaining ever his true and willing servant.

His belief in Helene's sacred influence on his destiny had, he imagined, received a new impetus, since her note had saved him in an hour of imminent danger. He wore it gratefully as a talisman on his heart, even if he did not read it so often, and with such delight, as he read Regina's.

Soon after his arrival in the capital, an intense yearning had drawn him to the Cathedral, where he had sought out the old altar-piece, which contained her living image. He experienced a bitter disappointment. The Madonna amidst her lilies and roses appeared absolutely ridiculous. She looked to him now as if she had been baked out of _Marzepan_, and the flowers, with their stiff stalks and drooping heads, appeared as unnatural and insipid as their doll custodian.

And this was what he had carried about with him for years, as the _facsimile_ of his beloved! Certainly it was high time she appeared in her own person before his bodily eyes, otherwise he would be in danger of loving a mere phantom.