"'You must put your arm round him,' a voice within me cried, 'otherwise he will still not find rest.'

"Twice or three times I attempted, and as often I drew back.

"What if Martha should suddenly wake! But even then her eyes saw nothing--her ears heard nothing.

"And I did it.

"Then a wild joy seized me: secretly I pressed him to me--and within me there arose the jubilant thought: 'Ah, how I would care for you and watch over you; how I would kiss those wicked furrows away from your brow, and the troubles from your soul! How I would fight for you with my virgin strength and never rest till your eyes were once more glad, and your heart once more full of sunshine! But for that----I looked across at Martha. Yes, she lived, she still lived. Her bosom rose and fell in short, rapid gasps. She seemed more alive than ever.

"And suddenly it flamed up before me, and the words seemed as if I saw them distinctly written over there on the wall--

"'_Oh, that she might die!_'

"Yes, that was it, that was it.

"Oh, that she might die! Oh, that she might die!"

VII.

Drawing a deep breath, the physician stopped short, and wiped the perspiration from his forehead.

Robert had jumped up, stared for a moment at the flaming orb of the lamp, as if dazzled by the light, and then rushed towards the old man as if to tear the paper out of his hands.

"That does indeed stand there?" he stammered.

"Read for yourself!" said the other.

A long silence ensued.

The lamp burnt with its quiet, cheery light as if it were illumining a deed of brightest gladsomeness, and softly, as if with velvety paws, the wind touched the windows. Downstairs everything seemed to be growing quieter. The intervals between the bursts of laughter grew longer and longer--the babel of voices changed to a steady, dull buzz.

The people were getting tired--they were digesting.

The physician looked round for Robert. He had dropped down once more upon the ledge of the empty bedstead, had buried his face in his hands, and was absolutely motionless.

Only his heaving breath, which escaped his breast in short, irregular gasps, testified to the turmoil that was raging within him.

"Come to yourself, my boy," said the physician, laying his hand on Robert's shoulder.

"Uncle, of course it goes without saying--she was not in her right mind when she wrote this?"

"She was never more in her right mind than at that moment!"

"How dare you affirm such a thing? Do not insult the dead!"

"Nothing is further from my thoughts, dear boy. Who shall presume to cast the first stone at her? But if you have been listening attentively, you will certainly understand that her whole life was nothing more than the maturing of this moment. Already in her girlish dreams the seeds of this criminal wish lay buried; they put forth sudden shoots on yonder stone in the wood, and came into blossom at the very hour when she crept into your room to unite you with Martha."

"Why did she do that, if she herself wished to step into Martha's place?"

"She was not conscious of what she wished. All her efforts to make you and Martha happy were nothing further than the secret struggle which her pure honest nature was waging with the wish growing up within her, since that day of her girlhood when she had seen you again. But she did not know it. Even her love for you did not become clear to her till she entered your house. How much less then could she suspect what was slumbering, as the fruit of this love, within her soul."

"And yet you say she fought against it and tried to exterminate it?"

"Not spiritually, not consciously. Her thought remained pure till that terrible midnight hour. It was only her instinct which struggled against the poison. That drew new resources daily from the healthy depths of her strong nature, by which to secrete the putrid matter or at least to enclose it so that it became innocuous. For this reason she condemned herself to exile, for this reason even in face of your house she contemplated a hasty retreat. How little she was, even later, conscious of the processes which for years had been developing within her, you may see by the whole tone of her reminiscences. She absolutely unconsciously dwells upon many unimportant incidents, which have nothing to do with the progress of the story and yet are valuable as showing the gradual development of her wish. She knows not why she does so: her feeling alone tells her: this has some connection with my guilt."

"I believe in no guilt!" exclaimed Robert, in greatest excitement. "If that wish was not a mere hallucination, not the result of a momentarily morbid, over-strung frame of mind, but had lain for a long while dormant in her nature, how came it that, only six hours before uttering it, she expressed herself with such indignation about my mother because she suspected her of harbouring it?"

"For my part," replied the old man, "nothing is more convincing for my view of the matter, than this very indignation. To free her own conscience from the burden which she felt resting upon it, she cast every stone which she could take hold of, at your mother. It was terror at her own sin which drove her to it."

"And the n.o.ble, self-sacrificing resolve which she formed only a few days before?"

Over the old man's weather-beaten features there flitted a smile full of understanding and forgiveness.

Then he said, "The old proverb about the good intentions with which the path to h.e.l.l is paved, may hold good here too; but it only touches the surface of the matter. This resolve was a last abortive attempt to unite sisterly love with her longing for you, to make a pact between her powerful, burning desire for happiness and the impulse to keep faith towards her sister. It was the most unnatural thing she could hit upon, for silent resignation was not in her line. It was a particularly cruel fate which doomed her, with her n.o.ble disposition and powerful will, to be forced into a sin which is the most common and most cowardly on earth, a sin which I have found lurking on countless faces, when I stood at the bedside of people seriously ill. This, my boy, is one of the darkest spots in human nature, a remnant of b.e.s.t.i.a.lity which has managed to find its way into our tamed world; even such sensitive natures as Olga may fall a prey to it, though of course they perish through it, while coa.r.s.er souls simply conceal and suppress what is struggling to appear from the darkest depths of their beings. Wait, I will speak more plainly. I once came to the bedside of a rich old man, a landowner, whose last breath was not far off. At the head of his bed stood his eldest son, a man of about forty, who for long years had held the post of inspector on strange estates, and whose intended bride was beginning to grow old and faded with waiting. The son was a good, honest fellow who would not have hurt a fly, who loved his father with all his heart, and would certainly have been ashamed to wish his deadliest enemy any ill; but in the stealthy, terrified glance with which he watched me, while I bent down my ear towards the old man's breast, I distinctly read the wish! 'Oh, that he might die!' Another time I was called in to a woman who was very happy in second marriage.

Only one cloud troubled her new happiness. Her husband could not befriend himself with the child of her first marriage. He knitted his brows at the mere mention of the little creature, and as she loved him pa.s.sionately, she feared he might come to hate her on the child's account, and hid it away from him as much as ever she could. The child got scarlet fever. I found the mother kneeling at its bedside and weeping bitterly. She trembled in fear for the feeble little life.

Had she not herself brought it forth! Then her husband entered the room--she started--and in the restless, wavering glance which she cast towards the cradle, there stood clearly and legibly written: 'It would be for my happiness, if you died.' I could give you innumerable examples where jealousy, covetousness, desire for independence, restlessness, impulse for liberty, amorous longing, have matured this terrible, criminal wish, which suddenly rises up dark and gigantic within the human breast, in which hitherto only love and light have found a place. Happily nowadays it does not do much harm. In olden, more barbarous times, when the pa.s.sions were permitted to rage unfettered, the deed aided the thought. And if perchance in the family circle any one happened to be in the other's way, poison and the dagger simply claimed their victims. History and literature abound with murders of this kind, and that great student of mankind, Shakspeare, for example, knows hardly any other tragic motive besides murder of kin. To-day people have grown calmer, and if a struggle for existence happens nowadays to creep into the holy family circle, one is content to wish the obnoxious one, in a dark hour, six feet under the earth.

This wish is the ancient murder restrained by modern civilisation.

There, my boy, now I have given you a long discourse, and if, meanwhile, your blood has cooled down, my object is fulfilled."

"So you absolutely condemn her?" Robert anxiously stammered forth.

"My dear boy, I condemn no one," replied the old man, with a serious smile, "least of all such an honest nature as Olga was. The fact alone that she had the courage to confess to herself and to him whom she loved most, what she was guilty of, raises her above the others. For this wish, of which we are speaking, as it is the most hideous spiritual sin of which the human soul can become guilty, so it is also the most secret. No friend confides it to a friend, no husband whispers it in the darkness of the nocturnal couch to his wife, no penitent dares to confess it to his spiritual adviser, even the prayer that struggles upwards to heaven out of the depths of contrition, pa.s.ses it over in hypocritical silence. G.o.d may have knowledge of everything, only not of this baseness. Let this perish in shame and silence, as it was brought forth in night and horror. And more than this! This wish is the only crime for which there is commonly no expiation, no punishment either before the tribunal of the outer world, or one's own conscience.

This is a case in which even that merciless judge which a man carries about within him proves amenable to bribery. Thousands of people who have once been guilty of this baseness go on living happily, put on flesh in perfect peace of soul, and rejoice in the fulfilment of their wish, which they themselves forget as speedily as possible, as soon as ever it is fulfilled. It becomes absorbed into the soul, just as a germ of disease becomes absorbed as soon as the stimulant of disease has disappeared. It is lost without any trace, it is absolutely blotted out by an abundance of social and personal virtues. I on no account say that I condemn these people. What would become of the world if every one who on looking into the gla.s.s discovered a wart on his face, were to cut his throat in despair at the fact? The people I have described to you are the healthy every-day people, whose so-called good const.i.tution can stand a blow, and who care not a rap if now and again something objectionable sticks to them. Olga was moulded of finer clay, her nervous system was sensible to lesser shocks, and what only caused others a slight irritation, was to her already a lash of the whip. Such natures are often somewhat morbid, they incline towards melancholy and hysteria, and their soul-life is governed by imaginations, which, in the eyes of others, are apt to a.s.sume the character of fixed ideas. And yet everything about them is strictly normal, indeed their organism works even more accurately than that of the ordinary, average human being, and if one were to place them, like delicate chemical scales under a gla.s.s case, one might see them work wonders. As a rule a certain weakness of purpose cleaves to this cla.s.s of sensitive people, which makes them shyly retreat into themselves at the slightest extraneous touch--and this is lucky for them; for thus they are saved all violent collision with the outer world, to which they would not, after all, prove equal. But woe to those among them who are driven by some impetuous desire, some mighty pa.s.sion, straight among rocks and thorns! Then it is very possible that an adhering thorn, which others would hardly have noticed, may become to them a poisoned arrow, and corrode their body and soul till they perish in consequence. There, now, I have talked enough. Here lie two or three more sheets. Listen!

Here we shall learn how one may be ruined by a wish."

VIII.

"Of that which now followed, I have only retained a vague recollection.

I remember that I suddenly uttered a shriek, which made even Martha start up, that I flung myself down at her bedside, clutched her burning hands, and continued to cry out, 'Save me! save me! wake up!'

"And then again I find myself in a different room, into which Robert has taken me. I remember how, there, in the looking-gla.s.s, I recognised my distorted face, bathed in the perspiration of terror, how I burst into a laugh, and, shuddering at my own laughter, sank all in a heap, and how all the while, chuckling and hissing with a thousand covetous voices, there came sounding in my ears the wish: 'Oh, that she might die!' How shall I describe it all, without being hunted to death by the spectres of that night?

"The only clear remembrance that I still retain is that suddenly the doctor's dear old face was bending over me, that I had to drink something that tasted bitter, and--then I know nothing more.

"When I awoke the pale light of dawn gleamed through the windows. My head ached, I looked around dazed, and then it seemed as if I saw written on the whitewashed wall opposite, the words: 'Oh, that she might die!'

"I shuddered, and then the thought rose within me: 'Now, if she dies, it will be your wish which has murdered her.'