Problematic Characters Part 22

When Oswald promised to do so, she went away; but after a quarter of an hour she came back and sat down by the young man near the window. She had her knitting in her hand, and knit with marvellous rapidity, for one so old, a little baby's sock. There she sat, now listening for the sick man's breathing, and now counting the meshes of her knitting; at times glancing at Oswald with a look of kindly interest from her gray, deep-set eyes.

"I know what that is," she said suddenly, as a bright ray from the setting sun fell through the window upon Oswald's face. "I must have seen you before."

"Why, to be sure," said Oswald, "yesterday, on the heath."

"No, no--not yesterday, no, a few years ago--perhaps forty--let me see, fifty years ago."

"How old are you, Mother Claus?" asked Oswald, surprised to hear her speak of forty and fifty years as a few years.

"I'll be eighty-two next Christmas coming," replied the old woman, resuming her knitting as if she had been warned that she would not have much time left.

"Eighty-two!" cried Oswald, astonished; "and have you lived all the time in this village?"

"Yes, here and at the big house. I was born there, on Holy Christmas Eve, in the year one thousand seven hundred and sixty-four, on the same day and in the same hour as the father of the late baron----"

"How long is it since he died?"

"Well, it may be some forty years--he would be just as old as I am, eighty-two years, hm, hm, eighty-two years--I wonder how he would look--wrinkled like me? and he was a fine fellow--yes, he was a fine fellow!"

The memory of the third baron, counting upwards, seemed to have a special interest for the old woman; she let the thin brown hands, with the knitting, sink into her lap, and stared dreamily into vacancy. "A fine fellow!" she whispered once more, and her wrinkled face brightened up with a sweet smile; then two big tears slowly appeared between the cast-down lashes and rolled down the wrinkled brown cheeks, upon her wrinkled brown hands.... What was she looking at in that moment, the old woman? Did she see herself again as she was sixty-five years ago, a tall, beautiful thing, with large gray eyes full of fire, and an abundance of soft, dark blonde hair, as she stole down at night into the garden of the chateau, to give a rendezvous to the young baron? The wild young baron, with whom she had grown up like a sister, and whom she loved like a brother--and like her best beloved, since he vowed he would make her a baroness as soon as he was master at Grenwitz. Then she was young and he was young; and the sun shone in those days so warm and mild into her young, fresh heart, and the larks sang so merrily, and the moonlight danced about slyly in the park, and the nightingale sobbed and wailed in the shrubbery as if her full little heart was breaking with loving joy and loving pain--for alas! the young baron had gone away that morning--how far? Beyond the sea, sent to Sweden to his relations there, to make an end to that foolish story with pretty Lizzie. And he sent her not a word, not a word, for one, two, three years, and when he came back from Sweden--great G.o.d! he was not alone then--a beautiful young wife sat by his side, and the old master and mistress were delighted, and the servants cheered, and they danced and shouted for joy. But in the thickest shrubbery near the chateau a girl had hid herself, the prettiest of all the girls far and near, and she was sobbing gently, gently, and the tears were rolling down one by one, and from much weeping her beautiful eyes were sunk deep down, and the glorious hair had turned gray, and--there she was now sitting, an old, immensely old woman--and the tears were still rolling down, one by one, over the wrinkled brown cheeks, over the wrinkled brown hands.

"A fine fellow," she said. "I have never in my life seen so fine a one again until yesterday morning, when you were suddenly standing before me on the heath. Then you looked so familiar to me, and now I know wherefore. By your leave, young master, how old are you now?"

"Twenty-three!"

"Twenty-three years; yes, yes, I know that, twenty-three years--you have not grown old, you are still young and fair."

Again she looked at Oswald, not with the careful look of shy examination, but openly and joyously, as an old grandmother looks upon her grandchild by her side. Suddenly she rose, went up to Oswald, and putting her withered, trembling hands on his head, she said slowly and solemnly, in a voice which did not seem to be hers, but to belong to another world: "The Lord bless thee and preserve thee, Oscar!" Then she sat down again on her low chair and began her knitting once more, busily, busily, that the needles sang, and she nodded her gray head and smiled so happy, as if a voice, which she alone could hear, was telling her an old, long-lost fairy tale of wondrous beauty about youth and love and the songs of nightingales.

CHAPTER XXI.

It began to darken in the low room; the needles of the old woman were still clicking busily; the cuckoo clock in the corner was ticking louder and louder in the deep silence, and Oswald was still sitting by the open window, his head leaning on his hand, as in a dream.

The rolling of a vehicle which came up the village street aroused him.

A light open carriage, with two horses, stopped at the cottage door; a man stepped out lightly and entered the room.

"Good evening," said a dear, rather decided voice. "Doctor Stein?--very glad to make your acquaintance--my name is Braun. Bruno told me I would find the Good Samaritan here--how is our patient?--ah, there in the bed?--what do you say, my good woman, could you get us a light, while Doctor Stein has the kindness to tell me all he knows about the case?"

Oswald described what he had seen as well as he could.

"I thought so," said Doctor Braun; "it is an attack of epilepsy. Has your son ever had an attack before?" he asked the old woman, who was coming back, protecting a thin tallow candle with her hand, so that only a faint gleam fell upon her wrinkled face.

"He is not my son, and his wife was not my daughter," said Mother Claus, placing the candle on a settee near the bed; "but his children are my dear grandchildren."

The doctor cast a searching glance at the face of the old woman--and then his eye turned to Oswald--but he kept the remark he was going to make to himself, took the light, and examined the face of the sick man.

Oswald took the candle and said: "Please let me help you."

"Thank you," said the doctor, examining the patient

In the mean time Oswald looked more closely at the newcomer. He was a man of from twenty-five to thirty, tall and rather thin, dressed in a simple, comfortable, but elegant summer costume. His head was remarkably well formed, and thickly covered with very dark hair, which refused to curl, and stood like a kind of cap around the firm, somewhat prominent forehead. The nose did not belong to any well-defined cla.s.s, but it was finely cut and full of expression; so was also the mouth, with its lips sharply defined, and yet delicately formed, as we find them in antique heads, especially in Mercuries, as if they might fully part for the sake of a pleasant, intelligent word. A thick silky beard covered chin and cheeks, harmonizing in color and feature with the hair, and completing the manly fair character of the face. Oswald also noticed, as the doctor was raising the eyelids of his patient, that his hands were of almost womanly delicacy and beauty of form.

"It is as I thought," said Doctor Braun, rising; "an epileptic attack.

I can prescribe nothing; nature will help. For the present he must be kept quiet. To-morrow he will be rather weak, but otherwise quite well again."

"Then such attacks are not dangerous?" asked Oswald.

"They can become fatal," replied the doctor, "especially when the patient is a hard drinker, as I presume is the case here. A radical cure is not to be expected, at least not under these circ.u.mstances; it is always long and tedious."

"I had made up my mind to spend part of the night here," said Oswald; "but now, I suppose that is not necessary?"

"By no means! Rest, as I said, is all that is required. The man is a widower?" he added, looking around in the room.

"Annie is dead," said Mother Claus; "but I'll take care of Jake. Old people like myself don't need much sleep; we shall soon have time enough to sleep. You can safely go home, young gentleman. You are very good; I always said so. Good-by, doctor; many thanks for Jake, as he can't thank you himself, and perhaps he wouldn't thank you even if he could. Good-by, young master."

With these words she showed the two to the door and out of the house.

"Will you come with me a little way?" said the doctor, as they were standing outside the door. "I shall go by Berkow, where I have to make a call in the village, and you can get out whenever you wish. The evening is really magnificent, and you are, at any rate, too late for supper at Grenwitz, as I can tell you from best authority, for I have taken supper there myself."

"You have taken supper there?" said Oswald, taking a seat in the doctor's carriage; "did Bruno not find you at home?"

"The poor boy had his ride for nothing; for while he was racing at full speed to my house, I was quietly enjoying myself at Grenwitz."

"And may I ask what brought you to Grenwitz?"

The doctor laughed. "_O tempora, o mores_--there you are! Mentor protects and nurses other people's children and does not know that his own Telemachus is lying dangerously ill at home."

"You are pleased to joke."

"Indeed I do; Malte is as well as a boy can be who wants to have no lessons to-morrow. But he had taken a long walk and was tired; this looked to the baron and the baroness like the beginning of typhus fever, and as there was no sensible man present to raise his voice against it, they sent at once for the unlucky man who enjoys the unenviable privilege of having to account for all the nonsense that can be found in people's heads--I mean the doctor. We had just finished supper, which--as you know, or, to speak with the baroness, as you ought to know--is always punctually served at eight o'clock, and I was just stepping into my carriage when that jewel of a boy, Bruno, came at full speed into the court-yard. You ought to have seen the horror of the baron and the baroness! He told us in breathless haste that Jake was about to die, and that Doctor Stein was by his bedside, and that I must come instantly. But, _a propos_, what does it mean that the old woman called you in that odd way, 'Young master?' I suppose I shall have to call you Baron Stein hereafter?"

"What an idea!" laughed Oswald, who was very much pleased with the manner of his new acquaintance. "No; I am as little of n.o.ble birth as Mother Claus, who, I cannot imagine why, but probably misled by some dim recollections of her early days, insists upon making me her young master."

"She is a strange old woman," said the doctor. "Just see how beautifully the moon rises there over the edge of the forest, and how lightly the mist is resting on the meadows--a very strange woman!

I remember now that I have been struck by her before--she looks like--well, like what?"

"Like an old, old woman from Grimm's Fairy Tales, who at the proper time changes into a beautiful princess!"

"That is it--she has a wonderful fire in her deep-sunk eyes. She always looks to me as if her old face was only a mask under which she hides a youthful soul."

"So it is in reality," said Oswald, and he told the doctor the strange conversation he had had with Mother Claus the day before on the heath, and how her words had appeared to him as natural and truthful as the song of the lark on the heath, and how little he had been pleased afterwards with the sermon of the self-sufficient preacher.

"Yes indeed," said the doctor. "There is truth in Goethe's words: It annoys men to find the truth so simple. They always try to make people believe truth is a marvel, a great wonder, and therefore they adorn it with all kinds of gay rags and fragments, and then carry it about in procession; while such people, like our old woman, read only one chapter in the great book of the universe, but they read it again and again, for sixty, seventy years, till they know it by heart. And as the whole book is but one great revelation, they learn in the end just as much as the great crowd of partially learned men, who turn in restless haste leaf after leaf, pick out a little here and a little there, and are finally about as wise or as stupid as they were before."

"Yes indeed," said Oswald; "a striking proof of the justness of your remark is, for instance, the Baroness Grenwitz. What has she not read!