The Dead Lake and Other Tales Part 3

At noon, the landlady entered his room, and seeing him asleep, tried to creep away noiselessly. But he was up in a moment, and inquiring if the soup were ready, followed her into the kitchen. "Where is the broth?"

he asked, and approached the hearth whence a tempting odour arose from the different pots and pans. The stupid maid who was stirring something in one of them, let fall her wooden ladle in amazement, and stared open-mouthed at the stranger as he lifted the lid of one of the pots, and examined its contents with a critical eye. Then he asked for a plate poured some of the chicken broth into it, and carefully took out the herbs which floated on it.

When he turned to carry away the soup, he saw the young mother standing at the entrance. "Is this right?" she asked with a charming smile, "instead of sleeping I see you have turned cook."

"I only cook for my patients," he replied, "the care of preparing dinner for the healthy, I leave to our hostess, who will do honour to our confidence in her, and needs no help of mine. Is our patient still asleep?"

"She awoke a moment since, and has just asked for you."

When he entered the sick-room, the child sat upright in her bed, and greeted the doctor with a smile. Then she willingly swallowed a few spoonfuls of the soup which he offered her. She did not appear to be hungry however, but only to do it because he wished it. She listened eagerly to all the doctor said. He told her that in the morning he had watched the fish disport themselves in the lake, and promised her that they would go and catch some of them when she could leave her bed.

After a while she again seemed to lose consciousness. Her blue eyes partially closed, and the small head sank back on her pillows.

"Be of good cheer," said the doctor; "the progress is slow but sure.

Your maid must continue to change the ice frequently. Meanwhile we will go and have dinner. It is ready."

"Leave me here with my child," she whispered. "No," he replied, curtly.

"You must breathe the fresh air. We do not want another patient, and your pulse is much agitated. When we have dined, we will relieve the nurse."

He walked on without another word, and she dared not oppose him. In the shade before the house, close to the window of the sick-room, the cover had been laid for two. Just as they came out, the landlady brought a dish of fish, and placed them on the table, these were followed by a roasted fowl. During the repast they hardly spoke a word to each other.

Both were lost in thought. Now and then, he would persuade her, not only to take a few mouthfuls on her plate, but to eat them. "I shall be offended," he said, gaily, "if you eat nothing. We doctors enjoy the reputation of being great gourmands. I hope I have not disgraced my profession in this instance?"

"Pardon me, if I cannot yet bear the brightness around me," she said.

"My heart has been too deeply troubled. I have pa.s.sed through such heavy storms, that the ground still trembles beneath me. To-morrow I will behave better." Then they both relapsed into silence, and gazed at the lake, over which the mid-day heat was brooding. A cricket chirped in the quiet little garden; and within the landlord snored on his bench by the stove. From the shed by the lake, the gurgle of the waves against the softly rocking boats was heard, and from the sick-room the nurse humming a nursery rhyme, the same with which years ago she had lulled the child in her cradle to sleep.

The quiet day was followed by a restless night. The fever increased in violence; the child moaned continually, and could hardly be kept in her bed. At midnight she grew calmer.

The doctor hardly stirred from the house; only in the evening, he refreshed himself with a cigar out of doors. Then he took a turn round the house, and every time he pa.s.sed the window of the sick-room, stopped for a moment, and spoke a few words of encouragement to the mother who would not quit the bed-side. In the night, while watching with her--the nurse had been sent to bed--he suddenly said; "How much your child resembles you. Just now, in this dim light, when you stooped over her and the little girl looked up to you with that peculiarly spiritual and precocious expression which illness gives, I could almost have fancied that you were sisters. Ten years hence, she will be your very image." "Perhaps you are right," answered the young mother, "but the resemblance is only outward: all her mental qualities she inherits from her father. I often wonder at so great a likeness in such a young child, and _that_ too a girl. Her truthfulness her self-denial, her courage often make me feel as if my lost husband had been given back to me in this child."

"You are mentioning qualities, which during our short acquaintance, I have remarked that you possess in a high degree."

She shook her head, "If I seem courageous, it is only owing to my natural cowardice. When you first saw me I was quite broken-hearted with misery, and anxiety, but I dared not give vent to my feelings, for I knew that I should break down utterly at the sound of my own voice.

My husband could look the most fearful events calmly in the face; and so it is with the child. He could make any sacrifice without thinking of himself."

"And you; I should think, you did not spare yourself in the first days of this trial."

"A mother's heart feels no sacrifice," she answered, "but before my child was born I often had to strive with myself, and force myself to do what was distasteful to me for the sake of others. It is not so with the child, though youth generally is, and well may be, the season for egotism. I could tell you a hundred traits of her excellent disposition. I have often felt anxious about her, for so precocious a tenderness of feeling is said to be the presage of a short life. Who can tell whether it may not be realized."

Everhard looked out on the lake, and seemed not to have heard her last words. Suddenly he said; "you have probably a portrait of your husband: Will you show it to me?"

She took off a delicately worked Venetian chain, which she wore round her neck, opened the locket which was fastened to it, and handed it to him.

He gazed at it for several minutes, and then silently gave it back to her. After a long pause he said, "Was it a youthful attachment?"

"Not quite what is generally so called. I was, certainly very young when I made his acquaintance. Before I saw him no man had ever made any impression on me; but I hardly knew how dearly I loved him till a month after our marriage took place. I only learnt to appreciate him fully during the short period of our union, and my love grew into a pa.s.sion when I had lost him for ever. Had you known him, you would have become friends; he never had an enemy."

Everhard had risen and was pacing the room with noiseless steps. He stopped before the table and took up a volume which projected from a travelling bag. They were Lenau's poems. On the fly leaf was inscribed the name of Lucille.

"Does this poet please you?" asked the doctor.--

"I hardly know whether he repels, or attracts me; and although I generally have a clear perception in such things, yet I cannot quite discover in his thoughts, what is genuine and what is artificial. He suffered much, yet it often appears to me, as if by continually irritating them, he purposely re-opened his wounds. I hardly know why I took this book on my journey; perhaps as a sort of consolation."

"You seek consolation with a poet so weary of life?"

"Why not? _He_ died mad. When I think of that death, the grief for my husband's seems easier to bear, for what a glorious death was granted to him! Young, loved by all, he died heroically for his country! I carry his image undefaced in my heart, not distorted by illness, and the last agony, nor estranged from me by insanity. How dreadful must it not be to see one dear to us deprived of his senses. Do you not feel the same?"

He was silent for a moment, and then replied by another question: "So you would have thought the death of your husband desirable, if he had been doomed to life long insanity?"

"Spare me the answer. I cannot give you one truthfully, without pain."

"So much the better," he said. She did not understand him. A few minutes later he left the room.

He returned an hour after midnight, and insisted on relieving the mother from her watch by the sickbed. She could not resist his imperative manner, and only begged him to let her, and the nurse, relieve him alternately. He promised to do so; and this time kept his promise. In the morning when Lucille awoke, she found the nurse alone, and heard that the doctor lay on a straw mattress in the tap-room to be near at hand in case of need.

A week had pa.s.sed since these events, and Everhard again sat in his little room at the crazy table, and the candle cast the same dim flickering light, as on that first occasion, only the moon shone so brightly through the cas.e.m.e.nt, that one could easily have dispensed with any other light. Everhard had just perused the letter written on that dark and gloomy night, and was now adding a postscript on the blank page.

"A week older, Charles; and yet a week younger! When I look at my face, and compare it with the aged features which appear to me in these pages, then I find that I have made the most retrograde movement, and have again arrived at an age, at which even you did not know me; at a time when I never thought of death, though I touched it daily with my dissecting knife; _then_ I had no more thought of it, than a child's doctor has of catching the measles. I have now studied the morbid symptoms in my letter, as coolly as I once did the strange countenance of number So and so in the hospital.

"You will be glad to hear that I have surmounted my last crisis, but I, when I search my thoughts, can only deplore this.

"Everything was ready for my departure, my trunks so nicely packed, the last leave takings exchanged; I heard the shrill whistle of the engine,--suddenly I am told that I have missed the train; and so I remain, not at home, nor abroad, but sitting at the railway station in a most provoking position. It seems ridiculous to have to stay and unpack, after all these preparations for departure. How it all happened I will tell you in a few words, lest you should think that cowardice overcame me at the last moment, that I regretted to leave this life, and persuaded myself that after all it was the best. No it was not that which played me this trick, it was my old pa.s.sion, my profession! I found it of more importance to save a young life, than to despatch my own, so prematurely old. The child in question was well worth the trouble, that I can tell you. And as for the mother! don't fancy that I have fallen in love; you would be mistaken. Or do you call love, the feelings of a poor devil of a miner who after having been buried in a coal-pit, is brought to life again and rejoices in the first breath of fresh air. Do not be afraid that I shall give you a description of this young woman's charms. Whether she be handsome, amiable--what is usually so called; clever, or whether she possess all those qualities the description of which generally fills columns, I know not. All I know, is that in her presence, I forget my existence; the past, the future--all I feel is that she is there beside me and that I would desire nothing more to all eternity, than that she should remain so. Do you recollect how strange it once seemed to us, that the same pa.s.sionate poet, from whose brain proceeded 'Werther' should have expressed such tame feelings as these--

"'Gaze at the moon, Or think of thee, I fancy 'tis the same.

All in a holy light, I see, And know not how it came.'

"And now to my shame be it spoken, I experience the same feelings in myself. This lunacy, as we jestingly called it, has taken such possession of me, that my only desire at present is, that through all the future years of my life, I might live as in one long night, surrounded by the pale veiled halo which now calms my soul.

"This is but a dream. Ere long I must insist on my little patient's departure to more civilised regions, where she will be better provided for during her convalescence, than she can be here, where chicken-broth is the landlady's sole culinary achievement. Then I shall become unnecessary, and can bid farewell to the Dead Lake, and once more try to live in a world which after these events will seem doubly desolate to me. Was I not right in deploring the departure of the train? By this time I should have reached my destination. But why should not the journey be only postponed for a fortnight; especially as the one I had intended to take does in no wise depend on the weather, or the company.

I can tell you the reason, Charles; I know that you will not despise me for it. My courage is gone! Is it so very despicable that I now dread that gloomy depth, into which a week ago I was willing to plunge; now that I have found a place of rest up here in the daylight? And though in a few days I shall be again roaming about, like the wandering unsettled savage I was, up to this last week, yet nothing can ever efface from my heart the feeling that somewhere between heaven and earth there is a corner where I could live in repose; where, like that Matricide, in Sophocles, I had found a sanctuary from which, awed by the holiness of the refuge even the furies keep aloof, and dare not sully the threshold.

"Unfortunately, it is perfectly clear to me that from her, I also must keep aloof. This woman even if I ventured to offer her my unamiable society for the remainder of her life, could but politely decline. She has made a vow to remain faithful to the memory of her dead husband.

What is a vow? Ought it to be a chain to bind and check our very existence, after we have outgrown our former selves. In the course of seven years the physical part of man is completely renewed, and is our spiritual part, surrounded by new flesh and blood to remain the same, because some misanthrope doubted his own power of revival. Have I not also broken my vow never again to approach a sick-bed. And I even deem this to be rather to my credit than my shame. But the vow of this woman is raised far above the fickleness of human wishes and resolves. She wishes me well; I could find no truer friend in need than she would prove. She would make any sacrifice but this for me, who have saved her child; but her whole existence, her heart, and soul are rivetted to the memory of her own pa.s.sed happiness, and to the future happiness of her child--and for me, to whom the present alone is of importance.... I have carefully avoided the question as to where she lives, in what town, under what circ.u.mstances in what neighbourhood. I will part from her without knowing anything of this, lest I should be tempted to seek her, and endeavour to make the impossible possible.

"A few days more of the happiness of this singular position--in this solitary wilderness among the mountains, far from all the littlenesses and miseries of the world, and as if we were in heaven, where there is neither giving in marriage, nor parting--then come what may; what must!

"In truth it is a strange and cruel remedy which fate has employed, making a deep incision in my heart, in order to convince me how little I was ripe for death; how much strength and feeling there was still in me, how much I could yet endure!

"Enough of this for to-day. We live here totally deprived of all postal communication. When, and where, I shall close this letter and forward it, the G.o.ds only know, if indeed they concern themselves with our correspondence.

"Farewell!"

He laid down the pen and listened. From the sick room, the child's soft prattle was heard and though free from the restless and rambling tone of fever, yet it was an unusually late hour for the child to be awake.