On the Cross Part 53

"You will not leave here, Josepha, as long as I remain. Especially now that you are ill. I have been her servant long enough. But this is the limit where I cease to yield to her caprices. She cannot ask me to give you up also, my relative, the only soul in my boundless solitude. If she did, I would not do it, for--no matter how lowly my birth, I am still her husband; have I no rights whatever? You will stay with me, I desire it, and can do so the more positively as my salary is sufficient to support you. So you need accept no wages from her."

"Yes, tell her so, say that I want nothing--nothing except to stay with you, near my angel's grave." Sobs stifled her words. After a time, she continued faintly: "I shall not trouble her long, you can see that."

"Oh, Josepha, don't fancy such things. You are young and will recover!"

said Freyer consolingly, but his eyes rested anxiously upon her.

She shook her head. "The child was younger still, yet he died of longing for his mother, and I shall die of the yearning for him."

"Then let me send for a doctor--you cannot go on in this way."

"Oh, pray don't make any useless ado--it would only be one person more to question me about the child, and I shall be on thorns while I am deceiving him. You know I never could lie in my life. Leave me in peace, no doctor can help me."

Some one rang. Josepha opened the door. The cabinetmaker was bringing in a little coffin, which was to take the place of the box containing the leaden casket. Her black dress and haggard face gave her the semblance of a mother mourning her own child. Nothing was said during the performance of the work. Josepha and Freyer lifted the metal casket from the chest and placed it in the plain oak coffin. The man was paid and left the room. Freyer hastened out and shook the snow from some pine branches to adorn the bier. A few icicles which still clung to them thawed in the warm room, and the drops fell on the coffin--the tears of the forest! The last scion of the princely House of Prankenberg lay under frost-covered pine boughs; and a peasant mourned him as his son, a maid servant prepared him for his eternal rest. This is the bloodless revolution sometimes accomplished amid the ossified traditions of rank, which affords the insulted idea of universal human rights moments of loving satisfaction.

The two mourners were calm and quiet. They seemed to have a premonition that this moment possessed a significance which raised it far above personal grief.

An hour later the pastor came--a few men and maid-servants formed the funeral procession. Not far from the castle, in the wood, stood a ruinous old chapel. The countess had permitted the child to be buried there because the churchyard was several leagues away. "It is a great deal of honor for Josepha's child to be placed in the chapel of a n.o.ble family!" thought the people. "If haughty old Count Wildenau knew it, he would turn in his grave!" The coffin was raised and borne out of the castle. Josepha, leaning on Freyer, followed silently with fixed, tearless eyes and burning cheeks. Yet she succeeded in wading through the snow and standing on the cold stone floor in the chilly chapel beside the grave. But when she returned home, the measure of her strength was exhausted. Her laboring lungs panted for breath; her icy feet could not be warmed; her heart, throbbing painfully, sent all the blood to her brain, which burned with fever, while her thoughts grew confused. The terrible chill completed the work of destruction commenced by grief. Freyer saw it with unutterable sorrow.

"I must get a doctor!" he said gently. "Come, Josepha, don't stare steadily at the empty s.p.a.ce where the body lay. Come, I will take you to my room and put you on the bed. Everything there will not remind you of the boy."

"No, I will stay here," she said, with that cruelty to herself, peculiar to sick persons who do not fear death. "Just here!" She clung to the uncomfortable sofa on which she sat as if afraid of being dragged away by force.

Freyer hastily removed the chairs which had supported the coffin, the crucifix, and the candles.

"Yes, put them out, you will soon need them for me. Oh, you kind-hearted man. If only you could have the happiness you deserve. You merited a better fate. Ah, I will not speak of what she has done to me, but her sins against you and the child nothing can efface--nothing!" A fit of coughing almost stifled her. But it seemed as if her eyes continued to utter the words she had not breath to speak, a feverish vengeance glittered in their depths which made Freyer fairly shudder.

"Josepha," he said mildly, but firmly. "Sacrifice your hate to G.o.d, and be merciful. If you love me, you must forgive her whom I love and forgive."

"Never!" gasped Josepha with a violent effort "Joseph--oh! this pain in my chest--I believe it is inflammation of the lungs!"

"Alas!--and there is no one to send for the doctor. The men are all in the woods. Go to bed, I beg you, there is not a moment to be lost, I must get the doctor myself. I will send the house-maid to you. Keep up your courage, I will be as quick as I can!"

And he hurried off, forgetting his grief for his child in his anxiety about the last companion of his impoverished life.

The house-maid came in and asked if she could do anything, but Josepha wanted no a.s.sistance. The anxious girl tried to persuade her to go to bed, but Josepha said that she could not breathe lying down. At last she consented to eat something. The nourishment did her good, her weakness diminished and her breathing grew easier. The girl put some wood in the stove and returned to her work in the kitchen. Josepha remained lost in thought. To her, death was deliverance--but Freyer, what would become of him if he lost her also? This alone rendered it hard to die. The damp wood in the stove sputtered and hissed like the voices of wrangling women. It was the "fire witch," which always proclaims the approach of any evil. Josepha shook her head. What could be worse than the evil which had already befallen her poor cousin and herself? The fire witch continued to shriek and lament, but Josepha did not understand her. A pair of crows perched in an old pine tree outside the window croaked so suddenly that she started in terror.

Ah, it was very lonely up here! What would it be when Freyer lived all alone in the house and waited months in vain for the heartless woman who remembered neither her husband nor her child? She had not troubled herself about the living, why should she seek the little grave where lay the _dead_?

A loud knock on the door of the house echoed through the silence.

Josepha listened. Surely it could not be the doctor already?

The maid opened it. Heavy footsteps and the voices of men were heard in the entry, then a dog howled. The stupid servant opened the door of the room and called: "Jungfer Josepha, here are two hunters, who are so tired tramping over the snow that they would like to rest awhile. Can they come in? There is no fire anywhere else!"

Josepha, though so ill, of course could not refuse admittance to the freezing men, who were already on the threshold. Rising with an effort from the sofa, she pushed some chairs for the strangers near the stove.

"I am ill," she said in great embarra.s.sment--"but if you wish to rest and warm yourselves here, I beg--"

"We are very grateful," said one of the hunters, a gentleman with a red moustache and piercing eyes. "If we do not disturb you, we will gladly accept your hospitality. We are not familiar with the neighborhood and have lost our way. We came from beyond the frontier and have been wading through the snow five hours."

Meanwhile, at a sign from Josepha, the maid-servant had taken the gentlemen's cloaks and hunting gear.

"See, this is our booty," said the other hunter. "If we might invite you to dine with us, I should almost venture to ask if this worthy la.s.s could not roast the hare for us? Our cousin, Countess Wildenau, will surely forgive us this little trespa.s.s upon her preserves."

"Are you relatives of Countess Wildenau?"

"Certainly, her nearest and most faithful ones!"

Josepha, in her mortal weakness felt as if crushed by the presence of these strangers--with their heavy hunting-boots and loud voices. She tried to take refuge in the kitchen on the pretense of roasting the hare herself. But both gentlemen earnestly protested against it.

"No, indeed, that would be fine business to drive you out of your room when you are ill! In that case, we must leave the house at once."

The red-bearded gentleman--Cousin Wildenau himself--sprang from his chair and almost forced Josepha to go back to her sofa.

"There, my dear--madam--or miss? Now do me the honor to take your seat again and allow us to remain a short time unto the roast is ready, then you must dine with us."

A faint smile hovered around Josepha's parched lips. "I thank you, but I am too ill to eat."

"You are really very ill"--said the stranger with kindly solicitude.

"You are feverish. I fear we are disturbing you very much. Pray send us away if we annoy you." Yet he knew perfectly well that she could not help asking the unbidden guests to stay.

"But my dear--madam--or miss?"--Josepha never answered the question--"are you doing nothing to relieve your illness, have you had no physician?"

"No we are in such a secluded place, a physician cannot always be had.

But I am expecting one to-day."

"Why, it is strange to live in this wilderness. And how uncomfortable you are, you haven't even a stool," said the red-haired cousin putting his huge hunting-m.u.f.f, after warming it at the stove, under her feet.

Josepha tried to refuse it, but he would not listen.

"You need not mind us, we are sick nurses ourselves, we commanded a sanitary battalion in the war. So we understand a little what to do.

You are suffering from asthma, it is difficult for you to breathe, so you must sit comfortably. There! Now put my cousin's m.u.f.f at your back.

That's better, isn't it?"

"But pray--"

"Come, come, come--no contradiction. You must be comfortable."

Josepha was ashamed. The gentlemen were so kind, so solicitous about her--there were good people in the world! The neglected, desolate heart gratefully appreciated the unusual kindness.

"But I am really astonished to find everything so primitive. Our honored cousin really ought to have done something more for your comfort. Not even a sofa-cus.h.i.+on, no carpet! I should have thought she would have paid more attention to so faithful a--" he courteously suppressed the word "servant"--and correcting himself, said: "a.s.sistant!"

Josepha made no answer, but her lips curled bitterly, significantly.

Wildenau noted it. "Dissatisfied!" escaped his lips, so low that only his companion heard it.

"You have been here a long time, I suppose--how many years?

"Have I been with her?" said Josepha frankly. "Since the last Pa.s.sion Play. That will be ten years next summer."

"Ah--true--you are a native of Ammergau!" said the baron, with the manner of one familiar with the facts, whose memory has failed for an instant. "I suppose you came to the countess at the same time as the Christus?"