Only a Girl Part 23

"G.o.d preserve any one to whom she is kind! No one wants anything from her. Her uncle distributes some money every week, but only the very poorest people take it, and they always cross themselves over it."

Johannes and Hilsborn looked at each other with a smile. "Then her evil influence extends even to her charities?"

"Yes, that's what I mean,--wherever she goes she carries misfortune.

She pretends to know more than any one, and wants to introduce all sorts of new-fangled ways. She wouldn't have people sick with a fever covered up in good, thick feather beds, or give them a single gla.s.s of good liquor. All that was wrong, she said. A poor widow in the village had a sick child, which she nursed as well as she could. The Hartwich went to see her, and overpersuaded the woman, so that she let her watch with it one night. Scarcely had she seated herself by the cradle when the child grew worse, and fell into convulsions. The Hartwich sent the mother to the castle to send off a man on horseback for the doctor, and was left all alone with the child. When the woman got back from the castle the witch had the child on her lap, and the poor little thing was dying. The woman, frantic with terror, tore the little body out of her arms; but it was dead! and the Hartwich left her, as she would not hear a word from her. When the doctor came, he talked all sorts of stuff, and wanted to have the child dissected, as they call it; but of course no Christian mother would allow such a thing, and no one knew what the Hartwich had done to the poor little creature."

"But, you foolish people," began Johannes indignantly, "you do not suppose----"

Hilsborn signed to him to be silent. "Hus.h.!.+" he said in a whisper; "will you attempt what the G.o.ds try vainly--to contend with stupidity?"

"You are right," replied Johannes. "This people needs the teaching of centuries."

"Well, my good fellow," he said, again addressing the peasant, "what happened then?"

"Why, that very night, after the doctor was gone, the Hartwich came to the woman and offered her money,--I suppose to induce her to hold her tongue,--but the poor thing showed her the door, and told her what she thought of her."

"That was her thanks!" murmured Johannes.

"Since then she goes to see no one, and we are quit of her."

"Was this unfortunate instance the only one?" asked Johannes, "or has she done any further mischief?"

"Oh, yes, quant.i.ties! Once she persuaded a man to go to the city and have his leg taken off,--he had injured it ten years before. The man died in the city, and left a wife and children. If that witch had not sent him there, he would have been living still. He had managed to live with the injury ten years, and he might have borne it ten more. The poor widow heaped her with curses!"

Johannes exchanged glances with Hilsborn.

"Do you, too, believe that she is a witch?" he asked the peasant.

"Well, if I don't exactly believe that, I know well enough that no blessing can attend her, for she does not love G.o.d."

"How do you know that?"

"Oh, there are a great many signs of it. She does not like to hear him mentioned,--she never goes to church, and doesn't pray at home."

"You cannot be sure of that," said Johannes.

"Oho! yes, I can, for Harcher's Kunigunda is a maid at the castle, and she tells us all about it. For one thing, there used to be a bell-tower up there, and the bell was always rung for prayers, morning and evening, in old times. It was right and good to hear the bell ringing with the one in the village church, and we were used to it, and liked it. Even when the last of the family up there died, the village congregation gave the castellan two bags of potatoes every year that he might allow the ringing to continue. But when the Hartwich came, what did she do? Why, she tore down the bell-tower and made it into an observatory, as she calls it, where she sits for nights long and counts the stars."

"Well, if she looks up into heaven so much, she must surely think of G.o.d and his works there," rejoined Johannes smiling, "and those who love to pray do not need to be reminded of it by the ringing of bells."

"No, no! that is not so," the peasant obstinately maintained. "She does not wish to be reminded of prayer, or she would have loved the clear sound of the bell, as we did, and would have left it hanging where it had rung out comfort and religion for a hundred years. She might have built her star-chamber upon the old tower all the same, if she had wanted to,--but she did not want to,--and so we hated her from the first."

Johannes and Hilsborn looked grave.

"Books she has in plenty; she brought whole chestsfull with her, but never a hymn-book or prayer-book, Kunigunda, who dusts them, says, and, search as she may, she has never seen a Bible there yet. And the Hartwich never mentions the name of G.o.d; and if any one does it before her, she talks of something else instantly. But the worst of all is that she has a room there that no one, except her uncle and herself, is allowed to enter, and she always locks the door when she is there with her uncle. What they do there no living soul knows, but Kunigunda tells all sorts of strange stories about it, for she has often listened at the door, and sometimes got a peep inside when the Fraulein was going in or coming out. She says there are all kinds of strange things in there, such as no honest man knows anything about,--black tablets, with eyes and ears painted on them, and burning flames, and bellows, and Heaven only knows what beside! And she has heard dreadful noises, that were not of this world,--sometimes sounds as sweet as the organ plays in the church, and then a rustle and roar as of a mighty wind, although not a breeze is stirring outside, or blasts of a trumpet like the trumpet of Jericho, so that she ran away in deadly fright."

"Those were experiments in sound," said Johannes, greatly amused, to Hilsborn.

"And Kunigunda says that it is often so light in that room that the rays through the keyhole dazzle her just like sunlight, although the sun has long been set outside. Kunigunda declares that it is not common light,--it burns quite blue, and she had to shut her eye quickly not to be blinded by it. Now, what sort of light is that? What business has she with fire and flames? And Kunigunda says she is almost always up until morning, and scarcely sleeps at all. Oh, she leads a G.o.dless life,--for, if G.o.d had not intended men to wake in the daytime and sleep at night, He would not have made night dark and day light; and if she were doing any good, why should she shun the daylight when she does it? Kunigunda says, too, that she tortures poor dumb animals just for pleasure, for she has often seen how she and her uncle carry rabbits and such creatures into their secret chamber, and they never bring them out again. Now, what do they do with the poor things? They cannot eat the rabbits. And Kunigunda will swear that there are a couple of skulls in the book-room, tumbling about among the old books. Now, I ask, what Christian would take the head away from a dead man and spoil his rest in the grave? Is it not just dishonouring a corpse out of devilish wantonness?"

"There certainly is a whole mountain of charges towering between Fraulein Hartwich and her neighbours," whispered Johannes to his friend, "and I see clearly that the curse of singularity has pursued her even hither, and that this rare creature is repulsed and isolated here as she was as a child. It is high time that some strong arm should bear her hence into the purer atmosphere of a warm, healthy existence, from which her eccentricity has. .h.i.therto excluded her."

"Do you see that green balcony there?" said the peasant, when they were quite near the house. "There she has hanging a kind of cittern that plays of itself. I would not believe Kunigunda, when she told me of it, at first; but then I hid myself here once, and heard it with my own ears, the music softer and sweeter than any that human hands can make.

I could feel it beginning to bewitch me."

"Indeed! and how did it feel?"

"Oh, my heart grew so soft, so different from usual,--just--just as if I had been drinking linden-blossom tea. I could not help thinking of the girl I loved, who is dead, and I could have listened forever.

Suddenly I bethought me that there was a spell weaving around me, and I ran away as fast as I could."

"That was an aeolian harp, my good friend," Johannes explained; "its strings were stirred by no spirit hand, but by the wind. The spell that you perceived was only the effect of the beautiful tones upon your ear and heart; and if you had examined yourself, you would have found that, when you were thinking of your dead sweet-heart, you were better than when you are sitting in the village inn abusing the Hartwich. Consider for a moment whether an evil spirit could inspire such good, tender sensations. And listen as often as you can to the aeolian harp; it will not bewitch you,--it will only do good to you."

The fellow looked in amazement at the kindly speaker.

"I don't exactly understand you, sir, but you seem to mean well."

"What makes you think so?" asked Johannes,--"you do not know me."

"Oh, why, you look honest and good, sir," said the peasant, looking frankly into Johannes's face.

"Then believe what I say, when I tell you that you do Fraulein Hartwich great wrong. I have known her from childhood, and I know that she is good and kind!"

Johannes sent an earnest glance towards the castle, which they were pa.s.sing. An elderly woman was just opening a window in an upper story.

"Look!" cried the peasant, "that is her housekeeper, Frau Willmers. The Fraulein is just getting up--it is nine o'clock."

"G.o.d bless your awakening!" Johannes breathed softly to himself.

And, borne on the breeze of morning and the fragrance of flowers, the blessing was wafted up to the girl, who, weary with her night-watch, was reposing by the open window. She laid her head upon the sill, and the fragrant summer air fanned her brow. Johannes's words floated around her in a sea of light and warmth, and she felt them without hearing them. At last she opened her burning eyelids, and looked abroad, seeing everything at first through the gray, misty veil which weariness spread before her eyes,--but gradually was revealed in its full splendour the sunny picture, above which arched the clear, cloudless firmament. She arose and leaned out with a deep sigh of pain.

She knew no happiness but that of gratified ambition,--she could imagine no other, and therefore desired no other, for we cannot desire that of which we have no conception,--and yet, in the sunlight laughing around her, in the gloom of night, in the beauty of the valley and the grandeur of the mountains, a promise of a far different happiness beckoned to her, and she pined in longing for it without recognising it. Yes, from every voice of nature, from the song of birds, the murmur of the brook, the roaring of the tempest, and the muttering of the thunder, a call was ringing in her ears, she knew not whence or whither, but she would willingly have plunged into the ocean to follow it.

"There is no surer means of preventing all aimless desires than study, nothing better to prevent all abstract dreaming than absorption in some specialty," her uncle had told her when he suspected her of moods like that we have just described. "If you long to grasp the whole, first grasp a part,--if you thirst to fly to heaven, remember that the observatory is the only way thither,--if you desire to feel the warm throb of life, you can find it nowhere so satisfactorily as at the dissecting-table."

And she had turned away silently, uncomplainingly, from her flight to distant realms, to the telescope, and with a warm, swelling heart that would have embraced a world, had busied herself with a.n.a.lyzing microscopic organizations. Thus, in the course of long years, she had grown used to suppress emotions such as she experienced to-day, and they seldom came to the surface, just as the bells of the sunken city are only heard above the sea on Sunday. To-day was not Sunday, but it was an anniversary. Ten years ago to-day she had been sent to her first and only party,--her father had almost killed her,--and the whole current of her life had been changed. She knew the date perfectly, for the next day was the anniversary of her father's death. The familiar forms of those days hovered around her; they were the only ones that had ever approached her nearly, for since that time she had had no intimate relations with any one. She had studied mankind, but human beings were strangers to her. And as she thought and pondered, she wished herself again the child that ran races with the wind and cradled herself among the storm-tossed boughs. Oh for one breath of hopeful childhood, one throb of that love-thirsty heart, one tear of that wrestling faith! All dead and silent now, every blossom of childhood and youth faded: a woman, old at two-and-twenty, looking down from the heights of pa.s.sionless contemplation upon a life, lying behind her, that she has never enjoyed, upon a time, now past, that she has never lived. Sighing, she turned away from the sunny landscape. "Our life lasts seventy--perhaps eighty--years," she said to herself, "and the delight of it is labour and trouble." This reading, by a great modern philosopher, of the golden words of the ancient writings, she had adopted as her motto, and it still possessed its old charm for her.

What more could she desire of life than labour and trouble? What could youth or age bring her beyond these? She turned away from the window, and quickly arranged in thick braids around her head her loosened hair which had fallen down like a black veil. Her glance, as she did so, fell only pa.s.singly and indifferently upon the mirror. She never saw the face that gazed at her from its depths,--a face as faultlessly beautiful as an artist's fancy pictures those dark, melancholy female forms with which the ancients peopled the night. She dressed herself in simple white, and then her arms dropped wearied at her side. The expression of strength that the word labour had called into her face gave way to a profound melancholy, almost despair, and she sank exhausted upon a couch. She sat still for one moment, her head sunk upon her breast, and then the large tears rolled down her cheeks.

"Labour is a delight, when one has strength for it--but I have none!"

she said, clasping her knees with her small, transparent hands, while she gazed despairingly towards the distant horizon.

The housekeeper, Frau Willmers, entered. "A gentleman is waiting below, Fraulein Hartwich, who sends his card and says he comes from the gentleman whose name is written upon it."

Ernestine read the name "Professor Heim," and below, in Heim's handwriting, "earnestly recommends the bearer of this card."

"The gentleman is welcome!" she cried with awakened animation. "Show him into the library."

"Will the Fraulein receive him without the knowledge of----" the woman asked with hesitation and surprise.

"I will!" replied Ernestine firmly.