Читать книгу The Sublime Jester - Ezra S. Brudno - Страница 12

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He might have dismissed Hedwiga from his mind had not a kindhearted gossip carried the report of his visit to his parents. Father and Mother held council. They had not been much concerned about their son’s religious belief, but the mother’s eye was ever vigilant as to his morals.

“You had better talk to him,” David Zorn said. “He must stop these visits. You can never tell what they might lead to at his tender age.”

Mrs. Zorn spent a troublesome night over this. She was alarmed but she did not wish to seem too antagonistic. She knew the effect of antagonism upon her impetuous, high-strung son. So she broached the subject with seeming levity, with playfulness almost.

“But you know, Albert dear, a headman’s daughter is no company for Doctor Hollman’s grandson,” she urged persuasively.

“The girl isn’t to blame because her father was a headman,” he returned. “Why should she bear the sins of her fathers?”

The longer his mother argued the more reasons he found against her arguments. It was unjust to make the poor girl an outcast because her father had been an executioner, he insisted.

When he left his mother his heart was full of pity for the poor outcast. He brooded over her unfortunate position. He could not dismiss her image from his mind—the slender frame draped by that clinging skirt! His imagination lent color to the misery of the child of the accursed. He visualized her past. He saw her in the Black Forest surrounded by those old, toothless hags, drinking and quarreling and whirring their spinning wheels. He saw her ragged garments, her little bare feet curled under her, her unkempt golden hair, her beautiful eyes. The picture of her as a child was blended with that of the present day Hedwiga.

In his cogitation he soon found himself fighting for a principle. He did not listen to the throbbing of his boyish heart, to the seething of the blood of youth, which were propelling him toward the Free House with a power of their own. He persuaded himself that it was his keen sense of justice that forced him to defy his mother’s wishes.

It was summer time, the thrushes were singing, the roses were in bloom, the call of flocks was heard over plain and meadow, the sunlight rested on hill and dale; it way summer and the morning dew of love was on Albert’s cheeks.

He called at the Witch’s again and again; and the more often he came the more natural it seemed to be with her. The constraint had soon worn off and they were children again—boy and girl. When Aunt Graettel was at home he talked to her, and she told him many weird tales of her husband and his coterie of headmen.

“That sword cut off more than a hundred heads,” she pointed to a large, shining sabre standing in a corner.

Albert shuddered at the sight of the bloody weapon.

“My husband could always tell beforehand when he would be called upon to perform his work,” the Witch added proudly. “When the sword quivered and emitted a strange sound my husband knew some thief’s head was to come off.”

But most of the time he found Hedwiga alone and he soon discovered that she could sing beautiful songs of loving knights and beloved princesses and shepherds on the hills.

While the cannons were roaring at Waterloo and crushing the armies of the Emperor he worshipped, Albert Zorn was seated in the little hut on the Rhine, listening to Hedwiga’s melodies; and intoxicated with love rushed to translate his sentiments into sweet rhymes.

Thus the summer passed, and winter came. He had left the Lyceum and was now attending the Realschule. His mother was steadfast in her resolution to make a banker of him. She saw great possibilities in the financial world as soon as the terms of peace were definitely settled. For Napoleon had already been decisively beaten and the rulers of the other nations were holding a momentous conference.

One afternoon he found Hedwiga in a strange mood. It was midwinter, the river asleep under blankets of the softest down, the long arms of the large elm tree covered with the whitest fleece, and inside the hut the cozy, stuffy warmth of a low ceiling, crackling logs in an open oven and flames wrapped in dense smoke, rolling into the flue with a roaring glare. Hedwiga was seated opposite the fire, her left elbow on her knee, her chin in the open palm of her hand, her cheeks and eyes aglow, warbling a weird song.

Albert was silent. He had had a strange dream about her the night before and her present preoccupation reminded him of the dream. He thought he had seen her before in precisely the same environments and in the same pose. His imagination often played him pranks of this sort.

With eyes narrowed, he watched the light in her eyes, the contour of her cheeks, the shadowy white of her throat and the slight movement of her breasts. Yes, he knew the song she was humming. Zippel used to sing it to him in his childhood.

Hedwiga’s eyes closed and her red lips trembled. Then silence; no sound save that of the roaring fire.

“Ich will küssen—” he chimed in, finishing the stanza.

He paused and looked yearningly at her red lips, which were slightly parted against the dazzling white of her teeth.

Hedwiga opened her great dark eyes, turned them upon him teasingly, and suddenly jumped up from her low seat; and dashing across the room seized the shining sword—the sword that had cut off a hundred heads—and brandishing it in the air whirled around and sang again of the Great Otilje and his shining sword, pointing the deadly weapon at his breast every time she faced him.

“Hedwiga!”

But her wild song drowned his whispered murmurs. There was provoking defiance in her roguish eyes, almost a trace of malevolence in her face as she came close to him, barely touching him, and then swung away in her mad dance with the glittering blade.

“Hedwiga!”

But she would not pause. She continued whirling around and warbling this odd song. Once or twice he tried to seize her as she brushed past him, but she gracefully evaded him. He finally leaped from his seat and flung his arms around her.

“Don’t—take care!—” she cried, panting, holding the sword in front of her.

But he clung to her recklessly and, the sword having dropped from her hand, pressed his lips against her feverish mouth.

She turned her head this way and that to escape his kisses, gurgling laughter in her throat, but was overpowered by his impetuosity, gradually yielding, listlessly turning her face to his, her parted burning lips seeking his ...

Entwined they sat, the fire of their beings leaping into a common flame. Soon tears overflowed her eyes—she did not know why she was crying but in her heart was dread mingled with inexpressible joy—and presently his tears streamed down his pale cheeks.

A strand of her hair loosened and touched his face. He begged for this lock of hair. He swore he would carry it to his dying day—“Yes, to my dying day,” he repeated again and again.

A new light appeared in her eyes, and suddenly freeing herself she cut the golden lock with the fallen blade.

He took it from her and kissed it tenderly and murmured reverently, “Until the last beat of my heart—.”