Читать книгу Hammer and Anvil - Spielhagen Friedrich - Страница 34

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On awaking the next morning, it was long ere I could arrive at a clear consciousness of my situation. My sleep had been disturbed by frightful dreams, which had left an oppression upon my spirits. It still seemed to me that I heard my father's voice, when a part of my dream recurred to my memory. I had been fleeing from my father, and came to a smooth pond, into which I threw myself, to escape by swimming. But the smooth pond suddenly changed into a stormy sea, upon whose waves I was now tossed towards heaven, and now plunged into the abyss. I was paralyzed with terror; and strove in vain to call to my father for help, while my father did not see me, although he ran up and down the shore, within reach of me, wringing his hands and breaking into loud lamentations over his drowned son.

I passed my hand repeatedly over my brow to drive away the frightful images, and opened my eyes and looking around, found myself in the room into which my host had conducted me on the previous night. The light in the great bare apartment was so dim, that I thought at first it must be very early; but my watch had stopped at nine, and on examination I discovered that this greenish twilight was produced by the thick foliage of trees whose branches touched the solitary window. At this moment a ray of sunlight found its way through some aperture, and fell upon the wall in front of me, upon which I at first thought the most singular and fantastic figures were painted, until closer observation showed me that the dark hangings had here and there detached themselves from the lighter ground, and hung in irregular strips, which seemed the strange garments of grotesque forms.

Altogether the appearance of the room was as inhospitable as it well could be: the plaster in several places had fallen from the ceiling, and lay in white fragments upon the floor, which was laid in parquetry, but now cracked in all directions. The whole furniture consisted of a great canopied bed, the curtains of which were of faded green damask; two high-backed chairs, covered with similar materials, one of which possessed its normal complement of legs, while the other, which in years had not yet learned to stand upon three, was propped against the wall; and finally, a pine washstand painted white, in singular contrast to the great oval mirror in a rich antique rococo frame, which hung above it; although it is true that the gilding on this piece of magnificence was in many places tarnished by age.

I made these observations while putting on my clothes, which in the short time I had slept by no means dried as thoroughly as I could have desired. But this was but a trifling discomfort: the thought that troubled me was, how should I dress myself the next day, and after? upon which followed the associate reflection:--what was going to become of me altogether?

The answer to this question was by no means clear; and after some consideration I hit upon the idea that it would be as well, before I came to a decision--which in any event was not a matter of such instant urgency--to consult my friendly host upon the subject. Singular enough! up to this day I had always rejected the advice of those whose position and knowledge best qualified them to give it, and had always maintained that I knew best what I had to do; and now I found myself looking with a sort of superstitious reliance to a man whom I had but just learned to know, and that under circumstances by no means of a nature to inspire confidence, and whose name was in evil repute, far and near. It was in this fact, possibly, that lay the greatest attraction for me. "The Wild Zehren" had held a place in my boyish imagination by the side of Rinaldo Rinaldini and Karl Moor; and I had keenly envied my friend Arthur, who used to tell the wildest stories about him, the possession of such an uncle.

Of late years he had been less talked about: I once heard the steuerrath, in a public garden, in the presence of my father and others, thanking God that the "mad fellow" had at last shown some signs of reformation, and the family might consider itself relieved from the perpetual fear that sooner or later he would come to some bad end. At the same time some allusions were made to a daughter, at which several of the gentlemen whispered together, and Justizrath Heckepfennig shrugged his shoulders. Later, Arthur told me that his cousin had eloped with a young tutor, but had not gone far, as his uncle gave chase to the fugitives and caught them before they reached the ferry. She was very beautiful, he said further, and on that account he the more regretted that his father and his uncle were on such unfriendly terms, for, owing to this disagreement, he had never seen Constance (I remembered the name) but once, and that was when she was a child.

All this and much more in this connection came into my mind while I finished my simple toilet before the dim mirror with the tarnished rococo frame; and as I thought of the pretty cousin, I felt chagrin at the tardy development of the beard that had begun to sprout on my upper lip. I caught up the sailor's hat which I had brought with me when I landed, and left the room to look for Herr von Zehren.

Pretty soon it became evident that this very natural intention was not so easy of accomplishment. The room which I left had, luckily, only two doors in it; but that which I entered had three, so that I had to make a choice between two, not including that which led into my chamber. Apparently I did not hit upon the right one, for I came upon a narrow corridor, very dimly lighted through a closed and curtained glass door. Another which I tried, opened into a hall of stateliest dimensions, the three windows of which looked out upon a large park-like garden. From this hall I passed into a great two-windowed room looking upon the court, and from this one happily back to the one adjoining my chamber, from which I had set out. I had to laugh when I made this discovery, but my laughter sounded so strangely hollow as to check my mirth at once. And indeed it was no wonder if laughter had a strange sound in these empty rooms, which seemed as if they had heard few sounds of merriment in recent times, however joyous they might have been in years by-gone. For this room was just as bare and cheerless as that in which I had slept; with just such ragged hangings, crumbling ceilings, and worm-eaten, half ruinous furniture, which might once have adorned a princely apartment. And so was it with the other rooms, which I now examined again more attentively than at first. Everywhere the same signs of desolation and decay; everywhere mournful evidences of vanished splendor: here and there upon the walls hung life-size portraits, which seemed to be spectrally fading into the dark background from which they had once shone brilliantly; in one room lay immense piles of books in venerable leather bindings, among which a pair of rats dived out of sight as I entered; in another, otherwise entirely empty, was a harp with broken chords, and the scabbard of a dress-sword, with its broad silken scarf. Everywhere rubbish, dust and cobwebs; windows dim with neglect, except where their broken panes offered a free passage to the birds that had scattered straw and dirt around--to a plaster cornice still clung a pair of abandoned swallow's nests; everywhere a stifling, musty atmosphere of ruin and decay.

After I had wandered through at least a half dozen more rooms, a lucky turn brought me into a spacious hall, from which descended a broad oaken staircase adorned with antique carved work. This staircase also, that once with its stained windows, its dark panels reaching almost to the ceiling, its antlers, old armor, and standards, must have presented an unusually stately and imposing appearance, offered the same dreary picture of desolation as the rest; and I slowly descended it amazed, and to a certain extent confounded, by all that I had seen. More than one step cracked and yielded as I placed my foot upon it, and as I instinctively laid my hand upon the broad balustrade, the wood felt singularly soft, but it was from the accumulated dust of years, into which, indeed, the whole stair seemed slowly dissolving.

I knew that I had not come this way the previous night, when my host conducted me to my chamber. A steep stair, as I afterwards learned, led from a side hall directly to that dark corridor which adjoined the room I had occupied. I had, therefore, never before been in the great hall in which I was now standing; and as I did not wish to go knocking in vain at half-a-dozen doors, and the great house-door that fronted the stairs, proved to be locked, I succeeded with some difficulty in opening a back-door, which luckily was only bolted, and entered a small court. The low buildings surrounding this, had probably been used as kitchens, or served other domestic purposes in former times; but at present they were all vacant, and looked up piteously with their empty window-frames and crumbling tile-roofs to the bare and ruinous main-building, as a pack of half-starved dogs to a master who himself has nothing to eat.

I was no longer a child: my organization was far from being a susceptible one, nor did I ever lightly fall into the fantastic mood; but I confess, that a strange and weird sensation came over me among these corpses of houses from which the life had evidently long since departed. So far I had not come upon the slightest trace of active human life. As it was now, so it must have been for years, a trysting place and tilt yard for owls and sparrows, rats and mice. Just so might have looked a castle enchanted by the wickedest of all witches; and I do not think that I should have been beyond measure astonished, if the hag had herself arisen, with bristling hair, from the great kettle in the wash-house, into which I cast a glance, and flown up through the wide chimney upon one of the broom-sticks that were lying about.

This wash-house had a door opening upon a little yard surrounded by a hedge, and divided by a deep trench, bridged by a half-rotten plank; which yard, as was evident from the egg-shells and bones scattered about, had formerly been a receptacle for the refuse of the kitchen, but grass had grown over the old rubbish-heaps, and a pair of wild rabbits darted at sight of me into their burrows in the trench. They might possibly preserve some legend of a time when the trench had been full of water, and these burrows the habitations of water-rats, but at such a remote period of antiquity that the whole tradition ran into the mythical.

Hearing a sound at hand which seemed to indicate the presence of a human being, I pushed through the hedge into the garden, and following the direction of the sound, found an old man who was loading a small cart with pales, which he was breaking with a hatchet out of a high stockade. This stockade had evidently once served as the fence of a deer-park; in the high grass lay the ruins of two deer-sheds blown down by the wind: the stags who used to feed from the racks, and try their antlers against the paling, had probably long since found their way to the kitchen, and why should the paling itself not follow?

So at least thought the withered old man whom I found engaged in this singular occupation. When he first came upon the estate, which was in the life-time of the present owner's father, there were forty head of deer in the park, he said; but in the year '12, when the French landed upon the island and took up quarters in the castle, more than half were shot, and the rest broke out and were never recovered, though a part were afterwards killed in the neighboring forest which belonged to Prince Prora.

After giving me this information, the old man fell to his work again, and I tried in vain to draw him into further conversation. His communicativeness was exhausted, and only with difficulty could I get from him that the master had gone out shooting, and would scarcely be back before evening, perhaps not so soon.

"And the young lady?"

"Most likely up yonder," said the old man, pointing with his axe-handle in the direction of the park; then slipping the straps of his cart over his decrepit shoulders, he slowly dragged it along the grass-grown path towards the castle. I watched him till he disappeared behind the bushes; for a while I could still hear the creaking of his cart, and then all was silent.

Silence without a sound, just as in the ruinous castle. But here the silence had nothing oppressive; the sky here was blue, without even the smallest speck of cloud; here shone the bright morning sun, throwing the shadows of the aged oaks upon the broad meadows, and sparkling in the rain-drops which the night's storm had left upon the bushes. Now and then a light breeze stirred, and the long sprays, heavy with rain, waved languidly, and the tall spires of grass bent before it.

It was all very beautiful. I inhaled deep draughts of the cool sweet air, and once more felt the sense of delight that had come over me the evening before, as the wild swans swept above me, high in air. How often, in after days, have I thought of that evening and this morning, and confessed to myself that I then, in spite of all, in spite of my folly and frivolity and misconduct, was happy, unspeakably happy--a short lived, treacherous bliss, it is true, but still bliss--a paradise in which I could not stay, from which the stern realities of life, and nature itself, expelled me--and yet a paradise!

Slowly loitering on, I penetrated deeper into the green wilderness, for wilderness it was. The path was scarcely distinguishable amid the luxuriant weeds and wild overgrowth of bushes--the path which in by-gone days had been swept by the trains of ladies fair, and by which the little feet of children had merrily tripped along. The surface grew hilly; at the end lay the park, and over me venerable beeches arched their giant boughs. Again the path descended towards an opening in the forest, and I stood upon the margin of a moderately large, circular tarn, in whose black water were reflected the great trees that surrounded it nearly to the edge.

A few steps further, upon a slightly elevated spot, at the foot of a tree whose gigantic size seemed the growth of centuries, was a low bank of moss; upon the bank lay a book and a glove. I looked and listened on all sides: all was still as death: only the sunlight played through the green sprays, and now and then a leaf fluttered down upon the dark water of the tarn.

I could not resist an impulse of curiosity: I approached the bank and took up the book. It was Eichendorf's "Life of a Good-for-Nothing." I had never seen the book, nor even heard of the author; but could not refrain from smiling as I read the title: it was as though some one had called me by name. But at that time I cared little for books: so I replaced it, open, as I had found it, and picked up the glove, not, however, without another cautious glance around, to see if the owner might not be a witness of my temerity.

This glove, I at once divined, belonged to Arthur's beautiful cousin--whose else could it be? The inference was simple enough; and, indeed, the circumstance of a young lady leaving her glove on the spot where she had been resting, had nothing in it remarkable. But the fancy of a youth of my temperament is not fettered; and I confess that as I held the little delicate glove in my hand, and inhaled its faint perfume, my heart began to beat very unreasonably. I had walked, times without number, past Emilie Heckepfennig's window in hope of a glance from that charmer; and had even worn on my heart, for weeks together, a ribbon which she once gave me as I was dancing with her; but that ribbon never gave me such feelings as did this little glove; there must have been some enchantment about it.

I threw myself upon the bank of moss, and indulged my fancy in the wild dreams of a youth of nineteen; at times laying the glove on the seat beside me, and then taking it up again to scrutinize it with ever closer attention, as though it were the key to the mystery of my life.

I had been sitting thus perhaps a quarter of an hour, when I suddenly started up and listened. As if from the sky there came a sound of music and singing, faint at first, then louder, and finally I distinguished a soft female voice, and the tinkling notes of a guitar. The voice was singing what seemed the refrain of a song: