CHAPTER X.
The large room at the Warnow Inn, filled with the smoke of bad tobacco and the odour of stale beer and spirits, was crowded with the noisy waggoners who had arrived that morning, and who had been joined in the course of the afternoon by two or three drovers, who also thought it pleasanter to remain here. The landlord stood near, snuffing the tallow-candles and bawling even louder than his guests, for he must be the best judge whether a railway from Golm direct by Wissow Head to Ahlbeck, without passing by Warnow, were a folly or not. And the Count, who had ridden in that afternoon, would pull a long face when he saw what havoc had been made; but if a man wouldn't hear reason anyhow, he must suffer for it. There were terrible doings at Ahlbeck, he heard, and murder and fighting too; it served the Ahlbeck people well right, they had been bragging enough lately about their railway station, and their harbour, and their fine hotels; they might draw in their horns again now!
The landlord was so loud and eager in his talk, that he never noticed his wife come in and take the keys of the best rooms upstairs from the board on the door, while the maid took the two brass candlesticks from the cupboard, into which she put candles, and then lighted them and ran after her mistress. He only turned round when some one touched him on the shoulder and asked where he could put up his horses, the ostler said there was no more room.
"No more there is," said the landlord; "where do you come from?"
"From Neuenfähr; the gentlefolks I brought are upstairs now."
"Who are they?" asked the landlord. "Don't know; a young gentleman and a young lady; something out of the common I should think. I couldn't drive quick enough for 'em; but how's a man to drive fast in this weather? We came a foot's pace. Two horses or one made no difference. A one-horse carriage that was behind us might easily have got ahead. It must have been a Warnow trap, it turned to the right as we came to the village."
"Jochen Katzenow," said the landlord, "was at Neuenfähr this morning; he's got a devil of a horse! Well, come along; we'll see what can be done; but I don't think we can manage it."
The Neuenfähr man followed the landlord into the hall, where they encountered the gentleman whom he had brought, who took the landlord on one side and spoke to him in an under-tone.
"They won't have done in a hurry," thought the driver, and so went out, unharnessed his horses, and, leaving the carriage standing for the time, led them under the overhanging roof of a barn, where they would be sheltered at any rate from the worst of the storm. He had just spread some horse-cloths over the smoking animals when the gentleman left the house and came up to him.
"I shall probably not remain long here," said the gentleman; "perhaps not more than an hour, and then shall continue our journey."
"Where to, sir?"
"To Prora, or back to Neuenfähr; I do not know yet."
"It can't be done, sir."
"Why not?"
"The horses couldn't do it."
"I know better what horses can do; I will give you my orders by-and-by."
The Neuenfähr man was irritated at the imperious tone in which the gentleman spoke to him, but he did not venture to contradict him. The gentleman, who now wore a greatcoat with metal buttons--during the drive he had worn a plain overcoat--turned up the collar as he passed round the shed towards the street. The light from the tap-room fell full upon his face.
"Aha!" said the Neuenfähr man; "I thought as much. One doesn't forget these things, however long one has been in the reserve. Where the devil is the Lieutenant going to?"
Ottomar had obtained full directions from the landlord, and indeed the road which led straight down through the village could not be mistaken. He walked slowly, and often stood still; sometimes because the storm which met him full would not allow him to continue, and sometimes because he had to try and recollect what he wanted to do at the castle. His head was confused with the long drive in an open carriage through this fearful storm, and his heart felt dead within him; he felt as if he had not energy left to tell the villain to his face that he was a villain. Besides, it ought to be, it must be done in his aunt's presence, if the scoundrel were not to be able to deny everything afterwards, and entangle his aunt again in his web of lies as he had entangled them all. Or was it all an arranged plot between him and his aunt! It looked suspicious that she should have left the castle so early to-day, when he must have been expected to come to call the villain to account. She had gone with Elsa, it was true; but might not the affection which she seemed to bestow upon Elsa--in secret, like all the rest of these dark mysteries--be affection after the pattern of Giraldi's? Perhaps his aunt had undertaken to allure and befool Elsa as Giraldi had done by him; and they had both fallen into the snare, and the crafty fowlers were laughing at their foolish prey. Poor Elsa! who had also no doubt put her faith in these fair promises, and now would have to try how she could get on as the wife of a Superintendent of Pilots with a few hundred thalers, and her home in that miserable fishing hamlet. "That was not what had been looked forward to for her, poor Elsa! That was to have been our inheritance, the castle by the sea, as we called it when we used to lay plans for our future; we were to live there together, you in one wing and I in the other; and when you married the prince and I the princess we were to draw lots which should have it to themselves; we could not continue together because of all the suite.
"And now, my dearest and best of sisters, you are far from me, waiting for your lover who is out in the storm, perhaps, to save the precious lives of a few herring-fishers; and I----"
At the spot where the road, leaving behind it the first houses in the village, turned downwards through a narrow gorge which led to the hollow whence it again began to rise towards the castle, he sat down upon a stone which projected from the extreme edge of the gorge towards the hollow, and was only held in its hazardous position by the roots of a magnificent fir-tree, which must once have stood much farther from the edge, and which now creaked and groaned as it bent backwards under the pressure of the gale, as if trying to avoid falling into the depths.
"There is no help for either of us," said Ottomar, "it has all crumbled away bit by bit; and we are hanging with our roots in the air. The stone that would gladly have held us up cannot do it; rather the reverse. And if there come one great storm, such as this, we must both fall. I wish to God we lay there, and that you would fall upon my head and kill me, and that the flood would come and wash us out to sea, and no one should know how we came to our end."
And she? She, whom he had just left in the miserable, dreary inn-room, she, whose kisses he still felt upon his lips, and who, as he went out at the door--thinking, no doubt, that he could not see her--threw herself upon the sofa, and leaning her head upon the back covered her face with her hands, weeping he was certain. For what? for her miserable fate that bound her to a man weaker than herself. She was strong, she would endure it all, come what would. But what could come for her? She had repeated to him a hundred times on the road, that he was not to trouble himself any more about that miserable money; that her father was far too proud to refuse her entreaty, the first she had made to him since she could remember, the last that she would ever make to him. And she had written to her father from Neuenfähr, where they had had to wait half an hour for the carriage. "The thing is done," she had said, as she stroked his hair from his forehead as a mother might have done to her boy, who had been playing truant from school.
She was the stronger; but then what did she lose? her father?--she seemed never to have really loved him; her comfortable life in her beautiful luxurious home?--what does a girl know of the things that make up her life!--her art? that she could carry with her everywhere; had she not said with a smile, "It will support us both." Of course! she would have to support him now, the disgraced soldier!
The fir-tree, against which he leaned, creaked and groaned like some tormented creature; Ottomar could feel how the roots heaved and twisted, and the soil showered down the steep gorge, while in the branches the wind whistled and howled and crackled like grape-shot or musketry fire, and from the sea came a roar and thunder as if from an endless line of batteries, whose fire was incessantly kept up.
"It would have been so simple then," said Ottomar; "my father would have paid my few debts and would have been proud of me, instead of sending me a pistol now, as if I did not know as well as he that it is all over for Ottomar von Werben; and Elsa would have often and lovingly talked of her brother, who fell at Vionville. Dear Elsa, how I should like to see her once more!"
He had learned from the landlord that the carriage with the two ladies, if they returned this evening as the driver had told him, must pass this way, it being the only road still practicable; the shorter road through the lower ground was no longer passable. Ottomar wondered what the man meant by the lower ground. The situation was so entirely different from what he had heard described; the sea seemed to be breaking immediately behind the castle, though in the wet, grey mist which was driving in his face he could no longer distinguish individual objects. The castle itself, which must surely be close under his feet, seemed to be a mile off; he could hardly have seen it sometimes, if lights had not been constantly flickering in the windows. In the indistinct masses of building to the left of the castle, which must belong to the farm, lights also glimmered occasionally, shifting their places as if people were running about with lanterns; and once or twice he fancied that he heard men's voices and the lowing of cattle. It might be all a delusion of his senses, which were beginning to fail him, as he sat there unsheltered from the raging storm which was freezing the very marrow of his bones. He must go on, if he were not to die here like a straggler behind a hedge on the roadside.
And yet he remained; but through his bewildered brain wilder and more confused images chased each other. There was a Christmas-tree with lighted candles, and he and Elsa came to the door hand-in-hand, and their father and mother stood at the table, on which there were dolls for Elsa, and helmet and sword and sabretache for him, and he threw himself joyfully into his father's arms, who lifted him high in the air and kissed him. Then the Christmas-tree changed into a lofty pine, and the crest of the pine was a blazing chandelier, under which he was dancing with Carla, in defiance of the Count, who looked on with furious glances, while the double bass boomed, and the violins squeaked, and the dancing couples whirled in and out: Tettritz with Emilie von Fischbach, that tall Wartenberg with little Fräulein von Strummin. Then it was a bivouac fire with the trumpets sounding to the attack at Vionville, against the batteries which thundered in return, and he called laughingly to Tettritz and Wartenberg, "Now, gentlemen, a bullet through the heart, or the cross on the breast!" and set spurs to his charger, which dashed straight forward with a wild neigh. Ottomar started to his feet and looked round him in bewilderment. Where was he? at his feet there foamed and hissed a broad eddying stream, and now he heard distinctly a horse neighing--close by him--in the hollow way, at the edge of which he stood, and below him was a carriage which was being backed by the resisting horses against the bank.
With one spring he was behind the carriage and helping the coachman to turn the snorting horses; there was just room left.
"Where are the ladies!"
He had seen that the carriage was empty.
"They got out--above--in such a hurry, by the causeway in the meadows to the park. Oh, Lord! oh, Lord! if only they can get across it! Lord have mercy upon us!"
A wave of the stream which had broken through between the hill and the castle, and which the coachman had nearly driven into, poured into the hollow way, and eddied up under the horses' feet, who could no longer be restrained but dashed up the road, the coachman running by them, having fortunately caught up the reins, and doing his best to stop them.
Ottomar had only understood so much from the coachman's confused words, made almost unintelligible by the storm, as to gather that Elsa was in danger. What was this causeway? Where was it? He ran after the coachman, calling and shouting to him, but the man did not hear.