Through Night to Light: A Novel

by Friedrich Spielhagen

CHAPTER IX.

It was after tea. Julius had gone to bed. Old Baumann had removed the tea-things, and then gone out, casting a benevolent glance at his mistress and her visitor. Melitta and Oldenburg were alone in the "red-room."

"Now tell me candidly, Adalbert, why you are so out of humor to-day," said Melitta, who sat on the sofa, while the baron was slowly walking up and down the room, as was his habit. "I am not out of humor."

"Well then, troubled?"

"That perhaps. I had a letter this afternoon from Birkenhain."

"That is strange. I have just been writing to him this afternoon."

"Have you heard from him lately?" said Oldenburg, pausing in his walk and looking kindly at Melitta.

"No; why?"

"Hem!"

"Is that an answer?"

"Certainly, and a very significative. 'Hem!' means a good deal."

"In this case, for instance?"

"Do you know that we were in all probability at the same time in Fichtenau when Czika and Xenobia as well as Oswald were all there, and we never knew it?"

Melitta blushed deeply, and did not at once know what answer to give. Oldenburg, however, did not give her time to reply, but drew Birkenhain's letter from his pocket, sat down by the table, opposite Melitta, and said:

"You see, Birkenhain writes, after having advised me, at my request, regarding Julius's health--'Julius must be spared all studying till New Year'--as follows:

"'You have so often and so kindly inquired in your letters after Professor Berger, dear baron, that it will interest you to hear again of this extraordinary man, especially after having made his personal acquaintance here at my house last summer. You may recollect from what he told you in your conversations with him, that his insanity belongs to the class of philosophical aberrations, and that he defended his fixed idea of the absolute non-existence of all things--or rather the great original Naught as he called it--with all the erudition and all the ingenuity which he possesses in so large a degree. My hope to be able to restore this distinguished man in a short time, was unfortunately ill-founded, and I confess that the method which I pursued in his case was, perhaps, not the correct one. I intended to arouse in him, by seclusion, withdrawal of books, etc., a sensation of weariness and loneliness, and through these a desire to see company, to exchange thoughts; in one word, a fondness for life. But I had immensely underrated the fund of inner life which was at the disposal of my patient. He could have lived for years on the treasures of his mind, and the only effect of my efforts was, that he gave himself up more fully than ever to his bottomless, original Naught. Nevertheless, I still hoped for some improvement, a reaction which I thought could not fail to arise in so vigorous a mind as Berger's. About that time--I think it was the very day on which you and Frau von Berkow were here, and I forgot to tell you in the hurry in which you were, anything about these matters which interested me deeply--a visitor, who had announced to me his desire to see Professor Berger, came very apropos. This was a young man called Doctor Stein'"--Oldenburg did not look up as he came to the name--"'of whom a colleague in Grunwald, with whom he was travelling, had told me that he had been Berger's favorite and most intimate friend. I hoped the very best results from this visit--a hope which I must confess was considerably weakened when I made the acquaintance of this Doctor Stein. I found him a remarkably handsome, distinguished-looking man, who, however, in spite of evidently rare talents and thorough cultivation, seemed to be completely at odds with the world and himself, as we find this to be the case, unfortunately, but too frequently, more or less, in our most gifted men, thanks to the inactive, thoughtless times in which we live. I ought to have been able to tell myself, if I had maturely reflected, that Berger would not have attached himself so heartily to this man just before the breaking out of his insanity, if he had not also been a hypochondriac. But here he was, and the thing could not be helped now; besides, I had given Doctor Stein very precise instructions before I allowed him to see Berger, and awaited with great interest the result of this interview, at which I was purposely not present. The result was strange indeed.

"'When I returned from my interview with you and Fran von Berkow, I went at once to my patient, who had in the meantime taken a walk at my request. He had been to the woods in company with his visitor.

"'At the first glance I felt convinced that something extraordinary had happened to him. He was walking up and down in great excitement. As soon as he saw me he paused and said: "What do you think of a theory, doctor, which has never been tried practically?" "Not much!" I replied; "but why do you ask?" "Oh, a thought occurred to me to-night, which lies so near, so near, that I cannot understand why it never occurred to me before." I asked him to explain. "I cannot do that now," he said, "but I will certainly do it as soon as I am able." I had to be content with his promise, for it was useless for me to press him further. I hoped to learn more about it from Doctor Stein. He had left the same night, "on account of pressing business," as he wrote me the next day in a little note from one of the nearest stations. What had happened between him and Berger remained a secret for me; I only learnt from others that they had been seen that night in a waggoner's inn, where they had been eating and drinking with rope-dancers, who happened to be in the place, and who had created quite a sensation there, less by their tricks than'"--Oldenburg's voice began to tremble a little--"'by a beautiful gypsy woman with a still more beautiful child. Berger was very quiet and taciturn the whole of the next day. I left him quite to himself, for I did not wish in any way to interfere with the crisis which was evidently taking place. He had from the beginning been free to go and come as he chose. It did not strike the waiters, therefore, nor the gate-keeper, as strange, when he went out of the asylum at seven o'clock in the morning of the seventh day--it was the day on which Frau von B. left. But this time he did not return during the day nor at night, as he usually did, nor on the following day. He had disappeared.

"'You can easily imagine what I felt when this occurred. Although the search which I immediately ordered, and which was carried out with great energy and circumspection, had no result, I was firmly convinced that Berger had not attempted his life. He had too often spoken most impressively against this way "of tying the Gordian knot still more firmly," as he called it. A letter written by him, which I received shortly afterwards, and which bore the post-mark of a small northern town, proved to my great joy that I had not been mistaken. In this letter the strange man asked my pardon if he should have caused me a few disagreeable days by his stealthy departure from Fichtenau; he had not known, he said, how else he could have carried out the idea which he had mentioned to me. He had joined, for the moment, a party consisting of "good people, but bad musicians," for the very purpose of carrying out that idea, and the idea itself was this: that he could not put his asceticism, the practical side of his theory of the non-existence of life, to a satisfactory test within the four walls of his room, or in solitude generally, but only in the wide world, and especially amid the lower classes of society, to which he had now descended for the purpose. He begged me, if I felt any interest in him, not to interrupt him in his experiment, and promised to inform me at the proper time of the result of his expedition, which promised to be very favorable.'"

Oldenburg folded up Birkenhain's letter, after having read so far, and looked at Melitta.

"How is it, Melitta?" he said; "you were several days in Fichtenau, I know; did you also hear people talk of this beautiful gypsy woman and her child, who must have been Xenobia and Czika, if I am not altogether mistaken?"

"More than that," replied Melitta; "it was Xenobia and Czika, and I saw them and spoke to them."

Oldenburg rested his head on his hand. "You did!" he murmured; "and you--why did you not tell me?"

"Because I feared to renew your sorrow about the lost one; because--listen to me, Adalbert, I will tell you. I would have told you long ago if I had had the courage." And she told Oldenburg of her meeting with the Brown Countess in the Fichtenau forest, how she had tried to persuade the gypsy to come with her, and how she had been grieved when she found all her persuasions and her prayers unavailing; and, finally, how she had received from Xenobia the promise to bring her the child if she should ever change her mind, and how she, Melitta, was firmly convinced that this would happen sooner or later.

As the young widow told him all this, the tears were running down her cheeks, and her voice trembled with deep emotion.

Oldenburg rose and silently kissed her hand, then he strode eagerly up and down the room, while Melitta continued to tell him how she had, shortly before her encounter with the gypsy, overtaken the wagon of the rope-dancer, and that she now recollected having seen among them a man in a blue blouse whom she had then taken for a peasant, but who she now knew must have been Professor Berger. "There is no doubt," she said, "that 'the good people and bad musicians,' of whom Berger speaks in his letter to Birkenhain, were none else but those very rope-dancers, whom he had joined, and with whom he has wandered to Northern Germany, as the letter says. Perhaps he is even now in our neighborhood. If Birkenhain had mentioned the name of the place, I would suggest to you to go there at once and to do what you can to bring Xenobia and Czika back with you; as it is, however, it would only be a wild-goose chase, from which you would return disappointed in your hopes, out of humor and out of health. I advise you, therefore, to write to Birkenhain and to await his answer before you undertake anything. I ought to add, candidly, that I consider it best, all in all, to leave the unravelling of this strange complication confidingly to the future. Xenobia has a thousand ways and means to escape from you if she chooses; her resolution to return to us and to surrender Czika to us must be the work of her own free will."

"If you think that waiting is the best I can do in this case, why do you advise me then to do just the opposite?"

"Because I fear you will find it impossible to sit still after you have once more found a trace of the lost one; because I know that you yearn to see your child; because I know that the resignation to which you have now condemned yourself is unnatural; and, finally----"

"Finally?"

"Because, if I advise you to do nothing for the recovery of Czika it might look as if I did not wish you such happiness, and for all the world I would not have you suspect me for a moment of such heartlessness."

"The human heart is a strange thing," said Oldenburg, after having continued his promenade through the room for a little while. "Can you believe it, Melitta, that I could now almost wish you would show less readiness to restore to me my child, and the woman to whom I owe her?"

"Impossible, Adalbert!"

"And yet it is so. I have made up my mind to be always unreservedly candid towards you, as you are towards me; at least to try to be so; and therefore I can keep nothing from you. Formerly, when you seemed to be beyond my reach as far as the stars in heaven, I often longed for other human hearts to warm me, and to let me feel by their pulsations that everything around me was not as dead as I felt; or I threw myself into wild excesses and neck-breaking adventures, in order to feel at least that I was still living. But now all that has suddenly changed. Since there has come to me the faintest ray of hope that you may yet some time consent to be mine, the world has recovered all its youthful beauty in my eyes; but now I should also like to see the fountain from which I have drunk this water of youth, free of all admixture and undimmed. As you are all in all to me, so I should like to be all to you; to see you have no other desire than to be loved--loved more and more--as I have no other desire than to love you, more and more. What is the rest of the world to us? I have forgotten it; it does not exist for me any more!"

Melitta had let this storm of passion rush over her with bowed head. When Oldenburg paused she took the diary, which lay open before her on the table, turned over a few leaves, and said:

"Man strives according to his nature after the general and infinite; in woman, who stands in every respect nearer to nature, the characteristic feature of every being, self-love, is much more distinctly marked. Man represents the centrifugal power of the moral world; woman the centripetal power. If the former had the government, the world would soon be in the clouds altogether; if woman ruled, we should never rise above the top of the wheat-blades that nod over the lark's nest in the furrow. The way to reconcile the two tendencies is love. When he loves a beautiful woman, man learns that he is not merely a denizen of the spiritual world; and when a woman loves a noble man, she learns that there are higher interests than those of the domestic hearth. They must complement each other; she must remind him that mankind is made up of men; he must teach even the most gifted among us first to spell and then to read fluently the great words of our day: 'Liberty and Fraternity.'"

She closed the book and glanced up at Oldenburg, who stood at a little distance from her, his arms crossed on his bosom.

"You were right not to let me become faithless to my own convictions," he said; "and I should like to know but this one thing--whether your zeal to convert me is quite pure, or whether the priestess is not anxious to direct the eyes of the sinner to the idol itself, because their longing glances directed at her begin to be a burden to her?"

"Oldenburg!"

"Yes, Melitta, I must say it or it will crush my heart. You know how dearly, how unspeakably, I love you. The wish to possess you is all-powerful in me. I have nourished it so long that it fills my whole being, and all my life is concentrated in it. Without you I am nothing. With you I defy a world in arms. I know very well that we ought to do right for the sake of the right, and that he who asks for reward has already his reward. But I am not a saint. I am a man, with all the weaknesses and passions of a man, which rise over him and threaten to drown him like a raging sea, if the dear, the beloved hand is not stretched out to save him. Melitta, say that you will be mine, and my deeds shall not fall below my words."

Oldenburg had remained standing at the same place, in the same position. As in his carriage, so in the tone of his voice there was rather a tone of command than of prayer. That man would not have knelt down before a dozen rifles, nor have suffered his eyes to be bandaged.

Melitta felt this; but his pride did not offend her this time as it had often done before. She answered in an almost humble tone:

"Do not let us act rashly, Adalbert! You know how dear you are to me, and that must for the present content you. See, Adalbert, this letter comes just in time to remind us of our duty. You must recover your child. I should not enjoy a single hour of my life if I were to fear that your love for myself had extinguished in your heart its most sacred sentiment. And, Adalbert, think also of this; I am willing to believe it: You do not love any longer the woman who once inflamed the passion of the inexperienced youth; but she is the mother of your child! What will you say to your Czika, if she asks you why another person than the poor woman whom she calls mother is the wife of her father?"

"Where did you meet Oswald Stein the last time since you saw him in Fichtenau?"

Oldenburg said these few words slowly and with withering scorn.

Melitta turned scarlet. A spark of the evil passion of offended pride which raged in Oldenburg's heart set her own on fire, and kindled the spirit of opposition which had already been so often fatal to both.

"Who tells you that I saw him at all in Fichtenau?

"I only thought so. Perhaps you kept this encounter from me as you did the others."

"And if I had seen him in Fichtenau?"

"That would be what I had expected."

"And if I had seen him since quite frequently?"

"That would only prove to me that my coming here is as improper for myself as it must be inconvenient to you."

Oldenburg went across the room and took his riding-whip and gloves from the console under the mirror. As he came back again to Melitta he stopped, and said: "Good-night, Melitta!" "Good-night!" replied the proud woman, without raising her eyes. He waited for a moment, and for another moment, hoping that she would look at him or say a word--but in vain. Not a word, not a sigh, rose from his crushed heart; he went to the door, opened it gently, and closed it as noiselessly again.

Melitta started. She hastened to the door; but instead of opening it she only leaned with uplifted arms against it and wept passionately. "I knew it would come thus," she murmured. "Poor, poor Adalbert!"

Suddenly she heard a horse's foot-fall close by the window. She ran from the door to the window and opened it, she leaned far out and cried "Adalbert! Adalbert!" but the storm that drove the icy snow-flakes in her face swept away her voice, and the black shadow of horse and rider, which was but just now gliding noiselessly over the white plain and through the gray night, was at the next moment no longer to be distinguished.