Joyfully cracking his whip, stood the little devil of the previous night close to his horse. "Now we shall lay you down gently in the waggon and then close the linen curtains." Getting her down was only managed with much pain and difficulty; then the well known Miller drove back unquestioned through the town to the portal of the Otto Heinrich building. The careful Barbara had seen the cart crossing the drawbridge and was immediately at hand. The Miller gave her no information. The young lady had hurt her foot falling was all he said, and carefully was she carried up the steps. Barbara by the Miller's advice wrapped the leg in wet cloths, till the father at his return at mid-day could apply a more surgically correct bandage. The brave Baptist had quietly withdrawn to escape being thanked. The father himself forbade his feverish child to talk, and appeared to be quite contented with the short account given by Klytia. It was sufficient for him that the cure proceeded satisfactorily, and the old Barbara scolded about the open turnip-pit in which more than one person had twisted his foot. When Erastus however asked later on for a more detailed account, he was surprised at his daughter's request to be allowed not to mention the cause of her accident. He shook his head, without however pressing his inquiries. "She must have come to grief through the fault of another," he thought, and was at last glad that she spared him any fresh troubles, as his own business began to demand more attention.
Nothing was heard of Magister Laurenzano in Heidelberg, except that he asked for leave of absence till the re-opening of the College, and wished especially to be relieved from his office of preacher at the Stift.
In the bright town of Speyer with its own independent Bishopric, the throng composing the parliament was so numerous that any individual man was soon lost to sight. Any person who however might have entered Speyer cathedral at the hour of Vespers on the day on which Lydia was rescued, might have seen a young man clothed in black kneeling in the most abject manner before one of the confessional boxes most concealed in the gloom. His confession was at an end and the priest was earnestly addressing him. A woman kneeling close by heard the words: "Only a long discipline, my Son, can restore the equilibrium and order of thy disturbed conscience." From that time onwards for several weeks the same stranger might be noticed entering the cathedral daily at daybreak and at sundown and going down to the dark crypt under the chancel. Thence he disappeared in a side chapel set aside for the use of the clergy of the chapter. "Where can Laurenzano be spending his holiday?" asked the philosopher Pithopöus at the round table in the Hirsch, who loved a rational audience.
"His brother says," replied Erastus, "that he is in Speyer, but I have not been able to hear a word about him from gentlemen who are there in the Kurfürst's suite, although I made all due inquiries."
"Very probably," answered Pithopöus, who liked Laurenzano for the interest he felt in scholastic discussions. "In the bustle which now goes on in that town, an individual is easily lost."
CHAPTER II.
When Klytia was sufficiently restored to health to be able to sit up with outstretched foot on a chair specially constructed by her father, the visits of her friends who where most anxious to hear all the details of the accident began, thereby greatly tormenting the poor child. Frau Belier especially wished to know so exactly how it all came to pass that finally nothing was left for Lydia but to avail herself of Barbara's device of the open turnip-pit. Happily private affairs remained still uppermost in the minds of these busy women and maidens, and Lydia was endued with sufficient feminine cunning to parry a disagreeable question by referring to another topic. "I am nothing but a false serpent," she used to say reproachfully to herself, "and repay all this love with deceit." She received more visits than she cared for,--only one remained away, one whom she so much feared, one for whom she so much longed. What could have prevented Paolo from coming to the very place chosen by himself? What prevented him even now from at all events asking her father about the health of his pupil? Had the miller not confirmed the fact that the note had been sent by Laurenzano, she would have preferred to think, that her rivals at the Stift had been making game of her, but after what the old Werner had told her she was forced to believe in Paolo's guilt. "He has no heart," she murmured, "otherwise he would have been here long ago." The less the news that could be obtained of him, the more did his conduct appear inconceivable to her. Had he quitted the town forever, in which he had caused so much misery? In that case he would never return! A feeling of horror crept over her at such a thought. Then she heard in the lofty echoing passage a well known elastic step and the voice of her father as he quietly approached. Erastus' head appeared at the door. "My child, Herr Laurenzano wishes to pay thee a visit. Remain lying down so that thy foot may not suffer." Lydia turned first pale and then red. At that moment she saw the figure of the architect, and with the disappointment her composure returned. Smilingly did she stretch out a small white hand to the Maestro. After that the handsome dark-eyed Italian had congratulated her gracefully on her recovery, he told her, that owing to the state of her health he had not up to the present time occupied himself with the repairs necessary to be made on the row of windows of Erastus' apartments. If she permitted it he would now begin the work. Lydia thanked him for his kind consideration. The work would not disturb her in any way; she would retire to the back rooms. The architect looked as childishly sad at her, as would a boy to whom a long wished for pleasure had been denied.--That she should not deny herself the bright sunshine so necessary to every sick person, was the very cause of his visit, he began with hesitating voice and maidenlike blush. It would be utterly impossible for him to undertake the work with any comfort and happiness if he had hourly to reproach himself with having delayed her convalescence. He would in that case prefer leaving the windows as they were, Erastus smilingly sided with him; in short Lydia had to capitulate and agreed neither to leave the room, nor to shut out the health-bringing pure air. Thus it happened that the merry Maestro appeared daily on the scaffold and seized every opportunity of coming to Lydia's window. He used then to tell her about the work, to complain of the laziness of German workmen who wasted half the day in eating, drinking and sleeping, and to praise the frugality and diligence of his Italian countrymen. Smilingly did the maiden bending over her work listen to the complaints of the Neapolitan, whose great delight seemed to consist in talking. As the neighbours however took to looking up at them, she reminded him half-seriously that he was no diligent Italian. "You say that a German eats and drinks as much as ten Italians, but it seems to me that an Italian chatters as much as twenty Germans. Now let me see for once how industrious you can be." Felix retired feeling rather ashamed, whilst she could not help thinking how much the brothers resembled each other. "I am afraid of the Magister," she thought smiling, "and yet long to see him. I am amused at the architect and yet dismiss him from me. Thou foolish heart to prefer sorrow to joy."
One morning the Maestro mentioned his brother to her. He was staying with the Bishop at Speyer where he had some friends. It was then as she feared. He had become Brother Paulus once more and returned to the Jesuits. Sad, and with beating heart did she stoop over her sewing whilst two large tears fell on her work. The Maestro pretended not to perceive this, but whilst angry with Paul on account of these tears, he himself became suddenly aware of how his own heart yearned towards this beauteous fair maiden.
Klytia herself could no longer be in doubt, that the worthy Maestro, whom she preferred to any one after Paul, earnestly sought her love, but her heart was filled with grief for him whom now she must reckon among the dead. Had he not abandoned her insultingly to her fate, disgraced her in her own eyes, was he not continuing on his own crooked dark paths, and had he not ceased to love her if indeed he had ever done so? What would she have given, not to have been daily reminded of him by his brother, and yet she was never so attentive, as when the latter told her of his youthful days in Naples, how he, Paul, and their little sister had played at ball with the golden fruit of the orange groves, sought for colored shells on the shore, hidden themselves in the hollow trunks of olive trees, looked for antique bits and marble splinters among the laurels and mountain-shrubs; of their adventures with huge earthworms, small snakes, scorpions and butterflies; then she saw standing out so distinctly before her the dark elder and the yet more swarthy younger brother, that she felt for them as a sister, and in her dreams she often imagined herself to be that deceased sister of the Laurenzanos. "Take the brown one, the dark one will render thee unhappy," had said the old witch, and Lydia had become superstitious since that terrible evening at the cross-roads on the Holtermann. The magic words of the old woman seemed to be too true. The maiden's heart could not free itself from the demoniacal priest, and it remained after Paul's faithless flight, in the trusty brother's power. Quite involuntarily, in her dreams, these innermost thoughts, still unknown to herself assumed expression.
Above the door of the Ruprecht building where dwelt Felix, might be seen a beauteous piece of artistic work of old German architecture, before which Lydia had as a child often stood in delighted wonderment. Two lovely angels' heads mutually o'ershadowed by each other's little wings; holding in brotherly affection within a wreath of roses, a pair of compasses, the sign of the masons. The Builder's guild had evidently thus intended to go down to posterity. The common people however related, that these two lovely twins had been the delight of the architect who had built the Schloss. To have them continually at his side he had taken them up on the scaffold, rejoicing in his two fresh-looking courageous boys. One day however one of them stumbled and dragged the other down with him. The architect became almost deranged, so that the building did not proceed. Instead of looking after the work, the sorrowful father daily made a wreath which he adorned with white roses and carried to the cemetery near the Peter's Church where were buried his darlings. The Emperor Ruprecht however became angry at the length of time the building continued, and ordered the Priest, who had buried the children to urge on the architect. He answered that all was ready, but that in his grief he could not conceive a proper ornament for the gateway. The Priest exhorted and consoled him to the best of his ability; the same night the twins appeared as bright angels to the father bringing back with them the wreath of roses which he had laid that morning on their grave. When the architect was roused the next morning by the light of the rising Sun, he thought of his dream, it seemed to him that the perfume of the roses still filled his room, and on rising, behold there lay the wreath fresh and fragrant, which he had the previous morning laid on the grave of his little ones, and which he had seen withered the evening before, but the white roses had turned to red. It was immediately plain to the architect how he should decorate the gate-way. He chiselled his children as angels as they had appeared to him, bearing a rose-wreath, and in the middle he placed a pair of compasses, the symbol of an art, to which he now bade a lasting farewell. On St. John's day 1408, the key-stone of the gate-way was fixed in, and the Emperor Ruprecht himself spoke the dedicatory oration. When he wished however to return his imperial thanks to the workmen, the architect had disappeared. Whilst all the bells were pealing loudly and filling the Neckar valley with their deep notes, the Master whom they were honoring, trod along the Michaelspath over the mountains to the monastery on the Heiligenberg. He became a monk and gazed from his cell at the tower, reared over the graves of his darling children, till his two boys once more appeared to him, crowned him with roses and bore away his soul into Abraham's bosom. This was the story as told to Lydia by her nurse, and when she thought of angels, the beauteous bearers of the wreath over the gate-way before which she daily passed always presented themselves to her memory. None of the noble statues wrought by Master Colins on the magnificent Otto Heinrich building had ever come near the impression made by these angels' heads. One evening after Felix had again been speaking about the games he and his brother Paul had played in their garden fragrant with roses at Naples, Lydia dreamt that night, that she was flying in the air above the Holtermann in the direction of the castle, and just as she was about to settle down the two angels of the Ruprecht building came towards her. The one was grave and cold, whilst the other which resembled Master Felix smiled on her joyously. Presently the one with the earnest, beauteous expression, which Magister Paul always wore when teaching opened his mouth and said: "Take Felice." On this she woke up, hearing also the witch saying distinctly: "the fairer one is the right one;" frightened she raised her head from the pillow and saw how the moon shone clearly into her room. Long did she think over this wondrous dream, in which the dearest impressions of her childhood and the terrible experiences of the previous weeks were so mixed together, then she fell asleep once more. The following morning she could not withstand the temptation of seeing whether the two angels' heads really resembled the brothers? Everything was quiet and peaceful in the court. This was the first time she had ventured out since her accident. She took a glass to draw water from the well-house, supported by the pillars taken from Charlemagne's palace in the Palatinate near Ingelheim. Whilst lowering the bucket she gazed at the beloved images at her ease. No one was there to disturb her at her early task. The glass filled with the pure water of the well sparkled in her hand. Clear shone the morning-sun on the Ruprecht building, and to see the images better the maiden was forced to approach closer. She protected her eyes against the light with her hand and looked intently at the well-known figures. Gently and kindly seemed the angels to smile back on her. The younger one to the left might stand for the grave Paolo, the older one to the right the joyous artist. Right! "He is the right one," the words of the witch kept dinning in her ears. And did not the compasses in the middle refer to Felice's art? Not the breviary, but the implement of the Maestro is surrounded by the roses of love. "But they are both clad as choir-boys." The thought distracted her. The angels' heads seemed to float, to nod to her, to greet her. Dazzled by the light it seemed to her confused eyes as if the wreath were coming away. Suddenly a full blown rose fell at her feet. Surprised she looked around whether she could see anyone. She picked up the flower. It was the same kind of deep-red rose as was sculptured on the wreath round the angels. With a feeling akin to superstition she looked up to see whether the beautiful rose had not fallen out of the wreath encircling the lovely children? But none was missing. The windows on the whole of that side were closed, with the exception of a single one, and that belonged to Felice's room. Smilingly she placed the flower in her glass, and hurried back as fast as her lame foot would permit, for just at that moment a servant maid inclined to question her about her early appearance in the court came out of the house. She did not however feel attracted towards the "red-haired Frances," who in admiration for the rose pressed too familiarly at her side.