After a little while the flakes had ceased falling, and, in the faint snowlight, beneath a clear sky, we gazed forth together from our ambulant nest, here upon mysterious stretches of plain-land, there upon ghosts of serried trees, trees that marched as it were past us back towards Budissin. I remember how in a clear space of sky a star shone out upon us at last, and how it seemed a good omen, and how we kissed in the darkness.
Then there was our meal, with Anna’s lantern to illumine the feast. I was so lost in watching my beloved bite her black bread contentedly with small white teeth, and toast me with loving eyes over the thin wine, that I could scarce fall to, myself. Yet when I did so it was with right good appetite, for I was hungered, and I never tasted better fare.
Then János got out of the waggon to sit in front by the driver and smoke. My great-uncle had been such a confirmed tobacco-man that János had acquired the habit in attendance upon him, and it did not behove me to interfere with an indulgence fostered by thirty years’ service.
Anyhow, on that night the stray whiffs of his strong tobacco mingled not unpleasantly with the keen cold scents of the night; and the sound of the two men’s talk, with the monotonous jingle and rumble of harness and cart, made a comfortable human accompaniment to our passage in the midst of the great silence. Anna went to sleep and snored after her good day’s work, waking now and again with a start and a groan, and thence to oblivion once more. And then we too, oblivious of the world, fell into a long dream, hand in hand—a great wide-eyed dream filling our silence with soaring music, our darkness with all the warm colour of life.
And thus we reached the first halting-place in the itinerary planned by János and myself on the Imperial Chaussée. The place whence we would best defy our enemies, and therefore our ultimate destination, was of course my own Castle of Tollendhal, recent experience having sufficiently demonstrated that in England we should be ill-protected from the machinations of Budissin. This first stage was Löbau.
Never did town look so thoroughly asleep under its snow-laden eaves, behind its black shutters, thought I, as our tired horses, steaming and stumbling, dragged our cart up the main street.
A watchman had just sung out his cry: “The twelfth hour of the night, and a clear heaven,” when we turned into the market-place, from the middle of which he chanted his informing ditty to those Löbauers who might chance to be awake to hear and thereby be comforted.
Spear in one hand and lantern in the other, the fellow approached to inquire into such an unusual event as the passage of midnight travellers. We heard János, in brief tones, tell a plausible tale of his lordship’s travelling coach having broken down (on its way from Görlitz, said he, who never missed a chance of falsifying a scent!), and of his lordship, who happened to be in a special haste to proceed, having availed himself of a passing country cart to pursue his journey to the next posting town, and so forth, all the main points of this story being corroborated by an affirmative growl from our Jehu. Whereupon the watchman, honest fellow, nothing loath doubtless to vary the perennial monotony of his avocation, undertook to awaken for our benefit the inmates of the post-house, the best house of entertainment, he asseverated, in the town.
It will be long, I take it, before the worthy burghers of Löbau, and especially mine host of the “Cross Keys,” forget the mysterious passage at dead of night of the great unknown magnate and his hooded lady, of the tire-woman with the forbidding countenance, and of the ugly body-servant, whose combined peremptoriness and lavish generosity produced such wonders,—even had subsequent events not sufficed to fix it upon their minds as a tragic epoch in the history of their country.
A few minutes of obstinate hammering and bell-ringing by János and by the deeply impressed watchman, awoke the hostelry from the depths of its slumbers. The bark of dogs responded first to the clangour; lights appeared at various corners; windows, and then doors, were thrown open. At last János threw back the leather curtain of our conveyance, and hat in hand, with his greatest air of bonne maison assisted my lord in his cloak, my lady in the furs (both much ornamented with wisps of hay), to alight from their cart.