I should probably not have cast a second look at this stranger had not something in the needless brutality of his action attracted my attention, and caused me to scan his features. I thus noticed that he appeared to be little over twenty years of age, had a small sallow face, a sprouting mustache, and dark eyes set rather near together.
I rang the house-bell, and my maid came down to let me in, when, to my surprise, the stranger rudely attempted to force himself in behind me; but we slammed the door in his face, and then my servant told me that this same young man had been hanging about here for over half an hour, and had already once endeavored to effect an entrance behind some other person.
Two days later the troops came back from the manœuvres, and everything returned to accustomed order and quiet. The officers were, however, one and all far too much engrossed in recollection of those glorious imaginary laurels they had been winning on their bloodless battle-fields to take interest in anything so commonplace as a real fire; so the tale of the terrors we had undergone during their absence fell upon callous ears, and as no more conflagrations ensued to give color of semblance to our story, the matter soon lapsed into oblivion.
The usual winter torpor settled down upon the place, and the months wore slowly away towards spring without anything having occurred to disturb their peaceful current, when late on the evening of the 21st of February the almost forgotten sound of the tocsin was again heard in the streets, and simultaneously the news of a fourfold murder spread like wildfire through the town. The house inhabited by a retired military surgeon, Dr. Friedenwanger, had been discovered burning, and some members of the fire-brigade, on forcing an entrance, found his corpse, along with that of his wife, child, and maidservant, still reeking with warm blood, and mutilated in the most disgusting manner.
At first everybody was quite at sea as to where to look for the perpetrators of this crime, but by a curious chance, just while Dr. Friedenwanger was being buried, two days later, a bloody knife and some iron crowbars, found concealed in a drain near the cemetery, led to the identification of the murderers in the persons of Anton von Kleeberg and Rudolf Marlin,[74] two young men of respectable burgher families, aged about nineteen and twenty-one. The photographs of these youthful criminals being soon after exhibited in several shop-windows, neither I nor my maid had any difficulty in recognizing that of Kleeberg as the portrait of the mysterious stranger who had tried to enter our house on the night of the fire.
Many interesting details, too lengthy to be here recorded, came out at the trial, and a long list of misdeeds was brought home to the culprits, who, among other things, confessed to having laid every one of the fires the previous summer, thus diverting public attention while they proceeded to rob some particular house known to be ill-guarded, or inhabited by women only. There is therefore every reason to suppose that Messrs. Kleeberg and Marlin, well aware of the temporary absence of all masculine element from the household, had selected our house for a visit of this description; and I am likewise firmly convinced that my beloved and sagacious dog Brick, with that delicate sense of perception which so favorably distinguishes the canine from the coarser human race, had instantaneously detected the guilty intentions of the very respectable-looking young man we met in the moonlight before our house that September night. The victim, Dr. Friedenwanger, enjoyed a bad reputation as a usurer, and his murder had been undertaken for the sake of stealing the watches and jewellery he kept in pawn; while by subsequently setting fire to the premises the murderers had hoped to annihilate all traces of their crime. Some of the horrible disclosures at the trial brought, nevertheless, moments of intense satisfaction to more than one female breast, as being so many triumphant vindications of those terrors so cavalierly treated by the other sex a few months before. Did they now realize in what danger we had been last autumn, when they were all away engrossed in their miserable sham-fights? Did they know that their homes might have been reduced to ashes while they were complacently toying with blank-cartridges? or that their helpless progeny could easily have been made mince-meat of while they were slaying their legions of visionary Russians or Turks?
Such the self-evident arguments with which we were now able to clear ourselves from the base imputation of cowardice, and surely no woman worthy her sex forbore to make use of these handy weapons, or missed such glorious opportunity of turning the tables on her lord and master.
Characteristic of Magyar legislation was the circumstance of the whole trial being conducted in Hungarian, though this language was absolutely unknown to the two German prisoners, who were thus debarred the doubtful privilege of comprehending their own death-sentence when finally pronounced about a year after their crime. Like enough, though, its meaning was subsequently made clear to them, for Anton von Kleeberg and Rudolf Marlin were executed at Hermanstadt on the 16th of June, 1885.[75]