As this girl was thus lying, rather than kneeling before me, half dead, dripping, I quickly pulled off my cloak and wrapped her in it, whispering to her, "Warm yourself, dear, oh, warm yourself, darling Dorothea, or you will die! What were you doing in the cold river?"
"Oh, keep silent!" she said, throwing back the hood of her mantle, and combing her dripping hair back with her fingers. "What I implore you to do is to keep silent. Come to that stone seat yonder. Father is speaking with Saint Andrew, and can't hear us."
We crept cautiously to the stone seat. Utterly carried away by the most extraordinary sensations, overmastered by fear and rapture, I clasped the creature in my arms. She sat down in my lap without hesitation, and threw her arms about my neck. I felt the icy water from her hair running down my neck; but as drops sprinkled on fire only increase its flaming, love and longing only seethed up within me the more vehemently.
"Anselmus," she whispered, "I believe you are good and true. When you sing it goes right through my heart, and you have charming ways. You won't betray me. Who would get you your coffee if you did? And, listen, when you are all starving (and you soon will be), I'll come to you at night, all alone, when nobody can know, and bake you nice cakes. I have flour, fine flour, hidden away in my little room. And we'll have bridecake, white and lovely!" At this she began to laugh, but immediately sobbed and wept. "Ah me! like those in Moskow. Oh! my Alexei! my Alexei! Beautiful dolphin, swim! Swim through the waves! Am I not waiting for you, your faithful love?" She drooped her little head, her sobs grew fainter, and she seemed to sink into a slumber, her bosom heaving and falling in sighs of longing. I looked at the old man. He was standing with outstretched arms, and saying, in hollow tones, "He gives the signal! See how he shakes his fiery locks of flame; how eagerly he treads into the ground those fiery pillars on which he traverses the land! Hear ye not his step of thunder? Feel ye not the vivifying breath which wreathes before him like a gleaming incense cloud? Hither! hither! mighty brethren!"
The sound of the old man's words was like the hollow roar of the approaching whirlwind, and while he spoke, the fire upon the Meissner Hills blazed brighter and brighter. "Help, Saint Andrew!" the girl cried in her sleep. And suddenly she sprung up as if possessed by some terrible idea, and throwing her left arm more closely round me, whispered into my ear, "Anselmus! it would be better that I killed you," and I saw a knife gleaming in her right hand. I repulsed her in terror, with a loud cry of, "Mad creature! What would you do?" Then she screamed out, "Ah, I cannot do it! But all is over with you now!" At that moment the old man cried, "Agafia, with whom are you speaking?" And ere I could bethink me, he was close to me, aiming a stroke with his swung staff at me which would have cleft my skull in two had not Agafia seized me from behind and drawn me quickly away. The staff splintered into a thousand pieces on the stone bench. The old man fell on his knees. "Allons! allons!" resounded from all sides. I had to collect my thoughts, and spring quickly to one side to avoid being crushed by the guns and ammunition waggons which were again coming across.
Next morning the Russians drove this expeditionary force down from the hills, and back into the fortifications, notwithstanding the superiority of its numbers. "'Tis a strange thing," people said, "that our friends outside were informed of the enemy's plans, for that signal fire on the Meissner Hills had the effect of assembling the troops, so that they might make a resistance in force, just at the very time and place where he intended to concentrate his attacking bodies."
For several days Dorothea did not come in the morning with my coffee; and my landlord, pale with terror, told me had seen her, along with the mad beggar of the Elbe bridge, marched off from the marshal's quarters to Neustadt under a strong escort.
"Oh, good heavens!" said Anselmus's friend, "they were discovered and executed."
But Anselmus gave a strange smile and said, "Agafia got away; and, alter the Peace was signed, I received, from her own hands, a beautiful white wedding-cake of her own making."
The reticence of Anselmus was proof against every effort to induce him to say anything more concerning this astonishing affair.