The Serapion Brethren, Vol. II

by E. T. A. Hoffmann

He went to Marguerite, who was lying profoundly insensible, only giving an occasional convulsive twitch. He bent over her, and was seen to take a small box out of his pocket, from which he took something between his fingers, and this he gently rubbed over Marguerite's neck and the region of her heart. Then coming away from her, he said to the others, "She has taken opium; but she can be saved by means which I can employ."

By the Count's directions Marguerite was taken upstairs to her room, where he remained with her alone. Meanwhile, Madame von G---- had found the phial which had contained the opium-drops prescribed some time previously for herself. The unfortunate girl had taken the whole of the contents of the phial.

"The Count is really a wonderful man," Dagobert said, with a slight touch of irony. "He divines everything. The moment he saw Marguerite he knew she had taken poison, and next he knew exactly the name and colour of it."

In half-an-hour the Count came and assured the company that Marguerite was out of danger, as far as her life was concerned. With a side-glance at Moritz, he added that he hoped to remove all cause of mischief from her mind as well. He desired that a maid should sit up with the patient, whilst he himself would spend the night in the next room, to be at hand in case anything fresh should transpire; but he wished to prepare and strengthen himself for this by a few more glasses of wine; for which end he sat down at table with the other gentlemen, whilst Angelica and her mother, being upset by what had happened, withdrew.

The Colonel was greatly annoyed at this silly trick, as he called it, of Marguerite's, and Moritz and Dagobert felt very eery and uncanny over the whole affair; but the more out of tune they were the more did the Count give the rein to a joviality which had never been seen in him before, and which, in sober truth, had a certain amount of gruesomeness about it.

"This Count," Dagobert said to Moritz, as they walked away, "has a something most eerily repugnant to me about him, in some strange inexplicable way. I cannot help a feeling that there must be something exceedingly mysterious connected with him."

"Ah!" said Moritz, "there is a weight as of lead on my heart. I am filled with a dim foreboding that some dark mischance threatens my love."

That night the Colonel was aroused from sleep by a courier from the Residenz. Next morning he came to his wife, looking rather pale, and constraining himself to a calmness which he was far from feeling, said, "We have to be parted again, dearest child. There's going to be another campaign, after this little bit of a rest. I shall have to march off with the regiment as soon as ever I can, perhaps this evening."

Madame von G---- was greatly startled; she broke out into bitter weeping. The Colonel said, by way of consolation, that he felt sure this campaign would end as gloriously as the last--that he felt in such admirable spirits about it that he was certain nothing could go amiss. "What you had better do," he said, "is, take Angelica with you to the country-house, and stay there till we send the enemy to the rightabout again. I am providing you with a companion who will keep you amused, and prevent your feeling lonely. Count S---- is going with you."

"What!" cried Madame von G----. "Good heavens! the Count to go with us!--Angelica's rejected lover--that deceitful Italian, who is hiding his annoyance in the bottom of his heart, only to bring it out in fullest force at the first proper opportunity; this Count who--I cannot say why--seems more intensely antipathetic to me since yesterday than ever?"