The Three Brides, Love in a Cottage, and Other Tales

by Francis A. Durivage

"My father?" asked Adelaide.

"Was a brave and good man. But of your mother—your good mother—she was—"

Here a spasm interrupted his utterance, and he lay back on his pillow gasping for breath. After a brief space he seemed to revive again, and made strong efforts to express himself, but his breath failed him. He motioned to Adelaide to fetch him writing materials, and while she held a sheet of paper on a book before him, he essayed with feeble fingers to trace a sentence with a pen. But the rapid approach of death foiled all his endeavors to communicate a secret that evidently lay close to his heart; and while the young girl bent over him in an agony of grief, he gently sighed away his last. The baron and baroness found their protégée, an hour afterwards, still sorrowing by the bedside of her early friend and protector. With gentle violence they removed her from the chamber of death, and took her home to the castle, where they gave directions to the proper persons to take charge of the old soldier's remains, and inter them with that decent respect which was due to his character and station. Among his effects was found a will, in which he made Adelaide his heiress, bequeathing to her his little landed estate, and a small sum in gold, the produce of his toil and frugality. This event cast a gloom over the spirits of the young maiden, from which, however, her religious persuasions, the attention of her friends, and the elasticity of her youth, eventually relieved her.

The old castle on the Rhine was gay once more, when Rudolph Ernstein, a nephew of the baron, a gay young captain of hussars, whose gallantry and beauty had given him reputation at Vienna, came to pay a long visit to his uncle. He was a high-spirited and accomplished young man, had served with distinction, was a devoted admirer of the ladies, and one of those military Adonises who are born to conquest. He was charmed to find domesticated beneath the old roof tree so fair and lovable a girl as Adelaide, and of course did his best to render his society agreeable to her. He sang to her songs of his own writing, to airs of his own composition, accompanied on his guitar; he told her tales of strange lands that he had visited, of cavalry skirmishes in which he had participated, sketched her favorite scenes in pencil, and offered to teach her the newest dances in vogue at Vienna. He was a dangerous companion to a young girl whose imagination needed but a spark to kindle it, and for a time she indulged in the wild hope that she had made a conquest of Rudolph. But then her reason told her, that even if he loved her, it would be impossible for a young man of family to offer his hand to an almost portionless girl, about whose origin a veil of mystery seemed wrapped. The names of her parents, even, had never been disclosed to her, by the lips of probably the only man who knew her history, and those lips were now cold and mute in death. Hence the little gleam of sunshine which had for a moment penetrated her heart was speedily quenched in a deeper darkness than that which reigned in it before, and she could not help viewing the visit of Rudolph as an ominous event.

One morning, she was witness to a scene which dashed out the last faint glimmering of hope. They were all seated at a huge oaken table, from which the servants had just removed the apparatus of the morning meal.

"Rudolph," said the baron, after lighting his pipe,—an operation of great solemnity and deliberation, and taking a few whiffs to make sure that its contents were duly ignited,—"Rudolph, do you know why I sent for you to Rosenburg?"

"Why, sir," replied the hussar, "I suppose it was because you really have a sort of regard for an idle, good-for-nothing fellow, whose redeeming quality is an attachment to a very kind old uncle, and whose nonsense and good spirits are perhaps a partial compensation for the trouble he gives every body in this tumble-down old castle."

"Tumble-down old castle!" exclaimed the baron, in high dudgeon, the latter part of the soldier's speech cancelling the former; "why, you jackanapes, it will stand for centuries. It resisted the cannon of Napoleon, and it bids defiance to the battering of time. Yes, sir, Rosenburg will stand long after your great-great-grandchildren are superannuated."

"I am not likely to be blessed in the way you hint at, uncle," said the soldier, carelessly. "I am likely, for aught I see, to die a bachelor."

"Nonsense!" said the baron. "What's to become of your family name? Do you think I will allow it to die out, like the Pumpernickels, the Snaphausens, and the Ollenstoffenburgers? No, boy. I sent for you to tell you that I have contracted for your hand with my friend the Baron Von Steinberg."