"From this time we were together for five years, and first as simple volunteers, then as officers of the line, shared perils and hardships like brothers. I was a good soldier, but my brother's name was known throughout the whole army, and again he was called 'the Wild Zehren,' as if to such a man that was the only fitting epithet. Innumerable were the stories told of his courage and foolhardiness. The general opinion was that he was seeking death; but he was not thinking of death--he only despised life. He laughed when he heard others talking enthusiastically of the regeneration of Germany; how we would rid our native soil both of foreign and native tyrants, in order to establish a kingdom of fraternity and equality in the liberated land. At that time he often had the old phrase of 'hammer and anvil' on his lips, which, as he said, expressed his philosophy in the simplest terms. 'Fraternity! equality!' he scoffed--'away with such empty phrases! This is a world of the strong and the weak; of masters and serfs. You have so long been the anvil under that giant hammer Napoleon, that now you want to play hammer yourselves. See how far you will bring it. Not far, I fear. You have only talents for the part of anvil.'
"'Why did you come to help us fight Napoleon?' I asked.
"'Because I was bored in Paris,' was his reply.
"But he did himself injustice. He was something more than the blasé cavalier of fortune which he pretended to be; he had squandered in a life of wild adventures the treasures of a heart dearer than Plutus' mine; but a fragment of this heart was yet left him, and in this fragment lived--if not genuine patriotism and philanthropy, at least the generous impulse to side with the oppressed and resist the oppressor, whether he be a brilliant conquerer or a stupid native prince ruling by the grace of God.
"And now that the conquerer was chained to the rock of St. Helena, and he saw the heroes of so many battles taking their old accustomed yoke once more upon their patient necks; when he saw that the whole proud torrent of liberty was wasting in the sand of loyal obedience, then he broke his sword, which he had gloriously carried through twenty battles, bestowed a curse upon both despots and slaves, and said that now, as before the war, the world was his home; the only home for a free-born man in a slavish age.
"I know well that his reasoning was strained and unsound; but there was a kernel of truth in it. The result has proven this; the incredibly vapid, idealess time in which we live, a time barren of thought and of deeds, a real age of the Epigoni, has completely confirmed his prediction. And now again he wandered, a homeless adventurer, through the land, only with the difference that before with insolent power he had sported with men, whom he now coldly preyed upon because he despised them. 'I endeavored to purchase with my blood a letter of indulgence for my past: it has been refused me. What now is the present or the future to me?' How often have I thought upon this expression of his to me at the moment of our parting. It has always remained with me a key to his enigmatical character.
"Again for years I heard nothing more of him. Our father was dead; our estate sequestered; my second brother, Arthur, whom his aunt had deceived in his expectations, was toiling in thankless public service; I, who had set my heart upon the regeneration of the public, and thought that I could see that the work must be begun at the very beginning, that is, at the bottom, had managed to obtain this place through my patron, Altenburg; had been here, a crippled man, for four years, and was still studying the rudiments of my vocation; Malte was nowhere heard of. Suddenly he reappeared, and with a wife who had followed the adventurer to his home. He declared his intention to take the paternal estate in hand. I afforded him every facility; Arthur sold his rights for a sum of money, the receipt of which, by the way, he still denies. The creditors were glad to get at all events something, and one of them at least consoled himself with the thought that 'omittance was no quittance,' and the hope--which has not deceived him--that the Zehren estates were as secure to him under the new master as under the old.
"We did not meet at his return; just at that time I could not well leave this place, and he, on his part, felt no desire to renew the old friendship. When we parted, I was about to contract a marriage, in which the first-born of an ancient line saw a criminal mésalliance; now for some years I had been holding an official post; and to hold any post, but especially such a post as this, was in his eyes throwing one's self away, trampling under foot the inborn right of a knight of the hammer, and making one's self a plebeian anvil. That I refused the compensation he had offered me for my interest in the estate, wounded him deeply. By so doing, in his eyes, I renounced my obedience and subordination to the first-born, the chief of the family. He could not forgive me that I had no more need of him; that I had no debts which he must plunge himself into debt to pay; in a word, that I was not like my brother Arthur, who was much more compliant in this point--too compliant, I fear.
"On the other side, what I heard of him--and he took care never to let men's tongues rest about him--confirmed me in the sad conviction that between him and me a gulf had opened, not to be crossed by even the sincere love I still felt for him. I heard of the wild life he was living with the noblemen of his neighborhood, now impoverished by the war; of the drinking and gaming bouts, of mad exploits of which he was the originator. At this time a dark rumor got abroad that he was conducting the smuggling traffic, which during the war had flourished greatly, being then encouraged by the government, but now was strongly repressed. But the worst rumors were those that spoke of the wretched life he led with his unhappy wife. He ill-treated her, it was said; he had imprisoned her in a cellar; it was unaccountable that the authorities did not interfere.
"I could not bear to hear these things, of which I did not believe a word, for the charges were in too glaringly contradiction to the naturally noble and generous nature of my brother. But I felt a natural hesitation to mix myself up in these affairs, until a letter which I received brought me to a decision. The letter was written in bad French, and the very first words informed me that the unhappy woman who wrote it must be out of her right mind. 'I hear you know the road to Spain,' it began, and ended with the words, 'I entreat you to tell me the road to Spain.' In an hour after receiving it I set out, and, after so many years, saw my father's house and my brother again. It was a painful meeting.