And higher rose the mighty sounds:
"But you must understand me right,
When men do part, they say with might,
Till we meet again!
Till we meet again!"
The music passed away; the lamps were extinguished. Quietly as they had come the crowds went away. It was dark again in the street; but in the hearts of those who were standing up-stairs in the bay-window, holding each; other in close embrace, it was bright, like a sunny morning in May.
CHAPTER VIII.
The great woods of Berkow are leafless. Where formerly birds were singing in the green twilight, and beetles and midges humming drowsily there the cold autumnal winds are now whistling through the bare branches; and where dry leaves are yet hanging on old oak-trees, they no longer whisper to each other lovingly as in the beautiful summer time, but rustle weird and woefully. Only the evergreens look as if the season could do them no harm; but their fine foliage also is darker, and they look now, when all around is bare, blacker and more dismal than ever.
Rough autumn has blown through the thick yew-hedge and into the garden behind the castle, has swept the flowers from the whole parterre, and filled the trim walks with withered wet leaves. On the terrace, under the broad branching pine-tree, the favorite place of the mistress of the house, the little round table with the marble slab is still standing, because it is deeply rooted in the ground, but the green benches and chairs have been carried into the garden-house.
The open place before the house, which is divided off by a railing from the farm-buildings, looks melancholy. The shutters on this side of the house are almost always closed, and are only now and then opened by a wrinkled old hand, whereupon often, as just now for instance, the wrinkled old face that belongs to the hand, with its icy gray moustache, looks out for a few minutes to watch a wagon heavily laden with wood, which four powerful horses can hardly drag through the deep mud at the side entrance to the yard between two barns, where even in summer the passage is often quite dangerous. The old man contracts his brows angrily as he sees the servant whip the horses furiously, amid calls and cries and curses. He grumbles something about 'infamous fellow' in his gray beard; but he no longer raises his voice to give vent to a powerful oath or so, as he used to do; for after all it is not the servant's fault, but the tenant's, who has not been prevailed upon these five years to mend the road. This tenant is every way a vessel of wrath for the old man. He keeps his cattle in bad order; he is cruel to his hands; in the third place he knows, according to the old man's notions, nothing of farming; and, finally, he has a red nose, and is always hoarse, two peculiarities attributed to brandy, and equally disgusting to the old man's eyes and ears. And, above all, the terrible prospect of never losing sight of this man for the whole of his life (for his term has twenty years more to run, and the old man is not going to live so long); to have to drag him along, so to say, till his blessed end, like the abominable ball which the old man received in his leg on the battle-field of Waterloo, and which is still there to this hour--no, worse than this ball, for that only hurts in spring and in fall, and whenever the weather is not as it ought to be. But this rascal of a tenant--and the old man abandoned his thoughts to this unprofitable and inexhaustible subject, fixing his eyes all the while upon the bleaching bones of a buzzard which, he had shot many years ago, and which (as a solemn warning to all evil-doers in the air and on the ground) had been nailed to the barn-door, until the voice of a boy, who has just come from the garden and is looking around the yard, comes up to his ear:
"Hallo! Baumann!"
At the sound of this voice the face of the old man clears up, as when a ray of sunlight passes over a rough Alpine landscape. It is the same voice, at least the same tone of voice, which has warmed the old man's heart now for a quarter of a century and longer. He rests both his elbows on the window-sill and looks down upon the handsome uplifted face of the boy with the light-brown, hearty eyes.
"What is the matter, young gentleman?"