"Or, rather, I did not sleep--I was enraged, I was maddened; my hands bled from my efforts to break the bars of my cage. Gradually I consoled myself with the hope that this captivity could not last long, and Leonora--well! she would bear her hard lot like a heroine. A second Egmont, I saw freedom and my beloved hand in hand. Through night to light! Through battle to victory! That was the mystic word with which I tried to frighten back the serpent-haired monster. Despair, when it was pressing upon me and about to strike its fangs into my heart. The mystic word had ample time to prove its power. I remained in prison for five years!
"You may imagine if my faith in the so-called divine nature of the world's government was shaken during this time, which I measured by the beats of my heart, and the drops which fell, one by one, from the damp ceiling of my cell. But, I told you before, my strength was great, and I was sternly determined to live. I had heard, to be sure, in the silent nights which saw me tossing restlessly upon my hard couch, the great word that releases us, but I had understood it only half, and perhaps not quite half. I had but just begun to spell the letters in my long apprenticeship; life itself was to be my school, before I should be able to read it fluently.
"I had scarcely been set free when I hastened to this place--you may imagine with what feelings! In the beginning of my captivity I had received one or two letters from Leonora, in which she conjured me to endure patiently, and to remain faithful, appealing to the God to whom she was hourly sending up her prayers for my release. Her letters had become rarer, and after about two years none had come any more. That was my greatest sorrow; but I always believed that it was the cruelty of my jailors which denied me this consolation, and I ground my teeth and cursed my tormentors.
"I had done them injustice.
"It was far in the night when I reached Fichtenau. I drove directly to the familiar house. I jumped from the carriage and pulled the bell. A window was opened up-stairs; an old woman looked out and asked what I wanted? I inquired after the schoolmaster. 'He died three years ago,' was the curt answer. 'And where is his daughter?' 'You must ask the great gentleman who eloped with her three years ago,' said the woman, and shut the window with violence. I stood thunderstruck. Then I laughed aloud; but I was silenced by an intense pain in the heart--for, Oswald, I had loved Leonora.
"I never knew how I reached the inn. Late in the night I roused the good people from their slumbers by my wild laughing and furious raging. They broke open the door of my room--I was in full delirium. The air of the prison had affected my health, and the fearful blow, finding me utterly unprepared, had shaken the weakened edifice to the foundation. I struggled four weeks for my life, but I clung to it fiercely, and Death had to give up its prey. Woe to me! That death would not have been the ordinary death to me--it would have restored me to life! If I should die now I would die for ever!"
Oswald shuddered. What was the meaning of these mysterious words: "Die forever!" Did they contain that great mystery which was yet hidden from him by a thick veil?
"My convalescence," continued Berger, "lasted long, for my strength had been utterly exhausted. I crept through the streets of the village, leaning on a stick, and rejoiced to find that I could climb, day by day, a few steps higher, until I succeeded at last in reaching this spot here--the scene of an oath, which I had fancied to be sworn for eternity, and which had passed away with the breath of her lips. I came every day here to weep over my lost happiness, and to quarrel with Heaven who lets his sun shine upon the unjust, and hurls his lightnings at the just. For I was, like King Lear, a man more sinned against than sinning. I had meant well and faithfully in all I had hoped and striven for in life. I had loved my native land as a child loves its parents, with a simple, believing heart; and in return it had made me suffer five years in a dungeon. I had loved Leonora with every drop of blood in my heart; and in return she had betrayed me. Up to that moment I had so lived in the world that I could face all and say: Who can accuse me of a sin?--and yet! and yet! I racked my brain to solve the mystery. I had never yet understood fully that life itself is the great sin, from which all other sins flow necessarily, as the stone, once set in motion, must roll inevitably down the precipice. Thus only I gradually comprehended that He cannot be a God of love who created and still creates a world in which the sins of the fathers are punished down to the third and fourth generation--a world, the whole government of which rests on the fearful Jesuitical principles that the end sanctions the means. So far I had always tried to find out only what was good in the world and in men; now my eyes had been opened by sore sufferings for the sufferings of my fellow-beings. I now saw how every page of our history bears the record of some fearful deed that makes our hair stand on end, and our blood curdle in our veins; I saw that there is a dark corner in every man's heart which he never dares look into; that no man yet has lived who did not wish once in his life that he had never been born; I saw that the life of countless multitudes is nothing more than a desperate struggle for existence; that sickness and sin, repentance and sorrow, undermine our life most thoroughly and eat their way to the core like worms in ripe fruit; that at best our pleasures are a dance upon graves--that, if life really ever was precious, death, inexorable death, is forever scorning and scoffing at this precious life. And I looked around on nature, in which poets see an idyll, and I found that it was either dead and insensible, or, when it does feel and sympathize, only repeating the bloody drama of human existence in a ruder and more shocking form. I saw that the different races of animals are engaged in fierce, implacable warfare against each other, uninterrupted by a moment's peace, and that their wars are carried on with a cruelty by the side of which even the most refined tortures of the Inquisition appear at times very harmless proceedings.
"And whilst I thus tore the gay rags to pieces, under which cowardice and stupidity try to conceal the wounds and sores of society, there arose in my heart a feeling which I had not known before--hatred. It was only my love in another form, although I tried to persuade myself that I had forgotten the faithless one; it was only another expression of my fondness of life, although I had fancied that I had forever closed my account with life. When we really give up life, we know nothing more of love or hatred.
"At that time, however, I did hate. Passionately as I had loved, my whole being was concentrated in the one, burning desire to be revenged. Revenge! revenge! on him! on her!--this was the cry of a voice within me, which I could never silence again. They all knew my misfortune in Fichtenau, and felt for me with that cheap sympathy which is composed of delight in scandal and the pleasure we take in the failures of others. They told me, unasked, all that was known about Leonora's flight.