Gotthold calmly did what he could to save himself; he carefully watched the rise and fall of every approaching wave and kept the boat's head to the wind, now with the right oar, now with the left, and anon making a powerful stroke with both. If it upset, all depended upon whether it sank immediately or floated on the surface. In the latter case his situation was not utterly desperate; he might perhaps be able to cling to it, and, if the wind veered, either be carried back to land, or rescued by some passing ship; but if the boat sank, he was lost according to all human calculation. He could not put down the oars a moment to divest himself of his clothing, and not even so good a swimmer as himself could hope, fully clad, to swim for many hours in such a sea, especially as he already began to feel that his strength, carefully as he had husbanded it, was gradually beginning to fail.
Gradually at first, and then faster and faster. Hitherto he had executed the most complicated movements of the oars with perfect ease, but now they grew heavier and heavier in the stiffened hands, the benumbed arms. His breast grew more and more oppressed, his heart beat more and more painfully, his breathing changed to gasping, his throat seemed choked, his temples throbbed; come what would, he must rest a moment, take in the oars, and let the boat drift.
The little skiff instantly began to ship water; Gotthold had expected it. "It can't last much longer now," he said to himself, "and what does it matter? If you could live for her, it would be worth the trouble; but now--to whom do you die except yourself? Death cannot be so very painful. True, she will think: 'He tried to lose his life, and he might have spared me that.' It is very ungallant in me to drift ashore a disfigured corpse, very ungallant and very stupid; but it is all of a piece, and surely a man cannot pay for a folly more dearly than with his life."
Thoughts crowded still more confusedly upon his bewildered brain as, utterly exhausted, he sat bending forward, staring at the oars, which he still clenched mechanically in his stiffened fingers, and the reeling edge of the boat, which was now sharply relieved against the grayish-black sky, and then buried a foot deep under the foaming crest of a breaking wave. Then he saw all this only as a background, from which her face appeared in perfect distinctness, no longer with the mouth quivering with pain and the cold Medusa eyes, but transfigured by a merry roguish smile, as it had always arisen before his memory from the precious days of youth, and as he had seen it lately for one moment.
Suddenly an infinite sorrow seized upon him that he must give up life without having lived, without being loved by her; the life which, if he was only permitted to go on loving her, was an inexpressible happiness; the life which did not belong to him, which he owed to her, and for which, for her sake, he would struggle till his latest breath.
The stiffened fingers again closed firmly around the handles of the oars; the benumbed arms moved and parried with powerful strokes the onset of the rushing waves; the wearied eyes gazed once more over the foaming waters for some hope of deliverance, and a joyful shout escaped his laboring breast when, as if summoned by some spell, a sail emerged from the watery mist with which the air was filled. The next moment it came shooting forward, a large vessel, with her larboard side so low in the water, that Gotthold saw the whole keel from bow to stern, and above the high bulwark nothing was visible except the head of the steersman, whose snow-white hair fluttered in the wind, and the upper part of the body of a young man on the bowsprit, who held a coil of rope in his hand. And now, like a serpent, the line fell directly across his boat. He seized it and wound it around him. Then came a powerful jerk; his boat, filled almost to the water's edge, reeled to and fro, and sank under his feet; but his hands were already clinging to the side of the larger vessel; two strong arms seized him under the shoulders, and the next moment he fell at the feet of Cousin Boslaf, who held out his left hand to him, while with the right he turned his helm by a powerful effort, to save his own boat from being swamped.
CHAPTER XIII.
The sea was still heaving after the thunder-storm of the afternoon, but the sun had cast a trembling light over the dark waves before it set. The stars now gradually appeared in the blackish-blue vault of the heavens; Gotthold raised his eyes to them, and then gazed into the quiet countenance of the old man, by whose side he was seated upon a bench, sheltered by the thick walls of the beach-house. Through the window beside them gleamed the light of the lamp, which, ever since Cousin Boslaf had lived in the beach-house, had burned there night after night, and would now continue to burn on, even after his eyes were closed in death. It was for this object that he had taken the journey to Sundin--the first since he returned from Sweden, sixty-five years ago, and probably the last he would ever make in his life. It had cost him an effort to give up his hermit habits for days, and mingle with mankind once more. But it must be done; he dared not ask whether the road would be hard or easy for him. So he had sailed away, accompanied by young Carl Peters, the son of his old friend, and for six long days presented himself at the Herr Präsident's every morning, and was always sent away because the Herr Präsident was too busy to see him, as the valet said, who finally roughly forbade him to come again, just at the moment the former left his study, and, seeing the old man, asked him kindly who he was, and what he wanted. Then Cousin Boslaf told the friendly gentleman that his name was Bogislaf Wenhof, and he had been very intimate with Malte von Krissowitz, whose portrait was hanging on the wall, and who, if he was not mistaken, was the Präsident's great-grandfather, and then told him his desire. Malte von Krissowitz was one of the six young men who had officiated as judges during the contest between Bogislaf and Adolf Wenhof; the Präsident, when a very young man, had heard the famous story from his father, who had it from his grandfather, to whom his great-grandfather had related it; it seemed to him like a fairy tale that the hero of that story should be still alive, and the very old man who was sitting on the sofa beside him. He called his wife and daughter, introduced them to the old man, and insisted that he should stay to dinner. Everybody was most kind and friendly, and--what was most important--the Präsident, when he bade him farewell, gave him his word of honor that the good cause for which he pleaded should henceforth be his own.
"Within a few days," said Cousin Boslaf, "a beacon will be erected here before the house, on a high foundation of stone, whose light can be seen a mile farther than that of my lamp. Carl Peters is appointed keeper, and will live with me in the beach-house, which for the present will serve as a watch-house, and after my death is to become the property of the government. So this great care is removed from my mind. I need say no longer, when I extinguish the lamp at daybreak: Will you be able to light it again this evening?"
The old man was silent; the Swedish banner flapped still more loudly upon the roof of the beach-house; the waves broke more heavily upon the rocky strand. Gotthold's eyes wandered with deep reverence over the figure at his side, the tall form of the silver-haired old man of ninety, whose heart still beat so warmly in his breast for all mankind--for the poor sailors whom he did not know, and who did not know him, of whom he knew nothing except that they were sailing yonder in the night, invisible even to his keen eyes, and so long as they saw the light kept away from the dangerous coast, as their fathers and grandfathers had taught them to do. The old man who lived only for others, whose whole existence was nothing but love for others, from whom he neither asked nor expected love or gratitude, had to-day risked his own life to save him, who scarcely desired to be saved, to whom life seemed valueless because he loved and was not beloved in return. What would the old man say to that? Would he, in the boundlessness of his unselfish love, even be able to understand such a selfish, egotistical passion?