The Lost Manuscript: A Novel

by Gustav Freytag

"What they know is, as a rule, more unreliable than is good for them or for us," replied Fritz; "but from their youth they are accustomed to view the learning that interests men, with sympathy. The best results of intellectual work are so easily accessible to them that everywhere they find common ground on which they can meet. But here, however charming and admirable this life may appear to our eyes, it is attractive just because it is so strange and different from ours."

"You exaggerate, you distort," cried the Professor. "I have felt deeply in the time that we have passed here how great are the rights that a noble passion has over one's life. This we have forgotten over our books. Who can tell what it is that makes two human beings so love one another, that they cannot part? It is not only pleasure in the existence of the other, nor the necessity of making one's own being complete, nor feeling and fancy alone, which joins the object of our love--although heretofore a stranger--so intimately to us. Is it necessary that the wife should only be the finer reed, which always sounds the same notes that the husband plays--only an octave higher? Speech is incapable of expressing the joy and exultation that I feel when near her; and I can only tell you, my friend, that it is something good and great, and it demands its place in my life. What you now express are only the doubts of cold reason, which is an enemy to all that is in process of becoming, and continues to raise its pretensions until it is subdued by accomplished realities."

"It is not alone reason," replied Fritz, offended. "I did not deserve that you should so misconstrue what I have said. If it was presumptuous in me to speak to you concerning feelings which you now consider sacred, I must say in excuse, that I only assume the right which your friendship has hitherto granted me. I must do my duty to you before I leave you here. If I cannot convince you, try to forget this conversation. I shall never touch upon this theme again."

He left the Professor standing at the window, and went to his bed. He softly took off his boots, threw himself upon the bed, and turned his face to the wall. After a short time he felt his hand seized, the Professor was sitting by his bed clasping his friend's hand without saying a word. At last Fritz withdrew his hand with a hearty pressure and again turned to the wall.

He rose in the early dawn, gently approached the slumbering Professor, and then quietly left the room. The Proprietor awaited him in the sitting-room; the carriage came; there was a short friendly parting, and Fritz drove away, leaving his friend alone among the crickets of the field and the ears of corn, whose heavy heads rose and fell like the waves of the sea under the morning breeze, the same this year as they had done thousands and thousands of years before.

The Doctor looked back at the rock on which the old house stood, on the terraces beneath, with the churchyard and wooden church, and on the forest which surrounded the foot of the hill; and all the past and the present of this dangerous place rose distinctly before him. Its ancient character of Saxon times had altered little; and he looked on the rock and the beautiful Ilse of Bielstein, as they would have been in the days of yore. Then the rock would have been consecrated to a heathen god. At that time there would have been a tower standing on it. And Ilse would have dwelt there, with her golden hair, in a white linen dress with a garment of otter skin over it. She would have been priestess and prophetess of a wild Saxon race. Where the church stood would have been the sacrificial altar, from which the blood of prisoners of war would have trickled down into the valley.

Again, later, a Christian Saxon chief would have built his log-house there, and again the same Ilse would have sat between the wooden posts in the raised apartment of the women, using her spindle, or pouring black mead into the goblets of the men.

Again, centuries later it would have been a walled castle, with stone mullions to the windows, and a watch-turret erected on the rock; it had become a nest for predatory barons, and Ilse of Bielstein again dwelt there, in a velvet hood which her father had robbed from a merchant on the king's highway. And when the house was assaulted by enemies. Ilse stood among the men on the wall and drew the great crossbow, like a knight's squire.

Again, hundreds of years later, she sat in the hunting-lodge of a prince, with her father, an old warrior of Swedish times. Than she had become pious, and, like a city dame, she cooked jams and preserves, and went down to the pastor to the conventicle. She would not have worn flowers, and sought to know what husband Heaven destined for her by putting her finger at hazard on a passage in the Bible.

And now his friend had met this same Saxon child, tall and strong in body and soul, but still a child of the middle ages, with a placid expression in her beautiful countenance which only changed when the heart was excited by any sudden passion; a mind as if half asleep, and of a nature so child-like and pliant that it was sometimes impossible to know whether she was wise or simple. In her character there still remained something of all those Ilses of the two thousand years that had passed away--a mixture of Sibyl, mead-dispenser, knight's daughter, and pietist. She was of the old German type and the old German beauty, but that she should suddenly become the wife of a Professor, that appeared to the troubled Doctor too much against all the laws of quiet historical development.