Regina, or the Sins of the Fathers

by Hermann Sudermann

Instinctively he stretched out his arms. The curtain dropped quickly, and a moment afterwards the light within was extinguished.

He waited, hardly daring to draw a breath, for a sign from the darkened spot. But none came. All was motionless and still.

"It is madness to think of it!" he said to himself. "Probably she didn't recognise you. She only saw a man's figure that gave her a fright. Make haste! For the whole house will be roused and turned out to hunt the supposed thief."

So he retraced his steps. In turning into the street he was conscious that his blood was flowing more calmly, and his pulses not throbbing so fiercely. Being in her neighbourhood even for a few minutes had soothed him.

"Where now?" Anywhere in the world, but not home. At the bare thought of that outstretched figure on the floor, his veins began to pulsate again with violence. Oh, she was a fiend, and he hated her!

He took a side path, not knowing where it led. It was divided from the Castle island by stables and carters' huts, and ended in an open field. On the opposite side, he saw the indigo belt of woods that encircled the flat white plains. The woods drew him towards them again like a magnet. There he would hide, in their majestic depths where the peace of winter reigned and slept its mysterious dreamless slumber.

He trod the pathless field covered with hills and dales of snow which swept away before him like the billows of a boundless ocean of liquid light. His feet crunched through the frozen crust till he sank to his knees, and then it needed all his powers to step forwards once more. But with strenuous effort he ploughed his way, still taking flight from his own thoughts. There was something almost comforting in this objectless striving. His lungs fought for breath; moisture poured from every pore of his body as he plunged and stumbled on. Here and there the crust was strong enough to bear him, and then he felt as if he had been endowed with wings and floated over the ground, till another crash laid him low, grovelling on his hands and knees.

Now the wall of woods rose higher and darker before him; ... he was only a hundred steps from his goal, when his eye was arrested by something in the shape of a hillock extending a distance of about fifty or sixty feet in the direction of the wood. Coming nearer, he saw it was too regular in form for a hillock, and its corners too sharply defined. A few feet off there was a second mound of the same description, and to the left again, a third. They must be gravel heaps, he thought, that had been dug up in the autumn and left to be removed till after the thaw set in. Why should the peasants not get gravel from his property when there was no one to prevent them?

But what did those crosses mean, that stood out so solemnly and eerily in the night, at the foot of each mound? At first he had not noticed them against the dark background of the woods. They were three in number. Roughly hewn out of fir trunks, they were so firmly planted in the earth, that they did not move a hair's-breadth when he shook them. They bore no inscription, and if they had, he would not have been able to read it. Inscrutable as memorials of forgotten misfortune, they stood ranged there in the dim moonlight like rugged sentinels.

And then the mystery was solved. He saw what they were. With a loud cry he dropped his face in his hands. He had stumbled on the graves of the men who had fallen on that accursed night in the year '7. Here lay the bones of his father's victims. What evil chance had led him here to-night? Or was it chance? Had not a thousand invisible arms beckoned him cajolingly and irresistibly along this maniacal route, and let him fight his way through snow and ice, till he was ready to faint from exhaustion? It seemed as though fate had kept in reserve the most excruciating lash of her scourge till this hour of his bitterest humiliation; so that he should no longer be in doubt as to there being any salvation in store for him, and to demonstrate once for all that he was doomed to sink for ever under the weight of shame and despair.