Regina, or the Sins of the Fathers

by Hermann Sudermann

Then in his sore distress he flung himself across the grave, face downwards in the snow, folded his hands and stammered forth an incoherent prayer, while tears gushed from his eyes.

The intense cold of his exposed position stung his face, and drove him to stand up again. He patrolled the row of graves, unable to evolve a single rational thought. He felt as if he were caught in a brazen net, that was drawing its meshes tighter and tighter around him.

"God in Heaven," he cried aloud, "visit not the sins of the fathers on me! Let the dead sleep.... I have not murdered them. Let something happen, a miracle, a sign, that I may be shown that Thou wilt not have me perish in this anguish of despair." He cast his eye round him as if looking for help.

But coldly and unsympathetically the moonlit, lead-coloured sky looked down on him. There was no sign, no miracle.

He laughed. "You are becoming imbecile," he murmured inwardly.

An unspeakable exhaustion overwhelmed him. He reeled, and his feet gave way beneath him. The next moment he was sitting in the cavity which the weight of his prostrate figure had made in the snow. He drew up the collar of his coat, and nearly frozen, brooded on, half sleeping, half waking.

When he rose with cramped limbs, happy to have escaped falling asleep and being frozen to death, one thin purple streak had appeared in the eastern sky. An ague, hot and cold at the same time, like the beginning of fever, shook his frame.

Now there was nothing for it, but to go home. But where was he to find the strength necessary to obliterate for ever from his mind what had happened in the night that was over at last? His tongue instinctively felt for his lip.... The wound left by the impress of her kiss burned there still.

And there had been no sign from Heaven, no miracle. One course only remained that might save him from the worst, and that was death.

Death! The thought came to him like a ray of light in the darkness, yet his brain was too weary, his soul too dispirited for him to grasp it, and it died out as quickly as it had come.