Regina, or the Sins of the Fathers

by Hermann Sudermann

The church clock had struck the midnight hour, by the time Boleslav got back to the spot where he had left Regina's soulless body.

A protecting darkness now veiled the white face, for the moon had passed behind a bank of clouds, yet even from the darkness the great lustreless eyes gazed appealingly up at him, as if asking a question to which there was no answer here or hereafter.

He threw himself on his knees beside her, and, saying good-bye to the two stars, whose light had gone out, he tenderly closed their lids. She now looked as if she were asleep, and he breathed more freely. He felt something almost approaching a painful satisfaction as he watched by her. "You belong to me, only to me," he said. "No one else shall have any part or lot in you, in death as in life."

What he had resolved to do, in a spirit of defiance, as he left the murderer's house, in his present calmer mood still seemed the most commendable course to take. Past events appeared to him now like a brazen chain of guilt, to which for years one link after the other had been added. And into this chain had been forged, till it was made a component part of it, an unlawful love. For the sake of this love which was sinful as hell and pure as heaven, that which only the silence of the night had witnessed should in the silence of the night be buried--buried with this corpse.

What retribution could be rendered by the poor tribunal of man, in a case in which fate had so clearly interfered and pronounced sentence? Would it not be profaning the dead body to drag it into the glare of publicity, and so expose it to the snivelling curiosity of the vulgar herd?

Should he permit the priest who had cursed her in her lifetime to consign her to the grave with a perfunctory blessing? And would not this involve her being laid in a coffin manufactured by her father's blood-guilty hands, followed by his accomplices as mourners, hooting and throwing stones?

Ah no; it should not be! She should be the prey, now she was dead, of no Schrandener wolves. He alone, for whom she had lived, for whom she had gone to meet her death, must prepare her last resting-place. He would hide her in the lap of mother earth, and smooth the turf so carefully above her that no body-snatcher would ever discover and profane the holy spot. He lifted the corpse in his arms and carried it to the grass-plot. The moon had risen high in the heavens and shrouded the landscape in a veil of silver. From the dewy glistening grass rose the fragments of the old Diana statue in dazzling whiteness. Here he bore her and let her sink on the turf, her neck supported by the cracked pedestal, so that with her face turned towards the moon, she looked as if she had fallen asleep in a sitting position. Then he sought a burial-place. His eye fell on the black, four-cornered patch which Regina had intended for his father's grave. How vividly she came back to him, as she had looked then, in the full splendour of her sunburnt strength and beauty, driving the heavy spade into the ground with her naked foot, as if it had been a ramrod. If he had not then interrupted her in her work, he would to-day have been spared his.

The service of love she had wished to render his father it was now his duty to do for her. What could be simpler than to go on digging deeper the grave that she had begun that day, little dreaming it would be her own?

He fetched a spade from the kitchen, where the fire she had kindled was still smouldering, and began with all his strength to throw up the sod. From time to time he paused and glanced at her. She seemed well content to sit there in the bright moonlight, and quietly contemplate his labours. Now and then, when the shadow of a cloud flickered on her face, he half fancied she moved, and was going to rise to her feet.

Then that tormenting scepticism that all experience in the presence of their beloved dead overwhelmed him. He called her name and rushed to her side. Her hand rested on Diana's head, which lay close to her in the grass. He dared not touch her, and stole back to his work, his face buried in his hands.