CHAPTER XL.
VINDICATED.
It was a wild night. Driving clouds kept hiding and revealing the stormy-looking moon. I was out-of-doors. I could not remain in the house; it had felt too small for me, but now nature felt too large. I dimly saw the huge pile of the schloss defined against the gray light; sometimes when the moon unveiled herself it started out clear, and black, and grim. I saw a light in a corner window—that was Sigmund’s room; and another in a room below—that was the Graf’s study, and there the terrible man sat. I heard the wind moan among the trees, heard the great dogs baying from the kennels; from an open window came rich, low, mellow sounds. Old Brunken was in the music-room, playing to himself upon the violoncello. That was a movement from the “Grand Septuor”—the second movement, which is, if one may use such an expression, painfully beautiful. I bethought myself of the woods which lay hidden from me, the vast avenues, the lonely tanks, the grotesques statues, and that terrible figure with its arms cast upward, at the end of the long walk, and I shivered faintly.
I was some short distance down the principal avenue, and dared not go any further. A sudden dread of the loneliness and the night-voices came upon me; my heart beating thickly, I turned to go back to the house. I would try to comfort poor Countess Hildegarde in her watching and her fears.
But there is a step near me. Some one comes up the avenue, with foot that knows its windings, its turns and twists, its ups and downs.
“Eugen!” I said, tremulously.
A sudden pause—a stop; then he said with a kind of laugh:
“Witchcraft—Zauberei!” and was going on.
But now I knew his whereabouts, and coming up to him, touched his arm.