One day she found his name in the list of the dead. She was crushed, utterly annihilated. A few hours afterwards, however, she received a letter from her brother, stating that the report of Meineck's death was a mistake; he was in Venice, severely wounded. She could not tell how it was, but on the same evening, almost without luggage, without telling any one of her plans, she started off with her old maid, and two days later arrived in Venice and was conducted by her brother to the room where the wounded man lay.
Pale, wasted, with dishevelled hair and sunken features, he lay back among the pillows. Too weak to stir, he could only greet her with a blissful smile.
She wore a black Spanish hat with large nodding feathers. As she entered she took it off, and, going to his bedside, she said, "I did not come merely to see you, but as a Sister of Charity, and I shall stay with you until you are well again."
He replied, in a voice so weak as to be scarce audible, "To make me well a single word will suffice: say it!"
She hesitated for a moment, and then, stooping over him, she pressed her lips to his.
Who that saw them together ten years later could have believed it? No marriage was ever more romantic than theirs at first. His case was considered hopeless. The two physicians whom she questioned as to his condition declared his recovery impossible. Resolutely setting aside all opposition, she was married to him immediately, that she might nurse him devotedly and be enabled to support him in the dark hour of the death-struggle.
At the end of ten weeks the physicians acknowledged that they had been mistaken. Not only was he out of danger, but he had well-nigh recovered his former strength and vigour. Early in October the pair took their wedding-trip to Bohemia. In matters of sentiment Franz was a poet to his fingertips, and he scorned the idea of the usual journey with his bride from one hotel to another. They spent their honeymoon in the old mill at Zalow.
On many a fresh, dewy, autumnal morning the peasants saw the two tall figures strolling through the forest where the leaves were rapidly falling. She who had hitherto carried herself so erect now walked with bent head and with shoulders slightly bowed, as if scarcely able to bear the weight of her great happiness.
They would wander unweariedly about the country for hours: they ransacked all the old peasant dwellings for antiquities, and they chose the spot for their graves in a picturesque, romantic churchyard. And when the light faded and they returned home, they would sit beside each other in the twilight in the spacious room where he had wooed her, and where now all the literary and scientific apparatus had given place to huge bouquets of autumn flowers filling the vases in every corner. The bouquets slowly changed colour, the cornflowers paled and the poppies grew black, in the darkening night; and something like profound melancholy would possess the lovers,--the sacred melancholy of happiness. With her hand in his, the wife would tell her husband of the mild March night in which the joyous sobbing of the brook had wakened her, calling to her that spring had come.
"Believe it or not, as you please," Meineck was wont to say, often with a very bitter smile, in after-years, "I am really that fabulous individual, hitherto sought for in vain, the man who never, during the entire period of his honeymoon, w as bored for a single quarter of an hour."