He saw the pond in the middle of the village; the little dusky waves swelled and rippled beneath the nipping wind of autumn and a single rugged elm cast its long reflection across the broken surface. He saw the soft black soil on the edge of the pond stamped with countless impressions of webbed feet. He saw the geese themselves, hissing and flapping their wings while the sunlight played upon the rough pink surface of their plucked breasts. Thatched roofs, swine, and geese had certainly never interested him much--these detailed impressions had been made upon his mind all unconsciously--they belonged to the whole.
He saw long transparent wreaths of mist like ghostly shrouds, floating above the freshly-ploughed fields, and the crows flapping above the brown leafless trees, in gloomy processions, mourners for the dead summer,--a dun-coloured cow was standing between two gnarled apple-trees by the way-side, looking inquisitively out of her dark-blue glazed eyes.
The pictures grew confused, and again distinct. He saw the park with its broad emerald meadows where the venerable trees grew in large dense clumps. He knew the voice of every single tree, the rustle of the oak differed from the murmur of the copper-beech; he knew the very tree which would turn orange-coloured in autumn, which one only yellow, edged with black, and which one dark crimson. They stirred their grand old heads and broke into a chant; it sounded like a magnificent choral through the still autumn air, while single leaves, frosted with dew, as with delicate molten silver, loosed their hold and sank slowly fluttering down upon the grass.
And the kitchen garden, that Paradise of childhood, with its hoary apricot-trees, whose mellow fruit always dropped on the old-fashioned sage beds. Ah, what fruit it was, so big, and so yellow, and so juicy!
Then he laughed softly at something that had happened twenty years before, and--waking from his visions, and his reverie, passed his hand across his brow. Where was he? Sitting in the room of a miserable lodging-house, beside the empty little bed of his dead child.
He lay down very weary. The last thing that he saw distinctly before falling asleep was a large circle of red gravel in front of Schneeburg Castle, furrowed with delicate ruts. These ruts formed the figure of eight--the first figure of eight which he, a boy of fifteen, had drawn in the gravel with his father's four-in-hand--the delicate fragrance, not perceptible to every one, of wild strawberries floated past him, and then all faded. Sleep compassionately laid her hand upon his heart and brain. He slept the sleep of the dead for a couple of hours, and the next morning his torture began afresh.
He could have wandered barefoot like a beggar to Schneeburg, only to be able to fling himself down on that dear earth, and kiss the very soil of his home.
The sale was long in concluding,--purchasers chaffered as usual, when in treaty for an impoverished estate. There were fears that it would be brought to the hammer. But in the spring Capriani appeared and offered a price for Schneeburg which was at least sufficient to cover the Count's indebtedness. His lawyer urged the old man not to delay accepting this offer, but Siegfried Malzin still hesitated. For three days he wandered about Schneeburg like one distraught, then he began to yield conditionally, but all conditions vanished before Capriani's energy. Malzin lost his head, and made many injudicious concessions. He sold with the estate very many valuable articles that he ought to have kept for himself. He forgot everything--and as a man at a fire will finally rescue in triumph an old umbrella, and a child's toy, so he rescued from his property, in addition to the family vault, which from the first he insisted upon keeping, nothing, save--the stuffed charger which stood in the hall, and which a Malzin had bestridden on the occasion of the liberation of Vienna by Sobiesky.
The morning after the deed of sale had been signed, the former possessor of Schneeburg was found dead in his bed--heart-disease had delivered him from misery.