"To set fire to places," added Blanden by way of explanation, "is a mania of such half-witted beings."
But he told himself that this girl was not more mentally deranged than all who are animated with a blind, senseless passion; that she since that visit to her attic chamber, since he had rejected her insane offers of love, had brooded upon revenge against him, and had executed it on his wedding day. The mixture of love and hatred, he knew was not only peculiar to those whose minds are disordered, but in all moody, narrow ones it works like an accumulated combustible, which at the first shock explodes, scattering all into ruins.
"I might be superstitious," thought he to himself, "she always brings evil and ruin to that which I love."
"Giulia," then he cried suddenly, "where are you, my sweet wife? You live, then is all well!"
And he clasped her in his arms, while the morning sun rose glowingly red on the horizon above the smoking Castle ruins, the closely thronging crowd, and the corpse of halfwitted Kätchen, the water nymph, who had died in the fire.
CHAPTER XI.
[A LEGACY.]
The sight of the ruins, constantly before the eyes of the newly-married couple, must have given a bitter flavour to their honeymoon.
And yet, Blanden was happier than he had ever been, in the possession, which he believed to be ensured, of a beloved wife. He gazed upon the Castle ruins, upon the ruins of his past, but in his Giulia's smile he saw the promise of an abiding, beautiful future.
The Ordensburg, the dining-hall, the Madonna's image, all should rise anew in the old form out of the rubbish. To attain this Blanden had sent for architects, who were well-known artists, to Kulmitten, so as to restore the building in accordance with the old foundations. Giulia took warm interest in all these plans, and often looked over Blanden's shoulder at the sketches of elevations over which he pored. Of course no art could compensate for the value of its historical age and associations, with the dining-hall the poetry of the olden days was destroyed, the new creation could but become a clever imitation. Several friends, especially Wegen and Olga, too, sometimes came to visit them, but the intercourse was not very lively, and Blanden wished to live alone with his love, and the object of that love. Often they sailed upon the lake or walked alone in the woods, upon the oak tree dykes, past the ponds filled with tall reeds; in that solitude which reminded her of primeval forests, Giulia forgot the world, the spell of her doom, the secret menaces of fate; and when Blanden's fowling piece brought down the water-fowl, and the broad belt of the fir forest sent back the echoes of the shot, Giulia felt as glad and as free as if she were living with a settler in the back woods, and as though prairie fires blazed between her and human society.