“I cannot look upon it,” exclaimed Gundchen, holding her hands before her eyes, and Tugendreich leaned against the recess as white as her veil. In the meanwhile Axel had given the horse so violent a blow on the head, that he was on his legs again and stood trembling; he dismounted, lifted the crying child gently from the ground and kissing it, carried it to its mother, who came up running and shrieking.
“Gallantly done,” cried the nobleman, “but the experiment might have cost your life.”
“Better that Hippolytus and I should die than the innocent child,” replied Axel. He mounted again, and the steed now knowing his master, leaped readily and gracefully without a run over the high bar.
“Well done,” cried the nobleman again. “Come up, you shall have a bottle of wine for that.” “I must first cool the animal,” was Axel’s short reply, as he rode off in a gentle trot. “This fellow is not to be bought for gold,” muttered the baron; “but he sometimes assumes a tone that makes it doubtful which of us two is the master and which the groom.”
Tugendreich, agitated by the scene she had just witnessed, was about to leave the hall. On her way, she again passed the pedigree, and turning her glowing countenance upon it, a black escutcheon met her eye. This belonged to a lateral relation whom her father had only recently struck out on account of a misalliance. With a gloomy foreboding she gazed at it, then cast an anxious glance upon the one bearing her name, and hurried sobbing from the hall.
About an hour after this, Tugendreich met the dangerous groom in the anti-room of her father’s closet. Their eyes flashed as they met each other, but both immediately looked on the ground while a blush, like the sky tinged by the rising sun, overspread her cheeks. “The gardener’s little Rosa has recovered from her fright,” she whispered softly, “I have just left her.”
“May heaven reward you, Fräulein, that sent you upon earth as a ministering reconciling angel!” cried the groom with transport.
“But promise me, Axel, not to ride so furiously again; I have been in great anxiety about thee,” stammered Tugendreich, becoming confused in the midst of her speech, as she had not yet settled in her mind as to whether she should address this groom by “thee,” or “you.”[[1]]
“About me? This makes me indescribably happy,” said Axel with delight, and suddenly raised her beautiful hand to his lips, imprinting a fiery kiss on it. At this she appeared angry, withdrew her hand from his bold grasp, though a minute too late, and saying, “You forget yourself,” quickly left the room.
Axel’s eyes followed her with rapture, and he then entered his master’s room and found him in company with Magister Talander, his spiritual adviser and factotum, playing chess, and exchanging high words. In vain did the excited magister prove from Damiano, Phillippo, Carrera, and Gustavo Seleno, that the adversary’s piece which threatened one of the squares over which the king must be moved, was one of the five impediments to castling the king. In vain did he assert that Palmedes, Xerxes, Satrenshah, and even Tamerlan could not have played otherwise. The baron stood to his own opinion, and said, the absurdity of the rule was so evident, that even his groom Axel, if he had but a notion of the moves, could not but see it.