The Elector flushed and walked over to his desk, expressing surprise at this haste, since, to his certain knowledge, he had made it clear that because of the necessity for a preliminary consultation with Dr. Luther, who had procured the amnesty for Kohlhaas, he wished to postpone the final departure of Eibenmaier until he should give a more explicit and definite order. At the same time, with an expression of restrained anger, he tossed about some letters and deeds which were lying on his desk. The Prince, after a pause during which he stared in surprise at his master, answered that he was sorry if he had failed to give him satisfaction in this matter; however, he could show the decision of the Council of State enjoining him to send off the attorney at the time mentioned. He added that in the Council of State nothing at all had been said of a consultation with Dr. Luther; that earlier in the affair, it would perhaps have been expedient to pay some regard to this reverend gentleman because of his intervention in Kohlhaas' behalf; but that this was no longer the case, now that the promised amnesty had been violated before the eyes of the world and Kohlhaas had been arrested and surrendered to the Brandenburg courts to be sentenced and executed.
The Elector replied that the error committed in dispatching Eibenmaier was, in fact, not a very serious one; he expressed a wish, however, that, for the present, the latter should not act in Vienna in his official capacity as plaintiff for Saxony, but should await further orders, and begged the Prince to send off to him immediately by a courier the instructions necessary to this end.
The Prince answered that, unfortunately, this order came just one day too late, as Eibenmaier, according to a report which had just arrived that day, had already acted in his capacity as plaintiff and had proceeded with the presentation of the complaint at the State Chancery in Vienna. In answer to the Elector's dismayed question as to how all this was possible in so short a time, he added that three weeks had passed since the departure of this man and that the instructions he had received had charged him to settle the business with all possible dispatch immediately after his arrival in Vienna. A delay, the Prince added, would have been all the more inadvisable in this case, as the Brandenburg attorney, Zäuner, was proceeding against Squire Wenzel Tronka with the most stubborn persistence and had already petitioned the court for the provisional removal of the black horses from the hands of the knacker with a view to their future restoration to good condition, and, in spite of all the arguments of the opposite side, had carried his point.
The Elector, ringing the bell, said, "No matter; it is of no importance," and turning around again toward the Prince asked indifferently how other things were going in Dresden and what had occurred during his absence. Then, incapable of hiding his inner state of mind, he saluted him with a wave of the hand and dismissed him.
That very same day the Elector sent him a written demand for all the official documents concerning Kohlhaas, under the pretext that, on account of the political importance of the affair, he wished to go over it himself. As he could not bear to think of destroying the man from whom alone he could receive information concerning the secrets contained in the paper, he composed an autograph letter to the Emperor; in this he affectionately and urgently requested that, for weighty reasons, which possibly he would explain to him in greater detail after a little while, he be allowed to withdraw for a time, until a further decision had been reached, the complaint which Eibenmaier had entered against Kohlhaas.
The Emperor, in a note drawn up by the State Chancery, replied that the change which seemed suddenly to have taken place in the Elector's mind astonished him exceedingly; that the report which had been furnished him on the part of Saxony had made the Kohlhaas affair a matter which concerned the entire Holy Roman Empire; that, in consequence, he, the Emperor, as head of the same, had felt it his duty to appear before the house of Brandenburg in this, as plaintiff in this affair, and that, therefore; since the Emperor's counsel, Franz Müller, had gone to Berlin in the capacity of attorney in order to call Kohlhaas to account for the violation of the public peace, the complaint could in no wise be withdrawn now and the affair must take its course in conformity with the law.
This letter completely crushed the Elector and, to his utter dismay, private communications from Berlin reached him a short time after, announcing the institution of the lawsuit before the Supreme Court at Berlin and containing the remark that Kohlhaas, in spite of all the efforts of the lawyer assigned him, would in all probability end on the scaffold. The unhappy sovereign determined, therefore, to make one more effort, and in an autograph letter begged the Elector of Brandenburg to spare Kohlhaas' life. He alleged as pretext that the amnesty solemnly promised to this man did not lawfully permit the execution of a death sentence upon him; he assured the Elector that, in spite of the apparent severity with which Kohlhaas had been treated in Saxony, it had never been his intention to allow the latter to die, and described how wretched he should be if the protection which they had pretended to be willing to afford the man from Berlin should, by an unexpected turn of affairs, prove in the end to be more detrimental to him than if he had remained in Dresden and his affair had been decided according to the laws of Saxony.
The Elector of Brandenburg, to whom much of this declaration seemed ambiguous and obscure, answered that the energy with which the attorney of his Majesty the Emperor was proceeding made it absolutely out of the question for him to conform to the wish expressed by the Elector of Saxony and depart from the strict precepts of the law. He remarked that the solicitude thus displayed really went too far, inasmuch as the complaint against Kohlhaas on account of the crimes which had been pardoned in the amnesty had, as a matter of fact, not been entered at the Supreme Court at Berlin by him, the sovereign who had granted the amnesty, but by the supreme head of the Empire who was in no wise bound thereby. At the same time he represented to him how necessary it was to make a fearful example of Kohlhaas in view of the continued outrages of Nagelschmidt, who with unheard-of boldness was already extending his depredations as far as Brandenburg, and begged him, in case he refused to be influenced by these considerations, to apply to His Majesty the Emperor himself, since, if a decree was to be issued in favor of Kohlhaas, this could only be rendered after a declaration on his Majesty's part.
The Elector fell ill again with grief and vexation over all these unsuccessful attempts, and one morning, when the Chamberlain came to pay him a visit, he showed him the letters which he had written to the courts of Vienna and Berlin in the effort to prolong Kohlhaas' life and thus at least gain time in which to get possession of the paper in the latter's hands. The Chamberlain threw himself on his knees before him and begged him by all that he held sacred and dear to tell him what this paper contained. The Elector bade him bolt the doors of the room and sit down on the bed beside him, and after he had grasped his hand and, with a sigh, pressed it to his heart, he began as follows "Your wife, as I hear, has already told you that the Elector of Brandenburg and I, on the third day of the conference that we held at Jüterbock, came upon a gipsy, and the Elector, lively as he is by nature, determined to destroy by a jest in the presence of all the people the fame of this fantastic woman, whose art had, inappropriately enough, just been the topic of conversation at dinner. He walked up to her table with his arms crossed and demanded from her a sign—one that could be put to the test that very day—to prove the truth of the fortune she was about to tell him, pretending that, even if she were the Roman Sibyl herself, he could not believe her words without it. The woman, hastily taking our measure from head to foot, said that the sign would be that, even before we should leave, the big horned roebuck which the gardener's son was raising in the park, would come to meet us in the market-place where we were standing at that moment. Now you must know that this roebuck, which was destined for the Dresden kitchen, was kept behind lock and key in an inclosure fenced in with high boards and shaded by the oak-trees of the park; and since, moreover, on account of other smaller game and birds, the park in general and also the garden leading to it, were kept carefully locked, it was absolutely impossible to understand how the animal could carry out this strange prediction and come to meet us in the square where we were standing. Nevertheless the Elector, afraid that some trick might be behind it and determined for the sake of the joke to give the lie once and for all to everything else that she might say, sent to the castle, after a short consultation with me, and ordered that the roebuck be instantly killed and prepared for the table within the next few days. Then he turned back to the woman before whom this matter had been transacted aloud, and said, 'Well, go ahead! What have you to disclose to me of the future?' The woman, looking at his hand, said, 'Hail, my Elector and Sovereign! Your Grace will reign for a long time, the house from which you spring will long endure, and your descendants will be great and glorious and will come to exceed in power all the other princes and sovereigns of the world.'
"The Elector, after a pause in which he looked thoughtfully at the woman, said in an undertone, as he took a step toward me, that he was almost sorry now that he had sent off a messenger to ruin the prophecy; and while amid loud rejoicing the money rained down in heaps into the woman's lap from the hands of the knights who followed the Elector, the latter, after feeling in his pocket and adding a gold piece on his own account, asked if the salutation which she was about to about to reveal to me also had such a silvery sound as his. The woman opened a box that stood beside her and in a leisurely, precise way arranged the money in it according to kind and quantity; then she closed it again, shaded her eyes with her hand as if the sun annoyed her, and looked at me. I repeated the question I had asked her and, while she examined my hand, I added jokingly to the Elector, 'To me, so it seems, she has nothing really agreeable to announce!' At that she seized her crutches, raised herself slowly with their aid from her stool, and, pressing close to me with her hands held before her mysteriously, she whispered audibly in my ear, 'No!' 'Is that so?' I asked confused, and drew back a step before the figure, who with a look cold and lifeless as though from eyes of marble, seated herself once more on the stool behind her; 'from what quarter does danger menace my house?' The woman, taking a piece of charcoal and a paper in her hand and crossing her knees, asked whether she should write it down for me; and as I, really embarrassed, though only because under the existing circumstances there was nothing else for me to do, answered, 'Yes, do so,' she replied, 'Very well! Three things I will write down for you—the name of the last ruler of your house, the year in which he will lose his throne, and the name of the man who through the power of arms will seize it for himself.' Having done this before the eyes of all the people she arose, sealed the paper with a wafer, which she moistened in her withered mouth, and pressed upon it a leaden seal ring which she wore on her middle finger. And as I, curious beyond all words, as you can well imagine, was about to seize the paper, she said, 'Not so, Your Highness!' and turned and raised one of her crutches; 'from that man there, the one with the plumed hat, standing on the bench at the entrance of the church behind all the people—from him you shall redeem it, if it so please you!' And with these words, before I had clearly grasped what she was saying, she left me standing in the square, speechless with astonishment, and, clapping shut the box that stood behind her and slinging it over her back, she disappeared in the crowd of people surrounding us, so that I could no longer watch what she was doing. But at this moment, to my great consolation, I must admit, there appeared the knight whom the Elector had sent to the castle, and reported, with a smile hovering on his lips, that the roebuck had been killed and dragged off to the kitchen by two hunters before his very eyes. The Elector, gaily placing his arm in mine with the intention of leading me away from the square, said, 'Well then, the prophecy was a commonplace swindle and not worth the time and money which it has cost us!' But how great was our astonishment when, even before he had finished speaking, a cry went up around the whole square, and the eyes of all turned toward a large butcher's dog trotting along from the castle yard. In the kitchen he had seized the roebuck by the neck as a fair prize, and, pursued by men-servants and maids, dropped the animal on the ground three paces in front of us. Thus indeed the woman's prophecy, which was the pledge for the truth of all that she had uttered, was fulfilled, and the roebuck, although dead to be sure, had come to the market-place to meet us. The lightning which falls from heaven on a winter's day cannot annihilate more completely than this sight did me, and my first endeavor, as soon as I had excused myself from the company which surrounded me, was to discover immediately the whereabouts of the man with the plumed hat whom the woman had pointed out to me; but none of my people, though sent out on a three days' continuous search, could give me even the remotest kind of information concerning him. And then, friend Kunz, a few weeks ago in the farm-house at Dahme, I saw the man with my own eyes!"