"What does it matter, in this hour?"
"What does it matter?" the countess indignantly exclaimed. "Joseph, I do not understand you! Have you so little feeling for the distress of your fellow men--and yet play the Christ?"
Freyer gazed at the destruction with a strange expression--his noble figure towered proudly aloft against the gloomy, cloud-veiled sky. Smiling calmly, he held out his hand to the woman he loved and drew her tenderly to his breast: "Do not upbraid me, my dove--the wood was mine."
[CHAPTER XIII.]
BANISHED FROM EDEN
Silence reigned on the height. The winds had died away, the clouds were scattering swiftly, like an army of ghosts. The embers of the wood below crackled softly. The trunks had all been gnawed to the roots by the fiery tooth of the flames. It was like a churchyard full of clumsy black crosses and grave-stones on which the souls danced to and fro like will-o'-the-wisps.
The countess rested silently on Freyer's breast. When he said: "The wood was mine!" she had thrown herself, unable to utter a word, into his arms--and had since remained clasped in his embrace in silent, perfect peace.
Now the misty veil, growing lighter and more transparent, at last drifted entirely away, and the blue sky once more arched above the earth in a majestic dome. Here and there sunbeams darted through the melting cloud-rack and suddenly, as though the gates of heaven had opened, a double rainbow, radiant in seven-hued majesty, spanned the vault above them in matchless beauty.
Freyer bade the countess look up. And when she perceived the exquisite miracle of the air, with her lover in the midst--encompassed by it, she raised her head and extended her arms like the bride awaiting the heavenly bridegroom. Her eyes rested on him as if dazzled: "Be what you will, man, seraph, God. Shining one, you must be mine! I will bring you down from the height of your cross, though you were nailed above with seven-fold irons. You must be mine. Freyer, hear my vow, hear it, ye surrounding mountains, hear it, sacred soil below, and thou radiant many-hued bow which, with the grace of Aphrodite, dost girdle the universe, risen from chaos. I swear to be your wife, Joseph Freyer, swear it by the God Who has appeared to me, rising from marvel to marvel, since my eyes first beheld you."
Freyer, with bowed head, stood trembling before her. He felt as if a goddess was rolling in her chariot of clouds above him--as if the glimmering prism above were dissolving and flooding him with a sea of glittering sparks. "You--my wife?" he faltered, sobbing, then flung himself face downward before her. "This is too much--too much--"