So at the breakfast-table, over the priest's smoking coffee, the bond had been formed which the good pastor was afterwards to enter in the church register as a marriage. But even this outward proof of the marriage between the widowed Countess Wildenau and the Ammergau wood-carver Freyer was removed, for the countess had been right in distrusting her father and believing that his advice concerning the secret marriage was but a stratagem of war to deter her from taking any public step.
On returning from the priest's, her carriage dashed by Prince von Prankenberg's.
Ten minutes after the prince rushed like a tempest into the room of the peaceful old pastor, and succeeded in preventing the entry of the "scandal," as he called it, in the church register. So the proofs of the fact were limited to the marriage certificate in the husband's hands and the two witnesses, Josepha and Martin, the coachman--a chain, it is true, which bound Madeleine von Wildenau, yet which was always in her power.
What was this marriage? How would a man like the prince regard it? Would it not wear a totally different aspect in the eyes of the sceptic and experienced man of the world than in those of the simple-hearted peasant who believed that everything which glittered was gold? Was such a marriage, which permitted the exercise of none of the rights and duties which elevate it into a moral institution, better than an illegal relation? Nay, rather worse, for it perpetrated a robbery of God--it was an illegal relation which had stolen a sacred name!
But--what did this mean? To-day, for the first time, she felt as if fate might give the matter the moral importance which she did not willingly accord it--as if the Deity whose name she had abused might take her at her word and compel her to turn jest into earnest.
Her better nature frankly confessed that this would be only moral justice! To this great truth she bowed her head as the full ears bend before the approaching hail storm.
Spite of the chill autumn evening, there was an incomprehensible sultriness in the air of the room.
Something in the brief conversation with Herr Wildenau and especially in the manner in which the prince, with his keen penetration, understood the episode, startled the Countess and aroused her fears.
Why had Herr Wildenau gone to the little hunting-box? How had he seen the child?
Yet how could she herself have been so imprudent as to display the picture? And still--it was the infant Christ of Raphael. Could she not even have one of Raphael's heads in her drawing-room without danger that some one would discover a suspicious resemblance!