On the Cross: A Romance of the Passion Play at Oberammergau

by Wilhelmine von Hillern

The countess stood with her hands resting on the table and her eyes bent on the floor. Her heart was throbbing violently--her breath was short and hurried. One thought whirled through her brain. "You might have had all this and forfeited it forever!" The consciousness of her marred destiny overwhelmed her with all its power. What a contrast between the prince, the perfect product of culture, who took into account all the demands of her rank and character, and the narrow, limited child of nature, her husband, who found cause for reproach in everything which the trained man of the world regarded as a matter of course. Freyer tortured her and humbled her in her own eyes, while the prince tenderly cherished her. Freyer--like the embodiment of Christian asceticism--required from her everything she disliked while Prince Emil desired nothing save to see her beautiful, happy, and admired, and made it her duty to enjoy life as suited her education and tastes! She would fain have thrown herself exultingly into the arms of her preserver and said: "Take me and bear me up again on the waves of life ere I fall into the power of that gloomy God whose power is nurtured on the blood of the murdered joys of His followers."

Suddenly it seemed as if some one else was in the room gazing intently at her. She looked up--the eyes of the Christ in the Gothic niche were bent fixedly on her. "Are you looking at me again?" asked a voice in her terror-stricken soul. "Can you never die?"

It was even so; He could not die on the cross, He cannot die in her heart. Even though it was but a moment that He appeared to mortal eyes in the Passion Play, He will live for ever to all who experienced that moment.

Her uplifted arms fell as if paralyzed, and she faltered in broken sentences: "Not another word, Prince--in Heaven's name--do not lead me into temptation. Banish every thought of me--you do not know--oh! I was never worthy of you, have never recognized all your worth--and now when I do--now it is too late." She could say no more, tears were trembling on her lashes. She again glanced timidly at the painted Christ--He had now closed His eyes. His expression was more peaceful.

The prince gazed at her earnestly, but quietly. "Ah, there is a false standpoint which must be removed. It will cost something, I see. Calm yourself--you have nothing more to fear from me--I was awkward--it was not the proper moment, I ought to have known it. Do you remember our conversation nine years ago, on the way to the Passion Play? At that time a phantom stood between us. It has since assumed a tangible form, has it not? I saw this coming, but unfortunately could not avert it. But consider--it is and will always remain--a phantom! Such spectres can be fatal only to eccentric imaginative women like you who, in addition to imagination, also possess a strongly idealistic tendency which impresses an ethical meaning upon everything they feel. With a nature like yours things which, in and of themselves, are nothing except romantic episodes, assume the character of moral conflicts in which you always feel that you are the guilty ones because you were the superior and have taken a more serious view of certain relations than they deserved."

"Yes, yes! That is it. Oh, Prince--you understand me better than any one else!" exclaimed the countess, admiringly.

"Yes, and because I understand you better than any one else, I love you better than any one else--that is the inevitable consequence. Therefore it would be a pity, if I were obliged to yield to that phantom--for never were two human beings so formed for each other as we." He was silent, Madeleine had not heard the last words. In her swift variations of mood reacting with every changing impression, a different feeling had been evoked by the word "phantom" and the memories it awakened. Even the cleverest man cannot depend upon a woman. The phantom again stood between them--conjured up by himself.

As if by magic, the Kofel with its glittering cross rose before her, and opposite at her right hand the glimmering sunbeams stole up the cliff till, like shining fingers, they rested on a face whose like she had never seen--the eyes, dark yet sparkling, like the night when the star led the kings to the child in the manger! There he stood again, the One so long imagined, so long desired.

And her enraptured eyes said: "Throughout the whole world I have sought you alone." And his replied: "And I you!" And was this to be a lie--this to vanish? It seemed as if Heaven had opened its gates and suffered her to look in, and was all this to be delusion? The panorama of memory moved farther on, leading her past the dwellings of the high priest and apostles in Ammergau to the moonlit street where her ear, listening reverently, caught the words: This is where Christus lives! And she stood still with gasping breath, trembling with expectation of the approach of God.

Then the following day--the great day which brought the fulfilment of the mighty yearning when she beheld this face "from which the God so long sought smiled upon her!" The God whom she had come to seek, to confess! What! Could she deny, resign this God, in whose wounds she had laid her fingers.