She must return to the slavery of her own guilt and of prosaic existence, while he went farther and farther away, like a vanishing star. She felt that her strength was failing, she must go, or she would sink dying in this place of woe--alone without aid or care.
She folded the marriage certificate and Freyer's letter together, and without another glance around the room--the ghost of her awakened conscience was stirring again, she took the dying candle and hurried down. The steps again creaked behind her, as though some one was following her downstairs. She had ordered the carriage at nine, it must have been waiting a long time. Her foot faltered at the door of the sitting-room, but she passed on--it was impossible for her to enter it again--she called--but the maid-servant had gone to her work in the stables--nothing save her own trembling voice echoed back through the passages. She went out. The carriage was standing at the side of the house. The rain had ceased, the forest was slumbering and all the creatures which animated it by day with it.
The countess locked the door. "Now interweave your boughs and shut it in!" she said to the briers and pines which stood closely around it. "Spread out your branches and compass it with an impenetrable hedge that no one may find it. The Sleeping Beauty who slumbers here--nothing must ever rouse!"
[CHAPTER XXX.]
THE "WIESHERRLE."
High above the rushing Wildbach, where the stream bursts through the crumbling rocks and in its fierce rush sends heavy stones grinding over one another--a man lay on the damp cliff which trembled under the shock of the falling masses of water. The rough precipices, dripping with spray, pressed close about him, shutting him into the cool, moss-grown ravine, through which no patch of blue sky was visible, no sunbeam stole.
Here the wanderer, deceived in everything, lay resting on his way home. With his head propped on his hand, he gazed steadfastly down into the swirl of the foaming, misty, ceaseless rush of the falling water! On the rock before him lay a small memorandum book, in which he was slowly writing sorrowful words, just as they welled from his soul--slowly and sluggishly, as the resin oozes from the gashed trees. Wherever a human heart receives a deep, fatal wound, the poetry latent in the blood of the people streams from the hurt. All our sorrowful old folk-songs are such drops of the heart's blood of the people. The son of a race of mountaineers who sung their griefs and joys was composing his own mournful wayfaring ballad for not one of those which he knew and cherished in his memory expressed the unutterable grief he experienced. He did not know how he wrote it--he was ignorant of rhyme and metre. When he finished, that is, when he had said all he felt, it seemed as though the song had flown to him, as the seed of some plant is blown upon a barren cliff, takes root, and grows there.
But now, after he had created the form of the verses, he first realized the full extent of his misery!
Hiding the little book in his pocket, he rose to follow the toilsome path he was seeking high among the mountains where there were only a few scattered homesteads, and he met no human being.
While Countess Wildenau in the deserted hunting-castle was weeping over the cast-off garments with which he had flung aside the form of a servant, the free man was striding over the heights, fanned by the night-breeze, lashed by the rain in his thin coat--free--but also free to be exposed to grief, to the elements--to hunger! Free--but so free that he had not even a roof beneath which to shelter his head within four protecting walls.