Liberty, yes, this was happiness. She believed that she had found it at last! And she would enjoy it. She need not reproach herself for breaking her troth to the prince, he had told her so--if thereby she could appease the avenging spirits of her deed to Freyer, they must have the sacrifice! True, to be reigning duchess of a country was a lofty position; but--could she purchase it at the cost of being the wife of a man whom she did not love? Why not? Was she a child?--a foolish girl? A crown was at stake--and should she allow sentimental scruples to force her to sacrifice it to the memory of an irrevocably lost happiness?
She shook her head, as if she wanted to shake off a bandage. She was ill from the long days spent in darkness and confinement like a criminal. That was the cause of these whims. Up and out into the open air, where she would again find healthy blood and healthy thoughts.
She rang the bell, a new servant appeared.
"My arrival can now be announced. Tell Martin to bring the carriage round, I will go to drive."
"Very well, Your Highness."
She seemed to have escaped from a ban. She had never known liberty. Until she married the Count von Wildenau she had been under the control of a governess. Then, in her marriage with the self-willed old man she was a slave, and she had scarcely been a widow ere she forged new fetters for herself. Now, for the first time, she could taste liberty. The decision was not pressing. The cool stoic who had waited so long would not lose patience at the last moment--so she could still do what she would.
So the heart, struggling against the unloved husband, deceived the ambitious, calculating reason which aspired to a crown.
The carriage drove up. It was delightful to hear a pair of spirited horses stamping before a handsome equipage, to be assisted to enter by a liveried servant and to be able to say: "This is yours once more!" The only shadow which disturbed her was that on Martin's face, a shadow resting there since she had last visited her castle of the Sleeping Beauty. She well knew for whom the old man was grieving. It was a perpetual reproach and she avoided talking with him, from a certain sense of diffidence. She could justify herself to the keen intelligence of the duke--to the simplicity of this plain man she could not; she felt it.
It was a delightful May evening. A sea of warm air and spring perfumes surrounded her, and crowds thronged the streets, enjoying the evening, after their toilsome work, as if they had just waked from their winter sleep. On the corners groups paused before huge placards which they eagerly studied, one pushing another away. What could it be?
Then old Martin, as if intentionally, drove close to the sidewalk, where the people stood in line out to the street before those posters. There was a little movement in the throng; people turned to look at the splendid equipage, thus leaving the placard exposed. The countess read it--the blood congealed in her veins--there, in large letters, stood the words: "Oberammergau Passion Play." What did it mean? She leaned back in the carriage, feeling as if she must shriek aloud with homesickness, with agonized longing for those vanished days of a great blissful delusion! Again she beheld the marvellous play. Again the divine sufferer appeared to the world--the mere name on that wretched placard was already exerting its spell, for the pedestrians, pausing on their errands, stopped before it by hundreds, as if they had never read the words "Passion Play" before! And the man who helped create this miracle, to which a world was again devoutly pilgrimaging, had been clasped in her arms--had loved her, been loyally devoted to her, to her alone, and she had disdained him! Now he was again bringing the salvation of the divine word and miracle--she alone was shut out, she had forfeited it by her own fault. She was--as in his wonderful gift of divination he had once said--one of the foolish virgins who had burned her oil, and now the heavenly bridegroom was coming, but she stood alone in the darkness while the others were revelling at the banquet.