She leaned her head on her hand and gazed mournfully out of the window at which she sat. They had now been playing six weeks in Oberammergau. It was June. The gardens of the opposite palace were in their fullest leafage; and the birds singing in the trees lured her out. Her eyes followed a little swallow flying toward the mountains. "Oh, mountain air and blue gentians--earthly Paradise!" she sighed! What was she doing here in the hot city when all were flying to the mountains, she saw no society, and the duke had gone away. She, too, ought to have left long before. But where should she go? She could not visit Oberammergau, and she cared for no other spot--it seemed as though the whole world contained no other place of abode than this one village with its gay little houses and low windows--as if in all the world there were no mountains, and no mountain air save in Ammergau. A few burning tears ran down her cheeks. Doubtless there was mountain air, there were mountain peaks higher, more beautiful than in Ammergau, but nowhere else could be found the same capacity for enjoying the magnificence of nature! Everywhere there is a church, a religion, but nowhere so religious an atmosphere as there.
"Oh, my lost Paradise, my soul greets you with all the anguish of the exiled mother of my sex and my sin!" she sighed.
And yet, what was Eve's sin to hers? Eve at least atoned in love and faith with the man whom she tempted to sin. Therefore God could forgive her and send to the race which sprung from her fall a messenger of reconciliation. Eve was a wife and a mother. But she, what was she? Not even that! She had abandoned her husband and lived in splendor and luxury while he grieved alone. She had given him only one child, and even to that had acted no mother's part, and finally had thrust him out into poverty and sorrow, and led a life of wealth and leisure, while he earned his bread by the sweat of his brow. No, the mother of sin was a martyr compared to her, a martyr to the nature which she denied, and therefore she was shut out from the bond of peace and pity which Eve's atonement secured.
Some one knocked. The countess started from her reverie. The servant announced that His Highness' nurses had sent for her; they thought death was near.
"I will come at once!" she answered.
The prince lived near the Wildenau Palace, and she reached him in a few minutes.
The sick man's mind was clearer than it had been for several months. The watery effusions in the brain which had clouded his consciousness had been temporarily absorbed, and he could control his thoughts. For the first time he held out his hand to his daughter: "Are you there, my child?"
It touched her strangely, and she knelt by his side. "Yes, father!"
He stroked her hair with a kindly, though dull expression: "Are you well?"
"In body, yes papa! I thank you."