"Up!" cry the men in front. They are raised--they are there--they are on firm ground, and a ringing shout of joy relieves the long-oppressed hearts of the bystanders. Wally has sunk speechless on the inanimate body of Joseph. She does not see, she does not hear, how all crowd round her and praise her--she lies with her face upon his breast--her strength is gone.
[CHAPTER XIII.]
Back to her Father.
In Wally's room, on Wally's bed, lay Joseph, stretched out, insensible. All was silent and still around him; she had sent every one away, she knelt by the bed, she hid her face in her convulsively clasped hands, and prayed.
"Oh, Lord God!--my God! my God! have mercy and let him live; take from me everything--everything--but let him live. I'll ask no more of him, I'll shun him--I'll leave him to Afra even--only he must not die!" And then she stood up again and made fresh bandages for his head where the blood flowed from a gaping wound, and for his breast that had been torn by the crag, and threw herself upon him as though with her body she would close those portals through which his life was streaming away.
"Oh, thou poor lad! thou poor lad! so stricken and brought down--oh, the sin of it--the sin of it! Wally, Wally, what hast thou done? Should thou not sooner have struck a knife into thine own heart--sooner have stood by at Afra's wedding, then gone home quietly and died, than have laid him there to see him perish like cattle that the butcher has felled?"
Thus she lamented out loud whilst she bound his wounds, turning against herself with the same anger with which she had been used to revenge herself on others. She would have torn her heart out with her own hands if she could, in the wild and frenzied remorse that had seized her. Just then the door opened softly. Wally looked round in astonishment, for she had forbidden any one to disturb her. It was the curé of Heiligkreuz. Wally stood before him as before her judge, pale, trembling in her very soul.
"God be praised!" cried the old man, "he is here then." He went up to the bed, looked at Joseph, and felt him. "Poor fellow," he said, "you have been roughly handled."
Wally set her teeth to keep herself from crying out at these words.
"How did they get him up again?" asked the priest, but Wally could not answer.