Chapter XX The True Reading of a Letter
“Give sorrow words: the grief that does not speak
Whispers the e’er-fraught heart, and bids it break.”
(Macbeth).
Steven, in his turn, had a tale to tell; and, as they retraced their way back towards the Burg through the gathering shadows, he narrated to the fiddler, with great simplicity, the episode with the Burgravine which had led him, first into the oubliette, and ultimately to the quarrel with Sidonia.
Geiger-Hans made small comment. The facts he knew already, the motives he had shrewdly surmised. Sometimes he smiled, unseen in the thick, moist gloom; the bright day had turned to a moody night, heavy clouded. The young man’s ingenuousness pleased him; also the manliness that refrained from any self-righteous assertion of innocence. But sometimes he sighed; it was a tangled story!
When they reached Wellenshausen village, it was evident that there could be no question of making the ascent to the Burg till the next morning. Rain had begun to fall. Geiger-Hans might have faced the break-neck road—doubly hazardous in the wet and the dark—but he flatly refused to aid the wounded man in any such mad undertaking, and Steven’s impatience had to submit to the inevitable.
Steven had thought to have measured ere this all the possibilities of the Silver Stork in the matter of discomfort. But in a house now thoroughly disorganized by the incursions of a stray detachment of Jerome’s cavalry, the claims, even of a fastidious traveller, not to speak of an itinerant musician, were the least of concerns to-night.
In the dismal, rat-haunted attic which he shared with the bridegroom, Geiger-Hans heard his comrade groan and toss through the long hours of his wedding-night. If sleep fell upon the young man at all, it was broken by nightmare. And the fiddler, lying flat on his back with his hands under his head, resignedly facing the insomnia which his restless spirit knew but too familiarly, could foretell almost to a breath the span of troubled unconsciousness, the start, the half-groan of awakening. And he was as glad, almost, as Steven himself when the white face of dawn began stealthily to peer through the dormer window.
Geiger-Hans glanced two or three times sharply at the youth’s face as once again he found himself trudging beside him. Steven had submitted almost sullenly to all the musician’s arrangements; in silence had mounted the mule prepared for him; in silence had they started on their upward way. The vagrant breasted the rugged path with his usual activity; but his countenance was dark with concern. He did not like the glassy stare of Steven’s eyes, the alternate pallor and flush on his cheek, the blackened, cracked look of the lips.
“Madame Sidonia will have some nursing to do, I think,” he said once.
Steven gave a wan smile, quite a long time after the words had been spoken. He was beginning to lose his original frenzy of intention in this early morning start; to think only of the rapture of lying between cool sheets in some dark place, with Sidonia’s flower touch upon his throbbing temples.
After the wet night had broken a gay morning—the rain-beaten earth was fragrant; fragrant every tiny sprig of herb and spicy rock-clinging bush. As they ascended, the pleasant wood-smoke from the village hearths gradually gave place to the more subtle pungencies of the heights. All this, however, was wasted upon Steven. And wasted, too, the gaunt picturesqueness of their first view of the castle, with the golden early sunshine upon the grimness of its walls, caressing the ruin, gleaming back from the defiant granite of the keep.
The dogs bayed, a flock of rooks rose, beating the air at their approach; a brown donkey, heavily saddled, hitched by the bridle to a bar of the open gate, flapped his ears and turned his patient countenance, mildly surprised, upon them.
The door to the hall, barred and nail-studded, so inhospitable as a rule, stood open. It was a vastly different scene from that of the evening of their first visit—when they stood, a pair of adventurers wrapped in mist, before the castle, seeking admittance to walls apparently as impenetrable as any in fairy-lore. Steven was here, now, by his right, to claim his own, and all lay in the sunshine, strangely peaceful, the open door seeming to forestall a welcome. But the fiddler was seized with boding. There are grim visages upon which the sight of a smile strikes misgivings: such was now the face of the Burg.
The voice of a woman singing lustily within some distant chamber smote his ear, as he lifted a hand for the bell chain; and he shook his head. Even before Martin, the doorman, put in an appearance, shuffling out of the kind of kennel where he lurked upon that watch which had been his for thirty years, Geiger-Hans knew what had occurred. Martin, with red waistcoat unbuttoned, a china pipe hanging from his jeering lip, slippers on his feet, and the froth of bridal beer running down his chin, stared in amazement at the sight of the travellers; then welcomed them with the heartiness of the slightly elevated.
“The noble family have all departed,” he cried quickly; and presently chuckled, leering at the bridegroom who sat stiffly on the mule, as if he neither heard nor saw.
Some one came trotting into the hall, softly on list soles, in a great bustle. It was the Forest-Mother. Her pleasant face wore an unwonted air of seriousness, and her lips were pursed as upon solemn thought. But never had she been to Geiger-Hans a more comfortable spectacle.
At sight of him her hands were flung up in wonder; and, at further glimpse of the rider without, they hovered in mid-air, as if paralyzed.
“Alas, Onkel—too late! All away, yesterday—and the child’s heart bursting. Aye, it is all mighty queer and sad. I little thought I should be making for home again this morning, with everything so criss-cross and wrong and strange!”
Geiger-Hans made a sudden stride out of the hall back to the side of the mule.
“Down with you, comrade,” he said, with that note of gentleness in his voice which, so far, only Sidonia had known. Steven, after a pause for comprehension, turned towards the speaker with his feeble smile, and suddenly swayed.
“Nay, mother,” the fiddler called out as he caught the lad in his arms, “you mistake; there will be no going home for you for some time to come.”
“Ach! the poor young gentleman,” sighed the Forest-Mother, when she had heard the tale. And that was not until Steven’s fever-dream had been realized, and he lay between cool sheets in a dark room; though, indeed, for Sidonia’s flower touch he had to put up with Mrs. Forester’s large plump hand. Not that it made much difference either just then, for he was somewhat rambling in his mind. “Ach, the poor young gentleman, it is a real talent he has for coming in the way of blows!”
“He has a talent for mending, too, remember,” said the fiddler, shortly. His dry tone concealed a real anxiety. Young things, as he knew, took blows of body and soul hard. A poisoned wound is bad enough in itself, without a sore heart and a mind ill at rest.... He could not leave the lad—that was clear. “Where have they taken the child?” he asked.
“Sidonia? Ach—she kept her lips close as wax and never told me a word—not even me, the old mother! But that French minx of the Lady Burgravine did nought but chatter of Cassel.”
The word fell like a stone on Geiger-Hans’ heart. It was almost with impatience that he glanced at the long, helpless figure in the bed. The young man ought to be up and doing!... Cassel, seething pot of intrigue and low manoeuvre, paradise of spendthrifts, adventurers, scoundrels, it was the last place on earth for the guileless fugitive bride—and Betty the born schemer. But, if life had taught this wanderer anything, it was submission to the inevitable.
For the moment nothing could be done but to nurse the sick man. Some vague thought of sending a message to Sidonia, to tell her of her bridegroom’s pass, flashed into his mind, only to be dismissed. The chances of any communication reaching her were remote. He could not go himself. And, could he have done so, some inner conviction told him that here he had best not interfere. Between the tree and the bark let none put his finger. The lovers must win back to each other without any further meddling. He was not certain that the separation, the very anger, misunderstanding and soreness, might not be working for the best. They all had gone too fast, they had made too sure. Steven had been an over-confident wooer: little Sidonia too ready to be won.
Geiger-Hans and the Forest-Mother made a tolerable existence for themselves within those sullen walls that had certainly never before beheld such free humours as the wanderer’s, such cosiness and comfort as the Frau Ober-Forsterin’s. Truth to say, from the instant the sick man was put into her care, the old dame became possessed of excellent spirits. Every one has a special ideal of happiness. Nursing chanced to be hers: nursing of men, be it understood, preferably young men—no harm if they were good-looking—and wounds her speciality. She had salves that would, she was proud to say, make the bark grow on a lopped tree. As for poisoned hurts, had she not, she alone, brought her Friedel round after he had been gored and trampled upon by the stag? And as for febrifuges and herb-teas, if she had been willing to sell her secrets, she had not a doubt about it, she now might be a rich woman.
On the fifth morning, a tan-faced boy, with wild eyes looking from side to side, like a bird’s, came pattering up into the Burg, having defied the crags with hardened bare feet. He brought a letter which had reached the Forest-House the night before, addressed to its mistress.
The Forest-Mother took it from the fiddler’s hand, with many winks and pointings towards the great bed whereon her charge lay asleep. She betook herself to the window and began to peruse, with some labour, forming each word with her lips as she went on.
The fiddler had recognized Sidonia’s characteristic hand, upright and painstaking. Presently the good woman, shaking her head, folded the sheet and, coming over to the fiddler with her noiseless yet ponderous tread, placed the missive back into his hand.
The fiddler read:
“BELOVED LITTLE FOREST-MOTHER,
“I promised to write. I am very well, but I wish I were back with you in the dear green forest. Greet good Friedel for me. Tell him not to forget to give the white doe a piece of rye bread from me every day. And it would be kind of him to take old Belthazar out with him now and again, if only for a short round. I know he is old and stiff; but the dear old fellow breaks his heart to be left behind when all the young dogs are taken out. And, dear Forest-Mother, when you go by the kennels, will you give him a pat for me? And you might just tell him that he is worth all the silly young things put together, and that the kennels had never such a fine dog as he. I am sure he understands, and it will hearten him up. And, when you see Geiger-Onkel, tell him I think of him, and that his airs keep playing in my head. But always the sad ones. And tell him, too, that I never was a fairy princess, but only a silly country girl. This is a place all streets and houses, and it is very noisy. Everybody seems running about, but I do not know what they do. I don’t like it, but it is better for me to be here than at the Burg. Of course we are at the Palace. Aunt Betty did not like Uncle Ludo’s apartment on the ground floor, so we have a great suite of rooms to ourselves in a wing. It is all gold and silk, and very grand. But, oh, I would rather have the old Forest-House kitchen, with the rafters and the little windows, and all the wood presses smelling so good of bees-wax!
“Aunt Betty says it is very dull at Cassel just now, because the king is still away. Next week, she says, it will be very different when he returns. But it seems to me that she is always out at parties. I have no dresses yet. I am very glad to be left at home. So I am quiet here, but oh, it is not the quiet of the forest. Thou Forest-Mother, I wish I could kiss thee.
“SIDONIA.
“I hope the old jackdaw is well.”
“Na,” said the old lady, who had watched him reading, her arms folded over her deep bosom, “what manner of letter is this at all for a bride who has run away from her man? That is verily but a foolish child. She was too young to be wed, eh, Geiger-Onkel?”
“That is the letter of a suffering woman,” quoth Geiger-Hans, softly, “and the whole letter, Mother Friedel, is one cry towards him.”
“Jeminy, and where do you see that?” whispered the dame with a shrug for the poor loony. “Well,” she added, in her cheerful undertone, “we’ve had a splendid night, our skin is as cool as a little frog’s, and we are healing as quick as a sapling. I wouldn’t say but that in another couple of weeks we might be quite able to travel.”
Geiger-Hans looked at the bed, at the fine sleeping face, placidly and wholesomely pale, at the charming languid hand flung in abandonment on the purple coverlet.
“Mother Friedel,” he said, and his voice was none the less decided because so low pitched, “three days must see us on the road again.”
Heedless of her scandalized protest he folded the letter and, thrusting it into his breast, gave himself up to reflection. A smile, half-bitter, half-tender, hovered upon his lips. The child... she had remembered him—after her old hound.