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Regina

or

The Sins of the Fathers

REGINA

OR THE SINS OF THE FATHERS

BY

HERMANN SUDERMANN

TRANSLATED BY
BEATRICE MARSHALL

LONDON: JOHN LANE, THE BODLEY HEAD
NEW YORK: JOHN LANE COMPANY. MCMVII

COPYRIGHT, 1898, BY
John Lane.

COPYRIGHT, 1905, BY
John Lane Company.

REGINA

OR THE SINS OF THE FATHERS

CHAPTER I

Peace was signed, and the world, which for so long had been the great Corsican's plaything, came to itself again. It came to itself, bruised and mangled, bleeding from a thousand wounds, and studded with battle-fields like a body with festering sores. Yet, in the rebound from bondage to freedom, men did not realise that there was anything very pitiable in their condition. The ground from which their wheat sprang, they reflected, would bear all the richer fruit from being soaked in blood, and if bullets and bayonets had thinned their ranks, there was now more elbow-room for those who were left.

The yawning vacuums in the seething human caldron gave a man space to breathe in. One great chorus of rejoicing from the Rock of Gibraltar to the North Cape ascended heavenwards. Bells in every steeple were set in motion, and from every altar and from every humble hearth arose prayers of thanksgiving. Mourners hid their diminished heads, for the burst of victorious song drowned their lamentations, and the earth absorbed their tears as indifferently as it had sucked in the blood of their fallen.

In glorious May weather the Peace of Paris was concluded. Lilies bloomed once more out of lakes of blood, and from the obscurity of lumber-rooms the blood-saturated banner of the fleur de lys was dragged forth into the light of day. The Bourbons crept from their hiding-places, whither they had been driven by fear of Robespierre's knife. They rubbed their eyes and forthwith began to reign. They had forgotten nothing and learnt nothing, except a new catchword from Talleyrand's en tout cas vocabulary, i.e. Legitimacy. The rest of the world was too busily engaged in wreathing laurels to crown the conquerors, and filling up bumpers to drink their health in, to pay any attention to this farce of Bourbon government. All eyes were turned in a fever of expectancy towards the West, whence were to come the conquering heroes, the laurel-crowned warriors who had been willing to sacrifice their lives for the honour of wife and child, for justice, and for the sacred soil of their fatherland. They had been under the fire of the Corsican Demon, the oppressor whom they in their turn had hunted and run to earth, till at last he lay in shackles at their feet.

When the victors began the homeward march, the German oaks were bursting into leaf, soon to be laughingly plundered of their young green foliage. On they came in swarms, first, joyous and lighthearted, the pride and flower of the Fatherland, the sons of the wealthy, who, as Volunteer Jägers, with their own horses and their own arms, had gone forth to the war of Liberation. Their progress through Germany was one magnificent ovation. Wherever they came, their path was strewn with roses, the most beautiful of maidens longed for the honour of winning their love, and the most costly wines flowed like water. Behind them followed a stream of Kossacks, riding over the German fields with a loose rein. A year before, when they had galloped like a troop of furies in the rear of the hunted remnant of the Grande Armée, the whole country had greeted them as saviours of Germany. Public receptions had been organised in their honour, hymns composed in their praise, and all sorts of blue-eyed German sentiment was lavishly poured out on the unwashed Tartar horde. To-day, too, they were conscientiously fêted, but the gaze of all true-hearted Germans was directed with intensest longing beyond them, looking for those who were still to come, of whom they seemed but the heralding shadows.

And at last these came, the men of the people, who had taken all their capital, their bare lives, in their hand, and gone forth to offer it up for the Fatherland. They advanced with a sound as of bursting trumpets, half hidden by dense columns of dust. Not exalted and splendid beings as they had often been painted in the imagination of the "stay-at-homes," with a halo of diamonds flashing round their heads, and a cloak flung proudly like a toga round their shoulders. No; they were faded and haggard, tired as overdriven horses, covered with vermin, filthy and in rags; their beards matted with sweat and dust. This was the plight in which they came home. Some were so emaciated and ghastly pale that they looked as if they could hardly drag one weary foot after the other; others wore a greedy, brutalised expression, and the reflection of the lurid glare of war seemed yet to linger in their sunken, hollow eyes. They held their knotty fists still clenched in the habitual cramp of murderous lust. Only here and there shone tears of pure, inspired emotion; only here and there hands were folded on the butt-end of muskets in reverent, grateful prayer. But all were welcome, and none were too coarse and hardened by their work of blood and revenge to find balm in the tears and kisses of their loved ones, and to greet with hope the dawn of purer times. Of course it could not be expected that passions which had been lashed into such abnormal and furious activity, would all at once calm down and slumber again. The hand that has wielded a sword needs time before it can accustom itself to the plough and scythe, and not every man knows how to forget immediately the wild licence of the camp in the hallowed atmosphere of home.

Every peace is followed by a period of delirium. It was thus in Germany in anno '14. That year, from which to this generation nothing has descended but the echo of a unison of pæans, swelling organ-strains, and clash of bells, was in reality more remarkable for tyranny and crime than any year before or since. More especially was this the case in districts where before the war the overweening arrogance and cruelty of the French occupier had been most heavily felt. Here the beast was let loose in man. The senses of those who stayed at home had been so inflamed by the scent of blood from distant battle-fields, and the smoke of burning villages, that they conjured up before their mental eyes scenes of horror and devastation at which they had not been present. Many thirsted for vengeance on secret wrongs, on acts of cowardice and treachery as yet unexpiated. After all, it seemed as if the awakened fervour of patriotism, the flowing streams of freshly-spilled blood, could not suffice even now to wipe out the memory of the shame and humiliation of previous years.

No one had any suspicion, then, that the Corsican vulture, set fast in his island cage, was already beginning to sharpen his iron beak, preparatory to gnawing through its bars, and that before his final capture thousands of veins were yet to be opened and drained of their blood.

CHAPTER II

One August day in this memorable year, a party of young men were gathered together in the parlour of a large country house.

The oak table round which they were seated presented a goodly array of tankards, and short, bulky bottles containing schnaps. Their faces, flushed with brandy and enthusiasm, were almost entirely concealed from view by the dense clouds of smoke they puffed from their huge pipes.

They were defenders of their country only lately returned home, and were revelling in reminiscences of the war. There was that distinct family likeness among them which equality in birth, breeding, and education often stamps on men between whom there exists no tie of blood-relationship.

Warfare had coarsened their honest, healthy countenances, and left its mark there in many a disfiguring scar and gash. Two or three still wore their arms in slings, and evidently none of them had as yet made up their minds to lay aside the black, frogged military coat to which they had become so proudly accustomed. For the most part they were well-to-do yeomen belonging to the village of Heide and its outlying hamlets, and though their homes were scattered they were united in a strong bond of neighbourly friendship. Some still lived on their fathers' patrimony, others had come into their own estate. It had never been their lot to experience the pinch of poverty, to till the soil and follow the plough, and so they had remained unaffected by the great changes Stein's new code a few years before had brought about in the position of the peasantry. In the spring, when the King's appeal to his subjects had resounded through the land, they could afford to leave their crops and, like the sons of the nobility, hurry with their own arms and their own horses to enlist in the ranks of the volunteer Jägers.

Only one member of the little group apparently belonged to another station in life. He occupied the one easy-chair the house boasted, an ungainly piece of upholstery, much the worse for wear.

His face was pale, somewhat sallow in colouring. The features were refined and delicately chiselled. The brown, melancholy eyes were shaded by long black lashes, which when he looked down cast a heavy fringe of shadow on his thin cheeks. Though he must certainly have been the youngest of them all, having hardly completed his twenty-second year, he looked like a man who had long ago ceased to take any pleasure in the mere frivolities of life.

On his smooth, square brow were lines that denoted energy and defiance, and in the blue hollows round his eyes lay traces of a past sorrow. He wore a grey overcoat that seemed too narrow across the shoulders, and beneath it a woollen shirt finely tucked, and ornamented with a row of mother-of-pearl buttons. The only military thing about him was the forage-cap bearing the Landwehr badge, which he had pushed on to the back of his head, to prevent the hard edge pressing on the scarcely healed wound which made a lurid streak on his forehead, close to where the dark hair clustered in heavy masses.

He was the cynosure of all eyes. Every one waited anxiously for him to take the lead in conversation. Next to him, on his right, sat a muscular youth, not much older than himself, who regarded him with unceasing and tender solicitude. To all appearances he was the host. There was a patch of white plaster on one of his temples, but his round, jovial face beamed radiantly nevertheless out of its frame of unkempt fair hair that hung about his neck and throat in wildest confusion.

"I say, lieutenant, you are positively drinking nothing," he exclaimed, pushing the bottle nearer him. "Because you aren't used to our beer, and still less used to our schnaps, there's no reason why you should be shy of swilling that red stuff of which we have plenty to spare.... We aren't rich, as you know, but if you stopped here till Doomsday we could supply you every day with a bottle like that. Couldn't we, lads?"

The others assented, and pressed round him eagerly to clink their mugs and liqueur-glasses against his cracked wine-glass.

A ray of gratitude and pleasure illumined momentarily the sad, pale face.

"I knew," he said--"I knew that if I came here you'd make me feel at home. Otherwise I should have gone on my way."

"That would have been kind of you, I must say," cried the host---"what did we enter into our covenant of blood for, and swear to be true till death after our first battle, don't you remember? In the church at ... where was it? I never can pronounce the name of the cursed hole!"

"The hole was Dannigkow," answered the young stranger addressed as "lieutenant."

"Ah, yes, that's it!" the host went on. "And do you imagine we went through that little ceremony with the sole purpose of letting you avoid us in future? Was it for that we chose you for our commanding officer, and blindly followed you into the thickest of the fight? No, Baumgart, there's no cement like blood and powder. So the devil take it, man, you must promise to stay with us a bit, now we've got you----"

"Don't talk nonsense, old fellow, it is impossible," the lieutenant replied, and blew thoughtfully on the purple mirror of his wine. But his friend was not to be silenced.

"You needn't be frightened," he continued, "that we shall plague you with curious questions. From the first we got into the way of looking on you as a sort of mystery. When we others used to lie by the bivouac fire and talk of our homes and parents, our sweethearts and sisters, your lips were resolutely sealed as they are now. And if one of us plucked up courage to ask you where you came from, and what you had been before the war, you always got up and walked away. We gave up questioning you at last, and thought to ourselves, 'He has gone through a furnace, may be, that has spoilt his life, and what concern is that of ours?' You were a good comrade, all of us can testify to that, and what is more, the most fearless, the bravest.... Ah, well, the fact is, that you had only to tell one of us to cut off his right hand, and he'd have done it without a murmur. Isn't it true, lads?"

An exclamation of assent went round the table.

"For mercy's sake, say no more," said the young lieutenant. "I don't know which way to look because of all this undeserved praise."

"Wait, I've more to say yet," the master of the house insisted on continuing. "Once we were really almost angry with you. You know why that was. During the armistice, shortly before we joined forces with the Lithuanians under Platen and Bülow, you were in the guard-room one evening, when you suddenly made a clean breast of it and announced that you must go away. You said, 'Don't ask me the reason, lads. But believe me, I can't help myself. The Landwehr wants officers. I know it is not much of an honour to leave the Jägers, for the Landwehr; but I'm going to do it, all the same.' Those were your very words, weren't they, Baumgart?"

The lieutenant nodded, and a bitter smile played round his lips.

"Tears were in your eyes as you spoke, otherwise one or other of us would have asked you if that was all the thanks we were to get for the confidence we had placed in you, to be deserted just then ... just when we longed to show those Platen fellows what baiting the French really meant.... We let you go without raising an objection, but our hearts bled.... Afterwards we heard nothing of you, no news in reply to all our inquiries; but I can tell you this much, we never ceased to talk of you every night for months. We racked our brains to think what had taken you away; speculated on where you were gone, and the like, till the men who joined later and had known you got sick of it, and implored us to give up talking about you, and to consign you to the Landwehr refuse-heap once for all. So you see how we pined for you; and now, after two days, you actually propose to turn your back on us again! It's a long journey from the Marne to the Weichsel, and a solitary one to walk, and your wounds still smarting. Stay and take a good rest, and relate at your leisure what your adventures with the greybeards really were, and how you came to be taken prisoner ... it must have been a strange accident that betrayed you into captivity?"

He glanced down with ingenuous pride at the iron cross which dangled between the froggings of his coat. It had been bestowed on him in reward for the intrepidity with which he had, unpardoned, hewn his way out of a nest of French Hussars and regained his liberty.

The lieutenant's breast was bare of ornament. At the end of the campaign, when a shower of decorations had rained down on the victorious warriors, he had not been present to receive his share. A painful sensation of being passed in the race, almost akin to shame, swept over him. He pushed his cap farther on to his brow, and drew himself erect in his chair, as if its fusty cushions threatened to suffocate him.

"Thank you," he said, "for your kind intentions, but I must go to Königsberg directly to report myself to the Commandant."

"I'm afraid you'll have some difficulty in finding him there," put in a curly-headed young man with twinkling dark eyes, who wore his right arm in a black sling.

"Don't you know that directly it came back the Landwehr was disbanded?"

"Even the staff is broken up," remarked another.

"Then I must try my luck with the Commissioner-General," replied Lieutenant Baumgart. "I have more reason, perhaps, than any one else to be extra careful that my discharge papers are in good order. At least, I fancy so. I don't want the reproach to be fastened on me that I sneaked out of the army secretly. So, please let me know as soon as you can if there will be any conveyance going to-morrow to Königsberg?"

A storm of indignation arose. They all left their seats, some seizing his hand, some forming a cordon round him, as if to prevent his departure by physical force.

"Stay at least a little longer, lest the fête we are organising in your honour should fall through," exhorted Karl Engelbert, the young host, as soon as he could make his voice heard above the hubbub.

Baumgart turned to him with a quick gesture of inquiry.

"In my honour?" he exclaimed. "Are you mad?"

"There's no getting out of it now," was the answer. "It was all settled the day you turned up here. I despatched Johann Radtke at once with a list of all the Jägers in the country round who are at home. Then, you know, we have representatives of six or seven regiments living about here.... Especially did I impress on him that he was to go to Schranden, where Merckel lives. Merckel," he added, "went over to the Landwehr, too; for if he hadn't, he couldn't have made sure of his lieutenancy. So there was more sense in his taking the step."

Baumgart at the mention of his name winced, but quickly recovering himself, gripped convulsively the arms of the battered easy-chair, and, with head bowed, listened in silence to what his well-meaning friends had to say about the gala-day arranged in his honour. He gave up protesting further, because he saw open resistance was useless. But the uneasy glances he cast about him seemed to indicate that he was meditating immediate flight.

His friends, however, did not observe his restlessness. After the excitement of war which had stirred their blood out of its normal channel, they found it irksome to subside into the ordinary routine of private life, and hailed with delight any excuse for varying its monotony with a few hours' roistering and dissipation. They were now engaged in eagerly discussing the result of their messenger's mission, whose return from Schranden, a few miles away, they had been expecting hourly all the morning.

"I wonder," said Peter Negenthin, the youth with the black sling, "how the Schrandeners are getting on with that fine landlord of theirs?"

Lieutenant Baumgart started and listened with all his ears.

"They set his house on fire long ago," remarked another. "For five years he's been roosting among the blackened ruins like an owl."

"Why didn't he build his castle up again?" asked a third.

"Why? Because the peasants and farmers down in the village would have thrashed any one at the cart-wheel who dared to work for him. Once he tried getting labourers over from his foreign estates, thinking that as they couldn't understand German it would be all right; ... but there was a free fight one day down at the inn, and heigh presto!--the Poles were hounded back to where they came from. Since then he hasn't made any more attempts to cultivate his land."

"How does he live then?

"Who cares how he lives! Let him starve."

In the midst of laughter, mingled with growls of hate which this humane remark had called forth from these doughty sons of the soil, the anxiously awaited ambassador entered the room. He was a stoutly built short man, whose straight fair hair, as yellow and bright as new thatch, hung over his round face, which was the colour of a lobster from exposure to the heat of the sun. Steaming with perspiration, and breathless from his hurried ride, he seized the stone jug of monstrous girth that stood in the middle of the table, before speaking a word, and held it to his lips with both hands, where it remained so long that it had at last to be torn away from his mouth by force, much to the amusement of the company. After a fusilade of banter and jokes had been discharged at him from all sides, he blurted forth his news. The idea of the fête had, it seemed, been caught at with enthusiasm. Every one in the neighbourhood was willing to lend his countenance to festivities in honour of those who had done such splendid service in the cause of German Unity. The only difference of opinion was as to where they were to come off. The Schrandeners, with Lieutenant Merckel at their head, declared that no spot on earth could be a more appropriate scene for their celebration than their own village.

"Then you see, lads," explained the messenger, "the Schrandeners have private reasons for being particularly gay just now. They are dancing in front of their houses, and scarcely know whether they are standing on their head or their heels. I'll tell you why. Perhaps you know that little chorale that they've for the last seven years been singing in church?

"Our gracious Baron and Lord
Of Schrandeners' souls abhorr'd.
For the shame he's brought on our head,
O God, let the plague strike him dead."

"Well, in a fashion their prayer has been answered. The betrayer of their country, who never tired of cursing and damning them up hill and down dale, and heaped on them every foul epithet he could lay tongue to, may now lie and rot in a ditch for all they care. They have sworn not to bury him."

Then arose excited shouts and eager questioning.

"Is he dead, the dog?

"Has the devil taken him to himself at last? Ha! ha! Bravo!"

Suddenly, above the din of voices, a grinding crunching noise was heard. Baumgart's arm had clasped the back of his chair with such vehemence that the long-suffering worm-eaten wood had collapsed. He sat rigid and motionless, staring at the speaker with wide, strained eyes, unconscious of the injury he had inflicted on the ancestral piece of furniture. Then garrulous Johann Radtke proceeded--

"Yes, happily enough, they were the cause of his death at last. They have never ceased to harass and torment him, and it was while they were trying to demolish the Cats' Bridge that he had a stroke of apoplexy from rage, and fell down foaming at the mouth."

"Lieutenant, have you ever heard of the Cats' Bridge?"

Still he neither moved nor uttered a word; only set his teeth on his under lip, till it bled. As if turned to stone, he sat gazing fixedly up into the speaker's face.

"It was by the Cats' Bridge that the French made the famous, or rather I should say infamous, sortie which surprised the Prussians, and it was the Baron who showed them the secret path which leads to it. You have heard of the Schranden invasion, of course. It's recorded in every calendar?"

The lieutenant nodded mechanically like a doomed man, who, swooning, resigns himself to inevitable fate.

"The stroke took him before their very eyes," Radtke went on. "His precious sweetheart, the village carpenter's daughter, the baggage who lived with him, you know, threw herself on his body, for the Lord only knows what liberties they might not have taken with it when their blood was up."

"And now they refuse to bury him, you say?" interrupted the good-natured Karl Engelbert, shaking his head meditatively. "Is such a scandalous outrage as that allowed to pass unpunished in a Christian country?"

Johann laughed scoffingly.

"The Schrandeners are like a flock of sheep. If one declines to pollute his hands with bearing such carrion to the grave, all the rest decline also. And who can blame them?"

"But," some one suggested, "suppose it came to the ear of the law?"

"The law! Ha, ha! Old Merckel is their magistrate, and he says, as far as he is concerned, they might have flayed----"

He broke off abruptly, for with a smothered cry of pain, and a gesture half threatening, half self-defensive, the young lieutenant had started to his feet. He was whiter than the whitewashed wall behind him, and a thin thread of crimson trickled from his blanched lips, over his chin.

"Stop, for God's sake!" he stammered in a strange muffled almost inaudible voice, and those who caught his words shrank away in horror.

"He was my father!"

CHAPTER III

The moon had risen and flooded the tranquil heath with its soft bluish radiance. Down in the marshes the alder-bushes were tipped with crowns of light, and the white, slender trunks of the birches which flanked the highway in interminable rows shone and shimmered, till the road seemed to stretch away and lose itself between hedges of burnished silver. Silence reigned everywhere. The last note of the birds' evening chorale had long since died away. Peace, the peace of well-being, peculiar to late summer, pervaded the wide-stretching level fields. Even the grasshopper in the ditch, and a fieldmouse scurrying in alarm through the tall blades of corn, hardly broke the stillness.

A traveller with staff and knapsack came along the road, gazing absently before him, evidently oblivious of the magic of the moon-lit landscape. It was the young lieutenant, on his way home to bury the father whose memory was held in such universal detestation. His host had put his best equipage at his disposal, but his comrade had firmly refused to accept the offer, and he had been obliged to content himself with accompanying his guest part of the way on foot. At parting he had solemnly affirmed that the compact of eternal friendship that they had entered into as brothers-in-arms after their first baptism of fire would hold good now and always, "the sins of the fathers" notwithstanding. Whenever he was in need of help and sympathy in the future, he might rely on the good-will of him and his neighbours.

This was meant well, but brought no comfort to the young man's sore heart. The allusion to "the sins of the fathers" stung him to the quick. It sounded very much like an insult, yet an insult that he was powerless to resent openly, as there was no shuffling off the incubus of shame which, as his father's heir, now weighed on his innocent shoulders.

Thus fiercely brooding he walked on, and pictures of the past involuntarily rose before his mental vision. He had never loved his father--the harsh, tyrannical man who flogged the peasants, whose laughter was more terrible than his oaths, to whom he, his only son, had been not much more than the pet dog that one minute was allowed to bite his heels when he was in a good humour, only to be hurled across the room the next with a savage kick. As long as he could remember, the small muscular figure, the sallow face with its high cheek-bones, coal-black goat's beard, and little keen grey eyes, had been the terror of his childhood. His mother he had never known. She had succumbed, a few years after his birth, to a long and tedious illness. It was rumoured at the time, in the village, that her lord's ungovernable passions had been the death of her--that his love was as terrible as his hate.

Her picture had hung at the end of a long line of ghostly portraits in the dimly-lighted picture-gallery with its vaulted roof, where one's footsteps echoed uncannily between the stone walls, and where it was possible to shiver with cold on the hottest summer day.... The picture of a gentle, tired-looking woman with thin bloodless lips, and half-closed lids that seemed to droop from sheer weariness and lack of spirit.

Many a time, unseen, the boy had stood by the hour before this picture, and waited--waited for the heavy lids to lift, that one warm ray of maternal love might at last be shed into his lonely young life. He would fold his hands in prayer, and lift a tear-stained face in eager anticipation, while his heart beat for fear; but the picture never came to life. Tired and slumberous as ever, as if already half-closed in their last long sleep, the heavily shadowed, star-like eyes continued to look down on him with a strange, cold, metallic gleam, till he could bear it no longer, and would rush from the spot half distracted with disappointment.

Not far from his mother's picture hung another still more remarkable--the portrait of an exquisitely beautiful woman with blue-black hair. The artist had represented her in the act of mounting a horse. A red velvet cloak, embroidered with gold and bordered with fur, hung over her left shoulder, and in her right hand, which was covered with a long, wrinkled, gauntleted glove, she tenaciously grasped her riding-whip. It was easy to imagine her bringing it down with a will on the back of a mauvais sujet. The whole figure was instinct with indomitable spirit and energy. Life glowed in the dark eyes that flashed imperiously from the canvas, as if demanding the homage of all who came within their radius. This was his grandmother in her youth--the old lady whose shrill scolding tongue, and witch-like appendages in the shape of gold-headed canes, liqueur-glasses, and snuff-boxes, were indissolubly associated with the boy's earliest memories. She had been the evil star of his house. Before her marriage, one of the most admired beauties of the Polish Court in Saxony, she had instilled into his father with the milk from her breast love for the country of the Pole, so that he, a nobleman of German name and lineage, living on German soil, grew up to hate the land of his birth, and to set all his affections on the moribund chimera of Polish nationality. Though he had married a German lady, he had not hesitated to give his son a Polish name, which, to be doomed to bear at a time when the spirit of hyper-sensitive patriotism was rampant in the land, seemed a worse misfortune by far than being afflicted by some hereditary disease.

But what was the innocent name of Boleslav compared with the indelible disgrace that his father, through his insane infatuation for the Poles, had since brought on him and his race?

And now he was dead, this father, and of the dead one should speak no evil. Yet even as he repeated this truism to himself, the consciousness of the stain with which he was branded, which no power on earth could remove, overwhelmed him with acutest anguish.

Passionately he threw up his arms towards the soft, blue, star-spangled heavens, as if he fain would demand that the soul of his father should be instantly brought to judgment, no matter in what remote planet it might be hiding.

Then came a reaction. His vehemence was succeeded by a gentler mood. He flung himself on the damp, dewy grass by the roadside, and buried his face in his hands. He felt he should like to cry. But his lids remained dry and burning. The thought of his immediate future was almost more than he could bear. He reflected that in a few hours he should find a forsaken wilderness, a howling desolation, where once bathed in all the rosy radiance of his boyish vision he had beheld a scene of sylvan peace and beauty.

For though he had been a lonely, motherless boy, it would have been wicked and ungrateful to maintain that even his childhood had not had its share of sunshine, and boasted its hours of unalloyed delight. Had he not been allowed to roam where he listed, through field and forest, untrammelled by conventions about meals and bedtime, as free to do as he pleased as any Robin Hood or gipsy in Arcadia? When the soft May zephyrs breathed on the shaking grasses, and the yellow butterfly danced from flower to flower, he had lain on his back between the tall blades and meadow-sweet, looking up into the blue sky, his day-dreams undisturbed. He might have stayed there from morning till night; so long as he was not hungry he did stay, and it mattered to no one.

If he took it into his head to wander off with the shepherd to the distant moorlands, to partake of black bread from his wallet, and quench his thirst at the babbling streams, who was there to prevent it? He was his own master. Round the Castle, which commanded an extensive view of the country, flowed the sparkling, merry river, in great serpentine curves, between its wooded banks and green terraces. By the river-side there was always something of interest going on. There the grooms watered the horses, the tanner washed his skins, and the boys winked from behind their fishing-rods at the servant-girls paddling bare-legged in and out of the water. But greatest delight of all--when the sun went down behind the alders, the stately wild deer would venture cautiously out of the neighbouring thicket, climb down the steep incline, through bush and briar, and thirstily lap up the moisture with its parched tongue. Often it was necessary to lie in ambush more than half-an-hour without moving so much as a hair to witness this enchanting spectacle, otherwise it would have vanished like a mirage. And what in the world could be more glorious than, when the moon rose and cast a silver network on the ripples; when the alders looked like white-veiled princesses, and the lively wenches sang over their griddle snatches of plaintive song, to plunge into the depths of the wood, and with a canopy of foliage overhead, and moonbeams dancing round you, dream the night away, and wake to greet the dawn? He let his hands fall from his face; and stared round him with vacant, wild eyes. The fields lay white and still in the moonlight.

Only the tree under which he rested cast dark, jagged bars of shadow over the peaceful landscape. A pitiful sound like the scream of a child in distress arose in the distance. It came from a young hare that had lost itself in the furrows, and frightened and hungry was crying for its mother, little suspecting that every yell was but a fresh signal to its murderers. He was thrilled with compassion for the sufferings of dumb creation, as he rose and pursued his way.... Reminiscences still kept pace with his footsteps.

Now it was his school-days that came vividly back to him--the time when the old Pastor Götz had undertaken his education, and the white parsonage among the nut-bushes became his second home. No more vagabond roamings now, for the grey-bearded, fiery-tempered old parson was a stern disciplinarian, and kept his pupils in good order. There were ten or twelve of them--boys and girls together;--children of the well-to-do farmer class. He had, of course, never associated with the children of the peasantry, who were allowed to run wild and grow up like young cattle. This was not to be wondered at, considering the village schoolmaster, an ex-valet of his father's, superannuated through drink, spent most of the time that should have been engaged in teaching the young idea how to shoot, in the various taverns of the neighbourhood.

Felix Merckel, son of the village innkeeper, was the one of his comrades he remembered best--a strapping, unruly lad, who, at the age of ten, wore top-boots and carried a gun, and whose tendency to bully kept the whole school in subjection. Even Boleslav himself, though two years younger, and of a retiring nature that had little in common with the elder boy's somewhat bumptious temperament, was much influenced by him. Yet his position as the squire's son was never lost sight of, and Felix joined with his other schoolfellows in paying him a sort of sly homage in deference to it. Felix was his mentor in all boyish accomplishments. He taught him to swim, to row, to snare birds, to make fireworks, to shoot rabbits, and even to plunder the poor peasants' garden during church time on Sunday evenings. And though the fruit in his own garden, which he was at liberty to pick whenever he liked, was a thousand times sweeter and more luscious than the hard, sour stuff he clambered after at the risk of breaking his neck, he could not withstand the allurements of those secret raids. Afterwards he was often seized with remorse on account of them, and was so heartily ashamed of himself that he would pay back in the morning a hundredfold what he had stolen over-night. Such acts of reparation, nevertheless, were only received with scowls or smiles of malice, for the unfortunate canaille were compelled by benighted feudal laws to plough and delve on his father's estates, and were sorely oppressed; therefore it was only natural that the boy should reap to the full the harvest of bitter hate sown by the father.

Of his other companions, especially of the girls, he had nothing but the haziest recollection. There was, of course, one exception. Her bright image had floated before him, through all the pain and heartache that had gradually darkened his whole existence, pain which even the fascinations of war could not alleviate. It was her image, that like a lodestar had led him into the thickest of the fight, and had not faded from him as he lay wounded, and, as he believed, dying.

Intense longing for her had become identified with that vague yearning after happiness which still sometimes possessed him, just as if his chances of happiness had not, by his father's misdeeds, been irretrievably ruined.

How this love had sprung up in his breast and grown apace, becoming stronger every day, till at last the whole world seemed filled with its reflection, he hardly knew himself.

As a child, the pastor's small daughter had always been distant in her manner. The fresh, neat, fairylike little creature never could be coaxed by any of them into jumping a ditch, even if the bottom was dry, and was very particular at hide-and-seek not to allow her frocks to be caught hold of lest "the gathers should go." Now and then, when they were alone together, Helene would show off with pride the glories of her doll's house, and point out that the tiny towels had hemmed edges and a monogram. They would be getting quite confidential till, in an outburst of boyish spirits, he was sure to do something rough or clumsy which brought down on his head a gentle rebuke, and he was reminded of the limitations of their friendship. Hurt and ashamed, he would afterwards try to keep out of her way, but a smile of forgiveness never failed to bring him to her feet, for there was a kind of sovereignty in her little person that was not to be resisted.

Felix resented her power. He called her affected and a mollycoddle, and teased her as only he could tease. She, on her part, had an aggravating trick of turning up her nose and appearing to look down on him, though he was a good head taller, which goaded him into tormenting her the more, and ended in her running to her father, and with streaming eyes begging that Felix might be punished.

At twelve years old, Boleslav left his birthplace. Some relations on his mother's side, belonging to the old Prussian official nobility, proposed to continue his education. His father had every reason to congratulate himself at getting rid of him. The life he had led since his wife died was scarcely of a character to bear the scrutiny of innocent, questioning, childish eyes. The Baron was in the habit of bringing back to the castle from his visits to the capital curious company, chiefly women, and many a half-opened bud, indigenous to the soil, had fallen an unwilling victim to his unbridled lust. Not that he carried on his intrigues openly and unashamed. It was simply that in his private life he refused to recognise the restraint of any moral law, and, after all, what he did was only, for the most part, what his fathers had done before him. Such amours were a part of the traditions of his house, and were not likely to excite surprise or comment, unless it were from the boy, who had occasionally been an involuntary witness of assaults on virtue and heartrending appeals for mercy.

There were many other transactions besides these going on at the castle that were not meant for his eyes. When the great Napoleon's call to arms roused that miserable cat's-paw of European ambitions, the lacerated country of Poland, from its death-throes, mysterious movements were set on foot in every quarter where the peculiar hiss of Polish speech was heard, and even extended so far as the unadulterated German regions of East Prussia.

Foreigners with slim, supple figures, and sharply-cut features used to arrive at Schranden Castle, driving through the village at express speed in small carriages, and leave again in the middle of the night. The post brought innumerable sealed packages bearing the Russian post-mark; and for weeks together the Baron's study was locked against all intruders. He himself became taciturn and pre-occupied, going about like a man in a dream, actually permitting the stripes and weals on the backs of his serfs to heal and fade away.

It was at this time that Boleslav migrated to his relations in Königsberg. Afterwards, years passed calmly away, years in which he grew in stature and developed in mind under the watchful care of the widow of a former chancellor, who stood in the place of a mother to him. All the leading families in the town opened their houses to him, and by degrees the old familiar scenes and faces of his home became little more than shadowy memories. His father's rare and hurried visits only demonstrated how estranged he had become from his son, and how little love was lost between them.

Then came that terrible winter in which the war-fury was let loose, devastating the old Prussian provinces, and the victorious march of Napoleonic cohorts resounded between the Weichsel and the Memel. Scores of provincial fugitives sought refuge from the invaders within the walls of Königsberg. Every house, from cellar to garret, was crammed with human beings, and in the streets smouldered the bivouac-fires of the soldiers who were camping out in the open air.

In the midst of war's alarms, to the accompaniment of beating of drums and bugle-blasts, it was vouchsafed to Boleslav to dream for the first time "love's young dream."

He had lately turned sixteen, and his upper lip was already shaded with a pencilled line of down. He knew Horace's odes to Chloe and Lydia by heart, and the passion which Schiller, who had recently died, had cherished for his Laura was no longer a mystery to him. One January evening on his way home from the gymnasium, as he crossed the castle square where Russian and Prussian orderlies were galloping hither and thither, he caught a glimpse of a pair of blue eyes which seemed turned on him with an expression of friendly inquiry. He blushed, but when he ventured to look round the eyes had vanished. The same thing happened again the next evening. Not till it happened a third time could he summon sufficient courage to watch more carefully and discover that the eyes belonged to a fair young face, which could boast besides a straight little nose, delicately curved lips, which naïvely smiled at him. The face reminded him of an old altar-piece in the cathedral representing the Virgin Mary standing in a garden of stiff white lilies and short-stalked crimson roses. Of something else it reminded him too, and it puzzled him to think what. He was racking his brains to remember, when a rosy glow tinged the girl's fair cheeks, and the charming lips opened.

"Boleslav!" they lisped. "Is it you?"

Now, of course, he knew.

"Helene, Helene! You!" he exclaimed joyously. Had she not bashfully evaded him, he would have embraced her then and there in the middle of the crowded square, regardless of spectators in the shape of giggling servant-maids and ribald soldiers. They withdrew into a more secluded street, and she told him that on the advance of the enemy her father had sent her for the sake of safety to board with an old aunt, who had set up an institution for the daughters of poor clergymen. Here she was very happy, and was making the most of her time, studying French and music, for she hoped that in the future she might render her father assistance with his school, for it was not likely she would ever marry.

All this she related in a quiet, old-fashioned way, which excited his respectful admiration, casting smiling side-long glances at him as she talked. Of his father she could not tell him much; the last time she had met him he had looked very fierce. It was some time since she had had any news from home, because the French were quartered there; but Felix Merckel was in Königsberg, and she saw him now and then. He was apprenticed to a corn merchant, and thought himself quite the fine gentleman. He wasn't likely to come to any good though, for he smoked cigars and wore loud Turkish neckties. She ended by giving him leave to call on her at her aunt's on Friday--Friday being the day for visitors at the institution.

Then she tripped lightly away, swaying her slender limbs from side to side, and as he watched her, he felt as if the Virgin in the altar-piece had graciously condescended to appear to him in the flesh, and was now returning to her lilies and crimson roses.

On Friday he pulled the bell of the institution and was admitted. He did not find her, it is true, among lilies and roses, but there were some plants of fuchsia and geranium in the room, whose faded, dusty leaves made a pretty background to the girlish figure. The glow of the winter sunset came through the diamond-pane windows, and spread a rosy veil over her face. Perhaps, too, the pleasure of meeting an old friend made her blush a little. The aunt, a toothless, antique spinster, with patches and a powdered toupee, exhausted herself with curtseying and compliments, and after regaling the distinguished visitor with chocolate, in a bowl of superb old English china, vanished as noiselessly as if the earth had swallowed her up. That was the first of a succession of blissful, beatific Fridays.

Troops went forth to battle and returned, but he did not even notice them. The thunder of cannons at Eylau reverberated through the town, but he was deaf, and heard nothing. It often seemed to him, as he looked up at the sky, that he must be lying far down in the depths of the blue sea, and that the world in which he had lived before was somewhere a long way off on the other side of the azure empyrean. But that he still in reality belonged to that world, he was forcibly reminded one Sunday afternoon, when the door of his attic-chamber, where he was dreaming over his books, was boisterously flung open, and his heaven invaded.

"Hurrah! my boy!" cried the intruder, with outstretched arms. "I've been looking for you everywhere for a year past, and it's been as difficult as searching for a needle in a bottle of hay. Even now I mightn't have tracked you out if that pious little girl Helene had not given me a hint of your whereabouts."

It was the harum-scarum Felix, and the Turkish necktie of which the beloved had spoken, flapped over either shoulder in aggressive fly-away ends.

Boleslav returned the greeting more heartily than a few weeks ago he would have thought possible; since his meeting with Helene, the old home and the old life had come back to him very distinctly, and his heart felt drawn to this once inseparable friend of his boyhood.

Felix did not stand on ceremony, but threw himself on the sofa, and as he stretched his legs on the leather cushions looked round him in amazed admiration. The room seemed to him the embodiment of luxury and magnificence.

"You are domiciled here like a prince in the 'Arabian Nights,'" he exclaimed; "that's what comes of being born a Junker, I suppose. I wish I was. Such as we have to rough it, and----"

He paused in order to shoot through his front teeth a stream of dark-brown saliva, a habit he had learnt from the sailors on the quays. After this, he frequently visited Boleslav's sequestered retreat, devoured the dainties his aunt sent up to him, borrowed money and books, and initiated him in the mysteries of life at the water's edge. In short, he conducted himself as do most "men of the world" between fifteen and nineteen years of age, who are apt to gain an ascendency over deeper and more thoughtful natures than their own.

Boleslav sometimes thought of making him his confidant in his love affair, but never, when it came to the point, could find the right words in which to express himself. So his secret remained, as he thought, buried in his heart of hearts. But one day Felix astounded him by saying--

"Don't think I am blind! I have discovered some time ago that you are head over heels in love with a certain little prude. She's pretty enough, but a bit too good for me."

The blood mounted swiftly and angrily to Boleslav's brow, and he demanded with dignity that henceforth no disrespectful word be spoken of the fair Helene in his presence. And Felix, though he made a contemptuous grimace, was careful not to offend again by any jibing allusion to his love.

Later he announced his intention of enlisting in the English navy as a midshipman, that he might be "revenged on the tyrant of his downtrodden Fatherland," as he expressed it, and Boleslav looked up to him in consequence with a profounder reverence than ever.

Then a day came when this friend passed him in the street without bestowing on him a shake of the hand, or even a nod. Only a scornful shrug of the shoulders indicated that he had seen him at all. Utterly disconcerted, he gazed after the rapidly disappearing figure that seemed anxious to get out of his way as quickly as possible.

What could be the meaning of this extraordinary behaviour? The same evening, with tears pouring down his face, he wrote asking for an explanation. Before there was time for an answer, a messenger brought him a parcel of books and a note that ran as follows:--

"To His Hochgeboren Herrn
Boleslav von Schranden.

"Having become apprised of events that have recently taken place in Schranden, I consider that it would be beneath my dignity, and contrary to all my patriotic principles, to continue our intercourse. The books you have lent me are therefore returned. The money will follow in due course as soon as I have earned the same. Meanwhile the messenger will hand you five silver groschens.--In humble submission, your Hochgeboren's obedient servant,

"Felix Merckel."

Boleslav felt as if some one had struck him a blow from behind. He was so bitterly humiliated that for a whole day he daren't look any human being in the face. At last he resolved to tell Helene of his trouble, in the hope that she might be able to give him tidings that would at least end his fearful suspense. She had forbidden him to speak to her in the street, because she considered such meetings out of doors unnecessary and improper, as he was allowed to call at the institution. Yet, in spite of her veto, he waylaid her and showed her Felix's letter. As usual, she smiled sweetly and consolingly, but could throw little light on the matter. The last time she had heard from her father, the letter had been full of nothing but the unfortunate engagement which had taken place in the wood near Schranden, when the Prussian soldiers had been completely routed. That had been in all the newspapers. There was only one means of learning the whole truth. Helene could walk along by the river's bank, where the clerks from the great warehouses lounged away their spare time, and make inquiries of Felix. This she consented to do, though reluctantly; and he, in a fever of anxiety, waited for her return on one of the bridges.

"He does think too much of himself!" she said, as she came back slowly from her errand, the colour deepening in her cheeks. "And so they all do, these merchants' clerks. It's not likely that I should allow any of them to make love to me!"

She smiled, and hid her burning face in the blue silk reticule she always carried.

"But you needn't mind him, dear Boleslav. Since he has determined to go as a midshipman, he has got love for the Fatherland on the brain."

"How have I interfered with his love for the Fatherland?" asked Boleslav. "Don't I abominate that bloodhound Bonaparte as much as he does?"

Helene was silent, and gathered the folds of her cloak closer about her slender limbs, to keep out the bitter winter wind. Then she continued--

"You may rely on me. I will never bear a grudge against you for it."

"For what? Good God, tell me at once!"

And then at last the mystery was cleared up.

"You mustn't take it too much to heart, dearest Boleslav. At home in the village they all say that your father showed the French the path by the Cats' Bridge in the middle of the night, so that they might surprise the Prussians; and that gipsy-looking Regina, the carpenter's daughter--you remember the little curly-headed thing who was at school with you and me--she confessed it, because it was she who really led the way. And now the people call your father the betrayer of his country, and refuse to work for him any more, and have burnt down his house."

Ah! so that was it. Now he knew all. In that hour his life's budding joys and hopes were withered like the blossoms of a tree struck by lightning in May. How intolerable were these memories of darkest hours of silent torture-hours in which he was oppressed with a sense of crime, and when shame literally consumed him!

It was some time before the news of the betrayal was openly spoken about in Königsberg. Months passed before the first signs that it had become known manifested themselves, and during these months his whole character underwent a complete change.

His glance became shifty and uneasy, his colour often forsook him. Shy and awkward he withdrew himself more and more from society, and frequented none of his old haunts. He would start and tremble at every word unexpectedly addressed to him. Then came days when the masters at the gymnasium began to look askance at him, and the pupils to shun him--days in which his aunt kept her room to escape his morning greeting, and the family sat in conclave behind closed doors, when the servants began to set his orders at defiance, and from time to time spat on the ground as they passed his door.

So he watched it creeping on, nearer and nearer, the cold, clammy monster, that, snake-like, was to bind his limbs and freeze the blood in his veins. He watched its wriggling progress, heard the gloating hiss of its approach, and defenceless, paralysed, he stared it stonily in the face, lacking the courage to cry out, or even to moan.

He had lost Helene too. Not through any fault of hers. She had still allowed him to go on pulling the institution bell on Fridays as if nothing had happened, and had been friendly as ever, and had even tried to distract his thoughts from the painful subject on which they incessantly brooded, with mild little jokes. But was it because he was himself so altered that he could only see the rest of the world through a distorting mist of shame, or had she really, since that day of the revelation, adopted a tone of pitying compassion towards him? Anyhow, he became more and more embarrassed in her presence, and dared not meet her eye.

One day, instead of Helene, the old schoolmistress received him alone. She curtseyed and grinned as usual, and assured him, a hundred times at least, that she was his humblest servant; but what she proceeded to unfold seemed to Boleslav the last straw. Her dear nephew, the Herr Pastor, she stuttered, thought it best that the intimacy between his daughter and the young nobleman should terminate, and in order that there should be no further temptation to continue it, had decided to remove her instantly from the town of Königsberg. A note sealed with blue sealing-wax contained Helene's farewell:--

"Dear, Dear Boleslav,--My father commands me to give up my friendship with you. I must obey him. Good-bye. I shall always be fond of you----always. I swear it. Your

"Helene."

Six hastily scribbled lines! Were these to be his food and drink through a life of longing and renunciation? Yet had he any right to expect more? Had she not promised to be true, and to hold to him though everyone else had cast him off? From that time forward she became for him transfigured and a saint. Her face became more than ever identified in his imagination with that of the Madonna he had seen in the Cathedral, and whenever he pictured her he beheld her adorned with an aureole, and surrounded by lilies and roses.

Had it not been for his extreme youth, energy and self-reliance might possibly have helped him over the abyss of enervating grief; but a habit of childlike respect, a latent instinct of veneration, put the idea of asking his father to explain what had happened, much less of calling him to account for it, out of the question. It was his unexpected appearance on the scene that at last roused in him a spirit of revolt.

He was now seventeen, and would have been ready to pass into the university, even if the authorities of the gymnasium had not repeatedly hinted that his withdrawal would be in every way desirable. Even his kindly aunt, who had carefully avoided referring to the rumour through which she herself suffered keenly, had, as mercifully as she knew how, spoken to him about the advisability of his going somewhere else to finish his studies.

Under other circumstances, his pride, his zeal for fair play and his own honour, would have rebelled against this unjust dismissal. But now, in his unspeakable bitterness, he cherished only one wish, and that was to hide away somewhere with his disgrace, and be seen by no human eye.

And in this mood he stood one day face to face with his father.

The baron had come to town, to call in the aid of the law in dealing with his rebellious peasants, but had found every door shut in his face. His fury knew no bounds; he appeared to have lost all control over himself, and his demeanour was one of desperate defiance.

At the sight of the short, stubborn figure, the bull-neck and the grey, fiery eyes rolling in their red sockets, Boleslav was seized with the old boyish terror. He had to pull himself together with a tremendous effort before he could bring the fatal question over his lips.

"Father, is it true what people are saying, that----"

Suspicion blazed up in the small grey eyes.

"Eh?--what are people saying?" he interrupted.

"That it was through you that the French found out the path by the Cats' Bridge."

"And what if it was through me, you Hottentot? What if I did avenge the wrongs of the down-trampled Pole on this pack of cowardly Russian thieves? These hulking, stupid, lazy serfs, who would only get their deserts if the great Napoleon extirpated them altogether from off the face of the earth. Don't gape at me like that, clown! What I did was done as a sacred duty. Heavily chained, scourged human beings cried out imploringly to me, 'Save us, save us!' I could not save them, it is true; that work was reserved for a greater than I--but I could at least help, help him, who like an avenging angel swept over Europe and laid it waste--help to annihilate a handful of ruffians I saw providentially delivered into my hand."

As he held forth thus, his short figure seemed to grow. His eyes flashed fire. The demon of fanaticism that so strongly resembles inspiration, its angelic sister, enveloped him in its red-hot, glowing mantle.

Boleslav shrank away, trembling. He felt keenly, how completely every tie between him and this man was now severed.

"Let them whisper, and nudge each other as I pass," he continued, "and make faces; what the devil do I care? They daren't do it so long as the Corsican lion held them in his claws. And after all, who is to prove it against me? If it hadn't been for that fool Regina, who let her father hunt her down in the Bockshorn, every one would naturally have supposed that General Latour, with his inventive brain, had found out the way over the river and through the wood of his own accord. As it is, the wretches are all at my throat.... The peasants are no longer to be brought to heel with the knout. They've always been so fond of me, you see. If what the papers say is true, and the king is willing to let the mutiny continue, they'll lynch me, as sure as fate. You will have good cause to congratulate yourself on your succession, my boy!"

Those were the last words his father had ever spoken to him, for the conversation which had taken place in his own study, was interrupted at this point by the entrance of his aunt.

The aristocratic old lady recoiled from the touch of the Baron's red muscular hand as from that of some poisonous reptile. But mastering her repugnance, she asked for a few minutes' private talk with him.

What decision they came to over his future he was never to know, for even before the short interview had elapsed, his former life already lay behind him like a nightmare, and he stood in the street and reflected through which of the city-gates he should wander out into the wide world. Finally, the goal of his travels proved to be a small property in a remote corner of Lithuania, where he found rest in hard work, and an opportunity of fitting himself for the duties of a landed proprietor.

Years went by. For him they meant unremitting labour for his daily bread--a struggle for existence full of hardships, which, however, could be engaged in without shame, or any wounding of his amour propre. For now he no longer bore the abhorred name of his fathers. If at the same time he only could have cast off, like a soiled garment, the host of bitter recollections with which it was associated, he would have been happier. But consciousness of the infamy that clung to the discarded name remained ever present. Love for his country, which hitherto had only slumbered in his heart, now bounded into full life. The passion of patriotism grew and grew, till it became a tormenting demon which scourged him with scorpions, drove the blood from his face, the sleep from his eyes, and heaped the guilt of Prussia's misfortunes on his shoulders.

Only once during this time did news of his home reach him. That was when he read in a Königsberg news-sheet that Schranden Castle, which had enjoyed such an unenviable notoriety in the winter of 1807, had been burned down with all its outlying buildings. Then he had folded his hands, and a sound had escaped his lips like a prayer of thanksgiving.

Expiation! expiation! must be the watchword of his soul.

But as yet nothing could be expiated. Still the unhappy Fatherland lay crushed beneath the heel of the dictator. Then came the downfall of the Great Army on the snow-covered plains of Eastern Europe, and the rising of Prussia quickly followed.

Now the hour had come. His hour! He would die--give his life for the Fatherland, and expiate his father's sin with his own blood.

In the volunteer Jäger Baumgart, who rode into Königsberg on the 5th of March 1813, no one recognised the youthful Baron von Schranden, who, just five years before, had fled from the town unable to face the dishonour brought upon his name; and there were many now hailing him with shouts and cheers of welcome, who then would have driven him out with stones and brickbats.

He attached himself to a cluster of intrepid sons of the soil, from whose mouths the dialect of his lost home fell familiarly and musically on his ear. He became their friend and their leader, till suddenly a well-known face cropped up in the camp, the sight of which immediately drove Lieutenant Baumgart out of it.

Felix Merckel, he knew too well, would not have hesitated to betray him to his comrades, and to inform them who it was that led them to battle.

What followed was like a ghastly confused phantasmagoria, in which bloodshed, salvoes, and death-rattles played their part. Why had he not died? How had he lived through it? These were the questions he asked himself on first regaining consciousness and opening his eyes on the world, after lying for months between life and death. For him, then, no French sabre had been sharpened, no French bullet fired.

The one complete atonement his conscience told him it was in his power to make had been denied him. Was a heavier one awaiting him now, as he drew near the dusky woodlands of his birthplace in the dim, grey dawn of day?

CHAPTER IV

It was eight o'clock in the morning, and already the rays of the sun had strengthened, as Boleslav left the wild tangle of the forest behind him, and beheld his home stretched out at his feet.

He had not set eyes on it for ten years. His first fierce impulse now was to shake his fist at the village which lay there so hypocritically idyllic in the calm of early morning, with its white toy cottages set in bowers of green bushes, its curls of blue-grey smoke, and opalescent slate church spire rising peacefully against the sky.

Beyond were the magnificent groups of old trees with dark, almost black foliage and yellowish trunks belonging to the Castle park, which sloped away on the eastern side of the hill. But the Castle itself, that had crowned the hill with its shining battlemented twin-towers, and had queened the landscape far and wide--where was it? Had the earth opened and swallowed the imposing structure whole? For a moment he was startled and shocked at its total disappearance. Then he remembered. How stupid it was to have forgotten! They had burnt it down, razed it to the ground.

Many and many a time he had thought of that deed of violence, which had laid waste the inheritance of his fathers, with a sort of grim satisfaction. But now, when he saw with his bodily eyes the scene of the conflagration, he felt sullen resentment rise in his heart.

"Incendiaries! Accursed incendiaries!" he cried, and once more shook his fist at the homesteads of his enemies. His enemies? Yes, in the flash of a moment it seemed clearly demonstrated that his father's enemies must be his enemies. Had he not inherited them, together with these woods and fertile valleys, with yonder smoked, blackened heap of ruins (he now noticed it for the first time) that reared itself like the mighty hand of a giant calling down the wrath of Heaven--together with that awful crime, which no one on earth hated more than he did, from which no one had suffered as he had suffered.... And though, instead of filial love, he had cherished nothing but a sensation of paralysing fear towards his father, though for years he had deliberately cut himself adrift from ties of kindred, and the performance of duties that custom and civilisation impose on those who are destined to hand down an ancient name and inherit vast estates--in spite of it all, the fact remained that it was his father's blood flowing in his veins, and he felt it at this moment coursing through them tumultuously, and rising in hot anger at the wrong that had been done his race.

A wild gleam shone in his eyes as he fumbled with his left hand for the leather case strung over his shoulder, from which obtruded the burnished knobs of a pair of cavalry pistols.

"Won't bury him!" he murmured through his clenched teeth, clasping the pistols close. "Won't bury him, indeed! We shall see!" And with a bitter, mirthless laugh, he walked resolutely down into the village.

The one long straggling street lay before him, deserted and basking in the brilliant sunshine. The cart-ruts in the rich clay soil shone as if they had been glazed; bottle-glass and rags from old besoms filled the interstices to prevent the accumulation of stones. On either side of the road stood the thatched cottages of the peasants, shaded by limes and chestnuts, some of whose leaves were even now beginning to look autumnally sere and yellow. These peasants had formerly been under the jurisdiction of the Castle, and only since the new rural laws came into force had been relieved of their service and joined the freemen.

Here and there he saw a new fence painted in glaring colours, as if the owner wished to mark off his recently acquired possession from the rest of the inhabited globe. In other respects the new régime had left everything much the same. Sunflowers and herbs bloomed in the front gardens as they had always done; damp mattresses hung out of the windows to air just as of old. Only the number of taverns had increased. Boleslav counted three, whereas once the Black Eagle had reigned supreme and met all the requirements of the place.

Nearer the church were the white houses of the free artisans, burghers as they were called, who paid to the Castle ground-rent, and therefore enjoyed the privilege of cultivating their own vegetable plots as they pleased. There were a couple of blacksmiths with the sign of a horseshoe over the entrance of their forges, two or three cobblers, a wheelwright, a basketmaker, and a----

He paused and let his eyes rest on a dilapidated tumble-down hovel, the most wretched in the whole row. A dirty green shield hung over the door, bearing the almost obliterated inscription--

"HANS HACKELBERG,

CARPENTER AND PARISH UNDERTAKER."

A coffin, also painted green, supported by pillars, loomed down on the neglected garden, and gave to those who couldn't read, the necessary information. At the sight of it an incident long forgotten occurred to Boleslav with extraordinary distinctness. He saw again a little untidy girl with great, dark, tearful eyes and a tangled cloud of black, curly hair flying about her face and shoulders in wild dishevelment. She had clung to this garden gate with one hand, while with the other she held the corner of her blue print pinafore convulsively pressed against her bosom. A pack of village hobbledehoys were pelting her with sticks and stones. He was not much taller than she was, but at his approach the little crowd made way for him, shy and awestruck. For he was the "young Junker," who had only to lift his finger, they thought, to bring down blessings or curses on their heads.

"What is going on here?" he had asked, whereupon the persecuted child had humbly advanced, and opened her pinafore just wide enough for him to get a glimpse inside.

"Beasts! They wanted to take it away from me!" she had exclaimed, lifting her wet eyes to his, blazing with indignation.

A poor unfledged sparrow, which somehow or other had fallen out of the nest, reposed in the pinafore.

"Give it to me," he had demanded, for he loved young birds; and obediently she had held out her pinafore for him to snatch it away. As beseemed a lordling, he had not said thank you, or troubled himself further about the giver.

And that was she--the girl who, it was said, had shown the French the path by the Cats' Bridge, and had lived with his father as his mistress to the last.

Why had he defended her then? Why had he prevented the pack hunting her down? One blow on the forehead from a stone might then and there have cut short her mischievous career!

He walked on. Now and then a dull, dirty face peered at him curiously through the small, dark window-panes, or a cur barked. But he passed unmolested through the village. It was unlikely enough that any one would recognise him. The parsonage came in view with its shady veranda, trim flower-beds, and nut-trees. It looked as quiet and peaceful as on that morning long ago, when, with a sigh of relief at escaping from the pastor's stern rule, he had seen it for the last time from the post-chaise, and Helene had waved him farewell with her little cambric handkerchief. With lowering brow he now took a short cut that he might avoid passing it. It seemed as if Helene must still be standing on the lawn waving her handkerchief. But what if she had been there? It would have been impossible for him to go to her. A path on his left led down to the river, which divided the Castle domain from the villagers' territory. As he turned into it he became aware of the frightful ravages the fire had made. Instead of the long line of barns and stables which had been ranged on this side of the river stood a row of ruins, falling walls and scorched beams, grown over with celandine and valerian. Beyond could be seen, through gaps in the walls, the courtyard, now a weedy, grass-grown rubbish heap, and on the summit of the hill, behind a lattice formed of the leafless branches of dead elms, a black ruined mass of fantastically jagged brickwork--all that remained of the once proud Castle.

His arms fell heavily to his sides. A sound escaped him like a sob, a sob for vengeance.

He dragged his way laboriously along the banks of the river to the drawbridge, which was the main mode of access to the island; for, since his grandfather's time, the whole of the Castle grounds had been, by means of an aqueduct, practically converted into an island. The drawbridge, at least, was still en evidence. It looked like a remnant of antiquity as it hung with its grey projecting timbers on its black, clumsy buttresses, at the foot of which the ripples broke with a gurgling sound. The rusty chains were tightened, and between terra firma and the floating edge of the bridge was a space of about three feet, which could be jumped with ease. Some one had evidently tried to draw it up, and failed in the effort.

Boleslav sprang over and passed through the stone gateway, whose nail-studded doors, half-burnt, were thrown back on their hinges. Suddenly he heard a sharp clicking sound at his feet resembling the snap of a bowstring. He stopped, and saw, to his horror, the iron semicircle of a fox-trap half-buried in the rubbish, and carefully covered with birch-broom. The long pointed teeth of the iron jaw had closed on each other in a tenacious grip. By a miracle he had escaped an accident which might have laid him up for many weeks.

Feeling the ground with his stick, he pursued his way more cautiously through the refuse and litter, amongst which he came across occasionally a disused waggon or the rotten barrel of a brandy cask held together by iron hoops. He went on, up the hill to the Castle. The path was overgrown with brambles as tall as himself, and again he came on traps, their wide open maws greedily eager to seize him by the leg. The whole place seemed strewn with them--the only signs of civilisation he had as yet encountered.

The Castle lay before him, with yawning window-frames and sundered walls, a complete ruin. Piles of fallen tiles and plaster, between which rank grass and weeds had sprung up, formed a mound round its foundations. The vestibule, with its drooping rafters, had become a perfect bower of creepers and evergreens, whose luxuriant growth seemed almost impenetrable. A white tablet hung among the leaves, on which, in his father's handwriting, were the words, "Caution to trespassers."

He shuddered at this, the first trace he had seen for six years of the man to whom he owed his existence, and whom he had now come to bury.

In a few moments he would be standing probably beside his corpse.

But how was he to find it? What resting-place could his father have found here while yet alive?

No door or unbroken window, no signs of a human habitation, were visible amidst all this fearful wreckage. He turned, and walked slowly the length of the Castle façade, past the towers which flanked the gabled roof; here over the blackened stonework the ivy had begun to grow afresh, enshrouding it in a peaceful melancholy. From this point his eye caught a vista of the park, with its giant timber and wealth of undergrowth. And then he saw a few yards off, on the grass-plot where once had stood the statue of the goddess Diana, of which nothing now was left but the shattered fragments and pedestal, a woman.... A slender, strongly-built woman, with long plaits of dark curling hair hanging down her back. Her primitive costume consisted of a red petticoat and a chemise. She was digging energetically with a heavy spade in the dark rich soil, and was apparently too engrossed to notice his approach. She set her naked foot at regular intervals, as if beating time on the hard edge of the spade, and with the slightest possible pressure drove it deep into the earth. As she dug she sang a song on two notes, a high and a low, which welled out of her full breast like the sound of a sweet-toned bell. The chemise, a coarse and roughly made garment, had slipped off her shoulders, laying bare the strong, magnificently moulded neck. When he addressed her, she drew herself erect with a sudden movement of surprise and alarm, and stood before him half naked.

She turned on him a pair of lustrous, large dark eyes. "What do you want here?" she asked, grasping the spade tighter, as if intending to use it as a weapon of defence. Then lifting her other arm she calmly raised the chemise over her shapely bosom.

"What do you want?" she repeated.

Still he did not answer. "So this is she," he was thinking, "the traitress, the courtesan, who---- Should he point his pistol at her, and drive her instantly from the island, so that the ground he trod on might at least be clean?"

Meanwhile his bearing seemed to have convinced her of the peacefulness of his intentions.

"This is no place for strangers," she went on. "Go away again at once. You are lucky not to have been caught in a wolf's trap."

She stood, drawn to her full height, and waved him off. Then gradually she became confused under his searching glance, and regarded him nervously out of the corners of her eyes. Tossing back the black tangle of hair from her sunburnt cheeks, she began to fidget with her inadequate garment, seeming conscious for the first time of her half-nude condition.

"Show me his corpse!" he asked imperatively.

She started and stared at him for a moment with astonished, questioning eyes, then threw herself weeping at his feet.

"Gnädiger Herr!" she murmured, in a voice stifled with emotion.

He felt her fingers seeking his hand, and pushed her violently from him.

"Show me his corpse!" he commanded again, "and then you may go."

She rose slowly, kicked the spade away with her foot, and led the way down to the park. As they neared some bushes she turned round and said timidly, "There's a trap here." He stepped quickly to one side, otherwise he would have walked straight into the snare. She held back the brambles of the thicket through which they were making their way, to prevent the thorns scratching his face. They came to a clearing in the wood where stood a small one-storied cottage with a tall chimney, surrounded by broken hot-house frames and lime heaps. It was the gardener's house, in which as a boy he had often played with flower-pots, seeds, and bulbs; the one solitary building the ravages of the fire had left untouched, because the incendiary had been unable to find his way to it.

Again his guide warned him. "Take care! That is dangerous," she said, pointing to a heap of earth like a mole-hill. "Whoever steps on it is a dead man," she added half to herself. He knelt down, and with his hands dug out the bomb that lay concealed in the soft earth, and hurled it with all his might far away, so that it exploded with a loud report against the trunk of a tree. She cast a shy, half-scandalised glance at him over her shoulder, for to her what he had done was an act of desecration.

Then she opened the door, and he found himself in a dark passage. The cottage had only two rooms. The one on the left of the front-door had been the gardener's dwelling-room, the other his workshop.

From the former, the door of which stood ajar, issued a powerful death odour.

He went in. A body veiled in white lay on a low bier in the middle of the close, gloomy little room.

"Leave me," he said, without looking round, and he threw back the cloth.

His father's rigid features, covered with bristles, stared up at him. The eyes had sunk far back in his head; the brows were contracted. In the hollows of his cheeks bushy black hair had sprouted, while the beard had turned partially grey. The short, thick nose had shrunk, and close to the firmly-shut lips that had not parted in death lay a deep line, denoting intense suffering, and, at the same time, defiant scorn; as Boleslav looked down on it, the line seemed to deepen still more, and at last to quiver and play round the mouth that was still for ever.

He dropped on his knees, and, with folded hands, prayed a paternoster. His tears fell fast, and rained heavily on the waxen face of the dead man.

"Your guilt is my guilt," he whispered hoarsely. "If I don't defend your memory, who else will? No one in all the world."

Then he covered up the body again with the white cloth, for flies were swarming round it. As he turned away, he observed the girl's dark head pressed against the foot of the bier. Her symmetrical neck and shoulders shone out in relief from the shadowy background.

"What are you doing here?" he demanded roughly. She crouched down, shivering, and raised her left shoulder, as if to ward off a threatened blow. Her eyes flashed a warm ray through the masses of her curly hair.

"No one has ever driven me away from him before," she murmured.

"But I drive you away," he answered with decision.

She rose and quietly vanished. He tore open a window, for he felt half suffocated, and then took a survey of the apartment. It was small and wretched enough, and was filled up without any attempt at arrangement with the most inappropriate and heterogeneous assortment of furniture, most of it evidently rescued in haste from the fire; a gold-legged table harmonised ill with rickety kitchen chairs; a peasant's canopied bed stood near gorgeous consoles of inlaid marble, and a cracked Venetian mirror hung beside a bullfinch's simple wicker cage. But nothing looked more out of its element than the life-size portrait of the beautiful Pole, his grandmother, and the original cause of all the evil that had befallen him. Her haughty, arrogant eye still pierced the distance triumphantly; the small gloved hand still grasped the flexible riding-whip. "Kneel, slave," the full proud lips seemed to say. Only the diamond pin which used to glitter in her bosom like a star was gone, for just there the colour had warped, and the grey canvas beneath was exposed to view. The once elegant and artistically carved frame representing a garland of gilded roses and cupids had suffered too, being chipped and cracked in various places, where patches of coarse orange paint had been daubed on to repair the damage.

"Probably he took every care to save that first," thought Boleslav, and had not the presence of his father's corpse restrained him, he would have pulled it down from the wall, and trampled it under foot.

A case containing arms stood in a corner. The newest and most costly of shooting weapons were ranged there, including every variety of pistol, sword, and spear. Above it was unrolled a plan of the Castle island, showing the spots where ingeniously contrived man-traps, mines, and spring-guns awaited the trespasser--roughly calculated, there were over a hundred of them.

Boleslav shuddered. Surely this unhappy man had been punished enough for his misdeeds in the life he had been compelled to lead during his last few years on earth! Caged up like a hunted wild beast, his murderous contrivances were a perpetual source of menace to himself, for to have forgotten for a moment the position of one of his death-traps must have instantly proved fatal.

When Boleslav went out at the door he stumbled over Regina, who was cowering on the threshold. She started to her feet with a low cry of pain, like the whine of a trodden-on dog. He felt a momentary thrill of compassion for her, but it vanished before he had spoken the kind words that involuntarily rose to his lips.

"What were you lying there for?" he inquired harshly.

"It's my place," she answered, always regarding him with the same humble, luminous glance.

"Indeed? It's a dog's place as a rule."

"It's mine too."

"Your name is Regina Hackelberg?"

"Yes, gnäd'ger Junker."

"It was you who led the French over the Cats' Bridge?"

"Yes, gnäd'ger Junker."

"Why did you do it?"

"Because I was told to do it."

"Who told you?"

She cast down her eyes.

"Why don't you answer?"

"Because I was forbidden to tell."

"Who forbade you; my--he?"

"Yes; the gnäd'ger Herr."

"So that's what you call him, eh?"

"Yes, gnäd'ger Junker."

"Call me, if you please, Herr, and not Junker. I am not Junker."

"Very well, gnäd'ger Herr."

"Herr, I say--simply Herr. Do you understand?"

"Yes, gnäd'ger Herr."

"Himmelkreuzdonnerwetter! Didn't I say you were to call me Herr, without any prefix?"

She trembled nervously at his oath; but when it dawned on her what he meant, a smile of pleasure illumined her face.

"I see, Herr," she said, and nodded.

"I shall expect you to tell me everything," he went on. "Do you hear?"

"The gnäd'ger Herr did not wish me to speak about it.... Not to any one."

"Did he say not to any one?"

"Yes."

He bit his lip. Why should he inquire further into the matter, when it was all as clear as daylight? This creature had been used as a tool because she was stupid, and bad enough to let herself be so used.

"How old were you at the time the French came?"

Again she cast down her eyes. "Fifteen, Herr."

Once more he felt softened towards her, but almost immediately dark suspicion stifled his pity.

"You were paid for your work?" he asked between his clenched teeth.

"Yes, Herr," she responded calmly.

He was overwhelmed with disgust.

"How much was it? Your bribe?"

"I don't know, Herr."

"What! You mean to say you did not stipulate for a certain sum beforehand?

"She seemed unable to comprehend.

"My father took it all away from me," she answered. "He said it was the wages of sin. It was a whole big handful of gold. I know that."

He looked at her in amazement.

The fine head, with its wealth of wild hair clustering on her neck, was humbly bent. She appeared not to have the slightest perception of the scorn she had aroused in him; or was she so used to it that she took his contempt as a matter of course?

"What were you doing at the Castle when the French were quartered there?"

A dark flush suffused her face, neck and bosom. He had struck some chord of memory that awakened in her a spark of shame.

"I was helping with the sewing," she stammered.

"Why did you come to the Castle?"

"My father told me I must. He said I was to go up and ask the gnäd'ger Herr if there was any sewing for me to do. I was to earn my bread somehow, he said."

"Oh, indeed!" There was a pause, then he continued: "Go and put on a jacket, Regina."

She passed her hand over her bosom and drew her linen garment tighter round her chest, till the string cut into the swelling flesh.

"Well, why don't you go?"

"I haven't got a jacket."

"What! Didn't he clothe you?"

"They tore my jacket off my back yesterday."