‘Very. And if you could spare the time—’ Berbel looked at Greif.
‘Very well,’ said the latter. ‘I have plenty to do, dear. Finish your business with Berbel and meet me on the tower — there is a man waiting for me, I believe.’
Thereupon Greif went on his way down the broad corridor, leaving Hilda and Berbel to their own devices.
‘What is it?’ asked Hilda, who wanted to lose no time in rejoining her husband.
‘It is a very serious affair, and concerns the baron,’ answered Berbel. ‘Perhaps it would be better if you would come to my room.’
Hilda followed her, wondering what could have happened, and not without some presentiment of evil. When they had reached their destination Berbel carefully bolted the door and turned to her mistress. It was a small bright room, vaulted and whitewashed, simply but comfortably furnished. Hilda sat down and looked up at Berbel’s face, somewhat anxiously.
‘It is nothing bad,’ said Berbel. ‘But it will give pain to the baron, and so I consulted you. I have found a letter written to him by Herr von Greifenstein on the night he died. No one but you can give it to him.’
Hilda started slightly. Anything which recalled the fearful tragedy was necessarily painful and disturbing to the peace of her unclouded happiness.
‘A letter?’ she repeated in a low voice. ‘Where did you find it? They searched everywhere for months. Are you quite sure?’
‘They might have searched for ever, but for the merest accident,’ answered Berbel, beginning to undo her bundle. ‘This,’ she added, unfolding the velvet garment— ‘this is the coat Herr von Greifenstein wore when he shot himself.’
Hilda gazed silently at the thing during several seconds, and shuddered at the thoughts it recalled, though she was by no means persuaded that Berbel was not mistaken.
‘How do you know it is?’ she asked at last.
‘It was stolen on that night by one of those city servants who were always at Greifenstein. Your mother did not notice it. The man took it to a Jew, who kept it a year and then hung it up for sale. A few days ago Wastei bought it to wear at the christening.’ ‘But how did he know?’ ‘He guessed it, and found these marks.’
Berbel showed the collar of the coat to Hilda, putting her finger on each spot in succession.
‘It looks like rust,’ said Hilda.
‘It is the blood of Herr von Greifenstein,’ answered Berbel solemnly. ‘The ball went in just below the right ear, as I have heard your mother say more than once.’
‘How horrible!’ exclaimed Hilda, drawing back, though her eyes remained riveted on the rusty marks.
‘It is not gay,’ said Berbel grimly. ‘Now look here. Do you see the pocket? Yes. Well, do you see that the lining is torn just above it? Good. Herr von Greifenstein wrote his letter and slipped it into his pocket, because he was thinking of other things at that moment, and paid no attention to what he did, which was natural enough, poor gentleman. But instead of putting it into the pocket, he happened to slip it through the slit, so that it fell down between the coat and the lining. Do you see?’
‘Yes — and then?’
‘And then he pulled the trigger of his pistol and died. The letter was hidden in the coat, the coat was stolen, taken to the Jew’s and sold to Wastei eighteen months later, with the letter still in it. And Wastei brought me the letter yesterday, and the coat to-day. That is the whole history.’
‘Where is it — the letter?’ asked Hilda in an anxious tone.
Berbel unlocked her little deal chest and withdrew the precious document, which she put into Hilda’s hand. Hilda turned it over and over, and looked from it to the coat, and back again to the sealed envelope, reading the address again and again.
‘It is a strange story,’ she said at last. ‘But I do not see that there can be any doubt. O Berbel, Berbel! What do you think there is written inside this little bit of paper?’
‘A few words to say good-bye to his son, I suppose,’ the woman answered.
‘If it were only that—’ Hilda did not finish the sentence, but her face grew slowly pale and she stared vacantly out of the window, while the hand that held the letter rested on her knee.
‘I do not see that it can be anything else,’ said Berbel quietly. ‘It cannot be a will, for they found everything about the property. What could the poor gentleman say except “Good-bye,” and “God bless you”? It seems very simple to me. Of course I knew that it would make the baron very sad to read it, and so I came to you, because I knew you could find just the right moment to give it to him, and just the right words to say, and it seemed wrong in me to keep it even a day. At first, I thought I ought to put it away and wait a year or two, until he had quite forgotten the first shock — but then—’
‘Thank heaven you did not!’ exclaimed Hilda.
‘Well, I am glad I have pleased you,’ observed Berbel in her sharp, good-natured way.
‘Pleased? Oh, anything would have pleased me better than this thing! It is dreadful, after all this time has passed—’
‘But, after all,’ suggested Berbel, ‘it is only the affair of a day or two, and the baron will be very glad, afterwards, to feel that his father had not forgotten him.’
‘You do not understand,’ answered Hilda with increasing anxiety. ‘We never knew why they killed themselves — it is an awful secret, and the explanation is in this letter.’
‘You never knew!’ cried Berbel in great astonishment. It had not entered her comprehension that the real facts could be unknown, though they had never been communicated to herself.
‘No — neither I nor my husband, and I had hoped that as all has turned out happily we might never know. It would have been far better, far better!’
‘Yes, far better,’ echoed Berbel, whose simple calculations had been upset by the news, and who began to wish that the coat had fallen into other hands.
Hilda sat quite still, thinking what she should do. The situation was painful from its very simplicity, for it was assuredly her duty to go to her husband and give him the letter, telling him the whole truth at once. He had a right to receive the message from his dead father without a moment’s delay, and she knew it, though she hesitated at the thought of what might follow. Her beautiful young face was pale with anxiety, and her bright eyes were veiled by sad thoughts. Poor Berbel was terribly distressed at the result of her discovery and tried to imagine some means of improving the situation.
‘If you would let me,’ she said, at last, ‘I would take the letter to the baron and explain — if it would hurt you—’
‘You? I?’ cried Hilda almost fiercely. ‘It is of him I am thinking, and of what he will suffer. What does it matter for me? It is my duty, and I must do it — am I his wife only when the sun shines and we are happy? Ah, Berbel, you should know better than that!’
‘I only wanted to spare you,’ said Berbel humbly.
Hilda looked up quickly and then took the old servant’s hand kindly in hers.
‘I know,’ she said softly. ‘But you must think first of him, always — if you love me. Berbel — are you perfectly sure that all this is true and real, that no wicked person is trying to do us some harm?’
‘I am as sure as I can be — Wastei said I might ask the Jew, if I pleased.’
‘It is true — it is Wastei. Unless he is mistaken himself there can be no doubt, then. But it is all so strange!’
It was stranger still, perhaps, that Wastei’s name should be enough to dispel in Hilda’s mind all doubts as to the truth of the story, and yet she would have believed the wild, kind-hearted free-shot sooner than many a respectable member of society.
‘Put away the coat, Berbel,’ she said after a pause. ‘He will not need to see it when he has read the letter, and it would hurt him, as it hurts me.’
‘Shall I give it back to Wastei?’ inquired Berbel, folding it up.
‘No, oh no! Put it away carefully where it will be safe, but where no one will ever see it again.’
&
nbsp; ‘Wastei gave twenty marks for it,’ observed Berbel. ‘It is not fair that he should lose his money.’ She could not help speaking a good word for her old friend.
‘Give him forty to buy a new one. He has been honest, very honest.’ Hilda sighed, thinking, perhaps, of all the pain that might have been spared, if Wastei had put the letter into the fire, instead of giving it to Berbel.
The good woman carefully folded the coat and hid it away in the recesses of a huge press that filled the end of the room. Then she rolled up the coloured handkerchief and put it into her pocket.
‘It is Wastei’s,’ she said, as her mistress watched her.
The disappearance of the coat recalled to Hilda the duty of acting immediately, and she rose from her seat with a heavy heart. As she was about to leave the room a thought crossed her mind, and she stopped.
‘Berbel,’ she said, ‘my mother must never know that this has been found, or at least, you must never speak of it to her or to any one, and you must tell Wastei to hold his tongue. She has had sorrow enough in her life, and we need not add any more, now that she is so happy.’
‘Good,’ answered Berbel. ‘I will not talk about it, and as for Wastei, I would trust him with anything.’
Hilda slipped the fatal letter into the bosom of her frock and went in search of her husband.
CHAPTER XXVIII
GREIF HAD NOT found the man who was supposed to be waiting for him, and he himself had sat down to wait for Hilda on the shady side of the great tower. The air was warm and fragrant, even at that height, with the odour of the pines, and the sun was not yet high enough to make it unpleasantly hot. Through the bright, sunlit distance Greif could see many a familiar landmark of the forest, and as he sat there doing nothing, he amused himself half unconsciously with counting the points in the surrounding landscape which he had visited, and those he had never reached, and the number of the former greatly exceeded that of the rest. It was a very peaceful scene, and Greif breathed in the smooth refreshing air with delight, while his eyes wandered lazily up and down the heights and along the feathery green crests of the forest’s waves. For all the firs and pines were still tipped with the green of their new-grown shoots, though the autumn winds and the winter snows would soon stain the newcomers as black as the old boughs on which they grew. The time is short indeed, during which the Black Forest is not black, but takes a softer hue, and a warmer light. The autumn comes early, the spring comes late, there is but little summer, and the winter has it all to himself during the rest of the time. But though the summer days be few, they are of exquisite beauty, such as are rarely seen elsewhere in Europe. Greif knew, as he sat by his tower, that they were nearly over, and he was the more grateful for the delight of the soft sunshine, of the green treetops, of the fragrance of the forest coming up to his nostrils over the grey ramparts, of the short whistle of the shooting swallows, that seemed to spring up like the spray of a fountain out of the abyss beneath, and after circling the highest pinnacle of the castle fell again with lightning speed into the cool depths below. Greif listened to the rushing noise of their wings, and to their short, clear cry, and he wished that Hilda were beside him, to help him to enjoy the more what already gave him such keen pleasure. To him, indeed, Sigmundskron still had the charm of novelty. Its situation on a high and projecting crag was very different from that of Greifenstein, which latter was but the three-cornered end of a precipitous promontory, cut off from the forest by its single enormous bulwark. Sigmundskron commanded a view of many miles over the landscape below, while Greifenstein lay much lower, and a man standing on the topmost rampart could but just look over the level sea of the treetops to the higher hills in the distance beyond.
Greif was very happy. It seemed to him as though all the possible unhappiness of his life had concentrated itself into a very short time, not extending over more than a few days, from the moment when he had received news of the catastrophe in the hall at the banquet at Schwarzburg, to that in which the delirium of his fever had overtaken him. The rest had been but little troubled by the tragedy which had left him alone in the world. Nothing cuts us off from the past more effectually than a dangerous illness in which we are for the most part unconscious. Greif had felt, when he recovered, that he was completely separated from the former time, and the sensation had itself contributed to his recovery, by deadening the sense of pain that had been with him so constantly before he broke down altogether. Rex had not been ill, and to him the past did not seem so distant; moreover he knew what Greif did not know, and had greater cause for sadness. Greif was happy, and he knew it. It appeared impossible, so far as he could see, that anything should arise out of the gloom of Greifenstein to trouble his serenity in Sigmundskron. Every effort had been made by him and Rex together to discover some clue to the mystery, which for Rex was no mystery any longer, and nothing had been found which could cast the smallest light upon what had happened. Rex suggested the possibility of a sudden madness having overtaken one or more of the party, and Greif was so easily satisfied, and so glad to bury the past, that he accepted the idea without defining it. He reflected, indeed, that under no imaginable circumstances could his present be touched or disturbed by the true explanation of the tragedy, should it ever be found, and he was content to let the tide of years flow silently over the place those terrible deeds held in his own life.
It is no wonder that he was happy now, since all his hopes were attained and all his desires satisfied. Being also of a faithful and persistent nature, his satisfaction was solid and permanent. Apart from the one dark spot which was so rapidly fading into the dim distance, he had no regrets; no dreams of what might have been sent rays of false light through his present, no images of disappointed desires haunted him in the silent night, no shadows of a lost joy, still madly anticipated in the distorted anachronisms of a wounded heart, came between him and Hilda’s glorious beauty. That misery of humanity was unknown to him, in which the soul still looks forward with a beating, throbbing hope to what the memory knows is buried in the depth and dust of twenty years. All was real, present, glorious, happy and complete. If any one had asked him what he most dreaded, he would have said that he dreaded death alone, death for Hilda, death for the sturdy little child that was to bear the name now his, death for himself, though for himself the fear was less than for the other two. That anything but death could bring back those days and nights of agony through which he had once passed, he did not and he could not believe. Even as he sat beneath the shadow of the tower on that summer’s morning he asked himself the question, and the answer was the same as ever. Why, indeed, should he not be left in peace? Why should he even expect the possibility of evil? Evil might come, assuredly, but it must come in some sudden, violent and unexpected shape out of the present, by accident, by illness, by death. The terrors of the past were with the past, and Greif was too strong, and young, and happy to expect misfortune in the present. He sat there, peacefully gazing at the green feathers of the firs and at the circling swallows, and almost laughing to scorn the possibility of a pain that was already near him, that was with him now, as Hilda’s graceful figure emerged from the door of the tower and stood beside him.
Her face was still a little pale, but she looked almost supernaturally beautiful in her gravity. It is possible that if she had been transported into the midst of the world, of that company of half-morbid, half-enthusiastic beings which we define commonly as society, she might not have pleased those tired critics altogether as well as one of themselves, though she would assuredly have surprised them exceedingly, and perhaps when she began to grow old they would remember that they had never seen anything like her. But here, in her natural surroundings, she was magnificent. She was dressed all in white, and the delicate shades of her colouring did not suffer by the contrast, but seemed more perfect and harmonious, blended as all the tints were by the all-pervading light of the clear mountain air in the thin, vapoury blue shadows of the old tower. And the rough grey stone was a harmonious background for
her beauty and its rugged surface showed more completely the exquisite outlines of her face and figure. Greif saw her beside him, and could not repress his admiration.
‘Hilda — how beautiful you are!’ he exclaimed, springing to his feet and putting his arms about her.
It seemed as though her perfection had suddenly become visible out of the dream of his cloudless happiness. She smiled faintly as she kissed him, so faintly that he was surprised and drew back, looking into her face.
‘Has anything happened, sweetheart?’ he asked anxiously. ‘Is anything the matter? You are pale, darling, tell me—’
‘Something has happened, Greif, and I will tell you,’ she said, sitting down upon the long stone seat that ran round the base of the tower, and touching the spot beside her with the palm of her hand, as though bidding him do likewise.
His face grew grave as he took his place at her side, still looking into her eyes.
‘It is something that pains you, dear — is it not?’ he asked tenderly.
‘Because it will pain you,’ she answered. ‘You must listen to my story patiently, Greif, for it is not easy to tell, and it is not easy to hear. But I will do my best, for it is best to tell it all quite plainly from beginning to end, is it not?’
‘Yes,’ answered Greif nervously. ‘Please tell me all quite frankly.’
‘It is about your father, Greif — about all that happened on that dreadful night at Greifenstein. Yes, darling, I will try and be quick. You know when — after they were dead, my mother went over, and did what she could until you came. You know, too, that the house was full of servants, whom your father was always changing — you sent them all away last year. Well, one of those wretches stole — had the heart to steal at that fearful time — a coat — one that belonged to your father — indeed—’ she hesitated.
‘And you have found it,’ asked Greif, whose face relaxed suddenly. He thought it was but a common theft, and was immensely relieved.
Complete Works of F Marion Crawford Page 361