In the meantime the Elector of Saxony, a prey to his dismal thoughts, had summoned two astrologers, Oldenholm and Olearius, who enjoyed a high reputation in Saxony at that time, and consulted them about the contents of the mysterious piece of paper that was of such importance to himself and to all his descendants. And since the two men, after a profound investigation lasting for several days in the tower of the palace at Dresden, could not agree whether the prophecy referred to later centuries or to the present, alluding perhaps to the kingdom of Poland with which relations were still very hostile, their learned dispute quite failed to dispel the unhappy prince’s uneasiness, indeed his despair, but rather increased and intensified it until he found it quite unendurable. And now in addition the Chamberlain sent word to his wife, who was about to follow him to Berlin, to break the news diplomatically to the Elector before she left that his attempt to get possession of the piece of paper held by Kohlhaas, with the help of an old woman who had not shown her face since, had failed, and that consequently their hopes of obtaining it were now very slender; for the sentence of death passed on the horse-dealer had now been signed by the Elector of Brandenburg, after he had meticulously scrutinized all the documents in the case, and the date of execution had already been fixed for the day following Palm Sunday. At this news the Elector of Saxony, consumed by anguish and regrets, shut himself up in his chamber like a lost soul; weary of life, he refused all food for two days, then on the third suddenly vanished from Dresden, after sending a brief message to the government that he was going to hunt with the Prince of Dessau. Where he really went and whether he travelled to Dessau we must leave in doubt, as the chronicles we have compared in order to compile this report are on this point strangely contradictory and incompatible. What is certain is that the Prince of Dessau was lying ill at this time in Brunswick at his uncle Duke Heinrich’s house, quite unfit to go hunting, and that Kunz the Chamberlain’s wife, the lady Heloise, arrived to stay with her husband in Berlin on the evening of the following day, accompanied by a certain Count von Königstein whom she introduced as her cousin.
Meanwhile the sentence of death was read out to Kohlhaas on the Elector of Brandenburg’s orders, his chains were struck off and the documents taken from him in Dresden concerning his property and financial affairs were returned to him; and when the lawyer assigned to him by the High Court asked him how he wished to dispose of what he owned after his death, he drew up with a notary’s assistance a will in favour of his children and appointed his trusty friend, the magistrate at Kohlhaasenbrück, as their guardian. His last days were accordingly spent in a peace and contentment which nothing could match; for soon after this, by special Electoral decree, the prison in which he was kept had also been opened and free access granted to all the many friends he possessed in the city. Indeed he even had the satisfaction of seeing the theologian Jakob Freising enter his prison as an emissary of Dr Luther, bringing him a letter in the latter’s own hand – without doubt a very remarkable communication, all trace of which, however, has been lost; and from this minister, in the presence of two Brandenburg deacons who assisted, he received the sacrament of holy communion. And so the fateful Monday after Palm Sunday arrived, the day on which Kohlhaas was to make atonement to the world for his rash attempt to wrest justice from the world with his own hands; the whole city was astir, for the people even now had not abandoned hope of seeing him reprieved. He was just passing out of the gate of his prison under strong escort, carrying his two little sons (for he had expressly requested this favour at the bar of the court) and with the theologian Jakob Freising conducting him, while a mournful crowd of his friends shook hands with him in farewell, when the castellan of the Electoral palace pushed his way through to him with a distraught face and gave him a note which, he said, an old woman had handed in for him. Looking in astonishment at the man, whom he hardly knew, Kohlhaas opened the note, the fastening of which was impressed with a seal that immediately reminded him of the gypsy-woman. But to his indescribable astonishment he read the following message: ‘Kohlhaas, the Elector of Saxony is in Berlin; he has gone ahead of you already to the place of execution and you may recognize him, if you care to, by a hat with blue and white plumes. I need not tell you the purpose that has brought him here: as soon as you are buried he intends to have the locket dug up and the paper inside it opened. – Your Elizabeth.’ Utterly dumbfounded, Kohlhaas turned to the castellan and asked him whether he knew the strange woman who had handed him this message. But just as the castellan was answering: ‘Kohlhaas, the woman…’, only to falter strangely in mid-speech, the horse-dealer was swept along in the procession which moved off again at that very moment, and could not catch what the man, who seemed to be trembling in every limb, was saying.
When he reached the place of execution, he found the Elector of Brandenburg with his retinue, including the High Chancellor Heinrich von Geusau, waiting on horseback surrounded by an immense crowd; on his right stood the Imperial Attorney, Franz Müller, with a copy of the death sentence in his hand; on his left, holding the Dresden High Court’s verdict, was his own lawyer Dr Anton Zäuner; and in the middle of the semicircle which the crowd completed stood a herald with a bundle of possessions and the pair of black horses, now shining with health and pawing the ground with their hooves. For the High Chancellor von Geusau had won the case which he had brought in Dresden in his sovereign’s name, and judgement had been given against Junker Wenzel von Tronka, point by point, without the least reservation; the horses, when they had been made honourable again by the waving of a flag over their heads and removed from the care of the knacker, had been fattened by the Junker’s men and then handed over to the prosecuting attorney in the market square of Dresden, in the presence of a commission especially appointed to witness this fact. Accordingly, when Kohlhaas and his escort had come up the hill at the place of execution and stood before him, the Elector said: ‘Well, Kohlhaas, the day has come on which justice will be done to you! Look: I here deliver to you everything of which you were deprived by force at Tronka Castle and which I, as your sovereign, was in duty bound to recover for you: your pair of blacks, the neckcloth, the imperial florins, the bundle of washing – everything, including the money for the medical treatment of your groom Herse who died at Mühlberg. Are you satisfied with me?’ Kohlhaas took the court’s verdict which was passed to him at a sign from the High Chancellor, and setting down beside him the two children he had been carrying, he read it through, his eyes wide and sparkling with triumph: then when he also found a clause condemning Junker Wenzel to two years’ imprisonment, he knelt down at a distance before the Elector with his hands crossed over his breast, completely overwhelmed with emotion. Rising again and putting his hand to his bosom, he joyfully assured the High Chancellor that his dearest wish on earth had been fulfilled; then he stepped up to the horses, examined them, patted their plump necks, returned to the Chancellor and cheerfully declared that he bequeathed them to his two sons Heinrich and Leopold. The Chancellor Heinrich von Geusau looked kindly down at him from his horse, promised in the name of the Elector that his last wishes would be held sacred, and invited him to decide at his discretion on the disposal of the other items of property in the bundle. At this Kohlhaas, who had noticed Herse’s aged mother in the crowd, called her over and handed her the things, saying: ‘There, my good woman, these belong to you!’ He also gave her the sum that had been added as his own damages to the money in the bundle, as a gift that would comfort and provide for her in her old age.
The Elector then called out: ‘So, Kohlhaas the horse-dealer, you have thus been given satisfaction; prepare now to make satisfaction in your turn to His Imperial Majesty, whose representative stands here, for your violation of His Majesty’s public peace!’ Taking off his hat and throwing it to the ground, Kohlhaas said that he was prepared; after raising his children once more in his arms and embracing them, he handed them over to the magistrate from Kohlhaasenbrück and as the latter led them away from the scene with silent tears,
he walked over to the block. He was just untying his neck-cloth and opening his tunic when he cast a quick glance round the circle of onlookers and caught sight, only a short distance away, of a figure he knew well: a man standing between two noblemen whose bodies half concealed him, and wearing a hat with blue and white plumes. With a sudden movement that caught his guards unawares, Kohlhaas strode up close to him, took the locket from round his neck, took out the piece of paper, unsealed it and read it; then, fixing his gaze steadily on the man with the blue and white plumes who was already beginning to harbour sweet hopes, he stuck it in his mouth and swallowed it. At this sight the man with the blue and white plumes swooned and collapsed in convulsions. But as his companions, in consternation, stooped over him and raised him from the ground, Kohlhaas turned back to the scaffold where his head fell beneath the executioner’s axe. Here the story of Kohlhaas ends. Amid general lamentation from the public his corpse was laid in a coffin, and as the bearers lifted it to take him for decent burial in the cemetery on the outskirts of the city, the Elector sent for the dead man’s sons and, declaring to the High Chancellor that they were to be educated in his school for pages, dubbed them knights forth-with. Soon after this the Elector of Saxony returned to Dresden physically and mentally a broken man, and for the sequel we refer our readers to history. But in Mecklenburg some hale and hearty descendants of Kohlhaas were still living in the century before this.
The Beggarwoman of Locarno
IN the foothills of the Alps, near Locarno in northern Italy, there used to stand an old castle belonging to an Italian marquis, which can now, when one comes from the direction of the St Gotthard Pass, be seen lying in ruins; a castle with high-ceilinged spacious rooms, in one of which the mistress of the house one day, having taken pity on an old sick woman who had turned up at the door begging, had allowed her to lie down on the floor on some straw they put there for her. The marquis, by chance, on his return from hunting, entered this room to place his gun there as usual, and angrily ordered the woman to get up from the corner in which she was lying and remove herself to behind the stove. As she rose, the woman’s crutch slipped on the polished floor and she fell, dangerously injuring the lower part of her back; as a result, although she did manage with indescribable difficulty to get to her feet and to cross the room from one side to the other in the direction indicated, she collapsed moaning and gasping behind the stove and expired.
Several years later, when the marquis found himself in straitened financial circumstances owing to war and a series of bad harvests, he was visited by a Florentine knight, who wished to buy the castle from him because of its fine position. The marquis, who was eager to effect this transaction, told his wife to accommodate their guest in the above-mentioned room, which was standing empty and was very beautifully and sumptuously furnished. But in the middle of the night, to the consternation of the husband and wife, the gentleman came downstairs to them pale and distraught, assuring them on his solemn word that the room was haunted: for something that had been invisible to the eye had risen to its feet in the corner with a noise as if it had been lying on straw, and had then with audible steps, slowly and feebly, crossed the room from one side to the other and collapsed, moaning and gasping, behind the stove.
The marquis, filled with an alarm for which he himself could not account, dismissed his guest’s fears with feigned laughter, and declared that to calm them he would at once get up and spend the remaining hours of darkness with him in his room, but the knight begged to be permitted to remain in the marquis’s bedroom in an armchair, and when morning came he called for his carriage, took his leave, and departed.
This incident caused an extraordinary stir and, to the marquis’s extreme vexation, deterred a number of purchasers; consequently, when his own servants began to repeat the strange and inexplicable rumour that a ghost was walking at midnight in that particular room, he resolved to take decisive steps to refute this report, by investigating the matter himself on the following night. Accordingly, when evening fell, he had his bed set up in the room in question and, without going to sleep, awaited midnight. But to his horror he did in fact, on the stroke of the witching hour, hear the inexplicable sounds: sounds as of someone rising from a bed of rustling straw, and crossing the room from one side to the other to collapse in moaning death-agony behind the stove. When he came down next morning the marquise asked him how his investigation had gone, whereupon he looked about him apprehensively and uncertainly, bolted the door, and assured her that the reports about the haunting were true. At this she was more terrified than ever before in her life, and begged him not to let the matter become generally known until he had once again, in cold blood, and in her presence, put it to the test. But sure enough, on the following night, both they and a loyal servant, whom they had asked to accompany them, heard the very same inexplicable, ghostly sounds; and it was only because of their urgent desire to get rid of the castle at all costs that they were able in their servant’s presence to conceal the dread that seized them and to attribute the occurrence to some trivial and fortuitous cause which would no doubt come to light. When on the third evening the couple, determined to get to the bottom of the matter, again went upstairs with beating hearts to the guest-room, it chanced that the house dog, which had been unchained, met them at the door; whereupon, without any explicit discussion of why they did so, but perhaps instinctively desiring the company of some third living creature, they took the dog with them into the room. At about eleven o’clock they each sat down on a bed, two candles burning on the table, the marquise fully dressed, the marquis with a rapier and pistols, which he had taken out of the cupboard, laid in readiness beside him; and while they sat there trying as best they could to entertain each other with conversation, the dog lay down in the middle of the room with its head on its paws and went to sleep. Presently, at exactly midnight, the terrible sounds were to be heard again: someone visible to no human eye, someone on crutches rising and standing up in the corner of the room, the rustling of the straw, the tap, tap, of the advancing steps – and at the very first of these the dog, waking and starting to its feet with ears erect, began growling and barking exactly as if some person were walking towards it, and retreated backwards in the direction of the stove. At this sight the marquise, her hair standing on end, rushed from the room; and while her husband, snatching up his sword, shouted ‘Who’s there?’, and on getting no answer lunged like a madman in all directions through the empty air, she called for her carriage, resolving to drive off at once to the town; but even before she had packed a few belongings together and gone clattering through the gate, she saw the whole castle burst into flames around her. The marquis, in a frenzy of horror, had seized a candle and, the house being panelled with wood throughout, had set fire to it at all four corners, weary of his life. In vain she sent in servants to rescue the unfortunate man; he had already perished miserably, and to this day his white bones, gathered together by the country people, still lie in that corner of the room in which he had ordered the beggarwoman of Locarno to rise from her bed.
St Cecilia
or
The Power of Music
(A legend)
TOWARDS the end of the sixteenth century, when iconoclasm was raging in the Netherlands, three brothers, young students from Wittenberg, met a fourth brother, who was a preacher in Antwerp, in the city of Aachen. Their purpose there was to claim an inheritance left to them by an elderly uncle whom none of them had known, and as they had no one in the place to turn to they took lodging at an inn. After a few days during which they had listened to the preacher’s tales of the remarkable events in the Netherlands, it happened that the nuns of the convent of St Cecilia, which at that time stood just outside the gates of Aachen, were due to celebrate the Feast of Corpus Christi; and in consequence the four brothers, inflamed by misguided enthusiasm, youth, and the example of the Dutch Protestants, decided to provide this city, too, with the spectacle of an iconoclastic riot. The preacher, who had already more than on
ce been the ringleader in similar enterprises, took steps on the previous evening to collect together a number of young men devoted to the new doctrine, students and the sons of merchants, and they spent the night in the inn wining and dining and cursing popery; then, when day dawned over the city’s battlements, they provided themselves with axes and all kinds of instruments of destruction in order to set about their wanton task. They gleefully agreed on a signal at which they would begin to smash the windows, which were of stained glass depicting biblical scenes; and certain that they would have a large following among the people, they set out towards the cathedral when the bells began to ring, determined to leave not one stone standing on another. The Abbess, who at daybreak had already been warned by a friend of the imminent danger, vainly sent repeated messages to the Imperial officer commanding the city, requesting a guard to protect the convent; the officer, who was himself an enemy of popery and as such, covertly at least, an adherent of the new doctrine, found a politic pretext for refusing her the desired protection, on the grounds that it was all a figment of her imagination and her convent was not threatened in the slightest. In the meantime the hour of the feast approached and the nuns, with much fear and prayer and despondent apprehension of what would happen, prepared to celebrate Mass. They had no one to protect them but a seventy-year-old convent administrator, who stationed himself with a few armed servants at the entrance to the church. In convents, as is well known, the sisters are practised players of all kinds of instruments and perform their music themselves, often with a precision, intelligence and depth of feeling which (perhaps on account of the feminine nature of that mysterious art) are not to be found in male orchestras. Now it happened, and this made the crisis all the more acute, that the nun who normally conducted the orchestra, Sister Antonia, had fallen violently ill of a nervous fever a few days before; consequently the convent was in the most painful embarrassment not only on account of the four impious brothers, who were already to be seen standing muffled up in cloaks among the columns of the church, but also because of the problem of finding a suitable piece of music to perform. The Abbess had on the previous evening ordered the performance of an extremely old Italian setting of the Mass by an unknown master which the orchestra had already played several times with most impressive effect, for this composition had a special sanctity and splendour; and now, more than ever determined to adhere to this choice, she sent once more to Sister Antonia to inquire how she was. But the nun who took her message returned with the news that Sister Antonia was lying in a state of complete unconsciousness, and that there was absolutely no question of her being able to conduct the piece of music proposed. In the meantime some ugly scenes had already taken place in the cathedral, where gradually more than a hundred miscreants had gathered, of all ages and of high and low estate, armed with axes and crowbars: the armed servants posted at the entrance had been subjected to ribald mockery, and the rioters had not scrupled to shout the most impudent and shameless insults at the sisters, one or other of whom from time to time entered the nave or transepts on some pious business; so much so that the administrator came to the sacristy and implored the Abbess on his knees to cancel the celebration and take refuge with the city commandant. But the Abbess resolutely insisted that this festival, ordained for the glory of the Most High God, must take place; she reminded the administrator of his duty to defend with life and limb the service and the solemn procession to be held in the cathedral; and as the bell was already tolling she ordered the nuns, who were standing round her trembling with fear, to select any oratorio they pleased, no matter what its quality, and begin the performance of it at once.
The Marquise of O and Other Stories Page 22