The Nameless Castle
Page 28
Vavel with difficulty refrained from giving voice to his overwhelming grief.
“Just see,” Marie continued in a gay tone, “how much better I am! Heretofore, when the hour came for the evening star to appear, the fever would come too, and to-day it has failed to come with the star. Joy has cured me. Don’t take your hands away from me, Ludwig—Katharina. They will—hold me—hold me—fast.”
But they did not “hold her fast.”
And why should such a being remain on this earth—a being that could do naught else but love and renounce, adoring her nation even when it persecuted her?
A dark thunder-cloud rose above the horizon out over the Hansag. The sky looked like a vaulted ceiling hung with mourning draperies. From time to time a distant flash of lightning illumined the cloud-curtain, then would be heard the rumbling of thunder, like the deep tones of a distant organ.
Under the threatening sky lay the glittering lake. Its surface of quicksilver was streaked here and there with black shadows—the track of the wind-gusts racing across it. The trees were rustling in the wind, making a sound like a distant choral.
On the shore of Lake Neusiedl stood the Volons in rank and file. They were waiting for something that was coming from the farther shore of the little cove.
Presently the glistening surface of the water was ruffled by a black object that pushed out from the shore. It was a boat. Six men were rowing, a seventh held the rudder. There was a coffin in the boat, covered with a simple pall. No ostentatious trappings ornamented the coffin; only a myrtle wreath lay on it. A woman, sat at the head of it, another at the foot—the former a lady, the latter a peasant wife.
The six men, with even and powerful strokes, sent the craft through the ripples which occasionally leaped into the boat, as if they would salute her who had so often toyed with them.
At the moment the boat touched the shore the storm burst. Vivid lightning illumined the heavy downpour of rain, and it seemed as if the black-robed forms bore the coffin to its grave amid a flood of harpstrings that reached from heaven to earth.
The two weeping women followed the coffin; at a little distance they seemed two shadows. The helmsmen of the funeral boat now stepped to the head of the grave and opened his lips to speak, but a heavy peal of thunder drowned his voice. When it had ceased he said:
“My brave comrades, you are here to pay a last honor to your patroness. There is nothing left for us to fight for. Peace has been proclaimed. The conqueror takes from you a plot of ground twenty-four hundred square miles in extent. The one lying here takes from you only six feet of earth. To you remain your tattered flag and your wounds. Return to your homes. My sword has finished its work, and will accompany the saint for whom it was drawn!”
As he spoke he broke the keen blade in twain and cast the pieces into the grave, adding impressively, “May God give us forgetfulness, and may we be forgotten!”
The Volons fired three salvos over the grave, the reverberating thunder and the flashing lightning mingling with the noise of the muskets.
When the storm had passed the moon rose in a cloudless sky. Only the waves, which had been stirred by the tempest, continued to murmur to their favorite who was sleeping peacefully in her grave on the shore.
Marie had asked to be buried on the grassy slope by the side of her old friend the Marquis d’Avoncourt, and that no other monument should mark her resting-place save the imperishable tree which turns to stone after it dies.
And what could have been graven on her tomb? A name that was not hers? A history that was not true?
Or would it have been well to carve on the marble her true life-history, that those who would not believe it might wage a lawsuit against an epitaph?
No; it was better so. No one would ever learn what had become of her.
Vavel had prayed for forgetfulness—that he might be forgotten.
His prayer was granted.
For a few years afterward tales were repeated about Sophie Botta, and some of her kinsfolk came from a distance to claim the sum of money Vavel had placed in the hands of the authorities for the young girl’s heirs. But none of the claimants could produce satisfactory proofs of kinship, and after a while Sophie Botta was forgotten by all the world, as were Count Vavel and Katharina.
The Nameless Castle as well vanished from the face of the earth, as have entire villages which once stood on the treacherous shores of Lake Neusiedl.
Gradually, imperceptibly, the castle disappeared; gradually, imperceptibly, bastion after bastion vanished, until not even the stone hand which held aloft the sword in the noble escutcheon, or the towering weathervane, could be seen above the placid waters of the lake.
Notes
1
Count de Provence, afterward Louis XVIII.
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2
A head-covering worn only by Hungarian maidens.
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3
Written by Alexander Kisfalndy, by order of the palatine. A memorable document.
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Document creation date: 08.03.2011
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