L'Arrabiata and Other Tales. Paul Heyse

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СКАЧАТЬ the old school; a diplomate of the Empire. He has seen the world in flames, and cannot forget the demoniac light by which he then saw all things, good and bad; fair and foul; high and low. Now the world is quiet, and regular enough; but sleepy, tame, and colorless. At least he thinks so. Still it is the world, and he who would rule in his generation, must make himself acquainted with his subjects. He gave me very few maxims to take away with me, when I came here; but this one, certainly with fifty variations, 'Read men more than books.'--'When I was at your age,' he used to say, 'books played a very subordinate part in the world. I have known many a clever man, who from the time he entered into society never read a line save the newest novel, or the latest war-bulletin, and never wrote a syllable, except in love-letters or dispatches. He had all the more time to act, or, if necessary, to think;--and when is it not necessary to think? But learning, book-learning! we never thought of such a thing, and yet, we knew everything, of course.--It was in the air; and where, now-a-days, you very soon get to the end of your Latin, our French took us a good way farther.'

      "So I considered that as settled, and more than once I have girded up my loins, to go and read these men, and study them. But after the first few pages, I generally found out that their titles were the most important part about them. Either I am a stupid reader; (a 'kind reader', I know I am not!), or else the great world of the present day really is a most insipid study."

      His carriage came to the door, and I went away, for I had often noticed that it embarrassed him, when any one was present while he was dressing.

      At a later hour, as I chanced to pass the house where the aristocracy of ---- was to be assembled, I saw him getting out of the carriage; we exchanged a short look with a shade of irony; and then he went slowly up the carpetted steps, and I looked after him, while I felt proud of his knightly bearing, and of the grace of his stalwart figure.

      He could be dangerous to womankind, as I had heard from several sources. They even told a story of a distinguished Englishwoman, who, after divers attempts to win him, attempts as fruitless as unequivocal, had at last gone off in rage and undisguised despair, after having wrung her parrot's neck, for screaming from the window, day and night, the name of the coy young count.

      I was not able to learn more of this, nor of any other of his adventures; he carefully avoided any conversation about women; still, nothing he ever said could have led me to assume that he thought meanly of them, or that he was suffering from any hidden wound, of which he could not bear the probing.

      Judging by the whole tenor of his conduct, I decided, that, striving as he did, at aims so serious, he found no time for trifling flirtations, and never had been touched by a deeper feeling. His mother had died very soon after the birth of her first-born son, but he would occasionally receive letters, addressed in a feminine hand, and he told me they came from an old nurse of his, who had been as a second mother to him. She was evidently very dear to him; but even of her he spoke but little; eager discussions upon his own studies, or on mine, were ever burning on his lips.

      He was several years in advance of me, and when we parted in the autumn, he went to pass his diplomatic examination at Berlin. We bid each other a very affectionate farewell, without much hope of continuous intercourse;--we knew that what we had hitherto exchanged, no correspondence could have replaced. But we were young, and we parted in the confident hope that life and its chances must, in some way or other, bring us together again.

      For many a long year, I heard nothing of him but his name; the last I learned was from a newspaper, which stated that Count Ernest ---- had been appointed secretary of Legation at Stockholm. Again a long time elapsed, without the smallest tidings of him, and I confess that his image had considerably faded in my memory, when it chanced, that, on a pedestrian tour, I suddenly lit upon his name, printed upon a road-post that pointed to a deep lane, all overgrown with brushwood, cutting at right angles the road which I had taken. I stopped, and, as if by a magician's wand, the country round me seemed metamorphosed.

      Again the Rhine was rolling at my feet, and again I saw his straight lithe figure, as he walked along, holding his hat in his hand, and letting the fresh breeze from the current play among his luxuriant hair of reddish gold; and those fine eyes of his, so full of thought, gazing over the river towards the mountains, until my voice would rouse him from his musings. This visionary play of memory lasted but a moment, and then an incontrollable desire came over me to look upon that face once more, and abundantly to make up for what I had lost so long.

      It was early in the afternoon; I hoped that I should not mistake the road, and never doubted but that at this autumn season, I should find my friend at home; he was an eager sportsman, and had spoken far oftener of the trees, than of the persons he had known from childhood.

      I may have followed this ravine for about an hour, when it suddenly occurred to me as strange, that the road should be so neglected and overgrown; it was evident that no sort of carriage could possibly have passed this way for years. The foliage of past autumns lay mouldering in deep crevices;--here and there, a fragment of rock, or rotten branch, had been hurled from the edge by the winter storms; only in the firmest parts of the ground, were occasional tracks of human passage. I sent my doubts to sleep, with the supposition, that long before this, some other and more level road, must have been made between the castle and the plain. And yet, on entering the ravine, I had certainly ascertained that no nearer way was possible, from the little manufacturing town I had left behind. At the summit of the pass, where half a dozen neglected paths diverged, I stopped, in real perplexity. I climbed up a wide armed beech-tree, and looked all round me.

      A deep circular hollow lay before me, almost like a lake, filled with lovely bright green waves of densest foliage. It was a vast forest of old beech-trees. Just in the centre rose the turrets of the castle, over which the wilderness seemed to close.

      It was like a fairy tale, to see the spires and weather-cocks glittering in the bright autumn sun; as in those stories of sunken castles, which shew their pinnacles on some clear day, peeping from the hidden depths of water. There was not a sound of human life; the woodpecker tapped monotonously against the trees;--a careless deer ran past me, with more surprise than terror;--while swarms of audacious squirrels, among the branches, were aiming at the intruder, with the empty husks of beechnuts.

      I was on the point of giving it up, when, with a sharper look at the enchanted castle, I saw a thin thread of smoke, to inform me that it could not exclusively be harbouring hobgoblins.

      That the owner had not been here for ages, might, with some degree of certainty, be surmised; but some sort of castellan or game-keeper might be there, and from him, I hoped to hear some tidings of my friend and his welfare, and at least to spend a night in a home which he had loved with all his heart.

      I took one of these downward paths at a venture, and soon plunged into the strangest, darkest night of wood that ever stirred above a wanderer's head.

      And in the night come dreams;--and these soon wove a spell about me, and I quite forgot whence I had come, and whither I was going, and blindly left my legs to guide me, as they stepped uniformly on, until they came to an involuntary halt, at a broad stream, where not a trace of path could be discerned; the trees stood thick, interlacing their branches with the brushwood, and forming an impenetrable barrier. I immediately turned back, and walked steadily upwards, until a path to the right again seduced me; then I tried another downwards, went astray again, and so went wandering on for hours, making the whole round of the valley, without catching a single glimpse of the castle peeping through the thickets. The moon was already shining upon the tree tops, and I made up my mind to pass the night in the airiest of lodgings.

      Suddenly, when I least expected it, the brushwood opened, and there, like an island in the midst of a lake of verdure, the old grey building stood square before me, with countless glassless windows, but without one trace of human habitation. A broad stone-bridge across the dried-up moat, reached СКАЧАТЬ