Since she had come thus far, she would inquire after Johann Leopold's protégé. Greeted and accompanied by the barking dogs, she was going towards the door, when close by the house a girl, very poorly clad, with a shawl about her head and shoulders, came out of the thicket. The slender figure stooped low as it passed the windows, softly lifted the latch of the house-door, and went in.
Johanna followed her. She turned to the door of the room opposite the sitting-room, and laid a little, blue, half-frozen hand upon the latch. "Jakob!" she whispered, as she tried to open it gently. But on the instant the door of the sitting room opened, and the forester's wife in a black gown and a cap with white ribbons made her appearance, the hymn-book in which she had been reading in her hand.
"Christine!" she exclaimed, angrily, in an undertone, and without noticing Johanna she rushed at the girl. "Christine, how dare you? Go away this moment!" And she tried to push the girl away from the door, but her hand held fast the latch. "For God's sake," a poor little pleading voice cried, "let me only say one word to Jakob!"
"Not one," Frau Kruger interposed. "Go this instant, I tell you!" And she raised the book as if to strike the girl.
"Frau Kruger!" Johanna exclaimed, approaching the pair. They turned. The girl's shawl had fallen back from her head, and a pale youthful face, the large dark eyes swollen with weeping, met Johanna's look, while the violence of the forester's wife was instantly replaced by extreme courtesy.
"Oh, Fräulein!" she said, with a curtsey, "do not take it amiss. I never like to harm a living creature, but Christine is a shameless girl, who will persist in worrying Jakob."
"I worry him?" the girl said, quickly. "Why, since his accident I have never even been allowed to see him. Have pity; let me bid him good-by. I am going to Oberroda to-day, but I cannot go so." And she burst into tears.
"Frau Kruger, be persuaded," Johanna entreated. "The poor girl – "
"Oh, Fräulein, do not waste your compassion," the forester's wife interrupted her, with an angry glance at the girl. "Christine has always been a bad, wilful creature. She has had a child, and wants to force Jakob to marry her, but he will have nothing to do with her."
"Jakob have nothing to do with me? That is not true," cried the girl. "He will not forsake me, and I will not forsake him. And he loved the little child dearly, and now he does not even know that it is dead. I must tell him." She hid her face and sobbed aloud.
"How can you be so hard-hearted?" said Johanna. "You must let the girl speak with the sick man."
"That she may make him worse with her whining," said Frau Kruger. "If she loves him as much as she says she does, she might spare him her blubbering. And what of it? It is lucky that the Lord took the brat from her."
"Frau Kruger!" Johanna exclaimed, indignantly; and Christine, who had grown deadly pale, drew the shawl over her head and silently left the house.
"Oh, Fräulein, if you but knew! Have the kindness to come in here and let me tell you," the forester's wife begged, all smiles and servility again; but Johanna left her and followed Christine.
The girl ran down the forest-path like a hunted creature. Suddenly her strength seemed to fail her, and she leaned against a tree.
Johanna hurried to her. "Where is your home? I will take you there," she said kindly.
"Home? I have none!" the girl replied, with a wild look. "My brother has turned me out of doors, and they will not let me go to Jakob. His sister says I am too bad for Jakob; my brother says Jakob is too bad for me. Ah, good heavens! if we are both such wretches, we are well suited to each other."
The depth of bitterness in her words contrasted so oddly with her gentle child-like face that Johanna's sympathy was still more strongly enlisted. She put her arm round her to support the slender, trembling figure, and walked with her slowly down the mountain. After a while Christine said, "You are so kind, Fräulein. Herr Forester Kruger told me about you. He is far kinder to me than his wife."
"What is Frau Kruger's grudge against you?" asked Johanna.
"At first it could only have been that I am poor and low-born," the girl replied. "My father was only a cowherd, it is true, and Jakob is a farmer's son. But for all that, he wanted to marry me, and if the others had consented all would have been different with me now."
"Who are the others?" Johanna asked again.
"The forester's wife opposed it most. She worked upon my guardian and my brother, and they forbade me to go with Jakob. So we had to see each other in secret, for he would not give me up, nor would I him. And then that happened that ought not to have been."
She was silent. For a while they walked along without speaking, and then Christine said, timidly, "Please, kind Fräulein, do not think hardly of us. Ah, how hard Jakob tried to have us married! and when the child came he loved it so dearly, – so dearly! And now it has been lying under the snow for a week, and Jakob is up there with his cruel sister, and I must go away. I have taken service at Oberroda, and oh, it is too, too hard to go without seeing Jakob, or letting him know anything about me and my trouble!"
Johanna spoke soothingly to her, promised to give her news of Jakob, – she depended upon Johann Leopold's help, – and when they reached the cross-road leading to the village, the girl took leave of her with a lighter heart and grateful words. Johanna looked thoughtfully after her. The sound of the Christmas bells struck clearly upon her ear in the crisp, frosty air. Where was the "Peace on earth" that it should have heralded to mankind?
CHAPTER IX
NEW YEAR'S EVE
The sleighing-party did not return to the second breakfast. The dinner-hour first assembled the various members of the family.
"Was grandpapa angry?" Magelone whispered to Johanna. Just then the Freiherr was wheeled into the room, and his frowning brow answered her question only too clearly.
Hildegard was not to be intimidated.
"Do not be angry, dear grandpapa," she said, with an air of arrogant ease quite her own. "It was my fault that we stayed so long; I had not seen the Klausenburgs for an age, and they begged us so to stay that it was impossible to say no."
"But you found it quite possible to keep us waiting here," the Freiherr rejoined. "Another time please to remember that such want of consideration has never been the rule of my household, and never shall be. Be seated!"
"I told you so," Karl Wildenhayn whispered to his wife as she passed him.
"You are all cowards!" she rejoined, and then seated herself with head erect and knitted brows on the left of the Freiherr, for whom she seemed no longer to have any existence.
The meal was very monosyllabic. Now and then Otto would whisper something to Johanna, and she would listen with a smile. Then Johann Leopold, who looked paler and more weary than usual, would look up from his plate, gaze at her, and then sink again into his usual apathy, from which Magelone to-day did not try to rouse him.
When they went to the drawing-room she left Johann Leopold, and, approaching Otto, said, "Pray suggest some folly to me, – I am dying of ennui."
"'Ah! fly with me, and be my love,'"
he began to sing in an undertone, and his eyes expressed the passion which was suppressed in his half-teasing voice. Magelone shrugged her shoulders.
"Nonsense! even the poet himself called that tragedy," she replied. "I want something merry to do. But you are afflicted with the Dönninghausen stupidity."
"How unjust!" cried Otto. "Was it not a merry thing to whisk you away from Klausenburg – right from under Johann Leopold's long nose – into the sleigh with me, and drive off with you?"
Magelone laughed. Otto continued passionately: "I should have liked to carry you off to the end of the world.