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The Man Wolf and Other Tales by Emile Erckmann and Alexandre Chatrian

E >> Emile Erckmann and Alexandre Chatrian >> The Man Wolf and Other Tales




This was the purport of the old servant's disclosures to the young baron,
who believed that in so doing he was only fulfilling his duty.

The son, anxious at any sacrifice to know the truth of this account, had,
that very year, ascertained it, first by following his mother to Baden,
and then by penetrating on her track into the gorges of the Black Forest.
The footsteps which Sebalt had tracked in the woods were his.

When the baron had thus imparted his knowledge to me, I thought I ought
not to conceal from him the mysterious influence which the appearance of
the old woman in the neighbourhood of the castle exercised over the
count, nor the other circumstances of this unaccountable series of
events.

We were both amazed at the extraordinary coincidence between the facts
narrated, the mysterious attraction which these beings unconsciously
exercised the one over the other, the tragic drama which they performed
in union, the familiarity which the old woman had shown with the castle,
and its most secret passages, without any previous examination of them;
the costume which she had discovered in which to carry out this secret
act, and which could only have been rummaged out of some mysterious
retreat revealed to her by the strange instinct of insanity. Finally,
we were agreed that there are unknown, unfathomed depths in our being,
and that the mystery of death is not the only secret which God has veiled
from our eyes, although it may seem to us the most important.

But the darkness of night was beginning to yield to the pale tints of
early dawn. A bat was sounding the departure of the hours of darkness
with a singular note resembling the gurgling of liquid from a narrow
bottle-neck. A neighing of horses was heard far up the defile; then, with
the first rays of dawn, we distinguished a sledge driven by the baron's
servant; its bottom was littered with straw; on this the body was laid.

I mounted my horse, who seemed not sorry to use his limbs again, which
had been numbed by standing upon ice and snow the whole night through. I
rode after the sledge to the exit from the defile, when, after a grave
salutation--the usual token of courtesy between the nobility and the
people--they drove off in the direction of Hirschland and I rode towards
the towers of Nideck.

At nine I was in the presence of Mademoiselle Odile, to whom I gave a
faithful narrative of all that had taken place.

Then repairing to the count's apartments, I found him in a very
satisfactory state of improvement. He felt very weak, as was to be
expected after the terrible shocks of such crises as he had gone through,
but had returned to the full possession of his clear faculties, and
the fever had left him the evening before. There was, therefore, every
prospect of a speedy cure.

A few days later, seeing the old lord in a state of convalescence, I
expressed a desire to return to Fribourg, but he entreated me so
earnestly to stay altogether at Nideck, and offered me terms so
honourable and advantageous, that I felt myself unable to refuse
compliance with his wishes.

I shall long remember the first boar-hunt in which I had the honour to
join with the count, and especially the magnificent return home in a
torchlight procession after having sat in the saddle for twelve hours
together.

I had just had supper, and was going up into Hugh Lupus's tower
completely knocked up, when, passing Sperver's room, whose door was half
open, shouts and cries of joy reached my ears. I stopped, when the most
jovial spectacle burst upon me. Around the massive oaken table beamed
twenty square rosy faces, bright and ruddy with health and fun.

The hob and nobbing of the glasses gave out an incessant tinkling and
clattering. There was sitting Sperver with his bossy forehead, his
moustaches bedewed with Rhenish wine, his eyes sparkling, and his grey
hair rather disordered; at his right was Marie Lagoutte, on his left
Knapwurst. He was raising aloft the ancient silver-gilt and chased goblet
dimmed with age, and on his manly chest glittered the silver plate of
his shoulder-belt, for, according to his custom on a hunting day, he was
still wearing the uniform of his office.

The colour of Marie Lagoutte's cheeks, rather redder even than usual,
told of an evening of jollity, and her broad cap-frills seemed as if they
were wanting to fly all abroad; she sat laughing, now with one, then with
another.

Knapwurst, squatting in his arm-chair, with his head on a level with
Sperver's elbow, looked like a big pumpkin. Then came Tobias Offenloch,
so red that you would have thought he had bathed his face in the red
wine, leaning back with his wig upon the chair-back and his wooden leg
extended under the table. Farther on loomed the melancholy long face of
Sebalt, who was peeping with a sickly smile into the bottom of his
wine-glass.

Besides these worthies there were present the waiting-people, men and
women servants, comprising all that little community which springs up
around the board of the great people of the land and belongs to them as
the ivy, and the moss, and the wild convolvulus belong to the monarch of
the forests.

Upon the groaning board lay a vast ham, displaying its concentric circles
of pink and white. Then among the gaily-patterned plates and dishes came
the long-necked bottles containing the produce of the vineyards that
border the broad and flowing Rhine--long German pipes with little silver
chains, and long shining blades of steel.

The light of the lamp shed over the whole scene its amber-coloured hue
and left in the shade the old grey and time-stained walls, where hung in
ample numbers the brazen convolutions of the hunting-horns and bugles.

What an original picture! The vaulted roof was ringing with the joyous
shouts of laughter.

Sperver, as I have already told, was lifting high the full bumper and
singing the song of Black Hatto, the Burgrave,

"I am king on these mountains of mine,"

while the rosy dew of Affenthal hung trembling from his long moustaches.
As soon as he caught sight of me he stopped, and holding out his hand--

"Fritz," said he, "we only wanted you. It is a long time since I felt so
comfortable as I do to-night. You are welcome, old boy!"

As I gazed upon him with surprise--for since the death of Lieverle I had
never seen him smile--he added more seriously--

"We are celebrating the return of monseigneur to his health, and
Knapwurst is telling us stories."

All the guests turned my way, and I was saluted with kindly welcomes on
all sides.

I was dragged in by Sebalt, seated near Marie Lagoutte, and found a large
glass of Bohemian wine in my hand before I could quite understand the
meaning of it all.

The old hall was echoing with merry peals of laughter, and Sperver,
throwing his arm round my neck, holding his cup high, and with an attempt
at gravity which showed plainly that the wine was up in his head, he
shouted--

"Here is my son! He and I--I and he--until death! Here's the health of
Doctor Fritz!"

Knapwurst, standing as high as he was able upon the seat of his arm-chair,
not unlike a turnip half divided in two, leaned towards me and held me
out his glass. Marie Lagoutte shook out the long streamers of her cap,
and Sebalt, upright before his chair, as gaunt and lean as the shade of
the wild jaeger amongst the heather, repeated, "Your health, Doctor
Fritz!" whilst the flakes of silvery foam ran down his cup and floated
gently down upon the stone-flagged floor.

Then there was a moment's silence. Every guest drank. Then, with a single
clash, every glass was set vigorously down upon the table.

"Bravo!" cried Sperver.

Then turning to me--

"Fritz, we have already drunk to the health of the count and of
Mademoiselle Odile; you will do the same."

Twice had I to drain the cup before the vigilant eyes of the whole table.
Then I too began to look grave. Could it have been drunken gravity? A
luminous radiance seemed shed on every object; faces stood out brightly
from the darkness, and looked more nearly upon me; in truth, there were
youthful faces and aged, pretty and ugly, but all alike beamed upon me
kindly, and lovingly, and tenderly; but it was the youngest, at the other
end of the table, whose bright eyes attracted me, and we exchanged long
and wistful glances, full of affection and sympathy!

Sperver kept on humming and laughing. Suddenly putting his hand upon the
dwarf's misshapen back, he cried--

"Silence! Here is Knapwurst, our historian and chronicler! He is
preparing to speak. This hump holds all the history of the house of
Nideck from the beginning of time!"

The little hunchback, not at all indignant at so ambiguous a compliment,
directed his benevolent eyes upon the face of the huntsman, and replied--

"You, Sperver, you are one of the _reiters_ whose story I have been
telling you. You have the arm, and the courage, and the whiskers of a
_reiter_ of old! If that window opened wide, and a _reiter_ was to hold
out his hand at the end of his long arm to you, what would you say to
him?"

"I would say, 'You are welcome, comrade; sit down and drink. You will
find the wine just as good and the girls just as pretty as they were in
the days of old Hugh Lupus.' Look!"

And he pointed with his glass at the jolly young faces that brightened
the farther end of the table.

Certainly the damsels of Nideck were lovely. Some were blushing with
pleasure to hear their own praises; others half-veiled their rosy cheeks
with their long drooping eyelashes, while one or two seemed rather to
prefer to display their, sweet blue eyes by raising them to the smoky
ceiling. I wondered at my own insensibility that I had never before
noticed these fair roses blooming in the towers of the ancient manor.

"Silence!" cried Sperver for the second time. "Our friend Knapwurst is
going to tell us again the legend he related to us just now."

"Won't you have another instead?" asked the hunchback.

"No. I like this best."

"I know better ones than that."

"Knapwurst," insisted the huntsman, raising his finger impressively, "I
have reasons for wishing to hear the same again and no other. Cut it
shorter if you like. There is a great deal in it. Now, Fritz, listen!"

The dwarf, rather under the influence of the sparkling wine he had taken,
rested his elbows on the table, and with his cheeks clutched in his bony
fingers, and his eyes starting from his head with his concentrated
efforts to speak with becoming seriousness, he cried as if he were
publishing a proclamation--

"Bernard Hertzog relates that the burgrave Hugh, surnamed Lupus, or the
Wolf, when he was old, used to wear a cowl, which was a kind of knitted
cap that covered in the crest of the knight's helmet when engaged in
fighting. When the helmet tired him he would take it off and put on the
knitted cowl, and its long cape fell around his shoulders.

"Up to his eighty-second year Hugh still wore his armour, though he could
hardly breathe in it.

"Then he sent for Otto of Burlach, his chaplain, his eldest son Hugh, his
second son Berthold, and his daughter the red-haired Bertha, wife of a
Saxon chief named Bluderich, and said to them--

"'Your mother the she-wolf has bequeathed you her claws; her blood flows,
mingled with mine, in your veins. In you the wolf's blood will flow from
generation to generation; it shall weep and howl among the snows of the
Black Forest. Some will say, "Hark! The wind howls!" others, "No, it is
the owl hooting!" But not so; it is your blood, mine and the blood of the
she-wolf who drove me to murder Hedwige, my wife before God and the
Church. She died under my bloody hands! Cursed be the she-wolf! for it is
written, "I will visit the sins of the fathers upon the children." The
crime of the father shall be visited upon the children until justice
shall have been satisfied!'

"Then old Hugh the Wolf died.

"From that dreary day the north wind has howled across the wilds, and the
owl has hooted in the dark, and travellers by night know not that it is
the blood of the she-wolf weeping for the day of vengeance that will
come, whose blood will be renewed from generation to generation--so says
Hertzog--until the day when the first wife of Hugh, Hedwige the Fair,
shall reappear at Nideck under the form of an angel to comfort and to
forgive!"

Then Sperver, rising from his seat, took a lamp and demanded of Knapwurst
the keys of the library, and beckoned to me to follow him.

We rapidly traversed the long dark gallery, then the armoury, and soon
the archive-chamber appeared at the end of the great corridor.

All noises had died away in the distance. The place seemed quite
deserted.

Once or twice I turned round, and could then see with a creeping feeling
of dread our two long fantastic shadows in ghostly fashion writhing in
strange distortions upon the high tapestry.

Sperver quickly opened the old oak door, and with torch uplifted, his
hair all bristling in disorder, and excited features, walked in the
first. Standing before the portrait of Hedwige, whose likeness to the
young countess had struck me at our first visit to the library, he
addressed me in these solemn words:--

"Here is she who was to return to comfort and pity me! She has returned!
At this moment she is downstairs with the old count. Look well, Fritz; do
you recognise her? Is it not Odile?"

Then turning to the picture of Hugh's second wife--

"There," he said, "is Huldine, the she-wolf. For a thousand years she has
wept in the deep gorges amongst the pine forests of the Schwartzwald; she
was the cause of the death of poor Lieverle; but henceforward the lords
of Nideck may rest securely, for justice is done, and the good angel of
this lordly house has returned!"




MYRTLE.




CHAPTER I.


Just at the end of the village of Dosenheim, in Alsace, about fifty
yards from the gravelly road that leads into the wood, is a pretty
cottage surrounded with an orchard, the flat roof loaded with
boulder-stones, the gable-end looking down the valley.

Flights of pigeons wheel around it, hens are scratching and picking up
what they can under the fences, the cock takes his stand majestically on
the low garden wall, and sounds the _reveillee_, or the retreat, for the
echoes of Falberg to repeat; an outside staircase, with its wooden
banisters, the linen of the little household hanging over it, leads to
the first story, and a vine climbs up the front, and spreads its leafy
branches from side to side.

If you will only go up these steps you will see at the end of the narrow
entry the kitchen, with its dresser and its pewter plates and dishes, its
soup-tureens puffing out like balloons; open the door to the right and
you are in the parlour with its dark oak furniture, a ceiling crossed by
brown smoke-stained rafters, and its old Nuremberg clock click-clacking
monotonously.

Here sits a woman of five-and-thirty, spinning and dreaming, her waist
encircled with a long black taffety bodice, and her head covered with a
velvet headdress, with long ribbons.

A man in broad-skirted velveteen coat, with breeches of the same, and
with a fine open brow, looking calm and thoughtful, is dandling on his
knee a fine stout boy, whistling the call to "boot and saddle."

There lies the quiet village at the end of the valley, framed, as you
sit, in the little cottage window; the river is leaping over the mill-dam
and crossing the winding street; the old houses, with their deep and
gloomy eaves, their barns, their gabled windows, their nets drying in the
sun; the young girls, kneeling by the river-side on the stones, washing
linen; the cattle lazily lounging down to drink, and gravely lowing
amidst the willows; the young herdsmen cracking their whips; the mountain
summit, jagged like a saw by the pointed fir-tree tops--all these rural
objects lie reflected in the flowing blue stream, only broken by the
fleets of ducks sailing down or the occasional passage of an old tree
rooted up on the mountain-side.

Looking quietly on these things, you are impressed with a sense of the
ease and comfort of which they speak, and you are moved with gratitude to
the Giver of all good.

Well, my dear friends and neighbours, such was the cottage of the Bremers
in 1820, such were Bremer himself, his wife Catherine, and their son,
little Fritz.

To my own mind they come back exactly as I have described them to you.

Christian Bremer had served in the chasseurs of the Imperial Guard. After
1815 he had married Catherine, his old sweetheart, grown a little older,
but quite fresh and fair, and full of grace. With his own little
property, his house, and his four or five acres of vineyard, and
Catherine's added to it, Bremer had become one of the most substantial
bourgeois of Dosenheim; he might have been mayor, or adjoint, or
municipal councillor, but these honours had no attractions for him; and
what pleased him best was, after work was over, to take down his old gun,
whistle for Friedland, and take him a turn in the woods.

Now it fell out one day that this worthy man, coming home after a day's
shooting, brought in his bag a little gipsy girl two or three years old,
as lively as a squirrel, and as brown as a hazel-nut. He had found her in
the bundle of an unhappy gipsy woman who had died of fatigue or hunger,
or both, at the foot of a tree.

You may well imagine what an outcry Catherine raised against this new
uninvited member of her family. But as Bremer was master in his own
house, he simply announced to his wife that the child should be
christened by the name of Susanna Frederica Myrtle, and that she should
be brought up with little Fritz.

As a matter of course, all the women in the place, old and young, came
to pass their observations upon the little gipsy, whose serious and
thoughtful expression of countenance surprised them.

"This is not a child like others," said they; "she is a heathen--quite a
heathen! You may see by her eyes that she understands every word! She is
listening now! Mind what I say, Maitre Christian! Gipsies have claws at
the ends of their fingers. If you will rear young ferrets and weasels you
must not expect your poultry to be safe. They will have the run of all
the farm-yard!"

"Go and mind your own business!" shouted Bremer. "I have seen Russians
and Spaniards, I have seen Italians, and Germans, and Jews; some were
brown, and some were black, some white, and others red; some had long
noses, and others had turned-down noses, but I found good fellows amongst
them all."

"Very likely," said the ladies, "but those people lived in houses, and
gipsies live in the open air."

He vouchsafed no reply to this argument, but with all possible politeness
he put them out by the shoulders.

"Go away," he cried; "I don't want your advice. It is time to air the
rooms, and then I have to go and attend to the stables."

But, after all, the rejected counsels were not so bad, as the event
unhappily showed a dozen or fourteen years afterwards.

Fritz was always delighted to feed the cattle, and take the horses to the
pond, and follow his father and learn to plough and sow, to reap and mow,
to tie up the sheaves and bring them home. But Myrtle had no wish to milk
the cows, churn the butter, shell peas, or peel potatoes.

When the maidens of Dosenheim, going out to wash clothes in the morning
at the river, called her the _heathen_, she mirrored herself complacently
in the fountain, and when she had admired her own long dark tresses, her
violet lips, her white teeth, her necklace of red berries, she would
smile and murmur to herself--

"Ah! they only call me a heathen because I am prettier than they are,"
and she would dip the tip of her little foot in the fountain and laugh.

But Catherine could not approve of such conduct, and said--

"Myrtle is not the least good to us. She won't do a single thing that is
useful. It is no use for me to preach, and advise, and scold, she does
everything the wrong way. The other day, when we were stowing away apples
in the closet, she took bites out of the best to see if they were ripe!
She has no pleasure but in gobbling up the best of everything."

Bremer himself could not help admitting that there was a very heathenish
spirit in her when he heard his wife crying from morning till night,
"Myrtle, Myrtle! where are you now? Ah, naughty, bad girl! she has run
away into the woods again to gather blackberries." But still he laughed
to himself, and pitied poor Catherine, whom he compared to a hen with a
brood of ducklings.

Every year after harvest-time Fritz and Myrtle spent whole days far away
from the farm, pasturing the cattle, singing, and whistling, and baking
potatoes under the ashes, and coming down the rocky hill in the evening
blowing the shepherd's horn.

These were some of Myrtle's happiest days. Seated before the burning
hemp-stalks, with her pretty brown face between her hands, she lost
herself in endless reveries.

The long strings of wild ducks and geese which traverse, about the end of
autumn, the boundless heavens spread from the mountains on the east to
the western hills, seemed to have a depressing effect upon her mind. She
used to follow them with longing eyes, straining them as if to overtake
the wild birds in the immeasurable distance; and suddenly she would rise,
spread out her arms, and cry--

"I must go! I must go! I can't stay!"

Then she would weep with her head bowed down, and Fritz, seeing her in
tears, would cry too, asking--

"Why do you cry, Myrtle? Has anybody hurt you? Is it any of the boys in
the village?--Kasper, Wilhelm, Heinrich? Only tell me, and I will knock
him down at once! Do tell!"

"No; it is not that."

"Well, why are you crying?"

"I don't know."

"Do you want to run as far as the Falberg?"

"No; that is not far enough."

"Where do you want to go?"

"Down there! down there! ever so far! where the birds are going."

This made Fritz open his eyes and his mouth very wide.

One day in September, when they were idling along by the woods, about
noon, the heat was so great and the air so still that the smoke of their
little fire, instead of rising straight into the air, fell like water and
crept among the briars. The grasshopper had ceased its dull monotonous
chirp, not the buzzing of a fly was to be heard, nor the warbling of a
bird. The oxen and the cows, with sleepy eyes half-closed, their knees
bent under them, were resting together under a spreading oak in the
meadow, now and then lowing in a slow, protracted way as if in idle
protest against such hot weather.

Fritz had begun by plaiting the strands of his whip, but he soon lay down
in the long grass with his hat over his eyes, and Friedland came to lie
near him, gaping from ear to ear.

Myrtle alone suffered no inconvenience from the overwhelming heat;
sitting on the ground near the fire, with her arms wreathed around her
knees, full in the sun, her large dark eyes slowly surveyed the dark
arches formed by the branches of the forest.

Time passed on slowly. The distant village clock had struck twelve, then
one, and two, and the young gipsy never stirred. In the woods and jagged
mountain-tops, the crags, the forests, descending into the valleys, she
heard some mysterious call. They spoke to her in a language not unknown
to her.

"Yes," she said to herself, "yes; I have seen all that before--long
ago--a long time ago."

Then with a quick, sharp glance at Fritz, who was in a deep sleep, she
rose to her feet and began to fly. Her light footsteps scarcely bent the
grass beneath her; she ran on and on, up the hill; Friedland turned his
head round with a careless glance, then stretched out once more his
languid limbs, and composed himself to sleep.

Myrtle disappeared in the midst of the brambles which border the common
wood. At one bound she cleared the muddy ditch where a single frog was
croaking amongst the rushes, and twenty minutes after she reached the top
of the Roche Creuse, whence you may have a wide prospect of Alsace and
the blue summits of the Vosges.

Then she turned to see if anybody was following her. She could still
distinguish Fritz asleep in the green meadow with his hat over his eyes,
and Friedland and the sleeping cattle under their tree.

Farther on she could see the village, the river, the roof of the
farm-house, with its flights of pigeons eddying round; the long, crooked
street and red-petticoated women walking leisurely up and down; the
little ivy-covered church where the good _cure_ Niclausse had baptised
her into the Christian faith and afterwards confirmed her.

And when she had sufficiently contemplated these objects, turning her
face the other way towards the mountain, she was filled with delight to
mark how the densely-crowded firs covered the hill-sides, up to their
highest ridge, close as the grass of the fields.

At the sight of all this grandeur the young gipsy felt her heart beating
and expanding with unknown delight, and again running on she darted
through a rift between the rocks, lined with mosses and ferns, to reach
the beaten track through the woods.

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