Linda Tressel — Chapter 17

CHAPTER XVII

For very many years no connection had been maintained between the two women who lived together in Nuremberg, and their nearest relative, who was a half-brother of Madame Staubach's, a lawyer, living in Cologne.

This uncle of Linda's was a Roman Catholic, and had on this account been shunned by Madame Staubach.

Some slight intercourse there had been on matters of business, and thus it had come to pass that Linda knew the address of her uncle.

But this was all that she knew, and knowing this only, she had started for Cologne.

The reader will hardly require to be told that she had not gone in company with him who a few weeks since had been her lover.

The reader, perhaps, will have understood Linda's character so thoroughly as to be convinced that, though she had submitted to be dragged out of her window by her lover, and carried away to Augsburg in the night, still it was not probable that she should again be guilty of such indiscretion as that.

The lesson had not been in vain.

If there be any reader who does not know Linda's character better than it was known to Herr Molk, or even to Tetchen, this story has been told in vain.

All alone she started, and all alone she made the entire journey.

Long as it was, there was no rest for her on the way.

She went by a cheap and slow train, and on she went through the long day and the long night, and on through the long day again.

She did not suffer with the cold as she had suffered on that journey to Augsburg, but the weariness of the hours was very great, and the continuation of the motion oppressed her sorely.

Then joined to this suffering was the feeling that she was going to a strange world in which no one would receive her kindly.

She had money to take her to Cologne, but she would have none to bring her back again.

It seemed to her as she went that there could be no prospect to her returning to a home which she had disgraced so thoroughly.

At Mannheim she found that she was obliged to wait over four hours before the boat started.

She quitted the railway a little after midnight, and she was told that she was to be on board before five in the morning.

The night was piercing cold, though never so cold as had been that other night; and she was dismayed at the thought of wandering about in that desolate town.

Some one, however, had compassion on her, and she was taken to a small inn, in which she rested on a bed without removing her clothes.

When she rose in the morning, she walked down to the boat without a word of complaint, but she found that her limbs were hardly able to carry her.

An idea came across her mind that if the people saw that she was ill they would not take her upon the boat.

She crawled on, and took her place among the poorer passengers before the funnels.

For a considerable time no one noticed her, as she sat shivering in the cold morning air on a damp bench.

At last a market-woman going down to Mayence asked her a question.

Was she ill?

Before they had reached Mayence she had told her whole story to the market-woman.

"May God temper the wind for thee, my shorn lamb!"

said the market-woman to Linda, as she left her; "for it seems that thou hast been shorn very close."

By this time, with the assistance of the woman, she had found a place below in which she could lie down, and there she remained till she learned that the boat had reached Cologne.

Some one in authority on board the vessel had been told that she was ill; and as they had reached Cologne also at night, she was allowed to remain on board till the next morning.

With the early dawn she was astir, and the full daylight of the March morning was hardly perfect in the heavens when she found herself standing before the door of a house in the city, to which she had been brought as being the residence of her uncle.

She was now, in truth, so weak and ill that she could hardly stand.

Her clothes had not been off her back since she left Nuremberg, nor had she come prepared with any change of raiment.

A woman more wretched, more disconsolate, on whose shoulders the troubles of this world lay heavier, never stood at an honest man's door to beg admittance.

If only she might have died as she crawled through the streets!

But there she was, and she must make some petition that the door might be opened for her.

She had come all the way from Nuremberg to this spot, thinking it possible that in this spot alone she might receive succour; and now she stood there, fearing to raise the knocker on the door.

She was a lamb indeed, whose fleece had been shorn very close; and the shearing had been done all in the sacred name of religion!

It had been thought necessary that the vile desires of her human heart should be crushed within her bosom, and the crushing had brought her to this.

She looked up in her desolation at the front of the house.

It was a white, large house, as belonging to a moderately prosperous citizen, with two windows on each side of the door, and five above, and then others again above them.

But there seemed to be no motion within it, nor was there any one stirring along the street.

Would it not be better, she thought, that she should sit for a while and wait upon the door-step?

Who has not known that frame of mind in which any postponement of the thing dreaded is acceptable?

But Linda's power of postponement was very short.

She had hardly sunk on to the step, when the door was opened, and the necessity for explaining herself came upon her.

Slowly and with pain she dragged herself on to her feet, and told the suspicious servant, who stood filling the aperture of the doorway, that her name was Linda Tressel, and that she had come from Nuremberg.

She had come from the house of Madame Staubach at Nuremberg.

Would the servant be kind enough to tell Herr Gruener that Linda Tressel, from Madame Staubach's house in Nuremberg, was at his door?

She claimed no kindred then, feeling that the woman might take such claim as a disgrace to her master.

When she was asked to call again later, she looked piteously into the woman's face, and said that she feared she was too ill to walk away.

Before the morning was over she was in bed, and her uncle's wife was at her bedside, and there had been fair-haired cousins in her room, creeping in to gaze at her with their soft blue eyes, touching her with their young soft hands, and calling her Cousin Linda with their soft voices.

It seemed to her that she could have died happily, so happily, then, if only they might have been allowed to stand round her bed, and still to whisper and still to touch her.

But they had been told that they might only just see their new cousin and then depart,--because the new cousin was ill.

The servant at the front door had doubted her, as it is the duty of servants to doubt in such cases; but her uncle had not doubted, and her uncle's wife, when she heard the story, wept over her, and told her that she should be at rest.

Linda told her story from the first to the last.

She told everything,--her hatred for the one man, her love for the other; her journey to Augsburg.

"Ah, dear, dear, dear," said aunt Gruener when this was told to her.

"I know how wicked I have been," said Linda, sorrowing.

"I do not say that you have been wicked, my dear, but you have been unfortunate," said aunt Gruener.

And then Linda went on to tell her, as the day so much dreaded by her drew nearer and nearer, as she came to be aware that, let her make what effort she would, she could not bring herself to be the man's wife,--that the horror of it was too powerful for her,--she resolved at the last moment that she would seek the only other relative in the world of whom she knew even the name.

Her aunt Gruener thoroughly commended her for this, saying, however, that it would have been much better that she should have made the journey at some period earlier in her troubles.

"Aunt Charlotte does not seem to be a very nice sort of woman to live with," said aunt Gruener.

Then Linda, with what strength she could, took Madame Staubach's part.

"She always thought that she was doing right," said Linda, solemnly.

"Ah, that comes of her religion," said aunt Gruener.

"We think differently, my dear.

Thank God, we have got somebody to tell us what we ought to do and what we ought not to do."

Linda was not strong enough to argue the question, or to remind her aunt that this somebody, too, might possibly be wrong.

Linda Tressel was now happier than she had remembered herself to have been since she was a child, though ill, so that the doctor who came to visit her could only shake his head and speak in whispers to aunt Gruener.

Linda herself, perceiving how it was with the doctor,--knowing that there were whispers though she did not hear them, and shakings of the head though she did not see them,--told her aunt with a smile that she was contented to die.

Her utmost hope, the extent of her wishes, had been to escape from the extremity of misery to which she had been doomed.

She had thought often, she said, as she had been making that journey, that her strength would not serve her to reach the house of her relative.

"God," she said, "had been very good to her, and she was now contented to go."

Madame Staubach arrived at Cologne four days after her niece, and was also welcomed at her brother's house.

But the welcome accorded to her was not that which had been given to Linda.

"She has been driven very nearly to death's door among you," said the one aunt to the other.

To Linda Madame Staubach was willing to own that she had been wrong, but she could make no such acknowledgment to the wife of her half-brother,--to a benighted Papist.

"I have endeavoured to do my duty by my niece," said Madame Staubach, "asking the Lord daily to show me the way."

"Pshaw!"

said the other woman.

"Your always asking the way, and never knowing it, will end in her death.

She will have been murdered by your prayers."

This was very terrible, but for Linda's sake it was borne.

There was nothing of reproach either from Linda to her aunt or from Madame Staubach to her niece, nor was the name of Peter Steinmarc mentioned between them for many days.

It was, indeed, mentioned but once again by poor Linda Tressel.

For some weeks, for nearly a month, they all remained in the house of Herr Gruener, and then Linda was removed to apartments in Cologne, in which all her earthly troubles were brought to a close.

She never saw Nuremberg again, or Tetchen, who had been faithful at least to her, nor did she ever even ask the fate of Ludovic Valcarm.

His name Madame Staubach never dared to mention; and Linda was silent, thinking always that it was a name of offence.

But when she had been told that she must die,--that her days were indeed numbered, and that no return to Nuremberg was possible for her,--she did speak a word of Peter Steinmarc.

"Tell him, aunt Charlotte, from me," she said, "that I prayed for him when I was dying, and that I forgave him.

You know, aunt Charlotte, it was impossible that I should marry him.

A woman must not marry a man whom she does not love."

Madame Staubach did not venture to say a word in her own justification.

She did not dare even to recur to the old tenets of her fierce religion, while Linda still lived.

She was cowed, and contented herself with the offices of a nurse by the sickbed of the dying girl.

She had been told by her sister-in-law that she had murdered her niece.

Who can say what were the accusations brought against her by the fury of her own conscience?

Every day the fair-haired cousins came to Linda's bedside, and whispered to her with their soft voices, and looked at her with their soft eyes, and touched her with their soft hands.

Linda would kiss their plump arms and lean her head against them, and would find a very paradise of happiness in this late revelation of human love.

As she lay a-dying she must have known that the world had been very hard to her, and that her aunt's teaching had indeed crushed her,--body as well as spirit.

But she made no complaint; and at last, when the full summer had come, she died at Cologne in Madame Staubach's arms.

During those four months at Cologne the zeal of Madame Staubach's religion had been quenched, and she had been unable to use her fanaticism, even towards herself.

But when she was alone in the world the fury of her creed returned.

"With faith you shall move a mountain," she would say, "but without faith you cannot live."

She could never trust her own faith, for the mountain would not be moved.

A small tombstone in the Protestant burying-ground at Cologne tells that Linda Tressel, of Nuremberg, died in that city on the 20th of July 1863, and that she was buried in that spot.

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