The Tales of Hoffmann, page 22
With these words the Baron dismissed me. I was inwardly devastated, reduced to a mere child! I, who was mad enough to believe I could inspire jealousy in him! He had himself sent me to Seraphine, an instrument to be employed and then discarded! A few minutes before I had feared the Baron and the consciousness of guilt lay upon me, but this very guilt had made me feel that I was maturing to a man; now I saw only a foolish boy who in his folly had taken for gold the paper crown he had placed on his hot head. I hurried to my uncle, who was already waiting for me.
‘Now then, Cousin, where have you been, where have you been?’ he called to me.
‘I have been talking to the Baron,’ I replied quietly, incapable of looking at him.
‘Good grief!’ he said, as if amazed. ‘Good grief! Yet I thought it must be something of the sort. The Baron has challenged you to a duel, eh, Cousin?’
The peal of laughter he emitted proved that he had completely seen through me again. I clenched my teeth: I did not want to utter a word, since I knew it would require no more to launch the thousand teasing quips already brimming on his lips.
The Baroness came to table in a morning gown whiter than newly fallen snow. She seemed tired, yet a sweet desire, a repressed ardour, shone from her eyes. She was more beautiful than ever. Who can number the follies of youth? I transferred the bitterness I felt towards the Baron to the Baroness; it all seemed to me a hopeless mystification. Like a sulky child, I avoided her and found a place at the end of the table between the two officers, with whom I began to drink and to talk loudly. A servant brought me a plate on which lay a few bonbons with the words: ‘From Fräulein Adelheid’. I took them and saw that on one of them there had been scratched: ‘and Seraphine!’ My blood coursed through my veins. I looked towards Adelheid, who looked back at me with a sly expression, lifted her glass and nodded to me with a slight movement of her head. Almost involuntarily I murmured silently: ‘Seraphine’, took up my glass and emptied it in a draught. My glance flew across to her; she too had taken a drink at the same instant and was setting down her glass – her eyes met mine, and a malicious devil whispered in my ear: ‘Unhappy man! She does love you!’
One of the guests rose and, in accordance with northern custom, proposed the health of the lady of the house. Glasses resounded in loud jubilation. Delight and despair – the wine flamed up within me, everything was going round, and I thought I should throw myself at her feet and breathe my last.
‘What’s the matter, dear friend?’ – this question from my neighbour brought me to my senses. Seraphine had disappeared, the guests were rising from the table; I wanted to go, but Adelheid took hold of me; she spoke, but I understood nothing; she took me by the hands and, laughing loudly, shouted something into my ear. As if paralysed, I stood mute and motionless. Then, without thinking, I took a glass from Adelheid’s hand and emptied it; I found myself alone at one of the windows; I staggered from the hall, down the stairs and into the forest. Snow was falling heavily, the trees were sighing in the storm; like a madman, I laughed and cried wildly: ‘Hey! the Devil is having a game with you!’
Who knows how it would have ended if I had not suddenly heard my name being called loudly in the forest? The storm had eased off, the moon was shining through the clouds; I heard the hounds starting up and saw a dark figure approaching. It was the old huntsman.
‘Herr Theodore!’ he began. ‘You got lost in the storm, I see. The Herr Justitiarius is waiting for you very impatiently!’
I followed him in silence and found my uncle working in the courtroom.
‘You did well to go outside to cool down,’ he cried to me. ‘Don’t drink quite so much; you are still too young to take it. It is not good for you.’
I sat at the desk and said nothing.
‘But now tell me, dear Cousin, what did the Baron want you for?’
I told my uncle everything, and ended by saying that I did not intend to lend myself to the dubious cure the Baron had suggested.
‘There would be no time for it, in any case,’ my uncle said. ‘We are leaving early tomorrow.’
So it happened, and I did not see Scraphine again.
Hardly had we arrived back home in K. when my greatuncle complained that he felt more than usually exhausted by the journey. His silence, broken only by violent outbursts of temper, presaged the return of his gout. One day I was called for urgently. I found that the old man had been smitten by a stroke and was lying speechless on his bed. A letter was crushed in his hand. I recognized the writing as that of the estate manager at R. and in my anguish I dared not take the letter from his grasp. I did not doubt that he was close to death; yet even before the doctor had arrived his pulse had begun to beat again and he had begun to recover. A few days later the doctor declared him to be out of danger.
The winter was more tenacious than ever, and a bitter, gloomy spring followed; his gout, rather than the attack he suffered, kept my uncle to his bed. He had now retired from business and all hope of ever returning to Castle R. had thus disappeared. I alone was permitted to care for him and to entertain him with conversation. At length, even his gaiety returned, and there was no lack of jokes and humour; but even when it came to tales of hunting and I expected my heroic deed with the wolf to be again the subject of banter, never, not even once, did he mention our visit to Castle R., and I too forebore to remind him of it. The concern I felt for my uncle had almost banished the memories of Seraphine; but one incident served to recall her, and in such a way that ice-cold shudders ran through me. When I opened the briefcase I had carried at Castle R. a dark lock of hair tied with a white ribbon fell out of the folded papers. I recognized it instantly as Seraphine’s. But as I looked at the ribbon more closely, I saw upon it a drop of blood! Perhaps it was Adelheid who had sent me this memento, but where did the bloodstain come from? and why did it seem to me like a fearful warning? The ribbon was that which, when I had first drawn close to Seraphine, had fluttered around me, but it now seemed to possess some dark power and to have become a symbol of fatality.
At last the storms gave up their blustering, summer asserted its rights, and by July it was the heat that had become unbearable. My uncle was visibly regaining his strength and, as was his custom, took himself off to a garden in the suburbs. One mild evening we were sitting together in the fragrant jasmine arbour; my uncle was unusually cheerful and in a gentle, almost mellow mood.
‘Cousin,’ he began, ‘I don’t know how it is, but today I feel a special wellbeing such as I haven’t felt for years. I believe it is a forewarning of my death.’
I tried to turn him away from such gloomy thoughts.
‘Let it be, Cousin,’ he said. ‘I shall not be remaining here below for much longer, and I therefore want to clear up a debt to you! Do you still think about the autumn at Castle R.?’
The question struck me like a bolt of lightning, but, before I could reply, he continued: ‘Heaven willed that you should become entangled in the darkest secrets of that house. The time has come for you to learn everything. We have often spoken of things which you have guessed at rather than understood. They say that nature represents the cycle of human life symbolically in the changing seasons, but I think of it in a different way. The spring mists fall, the summer haze shimmers, and only in the clear ether of autumn can the distant landscape be seen clearly before the world is immersed in the night of winter. In the clear sight of old age the workings of the inscrutable power can be seen more clearly. The dark destiny of that house now stands clearly before my ancient eyes! Yet no tongue can express the heart of it. Listen, my son, to what I am going to tell you as to a remarkable story; keep within your soul the knowledge that the secrets into which you strayed – perhaps not accidentally – could have destroyed you! Yet – that is all in the past now!
The story of Castle R. which my uncle now recounted I have carried so truly in my memory that I can almost repeat it in his own words (he spoke of himself in the third person).
One stormy autumn night in the year 1760, a tremendous crash, as if the whole rambling castle had collapsed in a thousand pieces, awoke the servants in Castle R. from a deep sleep. In a moment everyone was on his feet; lamps were lit; and, with fear and anxiety on his deathly pale countenance, the steward came panting up with the keys. In a silence like that of the grave, he moved through the passages, halls and rooms, but nowhere was there the slightest sign of damage. A dark foreboding seized him. He went up to the big hall, in one of the side rooms of which Baron Roderich von R. used to rest when engaged on his astronomy. Between the door of this room and another small room there was an entrance which led through a narrow passage directly to the observation tower. But as Daniel (as the steward was called) opened this heavy door, the storm, howling and roaring, hurled rubble and broken masonry at him, so that he recoiled in terror and, as he dropped the lamp to the floor, cried aloud: ‘O Lord of Heaven! The Baron has been dashed to pieces!’
At that instant, the sound of wailing was heard from the Baron’s bedroom: Daniel found the servants gathered around the body of their master. Fully clad, he was seated in his chair as if resting. As daylight came, they saw that the top of the tower had collapsed, stones had crashed through into the astronomy chamber, and the heavy timbers, exposed by the fall, had broken through the lower vaulting and torn away part of the castle wall and the passage. To step through the doorway from the hall was to risk falling eighty feet into the abyss.
The Baron had foreseen his death to the hour and had told his son, so Wolfgang, Baron R., the eldest son of the deceased and hence holder of the entail, arrived the following day from Vienna, where he had been on a visit. The steward had had the large hall hung in black, and the dead Baron lay on a bier in the dress in which he had been found, surrounded by silver candelabra with burning candles. Silently, Wolfgang went up to the hall and stood gazing into his father’s colourless countenance. At length, with a convulsive movement, he murmured: ‘Did the stars compel you to make miserable the son you loved?’
Stepping back a pace, he gazed heavenwards and said gently: ‘Poor deluded old man! Your game is now finished! Now you may learn that what we have here has nothing to do with what is beyond the stars. What will or power can reach beyond the grave?’
He again fell silent – then he cried vehemently: ‘No, not one atom of my earthly happiness, which you sought to destroy, shall I be robbed of now!’
With that, he drew a folded piece of paper from his pocket and held it to one of the candles: the paper flared up, and, as the reflexion of the flame flickered on the face of the corpse, it seemed as though the muscles were moving and the dead man speaking soundlessly, so that the servants standing at a distance were overcome by dread. The Baron calmly trod out the last piece of paper smouldering on the floor, then gave his father a final look and hurried from the hall.
The following day, Daniel told the Baron of the destruction of the tower and of all that had happened on the night of his father’s death, and said that the tower should be rebuilt immediately – or the whole castle would be in danger.
‘Rebuild the tower?’ the Baron exclaimed, his eyes blazing with anger. ‘Never! The tower’, he continued more calmly, ‘will not collapse further if there is no further cause. How if it was my father himself who destroyed the place where he carried on his uncanny astrology? How if he himself found certain contrivances which made it possible for him to destroy everything whenever he wanted to? Let it be as he wishes; and the rest of the castle can cave in too, for all I care. Do you think I intend to live here in this owl’s nest? No, that wise ancestor who laid the foundations for a new house in the valley anticipated me and I shall follow him.’
‘And so’, said Daniel dejectedly, ‘all the old faithful servants will have to take up their staves and go.’
‘That I will not be served by doddering old men goes without saying,’ the Baron replied, ‘but I will throw nobody out. You shall eat the bread of charity.’
‘Shall I be treated so?’ the steward exclaimed.
The Baron, who had been on the point of leaving the hall, wheeled round, his face red with anger, and strode up to the old man. ‘You hypocritical rascal,’ he cried, ‘you who carried on those sinister activities up there with my father, to whose heart you clung like a vampire, you who perhaps used his madness to drive him to the devilish decisions which brought me to the edge of the abyss – you, I ought to fling you out like a mangy dog!’
The old man had dropped to his knees in terror at this dreadful outburst, and so what happened may have been an accident; in anger, the body often mechanically follows the thought, and as he concluded his tirade the Baron struck out with his foot and kicked the steward in the chest, so that he fell with a muffled cry. As he then rose with difficulty he emitted a sound like the whimper of a dying animal and pierced the Baron with a look of rage and despair. The bag of money which the Baron threw to him as he went out he left untouched on the floor.
In the meantime, relatives had gathered, and the old Baron was interred in the family vault in Castle R. church with great ceremony. As the guests went their own ways again, the new Lord of the Manor, abandoning his gloomy mood, seemed highly delighted with what he had inherited. With V., the old Baron’s legal adviser, to whom he seemed to have given his trust immediately on meeting him and whom he had confirmed in his office, he drew up accounts of the estate’s income and considered how much could be used for improvements and for building the new house. V. believed the late Baron could not possibly have spent all his annual income, so that, as there were only a few insignificant sums in bank notes among the documents and as the cash found in an iron box was only just over a thousand thalers, there must be money hidden away. And who would know where it was if not the steward Daniel? The Baron was now worried that Daniel, whom he had seriously offended, would revenge himself by letting this hidden treasure rot away rather than disclose it. He recounted to V. all the circumstances of the case and ended by declaring his conviction that it had been Daniel who had nurtured in the late Baron an inexplicable horror of seeing his son in Castle R. The Justitiarius declared this conviction misguided: no human being in the world could sway the old Baron’s mind in the slightest. He also undertook to discover from Daniel the secret of any money hidden away. This hardly needed doing, however, for scarcely had he begun: ‘How is it, then, Daniel, that your former master left so little money in cash?’ when Daniel replied, with an unpleasant smile: ‘Do you mean the paltry few thalers you found in the box? The rest is in the vaulting next to my dear Master’s bedroom! But the best of it’, he continued, his smile changing into a fearful grimace and his bloodshot eyes flashing, ‘is that there are thousands of gold pieces lying buried under the rubble!’
The lawyer at once called on the Baron, and together they went into the bedroom, in one corner of which Daniel shifted the wall panelling and revealed a lock. The Baron gazed at it greedily and drew a large bundle of keys from his pocket and prepared to try them. Daniel stood very upright, looking down at him as he crouched at the lock. With a quivering voice, he then said: ‘If I am a dog, your excellency – I have the loyalty of a dog!’
With that he handed to the Baron a shining steel key. The latter tore it from his hand and easily opened the door. They stepped into a low vault, in which there stood a large iron trunk with its lid open. On the sacks of money there lay a note in the familiar hand of the late Baron:
One hundred and fifty thousand Reichsthaler in old Frederichsdor saved from the income of the Castle R. estate and intended for the upkeep of the castle. Further, the Lord of the Manor who follows me in ownership shall use some of this money for the construction of a high lighthouse tower for the benefit of seafarers on the highest hill to the east of the old castle tower, which he will find collapsed in ruins, and shall have it lighted each and every night.
Michaelmas Night in the year 1760, at Castle R.
Roderich Baron von R.
Only after the Baron had raised the bags of money one after another and allowed them to drop back into the chest, delighting in the jingling of the gold, did he turn to the steward, thank him for the loyalty he had displayed and assure him it was only slanderous gossip that had led him to treat him so badly at the outset: not only should he stay in the castle, but he would retain his post of steward with double the salary.
‘I owe you full recompense,’ he said. ‘If you want gold, take one of these bags!’
The Baron indicated the chest and stood with downcast eyes. Suddenly the steward’s face became a burning red, and he again emitted the dreadful sound as of a dying animal; as he did so he muttered between his teeth something that sounded like ‘Blood for gold!’
The Baron, lost in gazing at the treasure, was oblivious to all else. Shaking in every limb, Daniel humbly approached him, kissed his hand and said in a tearful voice: ‘Ah, my dear, gracious Master, what should a poor, childless old man like me do with gold? But the doubled salary – that I shall joyfully take, and will carry out my duties tirelessly!’
The Baron paid no particular attention to the old man’s words, but let fall the heavy lid of the trunk, so that the vault resounded. Then, as he locked the chest and carefully withdrew the key, he said: ‘That’s good, that’s good, old fellow! But’, he continued when they had regained the hall, ‘you also mentioned a quantity of gold pieces lying buried under the ruined tower.’
The steward went silently to the doorway and opened it with effort. The storm drove a thick flurry of snow into the hall; a frightened raven fluttered up, cawing and croaking, beat against the window with its wings and, having found the open doorway, plunged into the abyss. The Baron stepped into the passageway but took only a single glance into the depths before starting back.
‘Hideous sight! I am giddy,’ he stammered as he sank into the lawyer’s arms. Pulling himself together, he eyed the steward sharply: ‘And down there?’
