The Chief Justice: A Novel

"One of them had particular reason for this, Alexander von Mirescul, a Roumanianised Greek; his property lay close to the Moldavian frontier and passed for the head-quarters of the trade in tobacco smuggling. He was not to be found out, and when I saw him for the first time, I realized that that would be a difficult business; the little man with his yellow, unctuous face seemed as if he consisted not of flesh and bone, but of condensed oil. It was in his voice and manner. He was manifestly much better educated and better mannered than the rest, as he was also much more cunning and contemptible. I did not get rid of this first impression for a long while, but at length he managed to get me into his house; I gradually became more favourable to him as he was, in one respect at least, an agreeable exception; he was a tolerably educated man, his daughters were being brought up by a German governess and he had a library of German books which he really read. I had such a longing for the atmosphere of an educated household that one evening I went to see him.

"This evening influenced years of my life, or rather, as I have learnt to-day, my whole life. I am no liar, George, and no fanciful dreamer, it is the literal truth: I loved this girl from the first instant that I beheld her."

Berger looked up in astonishment.

"From the first instant," Sendlingen repeated, and he struggled with all speed through his next words.

"I entered, Mirescul welcomed me: my eye swept over black and grey heads, over well-known, sharp-featured, olive-faces. Only one was unknown to me: the face of an exquisitely beautiful girl encircled by heavy, silver-blond, plaited hair. Her slender, supple figure was turned away from me, I could only see her profile; it was not quite regular, the forehead was too high, the chin too peculiarly prominent; I saw all that, and yet I seemed as if I had never seen a girl more beautiful and my heart began to beat passionately. I had to tear my looks away, and talk to the lady of the house, but then I stared again, as if possessed, at the beautiful, white unknown who stood shyly in a corner gazing out into the night. 'Our governess, Fräulein Lippert,' said Frau von Mirescul, quietly smiling as she followed the direction of my looks.

"'I know,' I answered nervously, almost impatiently; I had guessed that at once. Frau von Mirescul looked at me with astonishment, but I had risen and hurried over to the lonely girl: one of the most insolent of the company, the little bald Popowicz, had approached her. I was, afraid that he might wound her by some insulting speech. How should this poor, pale, timorous child defend herself alone against such a man? He had leant over her and was whispering something with his insolent smile, but the next instant he started back as if hurled against the wall by an invisible hand, and yet it was only a look of those gentle, veiled, grey eyes, now fixed in such a cold, hard stare that I trembled as they rested on me. But they remained fixed upon me and suddenly became again so pathetically anxious and helpless.

"At length I was beside her: I no longer required to defend her from the elderly scamp, he had disappeared. I could only offer her my hand and ask: 'Did that brute insult you?' But she took my hand and held it tight as if she must otherwise have fallen, her eyelids closed in an effort to keep back her tears. 'Thank you,' she stammered. 'You are a German, are you not Baron Sendlingen? I guessed as much when you came in! Oh if you knew!'

"But I do know all, I know what she suffers in this 'salon,' and now we begin to talk of our life among these people and our conversation flows on as if it had been interrupted yesterday. We hardly need words: I understand every sigh that comes from those small lips at other times so tightly closed, she, every glance that I cast upon the assembly. But my glances are only fugitive for I prefer looking straight into that beautiful face so sweetly and gently attractive, although the mouth and chin speak of such firm determination. She often changes colour, but it is more wonderful that I am at times suddenly crippled by the same embarrassment, while at the next moment I feel as if my heart has at length reached home after years and years, – perhaps a life-time's sojourn in a chill strange land.

"An hour or more passed thus. We did not notice it; we did not suspect how much our demeanour surprised the others until Mirescul approached and asked me to take his wife in to supper. We went in; Hermine was not there. 'Fräulein Hermine usually retires even earlier,' remarked Frau von Mirescul with the same smile as before. I understood her, and with difficulty suppressed a bitter reply: naturally this girl of inferior rank, whose father had only been a schoolmaster, was unworthy of the society of cattle-merchants, horse-dealers and slave-drivers whose fathers had been ennobled by Kaiser Franz!

"After supper I took my leave. Mirescul hoped to see me soon again and I eagerly promised: 'As soon as possible.' And while I drove home through the snow-lit winter's night, I kept repeating these words, for how was I henceforth to live without seeing her?"

"After the first evening?" said Berger, shaking his head. "That was like a disease!"

"It was like a fatality!" cried Sendlingen. "And how is it to be explained? I do not know! I wanted at first to show you her likeness, but I have not done so, for however beautiful she may have been, her beauty does not unsolve the riddle. I had met girls equally beautiful, equally full of character before, without taking fire. Was it because I met her in surroundings which threw into sharpest relief all that was most charming in her, because I was lonelier than I had ever been before, because I at once knew that she shared my feelings? Then besides, I had not as a young fellow lived at high pressure. I had not squandered my heart's power of loving; the later the passion of love entered my life, the stronger, the deeper would be its hold upon me.

"Reasons like these may perhaps satisfy you; me they do not. He who has himself not experienced a miracle, but learns of it on the report of another, will gladly enough accept a natural explanation; but to him whose senses it has blinded, whose heart it has convulsed, to him it remains a miracle, because it is the only possible conception of the strange, overmastering feelings of such a moment. When I think of those days and how she and I felt-no words can tell, no subtlest speculation explain it. Look at it as you may, I will content myself by simply narrating the facts.

"And it is a fact that from that evening I was completely metamorphosed. For two days I forced myself to do my regular duties, on the third I went to Oronesti, to Mirescul's. The fellow was too cunning to betray his astonishment, he brimmed over with pleasure and suggested a drive in sleighs, and as the big sleigh was broken we had to go in couples in small ones, I with Hermine. This arrangement was evident enough, but how could I show surprise at what made me so blessed? Even Hermine was only startled for a moment and then, like me, gave herself up unreservedly to her feelings.

"And so it was in all our intercourse in the next two weeks. We talked a great deal and between whiles there were long silences; perhaps these blissful moments of speechlessness were precisely the most beautiful. During those days I scarcely touched her hand: we did not kiss one another, we did not speak of our hearts: the simple consciousness of our love was enough. It was not the presence of others that kept us within these bounds; we were much alone; Mirescul took care of that."

"And did that never occur to you?" asked Berger.

"Yes, at times, but in a way that may be highly significant of the spell under which my soul and senses laboured at the time. A man in a mesmeric trance distinctly feels the prick of a needle in his arm; he knows that he is being hurt; but he has lost his sense of pain. In some such way I looked upon Mirescul's friendliness as an insult and a danger, but my whole being was so filled with fantastic, feverish bliss that no sensation of pain could have penetrated my consciousness."

"And did you never think what would come of this?"

"No, I could swear to it, never! I speculated as little about my love, as the first man about his life: he was on the earth to breathe and to be happy; of death he knew nothing. And she was just the same; I know it from her letters later, at that time we did not write. And so we lived on, in a dream, in exaltation, without a thought of the morrow."

"It must have been a cruel awakening," said Berger.

"Frightful, it was frightful!" He spoke with difficulty, and his looks were veiled. "Immediately, in the twinkling of an eye, happiness was succeeded by misery, the most intoxicating happiness by the most lamentable, hideous misery… One stormy night in March I had had to stay at Mirescul's because my horses were taken ill, very likely through the food which Mirescul had given them… I was given a room next to Hermine's.

"On the next day but one-I was in my office at the time-the customs superintendent of the neighbouring border district entered the room. He was a sturdy, honourable greybeard, who had once been a Captain in the army. 'We have caught the rascal at last,' he announced. 'He has suddenly forgotten his usual caution. We took him to-night in the act of unloading 100 bales of tobacco at his warehouses. Here he is!'

"Mirescul entered, ushered in by two of the frontier guards.

"'My dear friend!' he cried. 'I have come to complain of an unheard-of act of violence!'

"I stared at him, speechless; had he not the right to call me his friend, – how often had I not called him friend in the last few weeks.

"'Send these men away.' I was dumb. The superintendent looked at me in amazement. I nodded silently, he shrugged his shoulders and left the room with his officials. 'The long and the short of it is,' said Mirescul, 'that my arrest was a misunderstanding: the officials can be let off with a caution!'

"'The matter must first be inquired into,' I answered at length.

"'Among friends one's word is enough.'

"'Duty comes before friendship.'

"'Then you take a different view of it from what I do,' he answered coming still closer to me. 'It would have been my duty to protect the honour of a respectable girl living in my house as a member of the family. It would now be my duty to drive your mistress in disgrace and dishonour from my doors. I sacrifice this duty to my friendship!'

"Ah, how the words cut me! I can feel it yet, but I cannot yet describe it. He went, and I was alone with my wild remorse and helpless misery."

Sendlingen rose and walked up and down excitedly. Then he stood still in front of his friend.

"That was the heaviest hour of my life, George-excepting the present. A man may perhaps feel as helpless who is suddenly struck blind. The worst torture of all was doubt in my beloved; the hideous suspicion that she might have been a conscious tool in the hands of this villain. And even when I stifled this thought, what abominations there were besides! I should act disgracefully if for her sake I neglected my duty, disgracefully if I heartlessly abandoned her to the vengeance of this man! She had a claim upon me-could I make her my wife? My oath to my dying father bound me, and still more, even though I did not like to admit it, my ambition, my whole existence as it had been until I knew her. My father's fate-my future ruined-may a man fight against himself in this way? Still-'A Sendlingen can never be a scoundrel'-and how altogether differently this saying affected me compared to my father! He had only an offence to expiate, I had a sacred duty to fulfil: he perhaps had only to reproach himself with thoughtlessness-but I with dishonour.

"And did I really love her? It is incomprehensible to me now how I could ever have questioned it, how I could ever have had those hideous doubts: perhaps my nature was unconsciously revenging herself for the strange, overpowering compulsion laid on her in the last few weeks, perhaps since everything, even the ugliest things, had appeared beautiful and harmonious in my dream, perhaps it was natural, now that my heart had been so rudely shaken, that even the most beautiful things should appear ugly. Perhaps-for who knows himself and his own heart?

"Enough! this is how I felt on that day and on the night of that day. Oh! how I writhed and suffered! But when at last the faint red light of early morning peeped in at my window, I was resolved. I would do my duty as a judge and a man of honour: I would have Mirescul imprisoned, I would make Hermine my wife. I no longer had doubts about her or my love, but even if it had not been so, my conscience compelled me to act thus and not otherwise, without regard to the hopes of my life.

"I went to my chambers almost before it was day, had the clerk roused from bed and dictated the record of the superintendent's information and a citation to the latter. Then I wrote a few lines to Hermine, begging her to leave Mirescul's house at once and to come to me. 'Trust in God and me,' I concluded. This letter I sent with my carriage to Oronesti; two hours later I myself intended to set out to the place with gendarmes to search the house and arrest Mirescul. But a few minutes after my coachman had left the court, the Jewish waiter from the hotel of the little town brought me a letter from my dear one. 'I have been here since midnight and am expecting you.' The lady looked very unwell, added the messenger compassionately, and was no doubt ill.

"I hastened to her. When she came towards me in the little room with tottering steps, my heart stood still from pity and fear; shame, remorse and despair-what ravages in her fresh beauty had they not caused in this short space? I opened my arms and with a cry she sank on my breast. 'God is merciful,' she sobbed. 'You do not despise me because I have loved you more than myself: so I will not complain.'

"Then she told me how Mirescul-she had kept her room for the two last days for it seemed to her as if she could never look anyone in the face again-had compelled her to grant him an interview yesterday evening. He requested her to write begging me to take no steps against him, otherwise he would expose and ruin us both. 'Oh, how hateful it was!' she cried out, with a shudder. 'It seemed to me as if I should never survive the ignominy of that hour. But I composed myself; whatever was to become of me, you should not break your oath as Judge. I told him that I would not write the letter, that I would leave his house at once, and when he showed signs of detaining me by force, I threatened to kill myself that night. Then he let me go, – and now do you decide my fate: is it to be life or death!'

"'You shall live, my wife,' I swore, 'you shall live for me.'

"'I believe you,' said she, 'but it is difficult. Oh! can perfect happiness ever come from what has been so hideously disfigured!'

"I comforted her as well as I could, for my heart gave utterance to the same piteous question.

"Then we took counsel about the future; she could not remain in Suczawa: we could see what vulgar gossip there would be even without this. So we resolved that she should go to the nearest large town, to Czernowitz, and wait there till our speedy marriage. With that we parted: it was to have been a separation for weeks and it proved to be for a lifetime: I never saw the unhappy girl again.

"How did it come about that I broke my oath? There is no justification for it, at best but an explanation. I do not want to defend myself before you any more than I have done: I am only confessing to you as I would to a priest if I were a believer in the Church.

"A stroke of fate struck me in that hour of my growth, I might have overcome it but now came its pricks and stabs. When I left Hermine to return to my chambers, I met the customs superintendent. I greeted him. 'Have you received my citation?' I asked. He looked at me contemptuously and passed on without answering. 'What does this mean?' cried I angrily, catching hold of his arm.

"'It means,' he replied, shaking himself loose, 'that in future I shall only speak to you, even on official matters, when my duty obliges me. That, for a time, is no longer necessary. You released Mirescul yesterday, you did not record my depositions. Both were contrary to your duty: I have advised my superiors in the matter and await their commands.'

"He passed on; I remained rooted to the spot a long while like one struck down; the honourable man was quite right!

"But I roused myself; now at least I would neglect my duty no longer. Scarcely, however, had I got back to my chambers, when my colleague, the Civil-Judge entered; he was as usual not quite sober, but it was early in the day and he had sufficient control of his tongue to insult me roundly. 'So you are really going to Oronesti,' he began. 'I should advise you not, the manœuvre is too patent. After twenty-four hours nothing will be found, as we set about searching the house just to show our good intentions-eh?'

"'I don't require to be taught by you,' I cried flaring up.

"'Oh, but, perhaps you do, though!' he replied. 'I might for instance teach you something about the danger of little German blondes. But-as you like-I wish you every success!'

"Smarting under these sensations, I drove to Oronesti. Mirescul met me in the most brazen-faced way; he protested against such inroads undertaken from motives of personal revenge. And he added this further protest to his formal deposition; he would submit to examination at the hands of any Judge but me who had yesterday testified that the accusation was a mistake and promised to punish the customs officials, and to-day suddenly appeared on the scene with gendarmes. Between yesterday and to-day nothing had happened except that he had turned my mistress out of his house, and surely this act of domestic propriety could not establish his guilt as a smuggler. You know, George, that I was obliged to take down his protest-but with what sensations!