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The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Volume 03

Год написания книги
2018
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Does there remain one to be taken?

COUNTESS.

Hush,

Collect yourself! I hear your mother coming.

THEKLA.

How shall I bear to see her?

COUNTESS.

Collect yourself.

SCENE III

To them enter the DUCHESS

DUCHESS (to the COUNTESS).

Who was here, sister? I heard someone talking,

And passionately too.

COUNTESS.

Nay! there was no one.

DUCHESS.

I am grown so timorous, every trifling noise

Scatters my spirits, and announces to me

The footstep of some messenger of evil.

And you can tell me, sister, what the event is?

Will he agree to do the Emperor's pleasure,

And send the horse-regiments to the Cardinal?

Tell me, has he dismiss'd Von Questenberg

With a favorable answer?

COUNTESS.

No, he has not.

DUCHESS.

Alas! then all is lost! I see it coming,

The worst that can come! Yes, they will depose him;

The accursed business of the Regensburg diet

Will all be acted o'er again!

COUNTESS.

No! never!

Make your heart easy, sister, as to that.

[THEKLA, in extreme agitation, throws herself upon her mother, and enfolds her in her arms, weeping.]

DUCHESS

Yes, my poor child!

Thou too hast lost a most affectionate godmother

In the Empress. O that stern unbending man!

In this unhappy marriage what have I

Not suffer'd, not endured? For even as if

I had been link'd on to some wheel of fire

That restless, ceaseless, whirls impetuous onward,

I have pass'd a life of frights and horrors with him,

And ever to the brink of some abyss

With dizzy headlong violence he bears me.

Nay, do not weep, my child. Let not my sufferings

Presignify unhappiness to thee,

Nor blacken with their shade the fate that waits thee.

There lives no second Friedland: thou, my child,
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