Chapter XV: What the 'extra Blatt' Told

A few days after the Thuringians and others advanced from the Moselle, the quiet family in the old Schloss of Frankenburg assembled as usual at breakfast. The old butler had cut and aired the morning papers--the _Staats Anzeiger_, the _Cologne Gazette_, the _Extra Blatt_, and so forth, and laid them beside the Count. The two young ladies were there in most becoming morning toilets, and there, too, was the Herr Baron Grünthal. The hour was an unusual one for his Excellency to be at Frankenburg, but he had been dining there the evening before; a storm had come on, and, to the infinite annoyance of Ernestine, he had accepted the Count's invitation to remain all night.

With the single exception of absurd family pride and the consequent tyranny over Ernestine, the general tenor of the Count's household presented a fair example of German domestic life.

'The serious character of a people,' says the translator of Schiller's poem 'The Glocke,' 'who begin the common business of everyday life with prayer, who attach importance as well to the manner of performing an action as to the action itself, the custom of travelling, either in their own or in foreign countries, in the interval between the completion of their education and their settlement in life, the domestic manners, where great attention is paid to the minutiæ of domestic economy,' are all, he maintains, peculiar to the German people.

As southerns, the family of Frankenburg were more gay and lively in manner than Germans usually are, for being nearer the Rhine they had been for generations insensibly under French influences; yet they were all German, to the heart's core.

Ernestine was looking crushed and pale. The self-conscious air that a really beautiful girl usually possesses had nearly left her now; while Herminia, happy in her love, and having but one anxiety--the safety of Heinrich--looked bright and radiant as ever.

In a letter from Heinrich to her, Ernestine had been told the story of the strangely coincident dreams; and to a romantic and enthusiastic girl like her--one deeply imbued, too, with German mysticism--the idea that she had thus communed and met, and might again commune with and meet her lover in the spirit, was a source of the purest joy. Every night she laid her head on the pillow in the hope that her soul might fly to him; but as yet no more such visions had come.

And this brave-hearted and handsome young Englishman--Carl, her own Carl--he was risking wounds and death, enduring toil and suffering for the Kaiser, for Germany, and for _her_; for well she knew that Charlie Pierrepont identified her image with the Fatherland. Then how cruel it was of the Countess to view him so, and to treat him as she did; and again and again she asked in her heart--

'Is it a crime to love?'

But rank was the _joss_, the idol that was worshipped in Frankenburg.

However, she had Charlie's ring on her finger, and a curly lock of his hair in a gold locket, reposing in the cleft of her white bosom, all unknown to the Herr Baron, and to all, save Herminia, who could now see the blue ribbon at which it hung encircling her slender neck; and in her bosom, too, she had his last letter, a mere scrap, but full of love and truth and great tenderness; and yet he wrote of pay and poverty. Ob, how hard it was when youth alone should be money, beauty, wealth, and everything.

'Ernestine, meine liebe,' the Countess would say from time to time, 'attend to the Herr Baron--assist him with your own pretty hands. Dear girl! she is always so bright when you are here, Grünthal. She must be doubly happy to see you this morning, after only leaving you last night.'

But poor Ernestine looked anything but happy or bright either, and the Baron, though a lover, was middle-aged; hence his raptures did not spoil his appetite, and he made genuine German breakfast, demolishing steaks, potatoes, rolls, eggs, and coffee, in the most unromantic way in the world.

His hair was turning iron-grey, and on his pericranium was a bald spot the size of a Prussian dollar. He limped a little in his gait--there was no concealing that devilish gout--yet he looked surprisingly young. He was attired in an elegant morning-coat with pale-coloured trousers, a scarlet flower as well as a red ribbon at his button-hole. His hair was brushed up into a stiff bristly pyramid in front; but his face looked flabby now, and his coarse moustache, like that of a walrus, overhung his mouth.

Though suspicious, as we have said elsewhere, concerning that visit to the Dom Kirche, and the mistake about the colour of the marble of Charlemagne's throne, he had not the slightest idea that he had a rival so formidable as Charlie Pierrepont, or that he, Herr Baron Grünthal, Oberdirector of the Consistory Court, could have any rival at all!

Yet there was one thing he could not help remarking--that of all the many handsome presents he had sent Ernestine, from Berlin and elsewhere, not one was ever to be seen on her slender wrists, her fairy-like hand, or round her delicate throat.

This surely boded ill for him as a lover! He found himself, however, highly acceptable to her family, and the marriage once over, all that was necessary would be sure to come after. Whenever he was present or expected, the Countess always seemed, somehow, unusually large and rustling, and on this morning was especially so, in white lace over back moiré, with her high _toupée_--it was quite an evening costume she had donned.

The meal was taken somewhat silently, for at times:

'When great events were on the gale,
And each hour brought a varying tale;'

and when newspaper correspondents were often fallacious and fallible, the gazettes were unfolded with fear and trembling, and the arrival of a telegram was quite sufficient to terrify the quiet household at Frankenburg.

The Count and Baron, with spectacles on nose, had skimmed over the papers, which contained nothing to alarm them in the way of friends' names among the lists of killed and wounded in the action of the 14th of August; but the Baron read aloud, with peculiar unction, some of those barbarous reports and stories with which the French and German papers then teemed of cruelties perpetrated on both sides. No one knew then whether they were false or true; but they served to fan and inflame the hatred of the adverse parties to fever heat.

The Baron read that many of the dead Arabs and Turcos at Freshweiler were found with fragments of human flesh--torn from the German wounded--between their jaws; that a Saxon officer, who had been struck by a bullet, and taken shelter in the house of a peasant, where he fainted from loss of blood, had his eyes torn out by a woman armed with a fork. These and many other details of atrocities, which actually found their way into the London papers, he read for the edification of the ladies, while Ernestine and Herminia exchanged glances of horror and commiseration, as much as to say how awful it was to think that those they loved so dearly had to run the risk of perils such as these!

Even the Countess forgot her Spitz pug, and a piece of mysterious crochet, that seemed endless as the web of Penelope, while listening to the news, and far away from her peaceful home her thoughts followed her son, to where in the fields, the lanes, the valleys, and pretty hamlets of Alsace and Lorraine, and in places then rendered deserts, there lay in hundreds--yea, in thousands--the hopes of families, the heads of homes, the source of many a broken heart!

Suddenly the Baron raised his voice, and a strange gleam passed over his face.

'Der Teufel!' he exclaimed; 'here is the name of a friend of yours--in the _Extra Blatt_?

'Of mine--who?' asked the Count.

'We regret to learn by a recent telegram from the seat of war that a party of the 95th Thuringian Regiment met with a severe misfortune, and lost two officers. Herr Lieutenant Pierrepont fell, it is believed, mortally wounded----'

The Baron paused and changed colour; the Countess grew pale, but with a smile of grim satisfaction on her lips; the Count said:

'Poor fellow--poor fellow!'

A low cry escaped Ernestine, who fell forward with her face on the table, and her arms stretched upon it at full length; but this emotion failed to avert the attention of the Baron, whose eyes, now dilated, were fixed on the newspaper. He was very pale, and shook his head slowly, as he said to the Count:

'Ach Gott--the worst is yet to come. Compose yourself, my dear friend.'

'Read--read--it is the name of my son--my Heinrich, that you see,' said the Countess, in a breathless voice.

'It is, madam. "Herr Lieutenant Pierrepont fell, it is believed, mortally wounded----"'

'You read that already; what matters it to me?'

'"And the Herr Graf Von Frankenburg was taken prisoner, and _hanged by the Francs Tireurs_!" Oh, my friends,' added the Baron, 'I beseech you to suspend your grief for a time; it may all be some terrible mistake, to be cleared up in the end.'

'We seem fated to have startling tidings here!' groaned the poor old Count, as his wife flung herself in a passion of tears upon his breast.