On the Cross: A Romance of the Passion Play at Oberammergau
them. All flocked around the burgomaster. "We will stand by you.
Burgomaster--only tell us what we are to do--and how we can help
ourselves. We rely wholly upon you."
"Alas! my friends, I must reward your restored confidence with
unpalatable counsel. Let us bear the misfortune like men! It is
better to fell trees in the forest, go out as day laborers--nay,
_starve_--rather than be faithless to the spirit of our ancestors! Am I
not right?" A storm of enthusiasm answered him.
It was resolved to announce the close of the Passion Play for this
decade. The document was signed by all the members of the community.
"So it is ended for this year! For many of us perhaps for this life!"
said the burgomaster. "I thank all who have taken part in the Play up
to this time. I will report the receipts and expenditures within a few
days. In consideration of the painful cause, we will dispense with any
formal close."
A very different mood from the former one now took possession of the
assembly. All anxiety concerning material things vanished in the
presence of a deeper sorrow. It was the great, mysterious grief of
parting, which seized all who had to do anything connected with the
"Passion." It seemed as if the roots of their hearts had become
completely interwoven with it and must draw blood in being torn away,
as if a part of their lives went with it. The old men felt the pang
most keenly. "For the last time for this life!" are words before whose
dark portal we stand hesitating, be it where it may--but if this "for
the last time" concerns the highest and dearest thing we possess on
earth, they contain a fathomless gulf of sadness! Old Barabbas, the man
of ninety, was the first, to express it--the others joined in and the
greybeards who had been young together and devoted their whole lives to
the cause which to them was the highest in the world, sank into one
another's arms, like a body of men condemned to death.
Then one chanted the closing line of the choragus: "Till in the world
beyond we meet"--and all joined as with a _single_ voice, the
unutterable anguish of resigning that close communion with Deity, in
which every one of them lived during this period, created its own
ceremonial of farewell and found apt expression in those last words of
the Passion Play.
Then they shook hands with one another, exchanging a life-long
farewell. They knew that they should meet again the next day--in the
same garments--but no longer what they now were, Roman governor and
high-priests, apostles and saints. They were excluded from the
companionship of the Lord, for their Christ had not risen as usual--he
had fled and faithlessly deserted his flock, ere their task could be
fulfilled. It was doubly hard!
Old Judas, the venerable Lechner, was so much moved that they were
obliged to support him down the stairs: Judas weeping over Christ! The
loyal man had suffered unutterably from the necessity of playing the
traitor's part--the treachery now practised toward the sacred cause by
the personator of Christ himself--fairly broke his heart! "That I must
live to witness this!" he murmured, wringing his hands as he descended
the steps. But Thomas Rendner shook his handsome head and mournfully
repeated the momentous words of Pilate: "What is truth?" With tears in
his eyes, he held out his sinewy right hand consolingly to Caiaphas.
"Don't take it so much to heart, Burgomaster; God is still with us!"
Then he cast a sorrowful glance toward the corner of the room. "Poor
Mary! I always thought so!" he muttered compassionately, under his
breath, and followed the others.
The burgomaster and Ludwig were left behind alone and followed
the direction of Rendner's glance. There--it almost broke their
hearts--there sat the burgomaster's sister--the "Mary" in the corner,
with her hands clasped in her lap, the very attitude in which she
waited for the body of her Crucified Son.
"Poor sister," said the burgomaster, deeply moved. "For what are you
waiting? They will never bring him to you again."
"He will come back, the poor martyr!" she replied, her large eyes
gazing with prophetic earnestness into vacancy. "He will come, weary
and wounded--perhaps betrayed by all."
"Then I will have nothing to do with him," said the burgomaster in a
low, firm tone.
"You can do as you please, you are a man. But I, who have so long
personated his mother--I will wait and receive and comfort him, as a
mother cheers her erring child."
"Oh, Anastasia!" A cry of pain escaped Ludwig's lips, and, overwhelmed
by emotion, he turned away.
The burgomaster, with tender sympathy, laid his hand upon his shoulder.
"Ah, sister, Freyer is not worthy that you should love him so!"
"How do I love him?" replied the girl. "I love him as Eternal
Compassion loves the poor and suffering. He _is_ poor and suffering.
Oh! do not think evil of him--he does not deserve it. He is good and
noble! Believe me, a mother must know her child better," she added,
with the smile that reveals a breaking heart.
She looked the drawing-master kindly in the face: "Ludwig, we both
understand him, do we not? _We_ believe in him, though all condemn."
Ludwig could not speak--he merely nodded silently and pressed
Anastasia's hand, as if in recognition of the pledge. He was undergoing
a superhuman conflict, but, with the strength peculiar to him,
succeeded in repressing any display of emotion.
The burgomaster stood mutely watching the scene, and neither of the
three could decide which suffered most.
He gazed in speechless grief at the clasped hands of his sister and his
friend. How often he had wished for this moment, and now--? What
_parted_ alone united them, and what united, divided.
"Aye, Freyer has brought much misery upon us!" he said, with sullen
resentment. "I only hope that he will never set foot again upon the
soil of his forefathers!"
"Oh, Brother, how can you speak so--you do not mean it. I know that his
heart will draw him back here; he will seek his home again, and he
shall find it. You will not thrust him from you when he returns from
foreign lands sorrowing and repentant. God knows how earnestly I wish
him happiness, but I do not believe that he will possess it. And as he
will be loyal to us in his inmost soul, we will be true to him and
prepare a resting place when the world has nailed his heart upon the
cross. Shall we not, Ludwig?"
"Yes, by Heaven, we will!" faltered Ludwig, and his tears fell on the
beautiful head of the girl, who still sat motionless, as if she must
wait here for the lost one.
"Woman, behold thy son--son, behold thy mother!" stirred the air like a
breath.
CHAPTER XVIII.
THE MARRIAGE.
On a wooded height, hidden in the heart of the forests of the Bavarian
highlands, stood an ancient hunting castle, the property of the
Wildenau family. A steep mountain path led up to it, and at its feet,
like a stone sea, stretched the wide, dry bed of a river, a Griess, as
it was called in that locality. Only a few persons knew the way; to the
careless glance the path seemed wholly impassable.
Bare, rugged cliffs towered like a wall around the hunting castle on
its mossy height, harmonizing in melancholy fashion with the white sea
of stone below, which formed a harsh foreground to the dreary scene.
Ever and anon a stag emerged from the woods, crossing the Griess with
elastic tread, the brown silhouette of its antlers sharply relieved
against the colorless monotony of the landscape. The hind came forward
from the opposite side, slowly, reluctantly, with nostrils vibrating.
The report of a rifle echoed from beyond the river bed, the antlers
drooped, the royal creature fell upon its knees, then rolled over on
its back; its huge antlers, flung backward in the death agony, were
thrust deep down among the loose pebbles. The hind had fled, the
poacher seized his prey--a slender rill of blood trickled noiselessly
through the stones, then everything was once more silent and lifeless.
This was the hiding-place where, for seven years, Countess Wildenau had
hidden the treasury filched from the cross--the rock sepulchre in which
she intended to keep the God whom the world believed dead. Built close
against the cliff, half concealed by an overhanging precipice, the
castle seemed to be set in a niche. Shut out from the sunshine by the
projecting crag which cast its shadow over it even at noonday, it was
so cold and damp that the moisture trickled down the walls of the
building, and, moreover, was surrounded by that strange atmosphere of
wet moss and rotting mushrooms which awakens so strange a feeling when,
after a hot walk, we pause to rest in the cool courtyard of some ruined
castle, where our feet sink into wet masses of mouldering brown leaves
which for decades no busy hand has swept away. It seems as if the sun
desired to associate with human beings. Where no mortal eyes behold its
rays, it ceases to shine. It does not deem it worth while to penetrate
the heaps of withered leaves, or the tangle of wild vines and bushes,
or the veil of cobwebs and lime-dust which, in the course of time,
accumulates in heaps in the masonry of a deserted dwelling.
As we see by a child's appearance whether or not it has a loving
mother, so the aspect of a house reveals whether or not it is dear to
its owner, and as a neglected child drags out a joyless existence, so a
neglected house gradually becomes cold and inhospitable.
This was the case with the deserted little hunting seat. No foot had
crossed its threshold within the memory of man. What could the Countess
Wildenau do with it? It was so remote, so far from all the paths of
travel, so hidden in the woods that it would not even afford a fine
view. It stood as an outpost on the chart containing the location of
the Wildenau estates. It had never entered the owner's mind to seek it
out in this--far less in reality.
Every year an architect was sent there to superintend the most
necessary repairs, because it was not fitting for a Wildenau to let one
of these family castles go to ruin. This was all that was done to
preserve the building. The garden gradually ran to waste, and became so
blended with the forest that the boughs of the trees beat against the
windows of the edifice and barred out like a green hedge the last
straggling sunbeams. A castle for a Sleeping Beauty, but without the
sleeping princess. Then Fate willed that a blissful secret in its
owner's breast demanded just such a hiding-place in which to dream the
strangest fantasy ever imagined by woman since Danae rested in the
embrace of Jove.
Madeleine von Wildenau sought and found this forgotten spot in her
chart, and, with the energy bestowed by the habit of being able to
accomplish whatever we desire, she discovered a secret ford through the
Griess, known only to a trustworthy old driver, and no one was aware of
Countess Wildenau's residence when she vanished from society for days.
There were rumors of a romantic adventure or a religious ecstacy into
which the Ammergau Passion Play had transported her years before. She
had set off upon her journey to the Promised Land directly after, and
as no sea is so wide, no mountain so lofty, that gossip cannot find its
way over them, it even made its way from the Holy Sepulchre to the
drawing rooms of the capital.
A gentleman, an acquaintance of so-and-so, had gone to the Orient, and
in Jerusalem, at the Holy Sepulchre, met a veiled lady, who was no
other than Countess Wildenau. There would have been nothing specially
remarkable in that. But at the lady's side knelt a gentleman who bore
so remarkable a resemblance to the pictures of Christ that one might
have believed it was the Risen Lord Himself who, dissatisfied with