The Marquise of O and Other Stories (31 page)

This sudden fall from the heights of serene and almost untroubled happiness to the depth of incalculable and quite helpless misery was more than the poor woman could endure. Clinging to the fence by the rocky path she stumbled down it, not knowing where to go, yet hoping at least to find some lodging for that night; but before she had even reached the entrance to the little straggling village in the valley she collapsed on the ground, her strength already utterly exhausted. Oblivious of all the troubles of this world, she lay there for perhaps an hour, and the whole
place was already plunged in darkness when she regained consciousness to find herself surrounded by a number of sympathetic villagers. For a boy playing on the cliffside had noticed her there and reported this strange and surprising discovery to his parents; whereupon the latter, to whom Littegarde had often given bountiful assistance and who were extremely dismayed to learn of her wretched plight, immediately set out to do whatever might be in their power to help her. Thanks to their attentions she soon recovered herself, and looking back at the castle which stood closed behind her, she also regained her balance of mind; but declining the offer of two women to take her up to the castle again, she merely asked the villagers if they would be kind enough to provide her at once with a guide who would help her to continue her journey. The good people vainly sought to persuade her she was in no fit state to travel; Littegarde insisted, on the grounds that her life would be in danger if she remained one moment longer within the boundaries of the castle domain; and as the crowd round her increased and still stood nonplussed, she even attempted to force her way through it and to set out alone, despite the darkness of the night which had now fallen. Accordingly the villagers, fearing to be held responsible by their masters at the castle if she should come to any harm, felt compelled to do as she wished and fetched her a vehicle in which, after they had repeatedly asked her where she wanted to go, she was driven off in the direction of Basle.

But scarcely were they outside the village when, after considering the situation more carefully, she changed her mind and told her driver to turn round and take her to Trota Castle, which was only a few leagues away. For she was well aware that without someone to help and support her, she could not hope to prevail in the court at Basle against an adversary such as Count Jakob Rotbart; and she could think of no one more worthy to be entrusted with the task of defending her honour than her gallant friend, the
noble-hearted Chamberlain Friedrich von Trota, who as she well knew still devotedly loved her. It was perhaps about midnight, and the lights in the castle were still glimmering when she drove up, utterly worn out by her journey. A servant of the house came to meet her and she sent him to announce her arrival to the family; but even before he had done his errand the ladies Bertha and Kunigunde, Herr Friedrich's sisters, appeared from the front door, having, as it chanced, been downstairs in the anteroom on some household business. They knew Littegarde very well and greeted their friend joyfully as they helped her down from her carriage: then, though not without some trepidation, they took her upstairs to their brother, who was sitting at a desk immersed in the papers concerning a lawsuit in which he was involved. With indescribable amazement Herr Friedrich, hearing sounds behind him, turned round and saw the lady Littegarde, white and distraught, the very image of despair, falling upon her knees before him. ‘My dearest Littegarde!' he exclaimed, rising and lifting her to her feet: ‘What has happened to you?' Littegarde sank into a chair and told him the whole story: how Count Jakob Rotbart, to clear himself of the suspicion of murdering the Duke, had made a vile statement about her to the court at Basle; how at the news of this her old father, ailing as he was at the time, had at once had a stroke and died of it a few moments later in the arms of his sons; and how the latter in furious indignation, without heeding anything she might say in her defence, had treated her with dreadful cruelty and finally turned her out of doors like a criminal. She begged Herr Friedrich to see her suitably escorted to Basle and put in touch with an advocate there, who would wisely and prudently counsel her and take her part when she appeared before the Emperor's court of inquiry to answer that shameful allegation. She assured him that if it had been uttered by a Parthian or a Persian on whom she had never set eyes it could not have surprised her more than it did coming
from Count Jakob Rotbart, whom she had always deeply abhorred for his ugly reputation as well as for his looks; and she had, she said, always rejected with the utmost coldness and contempt the compliments he had sometimes taken the liberty of paying her on festive occasions during the previous summer. ‘Say no more, my dearest Littegarde!' cried Herr Friedrich, seizing her hand with noble ardour and pressing it to his lips. ‘Waste no words defending your innocence and justifying yourself. There is a voice that speaks for you in my heart, and it carries a far livelier conviction than any assurances, indeed than all the evidence and proofs which the combination of events and circumstances may well enable you to bring in your favour before the court at Basle. Your unjust and ungenerous brothers have abandoned you: therefore accept me as your friend and brother, and grant me the honour of being your advocate in this case; I will restore your shining and untarnished reputation before the court at Basle and in the eyes of all the world!' Thereupon he took Littegarde, whose eyes were streaming with tears of gratitude and emotion at his magnanimous words, upstairs to his mother Frau Helena, who had already withdrawn to her bedroom; he explained to this dignified old lady, who was particularly fond of Littegarde, that the latter was a guest who had decided to stay for a time in his castle in consequence of a quarrel that had broken out in her family. That very night a whole wing of the spacious castle was put at her disposal, the cupboards in the rooms were abundantly stocked for her with clothing and linen supplied by the two sisters from their stores, and she was also provided suitably, indeed lavishly, with servants, quite befitting her rank. On the third day Herr Friedrich von Trota, accompanied by many mounted knights and squires, was already on his way to Basle, without having given any indication of how he proposed to set about proving the case in court.

In the meantime the court at Basle had received from
Littegarde's two brothers at Breda Castle a letter concerning the recent incident there, in which, either because they really believed her to be guilty or because they had other reasons for desiring to ruin her, they declared their unfortunate sister to be a proven criminal meriting the full rigours of the law. At all events they were so ungenerous and untruthful as to represent her expulsion from the castle as a voluntary departure; they described how, upon some expressions of indignation on their part, she had left immediately, unable to utter a word in defence of her innocence; and alleged that as they had vainly tried to discover her whereabouts, they could only suppose that she was now crowning her disgrace by wandering at large in the company of some further adventurer. At the same time, to restore the honour of the House of Breda which she had besmirched, they applied to the court to have her name struck off the family tree; they also demanded, adducing complicated legal arguments, that as a punishment for her unspeakable misdeeds she should be deemed to have forfeited all claims on the inheritance of their noble father, whose death her disgrace had precipitated. Now the judges at Basle were by no means disposed to comply with these requests, which in any case were a matter not within their competence; but since in the meantime Count Jakob, on hearing the news from Breda, gave clear and unmistakable evidence of his concern for Littegarde's fate and was known to have secretly sent out riders in search of her in order to offer her refuge in his castle, the court decided that there was no longer any ground for doubting the truth of his evidence, and that the charge of assassination of the Duke, which was still pending against him, should at once be withdrawn. In fact, this concern which, he showed for the unhappy woman in the hour of her need even swung public opinion very much in his favour, strongly divided as it was for and against him; whereas his exposure to general scorn of a lady whose amorous favours he had enjoyed had
hitherto been sharply criticized, the extraordinary and sinister circumstances in which nothing less than his life and honour had been at stake were now held to excuse it, and to have left him with no alternative but to reveal without further scruple his adventure on the night of St Remigius. Accordingly, on the Emperor's express command, Count Jakob Rotbart was again summoned before the court to be solemnly and publicly acquitted of the suspicion of complicity in the murder of the Duke. The herald, in the great hall of the court, had just read aloud the letter from Rudolf von Breda and his brother, and the judges, with the accused man standing beside them, were about to give effect to the imperial decree and proceed formally to his honourable discharge, when Herr Friedrich von Trota advanced to the bar and, invoking the right of any impartial spectator, requested permission to look at the letter for a moment. Consent was given, and the eyes of the whole assembly were turned on him; but scarcely had the paper been handed to him by the herald than Herr Friedrich, after a fleeting glance at it, tore it from top to bottom and hurled the pieces, with his glove wrapped round them, into Count Jakob Rotbart's face, declaring him to be a vile and contemptible slanderer and vowing to prove before all the world, in a life and death ordeal by combat, the lady Littegarde's innocence of the offence of which he had accused her. Count Jakob Rotbart, turning pale and taking up the glove, said: ‘As surely as God judges righteously in an ordeal by arms, even so surely shall I prove to you, in honourable knightly combat, the truth of what I was forced to disclose about the lady Littegarde!' And turning to the judges he added: ‘Noble sirs, pray inform His Imperial Majesty of Herr Friedrich's intervention, and request him to name the time and place at which we may meet each other, sword in hand, to decide this dispute!' Accordingly the court adjourned and the judges sent a deputation to the Emperor reporting what had happened; whereupon the
latter, somewhat shaken in his belief in the Count's innocence by the appearance of Herr Friedrich as Littegarde's champion, summoned her to Basle to witness the duel, as the code of honour required, and appointed St Margaret's Day as the time, and the castle square at Basle as the place, for the armed encounter, in the lady Littegarde's presence, between Herr Friedrich von Trota and Count Jakob Rotbart, to clear up the strange mystery surrounding this affair.

Accordingly, at noon on St Margaret's Day the sun had just reached its zenith over the towers of the city of Basle, and an immense crowd of people, for whom benches and platforms had been put up, had filled the castle square, when the herald, standing in front of the balcony on which the judges of the duel had taken their places, sounded his threefold summons, and Herr Friedrich and Count Jakob, both armed from head to foot in gleaming bronze, advanced into the lists to decide their cause by combat. Almost all the knights of Swabia and Switzerland were present on the sloping terrace of the castle just behind the square; and on the castle balcony, surrounded by his courtiers, sat the Emperor himself, together with his consort and the princes and princesses, his sons and daughters. Shortly before the beginning of the fight, as the judges were assigning to each combatant his due share of light and shade, Frau Helena and her two daughters Bertha and Kunigunde, who had accompanied Littegarde to Basle, again appeared at the entrance to the square and asked the guards standing there for leave to enter and speak a few words with the lady Littegarde, who in accordance with ancient custom was seated on a stage inside the lists. For although this lady's way of life appeared to justify complete respect for her and the most absolute reliance on the truth of her assurances, nevertheless the evidence of the ring which Count Jakob possessed, and still more the fact that, upon the night of St Remigius, Littegarde had given leave of absence to her chambermaid, the only person who might have borne witness
for her, filled their minds with acute misgivings; they resolved to test once more whether even under the stress of this decisive moment she was sustained against the accusation by a perfectly clear conscience, and to try to convince her that if any burden of guilt did indeed lie on her soul it would be vain and indeed blasphemous to attempt to cleanse herself of it by appealing to the sacred verdict of arms, which would infallibly bring the truth to light. And indeed Littegarde had very good reason to reflect carefully on the action Herr Friedrich was now taking on her behalf: the stake awaited both her and her friend Herr von Trota if God, in this iron ordeal, should decide not for him but for Count Jakob Rotbart and for the truth of the testimony against her to which he had sworn. Seeing Herr Friedrich's mother and sisters approaching from the side entrance Littegarde rose from her seat with that air of dignity which was natural to her and which the sorrow now afflicting her so deeply made still more moving, and, going to meet them, inquired what brought them to her at so fateful a moment. ‘My dearest daughter,' said Frau Helena, taking her aside, ‘will you not spare a mother, who has nothing but her son to comfort her in her desolate old age, the grief of mourning at his graveside? Before this duel begins, will you not take a carriage and accept from us a large gift of money and of whatever else you need, and go to one of our properties on the other side of the Rhine, where you will be suitably and kindly welcomed, and which we will also make over to you as a gift?' Littegarde stared at her for a moment, the colour leaving her face, and as soon as she had taken in the full meaning of these words she went down on one knee before her and said: ‘Most honoured and noble madam! In this decisive hour God is to give his verdict on the innocence of my heart: does your apprehension that he will pass judgement against me originate in the mind of your noble son?' ‘Why do you ask that?' replied Frau Helena. ‘Because in that case I implore him, if he wields his sword with any lack of confidence, rather not to draw
it, and to surrender the lists to his adversary on whatever fitting pretext he can find; and since I can accept nothing from his compassion, to waste none on me but to abandon me to my fate, which I commit to the mercy of God!' ‘No!' said Frau Helena in confusion, ‘my son knows nothing of this! He pledged his word to the court to champion your cause, and it would ill befit him to act as you suggest now that the hour of trial has come. As you can see, he stands confronting your adversary the Count, already armed for the fight and firmly believing in your innocence; it was I and my daughters who thought of this proposal in the stress of the moment, when we considered what advantages might be gained and how much misfortune might be avoided.' ‘Then,' said Littegarde, ardently kissing the old lady's hand and wetting it with her tears, ‘then let him do what he has promised to do! No guilt stains my conscience; and even if he were to fight this duel without helmet or armour, God and all his angels will protect him!' So saying she stood up and led Frau Helena and her daughters to some chairs that had been placed on the same platform behind her own, which was draped in scarlet and on which she now sat down.