influence! and I myself am dying.”
I bowed my head into my hands and wept in silence.
“One night,” she went on, “one night—I was only ten—and my mother, with the remains of her superhuman energy, for she was near her end that night, came to me when I lay asleep. It was in winter; a stony cold hand caught me by the wrist. I looked up. Before me stood a tall woman; in one hand she held a flaming torch, with the other she held me by the arm. Her robe was sprinkled with snow. There was a convulsive movement in all her limbs and her eyes were fired with a gloomy light through the long locks of white hair which hung in disorder round her face. It was my mother; and she said, ‘Odile, my child, get up and dress! You must know it all!’ Then taking me to Hugh Lupus’s tower she showed me the open subterranean passage. ‘Your father will come out that way,’ she said, pointing to the tower; ‘he will come out with the she-wolf; don’t be frightened, he won’t see you.’ And presently my father, bearing his funereal burden, came out with the old woman. My mother took me in her arms and followed; she showed me the dismal scene on the Altenberg of which you know. ‘Look, my child,’ she said; ‘you must for I—am going to die soon. You will have to keep that secret. You alone are to sit up with your father,’ she said impressively—‘you alone. The honour of your family depends upon you!’ And so we returned. A fortnight after my mother died, leaving me her will to accomplish and her example to follow. I have scrupulously obeyed her injunctions as a sacred command, but oh, at what a sacrifice! You have seen it all. I have been obliged to disobey my father and to rend his heart. If I had married I should have brought a stranger into the house and betrayed the secret of our race. I resisted. No one in this castle knows of the somnambulism of my father, and but for yesterday’s crisis, which broke down my strength completely and prevented me from sitting up with my father, I should still have been its sole depositary. God has decreed otherwise, and has placed the honour and reputation of my family in your keeping. I might demand of you, sir, a solemn promise never to reveal what you have seen to-night. I should have a right to do so.”
“Madam,” I said, rising, “I am ready.”
“No, sir,” she replied with much dignity, “I will not put such an affront upon you. Oaths fail to bind base men, and honour alone is a sufficient guarantee for the upright. You will keep that secret, sir, I know you will keep it, because it is your duty to do so. But I expect more than this of you, much more, and this is why I consider myself obliged to tell you all!”
She rose slowly from her seat.
“Doctor Fritz,” she resumed in a voice which made every nerve within me quiver with deep emotion, “my strength is unequal to my burden; I bend beneath it. I need a helper, a friend. Will you be that friend?”
“Madam,” I replied, rising from my seat, “I gratefully accept your offer of friendship. I cannot tell you how proud I am of your confidence; but still, allow me to unite with it one condition.”
“Pray speak, sir.”
“I mean that I will accept that title of friend with all the duties and obligations which it shall impose upon me.”
“What duties do you mean?”
“There is a mystery overhanging your family; that mystery must be discovered and solved at any cost. That Black Pest must be apprehended. We must find out where she comes from, what she is, and what she wants!”
“Oh, but that is impossible!” she said with a movement of despair.
“Who can tell that, madam? Perhaps Divine Providence may have had a design connected with me in sending Sperver to fetch me here.”
“You are right, sir. God never acts without consummate wisdom. Do whatever you think right. I give my approval in advance.”
I raised to my lips the hand which she tremblingly placed in mine, and went out full of admiration for this frail and feeble woman, who was, nevertheless, so strong in the time of trial. Is anything grander than duty nobly accomplished?
CHAPTER XII
An hour after the conversation with Odile, Sperver and I were riding hard, and leaving Nideck rapidly behind us.
The huntsman, bending forward over his horse’s neck, encouraged him with voice and action.
He rode so fast that his tall Mecklemburger, her mane flying, tail outstretched, and legs extended wide, seemed almost motionless, so swiftly did she cleave the air. As for my little Ardenne pony, I think he was running right away with his rider. Lieverlé accompanied us, flying alongside of us like an arrow from the bow. A whirlwind seemed to sweep us in our headlong way.
The towers of Nideck were far away, and Sperver was keeping ahead as usual when I shouted—
“Halloo, comrade, pull up! Halt! Before we go any farther let us know what we are about.”
He faced round.
“Only just tell me, Fritz, is it right or is it left?”
“No; that won’t do. It is of the first importance that you should know the object of our journey. In short, we are going to catch the hag.”
A flush of pleasure brightened up the long sallow face of the old poacher, and his eyes sparkled.
“Ha, ha!” he cried, “I knew we should come to that at last!”
And he slipped his rifle round from his shoulder into his hand.
This significant action roused me.
“Wait, Sperver; we are not going to kill the Black Pest, but to take her alive!”
“Alive?”
“No doubt, and it will spare you a good deal of remorse perhaps if I declare to you that the life of this old woman is bound up with that of your master. The ball that hits her hits your lord.”
Sperver gazed at me in astonishment.
“Is this really true, Fritz?”
“Positively true.”
There was a long silence; our mounts, Fox and Rappel, tossed their heads at each other as if in the act of saluting one another, scraping up the snow with their hoofs in congratulation upon so pleasant an expedition. Lieverlé opened wide his red mouth, gaping with impatience, extending and bending his long meagre body like a snake, and Sperver sat motionless, his hand still upon his gun.
“Well, let us try and catch her alive. We will put on gloves if we have to touch her, but it is not so easy as you think, Fritz.”
And pointing out with extended hand the panorama of mountains which lay unrolled about us like a vast amphitheatre, he added—
“Look! there’s the Altenberg, the Schnéeberg, the Oxenhorn, the Rhéthal, the Behrenkopf, and if we only got up a little higher we should see fifty more mountain-tops far away, right into the Palatinate. There are rocks and ravines, passes and valleys, torrents and waterfalls, forests, and more mountains; here beeches, there firs, then oaks, and the old woman has got all that for her camping-ground. She tramps everywhere, and lives in a hole wherever she pleases. She has a sure foot, a keen eye, and can scent you a couple of miles off. How are you going to catch her, then?”
“If it was an easy
