EPILOGUE
Whenthe curtain falls on a tragedy in real life, the actors do not take off their dresses and depart to other scenes. They linger upon the stage, and those who care to do so, may watch the slow settling-down of the passions that once led on to the catastrophe.
Most of the characters in this story are still alive.
Johann and Dorothea are married, and dwell together peacefully in an ancient German city. The ardent reformer keeps to his old ideal, but his methods of working for it have greatly changed. He now believes that till his fellow-countrymen are of one mind as to the value of freedom, it is idle to try and thrust a republic upon them by force; and that when they are of one mind the republic will come of its own accord. He has founded a newspaper, in which he preaches his social gospel, in language sobered by the experiences he has gone through.
The Count von Eisenheim still holds the Regency. But old Von Sigismark is no longer Chancellor. His daughter’s persistence has caused him, not very willingly,to resign in favour of her husband, who is now the Baron von Moritz.
The musician Bernal has recently produced his great opera,The Jomsburg Saga, into which he has introduced a touching allusion to Maximilian’s fate. It has been received with applause throughout Germany.
In the same room in the Castle of Seidlingen, from which its builder took his fatal plunge, Ernest V. of Franconia drags out his existence. Over him the Court physician and a number of attendants, chief of whom is Karl Fink, maintain a surveillance which is never broken. Twice in every year, he is visited by a grey-haired woman, who passes through the ranks of the servants closely veiled, but with a step which still retains some of the stateliness that once distinguished the Princess Hermengarde.
When the visit is over, the stricken mother returns to her lonely home, in a distant corner of the kingdom, where she lives under the name of the Countess Walstadt, and bestows the larger part of her revenues upon the poor. The only pleasure she permits herself is the occasional society of Dorothea, who generally brings with her a little girl named Hermengarde, with flaxen hair and big blue eyes, who sits on the elder woman’s knee, and shyly accepts her caresses.
Only one name is never mentioned between the two friends, and Dorothea will never know the entire truth concerning the fate of Maximilian: whether he was in reality mad; or whether he was only deemed so by the brief-lived swarm that infests God’s glorious creation,and re-makes God in its own image, and sets up the standards of its own blind limitations, and proclaims them to be the laws of life.
“He has outsoared the shadow of their night—Envy and calumny and hate and pain.”
“He has outsoared the shadow of their night—Envy and calumny and hate and pain.”
“He has outsoared the shadow of their night—
Envy and calumny and hate and pain.”
THE END.