Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 348

“Oh no!” she murmured to herself as he yet spoke; “that were too horrible!” and when he paused, it was with a smothered scream of agony, still mixed with doubt, that she cried “Karl!”

“Karl!” repeated the witchfinder, clenching the bars with still firmer grasp, and raising himself with the effort to the full height of his stature, as though his limbs had on a sudden recovered all their strength—“Karl! Ay, that was my name! How dost thou know it, woman?”

“O God!” exclaimed the wretched tenant of the cell, “was my cup of bitterness not yet full? Hast thou reserved me this?” She wrung her hands in agony, and then, looking again at the cripple, cried in a tone of concentrated misery, “Karl! they told me that thou wast dead—that thou, too, hadst died after that night of horrors!”

“Who art thou, woman?” cried the cripple again, with an accent of horror, as if a frightful thought had for the first time forced itself upon his brain. “Who art thou, that thou speakest to me thus, and freezest the very marrow of my bones with fear? Who art thou that criest ‘Karl’ with such a voice—a voice that now comes back upon my ear, as if it were a damning memory of times gone by? Who art thou woman?—speak! Let not this dreadful thought, that blasts me like lightning, strike me utterly to the earth.”

“Who I am?” sobbed the miserable woman. “Thy wretched and guilty mother, Karl!”

“Guilty!” shouted the cripple. “Then thou art not she! My mother was not guilty—she was all innocence and truth!”

“I am thy guilty mother, Karl,” repeated the kneeling woman, “who has striven, by long years of penitence and prayer, to expiate the past. Alas, in vain! for Heaven refuses the expiation, since it has reserved the wretched penitent this last, most fearful blow of all!”

“Thou!—oh no!—say it not! Thou my mother!” cried the witchfinder.

“Thy mother—Margaret Weilheim!”

“Horrible!—most horrible!” repeated the agonized son, letting go the bars, and clasping his bony hands over his face. “Thou, my once beloved mother, the wretched being of misery and sin—the accomplice of the spirits of darkness—and I thy denouncer! O God! This is some fearful delusion!”

“The delusion is in thy own heart, my poor, distracted, infatuated son,” pursued the miserable mother. “Happy and blessed were I, were no greater guilt upon my soul than that of the crime for which I am this day condemned to die. Bitter it is to die; but I had accepted all as the will of Him above, and he knows my innocence of all dealings with the powers of hell.”

“Innocent!” cried the witchfinder in frightful agitation. “Were it possible! And is it I, thy own child, who strikes the blow—I, who am thy murderer—I, who, to avenge the mother, have condemned the mother to the stake? Horrible! And yet those proofs—those fearful proofs!”

“Hear me, for my time is short now in this world,” said the poor woman, known by the name of Magdalena. “I will not tell thee how I listened to the voice of the serpent, and how I fell. My pride in my fatal beauty was my pitfall. All that the honied words of passion and persuasion could effect was used to lure me   on to my destruction—and at last I fled with my seducer. I knew not then, I swear to thee, Karl—God knows how bitterly it costs the mother to reveal her shame to her own son; but bitter if it be, she accepts is as an expiation, and she will not deceive him—I swear to thee, I knew not then that thy father had fallen in that unhappy night, and had fallen by the hand of him whom I madly followed. It was long after that the news reached me, and had nearly driven me distracted. The same tale told me, but falsely, the death of my first-born—my Karl. Remorse had long since tortured my heart. I was not happy with the lover of my choice—I never had been happy with him; but now the stings of my conscience became too strong to bear. Tormented by my bitter self-reproaches, I decided upon quitting my seducer, who had long proved cold and heartless. But I had borne him a child—a daughter; and to quit my offspring, the only child left to me, was agony; to take it with me, to bear it away to partake a life of poverty and wretchedness, was still greater agony to the mother’s mind. The great man who was its father—for he was of noble rank, and highly placed—when he found me determined to leave him and the world for ever—and he saw me part from him, the heartless one, without regret—offered to adopt my darling infant as his legitimate child; to bring it up to all the honours, wealth, and consideration of the world; to ensure it that earthly happiness the mother’s heart yearned to give it. But, as I have told thee, he was cold and worldly-minded, and he exacted from me an oath—a cruel oath—that I never should own my child again—that I never should address it as my offspring—that I never should utter the word ‘daughter,’ never hear the cry of ‘mother’ from its lips. He would not that his daughter, the noble Fraulein, should be brought to shame, by being acknowledged as the offspring of a peasant wife. All I desired was the welfare—the happiness—of my child.

“I stifled all the more selfish feelings of a mother’s heart and I consented. I took that oath. I kissed my child for the last time, and tore myself away. I hoped to die; but God reserved me for a long and bitter expiation of my sin. I still found upon earth, however, one kind and pitying friend. He was the brother of my noble lover, and himself among the highest in the land. He was a priest; and, in his compassion, he found me refuge in a convent, where, though I deemed myself unworthy to receive the veil, I assumed the dress of the humblest penitent, and took the name of the repentant one—the name of Magdalen. I desired to cut myself off completely from the world; and I permitted the father of my child to believe a report that I was no more. In the humility of my bitter repentance, I vowed never to pass the gates of the holy house of God—never to put my foot upon the sacred ground—never to profane the sanctuary with my soul of sin—to worship only without, and at the threshold, until such time as it should seem to me that God had heard my repentance, and accepted my expiation. Now, thou knowest why I have never dared to enter the holy building.”

The witchfinder groaned bitterly, clenching, in agony, the folds of his garment, and tearing his breast.

“My spiritual adviser was benevolent and kind; but he was also stern in his calling. He imposed upon me such penitence as, in his wisdom, he thought most fit to wash out my crime; and I obeyed with humble reverence. But there was one penance more cruel than the rest—the mortification of my only earthly affection—the driving out from my heart all thought of the child of my folly and sin—the vow never to seek, to look upon her more. But the love of the world was still too strong upon the wretched mother. At the risk of her soul’s salvation, she fled the convent to see her child once again. It was in the frenzy of a fever-fit, when I thought to die. I forgot all—all but my oath—I never sought to speak to my darling child; but I followed her wherever I could—I watched for her as she passed—I gazed upon her with love—I prayed for blessings on her head.”

“Alas! I see it all now. It is, as it were, a bandage fallen from my eyes. Fool—infatuated fool!—monster   that I was!” cried the witchfinder. “Bertha was your daughter—my sister; and I have smitten the mother for the love she bore her child. And he—her father—he was that villain! Curses on him!”

“Peace! Peace! my son!” continued Magdalena, “and curse no more. Nor can I tell thee that it was so. I have sworn that oath never to divulge my daughter’s birth; and cruel, heartless, as was the feeling that forced it on me, I must observe it ever. And thus I continued to live on—absorbed in the one thought of my child and her happiness—heedless of the present—forgetful of my duty; when suddenly, but two days ago, he who has been the kind guardian of my spiritual weal, appeared before me in the chamber where, alone and unobserved, I wept over the picture of my child. He came, I presume, by a passage seldom opened, from the monastery, whither his duties had called him. He chid me for my flight—recalled me to my task of expiation—and, bidding me return to the convent, left me, with an injunction not to say that I had seen him. Nor could I reveal the fact of my mysterious interview with him, or tell his name, without giving a clue to the truth of my own existence, and the discovery of all I had sworn so binding an oath ever to conceal. Thou sawest him also—but, alas! with other thoughts.”

“Madman that I have been!” exclaimed the witchfinder. “Or is it now that I am mad? Am I not raving? Is not all this insane delusion? No—thou are there before me—closed from my embraces by these cruel bars that I have placed between us. Thou! my mother—my long-lost—my beloved—most wretched mother, in that dreadful garb!—condemned to die by thy own infatuated son! Would that I were mad, and that I could close my brain to so much horror! But thou shalt not die, my mother—thou shalt not die! Thou are innocent! I will proclaim thy innocence to all! They will believe my word—will they not? For it was I who testified against thee. I, the matricide! I will tell them that I lied. Thou shalt not die, my mother! Already! already!—horror!—the day is come!”

The day was come. The first faint doubtful streaks of early dawn had gradually spread, in a cold heavy grey light, over the sky. By degrees the darkness had fled, and the market-place, the surrounding gables of the houses, the black pile in the midst, had become clearer and clearer in harsh distinctness. The day was come! Already a few narrow casements had been pushed back in their sliding grooves, and strange faces, with sleepy eyes, had peered out, in night attire, to forestall impatient curiosity. Already indistinct noises, a vague rumbling, an uncertain sound from here or there had broken up the utter silence of the night, and told that the drowsy town was waking from its sleep, and stirring with the faint movement of new life. The day was come! The sentinels paced up and down more quickly, to dissipate that feeling of shivering cold which runs through the night-watcher during the first hour of the morn. During the colloquy between the cripple and the prisoner, they had been more than once disturbed by the loud tones of passionate exclamation that had burst from the former; but Hans had contrived to dispel his comrade’s scruples as to what was going forward at the prison door, by making light of the matter.

“Let them alone. They are only having a tuzzle together—the witchfinder and the witch! And if the man, as the weaker vessel in matters of witchcraft, do come off minus a nose or so, it will never spoil Black Claus’s beauty, that’s certain. Hark! hark! they are at it again! To it, devil! To it, devil-hunter! Let them fight it out between them, man. Let them fight it out. It’s fine sport, and it will never spoil the show.” And Hans stamped with his feet, and hooted at a distance, and hissed between his teeth, with all the zest of a modern cockfighter in the sport, rather to the scandal and shame of his more cautious and scrupulous companion. But when the cripple, in his despair, shook, in his nervous grasp, the bars of the grating in the door, as if he would wrench it from its staples, and flung himself in desperation against the strongly-ironed wooden mass, with a   violence that threatened, in spite of its great strength, to burst it open, the matter seemed to become more serious in their eyes.

“Hollo, man! witchfinder! Black Claus! What art thou doing?” cried the sentinels, hurrying to the spot. “Does the devil possess thee? Art thou bewitched? Wait! wait! they’ll let her out quick enough to make her mount the pile. Have patience, man!”

“She is innocent!” cried the cripple, still grappling with the bars in his despair. “She is innocent! Let her go free!”

“He is bewitched,” said the one soldier. “See what comes of letting them be together.”

“He has had the worst of it, sure enough,” said Hans.

“I am not bewitched, fools!” cried the frantic man. “There’s no witchcraft here! She is innocent, I tell ye! O God! these bells! they announce their coming! Bid them cease! bid them cease! they drive me mad!”

At that moment a merry chime from the church-bells burst out joyously upon the morning air, to announce that a fête was about to take place in the town; for such a gratifying show as the burning of a witch, was a fête for the inhabitants of Hammelburg.

“These bells! these bells!” again cried Claus in agony, as their merry chime came in gusts along the rising wind, as if to mock his misery and despair. “How often, during this long night, I have longed to hear their joyous sound; and now they ring in my ears like the howlings of fiends! But she shall not die! I will yet save her,” continued the distracted man; and he again shook the prison door with a force which his crippled limbs could scarcely have been supposed to possess.

With difficulty could the now alarmed sentinels, who shouted for help, cause the cripple to release his hold. Fresh guards rushed to the spot, and assisted to seize the desperate man. But in vain he protested the innocence of the supposed sorceress—in vain he cried to them to release her. He was treated as bewitched; and it was only when at last, overcome by the violence of his struggles, he ceased to resist with so much energy, that they allowed him to remain unbound, and let fall the cords with which they had already commenced to tie his arms.

“The Ober-Amtmann will come,” he said at last, with a sort of sullen resignation. “He must—he shall hear me. He shall know all—he will believe her innocent.”

In the meanwhile, the market-place had already begin to fill with an anxious crowd. In a short time, the press of spectators come to witness the bloody spectacle, began to be great. The throng flowed on through street and lane. There were persons of all ages, all ranks, of both sexes—all hurrying, crowding, squeezing to the fête of horror and death. Manifold and various were the hundreds of faces congregated in a dense mass, as near as the guards would admit them round the pile—all moved by one feeling of hideous curiosity. Little by little, all the windows of the surrounding houses were jammed with faces—each window a strange picture in its quaintly-carved wooden frame. The crowd was there—the living crowd eager for death—palpitating with excitement—each heart beating with one pitiless feeling of greedy cruelty. And the bells still rang ceaselessly their merry, joyous, fête-like peal.

And now with difficulty the soldiers forced a way through the throng for the approaching officer of justice; the great officiating dignitary of the town, who was to preside over the ceremony. He neared the town-hall, to order the unlocking of the prison-door, when the wretched witchfinder again sprang forward, crying, “Mercy! mercy! she is innocent. Hear me, noble Ober-Amtmann!” But he again started back with a cry of despair—it was not the Ober-Amtmann. He had been obliged, by indisposition, to give up the office of superintending the execution, and the chief schreiber had been deputed to take his place.

“Where is the Ober-Amtmann?” cried Claus in agony. “I must see him—I must speak with him! She is innocent—I swear she is! He will save her, villain as he has been, when he hears all.”

The general cry that Black Claus had been bewitched by the sorceress,   was a sufficient explanation to the chief schreiber of his seemingly frantic words.

“Poor man!” was his only reply. “She has worked her last spell upon him. Her death alone can save his reason.”

In spite of the struggles and cries of the infuriated cripple, the door was opened, and the unhappy Magdalena was forced to come forwards by the guards. She looked wretchedly haggard and careworn in her sackcloth robe, with her short-cut grey hairs left bare. A chain was already bound around her waist, and clanked as she advanced. As her eyes fell upon her miserable son she gave one convulsive shudder of despair; and then, clasping her hands towards him with a look of pity and forgiveness, she murmured with a tone of resignation—“It is too late. Farewell! farewell! until we meet again, where there shall be no sorrow, no care, no pain—only mercy and forgiveness!”

“No, no—thou shalt not die!” screamed the cripple, whom several bystanders, as well as guards, now held back with force, in awe as well as pity at his distracted state.—“Thou shalt not die! She is my mother!” he cried like a maniac to the crowd around. “My mother—do ye hear? She is innocent. What I said yesterday was false—utterly false—a damning lie! She is not guilty—you would murder her! Fools! wretches, assassins! You believed me when I witnessed against her; why will ye not believe me now? She is innocent, I tell you. Ye shall not kill her!”

“He is bewitched! he is bewitched! To the stake with the sorceress!—to the stake!” was the only reply returned to his cries by the crowd.

In truth the miserable man bore all the outward signs of a person who, in those times, might be supposed to be smitten by the spells of witchcraft. His eyes rolled in his head. His every feature was distorted in the agony of his passion. His mouth foamed like that of a mad dog. His struggles became desperate convulsions.

But he struggled in vain. The procession advanced towards the stake. Between two bodies of guards, the condemned woman dragged her suffering bare feet over the rough stones of the market-place. On one side of her walked the executioner of the town; on the other, his assistant, with a lighted torch of tow, besmeared with resin and pitch, shedding around in a small cloud, the lurid smoke that was soon about to arise in a heavy volume from the pile. The chief schreiber had mounted, with his adjuncts, the terrace before the door of the town-hall, whence it was customary for the chief dignitary of the town to superintend such executions. The bells rang on their merry peal.

And now the unhappy woman was forced on to the pile. The executioner followed. He bound her resistless to the stake, and then himself descended. At each of the four corners of the pile, a guard on horseback kept off the crowd. There was a pause. Then appeared, at one end of the mass of wood and fagots, a slight curling smoke—a faint light. The executioner had applied the torch. A few seconds—and a bright glaring flame licked upwards with a forked tongue, and a heavier gush of smoke burst upwards in the air. The miserable woman crossed her hands over her breast—raised her eyes for a moment to heaven, and then, closing them upon the scene around her, moved her lips in prayer—in the last prayer of the soul’s agony. The crowd, which, during the time when the procession had advanced towards the pile, had howled with its usual pitiless howl, was now silent, breathless, motionless, in the extreme tension of its excitement. But still the merry peal of bells rang on.

The smoke grew thicker and thicker. The flame already darted forward, as if to snatch at the miserable garment of its victim, and claim her as its own, when there was heard a struggle—a cry—a shout of frantic despair. The cripple, in that moment when all were occupied with the fearful sight, had broken on those who held him, and before another hand could seize him, had staggered through the crowd, and now swung himself with force upon the pile. A cry of horror burst from the mass of spectators. They thought him utterly deprived of reason, and determined, in his madness, to die with the sorceress. But in a   moment his bony hands had torn the link that bound the chain—had unwound the chain itself—had snatched the woman from the stake. Before, in the surprise of the moment, a single person had stirred, his arm seized, with firm and heavy gripe, the collar of the nearest horseman, who found himself in his seat on horseback upon a level with the elevation of the pile. He knocked him with violence from the saddle. The guard reeled and fell; and in the next instant Claus had flung himself on to the horse, and in his arms he bore the form of the half-fainting Magdalena.

With a cry—a yell—a wild scream—he shouted, “To the sanctuary! to the sanctuary! she shall not die—room! room!” Trampling right and left to the earth the dense crowd, who fled from his passage as from an infuriated tiger in its spring, he dashed upon the animal over the market-place, and darted in full gallop down the street leading to the Bridge-gate of the town.

“After him!” cried a thousand voices. The three other horsemen had already sprung after the fugitive. The guards hastened in the same direction. Several of the crowd rushed down the narrow street. All was confusion. Part of those who passed on impeded the others. Groans arose from those who had been thrown down by the frantic passage of Claus, and who, lying on the stones, prevented the pushing forwards of the others.

“Follow! After him! to the sanctuary!” still cried a thousand voices of the crowd.

At the same moment a noise of horsemen was heard coming from the entrance of the town in the opposite direction to that leading to the bridge. Those who stood nearest turned their heads eagerly that way. The first person who issued on the street, at full gallop, was Gottlob, without a covering to his head—his fair hair streaming to the wind—his handsome face pale with fatigue and excitement.

“Stop! stop!” he shouted as he advanced, and his eye fell upon the burning pile. “I bring the prince’s pardon! Save her!”

In a few moments, followed by a scanty train of attendants, appeared the Prince Bishop of Fulda himself, in the dress—half religious, half secular—that he wore in travelling. His mild benevolent face looked haggard and anxious, and he also was very pale; for he had evidently ridden hard through a part of the night; and the exertion was too much for his years and habits. As he advanced through the crowd, who drew back with respect from the passage of their sovereign, he eagerly demanded if the execution had taken place. The general rumour told him confusedly the tale of the events that had just occurred. Gottlob was soon again by his side, and related to him all that he had heard.

“Where is my brother?” cried the bishop. “Is he not here?”

A few words told him that he had not appeared on this occasion.

“I will to the palace, then,” he continued. “And the poor wretched woman, which way has that maniac conveyed her?”

“To the sanctuary upon the mountain-side, in the path leading to your highness’s castle of Saaleck, as he was heard to cry,” was the answer.

“But the torrents have come down from the hills,” exclaimed others, “and the inundations sweep so heavily upon the bridge, that it is impossible to pass it without the utmost danger.”

“Save that unhappy woman!” exclaimed the bishop in agitation. “A reward for him who saves her!” and followed by his attendants, he took the direction of the street leading to the palace.

It was true. The torrents had come down from the hills during the night, and the waters swept over the bridge with fury. The planked flooring of the bridge, raised in ordinary circumstances some feet above the stream, was now covered by the raging flood; and the side parapets, which consisted partly of solid enclosure, partly of railing, tottered, quivered, and bent beneath the rushing mass of dark, dun-coloured, whirling waters. The river itself, swelled far beyond the usual extent of the customary inundations, for the passage of which the extreme length of the bridge had been provided, hurried in wild eddies round the walls of the town, like an invading army seeking to tear them down.   But the frantic Claus heeded not the violence of the waters, and dashed through the town-gate towards the bridge with desperation. The frightened horse shied at the foaming stream, struggled, snorted; but the cripple seemed to possess the resistless power of a demon—a power which gave him sway over the brute creation. He urged the unwilling animal, with almost superhuman force, on to the tottering bridge.

The guards who had galloped after him, stopped suddenly as they saw the roaring torrent. None dared advance, none dared pursue. Others, on foot, clogged the gateway, and stood appalled at the sight of the rushing flood. The more eager of the crowd soon mounted on to those parts of the town-walls that flanked the gate, and watched, with excited gesture, and shouts of wonder or terror, the desperate course of the cripple.