Memories | Page 6

stolen it. Thereupon I grew very angry and
explained with holy zeal that I had given her the bracelet and that I
would not take it back again. What further occurred I know not, but I
remember that after that time, I showed the Princess everything I took
home with me.
It was a long time before my conceptions of Meum and Tuum were
fully settled, and at a very late period they were at times confused, just
as it was a long time before I could distinguish between the blue and
red colors. The last time I remember my friends laughing at me on this
account was when my mother gave me some money to buy apples. She
gave me a groschen. The apples cost only a sechser, and when I gave
the woman the groschen, she said, very sadly as it seemed to me, that
she had sold nothing the whole livelong day and could not give me
back a sechser. She wished I would buy a groschen's worth. Then it
occurred to me that I also had a sechser in my pocket, and thoroughly
delighted that I had solved the difficult problem, I gave it to the woman
and said: "Now you can give me back a sechser." She understood me so
little however that she gave me back the groschen and kept the sechser.
At this time, while I was making almost daily visits to the young
princes at the castle, both to play as well as to study French with them,
another image comes up in my memory. It was the daughter of the
Princess, the Countess Marie. The mother died shortly after the birth of
the child and the Prince subsequently married a second time. I know
not when I saw her for the first time. She emerges from the darkness of
memory slowly and gradually--at first like an airy shadow which grows
more and more distinct as it approaches nearer and nearer, at last
standing before my soul like the moon, which on some stormy night
throws back the cloud-veils from across its face. She was always sick

and suffering and silent, and I never saw her except reclining upon her
couch, upon which two servants brought her into the room and carried
her out again, when she was tired. There she lay in her flowing white
drapery, with her hands generally folded. Her face was so pale and yet
so mild, and her eyes so deep and unfathomable, that I often stood
before her lost in thought and looked upon her and asked myself if she
was not one of the "strange people" also. Many a time she placed her
hand upon my head and then it seemed to me that a thrill ran through
all my limbs and that I could not move or speak, but must forever gaze
into her deep, unfathomable eyes. She conversed very little with us, but
watched our sports, and when at times we grew very noisy and
quarrelsome, she did not complain but held her white hands over her
brow and closed her eyes as if sleeping. But there were days when she
said she felt better, and on such days she sat up on her couch,
conversed with us and told us curious stories. I do not know how old
she was at that time. She was so helpless that she seemed like a child,
and yet was so serious and silent that she could not have been one.
When people alluded to her they involuntarily spoke gently and softly.
They called her "the angel," and I never heard anything said of her that
was not good and lovely. Often when I saw her lying so silent and
helpless, and thought that she would never walk again in life, that there
was for her neither work nor joy, that they would carry her here and
there upon her couch until they laid her upon her eternal bed of rest, I
asked myself why she had been sent into this world, when she could
have rested so gently on the bosom of the angels and they could have
borne her through the air on their white wings, as I had seen in some
sacred pictures. Again I felt as if I must take a part of her burden, so
that she need not carry it alone, but we with her. I could not tell her all
this for I knew it was not proper. I had an indefinable feeling. It was not
a desire to embrace her. No one could have done that, for it would have
wronged her. It seemed to me as if I could pray from the very bottom of
my heart that she might be released from her burden.
One warm spring