The Valley of Vision : A Book of Romance and Some Half-Told Tales — John Shaqi
The Valley of Vision : A Book of Romance and Some Half-Told TalesVan Dyke, Henry
General
The Valley of Vision : A Book of Romance and Some Half-Told Tales
Van Dyke, Henry
Religious fiction, American; Short stories, American
He did not return the next day, nor the day after. His wife, tortured
by anxiety, went to the district headquarters. The commandant was
away. The aide could not enlighten her. There had been no message
sent to the baron--that was certain. Major Barenberg and Captain
Ludra had been transferred to another command. Unfortunately,
nothing could be done except to report the case.
The brave woman was not broken by her anguish, but raised to the
height of heroic devotion. She dedicated herself to the search for
her husband. The faithful forester, convinced that his master had
been killed, was like a slow, sure bloodhound on the track of the
murderers. He got a trace of them in a neighboring village, where
their car had been seen to pass at dusk on the fatal day. The
officers were in it, but not the baron. The forester got a stronger
scent of them in a wine-house, where their chauffeur had babbled
mysteriously on the following day. The old woodsman followed the
trail with inexhaustible patience.
“I shall bring the master's body home,” he said to his mistress,
“and God will use me to avenge his murder.”
A few weeks later he found his master's corpse hidden in a hollow
on the edge of the forest, half-covered with broken branches,
rotting leaves, and melting snow. There were three bullets in the
body. They had been fired at close range.
The widow's heart, passing from the torture of uncertainty to the
calm of settled grief, had still a sacred duty to live for. She had
not forgotten her husband's dream. She went to the cardinal-archbishop
to beg the consecration of a little burial-plot at the foot of the
greatest of the beeches of Azan. That wise and brave prince of
the church consented with words of tender consolation, and promised
his aid in the pursuit of the criminals.
“Eminence,” she said, weeping, “you are very good to me. God will
reward you. He is just. He will repay. But my heart's desire is
to follow my husband's dream.”
So the body of the old botanist was brought back to the shadow of
the great beech-trees, and was buried there, like the bones of a
martyr, within the sanctuary.
Is this the end of the story?
Who can say?
It is written also, among the records of Belgium, that the faithful
forester disappeared mysteriously a few weeks later. His body was
found in the forest and laid near his master.
Another record tells of the trial of Prince Barenberg and Count
Ludra before a court martial, The count was sentenced to ten years
of labor _on his own estate._ The death-sentence of the prince
was commuted to imprisonment _in some unnamed place._ So far
the story of German justice.
But of the other kind of justice--the poetic, the Divine--the record
is not yet complete.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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