The Burning Secret Chapter 10 by Stefan Zweig

CHAPTER X

ON THE TRAIL

THE waiter, after serving Edgar with dinner in his room, closed and locked the door behind him. The child started up in a rage. His mother’s doings! She must have given orders for him to be locked in like a vicious beast.

“What’s going on downstairs,” he brooded grimly, “while I am locked in up here? What are they talking about, I wonder? Is the mystery taking place, and am I missing it? Oh, this secret that I scent all around me when I am with grown-ups, this thing that they shut me out from at night, and that makes them lower their voices when I come upon them unawares, this great secret that has been near me for days, close at hand, yet still out of reach. I’ve done everything to try to get at it.”

Edgar recalled the time when he had pilfered books from his father’s library and had read them, and found they contained the mystery, though he could not understand it. There must be some sort of seal, he concluded, either in himself or in the others that had first to be removed before the mystery could be fathomed. He also recalled how he had begged the servant-girl to explain the obscure passages in the books and she had only laughed at him.

“Dreadful,” he thought, “to be a child, full of curiosity, and yet not to be allowed even to ask for information, always to be ridiculed by the grown-ups, as if one were a stupid good-for-nothing. But never mind, I’m going to find it out, and very soon, I feel sure I will. Already part of it is in my hands, and I mean not to let go till I hold the whole of it."

He listened to find out if anyone were coming to the room. Outside, the trees were rustling in a strong breeze, which caught up the silvery mirror of the moonlight and dashed it in shivering bits through the network of the branches.

“It can’t be anything good that they intend to do, else they wouldn’t have used such mean little lies to get me out of their way. Of course, they’re laughing at me, the miserable creatures, because they’re rid of me at last. But I’ll be the one to laugh next. How stupid of me to allow myself to be locked in this room and give them a moment to themselves, instead of sticking to them like a burr and watching their every move. I know the grown-ups are always incautious, and they will be giving themselves away, too. Grown-ups think we’re still babies and always go to sleep at night. They forget we can pretend to be asleep and can go on listening, and we can make out we’re stupid when we’re really very bright.”

Edgar smiled to himself sarcastically when at this point his thoughts reverted to the birth of a baby cousin. The family in his presence had pretended to be surprised, and he had known very well they were not surprised, because for weeks he had heard them, at night when they thought he was asleep, discussing the coming event. And he resolved to fool his mother and the baron in the same way.

“Oh, if only I could peep through the key-hole and watch them while they fancy they’re alone and safe. Perhaps it would be a good idea to ring, and the boy would come and open the door and ask what I want. Or I could make a terrible noise smashing things, and then they’d unlock the door and I’d slip out.”

On second thought he decided against either plan, as incompatible with his pride. No one should see how contemptibly he had been treated, and he would wait till the next day.

From beneath his window came a woman’s laugh. Edgar started. Perhaps it was his mother laughing. She had good cause to laugh and make fun of the helpless little boy who was locked up when he was a nuisance and thrown into a corner like a bundle of rags. He leaned, circumspectly out of the window and looked. No, it wasn’t his mother, but one of a group of gay girls teasing a boy.

In looking out Edgar observed that his window was not very high above the ground, and instantly it occurred to him to jump down and go spy on his mother and the baron. He was all fire with the joy of his resolve, feeling that now he had the great secret in his grasp. There was no danger in it. No people were passing by—and with that he had jumped out. Nothing but the light crunch of the gravel under his feet to betray his action.

In these two days, stealing around and spying had become the delight of his life, and intense bliss, mingled with a faint tremor of alarm, filled him now as he tiptoed around the outside of the hotel, carefully avoiding the lights. He looked first into the dining-room. Their seats were empty. From window to window he went peeping, always outside the hotel for fear if he went inside he might run up against them in one of the corridors. Nowhere were they to be seen, and he was about to give up hope when he saw two shadows emerge from a side entrance—he shrank and drew back into the dark—and his mother and her inseparable escort came out.

In the nick of time, he thought. What were they saying? He couldn’t hear, they were talking in such low voices and the wind was making such an uproar in the trees. His mother laughed. It was a laugh he had never before heard from her, a peculiarly sharp, nervous laugh, as though she had suddenly been tickled. It made a curious impression on the boy and rather startled him.

“But if she laughs,” he thought, “it can’t be anything dangerous, nothing very big and mighty that they are concealing from me.” He was a trifle disillusioned. “Yet, why were they leaving the hotel? Where were they going alone together in the night?”

Every now and then great drifts of clouds obscured the moon, and the darkness was then so intense that one could scarcely see the white road at one’s feet, but soon the moon would emerge again and robe the landscape in a sheet of silver. In one of the moments when the whole countryside was flooded in brilliance Edgar saw the two silhouettes going down the road, or rather one silhouette, so close did they cling together, as if in terror. But where were they going? The fir-trees groaned, the woods were all astir, uncannily, as though from a wild chase in their depths.

“I will follow them,” thought Edgar. “They cannot hear me in all this noise.”

Keeping to the edge of the woods, in the shadow, from which he could easily see them on the clear white road, he tracked them relentlessly, blessing the wind for making his footsteps inaudible and cursing it for carrying away the sound of their talk. It was not until he heard what they said that he could be sure of learning the secret.

The baron and his companion walked on without any misgivings. They felt all alone in the wide resounding night and lost themselves in their growing excitement, never dreaming that on the high edges of the road, in the leafy darkness, every movement of theirs was being watched, and a pair of eyes was clutching them in a wild grip of hate and curiosity.

Suddenly they stood still, and Edgar, too, instantly stopped and pressed close up against a tree, in terror that they might turn back and reach the hotel before him, so that his mother would discover his room was empty and learn that she had been followed. Then he would have to give up hope of ever wresting the secret from them. But the couple hesitated. Evidently there was a difference of opinion between them. Fortunately at that moment the moon was shining undimmed by clouds, and he could see everything clearly. The baron pointed to a side-path leading down into the valley, where the moonlight descended, not in a broad flood of brilliance, but only in patches filtering here and there through the heavy foliage.

“Why does he want to go down there?” thought Edgar.

His mother, apparently, refused to take the path, and the baron was trying to persuade her. Edgar could tell from his gestures that he was talking emphatically. The child was alarmed. What did this man want of his mother? Why did he attempt—the villain!—to drag her into the dark? From his books, to him the world, came live memories of murder and seduction and sinister crime. There, he had it, the baron meant to murder her. That was why he had kept him, Edgar, at a distance, and enticed her to this lonely spot. Should he cry for help? Murder! He wanted to shriek, but his throat and lips were dry and no sound issued from his mouth. His nerves were tense as a bow-string, he could scarcely stand upright on his shaking knees, and he put out his hand for support, when, crack, crack! a twig snapped in his grasp.

At the sound of the breaking twig the two turned about in alarm and stared into the darkness. Edgar clung to the tree, his little body completely wrapped in obscurity, quiet as death. Yet they seemed to have been frightened.

“Let’s go home,” he could now hear his mother say anxiously, and the baron, who, evidently, was also upset, assented. Pressed close against each other, they walked back very slowly. Their embarrassment was Edgar’s good fortune. He got down on all fours and crept, tearing his hands and clothes on the brambles, through the undergrowth to the turn of the woods, from where he ran breathlessly back to the hotel and up the stairs to his room. Luckily the key was sticking on the outside, and in one second he was in his room lying on the bed, where he had to rest a few moments to give his pounding heart a chance to quiet down. After two or three minutes he got up and looked out of the window to await their return.

They must have been walking very slowly indeed. It took them an eternity. Circumspectly he peeped out of the shadowed frame. There, at length, they came at a snail’s pace, the moonlight shining on their clothes. They looked like ghosts in the greenish shimmer, and the delicious horror came upon him again whether it really might have been a murder, and what a dreadful catastrophe he had averted by his presence. He could clearly see their faces, which looked chalky in the white light. His mother had an expression of rapture that in her was strange to him, while the baron looked hard and dejected. Probably because he had failed in carrying out his purpose.

They were very close to the hotel now, but it was not until they reached the steps that their figures separated from each other. Would they look up? Edgar waited eagerly. No.

“They have forgotten all about me,” he thought wrathfully, and then, in triumph, “but I haven’t forgotten you. You think I am asleep or non-existent, but you’ll find out you’re mistaken. I’ll watch every step you take until I have got the secret out of you, you villain, the dreadful secret that keeps me awake nights. I’ll tear the strings that tie you two together. I am not going to go to sleep.”

As the couple entered the doorway, their shadows mingled again in one broad band that soon dwindled and disappeared. And once more the space in front of the hotel lay serene in the moonlight, like a meadow of snow.