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CHAPTER VI.
Meanwhile our three adventurers continued yet a space in their strange
position, no one returning to their aid. Evening was advancing: the darkness
threatened to come on. Philina’s indifference was changing to anxiety; Mignon
ran to and fro, her impatience increasing every moment; and at last, when their
prayer was granted, and human creatures did approach, a new alarm fell upon
them. They distinctly heard a troop of horses coming up the road they had lately
travelled: they dreaded lest a second time some company of unbidden guests
might be purposing to visit this scene of battle, and gather up the gleanings.
The more agreeable was their surprise, when, after a few moments, a lady
issued from the thickets, riding on a gray courser, and accompanied by an
elderly gentleman and some cavaliers, followed by grooms, servants, and a troop
of hussars.
Philina started at this phenomenon, and was about to call, and entreat the fair
Amazon for help, when the latter turned her astonished eyes on the group,
instantly checked her horse, rode up to them, and halted. She inquired eagerly
about the wounded man, whose posture in the lap of this light-minded Samaritan
seemed to strike her as peculiarly strange.
“Is he your husband?” she inquired of Philina. “Only a friend,” replied the
other, with a tone Wilhelm liked not at all. He had fixed his eyes upon the soft,
elevated, calm, sympathizing features of the stranger: he thought he had never
seen aught nobler or more lovely. Her shape he could not see: it was hid by a
man’s white great-coat, which she seemed to have borrowed from some of her
attendants, to screen her from the chill evening air.
By this the horsemen also had come near. Some of them dismounted: the lady
did so likewise. She asked, with humane sympathy, concerning every
circumstance of the mishap which had befallen the travellers, but especially
concerning the wounds of the poor youth who lay before her. Thereupon she
turned quickly round, and went aside with the old gentleman to some carriages,
which were slowly coming up the hill, and which at length stopped upon the
scene of action.
The young lady having stood with her conductor a short time at the door of
one of the coaches, and talked with the people in it, a man of a squat figure
stepped out, and came along with them to our wounded hero. By the little box
which he held in his hand, and the leathern pouch with instruments in it, you
soon recognized him for a surgeon. His manners were rude rather than attractive;
but his hand was light, and his help welcome.
Having examined strictly, he declared that none of the wounds were
dangerous. He would dress them, he said, on the spot; after which the patient
might be carried to the nearest village.
The young lady’s anxiety seemed to augment. “Do but look,” she said, after
going to and fro once or twice, and again bringing the old gentleman to the
place: “look how they have treated him! And is it not on our account that he is
suffering?” Wilhelm heard these words, but did not understand them. She went
restlessly up and down: it seemed as if she could not tear herself away from the
presence of the wounded man; while at the same time she feared to violate
decorum by remaining, when they had begun, though not without difficulty, to
remove some part of his apparel. The surgeon was just cutting off the left sleeve
of his patient’s coat, when the old gentleman came near, and represented to the
lady, in a serious tone, the necessity of proceeding on their journey. Wilhelm
kept his eyes bent on her, and was so enchanted with her looks, that he scarcely
felt what he was suffering or doing.
Philina, in the mean time, had risen to kiss the lady’s hand. While they stood
beside each other, Wilhelm thought he had never seen such a contrast. Philina
had never till now appeared in so unfavorable a light. She had no right, as it
seemed to him, to come near that noble creature, still less to touch her.
The lady asked Philina various things, but in an under-tone. At length she
turned to the old gentleman, and said, “Dear uncle, may I be generous at your
expense?” She took off the great-coat, with the visible intention to give it to the
stripped and wounded youth.
Wilhelm, whom the healing look of her eyes had hitherto held fixed, was now,
as the surtout fell away, astonished at her lovely figure. She came near, and
softly laid the coat above him. At this moment, as he tried to open his mouth and
stammer out some words of gratitude, the lively impression of her presence
worked so strongly on his senses, already caught and bewildered, that all at once
it appeared to him as if her head were encircled with rays; and a glancing light
seemed by degrees to spread itself over all her form. At this moment the
surgeon, making preparations to extract the ball from his wound, gave him a
sharper twinge; the angel faded away from the eyes of the fainting patient; he
lost all consciousness; and, on returning to himself, the horsemen and coaches,
the fair one with her attendants, had vanished like a dream.
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