Page:Select Popular Tales from the German of Musaeus.djvu/26

14 horse which was to carry him to his debtors, under the title of a Bremen merchant.

All that he regretted, was his departure from his beloved Mela. “What will she say to my sudden disappearance? I shall no longer meet her coming home from church; she will perhaps think me faithless, and banish me from her heart for ever!” Such ideas made him very uneasy, and, for some time, he could discover no means to inform her of his real intentions. Ingenious love at length supplied him with the happy notion of having prayers put up for the success of his journey in the church, which Mela and her mother generally frequented, and thus they would no longer remain ignorant of his object. With this view he gave the priest a small sum, begging that a daily prayer might be offered for a young man compelled to go abroad upon business, as well as for the success of his undertaking. The same prayer was to be continued until his return, when it was his intention to purchase a thanksgiving.

On meeting Mela for the last time, he was in his travelling dress. He passed quite close to her; saluted her in a more marked manner than usual, which brought the eloquent blood into the lovely girl’s cheeks. Her mother scolded, made many unpleasant remarks, and expressed her dislike of him in no very guarded terms. She declared that such impertinence would injure her daughter’s reputation, and spite of her vow to keep silence, she never dropped the subject during the whole of that day. Young Franz, however, had taken his leave of the good city of Bremen, and the most lovely eyes might now wander in search of him in vain.

Mela went to church, and heard her lover’s prayer repeated very often; and, in truth, it was in some degree intended for her ears. Yet she paid little attention to it, such was her grief for the disappearance of her lover. The very words that would have explained it, escaped her ear, and she was at a loss what to think of it. In the course of a month or two, when her sorrow was a little abated, and his absence grew less trying, she had been, for the first time, paying attention to the words of the prayer, and comparing them with other circumstances, she suddenly guessed their meaning, wondering at her own stupidity in not sooner discovering it, and at the same time praising her lover’s ingenious notion.

Franz, meanwhile, was pursuing his way towards Antwerp, where his father’s debtors chiefly resided, and where he hoped to recover some considerable sums. Such a journey, from Bremen to Antwerp was, in those days, more formidable than one from Bremen to Kamschatka in the present. The peace just proclaimed by the Emperor Maximilian was so little observed, that the public roads were in all parts infested with nobles and knights, who invariably despoiled the poor travellers who refused to purchase a