CHAPTER XLV. FIRE AND BLOOD—THE HERMANSTADT MURDER.

At risk of dispelling the idea just given of the somnolent nature of life at Hermanstadt, I am bound to mention that the quiet little town was once distinguished by a murder as repulsive and cold-blooded as any of which our most corrupted capitals can boast.
 
It came to pass, namely, that during the summer of 1883 the town was several times roused by the fire-alarm, and at short intervals more than one barn or stable was partially reduced to ashes. Nobody thought much of this at the time, for, thanks to the energetic conduct of the volunteer fire-brigade, assistance was promptly rendered, and though some few Saxon voices were heard to express a belief that their beloved compatriots the Roumanians were probably at the bottom of this, as of most other unexplained pieces of mischief, the majority of people were of opinion that the unusually dry summer, coupled with some chance acts of negligence, was quite sufficient to account for these conflagrations.

In the month of September, however, the entire garrison of Hermanstadt being absent at the military man?uvres, these fires began to assume an epidemic character, and by a strange coincidence they occurred invariably at night. During the week the troops were away there were no less than four or five fires.

Vague alarm now began to take possession of the population, and the uneasy feeling that something was wrong took shape in a dozen fantastic rumors, the one more startling than the other. The cook coming back from market brought news of a parcel of combustible materials found concealed in some barn or hay-loft; the boys returned from school full of some mysterious threatening letter, said to have been discovered posted up on a tree of the promenade; and the shopman, while tying up a parcel, sought to enliven us by dark allusions to sinister-looking individuals seen dodging about the scene of conflagration, and apparently regarding their handiwork with fiendish glee.

By daytime these rumors certainly tended to break the monotony of our solitude, and, proud of our superior common-sense, we, the bereaved grass-widows of the absent officers, could afford to laugh at the many ridiculous stories which were scaring our weaker-minded attendants.

Only when darkness had set in, when the children had gone to bed, and we ourselves prepared to spend a long, lonely evening, did these various reports begin to assume a somewhat more definite shape in our brain, and to appear infinitely less absurd than they had done in broad daylight. We nervously wondered whether again this night we should be roused from sleep by the horrid sound of the tocsin. Though it was autumn, not spring, we could not shake ourselves free from an atmosphere of vague April fools on a large and most unpleasant{328} scale, and dimly began to realize what it must feel like to be a Russian emperor, as quaking we counted the days which must elapse before our natural protectors and the defenders of the town were restored to us.

One night, having, as usual, gone to bed with these sensations, I was just dropping into an uneasy sleep, when, sure enough, shortly before midnight the odiously familiar sound of the fire-alarm broke in upon my dream, and, hastily opening the window, I could see the sky all red with the fiery glare, at what appeared to be a very short distance from our house in the direction of the stables where, about a hundred paces farther up the street, our horses were lodged. My husband’s chargers were, of course, away with him at the man?uvres, but the children’s pony and one horse had remained behind; so, afraid of anything happening to them in case the orderly were asleep or absent, I resolved to go and assure myself of their safety. In a few minutes I was dressed, and, accompanied only by my faithful Brick, who was vastly delighted at the idea of a midnight walk, I left the house.

Before I had gone many steps I saw that my fears for the horses were groundless, the fire being ever so much farther away than had appeared from the window. However, having taken the trouble to rise and dress, I resolved to go on a little, and see whatever there was to be seen. It was a lovely moonlight night, almost as bright as day, only that the town had a much more lively aspect than I had ever seen it wear by daylight, for every one was afoot, and, like myself, hurrying towards the red glare visible over the high-pointed gables.

It proved impossible to get close to the fire raging in a narrow street at the beginning of the Untere Stadt, but any one standing at the top of the steep stone staircase by which this portion of the town is reached could command a good view of the scene, all the more striking from being seen from above. After I had stood there for nearly half an hour watching the tossing flames below me, and choked by occasional puffs of smoke, I began to feel both chilly and sleepy, and thought I might as well go back to bed, since it was nearly one o’clock, and the excitements of this night appeared to be exhausted. I left a large crowd still assembled round the scene of action, while the streets I passed on my homeward way were empty and deserted. Deserted, likewise, was our own street, the Fleischer Gasse, as it lay before me in the moonlight; but as I approached I became aware of the solitary dark-clad figure of a slender young man walking on the{329} pavement just in front of our house. He seemed to me well dressed, and in appearance thoroughly respectable—an opinion which Brick, however, failed to share, for he advanced to meet the stranger with a low growl of suppressed but intense disapproval, which compliment the respectable young man returned by savagely hitting the dog with the tightly rolled-up umbrella he carried in his hand.

I should probably not have cast a second look at this stranger had not something in the needless brutality of his action attracted my attention, and caused me to scan his features. I thus noticed that he appeared to be little over twenty years of age, had a small sallow face, a sprouting mustache, and dark eyes set rather near together.

I rang the house-bell, and my maid came down to let me in, when, to my surprise, the stranger rudely attempted to force himself in behind me; but we slammed the door in his face, and then my servant told me that this same young man had been hanging about here for over half an hour, and had already once endeavored to effect an entrance behind some other person.

Two days later the troops came back from the man?uvres, and everything returned to accustomed order and quiet. The officers were, however, one and all far too much engrossed in recollection of those glorious imaginary laurels they had been winning on their bloodless battle-fields to take interest in anything so commonplace as a real fire; so the tale of the terrors we had undergone during their absence fell upon callous ears, and as no more conflagrations ensued to give color of semblance to our story, the matter soon lapsed into oblivion.

The usual winter torpor settled down upon the place, and the months wore slowly away towards spring without anything having occurred to disturb their peaceful current, when late on the evening of the 21st of February the almost forgotten sound of the tocsin was again heard in the streets, and simultaneously the news of a fourfold murder spread like wildfire through the town. The house inhabited by a retired military surgeon, Dr. Friedenwanger, had been discovered burning, and some members of the fire-brigade, on forcing an entrance, found his corpse, along with that of his wife, child, and maidservant, still reeking with warm blood, and mutilated in the most disgusting manner.

At first everybody was quite at sea as to where to look for the perpetrators of this crime, but by a curious chance, just while Dr. Friedenwanger{330} was being buried, two days later, a bloody knife and some iron crowbars, found concealed in a drain near the cemetery, led to the identification of the murderers in the persons of Anton von Kleeberg and Rudolf Marlin,[74] two young men of respectable burgher families, aged about nineteen and twenty-one. The photographs of these youthful criminals being soon after exhibited in several shop-windows, neither I nor my maid had any difficulty in recognizing that of Kleeberg as the portrait of the mysterious stranger who had tried to enter our house on the night of the fire.

Many interesting details, too lengthy to be here recorded, came out at the trial, and a long list of misdeeds was brought home to the culprits, who, among other things, confessed to having laid every one of the fires the previous summer, thus diverting public attention while they proceeded to rob some particular house known to be ill-guarded, or inhabited by women only. There is therefore every reason to suppose that Messrs. Kleeberg and Marlin, well aware of the temporary absence of all masculine element from the household, had selected our house for a visit of this description; and I am likewise firmly convinced that my beloved and sagacious dog Brick, with that delicate sense of perception which so favorably distinguishes the canine from the coarser human race, had instantaneously detected the guilty intentions of the very respectable-looking young man we met in the moonlight before our house that September night. The victim, Dr. Friedenwanger, enjoyed a bad reputation as a usurer, and his murder had been undertaken for the sake of stealing the watches and jewellery he kept in pawn; while by subsequently setting fire to the premises the murderers had hoped to annihilate all traces of their crime. Some of the horrible disclosures at the trial brought, nevertheless, moments of intense satisfaction to more than one female breast, as being so many triumphant vindications of those terrors so cavalierly treated by the other sex a few months before. Did they now realize in what danger we had been last autumn, when they were all away engrossed in their miserable sham-fights? Did they know that their homes might have been reduced to ashes while they were complacently toying with blank-cartridges? or that their helpless progeny could easily have been made{331} mince-meat of while they were slaying their legions of visionary Russians or Turks?

Such the self-evident arguments with which we were now able to clear ourselves from the base imputation of cowardice, and surely no woman worthy her sex forbore to make use of these handy weapons, or missed such glorious opportunity of turning the tables on her lord and master.

Characteristic of Magyar legislation was the circumstance of the whole trial being conducted in Hungarian, though this language was absolutely unknown to the two German prisoners, who were thus debarred the doubtful privilege of comprehending their own death-sentence when finally pronounced about a year after their crime. Like enough, though, its meaning was subsequently made clear to them, for Anton von Kleeberg and Rudolf Marlin were executed at Hermanstadt on the 16th of June, 1885.