On the Night of the Seventh Moon

I thought of riding to the hunting lodge and his impatience and the way he had held me against him and the thrills of excitement he communicated to me. I thought of the simple ceremony with the priest.

The marriage lines! Of course I had them. I had put them away carefully. They were in the top drawer of the dressing-table. I remembered putting them with the few pieces of jewellery I possessed, in the little sandalwood box which had been my mother’s.

There was the box. I brought it out joyfully. I lifted the lid. The jewellery was there, but no marriage lines.

I stared at it blankly. No ring. No marriage lines. No proof. It was beginning to look more and more as though they were right and my romance and my marriage were indeed something induced by the doctor’s treatment to wipe out the terrible memory of the dreadful thing that had happened to me.

I don’t know how I got through the day. When I looked at my face in the mirror I saw another person. My high cheekbones stood out more than ever; there were faint shadows under my eyes; but it was the despair which was so startling. The face which looked back at me was touched with a certain hopelessness and that was when I knew that I was beginning to believe them.

Dr. Carlsberg came to see me during the morning. He was delighted, he said, that I was up. He wanted nothing put in the way of my improvement. He was sure that what had to be done now was face the truth.

He sat beside me; he wanted me to talk, to say anything that came into my mind. I explained to him what I had told Ilse, about the meeting in the mist and the night I had spent at the lodge. He did not attempt to persuade me that I had dreamed that.

“If it were possible,” he said, “I should like to obliterate completely from your mind what happened on the Night of the Seventh Moon. That is not possible. The memory is not like a piece of writing in pencil which can be wiped out with an eraser. But it is over. No good can come by preserving the memory of it. So we must come as near to forgetting as possible. I am glad that you are here away from your home. When you return to England which I hope you will not think of doing for at least two months-you will go among people who have not heard what has happened. This will help you to push the affair right to the back of your mind. No one will be able to remind you because they do not know what has happened.”

I said, “Dr. Carlsberg, I can’t believe you. I can’t believe my cousins. Something in me tells me that I am married and that it all happened as I am sure it did.”

He smiled, rather pleased.

“You are still in need of that belief.

Perhaps it is better for you to cling to it for a while. In due course you will feel strong enough to be without it and the truth will be more important to you than the crutch these dreams are at the moment offering you. “

“The time works out perfectly,” I said.

“The second day after the Night of the Seventh Moon we were married and on the morning of the fourth day news came to him that his father was in trouble, and he went. Then the next day I woke up in the room above. It’s simply impossible that I was there all that time.”

“Yet that is what you will accept in time when you are strong enough to discard your crutch.”

“I can’t believe I imagined him.”

“You have attached him to this adventurer you met in the mist. You have told me that your mother often recounted fairy stories and legends of the forest. You came here in a receptive mood; you half believed in the gods and heroes. You say you called him Siegfried.

This made “you an easy subject for this experiment. I am sorry that you were used in this way, but, believe me, it has probably saved your reason.”

“Why should I have thought of such a marriage?”

“Because you were no longer a virgin and you had thought, as a respectably brought-up girl, that this could not be the case without marriage. That’s an easy conclusion. Your terror when you knew what was happening to you has to find its opposite so the dreams gave you this ecstatic union.”

“Why should I have thought him to be a count? I never thought of marrying a count.”

“He had seemed all-powerful-rich, a nobleman. That is easily explained.”

“But Lokenberg.”

“Well, we are in the Lokenwald. The name of the town is Lokenburg. Ah, I think I have it. There is a Count Lokenberg.”

My heart began to beat wildly. I cried: “Then take me to him. I am sure he must be Maximilian. I know he was not lying to me.”

Dr. Carlsberg rose; he led me out of the room and took me to a picture which was hanging on the wall. I had noticed it when I arrived but had not studied it particularly. It was a picture of a bearded man, more elderly than middle-aged, in uniform.

“It’s the head of our ruling house,” he said, ‘you will see his picture in many loyal households. Read the inscription. “

I read: “Carl VII; Carl Frederic Ludwig Maximilian, Duke of Rochenstein and Dorrenig, Count of Lokenberg.”

“Carl Frederic Ludwig Maximilian,” I said dully.

“Duke of Rochenstein and Count of Lokenberg!”

“The Lokenberg title is one of Duke Carl’s,” he said.

“Then why did he...

“You had looked at the picture.”

“I had never looked at it closely.”

“You looked at it without realizing you did. The names became fixed in your memory without your suspecting it and in your dream you selected one of them Maximilian and attached it to one of the titles you had seen on the inscription.”

I put my hands over my eyes. But he was so clear to me. I could see his beloved face, with the passionate, arrogant eyes that gleamed for me.

I would not believe that I had imagined that. But they had the tangible evidence; for the first time there was a doubt in my mind.

That terrible day seemed interminable. I sat listlessly with my hands on my lap thinking of him. My ears were strained for the sound of horses’ hoofs because I believed that I should hear them and that he would come into the house, his eyes alight with passion.

“What have they been trying to tell you, Lenchen?” he would demand, and turn on them in his fury; and they would cringe, as in the dream my cousins had appeared to-well, not exactly cringe, but they had been eager to placate him.

But this, according to them, had not been the case. They had never known each other. How could living people know a phantom? In the dream they had shown respect because that was what I expected them to do.

None of it, according to them, had existed.

But it had. I could feel his arms about me. I could remember so many passionate and tender moments.

I knew what Ilse was thinking: “Could I really believe that a count would suddenly decide to marry an unknown girl with such haste that the day after his decision a priest married them?”

Oh yes, they had reason on their side; and I had nothing but dreams. I could not produce my wedding-ring nor my marriage lines. If I had ever had them, where were they now?

Suddenly I thought: There’s the hunting lodge. I must go back there. I would fin de HUdegarde and Hans, and they would corroborate my story.

I was excited. If I could go back to the lodge Hildegarde would corroborate my story about the marriage. But if she did, that would mean that Cousin Ilse was lying, Ernst too, and the doctor. Why should they? What motive could they possibly have?

If I believed that, I must get away from them as soon as possible for they would be my enemies. They were trying to prove . what were they trying to prove?

Sometimes I thought: I’m going mad.

Were they trying to prove me mad? For what purpose? They were trying to save me, they said, from the mental collapse which I had been near when I came in, according to them, the victim of a savage attack in the forest.