Chapter 48
"Yes, father."
"Good-night, then."
He had himself extinguished the lamp in front of the looking-gla.s.s and taken up the other one. "You may go."
Ottomar longed to ask for his hand, but he dared not, and with a good-night that sounded defiant, because he was ready to burst into tears, he moved towards the door. His father stopped at the door of his bedroom: "One thing more! I had forgotten to say that I reserve to myself the right of taking the next step. As you have delayed so long in taking the initiative, you will not refuse to grant me this favour.
I shall of course keep you _au courant_. I beg that you will meantime take no step without my knowledge. We must at least act in concert, now we have come to an understanding."
He said the last words with a sort of melancholy smile that cut Ottomar to the heart. He could bear it no longer and rushed out of the room.
The General also had his hand on the door; but when Ottomar had disappeared he drew it back, carried the lamp to the writing-table, and took out a casket in which he kept, amongst other ornaments of little value that had belonged to his dead wife and his mother, the iron rings that his parents had worn during the war of liberation.
He took out the rings.
"Times have altered," he said, "not improved. What, ah! what has become of your piety, your dutifulness, your chaste simplicity, your holy self-sacrifice? I have honestly endeavoured to emulate you, to be the worthy son of a race that knew no fame but the courage of its men and the virtue of its women. How have I sinned that I should be so punished?"
He kissed the rings and laid them in the casket; and took from amongst several miniatures on ivory, one of a beautiful brown-eyed, brown-haired boy about six years old.
He gazed long and immovably at it.
"The male line of the Werbens would die out with him, and--he was my darling. Perhaps I am punished because I was so unspeakably proud of him."
CHAPTER XI.
"Why did my brother ring for his coffee at four o'clock!" asked Aunt Rikchen in the kitchen.
"I do not know," answered Grollmann.
"You never do know anything," said Aunt Rikchen.
Grollmann shrugged his shoulders, took the tray on which the second breakfast was prepared for his master and left the room, but came back in a few minutes and set down the tray, as he had taken it away, on the dresser.
"Well?" asked Aunt Rikchen irritably, "is it wrong again?"
"My master is asleep," said Grollmann.
Aunt Rikchen in her astonishment almost dropped the coffee-pot from which she had just poured Reinhold's coffee. "Good heavens!" she exclaimed, "how can my brother sleep at this hour! He has never in his whole life done such a thing before. Is he ill?"
"I don't think so," said Grollmann.
"Has anything happened this morning?"
"This morning, no."
"Or yesterday evening?" asked Aunt Rikchen, whose sharp ears had detected the short pause which Grollmann had made between "this morning" and "no."
"I suppose so," said Grollmann, staring before him, while the wrinkles in his weather-beaten face seemed to deepen every moment.
"Miserable man, tell me at once!" exclaimed Aunt Rikchen, seizing the old man by the arm and shaking him, as if she wished to shake his secret out of him.
"I know nothing," said Grollmann, freeing himself; "is the coffee ready for the Captain?"
"Why does my nephew want it in his room to-day?" asked Aunt Rikchen.
"I don't know," answered Grollmann, slipping away with the coffee, as he had done before with the breakfast-tray.
"He is a horrid man," said Aunt Rikchen; "he will be the death of me some day, with his mysteries. He shall tell me when he comes back."
But Grollmann did not come back, although Aunt Rikchen almost tore down the bell-rope. Aunt Rikchen was very angry, and would have been furious if she had heard Grollmann relating above to Reinhold unasked, with the minutest details, what he would not have told her for any money.
"For you see, sir," said Grollmann, "she is so good in other respects, Fraulein Frederike; but what she knows she must tell, sooner or later, if it cost her her life; and the master cannot bear that, especially from his sister, and we are the sufferers."
"What did happen?" asked Reinhold.
"This was it," said the old man. "About twelve o'clock last night he came back from the second meeting of the manufacturers; I lighted him to his room, as usual, turned up the lamps in his study, and went into his bedroom to shut the windows, which always stay open till he goes to bed, winter and summer; and there, close to the window, on the floor, lay, what I took at first for a piece of paper, till I took it up and found that it was a regular letter, which somebody must have thrown in from the street, and the small stone that had been fastened to it by a bit of packthread lay close by. I hesitated for a minute or two whether
"Let him sleep, Grollmann," said Reinhold, after a short pause; "I will take the blame on myself."
"He won't blame you," said Grollmann, pa.s.sing his hand through his grey hair; "he thinks too much of you; I will risk it."
"Do so," said Reinhold, "on my authority, and do not trouble yourself any more about it. I am convinced that your first idea was correct, and that it was a threatening letter. You know my uncle; he fears nothing."
"G.o.d knows it," said Grollmann.
"But it has vexed and excited him still more, when he had already come back vexed and excited from the meeting. These are troublesome times for him, which must be gone through. We must be prepared for bad days till the good ones come again."
"If they ever do come," said Grollmann.
The old man had left the room; Reinhold tried to return to the work he had begun, but he could not collect his thoughts. He had tried to comfort the old man, yet he himself now felt uneasy and troubled.
If his uncle did not learn to moderate himself, if he continued to look and to treat in this pa.s.sionately tragical way an affair which, near as it lay to his heart, was in fact a matter of business and must be considered from a sober, business-like point of view, the bad days might indeed last long, inconveniently long, for all concerned--"to whom I myself belong now," said Reinhold.
He stood up and went to the window. It was a raw, disagreeable day.
From the low-hanging clouds was falling a fine, cold rain; the tall trees rustled in the wind, and withered leaves were driven through the grey mist. How different had it looked when a few days ago--it was only a very few, though it seemed to him an eternity--he had looked down here one morning, for the first time. The sky had been such a lovely blue, and white clouds had stood in that blue sky so still, it seemed as if they could not weary of contemplating the beautiful sun-lighted earth, on which men, surrounded, indeed, by the smoke of chimneys and distracted by the noise of wheels and saws, must earn their bread in the sweat of their brow, though the sun shone brightly and the birds sang cheerily in the thick branches--that earth on which there was so much pleasure, and love, and blessed hope, even in the heart of a poor blind girl, and a thousand times more for him who saw all this beauty spread out before him, doubly glorious in the reflection of the love which shone and glittered through his heart as the sun through the dewdrops on the leaves. And because the sun was now for a time hidden behind a cloud, was all the glory pa.s.sed away? Because a few hundred idle men had cast their tools from their h.o.r.n.y hands, must every one feel life a burden, and refuse to carry that burden any longer? No; a thousand times no! The sun will s.h.i.+ne again; the men will return to their duty; and you, happy man--thrice happy man--for whom the sun s.h.i.+nes in spite of all in your innermost heart, return to your work, which for you is no hard duty, but rather a joy and an honour.
Reinhold greeted with eyes and hand the neighbouring house, one window of which he had long ago discovered between the branches of the plane trees, which he watched more eagerly than any star; and then hoped that Ferdinanda, whom he suddenly perceived in the garden, would take his greeting to herself if she had seen him.
She could hardly have seen the greeting, and could not even have seen him at the window as she walked up and down between the shrubs, under the rustling trees, without appearing to notice the rain which was falling on her. At any rate she was without hat, without umbrella, in her working dress, without even a shawl; sometimes standing still and gazing up into the driving clouds, then walking on again, her eyes turned to the ground, evidently sunk in the deepest thought.
"Curious people, those artists," thought Reinhold, while he seated himself again at his work. "What a fool you were to think that her heart could beat for any creature of flesh or blood, or, indeed, for anything but her Reaping Girl and Boy, if she has a heart at all."
In the meantime Grollmann was standing undecided at the top of the staircase, before the door leading to his master's room.
His conscience was not quite satisfied by Reinhold's a.s.surance that he would take the responsibility on himself, if the master overslept himself. Should he go downstairs? should he go in? He must make up his mind; it was a quarter past nine. "If only something would occur to oblige me to wake him," said Grollmann.