Chapter XXIII…

Chapter XXIII

Food, drink, and sleep had completely restored my old strength, and I was now in a condition to play my part in the game of "robbers and soldiers" more successfully.

The following days--there were three or four of them--form a strange episode in the history of my life; so that it often seems to me that I cannot really have lived them, but must have read the whole in some story-book. Yes, after so many years--there are thirty of them now--the remembrance of those days comes before me like some story about the bad boy who lost himself in the woods, and to whom so many uncomfortable things happened there; and yet who drank so much sweet pure air, and bathed in so much golden sunshine, that one would give who knows how many stations in the monotonous turnpike of his orderly life, could he but once experience such romantic suffering and happiness.

As if heaven itself was disposed to be good to the bad boy who, whatever his errors, had erred but through youthful folly, and perhaps, all things considered, was not after all so utterly bad, it sent him two or three of the loveliest autumn days for his adventurous flight. The recent rains had cleared the air to a crystalline transparency, so that the remotest distance seemed brought near at hand. A flood of bright but indescribably soft sunlight streamed from the cloudless sky, and penetrated into the inmost recesses of the forest, where from the huge old trees the yellow leaves silently floated down to the others, with which the ground was already strewn. Not a sound was audible in the sunny wilderness except the melancholy chirp of a yellow-hammer in the thicket, or the hoarse cawing of a crow who regarded with disfavor the gun which I was carrying, or the faint cry of cranes that, careless of what was going on below, were winging high in air their proud flight to southern lands.

Then again I lay in the heart of the forest upon some hillock, perhaps a "giant's barrow," as they were traditionally called, and watched sly Reynard steal out of his Castle Malepartus among the great stones, to bask in the morning sun, while a few paces farther off his half-grown cubs chased each other and rolled over and over in merry romp; or I marked in the evening light a herd of deer crossing a clearing, the stag in front with head proudly held aloft, and only lowered occasionally to pick a peculiarly tempting tuft of herbage, while the does came peacefully grazing after.

Again I stood on the heights, close to the verge of the steep chalk-cliff, and looked longingly out over the blue sea, where on the farthest horizon a little cloud marked the spot where the steamer which I had been watching for an hour had disappeared, while in the middle distance glittered the sails of a pair of fishing-boats. The speck of cloud vanished, the white sails dwindled away, and with a sigh I turned back into the forest, scarcely hoping now that I should succeed in getting off the island.

Twice already I had made the attempt. Once at a small fishing village that lay at the head of a narrow cove in a recess of the shore, and was the picture of isolation and loneliness. But the men were all out fishing; only a very old man and a couple of half-grown youths were at home with the women and children. If the catch was a good one, it might be two days before the men came back; and it was not likely then that any one would take me so far. So said the old man, when I asked; while a pair of red-haired children stood by staring at me with open mouths, and an old woman came up and confirmed the man's statement, while the sun sank below the horizon, and a cool breeze blew down the cove towards the darkened sea.

It was the second day of my wandering. The first night I had passed in a sheep-fold: I thought I might venture for once to sleep under a roof; and the good wife to whom I made the proposal willingly gave up to me the chamber of her son, who had sailed away three years before, and not been heard of since. I might, very likely, have spent days in this retired nook without being discovered; but the necessity of my getting off the island was too pressing, and early on the next morning I set out to try my fortune elsewhere.

My next trial was made in a large village. There were boats enough and men enough there, but no one would take me; not even though I offered ten dollars, half the money I had, for the short passage to the Mecklenburg coast, where I might consider myself tolerably safe. I do not know whether, as was possible, they knew who I was, or merely saw something suspicious in the wild-looking young man with a gun on his shoulder who asked a passage to another country; or whether, as I seemed in such extreme haste, and appeared to have money, they merely wished, by delay and apparent reluctance, to extort a higher fare. But after an hour had been spent in parleying, and Karl Bollmann said he was willing to take me, if Johann Peters would lend his boat; and Peters, for his part, was ready to go, but only in Bollmann's boat; and Christian Rickmann, who was standing by with his hands in his pockets, said he would take me with his boys, but not for less than thirty dollars; and all then held a whispering consultation together, during which the whole population, women and children included, gathered around--I thought it prudent not to await the result, but turned abruptly away, and strode off towards the dunes. A half-dozen followed me, but I showed them my gun, upon which they kept back.

The same day I had another proof that the pursuit for me was still kept up, which indeed I had never doubted. It was towards evening, when reconnoitring from the edge of the woods a piece of open country that I had to cross, I caught sight of two mounted patrols on the road, talking with a shepherd who had driven his flock upon the strip of heath between the road and the woods. I observed that they several times pointed to the forest, but the shepherd's answers seemed satisfactory, for they presently rode away in the opposite direction, and disappeared beyond some rising ground. When I thought them far enough, I came out of my concealment and joined the shepherd, who was knitting a long black stocking, and whose simple face gave a sufficient guaranty of the security of the step. He told me, in answer to my inquiries, that the patrol were on the track of a man who had committed a murder. He was a tall young man, they had said, and a desperate villain; but they would have him yet.

The lively imagination of the stocking-knitter had probably had sufficient time in the interval between the departure of the patrol and my appearance, to paint the portrait of the fugitive from justice in the most frightful colors. At all events he did not recognize me, but took me at once for what I gave myself out to be: a huntsman, who was stopping on a visit at one of the neighboring estates, and not knowing the country well, had lost his way. He gave me minute directions how to find my way, thanked me for the coin I put in his hand, and dropped his knitting in astonishment as he saw me, instead of following his directions, strike across the heath into the forest.

The vicinity of the patrol had startled me, in fact, and I had determined to pass this night in the woods. It was a bad night. Warm as it had been in the day, it grew cold at nightfall, and the cold steadily increased as the night advanced. In vain did I bury myself a foot deep in the dry leaves, or try by brisk walking backwards and forwards to gain a little warmth. The dense mist that arose from the earth soaked my clothes through, and chilled me to the marrow. The long hours of the autumn night crept on with dreadful slowness; it seemed as if it would never be day. And in addition to these physical and almost intolerable sufferings of cold, hunger, and fatigue, the recollection of what I had recently gone through presented itself to me in ever more frightful pictures the longer the night lasted, and the more hotly the fever burned in my veins. While, half dead with fatigue, I staggered backwards and forwards in a clear space between the trees, I saw myself again on the moor at Herr von Zehren's side, with Jock Swart lying dead at our feet, while the flames of the burning castle wrapped us in an awful glare, so fearfully bright that it seemed the whole forest was burning around me, while yet my limbs shivered and my teeth chattered with cold. Then Herr von Zehren sat before me as I had last seen him sitting, with the rising sun shining in his glazed eyes; and then again it was not Herr von Zehren, but my father, or Professor Lederer, or some other, but all dead, with glassy eyes open to the sun. Then again I became conscious of my real situation, that it was dark night around me, that I was excessively cold, that I had sharp fever, and that despite the risk of discovery I must resolve to kindle a real fire instead of the frightful visionary one which I still saw in my feverish hallucination.

I had provided myself against this necessity with a large piece of touchwood which I had broken out of a hollow tree and placed in my game-bag. By its aid I succeeded after a while in kindling a pile of half-dry wood, and I cannot describe the delicious sensation that thrilled through me as at last a bright flame sprang up. The cheery light drove back the fever-phantoms into the darkness from which they had sprung; the luxurious warmth expelled from my veins the icy cold. I dragged together great quantities of fuel; I could not sufficiently luxuriate in the sight of the curling smoke, the leaping flames, and the glittering sparks. Then I seated myself at my forest-hearth, and resolved in my mind what I should do to escape a situation which I clearly saw I could not long endure. At last I hit upon a plan. I must make the trial to get away at some one of the points from which there was a regular communication with the main-land, and which I had, on good grounds, hitherto avoided; and the attempt must be made in disguise, as otherwise I should be recognized instantly. The difficulty was, how to obtain a suitable disguise; and here a happy thought struck me. I had noticed in the chamber in which I had slept the previous night, a complete sailor's dress hanging against the wall; very likely the kind old woman would sell it to me. If thus disguised I could get off the island, I was pretty confident that by a night-march I could reach the Mecklenburg frontier; and once there, I would let chance decide what was next to be done.

At early dawn I began to put this plan into execution; and although I had a walk of eight or ten miles to the lonely fishing village, I reached it just after sunrise. The good old dame would not hear of any sale; I needed the things, and that was enough; perhaps some one in some strange land might do as much for her son, if he was alive--and a tear rolled down her aged wrinkled cheeks. My clothes and my gun--for I had left my pistol at Hans's--she would keep for me; I should have them any time that I came for them. I do not I know for what the kind old creature took me; but no doubt she thought that I was in distress; and she helped me thus because I said that this was the only way to help me. The worthy soul! Later in my life it was in my power in some measure to repay her kindness, if indeed a kind deed can ever be repaid.

So I set out at once upon my way, which took me, through many perils, directly across the island to a point where I determined to wait until evening before entering Fährdorf, which I could reach in an hour. Relying upon my sailor's dress, which fitted me perfectly, and, as I thought, completely disguised me, I had chosen the ferry which led most directly to Uselin. In this way, it was true, I should have to go through my native town; but it was probable that just there I should be least looked for; and at that time, I confess it, it took but a little to rouse in me the old daring spirit which had already played me so many an unlucky trick. With a grim satisfaction I imagined myself pacing at night through the silent streets, and even considered whether I should not write on the door of the Rathhaus[4] the old saying of the Nuremburgers, and sign my name to it.

At nightfall I entered Fährdorf. I had missed the boat; but the next one, which was the last, sailed in half an hour. As I had seen through the window of the tavern that the large tap-room was almost empty, and as I must of necessity strengthen myself for my night-journey, I entered it, took my seat at the farthest table with my face to the wall, and ordered some supper of the bar-maid.

The girl went to get it for me. On the table, beside the candle which she had lighted, lay a beer-stained copy of the Uselin Weekly News of the previous day--another cleaner copy is now lying beside the page on which I am writing. I took it up, and my first glance fell upon the following announcement:

NOTICE.

Frederick William George Hartwig, former pupil of and fugitive from the Gymnasium in Uselin, strongly suspected of smuggling, of violent resistance to officers of the Government, and of murder, has still, notwithstanding every exertion on the part of the authorities, evaded arrest. As it greatly concerns the public welfare that this apparently most dangerous person should be brought to justice, he is hereby summoned voluntarily to surrender himself; and all persons who may have any knowledge of the place of concealment of the aforesaid Hartwig, are called upon to give notice thereof without delay to the undersigned. We also urgently and respectfully request the various authorities, both here and abroad, to keep a strict watch for the aforesaid Hartwig, (description at foot), to arrest him promptly, should he be discovered, and forward him to us at our expense, under the assurance of the readiest reciprocity on our part in a similar case. (Signed) Heckepfennig.

District of * * *

Uselin, November 2, 1833.

I will not copy the description that followed. The reader could learn from it nothing except that at that time I rejoiced in dark-blond, curly hair ("sorrel-top" the boys used to call me when they wanted to tease me), stood six feet without my shoes, and, as a well-finished specimen of humanity, had no special marks, or at least none in the eyes of Herr Justizrath Heckepfennig.

But in truth, at this moment so critical for me, I scarcely noticed the description of my person; the Notice occupied all my thoughts. When, the evening before, the shepherd said that the man whom the patrol were after was charged with murder, I did not believe it for a moment. He was such a simple-looking fellow, that I thought the patrol had been telling him a frightful story to scare him, or to enhance their own importance. But here it stood in large clear letters in the Weekly News, which, as but few other papers had ever fallen into my hands, was always to my uncritical youthful mind invested with a certain magisterial authority--I might almost say, bore the stamp of infallibility. "Suspected of murder!" Was it possible? Was I then looked upon as the murderer of Jock Swart? I, who had thanked God when I saw the man at whom I had fired, limping briskly off? I, whose only consolation in these last days of suffering, was that at the worst no man's death weighed upon my conscience? And here it was proclaimed to all the world that I was a murderer!

The bar-maid brought the refreshment I had ordered, and I think advised me to waste no time, as the ferry-boat would soon start. I scarcely heard what she said, but left my supper untouched, and sat staring at the paper, which I had hastily turned over as the girl entered, as if my printed name might betray me. But on the other side it again appeared in a paragraph headed City Items. The paragraph ran thus:

"Yesterday evening, in some unaccountable way, a rumor got afloat that George Hartwig, whose name is now in everybody's mouth, had taken refuge in the house of his father, Customs-Accountant Hartwig, and was there in hiding. An immense crowd, of probably more than a hundred persons, assembled in consequence in the Water street, and tumultuously demanded that the young criminal should be given up to them. In vain did the unhappy father, standing on his threshold, protest that his son was not in his house, and that he was not the man to obstruct the course of justice. Even the vigorous exertions of those dauntless public servants, officers Luz and Bolljahn, were ineffectual; only the eloquent appeals of our respected mayor, who had hurried to the spot at the first news of the disturbance, succeeded at last in dispersing the excited crowd. We cannot refrain from earnestly warning our fellow-citizens of the folly and lawlessness of such proceedings, although we willingly admit that the affair in question, which unhappily seems to assume even more serious proportions, is of a nature to strongly excite the minds of all. But we appeal to the men of intelligence--that is to say, to the great majority of our fellow-citizens--and ask them if we cannot repose the fullest confidence in the authorities? Should we not be convinced that the public welfare is in better keeping in their hands than in those of a thoughtless, ungoverned mob? And in reference to the occurrence of yesterday, we earnestly appeal to the good feeling of all well-meaning persons. Let them remember that the father of the unhappy George Hartwig is one of our most respectable citizens. He would, as he declared, and as we for our part firmly believe, be the last to obstruct the course of justice. Fellow-citizens, let us respect this assurance; let us respect the man who gave it. Let us be just, fellow-citizens, but not cruel. And before all, let us take care that the reputation of good-order and of a law-abiding spirit which our good old town has so long enjoyed, be not lost through our fault."

The well-known signal summoning the passengers on board, now sounded from the wharf, and at the same moment the girl came in again and told me I must make haste.

"But you have not eaten a bit!" she exclaimed, and stared at me with surprise and alarm. I suppose that I looked very pale and agitated. I muttered some reply, laid a thaler on the table, and hurried from the house.

Notwithstanding the lateness of the hour, the boat was crowded with passengers. On the forward-deck were standing two saddled horses, which could only belong to the mounted patrol; and I soon discovered their riders, who were the same that I had seen talking to the shepherd, as I gathered from their conversation with a couple of peasants. They were complaining bitterly of being recalled, for they were sure, they said, that they would have caught the villain, who must be somewhere hidden on the island, though six more besides themselves, two on horseback and four on foot, had searched it through in every direction. Now the others would gain the reward, while they were sent for to keep order in the town, which was no affair of theirs; there were Bolljahn and Luz to attend to that duty.

I sat quite near them, and could hear every word they said; and I thought what delight it would give the brave fellows if I were suddenly to stand up and say, "here's the villain." But I could not afford them that pleasure; what I had resolved to do, must be done voluntarily. So I kept quiet, and it never occurred to the wise servants of the law that the young sailor who was listening to them with such apparent interest was the man they were looking for.

The wind was fair, and the passage quick; in half an hour the boat reached her wharf. The horses pawed, the patrolmen swore, the passengers crowded out of the boat, and went up the wharf with their luggage. At the upper end of the wharf, just by the gate, stood fat Peter Hinrich, the landlord of the sailor's tavern, and asked me if I would not lodge in his house. I said I had a lodging engaged elsewhere.

So I passed through the ruinous old port-gate, which was never shut, and entered the Water street. When I arrived at the small house, I paused for a moment. All in the house was dark and silent, and it was dark and silent in the street; but only two days before there had been commotion enough here, and there upon the threshold my father had stood and said that he was not the man to obstruct the course of justice. He should not incur the suspicion of having concealed his son in his house; he should see that his son had still some regard for his father's good name, and that he had the courage to face the consequences of what he had done.

The exhortations of the Weekly News had not been in vain. The little town seemed as if life had departed; the energetic Luz and Bolljahn, with the best will in the world, could have found no field for their activity. My steps resounded along the empty alleys, which struck me as being singularly narrow and crooked. Here and there was light in the windows; but folks went early to bed in Uselin, and the authorities could therefore extinguish the street lamps at a very early hour, especially when, as now, the new moon over St. Nicholas's church looked sadly down through driving clouds upon the empty market-place.

I stood in the market-place before the house of Herr Justizrath Heckepfennig. It was one of the stateliest mansions in the town. How often had I passed it when I came out of school at mid-day, and cast a glance of respectful longing at the left-hand corner-window in the second story where Emilie used to sit behind a vase of gold-fish, and always happened, just as I passed by--a little dim window-mirror gave her faithful notice--to have her attention attracted by something in the market. Now I again looked up at the window, but with very different feelings. There was a light in the room, which was the usual sitting-room of the family. The justizrath used to smoke his evening pipe there. I had a presentiment that the visit that he would presently receive would cause it to go out.

The good people of Uselin did not usually fasten their street-doors until they went to bed; but whether it was that the recent disturbances so energetically and successfully contended with by the officers Luz and Bolljahn had rendered greater precautions advisable; or whether the justizrath, in his double capacity of wealthy man and officer of the law, insisted upon a stricter rule in this matter--in any case his door was fastened, and it was some time before my repeated ringing was answered by a female voice that called through the keyhole in rather a quavering tone to know who was there. My reply, "one who wishes urgently to speak with the Herr Justizrath," did not seem by any means entirely to satisfy the portress, who could be none other than the pretty housemaid Jette. A whispering followed, from which I inferred that Jette had brought the cook with her; then a giggling, and finally the answer that she would tell her master.

I was patrolling up and down before the house in my impatience, when a window opened in the sitting-room above, and the Herr Justizrath in person, putting out his head a very little way indeed, repeated the question of the housemaid, and received the same answer.

"What is your business?" asked the cautious man.

"I come from the island," I replied at a venture.

"Aha!" cried he, and closed the window.

For some days the justizrath had done nothing but give audience to people who professed to be able to throw some light upon the great mystery. A sailor or fisherman just from the island, and who urgently desired to speak with him at ten o'clock at night, could come with but one object: to make some important communication which might bring some illumination into the obscurity of this mysterious affair. I for my part believed that the justizrath had recognized me by my voice, and that his exclamation meant: "So! here you are at last!" I was soon to learn how greatly I was mistaken.

The door was opened, and I hastily entered. Scarcely had the light of the candle which Jette was holding up in her hand, fallen upon my face, when she gave a loud scream, dropped candlestick and all, and ran off as hard as she could, while the cook followed her example, at least so far as screaming and running went. The cook, who was an elderly female, ought to have had more sense; but still she only knew me by sight, and for a long time had heard nothing but horrors about me, so I cannot blame her. But the conduct of the pretty Jette admitted of no defence. I had always been very friendly to her, partly on her mistress's account, and partly on her own; and she had always freely acknowledged it, coquettishly smiling whenever I met her, saluting me with her deepest curtsey whenever I entered the house, and now--but I had now something else to think of than the ingratitude of a housemaid. I passed through the dark hall, ascended the stair I knew so well, and knocked at the door of the justizrath's study, which adjoined the sitting-room, and to which he had doubtless betaken himself to receive his late visitor.

"Come in!" said the justizrath, and I entered.

There he stood, just as I expected to find him, a tall, broad-shouldered figure, wrapped in his loose flowered dressing-gown, his long pipe in his hand, his low, narrow forehead wrinkled into deep folds as he fixed his little stupid eyes with a look of curiosity upon me at my entrance.

"Well, my friend, and what do you bring?" he asked.

"Myself," I answered, in a low but resolute voice, stepping up nearer to him.

My presentiment that he would let his pipe go out was fulfilled by his simply letting it drop upon the floor; and without saying a word he caught up the skirts of his flowered dressing-gown in both hands, and fled into the family-room.

There I stood by the broken pipe, and trampled out the glowing ashes which had fallen upon the little carpet by the writing-table. While engaged in this certainly not criminal occupation, I was startled by a cry for the watch from the adjacent window that opened on the market-place. It was the voice of the justizrath, but it had a very hoarse and lamentable sound, as if some one had him by the throat. I stepped to the door of the sitting-room and knocked.

"Herr Justizrath!"

No answer.

"Frau Justizrath!"

All silent.

"Fräulein Emilie!"

A pause, and then a frightened little voice that I had so often heard laughing, and with which I had sung so many a duet in parties by land and water, piped feebly out:

"What do you want?"

"Tell your father, Fräulein Emilie, that if he does not at once stop calling the watch, and does not immediately come into his study, I shall go away and not come back."

I said this in a tone in which resolution and politeness were so blended, that I was sure it could hardly fail of its effect. I could hear a whispered discussion within. The women seemed to be adjuring the husband and father not to adventure his precious life in so manifest a peril, while the husband and father sought to calm their terrors by heroic phrases, such as, "But it is my duty," or, "It might cost me my place!"

At last, assisted by these weighty considerations, duty triumphed. The door slowly opened, and by the side of the flowered dressing-gown I caught a glimpse of the cap of the Frau Justizrath, and of the curl-papers of Fräulein Emilie, whose golden ringlets I had always supposed a beautiful work of nature. But so many great illusions of mine had been dissipated in the last few days, that this small one might well go with the rest.

Hesitatingly the justizrath closed the door behind him, hesitatingly he came a few paces nearer, stopped and tried to fix me firmly with his eye, in which, after some difficulty, he almost succeeded.

"Young man," he began, "you are alone?"

"As you see, Herr Justizrath."

"And without weapons?"

"Without weapons."

"Without any weapon?"

"Without any weapon."

I unbuttoned my sailor jacket to convince my questioner of the truth of my statement. The justizrath evidently breathed more freely.

"And you have come----?"

"To surrender myself to justice."

"Why did you not tell me so at once?"

"I do not think you gave me time."

The justizrath cast a confused glance at his broken pipe on the floor, cleared his throat, and seemed not to know exactly what was to be done in such an extraordinary case. There was a pause of silence.

The ladies must have inferred from this pause that I was engaged in cutting the throat of the husband and father; at least at this moment the door was flung open, and the Frau Justizrath, in night-gown and night-cap, came rushing in and fell upon the neck of her spouse in the flowered dressing-gown, whom she embraced with every mark of mortal fear, while Emilie, who had followed close behind her, turned to me, and with a tragic gesture of supplication, raised both her hands as high as her curl-papers.

"Heckepfennig, he will murder you!" sobbed the nightgown.

"Spare, oh spare my aged father!" moaned the curl-papers.

And now the door leading into the passage opened. Jette and the cook were curious to see what was going on, though at the peril of perishing in the general massacre, and appeared upon the threshold wailing aloud. This mark of courageous devotion so touched the night-gown that it burst into a flood of hysterical tears, and the curl-papers tottered to the sofa with the apparent intention of swooning upon it.

Here the justizrath showed, for the second time, how great emergencies bring out the strength of great characters. With gentle firmness he freed the flowered dressing-gown from the embrace of the night-gown, and said in a voice that announced his resolve to do and dare the worst: "Jette, bring me my coat!"

This was the signal for a scene of indescribable confusion, out of which, in about five minutes, the victim of his devotion to duty emerged victorious with coat, hat, and stick: a sublime sight, only the effect was a little damaged by the hero's feet being still covered with embroidered slippers, a fact of which he was not aware until it was too late, when we were standing on the pavement of the market-place.

"Never mind, Herr Justizrath," I said, as he was about to turn back. "You would not get away again, and we have but a few steps to go."

In fact the little old Rathhaus was at the other side of the by no means wide square, and the pavement was perfectly dry, so that the victim of fidelity had not even to fear a cold in the head.

"Herr Justizrath," I said, as we crossed the market-place, "you will tell my father, will you not, that I gave myself up voluntarily, and without any compulsion; and I will never mention to any one a word about the broken pipe."

I have spoken many foolish and inconsiderate words in my life, but few that were more foolish and more inconsiderate than this. Just as I was touching the point which I might say was the only thing in the whole affair to which I attached importance, namely, to show my pride to the father who had disowned me, I failed to perceive that I gave mortal offence to a man who would never forgive, and had never forgiven me. Who can tell what other turn the affair might have taken, if, instead of my unpardonable stupidity, I had intoned a pæan to the heroic man who knew how to guard himself from a possible and indeed probable attack, and then did his duty, happen what might. But how could I know that, young fool that I was?

So we reached the open hall of the Rathhaus, where in the day time an old cake-woman used to sit in a chair sawed out of a barrel, before a table where plum-buns and candies lay upon a cloth not always clean, that was constantly fluttering in the wind that blew through the hall. The table was now bare, and presented a very forlorn appearance, as if old Mother Möller, and not only she, but all the cakes, plum-buns, and candies of the world, had departed forever.

A desolate feeling came over me; for the first and only time this night, the thought occurred to me that perhaps after all I had better make my escape. Who was to prevent me? Assuredly not the slippered hero at my side; and as little the old night-watchman Rüterbusch, who was shuffling up and down the hall, in front of his sentry-box, in the dim light of a lantern that swung from the vaulted roof. But I thought of my father, and wondered if his conscience would not smite him when he heard the next morning that I was in prison; and so I stood quietly by and heard the night-watchman Rüterbusch explaining to Justizrath Heckepfennig that the matter would be very hard to manage, since the last few days so many arrests had been made, that the guard-house was completely full.

The guard-house was a forbidding-looking appendage to the Rathhaus, and fronted on an extremely narrow alley in which footsteps always made a peculiar echo. No townsman who could avoid it ever went through this echoing alley; for that gloomy appendage to the Rathhaus had no door, but a row of small square windows secured with iron bars and half-closed with wooden screens, and behind them here and there might be seen a pale, woe-begone face.

A quarter of an hour after the conversation between Herr Justizrath Heckepfennig and night-watchman Rüterbusch had come to a satisfactory conclusion, I was sitting behind one of these grated windows.

PART SECOND.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

Chapter I

This little alley by the Rathhaus, in which footsteps gave such a singular echo, had never, even within the recollection of the most ancient crow on the neighboring steeple of St. Nicholas's church, enjoyed such a reputation for uncanniness as in the last two months of this year, and the first two of the next. It was also observed that in no previous winter had the snow lain so deep in it, and it grew dark much earlier in the evening than had ever before been known. And Mother Möller, the old cake-woman in the Rathhaus hall, who always hitherto, in the winter season, packed up her wares at the stroke of five, now did it regularly at half-past four, because, as she affirmed, just as it grew dark there was "what you might call a kind of corpsy smell about," and her old table-cloth flapped about in a way no natural table-cloth would do. On the other hand Father Rüterbusch, the night-watchman, asseverated that for his part he had not observed either in the hall or the alley anything out of the common, not even between twelve and one o'clock, which was the fashionable hour with ghosts, let alone at other times. Yet people were more disposed to accept the views of the old cake-woman than those of the still older night-watchman; as the first, though she took a nap now and then, still on the whole was more awake than asleep; while in regard to the other, the regular customers of the Rathhaus cellar, who had to pass his post at night, maintained precisely the contrary. By these assertions they deeply wounded the good heart of Father Rüterbusch, but did not confute him. "For, d'ye see," he would argue, "you must know that a sworn night-watchman never goes to sleep, on any account; but it may happen that he pretends to be asleep, in order not to mortify certain gentlemen who would be ashamed if they knew the old man had his eye on their doings. And mark you, I am willing to be qualified to what I say, upon my oath of office; and none of them can say that. And even if many of them, for instance Rathscarpenter Karl Bobbin, come and go the same way every evening, that is to say every night, for nigh on to twenty years now, a habit is not an office, mark you; and I for my part have never heard, for example, that the customers of the cellar ever took any oath or were qualified in any manner, shape, or form; and yet it was only last Easter I celebrated my jubilee, for it was then fifty years I had held this place, and I went to school with Karl Bobbin's father, who was never of any account, for that matter."

However, be that as it might, during the winter of '33-'34, there was but one opinion of the matter in Uselin; and that was, that if there was anything queer about the Rathhaus alley, nobody need wonder at it, as things were.

Things were certainly bad enough, and worse for no one than for me, who, as was admitted on all hands, was by far the chief figure in the great smuggling case; for into such proportions, thanks to the inquisitorial genius of the justizrath who had charge of the investigation, a thing which to my eyes was of extreme simplicity had now been developed.

As if it was of the least importance how the case looked in my eyes! As if anybody gave himself the trouble to inquire what my thoughts or wishes were! But no; I will do Justizrath Heckepfennig and co-referent Justizrath Bostelmann no injustice. They gave themselves the very greatest trouble; but they had no desire to find out where the truth lay, and where I told them it might be found.

"Why had I left my father?" they asked.

"Because he ordered me out of his house!"

"A fine reason, truly! Angry fathers often tell their sons to be gone, without the idea ever seizing the sons to start off into the wide world. There must be something more behind. Perhaps you wanted to be sent off?"

"To a certain extent I admit it."

"Perhaps you admit it unqualifiedly?"

"I admit it unqualifiedly."

"Very good. Actuary, please to take down the reply of the prisoner, who admits without qualification that he wished to be sent off by his father. And when and where did you first make the acquaintance of Herr von Zehren?"

"On that evening at Smith Pinnow's."

"Had you never seen him before?"

"Never, to my knowledge."

"Not even at Smith Pinnow's? Pinnow declares that Herr von Zehren was so often at his house, and you also so often, that it is incredible that you never met before."

"Pinnow lies, and knows that he lies!"

"You still persist then that your meeting with Herr von Zehren was entirely accidental?"

"Entirely."

"How much money had you about you when you left your father?"

"Twenty-five silbergroschen, as well as I can remember."

"And had you any prospect of obtaining anywhere a permanent position?"

"None."

"You had no such prospect, had but twenty-five silbergroschen in your possession, were anxious that your father should send you off, and yet you persist in asserting that your meeting on that same evening with the man who took you at once into his house, and with whom you stayed until the final catastrophe, was purely accidental! You are sharp enough to see how extremely improbable this is; and I now ask you for the last time, if, at the risk of casting the strongest suspicions on your veracity, you still persist in that statement?"

"I do."

Justizrath Heckepfennig cast a look at Actuary Unterwasser as much as to say: Can you conceive such impudence? Actuary Unterwasser smiled compassionately, and sadly shook his head, and scratched away with his pen over his paper, as if his shocked moral sense found some relief in getting such inconceivable things at all events down in black and white.

Thus it went on with I do not know how many interrogations and examinations; summary examination, examination in chief, articular examination. Often I could not tell what they were aiming at, and what was the object of all the long-winded interrogatories, and short cross-questions, in which last Justizrath Heckepfennig considered himself particularly great. I complained bitterly of this to my counsel, Assessor Perleberg, saying that I had told--or, as they preferred to express it, confessed--everything to the gentlemen.

"My dear sir," said the assessor, "in the first place it is not true that you have confessed everything. For instance, you have refused to say who was the person whom caller Semlow saw, about four o'clock on the evening in question, with you on the path leading to Zehrendorf. And in the second place, what is confession? In criminal jurisprudence it has but a very subordinate value. How many criminals cannot be brought to confess at all? and how many confessions are false, or are afterwards recanted? The real object of the examination is the detection of guilt. Consider, my dear sir, your entire so-called confession might be a fabrication. It has often happened before, the criminal record--"

It was enough to drive a man desperate. Years after, my counsel became a great beacon and luminary of jurisprudence; and indeed he was such at that time, though he was not then a professor, a privy-councillor, and a man of wide reputation, but an obscure assessor of the superior court, a very learned man, and of wonderful acuteness--a world too learned and too acute for a poor devil like me. With his "in the first place," and "in the second place," he would have prejudiced a jury of angels against innocence herself, to say nothing of a college of learned judges who could not avoid the conclusion that a man whose defence required so extraordinary an expenditure of learning and acumen, must of necessity be a very great criminal. I can still see him sitting on the end of the table in my cell, which was fastened with iron clamps to the wall, jerking his long, thin legs, and flourishing his long, thin arms, like a great spider who finds a broken mesh in his web. It was probably a hard task for so learned a spider, into whose web a clumsy blue-bottle had blundered and was floundering about in his awkward way, to extricate him with scientific nicety. And now for the first time I began to find out how far-spreading this web was, and how many flies, besides myself, were entangled in its meshes.

There were very careless flies that under the masks of respectable citizens and honest tradesmen of my native place and the neighboring towns, had for years carried on an extensive business in smuggled goods, and defrauded the revenue of thousands upon thousands. This sort of flies was very dirty and disgusting. For as soon as one had caught its foot in the web, and found itself entangled, it turned traitor to its companions, and did not rest until all were fast in the web.

Then there was another and honester species, though it was far from wearing so honest an appearance. These were my old friends, the weather-beaten, tobacco-chewing, silent men of Zanowitz and the other fishing villages on the coast. They had by no means had so good a time of it as the gentlemen in the counting-houses and behind the counters. They had had to fight with wind and storm, to keep watch and ward, to suffer hunger and cold, and carry their lives in their hand, and all for small gain, many of them for only just enough to keep wife and children from starving; and yet, though four of them had been taken prisoners in that terrible night on the moor, the examiners could draw nothing from them. No one betrayed his comrade; no one knew who had been the man at his side. "The night was dark, and in the dark all cats are gray; every man had enough to do to look to himself. If Pinnow has said that this man and that man was there, why he can probably make oath to it." In vain did the justizrath ask the most ingenious questions, in vain did he wheedle and threaten--they had to let go a dozen or two that were very strongly suspected, and console themselves with the reflection that at all events they had four who had been taken in the act.

Yes, it was a very peculiar sort of flies who had thus been caught with the others in the web of law; a tough, rough sort, very inconvenient for the guardians of the flesh-pots of an orderly government, but still honest after their fashion, and not the sneaking crew that the others were.

These two species of flies had for a long time played into each other's hands, but without any proper system, and consequently at great disadvantage, until, about four years before, the business had taken a sudden and enormous expansion. For some one, who hitherto, like all the proprietors along the coast, had obtained his wine, his brandy, his salt, his tobacco, from the smugglers in small quantities, had hit upon the idea that what was needed was an intermediary between the supply and the demand; a middleman who should provide a sort of warehouse or magazine for the smuggling trade, and thus afford the furnishers an opportunity of getting rid of larger quantities at once, and the purchasers the means of procuring their supplies as they needed them, and at convenient times.

This plan, founded on the soundest commercial principles, begotten of necessity, and joyfully welcomed by the naturally adventurous spirit of the man, he carried out with the audacity, the judgment, and the energy, which so highly distinguished him. The solitary position of his estate upon the long promontory, with the open sea on one side and a narrow strait on the other, was as if it had been made for the very purpose. If before the dealings were in boat-loads, now whole ships' cargoes were received at once, or in a couple of nights, and stored in the cellars of his castle, from which they were gradually delivered to the purchasers, the neighboring proprietors, and the tradespeople in the small towns of the island and the little seaports of the mainland.

This part of the business was chiefly undertaken by Smith Pinnow. Smith Pinnow had been long known to be a smuggler, had been frequently overhauled by the officers of justice, and more than once punished, when of a sudden he found that he was going blind, had to wear great blue spectacles, and could only in very fine weather, with the help of his deaf and dumb apprentice Jacob, take some of the bathing-guests at Uselin out in his cutter for an hour or two's sail. This affliction befel the worthy man just at the time that the great smuggler-captain on the island, whose attention had been drawn to so highly qualified an assistant, one night paid a visit to the forge, and took him, so to speak, into his service. From that time forth the two acted in concert; and by the time the four years had passed, the smith had amassed so much money that he would never have thought of betraying his chief, had not jealousy got the upper hand of the old sinner. "If you do not leave the girl in peace, I will shoot you down like a dog," the Wild Zehren had said; and Smith Pinnow was not the man to quietly put up with such a threat, especially when he knew in what deadly earnest it was uttered.

From that time a rumor, of which no one knew the source, spread abroad in the city, but especially in the offices of the customs, that the Wild Zehren at Zehrendorf was the soul of the whole smuggling trade, which was carried on with such activity for leagues up and down the coast. At first no one gave credit to the rumor. To be sure the Wild Zehren was a man whose name was used as a bugbear to frighten children with in Uselin; and no doubt things were known or believed of him which people hardly ventured to whisper--he had stabbed his brother-in-law, he had horribly maltreated his wife and afterwards drowned her in the tarn in the woods, and more of the same sort--but these were things that were to be expected of the Wild Zehren, while smuggling--no, it was not possible! A man of the most ancient nobility, and whose brother moreover was the highest officer of the Revenue Department in the province!

This was the general opinion. But now and then there would be a voice heard, but very softly indeed, remarking that however different the brothers might be in disposition, mode of life, and even in person, they resembled each other at least in this, that both were deeply in debt; and similar causes might very well produce similar effects. If the Wild Zehren's undertakings had been accompanied with such extraordinary good fortune during these years, the reason probably was that the custom-officers had no clue to his movements, while he, for his part, was perfectly well informed when and where there was no risk of meeting any of them.

The matter might still have been long quietly argued pro and con, had not an unlucky chance happened to give effect to Smith Pinnow's treachery. In the same night when Pinnow and Jock Swart, who could have turned traitor to his master from no other cause than sheer black-heartedness, lodged their information with Customs-revisor Braun, the provincial customs-director arrived in Uselin. The revisor, who belonged to the party that distrusted their chief, did not go to the latter, as he would certainly have contrived to render the denunciation harmless; but went straight to the director, who at once laid his plans with great skill and forethought, to strike a strong blow at the smugglers, in which he succeeded but too well.

Was the steuerrath guilty? There was no direct proof of the fact, if it was a fact. The steuerrath had always declared that for a long time he had broken off all personal intercourse with his brother, whose conduct--though in truth he was greatly reformed of late--was of a nature to compromise a faithful public officer. And in truth, the Wild Zehren had in the last year never been seen with his brother, nor even in the city. If, notwithstanding, there had been any personal intercourse between them, their meetings must have been kept extremely secret. Any letters he might have received from his brother, the steuerrath would of course have destroyed; and if the Wild Zehren was less cautious, he was now dead, his castle burned to the ground--who or what was there to bear witness against the steuerrath?

I was the only one who could have done it. I remembered well the expressions which Herr von Zehren had always used in speaking of his brother; I knew that this last expedition had been made chiefly on that brother's account. I had held in my hands the proof of his guilt, and--destroyed it.

It seemed as if something of the sort was suspected. Suddenly the name of the steuerrath made its appearance in the examinations to which I was subjected, and I was closely questioned as to what I knew of the relations between Herr von Zehren and his brother. I firmly denied all knowledge of anything of the kind.

"My dear sir," said Assessor Perleberg, "why do you wish to screen the man? In the first place, he does not deserve to be spared, for he is a bad subject, take him as you will; and in the second place, you thus do yourself irreparable injury. I will tell you beforehand, you will not get off with less than five years, for in the first place----"

"For God's sake let me alone!" I said.

"You grow less reasonable every day," said Assessor Perleberg.

And he was quite right; but it would have been a marvel had it been otherwise.

I had been confined now for nearly half a year in a cell but half lighted by a small grated window, and which I could traverse with four steps lengthways and with three across. This was a hard trial for a young man like me, but harder, much harder, were the mental sufferings that I endured. The confidence in humankind which had hitherto filled my heart, was all now gone. That no one visited me in my prison, I could lay to the account of Justizrath Heckepfennig, who felt it to be his duty to see that so dangerous a man held no communication with the outer world; but that men to whom I had done nothing, or at the worst had perhaps at some time or other, in my clumsy way, ruffled their pride a little, should set their hearts upon trampling a fallen man still deeper into the dust--this I could not forgive; this it was that filled my soul with bitterness unspeakable. Ten witnesses were called to prove my previous good character; and of these ten there was but one, and that one the man whom of all others I had most deeply wounded--Professor Lederer--who ventured to say some words in my behalf, and to put up a timid plea for lenity. All the rest--old friends of my father, neighbors, fathers whose sons had been my friends and companions--all could hardly find words to express what a miscreant I had been all my life long. And good heaven! what had I done to them? Perhaps I had filled the pipe of one with saw-dust; I had caught a pair of pigeons that belonged to another; the son of a third I had sent home with a bloody nose--and this was all.

I could not comprehend it, but so much of it as I did understand, filled me with inexpressible bitterness, which once even broke out into indignant tears when I learned through my counsel that Arthur--the Arthur whom I had so dearly loved--when interrogated as to his association with me, declared that for years I had talked to him about turning smuggler, and had even attempted to persuade him to join me; that I had always been on the most intimate terms with Smith Pinnow, and that if he were asked if he believed me capable of the crime laid to my charge, he must answer unequivocally Yes.

"That ruins you," said Assessor Perleberg. "You will not get off under seven years; for in the first place----"

I brushed away the tears that were streaming down my cheeks, burst into a wild laugh, and then fell into a paroxysm of frantic rage, which finally gave place to a stony apathy. I still felt a kind of interest in the sparrows that I had taught to come every morning and share my ration of bread; but all other things were indifferent to me. I learned, without feeling any special interest in the news, that Constance was already deserted by her princely lover, who had yielded to the entreaties and threats of his father; that Hans von Trantow had disappeared and no one knew what had become of him, but the general opinion was that he had met with some accident in the forest or on the moor; that old Christian had never recovered from the effects of his young mistress's flight, his master's death, and the burning of the castle, and had been found one morning lying dead among the ruins which he could never be prevailed on to leave; and that old Pahlen had escaped from the jail at B. in which she had been confined. I heard all this with indifference, and with similar apathy I received my sentence.

Assessor Perleberg, with his "first place" and "second place," had been perfectly right. I was condemned to seven years' imprisonment in the prison at S.

"You may think yourself lucky," said Assessor Perleberg. "I would have condemned you to ten years and to hard labor; for in the first place----"

It was no doubt a mark of youthful levity that I had no ears for the very learned and instructive exposition of my counsel, and that too when it was my last opportunity. But I was really thinking of something quite different. I was thinking what the Wild Zehren would have done had he been alive and learned that they had shut up his faithful squire in prison and placed his own brother as jailor over him.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

Chapter II

It was an evening of May, as the wagon in which I was conveyed, escorted by two mounted gendarmes, drew near the place of my destination. On the left of the road, which was lined with stunted fruit-trees, I saw numbers of laborers working on the new turnpike which was to connect my native town with the provincial metropolis; on the right, open meadow-land stretched away to the sea, which was visible as a wide dark-blue streak. On the other side of the water, from a low beach of sand, green fields sloped upwards to a moderately high upland which was crowned with woods. This was the island, which here lay much nearer the mainland than it did near Uselin, and which I now beheld again for the first time. Before me, still more than a mile distant, I could perceive two towers rising high above a range of hills that we were slowly approaching.

My feelings were strange. During the whole journey I had been looking through the rents in the cover of the little wagon, but only watching for an opportunity of escape. But however determined I was to seize the very first that presented itself, there was none, not even the slightest. The two gendarmes, of whom one was one of those who had hunted me in vain upon the island, rode on the right and left close behind the wagon without exchanging a word, their moustachioed faces looking straight between their horses' ears, or turned sideways towards the wagon. There was not the slightest doubt that the first movement that looked like an attempt to escape would bring the butts of their carbines to their shoulders. To make the attempt in the presence of two well-armed, well mounted, and thoroughly determined men, would have been to seek, not liberty, but death.

And none of the chances had happened which I had imagined possible. We had passed no bridge over which I might have leapt into a torrent, we had entered no crowded market-place in which I might have sprung into the throng, and perhaps found shelter with some compassionate soul. Nothing of the kind; we travelled the seven or eight miles of the journey at a walk, or a short trot, without a single halt, and without an interruption of any kind, and now before me rose the towers in whose shadow lay my prison.

And yet at this time I no longer felt the wrath and burning indignation which had filled my breast the whole time that I was in custody under examination. The two hours in the open air had done me inexpressible good. It had been raining for some time before, and I had held out my hands to catch the drops; I had inhaled with delight the fresh air that blew into the wagon. Now the sun had again broken through the clouds, and, as it was near its setting, cast long ruddy streaks over the green sprouting fields and the sparkling meadows. Birds sang and twittered in the trees by the wayside; just before us in the east stood a brilliant rainbow with one foot on the mainland, and the other on the island. All nature seemed so calm and gentle, so free from hate or anger; on the contrary all things wore so mild a beauty and breathed such sweet peace, that I who from a child had sympathized with every mood of nature, could not close my heart to her soft solicitations. My heart sang with the birds; it floated on the moist pinions of the gentle breeze that bore blessings over the fields and meadows; it bathed in the bright hues of the bow of hope, which sprang from earth to heaven and back to earth again. The feeling that I was, as it were, a part of all these, and yet was sitting a prisoner in the jail-van, begat in me such a sense of pity for myself as I had never before experienced. I covered my face with my hands and wept.

The sun had now set; the eastern and western skies were glowing with the most splendid hues as the van rolled through the town-gate, rattled up two or three narrow, badly-paved streets, and stopped at last at a gateway in a high dead-wall. The gate slowly opened, the van rolled across a wide yard shut in on all sides with lofty blank walls and tall, gloomy-looking buildings, to the gate of the tallest and most forbidding of these, and there stopped. I had reached the place where I was to spend seven years because I had endeavored to guard my friend and protector from the results of a crime which I myself abhorred.

Seven years! I was determined that it should not be so long. I had read the adventures of Baron Trenck, and knew that it was possible to pierce thick masonry and undermine great fortress-walls. What he had succeeded in doing, I thought I could not fail to accomplish.

So my first proceeding, when the door closed behind the surly warden, was to examine my cell as closely as the faint remains of daylight would allow. If all the prisoners were so well lodged, there were certainly many of them that fared much worse when at liberty. The walls of the small room were simply whitewashed, it is true; but so were those of my garret at home. There was an iron bedstead with what seemed a very comfortable bed, a clothes-press, at the solitary window a large table with a drawer, two wooden chairs, and, to my surprise, a great arm-chair covered with leather, which strongly reminded me of the one in my room at Castle Zehrendorf.

Yes, I was again the guest of a Zehren, though this time he was only the superintendent of a prison. It seemed as if the Zehrens were inextricably woven into my life. They had brought me but little good fortune; and the proud lustre that had formerly seemed to me to illume the name, had greatly paled in my eyes. The steuerrath, in whom the boy had beheld the incarnation of the highest earthly authority, what was he in the eyes of the prisoner but a liar and hypocrite who had ten-fold and a hundred-fold deserved the misfortunes he had brought upon men who were better than he? And the man here, who, sprung from such a family, had been willing to undertake such an office as his, must be even worse than the hypocrite and liar. I would let him feel the full measure of my contempt when I met him; I would tell him that if he chose to be a jailor, he ought at least to renounce the name which his noble brother had borne, who preferred dying by his own hand to falling into the hands of those who would have brought him here, behind this triply-bolted door, and these windows with massive bars of iron.

The window was by no means so high as those in the guard-house, and I looked with curiosity through the bars. The prospect might have been worse. True, a high and perfectly blank wall shut out the view to the left, but on the right I could see into a court planted with trees, in which at no great distance was a two-storyed house presenting a gable covered entirely with vines. Behind the house there seemed to be a garden: at least I could catch glimpses of fruit-trees in blossom. All this had a very lovely and peaceful appearance in the dim light of the spring evening; and the shrill twittering of the swallows that skimmed in flocks past my window, might have made me forget that I was a tenant of a prison, had I not been painfully reminded of it by the sharp angle of one of the bars against which I had pressed my forehead.

I seized the bar with both my hands, and shook it with my whole force. Six months of confinement had not deprived my muscles of their strength, as I well perceived. I felt as if with one wrench I could bring away the whole grating. Did I deceive myself, or did it yield a little? I was not mistaken; either the screws were loose, or the wood-work decayed; I could not at the moment determine which; but this seemed no grating that could hold me. My heart beat with the exertion and the joyful surprise. I had vowed to myself that they should not keep me seven years! But caution! it was not the grating alone that made a prisoner of me. Were the grating away, there was a depth of at least thirty feet to the stone pavement of the court. And were I safely down, there were doubtless other difficulties to overcome, and a baffled attempt at escape might make my position incalculably worse.

I heard a rustling in the passage. Footsteps drew near and came to my door. I sprang back from the window and stood in the centre of the room, when there was a rattling of keys on the outside, the door opened, and a man of tall stature entered, passing the turnkey, and the door was closed after him. He stood for a moment at the threshold, and then approached me with a peculiar light step. From the ruddy evening clouds there still fell a pale rosy light into the room; in this rosy glow I always see him again when I think of him--and how often do I think of him, with the deepest emotions of gratitude and love!

Over the table at which I am writing these words, hangs his portrait, painted by a beloved hand. It is a most perfect likeness. It would recall to my memory every feature, every line, were it possible that I could forget them. And now, did I close my eyes, he would stand before me again as he stood on that evening, in the rosy sunset light, and not less clearly would I hear his voice, whose soft, deep tone I then heard for the first time, and whose first word was one of pity and sympathy.

"Poor youth!"

How deeply must the prison air have poisoned my heart, that these words and the tone in which they were spoken did not move me! Alas, it is one of my most painful recollections that this was so; that I rudely repulsed the hand of the noblest of men, and deliberately wounded the kindest heart on earth. But the narrative of my life would have no worth, if my faults were not honestly set down. And I have often thought that I might not have learned to love him so well had I been less obdurate at first, had I not given him the occasion to heap upon me all the wealth of his benevolence and love. And yet I err in this. Jewels of the costliest price, of the purest water, need no dark foil.

"Poor youth!" he said again, and held out his white and almost transparent hand; but let it fall again, when, instead of taking it and pressing it with reverence to my lips, as I should have done had I known him, I folded my arms and stepped back.

"Yes," he said, and his voice sounded, if possible, still gentler than before, "it is very hard, very cruel, the fate which has befallen you for a crime which, whatever it may be in the eyes of the judge who must follow the stern letter of the law, in the eyes of others merits a milder name, for at least it does in mine. I am the brother of the man for whose fault you are suffering."

He seemed to expect an answer from me, or at least some word of acknowledgement, which I would not give. I would not do my jailor the favor to help him in his attempt to show himself in another light than that in which I saw him.

"It is a strange caprice of fortune," he continued, after a short pause, always in the same gentle manner, "that one brother should to a certain extent be the instrument of punishing you for the injury which another has done you--a chance for which I am thankful, and which I think I shall rightly employ by--but of this another time. To-day the gloomy shadow of the first dreary impression a place like this must make upon a spirit like yours, lies too heavily upon you; though I could speak with the tongues of angels, I could find no entrance to your heart, which is closed by anger and hatred. I have merely come to perform a duty which my office and I may say my heart prescribes. And this also is my duty, so that you may freely answer me without feeling that your pride is making concessions. Have you any wish that it is in my power to grant?"

"No," I answered, "for you could hardly give me a day's shooting over the heaths of Zehrendorf."

A sad smile played around the superintendent's delicate lips.

"I have heard," he said, "that you used to hunt much with my brother, and that you are yourself a skilful hunter. The hunter's nature is a peculiar one. I think I understand it, for I was born with the hunter's instincts; but there is no room for its exercise in these court-yards and gardens. I seldom have a holiday, and still more rarely avail myself of it; and in this respect I enjoy, and indeed desire, but little advantage over my prisoners. So it would be a hard trial for me, if with the old passion I still possessed my former vigor; and thus I may almost count it a piece of good fortune that at the Battle of Leipzig I was shot through the lungs, so that it would avail me nothing though I had the range of the boundless hunting-grounds of America. I have since learned to confine my activity within narrower limits. My favorite recreation is the turning-lathe. It is light work, and yet often proves too heavy for an invalid like myself I shall probably soon give it up, and must choose some still lighter work. But I should not like to find myself condemned to absolute inactivity. You do not now know, but you will soon learn, how great a blessing to a prisoner is a mechanical occupation which fixes his wandering thoughts upon some near and easily obtainable result which shapes itself under his hand. And now I will leave you. I have still two visits to make, besides my evening round through the building. One thing more: the old man who will wait upon you, is, despite his rough ways, a thoroughly good man, whom I have known for many years, and who has rendered me in my life the most important services. You can trust him absolutely. Now, good-night, and good sleep to you, and dream of the freedom which I hope you will sooner regain than you now think."

He gave me a friendly nod, and left the room with the slow, light step with which he had entered. I looked after him with fixed eyes, and passed my hand over my brow; the silent cell seemed to have become suddenly darker.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

Chapter II

I was still standing on the same spot, endeavoring to collect my thoughts, when the door again opened, and the old turnkey who had first received me, entered with a lighted candle, which he placed upon the table. Then returning to the door, he took from some female whose form was barely perceptible, a waiter upon which was a collation, and even a bottle of wine. He laid a snow-white napkin over one corner of the great oak table, placed everything neatly and orderly, took a step back and cast a satisfied look at his work, then an angry one at me, and said with a voice which strikingly resembled the growl of a great mastiff: "There!"

"It seems this is for me," I remarked, indifferently.

"Don't see who else it could be for," growled the old man.

The roast meat on the dish had a very appetizing odor; for half a year I had not tasted a drop of wine; and what was more, I did not feel towards the surly turnkey the aversion that I felt towards the gently-speaking, courteous superintendent; but I was resolved to accept no favors from my jailor.

"I owe this to the kindness of the Herr Superintendent?" I asked, taking my seat at the table.

"This and more," said the old man.

"For instance?"

"For instance, that one has our best cell, with a look-out into the garden, and not one looking into the prison-yard, where neither sunlight nor moonlight ever comes."

"Thanks," said I, "anything else?"

"That one can wear his handsome town-clothes, instead of unbleached drilling; which is not such a bad rig, though, after all."

"Thanks," said I; "anything else?"

"And that one has Sergeant Süssmilch for warden."

"With whom I have the honor?"

"With whom one has the honor."

"Much obliged."

"Well you may be."

I looked up to get a better view of the man whose relation to me was so fraught with honor and advantage. He appeared to be above fifty years of age, of short, compact build, who seemed to stand remarkably firmly for his age upon his short bowed legs. From his broad shoulders hung a pair of quite disproportionately long arms, with great brown hairy hands, which evidently had not lost their strength of grasp. From his furrowed and wrinkled face, which might once have been good-looking, twinkled under gray bushy eyebrows a pair of clear, good-humored eyes, which in vain tried to look fierce and cruel. His smooth, close-cropped gray hair lay thick above his bronzed forehead; and beneath his great hooked nose, like an eagle's beak, a heavy moustache drooped on either side far below his firm chin. Sergeant Süssmilch was, in later years, long my true friend; in hours of trial he rendered me priceless services; he taught my eldest boys to ride; and when, five years ago, we carried him to his last resting-place, we all heartily sorrowed over him; but at this moment I was considering what amount of resistance he would be likely to offer in a contingency which I deemed very probable, and thought that I should be sorry to have to take the life of the old fellow who was so delightfully surly.

"If one has looked at Sergeant Süssmilch long enough, one will do well to fall to the supper, which is getting no better by standing," he said.

"It may stand there for me," I answered. "I have no appetite for the Herr Superintendent's roast meat and wine."

"Might as well have said so at once," growled Herr Süssmilch, commencing to replace the things on the waiter.

"Who the deuce was to know what your custom here is," I said in a sulky tone.

"The custom here is that one has to work when he wants to eat."

"That is not true," I said. "I am not condemned to labor: I was sentenced to seven years' imprisonment, and should by rights have been sent to the fortress, where decent people go."

"Meaning one's self?" asked Herr Süssmilch.

"Meaning one's self."

"One is altogether mistaken," he replied, having by this time cleared away the things. "In the prison one is compelled to work, unless one has a father or some one who will pay for his keep. In this case one has a father, and gets from him ten silbergroschen daily."

"Herr Süssmilch," I cried, stepping up to the old man, "I take for granted that you are telling me the truth; and now I give you my word that I will rather starve in the dungeon like a rat, than take a penny from my father."

"One will be of another way of thinking to-morrow."

"Never."

"Then one will have to work."

"We shall see about that."

"Yes, we shall see."

Süssmilch went, but stopped at the door, and remarked over his shoulder:

"One wants, then, the ordinary diet, such as every one receives when he comes here?"

"One wants nothing at all," I said, turning my back upon him.

"No light, then, for that is extra too."

I made him no answer. I heard the old man go to the table, take the light, place it on the waiter, and move to the door. There he paused, apparently to see if I would change my mind. I did not move. He coughed; I took no notice. The next moment I was alone in the dark.

"To the devil all of you, with your smooth ways and your rough ways!" I muttered to myself "I want the one as little as the other, and I will be under obligations to no one--no one!"

I laughed aloud, seized the grating of the window and shook it, and then ran up and down the dark room like some wild animal. At last I threw myself in my clothes upon the bed, and lay there in gloomy desperation brooding over my fate, which had never before seemed to me so intolerable. I wrought myself up to a pitch of wild hatred against all who had had any share in my ruin, against my judge, my counsel, my father, the whole world; strengthening myself in my resolution not to abate my obduracy, not to ask the slightest thing of any one, not to be grateful to any one, and above all to win my liberty, cost what it might.

Thus I lay for long hours. At last I slept and dreamed of a flowery meadow over which were fluttering gay butterflies which I tried to catch but could not, for whenever I touched them they turned to red roses. And the red roses, when I attempted to pluck them, began to flash with light and ring with music, and flashing and ringing they floated up to heaven, whence they looked smiling down upon me as the faces of blooming maidens. It was all so strange and sweet and fair, that I lay upon the grass, laughing with bliss. But when I awaked I did not laugh. When I awaked Süssmilch stood at my bed-side and said: "Now one will have to work."

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

Chapter III

For a fortnight I had been doing the very hardest work which at the time was to be had in the establishment, which combined in itself the features of a work-house, jail, and penitentiary. I was not compelled to do this either by the letter of the law which prescribed that prisoners should be employed in accordance with their capabilities, nor by order of the superintendent, who on the contrary had allowed me to choose whatever work I preferred. Indeed he proposed to me to draw up certain lists, and make out certain accounts which happened to be needed in the office, and for which the materials should be sent to my cell. For exercise I might find pleasant and healthful work in the large garden, which was about to be extended.

I replied--and in this I spoke the exact truth--that I was but a poor hand at accounts, and that I understood nothing of gardening. I should prefer, if I were allowed any choice in the matter, the very hardest work that could be found. The Herr Superintendent had himself remarked that work of this sort was the most suitable to a man of my constitution. I had at first denied this; but had more maturely considered the matter and found that the superintendent was right. Indeed I must confess that I felt an irresistible desire to split wood, to break stone, or to handle great weights.

In this, too, I spoke but the truth. My powerful frame was really suffering from the compulsory inactivity. But there were other reasons besides this which really prompted my request. Though I scarcely knew it myself, most of my decisive steps were taken with reference to my father. It was in a spirit of defiance to him that I had left his house; it was in defiance to him that I had given myself up to justice; and it was in defiance that I rejected his provision for my support and demanded the hardest work. He should not have it in his power to say that I ever, even in prison, was a burden to him; he should know that his son was treated no better than a common criminal, which indeed he was in his eyes.

And as little should the soft-speaking superintendent be able to say that he had dealt out to the young man who came of such respectable parents, mercy instead of justice.

And finally, heavy work which would have to be done in the open air must offer better chances for the execution of the plan over which I was brooding day and night, the plan either by cunning or force, or both combined, to obtain my liberty.

Now it is true that the work in the garden which was proposed to me perhaps offered still greater facilities for my purpose. The watch that would be kept there would hardly be very strict, especially for me, whom for some reason or other the superintendent seemed so particularly disposed to favor; but here a feeling arose within me which would probably appear singular to most men in my position, and yet of which I have no cause to feel ashamed.

I was not willing to abuse any confidence that might be placed in me. I had never done this in my life before; and I would not learn it now, not even though a prisoner, not even to win the liberty for which I so wildly longed. If they set me to work with the common criminals condemned to hard labor, they would probably treat me and watch me as one of them; and if they neglected this, so much the worse for them who made the distinction at their own risk, and so much the better for me who did not ask to be spared, and consequently was under no obligations to spare any one.

These thoughts passed through my mind as I appeared before the superintendent on the following day--this time in his office--and presented my request to him.

He looked searchingly at me with his large gentle eyes, and answered:

"Whoever enters this place as a prisoner, is an unhappy man, who as such alone is entitled to my compassion. If your fate touches me more nearly than the rest, the reason is so clear as to need no explanation. You have rejected the sympathy which I proffered you, but have not offended me. From what I know of you, from your attitude during your trial, this was what I had to expect. Whether you do well to reject the provision which your father is willing to make for you, I greatly doubt, as by so doing you but widen the breach between you; and in any circumstances one owes a father so much, that one can, without shame, accept even a humiliation at his hands. But this matter I must leave to your own feelings. If you wish to be treated as a common pauper criminal, who has to work for his maintenance, I had planned, as you know, work for you better suited to your capacities and your education. You say that what you desire is hard, laborious work. It may be so: you are a man of very unusual bodily strength, and the confined air of a prison is poison to both your mind and body. You have been deeply embittered by the long term of your preliminary detention, which appears to have been unprecedentedly rigorous. You will again, I am convinced, become the generous, good-natured, noble fellow which you are by nature, and which in my eyes you still are, when you have expanded this deep chest with pure fresh air, and your torpid circulation has been quickened by active work. You need, moreover, a strong counterpoise to the passions that are raging within you. So, all things considered, I am willing to grant your request. Süssmilch shall show you your duties. But I tell you beforehand, it is convicts' work, and you will find yourself in very bad company; so much the earlier will you remember the difference between you and them."

He gave me a friendly look and wave of the hand, and dismissed me. A feeling which I could not explain brought tears to my eyes as I turned from him to the door, but I forced them back and said to myself: That is all very fine; but I do not wish to be good, I wish to be free.

At the extreme corner of the prison wall, upon a slight elevation, there was a new infirmary to be built. Design, plans, specifications, had all been prepared by the superintendent himself, who was an excellent architect, and the work was to be done by the convicts. They were now digging the foundations. It was a heavy piece of work. An old tower, forming part of the city wall, had once stood upon the spot the ruins of which in the lapse of centuries had first crumbled to rubbish, and then become consolidated into a compact mass which had to be broken up with the pick until the old foundation-wall was reached, which was to serve in part for the new building.

About twenty men were employed on this work. Sergeant Süssmilch had the general supervision of it, and indeed, I being the only prisoner under his immediate charge, had nothing else to do, the convicts from the penitentiary being under the charge of two overseers. The most of these convicts, of whom the majority were young men, and all strong and well fitted for such work, looked as any men would look dressed in coarse drilling, working under the eyes of a pair of stalwart overseers, and forbidden to smoke, to whistle, to sing, or to speak in a low tone. This latter prohibition first struck me upon hearing Süssmilch give to one who had attempted to open a private conversation with his neighbor, in a very emphatic tone the warning: "One has no secrets here; one can talk loud or hold his tongue."

This warning was most frequently given to one particular convict, with the additional remark that he had every reason to be careful.

This was a fellow of Herculean frame, the only one that had what might be called a thorough gallows-face, and who owed his precious life only to the circumstance that a murder of which he was most vehemently suspected, could not quite be brought home to him in the eyes of the judges. He was named Kaspar, and his fellow-convicts called him Cat-Kaspar, because he was believed to possess the mysterious faculty of seeing in the dark as well as in broad daylight, and, notwithstanding the gigantic breadth of his shoulders, of creeping through holes only large enough to allow the passage of a cat.

From the very first day I had made a conquest of this richly-gifted man. While the others watched me with suspicious side-glances, never spoke a word to me, and visibly avoided me, Cat-Kaspar sought every opportunity to be near me; made furtive signals with his eyes, first looking at me and then at the overseers, and gave me in every way to understand that he wished to enter into more intimate relations, and especially that he wished to speak with me.

I confess that I felt the strongest abhorrence for the man, whose nature was plainly enough indicated by a low forehead almost covered by his hair, a pair of evil, poisonous eyes, and a great brutal mouth; and any one would have felt the impulse to shun him even without the knowledge that his hands were stained with blood. But I mastered this instinctive aversion, for I said to myself that this man would have decision enough for any venture, and dexterity and strength enough to carry out any plan. So I also sought an opportunity to get near him, but did not succeed until we had been working together for a fortnight. I had hardly effected this, when I made the discovery that Cat-Kaspar, in addition to the accomplishments of which I had heard, possessed another, which I afterwards found out to be easily acquired. This art consisted in a most perfect imitation of a yawn, and while holding the hand to the open mouth, forming by means of the tongue and teeth certain sounds which, when closely listened to, could be detected to be words. Thus for the first time I heard, to my no small astonishment, from the midst of the most natural yawn in the world, the words: "The great stone--help me."

What he meant I learned a few minutes later.

They had recently been hauling stone for the foundations, and a particularly large one, through the clumsiness of the wagoners, had rolled into the foundation at a place where it was not needed. It seemed a matter of impossibility to get it out again without erecting apparatus for the purpose. Sergeant Süssmilch swore at their cursed stupidity, which would now cause an hour or more of unnecessary work. Cat-Kaspar, after he had given me the mysterious hint, suddenly raised his voice and said:

"What is the great difficulty, Herr Süssmilch? I will undertake it, single-handed."

"Yes, if a big mouth could do it," growled Herr Süssmilch.

The rest laughed. Cat-Kaspar called them a pack of toadies, and said that it was an easy thing to crack jokes and laugh at an honest fellow who was not allowed to show what he could do.

Cat-Kaspar knew his man. The honest sergeant turned red in the face; he pulled his long moustache, and said:

"In the first place, no arguments; in the second place, one may show now what he can do."

In an instant Cat-Kaspar had seized an immense crowbar and sprung into the foundation.

The stone lay upon the incline covered with planks by which the rubbish and earth were hauled away, and a giant, by means of a lever, might perhaps have rolled it up. Cat-Kaspar certainly exhibited very surprising strength. Thrusting his bar under the stone, he raised it so far that it required but little more to turn it over. The exertion of strength was really so astonishing, that the men hurrahed, and the attention of even Sergeant Süssmilch and the two overseers was riveted on the performance. Suddenly Cat-Kaspar's strength seemed to fail him; he looked as if in peril every instant to be crushed between the stone and the bank of earth.

"Help me, some one!" he cried.

I did not imagine that all this was a mere stratagem of the cunning rascal. Snatching a second crowbar, and without waiting for the sergeant's permission, I leapt down, thrust the bar under the stone, clapped my shoulder to it and heaved with all my strength, and the stone rolled over.

"Hurrah!" shouted the men.

"Slowly, comrade," said Cat-Kaspar, as I was exerting myself further to help him with the stone, "slowly, or we will get up too soon."

He had no need to yawn now; the excitement of both convicts and overseers was such that the regulations were for the time forgotten; and then we were at least fifteen feet below them, and only our backs were visible. Cat-Kaspar took advantage of his opportunity. While we were heaving at the stone, shoulder to shoulder, he kept bandying coarse jokes with those above, and in the intervals addressed me in rapid, broken sentences.

"Will you join us.--never have such another chance--two fellows at least, such as you and I, must take it in hand--there are ten more of them--but two must begin--no one has the courage but myself--and you too, I hope--to-morrow is the last day--through the gate across the bridge over the rampart to the outer harbor at the strand--only follow me--I'll bring you through--if any one offers to stop us, kill him--the scoundrel Süssmilch first of all. If you betray us----"

"Work, and stop gabbling!" called out the sergeant.

"I can do no more!" said Cat-Kaspar, throwing down his crowbar.

He had gained his object, and had no desire to expend his strength further, at no advantage to himself.

"Come out!" ordered the sergeant, well pleased to have been right, and indeed doubly right, since the two strongest men of the gang had not been able to accomplish what Cat-Kaspar had undertaken to do single-handed.

Order was restored, and the work proceeded as usual. I did the work of two, to conceal the excitement into which the assassin's words had thrown me. His plan at once seemed tolerably plain, and I comprehended it thoroughly when I found an opportunity to take a look around from the highest point of the site from which one could see over the wall. Immediately adjoining the place where we were working was a gate in the wall, which during the progress of the work was frequently used, and the key to which the sergeant carried in his pocket. A short bridge, which had in the centre a gateway defended by chevaux-de-frise, led from the gate over a wide moat which in former times had been the town-fosse, as our prison-wall had once been part of the town-wall. Beyond the moat was a high bastion, with a walk shaded with walnut-trees at its foot, and on it stood two cannon, but I had never observed any sentry near them. To the right of the bastion was a much lower rampart, over which from my position it was easy to see; and beyond this I caught sight of the pennons of ships, which must be in the outer harbor of which Cat-Kaspar had spoken. Between the pennons glittered a bit of blue sea; indeed I could catch a glance of the island beyond, whose low chalk-cliffs shone bright in the sunset.

I had seen enough, and hastened to descend in order to awake no suspicion. The evening-bell rang, our work was over for the day; with the sergeant at my side I retraced the now familiar way by the garden, past the house to my cell.

This night no sleep visited my eyes. All night long I revolved in my mind the possibilities of flight. That Cat-Kaspar's plan was feasible, I was now convinced; and equally so that this cunning, bold fellow was the very man to carry it out. The place could not have been better chosen; a high bastion, an outer harbor with ships and boats, a deserted strand beyond, and over there the island, which I could reach in any event by swimming. Once there, I knew now how to get away, and how easily it could be done. My clothes were still in the old woman's keeping, and there also were my gun and my game-bag. Then farewell preliminary detention and imprisonment; farewell judges and counsel, superintendents and turnkeys! I should be a free man and could mock you all--and you too, worthy citizens of my native town, who had dealt so generously with me, and my father--well, my father might look to it how he reconciled to his conscience his treatment of a son whom his severity had driven from his house, whom he and he alone had made a criminal.

I had not been a criminal yet, but I knew that I should soon be one; indeed I felt myself one already. I even now felt the taint of my associations with Cat-Kaspar. It was plain enough that without real and deep crime--without murder--our plan could not be executed. The sergeant kept the keys of the gates in his pocket, and he was not a man to yield, especially in such a case. Then the other two overseers were there, who were clearly no chicken-hearts. The three would resist as long as life was in their bodies. They must be despatched at the very first attack, in order that terror should be added to confusion, if our flight was to succeed.

I sprang up from my bed with a wildly-beating heart. Cat-Kaspar counted on my assistance first of all, and he was right; unless we two began the attack simultaneously, there was no chance of success; one man alone would have none to second him; so one of the guards, probably the sergeant, must fall by my hand.

By my hand--how easy it was to think and to say this; but would not my courage fail me at the moment? True, I had fired at the officer in the moor, but then not only my own liberty, but that of my protector, benefactor, and friend was at stake, and thankful had I been that my bullet went astray. Now my associate was not the man I so loved and admired, but Cat-Kaspar; the thing to be done now was not to fire a pistol at a dark figure that suddenly springs up threatening in the way, but to perpetrate a deliberate murder; it was to kill a comparatively unarmed man with a spade, a pick, or a crowbar, or the first tool that came to the murderer's hand. And I had done everything in my power to hate the man, and could not do it. Through all his roughness there shone so much genuine kindness, that it often seemed to me that he had put on this prickly garb because he knew how soft he was by nature. If my relations to him were none of the best, whose fault was it but mine who had so rudely repulsed all his advances? He had not retaliated; he had never wavered in his rough but sincere good-will; if I overlooked his surly fashion of speech, he had treated me, not as a keeper his prisoner, but as an old faithful servant, who can take many liberties, might treat a young master who has behaved badly, and who has been entrusted to him to bring back to reason. Often during the work I found his clear blue eyes looking at me with a strange expression as if he were saying constantly to himself: "Poor youth! poor youth!" and as if he would like to throw down his measuring-rod, seize my pick, and do the work in my place. Once or twice he had said, as we were returning from work, "Well, hasn't one had enough of it yet?" and again, "One shouldn't be too obstinate and grieve the captain so." (The sergeant never called his former officer the "superintendent," except where it was absolutely necessary.) "How grieve the captain?" I asked. "One will not understand it," the old man replied, and looked quite sad and dejected.

I would not understand it--he was right in that.

But does any one understand less because he pretends unconsciousness? Whatever the reason might be that drew the superintendent's sympathy to me and my fate, I could not close my eyes to the fact that this sympathy existed, and that it was expressed in the sincerest, in the most winning manner, I still heard his words and the tone in which they were spoken, a tone which so vividly brought back to my memory the voice of the man who had been and still was my hero. The oftener I saw the superintendent--and I saw him nearly every day--the more I was struck by his resemblance to his unfortunate brother. It was the same tall form, but toil and sickness, and probably grief and care, had broken down the proud strength; it was the same noble face, but nobler and gentler; the same great dark eyes, but their looks were more earnest and sad. Even when his lips were silent, these eyes greeted me with kindness; and in this frightful night, while I was struggling with the tempter, I saw them still, and their soft sad looks seemed to ask: "Have you a heart to plan such a deed?--a hand to execute it?"

But I will, I must be free! my spirit cried out. What care I for your laws? If you have brought me to despair, you can only expect from me the actions of a desperate man. From my school here--from one prison to another! I shook off one tyranny because I found it intolerable; should I patiently bear this which oppresses me so much more heavily? Shall I not meet force with force? What would the Wild Zehren do were he alive and knew that his dearest friend was here in a dungeon? He would strive to set me free, though he had to burn down the prison or even the town, as those faithful fellows did, who delivered his ancestor! What he would do and dare, that would I. At the worst it could but cost my life; and that life should be thrown away when it was no longer worth having--the Wild Zehren had taught me that.

Thoughts like these agitated me as if a hell had been let loose in my breast. Even now, after so many years, now when with a joyous and innocent heart I feel grateful for every sun that rises bringing me another day of earnest work and calm happiness--even now my heart palpitates and my hand trembles as I write these lines, which bring so vividly before me the terrors of that night, and of the time when I sought for any means of escape from the labyrinth in which I wandered in despair.

Let no one cast a stone at me that I strayed so far from the right path. Well for thee, be thou who thou mayst, whose brow falls into severe judicial folds upon reading this--well for thee if the happy temper of thy blood has preserved thee from the blind fury of raging passions, if a judicious education has early given thee a clear view of life, and kindly smoothed thy path before thee. Then thank thy beneficent stars that have granted thee all this, and perhaps kept thee from going widely astray. For when is this not possible? It is a peril to which all are exposed. Then devoutly pray that thou mayst not be led into temptation, that no such night may come to thee as that through which I suffered; a night in which it is not only dark without, but within; a night which, when thirty years have passed, you will still shudder to think of.

When the dawning light entered my cell, it found me with burning temples, and shivering with chill. I probably looked pale and haggard, for the sergeant's first word when he saw me was, "Sick: no work to-day."

I was sick; I felt it but too plainly. I had never felt thus in my life before. Was this the hand of fate, I thought, which forbade our designs? If I did not go to work to day, the attempt would not be made. Cat-Kaspar reckoned on my strength, courage, and decision. My example--the example of one who was to a certain extent a volunteer, and whom they all felt to be their superior--must exert an irresistible influence upon them. Cat-Kaspar fully calculated upon this, and he neither could nor would venture without me.

"No work to-day," said the sergeant. "Look as miserable as a cat. Overdid it yesterday. Not got seven senses like a bear."

This last mysterious phrase--a favorite one with the sergeant--was beyond my comprehension; but its meaning could only be a friendly one, for his blue eyes rested upon me as he spoke with an expression of sincere solicitude.

"Not at all," I said. "I think I shall feel better out of doors: the prison air does not suit me."

"Doesn't suit anybody that I know of," growled the sergeant.

"And me first of all," I said; "so badly that I have a strong inclination to go away pretty soon."

I looked the old man fixedly in the eye. I wanted him to read my intention in my looks. But he only smiled and replied:

"Not many would stay if all went that wanted to--Would go away myself."

"Why do you not?"

"Been with the captain now five-and-twenty years. Stay with him till I die."

"That may happen any day."

Again I looked at him steadily in the face. This time the expression of my look struck him.

"Look like a bear with seven senses. Got a robber-murderous-gallows look,"[5] said he.

"What I am not, I may be yet," I said; "what if I were to throttle you this moment? I am thrice as strong as you."

"No stupid jokes," said the sergeant. "Not a bear; and an old soldier is no toothpick."

In this way the worthy Herr Süssmilch disposed of the matter. As I would neither remain in my cell nor see the prison-doctor, we started for the work-place.

On the way I had to stop more than once, for everything grew dark before my eyes, and I thought that I was about to die. The same sensations returned several times during the day, which was unusually hot. A fierce fever was raging in my veins, a terrible malady was swiftly coming on me, or indeed had already come.

Dr. Snellius said to me afterwards, and indeed repeated the remark to me but a few days ago, over our wine at table, that he cannot to this day understand how a man in the condition in which I must have been, could not only remain upon his feet all day long, but do hard work. He said it was the strongest proof he had ever met, of how far an intense will could prevail contra naturam, against the course of nature. "To be sure," he added, clapping me on the shoulder, "only blacksmiths can do it; tailors die in the attempt."

How dreadfully I suffered! When the dream-god has a mind to play me a malicious trick, he places me in a deep excavation into which pour the rays of a pitiless sun; he claps a pick into my hand, with which I smite furious blows upon a soil hard as rock, but the soil is my own head, and every blow pierces to my brain; and then he fills the excavation with fiends in the shape of men, who are all working like myself with picks or with spades, shovels and barrows, and these fiends have all flat, brutal faces and evil eyes that they keep fixed upon me, giving me signs of intelligence and readiness for the devilish work I am to do. And among them rises from time to time a head that has eyes more evil than all the rest, and the head opens its horrible mouth to yawn, and from the distended jaws come the words: "Sunset soon--ready, comrade--I take Rollmann, you sergeant--smash skulls!"

But the most dreadful part is to come.

It is half an hour before sunset. In half an hour the bell will ring to stop work. This is the last day; the excavation is done and the foundation-stones are brought. Tomorrow regular masons will take the work in hand. Some of the convicts will help them, but others will be employed elsewhere; it is the last evening on which the eleven of whom I am to be the twelfth will be together. Now or never is to be the time, and the signal has been already given.

Cat-Kaspar commences a dispute with his neighbor, in which the others join, one by one. The quarrel gets hot; the men appear to grow furious; while the overseers, with the sergeant at their head, endeavor to separate them, and threaten them with solitary confinement on bread and water for such unheard-of insubordination. The rioters pay no attention; from words they come to blows, and pushing and striking, they get into a confused mêlée, into which they endeavor to involve the overseers.

This prelude has lasted but a few moments, and it can be continued no longer, lest the unusual noise should bring other officers upon the spot, and so the whole plan be defeated.

Whether I was drawn into the mêlée, or whether I sprang into it voluntarily, I cannot say--I find myself in the midst. I do not know if I am helping the overseers to drag the men apart, or if I am trying to increase the confusion; but I shout, I rave, I seize two by their necks and hurl them to the ground as if they were puppets; I behave like a madman--I am really mad, though neither I nor the rest know it; even Cat-Kaspar does not perceive it, but rushes up to my side and shouts: "Now, comrade!"

At this instant I see a man of tall stature emerge from the garden-gate and hasten towards us. It is the superintendent. A maiden of about fifteen, of whose slender figure I have more than once caught a glimpse through the garden-gate, holds him by the hand, and seems to endeavor to detain him, or else to share the danger. Two boys appear at the gate, and hurrah loudly; they have no idea of the terrible seriousness of the affair.

The tall superintendent confronts us. He draws his left hand gently from the hand of the maiden and presses it upon his weak chest, which is laboring with the exertion of his rapid walk. The other hand he has raised to command silence, as he is not yet able to speak. His usually pale cheeks are suffused with a feverish glow; his large eyes flash, as if they must speak, since his lips cannot.

And the raging, furious crew understand their language. They have all learned to look up in reverence to the pale man who is always grave and always kind, even when he must punish, and whom no one has yet known to punish unjustly. They are prepared for everything except this, that at the last moment this man should confront them. They feel that their plan has failed: indeed they abandon it.

One does not. One is resolved to win the game or lose all. In truth, is not the chance now better than ever? Let yonder man once lie prostrate, who or what could restrain him and the rest?

Giving a yell more horrible than ever issued from the throat of the fiercest beast of prey, he swings high his pick and rushes upon the superintendent. The maiden throws herself before her father. But a better defender is still swifter than she. With one bound he springs between them and seizes the miscreant's arm. The pick, in descending, grazes his head, but what is that to the torments that have been raging in it for hours?

"Cursed hound!" roars Cat-Kaspar, "have you betrayed us?" and swings his pick again, but has hardly raised it when he is lying upon the ground, and on his breast is kneeling one to whom the delirium of fever has now given the strength of a giant, and whom in this moment no living man could resist.

In a moment it is all over. For an instant he sees the horribly distorted face of Cat-Kaspar--he feels hands striving to wrench his hands from the man's throat, and then a black night swallows up all.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

Chapter IV

A black night which is but a long, long continuation of the dreadful dream, until at last it is broken by rare gleams of soft, dim light, at which the forms of fear grow faint and give way to more friendly shapes. These also melt into deep night, but it is not the old terrible gloom, but rather a blissful sinking into happy annihilation; and whenever I emerge from it the figures are clearer, so that I sometimes now succeed in distinguishing them from each other, whereas at first they melted indistinguishably into one another. Now I know that when the long gray moustache nods up and down before my face, there is always an honest, good-natured old mastiff there, who growls out of his deep chest; only I never get sight of the mastiff, and sometimes think that it is the long gray moustache itself that growls so. When the moustache is dark, I hear a soft voice, the sound of which is inexpressibly soothing to me, so that I cannot refrain from happy smiles, while when I hear the mastiff I would laugh aloud, only I have no body, but am a soap-bubble which floats out of the garret-window in my father's house, into the sunny air, until two spectacle-glasses which have no moustache, are reflected in it. These spectacle-glasses perplex me; for although they never have a moustache, they are sometimes blue, and then they are a woman; but when they are white they are a man and have a creaking voice, while the blue glasses have the softest voice--softer even than that of the dark moustache.

I cannot make out how all this is, and puzzle myself over it until I fall asleep, and when I awake some one is leaning over me who has a dark moustache and brown eyes, and exactly resembles some one that I know, although I cannot recall where and when I have seen him. But I feel both glad and sad at the sight of this unknown acquaintance, for it seems to me that I owe him boundless gratitude for something--I know not what. And this feeling of gratitude is so strong that I draw his hand, which he has laid upon mine, very slowly and softly, for I have little or no strength, to my lips, and close my eyes, from which happy tears are streaming. I have something to say, but cannot recall it, and fall to thinking it over, and when I again open my eyes the form is gone, and the room vacant and filled with a dim light, and I look around in surprise.

It is a moderately-large, two-windowed room; the white window-curtains are pulled down, and on them I can see the shadows of vine-branches waving to and fro. I watch the motion with delight; it is an image of my thoughts that float and waver thus without being able to fix themselves on any point. I look again into the room, and my eyes find an object on which they rest. It is a picture which hangs directly opposite to me on a plain light-gray wall; it represents a young and beautiful woman with a child in her arms. The eyes of the young mother, who is calm and almost sad, as though she were pondering over some wondrous mystery, are mild and gentle; while those of the boy, under his full brow, have a dignity beyond his years, and look out into the far distance with an air of majesty as if their glances comprehended the world.

I can scarcely turn my eyes from the picture. My admiration is pure and artless; I have no knowledge of the original; I do not know that it is an exquisite copy in crayons of the most celebrated painting of the Master of masters; I only know that never in my life have I seen anything so beautiful.

Under this picture hangs a little étagère with two rows of neatly-bound books. Under the étagère stands a bureau of antique form with brass handles, and on it lie drawing-materials, and, between two terra-cotta vases, a little work-basket with ends of red worsted hanging over its edge.

Between the windows and the bureau, evidently set on one side, is an easel, upon which is a drawing-board with the face inwards; and on the other side of the door a cottage piano, the upper part of which has a peculiar, lyre-shaped figure.

I do not know what it is that suddenly brings to my mind Constance von Zehren. Perhaps it is that the lyre-shaped instrument reminds me of a guitar; and indeed this must be the reason, for in nothing else does the room bear any resemblance to Constance's. As there all was neglect and confusion, here all is orderly and cheerful; no torn threadbare carpet covers the white floor upon which the windows throw squares of sunlight, and the shadows of the vine-branches play, but fainter than upon the curtains. No, I am not at Castle Zehren. In all that castle there was no apartment like this, so bright, so cheerful, so clean; and now I remember Castle Zehren is burnt down--to the very ground, some one told me--so I cannot be at Castle Zehren; but where am I, then?

I turn my eyes to the beautiful young mother of the picture, as if she could answer me; but looking at her, I forget what it was that I had intended to ask. I have only the feeling that one can sleep peacefully when such eyes are watching him; and I wonder that the fair boy does not rest his head upon the shoulder or the bosom of his mother, close his great thoughtful eyes, and sleep sweetly--oh! so sweetly!

The long sweet sleep wonderfully strengthens me. When I awake, I at once raise my head, rest myself upon my elbow, and stare with surprise at the brown furrowed face, the blue eyes, the great hooked nose, and the long gray moustache of Sergeant Süssmilch, who sits at my bed-side.

The old man, on his part, looks at me with no less surprise. Then a pleasant smile shoots from the moustache through a pair of the deepest furrows up to the blue eyes, where it stays and blinks and twinkles joyously. He brings three fingers of his right hand to his forehead, and says, "Serviteur!"

This comes so drolly from him that I have to laugh, for I can laugh now, and the old fellow laughs too, and says, "Had a good nap?"

"Splendid," I answer. "Have I been sleeping long?"

"Pretty well. To-morrow it will be eight weeks," he replies cheerily.

"Eight weeks," I repeated, mechanically; "that is a long time;" and thinking of this, I pass my hand over my head. My head was naturally covered with very thick, curly, soft auburn hair, inclining to red; but I now feel nothing but short bristles, as of a brush, a brush too in which time has made considerable ravages.

"This is very strange," I said.

"Soon grow," said the sergeant, encouragingly. "Shaved me bald as a turnip after this"--he pointed to a deep scar on his right temple, running up into his thick gray hair, and which I now noticed for the first time--"and yet I had a crop afterwards like a bear----"

"With seven senses," I added, and had to laugh at my own wit. It seems that I have a child's head on my broad shoulders.

The old man laughed heartily, then suddenly grew serious and said:

"Now keep still, and go to sleep again like a----"

He did not finish his favorite simile, apparently in fear lest he should set me to laughing again; but I laughed in spite of his precautions, and while doing so pulled up the sleeve of my shirt, which struck me as singularly loose. But it was not that the sleeve was wider, but my arm thinner; so thin that I could scarcely believe it to be mine.

"Soon get strong again," said the sergeant.

"I have been very sick, then?"

"Well," said he, "it was very near tattoo; but I always said: weeds won't die," and he rubbed his hands with satisfaction. "Talk enough now," he added, in a tone of authority. "Strict orders, when awake, to allow no discussion, and report fact; which shall be done forthwith."

The sergeant is about rising, but I take one of his brown hands and beg him to stay. I feel myself quite strong, I say; speaking does not fatigue me at all, and of course hearing does not; and I should like to hear how I came into this condition, who the persons are that have been about me, and whose faces I have seen floating through the mist of my dreams; and if there has not been a great good-natured mastiff that guarded me, and had a way of growling deeply.

The old man looks at me attentively, as if he thought all was not yet quite right under my bristly, half-bald skull, and that it was high time he made his report. He placed my hand upon the coverlid, and said, "So! so!" smoothes the pillow, and again says, "So! so!" so to please him I shut my eyes and hear how he rises softly and goes away on tiptoe; but the door has hardly closed behind him when I open my eyes again, and apply myself resolutely to the task of solving the questions which I had addressed to the old man.

As when we look down from a high mountain upon a sea of mist, we note bright points emerging, one by one--a sunlit corn-field, a cottage, a bit of road, a little lake with grassy shores, until at last the whole landscape lies plain before us, except a few spots over which gray wreaths of vapor still float, which more slowly than the rest roll up the ravines--just so before my mental vision dissolved the night of oblivion which during my illness had covered the recent events of my life. Now I again remembered that I was in prison and how I came there; that the old man with the gray moustache was not my friend and nurse, but my keeper; that I had had thoughts of killing him, if necessary, to gain my liberty; and so everything that had happened, up to that last frightful day; but that was confused and obscure--as confused and obscure as it has ever since remained in my memory to this hour. Dark and painful; but strange to say, this painful feeling was turned exclusively against myself. The hate, the bitterness, the rancor, the desperation, the frenzy--all the demons which had dwelt in my soul, were gone, as though an angel with flaming sword--perhaps the Angel of Death, who had hovered over me--had driven them away. Even the remains of pain melted away in thankfulness that the most fearful of all had been spared me--that I could look upon my white, wasted hands without a shudder.

As I lay here, pondering these things, and my eyes rested upon that fair young mother, who bore her boy so securely upon her strong, faithful arm, my hands involuntarily folded, and I thought of my own mother so early lost--far too early for me--and how all would have happened differently if she had ever encircled me with her protecting arms; if in my young sorrows and doubts I could have sought refuge, counsel, and consolation upon her faithful breast. And I thought too of my father, who was so lonely now, whose hopes I had so cruelly blighted, whose pride I had so deeply wounded; and I thought of him for the first time without animosity, with only a feeling of deepest pity for the poor old forsaken man.

"But he will live," I said to myself, "and I am not dead; and all shall be well again. No, not all. The lost past cannot be recalled; but the future still is mine, even in a prison."

In a prison. But was this a prison in which I was?--this pleasant room with windows barred only by nodding vine-branches; a room in which everything spoke of the peacefully cheerful life of its fair inhabitant.

How I came to this idea I do not know, but I could not rid myself of it; and there were the ends of red worsted hanging from the little work-basket. What had a workbasket to do in the room of a man?

I thought and thought, but could arrive at no conclusion; the streak of mist would not move. Indeed it rather widened and spread to a thin veil, which threatened gradually to envelope the whole prospect. I did not care; I had seen it once and knew that I should see it again; knew that I should hear the voices again which now fell faintly on my ear as if from a vast distance, among which I could distinguish the muttered growl of my faithful mastiff, and the soft voice that accompanied the eyes whose gentle light had shone through my darkness.

When I again awaked, it was really night, or at least so late that the little astral lamp by my bedside was already lighted, and by its feeble glimmer I saw some one sitting by my bed whom I did not recognize, as his head was hidden in his hand. But when I moved, and he raised his head and asked, "How are you now?" I knew him at once. The low gentle voice I would have recognized among a thousand. And now, strangely enough, without having to give a moment's thought to the matter, but just as if some one had told me everything in my sleep, I knew that the house in which I had been for the last eight weeks, and in which I had all this time been tended as carefully as if I had been one of the family, was the house of the superintendent, of the man who certainly not to-day for the first time was watching by my bed, and who spoke to me in a tone of affection, as might a kind father to his son.

Leaning over me, he had taken my hand while he went on speaking; but I could only half hear his words for another voice that cried out within me, loud and ever louder, in the words of Scripture: "I am not worthy!"

I could not silence this voice. "I am not worthy!" it continually cried, until at last I exclaimed aloud: "I am not worthy!"

"You are, my friend," said the soft voice; "I know that you are, even though you know it not yourself."

"No, no, I am not," I said, in great agitation. "You do not know whom you are caring for; you do not know whose hand you are holding in yours."

And now, following that irresistible impulse which urges every nature that is upright at heart to refuse at all hazards gratitude which it is conscious of not deserving, I confessed my grievous fault; how I had been resolved to run every risk to gain my liberty; that I had not, it is true, invited the overtures of the ruffian, but nevertheless had permitted them; how I had known of the plot and of the hour when it was to be carried out, and that I did not know why in the last moment the courage to do my part in it had failed me so that I turned my hand against the man whom I had voluntarily admitted as my comrade, and whose accomplice I must necessarily consider myself.

The superintendent allowed me to speak to an end, only retaining with a gentle pressure my hand, whenever I attempted to withdraw it. When I ceased speaking, he said--and even now, after so many years, on awaking in the night, I fancy I hear his voice:

"My dear young friend, it is not what our fancies, intentions, desires, represent to us as possible or even necessary, not what we believe we can do or ought to do, not what we have resolved to do, but it is what at any given moment we really do, that makes us what we are. The coward believes himself a hero until the moment of trial convicts him of cowardice; the brave man fancies that he will prudently avoid all perils, and plunges headlong into danger as soon as a cry for help reaches his ear. You believed yourself capable of lifting your hand against a defenceless man, and when you saw him attacked by a murderer, you sprang to his assistance. And do not say that you did not know what you were doing; or if you really did not know, you were following the irresistible promptings of your nature, and were just at that moment your real self. I and mine will evermore see in you the man who saved my life at the peril of his own."

"You would make me out better than I really am," I murmured.

"Even were that so," he answered, "few have my opportunity for knowing that the surest, often the only way to make a man better, is to take him for better than he is. Would to heaven that this secret of my craft were always as easy of employment as with you. And if I can help, as I joyfully trust I can, in refining the noble metal of your nature from the dross with which it may yet be mingled; if I can help to enlighten you in regard to yourself, to light up the path of your life which lies but dark before you, and from which you believe you have--and perhaps really have--wandered; in a word, to make you what you can be, and therefore ought to be--that would be but dealing you out justice in return for the sharp injustice which has brought you here; and I might thus repay the debt of gratitude which I owed you before you set foot in this house, let alone before you preserved for my children their father's life."

The soft light of the lamp fell upon his beautiful pale face, which seemed to beam upon me with mild radiance like a star out of the surrounding gloom; and his gentle voice came to my ear like the voice of some good spirit that in the stillness of the night speaks to some needy and stricken soul. I lay there without moving, without turning my eyes from him, and softly begged him to speak on.

"It is perhaps selfish in me to do so," he said, "if I now seize the moment when your soul awakes to fresh life, and is disposed to look with trusting child-like eyes upon the world it has regained, to teach you to know me, and, if possible, to love me, as I know and love you--I repeat it, not now for the first time. I knew you before you came here. You look at me with surprise, and yet nothing could be more simple. I always deeply loved my eldest brother, although in reality we only passed our childhood and boyhood together, and were then separated, never again to associate, nor indeed even to see each other, for the last fourteen years. For, whatever the world and his passions may have made of him, his was originally the fairest, noblest, bravest soul that ever was bestowed upon man. You can imagine what a blow to me was the news of his death; with what painful care I strove to learn everything connected with his death and its cause; how eagerly I seized an opportunity that offered to read the reports of the trial in which the name and actions of my unfortunate brother figured so conspicuously, and in which you were yourself so unhappily involved. From these reports I first learned to know you, I have long been accustomed to inspect reports of this kind, and know how to read between the lines of the text. Never was this skill more necessary to me than in this case; for never has the juristic understanding--or rather imbecility--divested of all psychological insight, committed grosser wrong than in your case; never did the hand of a dauber produce from an easily-outlined, sun-clear, youthful face, a more hideous caricature in black upon black. In almost every feature with which the accusation furnished it, I thought I could perceive and prove exactly the contrary. And had it not been my dearly-loved brother whose fault you were to expiate--if the whole trial had been foreign to me, instead of touching me nearly, and in a thousand painful ways, I would have made your cause my own, and tried to save you, if in my power. But I could do nothing for you; I could only exert all my influence to have you brought here instead of to N., where it was originally intended to send you.

"You came, I saw you as I had pictured you to myself; I found you just as I had thought. There may have been some apparent difference, but that was not the youth who, to rescue my brother, had rushed upon ruin; who had given himself up to justice that men might not say his father was his accomplice; who during the trial had knowingly damaged his own cause by obstinately refusing all information implicating others; whose manly candor in all other points would have touched any heart but the shriveled heart of a man of acts and processes. This was a man who had been wronged under the forms of law, whose clear soul had been darkened by the gloom of a dungeon.

"It was worthy of you that you attempted no concealment of your feeling of hatred, that you proudly rejected what was offered you here, which others would have greedily seized. Let me be brief The malady that had been so long incubating, which nothing but your unusually strong constitution was able to withstand so long, at last declared itself. In the frenzy of your disturbed mind you wished to show: 'This is what you have made out of me!' and the result showed that you had remained what you always were. You were carried away for dead from the place; a physician hastily called in gave some hope, but said that only the most unremitting care could save you. Where could you receive that care but here? Who could more faithfully watch over your life than he who owed you his own? What, in such a case, were to me the rules of the house, or the talk of men? We carried you into the first room, which happened to be the best for our purpose. We--that is, my wife, my daughter, who is older than her years, the faithful old Süssmilch, the physician, whom you will learn to love as he deserves, and myself--we have fought faithfully and bravely with the death that threatened you; and the women wept, and the men shook each other by the hand when your strong nature triumphed over its enemy, and the physician said to us--a week ago--'He is saved.' And now enough; perhaps too much for to-day. If from our conversation you have received the impression, and will bear it with you into your sleep, that you are among friends that love you, that is all I wish. I hear Süssmilch coming; I wanted to relieve him to-night, but he says he cannot leave his prisoner. And now good night and good rest."

He passed his hand softly over my brow and eyes, and left the room. My soul was filled with his words. No man had ever spoken to me like this. Was it really myself? Had my gloomy soul departed during my long sickness, and given place to a purer, brighter spirit? Be it as it might, it was sweet--almost too sweet to last. But I would keep it as long as I could, as one holds fast the refrain of some lovely melody. I did not move, I did not open my eyes, when I heard by a slight rustling in the room that my faithful guardian was making his preparations for the night.

How could I do otherwise than rest sweetly, so richly blessed; than rest calmly, so faithfully guarded?

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

Chapter V

In the shady garden, especially reserved for the use of the superintendent and his family, there was at the farthest corner a little garden-house, which stood upon the old city-wall, and in the family rejoiced in the pompous name of Belvedere, because from it a charming view might have been had, over the ramparts, of a large part of the strait and a still larger part of the island, if one could only have opened the windows. But the window-frames were very old, and rotten and warped with age; the sashes were narrow, and the regular pattern they once presented could scarcely now be discerned in the small, lead-set panes of stained glass which had once belonged to an adjacent chapel, now in ruins. The house was to a certain extent a ruin, as the wood of which it was built had not entirely resisted for so many years the influences of the sun, the rain, and the sea-breeze; and it was in consequence but seldom used, far more rarely than the space immediately in front of it, which was, in reality, the summer residence of the family, where they passed the best part of the time in fine weather.

This spot fully deserved their preference. On a level with the garden-house and the crest of the wall, and thus considerably higher than the rest of the garden, it was reached by a refreshing breeze from the near sea, while but rarely did a ray of the noon sun pierce the thick foliage of the old plane-trees that surrounded it. The spaces between the trunks of these trees were filled up with the green wall of a living hedge, which added to the cosy, secluded character of the spot, and threw into bold relief the figures of six hermæ of sandstone. Two round pine tables, painted green, stood on either side, with the needful chairs, and invited to work or to reverie.

Of the two persons who were sitting here one fine afternoon in August, about a fortnight after I had been able to leave my room, the one was occupied--if day-dreaming may be called an occupation with the other; while the other was really diligently at work. The dreamer was myself; and a light covering, which, despite the warmth of the day, was thrown across my lap, seemed meant to indicate that I was still a convalescent, to whom dreaming is allowed and work forbidden; while the other was a young maiden of about fourteen years, and her work consisted in drawing a life-size head à deux crayons upon a sketching-board. During her work she frequently raised her eyes from her sketching-board to me, and if I must name the subject of my dreams, I must confess that it was these eyes of hers.

And indeed one did not need to be twenty years old, and a convalescent, and in addition precisely the one upon whom these eyes were so often fixed with that peculiar look at once decisive and doubtful, piercing and superficial, which the painter casts upon his model--I say one did not need to be either of these, let alone all three at once, to be fettered by these eyes. They were large and blue, with that depth in them which has a surface on which play every emotion of feeling, every glancing light and passing shadow, and which yet remains in itself something unfathomable. Once already, and that not so long before, I had looked into eyes that were unfathomable, at least for me, but how different were these! I felt the difference, and yet was not able precisely to define it. I only knew that these eyes did not confuse and disquiet me, did not kindle me into a flame to-day to chill me as with ice to-morrow; but that I could gaze into them again and again as one gazes into the clear sky, full of blissful calm, and no wish, no desire awakens within us, unless it be the longing to have wings.

What possibly may have caused these large deep eyes of the maiden to appear larger and deeper, was the circumstance that they were by far the chief beauty of her face. Some said the only beauty; but I could not at that time agree with this opinion. Her features were indeed not perfectly regular, and certainly not at all what is called striking, but there was nothing ignoble about them; on the contrary, all was refined and full of character, at once bright and thoughtful, designed in soft yet well-marked lines. Especially did this apply to the mouth, which seemed to speak even when the lips were shut. And this bright, intelligent, rather pale face was inclosed by two thick plaits of the richest blond hair, which, as was then the fashion, commenced at the temples and were carried under the ears to the back of the head--almost too heavy a frame, one would have said, for the delicate head, which was usually inclined a little forward or to one side. This attitude, combined with her usual seriousness of expression, gave the maiden an appearance of being several years older than she really was. But work and care soon brush away the first lustre of youth; and she, though hardly more than a child, knew what work was but too well, and over her young life care had already cast its gloomy shadow.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

Chapter VI

At this moment, however, a smile played over her serious face. She looked over her sketching-board at me and said: "You can get up, if you wish."

"Have you finished?" I asked, availing myself of the permission, and going behind her chair. "Why, you are still at work on the eyes. How can you have so much patience?"

"And you so much impatience?" she asked in return, quietly going on with her drawing. "You are just like our little Oscar. When he has planted a bean, five minutes afterwards he digs it up again to see if it has grown at all."

"But he is only seven years old."

"Old enough to know that beans do not grow so fast as that."

"You always find fault with Oscar, and after all he is your pet."

"Who says so?"

"Benno told me so yesterday, in strictest confidence. I was not to tell you."

"Then you ought not to have told me."

"But he is right."

"No, he is not right. Oscar is the smallest, and therefore I must look after him the most. Benno and Kurt can get along without me."

"Except their exercises, which you correct for them."

"Now take your seat again."

"I may speak, may I not?"

"Certainly."

I had taken my seat, but several minutes passed while I sat silently watching her work. A ray of the evening sun, which pierced the thick foliage of the great plane, fell upon her head and surrounded it with an aureole.

"Fräulein Paula," I said.

"Paula," she answered, without looking up.

"Paula, then."

"Well?"

"I wish I had a sister like you."

"You have a sister."

"But she is so much older than I, and never cared much for me; and now she of course will have nothing more to do with me."

"Where did you say that she lives?"

"On the Polish frontier. She has been married, these ten years, to an officer in the customs. She has a number of children."

"Then she has enough to do with them; you must not be angry with her."

"I am not angry with her; I hardly know her; I believe I should pass her by if I met her on the street."

"That is not well; brothers and sisters should hold together. If I thought that ten or twenty years hence I should meet Benno or Kurt or my little Oscar on the street and they would not know me, I should be very unhappy."

"They would know you, even if fifty years had passed."

"I should be an old woman then; but I shall never be so old."

"Why not?"

"By that time the boys will have long been men, and will have wives and children, and my father and my mother will long have been buried, and what should I then do in the world?"

"But you will marry too."

"Never," she replied.

Her voice was so serious, and her great blue eyes that looked over the board at my forehead, which she was then drawing, had so grave an expression, that I could not laugh, as I at first felt disposed to do.

"Why?" I inquired.

"When the boys can do without me, I will be too old."

"But you cannot always go on correcting their exercises."

"I do not know; it seems to me as if I should always do it."

"Even when they are learning Latin and Greek?"

"I learn Latin with them now; why should I not learn Greek too?"

"Greek is so desperately hard; I tell you, Paula, the irregular verbs--no human creature can learn them unless it be gymnasium professors, and I never can believe that they are exactly men."

"That is one of your jokes, which you must not let Benno hear: he wants to be a teacher."

"I think I will get that notion out of his head."

"Do not do so. Why should he not be a teacher if he has a liking for it, and talent enough? I do not know anything more delightful than to teach any one something which I believe to be good and useful to him. And then it is a good position for one in Benno's circumstances. I have heard it said that when one makes no great pretensions, he can soon secure a modest sufficiency. My father, it is true, has other views: he would like Benno to be a physician or naturalist. But these are expensive professions to learn; and although my father always takes a hopeful view--but I am not sure that he always does."

Paula bent her head over her sketching-board, and went on with her drawing more assiduously than ever; but I saw that once or twice she raised her handkerchief to her eyes. It gave me pain to see it. I knew what anxiety, and that too well-founded, Paula felt for her father's health, whom she loved devotedly.

"Fräulein Paula," I said.

She did not correct me this time--perhaps did not hear me.

"Fräulein Paula," I said again, "you must not cherish such gloomy thoughts. Your father is not so ill: and then you would not believe what a race the Zehrens are. Herr von Zehren used to call the steuerrath a weakling, and yet he might take an undisputed place among those who account themselves robust men; but Herr von Zehren himself was a man of steel, and yet he once told me that his youngest brother was a match for two like him. And you see a strong constitution is everything, Doctor Snellius says, and so I say too."

"To be sure, if you say so----"

Paula looked up, and a melancholy smile played about her beautiful lips.

"You mean that a miserable scarecrow, such as I sit here, has no business to be talking about strength?"

"O no; I know how strong you were before you were ill; and how soon you would be strong again, if you would take proper care of yourself, which you do not always do. For example, you ought never to be sitting here without some wrappings, and you have let the coverlid fall off your lap; but----"

"But----?" said I, obediently drawing up the coverlid over my knees.

"I mean that it is not quite right to say that a strong constitution is everything. Kurt there is certainly the strongest of the boys, and yet Oscar can read, write, and cipher as well as he, though Kurt is nine years old, and Oscar only seven."

"But you see Oscar is your favorite."

"That is not kind of you," Paula said.

She said it gently and pleasantly, without a trace of offence, and yet I felt the blood rush to my cheeks. I felt as though I had struck a defenceless child.

"No, it was not at all kind," I said, with warmth; "it was a very unfeeling speech; I do not know how I could say it. But clever boys have always been held up to me as models, and the comparison always carried with it so many disagreeable allusions to myself, that the blood always rises to my head when I hear them talked about. It always makes me think how stupid I am."

"You ought not to call yourself stupid."

"Well then, that I know so little; that I have learned so very little."

"But that is nobody's fault but yours--that is, supposing it to be really the case."

"It is the case," I answered. "It is frightful how little I know. To say nothing at all about Greek, which I maintain to be too hard, and only invented by teachers on purpose to torment us, my Latin does not amount to much, and that is certainly my fault, for I have seen how Arthur, who I don't believe is a bit cleverer than I am, could get along with it very well when he tried. Your English books, in which you read so much, might all be Greek for me; and as for French--perhaps I can still conjugate avoir and être, but I doubt it. And yesterday, when Benno could not get his exercises right, and asked me, and I told him he must get them right himself--I don't mind telling you that I had not the slightest notion how to begin them--and when he afterwards got them right by himself, I felt shamed by a boy eleven years old; just as I have felt ashamed before Dr. Busch, our professor of mathematics, whenever, as he always did, he wrote under my work, 'Thoroughly bad,' or 'Quite remarkably bad,' or 'Very well copied,' or some such maliciousness."

While I thus remorsefully confessed my shortcomings, Paula looked steadily at me with her great eyes, from time to time shaking her head, as if she could not believe her ears.

"If this is really so----"

"Why do you always say 'if,' Paula? Little as I have learned, I have at least learned to tell the truth, and I would never attempt a falsehood with you."

The maiden blushed to her blond tresses.

"Forgive me," she said; "I did not mean to wound you; although I can scarcely believe that you--that you spent so ill your time at school. I only meant to say that you must make it good again; you must make up for that lost time."

"Easily said, Paula! How am I to begin? Benno knows more French, geography, and mathematics than I, and he is only eleven years old, and next month I am twenty."

Paula pushed the drawing-board away from her upon the table, and leaned her head upon her hand, apparently in order better to ponder over so desperate a case. Suddenly she raised her head and said:

"You must speak to my father."

"What shall I tell him?"

"All that you have told me."

"He will not be able to help me either."

"He will, be sure. You do not know how much my father knows. He knows everything--understands everything."

"That I well believe, Paula; but how can that help me? He can give me no part of his knowledge, even if he were so kind as to wish it."

"True, he cannot do that; you must work yourself; but how to work the best, and how to succeed the soonest, he knows, and will tell you if you ask him. Will you?"

"Yes, I will; but----"

"No--no 'buts.' I am not to say 'if,' so you must not say 'but.' Will you?"

"Yes."

As to utter this "yes" required some determination on my part, I spoke it in a firm loud voice. Paula folded her hands and bent her head, as if she were inwardly praying that my resolution might be blessed. Everything was calm around; only a bird twittered, and the red sunset-rays glanced through the twigs. It may have been a remnant of weakness which still clung to me, but a strange and solemn feeling possessed me. It was as though I were in a temple, and had just pronounced a solemn vow by which I broke away from my entire past, and devoted myself to a new life and to new obligations. And while thus thinking I gazed with fixed eyes at the dear maiden, who sat still, her hands folded, her thoughtful head bent--gazed until the tears came into my eyes, and trees, sunlight, and maiden were lost behind a misty veil.

At this moment clear voices came ringing from the garden; it was Paula's brothers, who had finished their task in the house, and now were joyously hurrying to their favorite spot where they were certain of finding their sister. Paula gathered up her drawing materials, and was spreading a sheet of tissue-paper over her drawing, when the boys came bounding up the hill at full speed to us.

"I am first!" cried little Oscar, springing into his sister's arms.

"Because we let you," said Kurt, jumping upon my knee.

"Let's see, Paula," said Benno, laying his hand upon his sister's arm.

Paula threw back the tissue-paper. Benno looked attentively at the drawing, and then carefully compared it with the original. Kurt jumped down from my knee to examine his sister's work too. Even Oscar stuck his curly head from under her arm to see what was going on. It was a charming group, the three boys clustered around the sister, now turning their bright eyes upon me, and then fixing them on the picture.

"That is Uncle Doctor!" said Oscar.

Paula smiled and gently stroked the pretty boy's blond curls.

"You are silly," said Kurt; "he wears spectacles."

"It is well done, Paula," said Benno, with the air of a connoisseur.

"Do you think so?" she asked.

"Yes; only he is not so good-looking."

"Now you have all seen it," said Paula, in a tone of decision. "Benno, carry it into the Belvedere."

"I will carry it!" said Kurt.

"No, I!" cried Oscar.

"Have you not heard that I am to carry it?" said Benno. "You are too little."

"O yes, you are the big one!" said Kurt, scornfully.

"Hush, hush!" said Paula. "No disputes about it. He who is older is bigger, and cannot help it; and he who is younger is smaller, and cannot help it either."

"No, Paula," said Kurt, "that is not so, George is younger than father, and bigger too."

"Here comes father," said Paula, "and mother with him; and now be quiet."

The superintendent came up the path; his wife held his arm, and he was leading her slowly. Her eyes were covered with a broad green shade. Behind them, now on the left and now on the right side of the path, turning his uncovered head first in one way and then in another, with a hat and stick that he kept changing from hand to hand, came a short compact figure with a disproportionately large head, whose perfectly bald surface shone in the light of the evening sun.

This was Dr. Willibrod Snellius, resident physician and friend of the family.

I had arisen, and advanced a few paces to meet them.

"How are you now?" asked the superintendent, giving me his hand; "has your first long stay in the open air done you good?"

"We will ask about that early to-morrow morning--hm, hm, hm!" said the doctor.

Doctor Snellius had a habit of accompanying his remarks with a peculiar nasal sound which was half a grunt and half a snort, and always just an octave below his ordinary voice, which was very thin and of an unusually high pitch. This shrill voice was the trial of his life to the doctor, who was a man of great taste; and by the deep, growling sound he emitted from time to time, he strove, according to his own explanation, to convince himself that he was really a man and not a cock, as his voice would indicate.

"But you ordered it yourself, doctor," said the superintendent.

"Can I know from that that it will do him good?--hm, hm, hm!" said Dr. Snellius. "It was a medicine like another. If I always knew what effect my prescriptions would have, I would die Baron Willibrod Snellius of Snelliusburg--hm, hm, hm!"

"Any one to hear you would think that all your science was mere illusion," said Frau von Zehren, taking her seat upon a chair which Paula had placed for her.

"You have certainly but slight reason to consider us wizards, gnädige Frau!"

"Just because I do not so consider you, I do not expect from you what is probably impossible."

Frau von Zehren removed the disfiguring shade and raised her eyes with a look of thankfulness to the foliage of the trees which kindly softened the daylight for them. How lovely must those eyes have been while they were yet radiant with youth and happiness! How fair this face before sickness had wasted its beauteous features, and far too soon--for Frau von Zehren was hardly forty years of age--whitened the luxuriant hair! Pale and wasted as she was, she was still beautiful--at least to me, who, short a time as I had been near her, had already learned her angelic goodness, and how with the inexpressible devotion with which she clung to her husband and her children, her heart was full of sympathy for all who suffered or sorrowed.

"We shall soon have a visit from your friend Arthur," said the superintendent to me, drawing me a little to one side; "but I think you said he had not dealt with you in the most friendly manner."

"He has not," I answered. "I should speak falsely to say otherwise. But what brings him here?"

"He passed his examination at Easter, and is ordered to the battalion stationed here, with the rank of ensign. We shall probably see his parents also; and it may be the commerzienrath, if he condescends to manage his affairs in person. The matter in question is the inheritance of my brother, or so much of it as has thus far escaped the hands of justice and of his creditors, among whom, as you know, the commerzienrath holds the first place. The affair is rendered more difficult from the fact that all his papers were destroyed when the castle was burned. Constance has sent from Naples a formal renunciation of the inheritance, and so there remain really only my brother and the commerzienrath, as I for my part prefer to have nothing to do with the whole affair; indeed I will add that if it were not a duty to meet with dignity what is inevitable, I should look forward to the meeting with great repugnance. What will not be brought up at such a conference? What do you want, my child?"

Oscar must needs show his father an unlucky beetle that had run across his path. I remained sitting in the garden-house, sunk in painful reflection such as had not entered my mind since I had risen from my bed of sickness. Arthur! Constance! Arthur, who had so cruelly turned against me; Constance, who had so shamefully deceived me! The steuerrath, whom I knew to have been the cowardly accomplice of his brave brother; and the commerzienrath, who had traded in the recklessness of the Wild Zehren, and, in all likelihood, had hastened, if not brought about his ruin. What a tumult of emotions did not these names arouse within me! How hateful appeared to me all my past, into which these names and these persons were forever interwoven!--hateful as the island even now appeared through a dingy sulphur-yellow pane of the window at which I was standing. And now, as I turned away with a sigh, my glance fell through the open door upon the space under the plane-trees, filled with the pure bright evening light, and upon the persons that were moving in it. The superintendent and the doctor were walking, the latter first on the right and then on the left, and both in animated conversation; the two eldest boys were playing about the knees of their mother, who, sitting in her easy-chair, laughed and sported with them; Paula had taken the tea-things from the maid, and was setting the table, as they were about to take tea in the open air, as was their custom in fine weather. How deftly she did it all; how silently, that the gentlemen might not be disturbed in their conversation, and that no clatter of plates should annoy her mother's sensitive nerves! And how with it all she had time to chat with the little Oscar, who kept close at her side, and to look if I was not exposing myself too much to the wind! Yes, the bright peaceful present was fairer than my dark stormy past; and yet it seemed as though a shadow was cast across this also. If Arthur came here; if, as was to be expected, he was received into the family as a kinsman; if, with his plausible address, he wormed his way into the confidence of these unsuspicious people, and won their favor with his insinuating manners--if he, who as a mere boy had practised the wiles of the rake, should dare--and his insolence would dare anything--to pay his insidious court to Paula, his cousin! I must still have been very weak, for I trembled at this thought from head to foot, and started violently as I perceived some one coming up the garden path towards the plane-trees. I thought for a moment it must be he whom I had once loved so dearly, and now so hated.

But it was no dandy ensign glittering in his new uniform, but a lean man dressed in black, wearing an extremely narrow white cravat, and a low-crowned hat with very broad brim, and whose sleek dark hair, unfashionably long, was seen, when he took off his hat in a polite salutation, to be parted in the middle, and combed back behind his ears. I knew the gentleman well; I had seen him often enough crossing the prison-yard with slow pace and bowed head, entering this or that cell, and after a while coming out again, always in the same attitude of humility. Indeed I already enjoyed the happiness of a personal acquaintance, as he had one day unexpectedly entered my sick-room, and begun to talk about the welfare of my soul; and I should more frequently have enjoyed this felicity, had not Dr. Snellius, who came in, put a stop to it by giving him to understand that at the time the question was not that of the welfare of my soul, but that of my body, which was not likely to be benefited by such exciting topics. Indeed this difference of opinion led to a rather lively dispute at the door of my room, and, as it seemed, they came to pretty hard words; so that it was clearly a proof of the placable disposition of the Deacon and Prison-Chaplain Ewald von Krossow, that he now, after bidding the family good evening, politely saluted the doctor, and even offered me his hand.

"How are you, my friend?" he asked, in his soft voice. "But how can it be other than well with you, since I find you still in the open air, though it is already growing somewhat chilly. This is no impeachment of your better knowledge, doctor. I well know that præsente medico nihil nocet."

The doctor gave a scrape with his right foot, like a cock who is preparing for battle, and crowed in his sharpest tones:

"It was unfortunate, then, that when Adam ate that unlucky apple, there was no doctor by. The poor fellow would probably be living now. Hm, hm!"

He glared wrathfully through his spectacles at the chaplain to see if his shot had told, but the chaplain only smiled.

"Still sitting in the seat of the scorner, doctor?"

"I must stay where I am; I do not belong to those who are never squeamish about pushing for a good place."

"But to those who are never at a loss for a sharp answer."

"Sharp only for souls as soft as butter."

"You know that I am a minister of peace."

"But you may change your service."

"And that it is my office to forgive."

"If you hold your office from above, probably the necessary understanding for it has not been forgotten."

"Doctor!"

"Herr von Krossow."

This conversation was hardly meant for my ears, at least on the chaplain's side, who spoke throughout, even to his last exclamation, in the gentle, deprecatory tone of wounded innocence, and now, with a pitying shrug of the shoulders, turned away and joined the others.

That game-cock, the doctor, whose antagonist had so unexpectedly quitted the field, wore an air of blank surprise for a moment, then burst into a hoarse crowing laugh, shook his arms like a pair of wings, and turned suddenly to me, as if he felt the greatest desire to turn his baffled pugnacity upon me.

"You would be acting more sensibly to go to your room."

"I have only been waiting for your orders."

"And now you have them; and I will see to their prompt execution myself."

He took my arm and hurried me so rapidly away, that I had hardly time to bid the company good-night. His ire had not evaporated: he snorted, he grunted, he clicked with his tongue, and growled at intervals: "The scamp--the scamp--the scamp!"

"You seem to have no very high opinion of our chaplain," I said.

"Don't you grow ironical, young man!" said the doctor, looking up at me. "High opinion! high fiddlesticks! How can there be but one opinion of such a fellow?"

"Yet the superintendent is always friendly to him."

"Because he is friendly to every one; and besides it does not occur to him that this is not a man but a snake. Yes, that is easy enough to do, when other honest folks are left to do the rudeness."

"That is no great trouble for you, doctor."

"Young man, I say, do not exasperate me. I tell you the thing is no trifling matter; for if I cannot drive the fellow away, he will sooner or later oust us all, and his kind friend the superintendent, the very first. He has done you an ill turn already."

"Me?"

"Yes, you, the superintendent, myself. He would like well to kill three birds with one stone."

"Tell me about it, doctor, I beg you."

"I would tell you without your asking. Sit down in your easy-chair and make yourself comfortable: it is likely to be the last time you will sit in it."

We had reached my room; the doctor pushed me into the easy-chair, while he stood before me--sometimes on one leg, sometimes on the other, but rarely on both at once--and spoke as follows:

"The case is simple, and therefore plain. To this pietistic, aristocratic, beggarly mawworm, who has had himself appointed prison-chaplain to let the light of his Christian humility shine before men, the humanitarian superintendent and the materialist doctor are an abomination. To a fellow like that, humanity is a democratic weakness, and matter he does not respect, unless it is eatable. With the deceased pastor Michaelis, a man of the good old rationalistic school, we lived as if we were in paradise; he and Herr von Zehren, or rather Herr von Zehren and he, in the twenty years that they worked together, made the establishment what it is; that is, a model, in every sense of the word; and during the five years that I have been here I have done all in my power to imbue myself with the spirit of these men, and I believe that I have indifferently well succeeded. Now for this half year, since Michaelis is dead, and this pietistic snake has wormed himself into our paradise, our peace has gone to the deuce; the snake crawls into every corner, and leaves the track of his slimy nature wherever he goes. The officers are demoralized, the prisoners mutinous. Such a plot as that which Cat-Kaspar hatched--thank heaven we are rid of the rascal; he is transferred to-day to N., where he ought to have been sent at first--would formerly have been impossible. Cat-Kaspar was a pet of Mr. Chaplain, who saw in him a precious, though not over-cleanly vessel, whose purification was his allotted task; and he begged the scoundrel out of the solitary confinement in which the superintendent had judiciously placed him. So it goes on; divine worship publice, prayers privatim, soul-saving exhortations privatissime. The Judas intrigues against us wherever and whenever he can, flatters the superintendent to his face, swallows down my rudeness, and thinks, 'I shall have you both soon,' like the owl when he heard the two bulfinches singing round the corner. And he thinks he has us by the wings already. You know, the president of the council, who is just such another mawworm, is his uncle, and uncle and nephew are hand and glove. The president, who is the superintendent's immediate superior, would have removed him long ago, if Minister von Altenberg, one of the last pillars left standing from the good old times, and Herr von Zehren's friend and patron, did not support him, though with but a feeble arm, it is true; for Altenberg is advanced in years, in ill health, and may die any day. In the meantime they work as they can, and collect materials to be water to the mill of the next excellency. And now listen: Assessor Lerch, my good friend, was with the president yesterday. 'My dear Lerch,' said the president, 'you perhaps can give me some information. There is another complaint against Superintendent von Zehren.' 'Another, Herr President?' asked Lerch. 'Unhappily, another. I have hitherto taken no action in these matters, though I have not disregarded them; but this case is so flagrant that I must take it in hand and report it to his excellency. Only think, my dear Lerch, Von Zehren has been guilty of the--folly, I will call it, of allowing the young man who gained such an unhappy notoriety in connection with the smuggling case in Uselin----' and now it all comes out that the superintendent, immediately after the catastrophe--out of which the denouncer had spun a pretty story, you may suppose--did not send you to the mouldy old infirmary, where you would infallibly have died, but took you into his own house, kept you here, and still keeps you, though you have been a convalescent for three weeks now; that he associates with you as with his equal; that he has brought you into his family, and indeed made you a member of it, so to speak. Why need I go into all the particulars? hm, hm, hm!"

The doctor had crowed up to the very highest note of his upper register, and had to grunt at least two octaves lower to obtain his usual satisfactory reassurance.

"And you really hold that man as the denouncer?" I cried, angrily springing from my chair.

"I know it. Would I otherwise have been so rude today?"

I could not help laughing. As if growler needed any special provocation before he made free with the calves of an intrusive clodhopper! But the affair had a serious side. The thought that Herr von Zehren, to whom I owed such limitless gratitude, whom I so revered, should through me be brought into so unpleasant a position, was intolerable.

"Advise me, help me, doctor!" I besought him earnestly.

"Yes, advise, help--when I always told you that this state of things could not go on. However, you are so far right: the thing must be helped. And in truth there is but one expedient. We must be beforehand with the viper, and so for this time we shall draw his fangs. I know the superintendent. If he had an idea that they wished to take you from him, he would let his hand be hewn off before he would give you up. Now this evening do you complain of headache, and again to-morrow evening at the same time. Your room is on the ground-floor; at this moment there is not another vacant. Intermittent--quinine--a higher, more airy apartment--day after to-morrow you will be back in your old cell. Let me manage it."

So I let Doctor Willibrod Snellius manage it; and two days later I was sleeping, if not under lock and bolt, at least behind the iron gratings of my old cell.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

Chapter VI

I stood behind these iron gratings on the following morning, and looked sadly out of the window. Strangely enough, I had not thought the evening before that these gratings could produce any unpleasant sensations in me now, and yet such was the case. They served as a grave reminder to me of what lately I had almost forgotten, that I was, after all, a prisoner. "It makes no difference," the superintendent said, when I took leave of him, and all had vied to make a family festival of the last day that I was to spend under their roof; but be that as it might, there was a difference. My breakfast was not now as appetizing as it had been when I sat at it under the high trees of the quiet garden with Frau von Zehren and Paula; and even though I could go, if I chose, into the garden, which seemed to give me a friendly greeting, I must after a certain time return here again.

I looked around the cell, and now first remarked what pains they had taken to make me forget where I was. There was the picture of the Sistine Madonna with the child, which I had grown to love so during my illness, and which was hung opposite my bed, just as it had hung in Paula's room. There stood upon the bureau the same two terra-cotta vases, and in each a couple of fresh roses. There was the easy-chair in which Dr. Snellius had falsely predicted that I had sat for the last time, and over the back hung a cover of crotchet-work on which I had seen Paula engaged the previous evening. There hung the same étagère with the same neatly-bound books; Goethe's Faust, Schiller's and Lessing's works, which Paula had so often urgently recommended me to read, and into which I had as yet hardly looked. They had done all they could to make my prison as endurable, as pleasant as possible; but did not the very pains they took show that it was a prison, and that the episode of my apparent freedom was at an end. Yes, they had been kind, inexpressibly kind to me, under the friendly smiling mask of Samaritan compassion to one sick unto death--a mask that must be laid aside, as soon as a Pharisee passed that way and looked askance upon the moving sight. No, no; I was and remained a prisoner, whether my chains were decked with roses or not.

Why had I not been able to break these chains? True, as I had begun, it was impossible; but why did I begin so clumsily? Why did I not keep to myself, calmly trusting in my own strength and my own craft, and in some lucky chance that must have offered sooner or later? Now, as things had happened, after I had incurred such a debt of gratitude to these people, after I had grown so attached to them, I was twice and thrice a prisoner. For the tempting pottage of friendship and love, I had bartered the first inalienable birthright of man, which is the very breath of his soul--the right of liberty. Seven years! Seven long, long years!

I strode up and down my cell. For the first time since my sickness I felt something of my former strength; it was but a remnant, but enough to bring back a part of my old roving humor, of my old restlessness. How would it be then when I felt myself all that I had ever been? Would it not, combined with the knowledge that nothing held me but my own will, drive me to frenzy? Would it not have been better if they had left me in my old slavery, with the dream that some day I should be able to break their bonds, even if this dream was never verified?

"Here is a young man who wants to speak with us," announced the sergeant. Since my sickness when "we" had come through so much together, he frequently used in speaking to me the same plural which he employed with all who, in his opinion, had acquired an entire claim on his honest heart; for example, the superintendent and all his family, including the doctor, and now myself.

"What sort of a man!" I asked, while a joyous shiver ran through me. As long as I had been in confinement this was the first time that any one had come to see me; and somehow I connected the extraordinary event of a visitor with the thoughts that had been passing through my mind.

"Looks like a sailor," answered the sergeant. "Says he has news of our dead brother."

This sounded extremely improbable. My brother Fritz had been dead for five years; he had fallen from the foreyard overboard one stormy night, and was drowned. The ship had returned in safety; there was no mystery of any sort connected with his death; and if any one now brought me intelligence of his end, there must be some other purpose involved with it.

"Can I speak with him, Süssmilch?" I asked, in the most indifferent tone I could assume, while my heart seemed to rise in my throat.

"We can speak to whom we like."

"Then let him in; and, Süssmilch, if he is a sailor he would like a glass of something; perhaps you could get me something of the kind?"

What superfluous trouble a man with an evil conscience gives himself and others! I must needs lie, always a trial to me, to get the old man out of the way; and the honest Süssmilch, who had not a thought of being present at my interview with the stranger, had to go down two flights of stairs into the cellar.

"But we mustn't touch a drop ourselves," said the old man, warningly.

"Have no fear."

He went, after first introducing the visitor--a broad-shouldered deeply-bronzed man in sailor dress who was an entire stranger to me.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

Chapter VII

I gazed in mute astonishment at the stranger, whose looks and manner were, to use the mildest expression, very singular; but was really frightened when he, so soon as the door had closed behind the sergeant, without a word and with the haste of a man completely out of his senses, but still with the dexterity of a clown in a circus, began to tear off his clothes, and to my utter amazement appeared in precisely the same dress as that which now lay in its various elements at his feet, while a triumphant smile disclosed two rows of the whitest teeth in the world.

"Klaus!" I exclaimed, in joyous amazement.

The white teeth were now visible to the very last grinder. He seized both my extended hands, but remembered at once that such friendly manifestations did not belong to his part, and hurriedly whispered:

"Into them, quick! They will fit--folds will open out of themselves--only quick before he comes back!"

"And you, Klaus?"

"I stay here."

"In my place?

"Yes."

"But they will find it out in five minutes."

"Still you have time to get out; and getting out and getting off is one and the same thing to you."

"And do you suppose that you can do such a thing without being punished?"

"At the worst, they can but shut me up in your place, and that will not be for long. With the locks I can easily deal, and here"--he showed me a watch-spring-saw, which he drew out of his thick hair--"with this I will cut that grating through in a quarter of an hour."

"Klaus, all that cannot have come out of your own head."

"No, out of Christel's; but I beg you make haste."

I kicked the sailor-dress, which still lay upon the floor, under the bed, for I heard the sergeant coming along the corridor. He knocked at the door, and when I opened it, handed me a bottle of brandy and a glass.

"But we are no bear, and won't drink a drop ourselves, will we?"

Klaus stared in astonishment when he saw the dreaded keeper turned into so obliging an attendant.

I closed the door again, and then fell on the good fellow's neck. The tears stood in my eyes.

"Dear, good Klaus," I cried, "you and Christel are the kindest hearts in the world, but I cannot accept your generous offer. I would not have accepted it under any circumstances; and as it is, it is not to be thought of. I could go away from here at an moment, but I will not, Klaus, I will not."

Here I embraced Klaus again, and gave free course to the tears which I had been repressing. I felt as if now for the first time I knew what a prisoner was, since I had declared that I wished to be one, and thus made myself one of my own choice. Klaus, who naturally had no conception of what was passing within me, constantly endeavored, while casting uneasy glances at the door, to persuade me to let him take my place; he would wager his head that he would be out in twenty-four hours.

"Klaus, Klaus!" I cried, clapping him on the plump cheeks, "you want to deceive me. Confess now, you have no expectation of getting out so soon."

"Well, anyhow," he answered, very shame-facedly, "my wife thought----"

"Your wife, Klaus! your wife!"

"We have been married these two months."

I thrust Klaus into the easy-chair, sat down before him, and begged him to tell me everything. It would be the greatest kindness he could do me, I said, if he could tell me that all was going well with him; that I was by no means in so evil a straight as he imagined in his true heart of friendship; and I gave him in brief words a sketch of my adventures in the prison, my attempt to escape, my illness, and my friendly relations with the superintendent and his family.

"You see," I concluded, "that in every sense I am well taken care of; and now I must know how things have gone with you and Christel, and how you managed so soon to become man and wife. Only twenty-two, Klaus, and married already! How do you expect to get on? And your Christel has let you come away? Klaus, Klaus, I don't like the look of that."

I laughed at him, and Klaus, who now at last perceived that nothing could come of his plan to rescue me, laughed also, but not very heartily.

"There it is," said he. "How will she look when I come back without you."

"'Without thee,'[6] I said, Klaus. I am not going to put up with any breach of our old brotherhood now, or I shall think you too proud to be on terms of thee and thou with a prisoner. And how will she look when you come back without me?"

"There it is," said Klaus, "how will she, indeed! We are so happy; but one or the other of us was always saying, 'and he is shut up there!' and then there was an end of all our happiness, especially because in a manner it is Christel's fault that you are here; for that morning at Zanowitz----"

"Klaus," I interrupted him, "do you know then that for a while I believed that Christel herself gave the information to get rid of your father?"

"No," said Klaus, "she did not do that, thank God; though more than once she was quite desperate and thought of killing herself."

He wiped his forehead with his hand; I had touched a painful subject. We sat awhile without speaking, when Klaus commenced again:

"One good result it has had: 'he'"--Klaus had already adopted Christel's habit of never calling 'him' by his name--"'he' of course had to give up the guardianship of Christel, and as a person of damaged reputation, could not interfere much with me. Aunt Julchen in Zanowitz, with whom Christel stayed after that day, fitted Christel out, and we might have lived like angels, if--" and Klaus, with a melancholy look at me, shook his big head.

"And you are still in Berlin, in the commerzienrath's machine-shops?" I asked, to give his thoughts another direction.

"Of course," he said, "I have been promoted already; I am now foreman in my shop."

"And you earn plenty of money?"

"So much that we don't know what to do with it."

"Your Christel is an excellent housekeeper----"

"And washes and irons to that extent that our whole house smells of nothing but soap and flat-irons."

Klaus showed his teeth; I pressed his hand in token of sympathy with his happiness, though I had never been especially ravished by the perfumes he so highly prized; but now more urgently than ever I desired to know how this happy young pair ever made up their minds so cruelly to risk their good fortune.

"I told you already," answered Klaus, "that we never were quite happy. Wherever we went or stood, and above all when we were in real good humor about anything, the thought always came up: if he could only be here! And four weeks ago yesterday, when we had some Bierkaltschale[7]--no, no, we could stand it no longer."

"Some Bierkaltschale?" I asked, in some surprise.

"Yes; don't you know how you always used to have some made for you at the forge, in the summer-time, when you wanted to give yourself a treat? Christel often made it for you. Well, then, just four weeks ago we were drinking some--they have an excellent beer for it in Berlin, much better than ours, that was always a little bitter--and I was enjoying it, when Christel on a sudden let the ladle fall and began to howl, and I knew at once what she was thinking of, and then I began, and we kept on drinking and howling, and when we had finished, we both said together: It can't go on this way! So then we put our heads together----"

"As you did that evening when I met you on the heath?"

"And contrived a plan at last," continued Klaus, who would have turned red at my indiscreet remark, had the color of his complexion allowed it, "that is to say, Christel contrived it. She had read just such a story, only the prisoner was a king's son, and his deliverer was a knight, who disguised himself as a priest--of course that wouldn't do, but a sailor would do, Christel said, for here in the workhouse there was sure to be many a tarpaulin, and of course there would be some coming to see them. And anyhow, Christel said, a sailor's dress was the best disguise in a sea-port. So we practised the whole thing----"

"You practised it?"

"To be sure; it wasn't so easy; we went through it every night for a week when I came home from work, until Christel said at last she thought it would do at a pinch."

"It went capitally, Klaus!"

"Yes, but what good has it done?" asked Klaus, with a regretful look at the bed under which the disguise was lying, "when I had my ears bored to put these rings in? and when Christel every morning rubbed my face with bacon----"

"With bacon?"

"I must look like a sailor from the other side, Christel said, and for that there is nothing so good as to rub your face with bacon and then scorch it at a furnace."

"You look like a mulatto, Klaus."

"So Christel said; but what good would it do if I looked like a negro, when you won't come out?"

"It does this good, Klaus," I cried, catching the faithful fellow round the neck, "that you two have given me one of the happiest moments of my life, and which I should not have had had I taken your generous offer. God bless you both for your love to me; and when I am free again and am a rich man, I will repay it with interest. And now, my dear good fellow, you must go; I have to go and see the superintendent. And do you hear, Klaus, you go right back without wasting a minute. And one thing more: if your eldest is a boy----"

"He is to be named George; we settled that some time ago," said Klaus, showing his very farthest grinders.

I put Klaus out of the door, and was pacing up and down the room, somewhat agitated by what had just passed, when I bethought me of the disguise which I had pushed under the bed, and which, in our excitement, we had quite forgotten. I now drew it out, and could not resist the temptation to try on the jacket of rough cloth. It was as Klaus had said. In the sleeves, the back, and the skirts, there were folds so dexterously made and caught with stitches, that I had only to give a smart pull and they came out; and although I was a head taller and six inches wider across the shoulders than Klaus, the garment fitted me as if it had been made for me. So was it with the waistcoat and the trousers: all were so accurately made that--now that my illness had left me much thinner than I had been--I could very conveniently put them on over the clothes I was wearing.

Just as I had finished doing so, some one knocked at the door. It could only be the sergeant or the superintendent, who usually came at this hour. I seated myself at the table with my back to the door and called, "Come in!"

It was the sergeant.

He thrust in his head and began: "We are to go to the captain at eleven o'clock to-day, because----" here he checked himself, as it looked odd that the strange sailor sat there so still and I was nowhere to be seen. He came into the room and asked: "Where are we, then?"

"Gone to the devil!" I answered without turning round, imitating as well as I could the broad Plattdeutsch which Klaus had used as a part of his stratagem.

"No stupid jokes!" said the old man.

"And now it is my turn!" I cried, rushing past the astonished sergeant out at the door, which I flung to, and turned the key.

There lay the long corridor before me: not a soul was to be seen. It was an easy thing to run down the steps and into the house-yard, and from this by a side-gate which I knew was never closed at this hour, to get into the adjoining alley. To find out Klaus's lodging would be an easy matter; probably I should reach it before him--in ten minutes we could be out of the town, and----

"Good morning, Herr Süssmilch, how are we?" I asked, opening the door again.

The sergeant was standing just where I had left him; and to judge from the confounded look of his honest face, had not been able to comprehend what it all meant. I pulled off the broad-brimmed hat, made him a low bow with a scrape of the right foot, and said: "Have the honor to place myself again under your worshipful charge."

"After that, one can take a toothpick for a barn door!" exclaimed the old man, who began now to get a glimmering of the real state of the case. "That codfish of a smoke-dried flounder! Isn't it enough to turn a body into a bear with seven senses?"

"Hush!" I cried, "I hear the doctor coming. Not a word, my good Süssmilch!" and I pushed the old man out of the door, by which Doctor Snellius entered in his usual hasty fashion, with his hat in his hand. He started when he saw me, gave a glance round the room, looked at me again, and went out without saying a word.

I pulled off my sailor-dress in a moment, thrust it under the bed, and called after him in my natural voice:

"Why do you go away, doctor?"

He turned back instantly, came into the room, sat down upon a chair in front of me, and stared steadily at me through his round spectacles. I fancied he looked paler; and feared that perhaps I had carried the jest too far, and offended my irascible friend.

"Doctor----" I began.

"Something very singular has just happened to me," he interrupted me, always with the same fixed look.

"What is the matter, doctor?" I inquired, startled at his looks and the unaccustomed gentleness of his tone.

"Nothing at this moment; but I have just been the subject of a most remarkable hallucination."

"Of what, did you say?"

"A hallucination. A complete and perfect hallucination. When I first entered your chamber, my friend, I saw, standing before me, a sailor of just your height, or possibly an inch or an inch and a half shorter, but of your breadth across the shoulders, in a rough sailor jacket, gray trousers, wide straw-hat like the traders to the West Indies wear; with exactly no, not exactly, but very nearly your features. I saw the figure as plainly as I see you at this moment--it could not have been more distinct. The illusion was so perfect that I supposed they had put you in another room, and went to ask Süssmilch what he meant by giving our healthiest room to the first comer. Do not smile, my friend; it is no laughing matter--at least for me. It is the first time that anything of the kind has happened to me, though my frequent congestions of the head might have prepared me to expect it, I know that I shall die of apoplexy; and even if I had not known it before, I should know it now."

He took out his watch and examined his pulse.

"Strange to say, my pulse is perfectly normal; and all this morning I have felt unusually well and cheerful."

"My dear doctor," I said, "who knows what you saw? You learned men have such singular notions, and out of the merest gnat you will make a scientific elephant."

"Scientific elephant is good," said the doctor; "nobody would have expected such an expression from an unscientific mammoth like you--very good! but you are mistaken. That may apply to others, but not to me. I observe too coolly to commit gross blunders. I have told you already that my pulse is normal, exactly normal, and all my functions in perfect order; therefore the thing must have a deeper psychological cause, which just now escapes my perceptions; for the psychological cause----"

"Then at all events you have a psychological cause," said I, who was mischievous enough to be delighted at the serious scruples of my learned friend.

"I have; and I will tell it to you, even at the risk of more of your malicious grins. I was dreaming all night long of you, you mammoth, and always the same dream, though in different forms, namely, that you either were escaping, or had escaped, or were about to escape from here. Sometimes you were lowering yourself by a rope from the window, or clambering over the roofs, or leaping down from the wall, or any other neck-breaking trick that one might expect from a fellow of your physical and moral peculiarities; and you were every time in a different dress, now a chimney-sweep, now a mason, a rope-dancer, and so forth. As soon as I awaked, I asked myself what this dream could mean, and I said to myself--True, George Hartwig is now again in his prison, but the exceptional position in which he stands still continues, and so does the danger for our valued friend the superintendent, which lies in an arrangement which we must acknowledge to be not merely irregular, but contrary to the rules. For every creature is only content in the element to which it is born. The frog would spring from a golden chair into his native swamp; and the bird escapes when he can, though you cram his cage with sugar. Will it not be so with this youth, who of all men must most long for liberty? May he not in a moment of weakness forget what consideration he owes to Herr von Zehren, that the latter to a certain extent risks his position on his account, and in this moment of weakness and forgetfulness make his escape? And do you know, young mammoth, I determined that, as I also had some claim upon you, I would privately and in all friendship ask you to give me your word that if such a temptation seizes you, you will only think of your own honor. This was what I had in my mind when I came up the corridor, and I was in some degree undecided, for I thought he will have taken this resolution already, and to give his word to me will be superfluous. But now, after this singular projection of my dream into reality--a memento mori to me, moreover--I beg you earnestly to give me your word. Hm, hm, hm!"

I had ceased to laugh, long before he had reached this conclusion; and now, while the worthy doctor tuned down his voice, extended him my hand, and said with emotion:

"With all my heart I give you my word, although it is true that I have given it to myself, and that not ten minutes ago. And as for the hallucination, you may make your mind easy, doctor; here lies your memento mori."

With these words I pulled out the sailor's dress from under the bed, slipped on the jacket, and put on the hat, to make the proof more convincing.

"So you did really think of escaping, then?" said the doctor, adroitly dropping the hallucination, in order at least to preserve the dream.

"No," I answered, "but others tempted me, and I strove with them, and they fled leaving this garment behind them."

"Which you may hang as a votive offering on the temple-wall," replied Doctor Snellius, thoughtfully; "for though I do not know how it happened, I see this much, that you have escaped a great danger; and now--now for the first time you belong to us."

There was a saying in the prison that one could tell a lie to any one, but not to the superintendent.

Superintendent von Zehren had a way of looking at the person with whom he was speaking, to which none but a front of brass could have been callous. Not that one could read in his glance the endeavor to be as comprehensive and as penetrating as possible; his eye had in it nothing of the spy or the inquisitor; on the contrary, it was large and limpid as the eye of a child, and just in this lay the power which few men could resist. As he sincerely wished well to every one with whom he spoke, and on his own part had nothing to conceal, this large, clear, dark eye rested steadily upon one, with the gaze of the sun-bright gods, who do not wink like weak mortals living in twilight and concealment.

When, with this look fixed upon me, he asked me about the man whom he had sent to me that morning, I told him at once who the man was, and what was his object in coming. And I further told him in what frame of mind he had found me, and how strong the temptation had been, but that, even without the assistance of the good doctor, I had conquered it, I might venture to say, at once and for ever.

The superintendent listened to my narrative with all the signs of the most lively interest. When I ceased, he pressed my hand, and then turning to his writing-table, handed me a paper, which he said he had just received, and which he desired me to read.

The paper was an inquiry from the president, couched in polite but very decided phraseology, as to the facts referred to in a certain anonymous charge which had reached him, and the superintendent was called upon at once to put an end to an arrangement which compromised his position and character, and to treat the young man in question with the severity which the dignity of the law, of the judges, and his own, alike demanded.

"You wish to know," said the superintendent, as I laid down the paper with an inquiring look, "what I intend to do. Exactly as if I had never received this. I do not desire to know whether Doctor Snellius, whose friendship for me often gives him a sharper insight in matters that concern me, than I have myself, was playing a little comedy when he hurried you off so abruptly yesterday, but I am very glad it so happened. For it would have wounded my pride to be compelled to sacrifice you, to whom I am so much attached, to a pitiful bit of chicanery. According to the letter of the law, they are right in insisting that a prisoner cannot be a guest in the superintendent's family; and this point I should have had to yield; but beyond this I am fully determined not to yield a single step. To decide in what kind of work a prisoner shall be engaged, and how he shall employ his hours of recreation, is my incontestable right, which I will not suffer to be curtailed by a hair's breadth, and which I will maintain through all the tribunals, even though it should be brought before the king. And I am not sorry that this has happened, since it gives us an occasion to speak of our mutual relations, and to have a clear understanding of the way we shall pursue in future. If you are disposed to hear what I think on the subject, we will go into the garden. My lungs suffer to-day from the confined air of a room."

We stepped from his office into the garden. I offered him my arm, as my strength was now sufficient for this service, and we walked in silence between the flower-beds, from which the warm south wind wafted us the perfume of wallflowers and mignonnette, to the grateful shade of the plane-trees. The superintendent took his seat upon one of the benches, motioned to me to place myself at his side, and after a silent glance of gratitude at the leafy crowns of the noble trees that afforded the refreshing coolness, he said:

"If we are to believe the jurists, by whose words the students everywhere swear, Punishment is the right of Wrong. This definition, by its simplicity, recommends itself to the logicians at their desks, but I doubt extremely whether the Founder of the Faith would have been content with it. He did not declare that to be stoned was the right of the guilty woman; on the contrary, by summoning him who was without sin to cast the first stone, he showed that under the smooth logical surface of the legal code there lay a deeper principle, which only reveals itself to the eye that can see and the heart that can feel. To such an eye and such a heart it soon is clear that every wrong which is to be punished in order that it may have its right, is, if not always, almost always, a wrong at second, third, or hundredth hand; and thus the punishment rarely reaches the one who may have deserved it. So the justest judge, whether he will or not, resembles the sanguinary general who orders every tenth man to be led off to execution, not because he is guiltier than the other nine, but because he is the tenth.

"But this is not apparent to the logician, who smiles with satisfaction if he does not come into conflict with his principle of Identity and his principle of Contradiction; nor to; the judge who has before him but an isolated fact, torn from its connections, and who has to give judgment when he has not all the parts in his hand, not to mention the visible and invisible threads upon which these parts are necessarily strung. They both are like the crowd which judges a picture by its effect alone; while the connoisseur knows how it came into existence, what colors the painter had upon his palette, how he blended them, how he handled his brush, what difficulties he encountered, and how he overcame them, or why it was that he failed of his aim. And as the only true criticism is creative, which takes the secrets of art as the starting-point of its judgment, so that none but an artist can be a real critic, even so men's actions can only be judged by those to whom the old wise word applies, that nothing human is alien to them, because they have experienced in themselves and in their brethren the whole misery of humanity. But for this are necessary, as I said before, the feeling heart and the seeing eye, and an ample opportunity for training and using both.

"Who has a better opportunity for this purpose than the superintendent of a prison? He and the physician, when their views coincide and they strive together towards the same ends, alone can know what the most conscientious judge has no means of learning, how the man whom mankind have thrust out from among them for a time or forever, became what he now is; how, born thus, and of such parents, brought up in such associations, he acted thus and not otherwise at such a critical moment. Then when the superintendent, who is of necessity the confessor of the criminal, has learned his life in all its details, and the physician has discovered the defects with which he has suffered for years, when they consult upon his case, the question only is if he can be helped and how; and in the so-called prison they see, respectively, but a reformatory and an infirmary. For--and this is a point of infinite importance, which physiology will yet compel jurisprudence to acknowledge--nearly all who come here are diseased in the ordinary acceptation of the word; nearly all suffer from organic defects, and in almost every case the brain lacks the proper volume which a normal man needs for normal activity, for a life which shall not bring him into conflict with the law.

"And how could it be otherwise? Almost without exception they are children of want, of wretchedness, of moral and physical malformation, the Pariahs of Society which in its brutal egotism sweeps by with garments gathered up for fear of defilement, or thrusts them away with cruel violence from its path. The right of wrong! Insolence of Phariseeism! A time will come when this invention of the philosophers will be placed on a level with that other of the theologians, that death is the atonement for sin, and men will thank God that at last they have awaked from the night of ignorance which gave birth to such monsters.

"That day will come, but not so soon.

"We are still deeply sunk in the mire of the Middle Ages, and no man can yet see when this flood of blood and tears will have passed away. However far the glances of a few brighter intellects may reach into the coming ages, the progress of humanity is unspeakably slow. Wherever we look abroad into our own time, we behold the unbeautiful relics of a past that we had believed to be overthrown long ago. Our systems of government, our nobility, our religious institutions, our official arrangements, the organization of our armies, the condition of the laboring classes--everywhere the scarcely hidden relation between masters and slaves; everywhere the critical choice whether we will be hammer or anvil. All our experience, all our observation seems to prove that there is no third alternative. And yet no greater misconception of the real state of the case is possible. Not hammer or anvil, hammer and anvil is the true word, for every man is both, and both at once, in every moment of his life. With the same force with which the hammer strikes the anvil, the anvil strikes the hammer; the ball is thrown off from the wall at the same angle under which it impinges upon it; the elements which the plant has appropriated in its growth, it must exactly restore in its decomposition--and so throughout all nature. But if nature unconsciously obeys this great law of action and reaction, and is thereby a cosmos and not a chaos, then should man, whose existence is subordinated to precisely the same law, acquire an intelligent knowledge of it, and endeavor intelligently to shape his life in conformity with it; and his worth increases or diminishes exactly in proportion as he does this or neglects it. For though the law remains the same, whether the man knows it or knows it not, yet for himself it is not the same. Where it is known, where the inseparableness, the unity of human interests, the inevitableness of action and reaction, are recognized, there bloom freedom, equity, justice, which are all but varying expressions for the same law. Where it is not known, and he fancies in his blindness that he can with impunity make a tool of his fellow-man, there flourish rankly slavery and tyranny, superstition and priestcraft, hatred and contempt, in all their poisonous luxuriance. What man would not naturally wish rather to be hammer than anvil, so long as he believes that the choice lies open to him? But what reasonable man will not cheerfully renounce the part of hammer, when he has learned that the part of anvil will not and cannot be spared him, and that every blow that he gives smites also his own cheek; that the serf corrupts the master as well as the master the serf, and that in politics the guardian and the ward are rendered equally stupid. Would that the consciousness of this might at last penetrate to the mind of the German peoples, who stand so sorely in need of it!

"So sorely in need! For I must say it that at this moment, hardly twenty years after our war of freedom, that fundamental principle of human existence is probably by no enlightened nation so thoroughly and universally ignored as by us Germans, fond though we are of calling ourselves the intellectual flower of the nations, the people of thinkers. Where is the young plant of humanity subjected with more intolerable schoolmasterly pedantry to a too early, too strict, and incredibly narrow training? Where is its free, beautiful development more systematically hindered and maimed than it is with us? The shameful wrongs that we perpetrated by aid of school-benches and church-benches, the drill-sergeant's stick, the Procrustes-bed of examination, the many-rounded ladder of official hierarchy--to think of them sends the blush of shame to the cheeks and the glow of indignation to the brow of those who can perceive it; it is justly the inexhaustible theme of derision for our neighbors. The frenzy of ruling, the slavish desire of being ruled, these are the two serpents that have coiled around the German Hercules, and are crushing him; they it is that are everywhere impeding the free circulation, and producing here a condition of hypertrophy, and there of atrophy, that cruelly injure the body of the nation; they it is that, injecting their venom into the veins of the people, poison its blood and marrow, and degrade the race itself; they it is, finally, that we have to thank for the fact that our penitentiaries and jails can no longer contain the multitude of the prisoners. For it is not an exaggeration if I say that nine out of ten that come here would never have come had they not been made anvils by force, in order that the lords of the hammer might have something to vent their courage on. And as the natural right of every man to maintain himself in the way most suitable to his powers and capabilities has been impeded in them as much as possible by hindering them systematically from becoming sound strong members of the commonwealth, they have finally been brought here to the workhouse. The workhouse is at bottom nothing but the last consequence of our conditions, the problem of our life reduced to its simplest terms. Here they must accomplish a strictly prescribed task in a strictly prescribed manner; but when were they ever allowed freely to choose their work? Here they must be silent; but when were they ever allowed to speak freely? Here they must pay implicit obedience to the lowest overseer; but without having read Shakspeare, do they not know that a dog in office is obeyed? Here they must walk, stand, lie down, sleep, wake, pray, work, idle, at the word of command; but are they not admirably trained for it?--are they not all born workhouse men? My heart aches when I think of it; yet how can I help thinking of it especially at this moment when I see you before me, and ask myself: how comes this youth with the frame of a strong man, and the frank blue eyes of a child, in this abode of vice and crime?

"My dear young friend, I would that the answer were more difficult. Would that it were not the same formula by which I can calculate the equation of your life also. Would that I did not know that the unnaturalness of our relations is like a poisonous simoon that withers the grass and even strips the leaves from the oak.

"I have endeavored from what I before knew of you, and from what you so frankly have confided to me of your earlier life, of your family affairs, of the life and customs of the citizens of your native town, to form a background upon which I might design your portrait. And how cheerless it is, lying in the dim light in which all things now seem to lie with us! Everywhere littleness, narrow-mindedness, restrictions, blind adhesion to old formulas, pedantic ceremoniousness, everywhere the free outlook into life shut out by high walls of prejudice. You have told me that you besought your father to let you go to sea, and that he steadfastly insisted that you should be a man of learning, or at least follow an official career. It was certainly not, as you accused yourself, a mere inclination to idleness or a hankering after adventures that again and again prompted this wish; and assuredly your father, whatever his reasons, did not do well so obstinately to reject it. He had lost one son at sea--very well; there is another sea, the sea of happy, active, energetic life, in which all faculties have their free play. This he should not have forbidden you; and this was really the sea for which you longed, of which the ocean with its storms was but the image, though you took it for the reality.

"Your father did not do well; yet we cannot reckon with him, rendered gloomy by domestic misfortune, too soon left alone in the world, and irritated by his son's resistance. But what can we say of your pedantic teachers, not one of whom could comprehend a youth whose character is openness itself? What of your worthy friends who raised a hue and cry over the profligate who was leading their sons into mischief, and who held it a devout work to widen the breach between father and son? Many an honest German youth has been in your case, my friend; brought up under such desperately stringent social restrictions, that he thanks heaven, when, in the far west of America, under the trees of the primeval forest, he hears no more about social order. True, in your flight from the oppressive narrowness of your father's house, you did not get so far as the American forests, but unhappily, only as far as the woods of the Zehrenburg, and this filled up the measure of your misfortunes.

"For there you met with one towards whom you must have felt yourself drawn by an irresistible attraction, as his nature in many points had a wonderful resemblance to your own; one whose ruin had been mainly due to the wretchedness of our social relations, and who had made a wilderness around; him in which he could move in accordance with his unfettered will, which he called liberty. A wilderness in the moral as well as the literal sense; for as I learn from what you have told me of his discourses, and as the result has shown, in throwing away prejudice he also cast overboard judgment, with precaution, discretion, with scrupulousness, consideration, with the faults of the German character the virtues of all; and all that at last remained to him were his adventurous spirit and a kind of fantastic magnanimity which at times, as you have yourself experienced, could be more fantastic than magnanimous.

"But be that as it may, he was a man with whom you were at once struck, because he was the exact opposite of all men whom you had hitherto met, and who still possessed chivalrous qualities enough for a youth so inexperienced to see in him his ideal. And then the free life upon the broad heaths, the lofty cliffs, the far-reaching shore--how could this do other than intoxicate and confuse a brain yet clouded with the dust of the school-room?

"But this freedom, this independence, this energetic life, were all but a glittering reflection, the Fata-Morgana of a Hesperian shore, which was destined to vanish, leaving behind a guard-house and a penitentiary.

"To make this prison a Hesperian garden to you, is not in my power, my friend; nor would I do it if it were. But one thing I hope to effect, and that is, that here, where the errors that warped your early training can no longer reach you, you may come to yourself, learn to know yourself, your aims, and the measure of your powers--that in a workhouse you may learn how to work."

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

Chapter VIII

I will not maintain that the excellent man said all that I have put into his mouth in the last chapter, in these identical words, or upon this particular morning. It is probable that I have thrown into connection his remarks upon more than a single occasion, and perhaps have added a phrase or a figure of my own. But hardly more than this; for I too deeply absorbed his philosophy, which descended upon my thirsting soul like the fruitful shower upon a parched field; and while I attempt to repeat his thoughts, his image stands so lively in my memory, that I fancy I hear the words issuing from his lips.

And at this time I enjoyed the happiness of his converse every day and often for hours at a time. It was not in my power to keep the promise I had made to Paula, for her father did not wait for me to put the question to him. I had told him our conversation, however, at which he smiled.

"She wants to make a learned man of you," he said. "I wish to make nothing of you; I wish you to become what you are capable of becoming; and to find out your capabilities we must experiment a little. One thing is certain: you can become a first-rate hand-worker. You have shown that already; and I am well satisfied that you have gone through this brief course, for the first touches of the artist follow the last of the craftsman, and it is well that he should understand the handiwork upon which his art rests; not only because only thus is he able to see rightly and help with counsel and hand wherever help is needed, but only then is it truly his work, and belongs to him as a child to a parent not only spirit of his spirit, but also flesh of his flesh. Then how much more sharply does the eye see where the hand has been busy? Here is the ground-plan of the new infirmary; this is the foundation which you yourself helped to clear out, and for which you yourself helped to bring the stones. This wall will be built upon that foundation; it is of this height and this thickness; without a calculation you are satisfied that such a foundation can support such a wall. Do you not feel a pleasure in the neat, firm drawing in which a single line represents the work of an hour, or perhaps of many days? Paula has told me that you have an accurate eye and a sure hand. I need copies of these plans: would you like to make them for me? It is work suited to a convalescent; and the use of compass, ruler, and drawing-pen, I can show you in five minutes."

From this day I worked in the superintendent's office, copying simple outlines or the design of a front, or engrossing specifications, with a pleasure which I had never imagined could accompany work. But who then ever had such a teacher--so kind, so wise, so patient, who so well knew how to lead the pupil to confidence in himself? How grateful to me was his praise; and how I stood in need of it. I who at school had always been blamed and scolded, who looked on it as a matter of course that my work was worse than that of any of the others, and who had come to consider myself as destitute of all capacity. My new teacher taught me that my capacities were only dormant, and that I could perfectly well understand anything that I thought worth understanding. Thus I had resigned myself in mathematics to make no progress beyond the first rudiments, and now to my astonishment I discovered that these uncouth symbols and crabbed formulas were composed of simple ideas and figures, and constructed with a logical consequence which I had no difficulty in perceiving, and in which I felt inexpressible delight.

"It is singular," I said on one occasion, "that when I was with Herr von Zehren I thought there could be nothing on earth more delightful than shooting over a wide heath on a sunny autumn morning; but I now find that to correctly employ a difficult formula gives more pleasure than a good shot that brings down an unlucky pheasant."

"The whole secret," replied my teacher, "lies in giving free play to our powers and our talents in a direction which is agreeable to our own nature. For in this manner we feel that we are; and every creature at every moment seeks for nothing further. But if we can so contrive it that our activity, besides giving us the proof of our existence, turns to the advantage of others--and happily that is almost always in our power--so much the better for us. Would to heaven my unfortunate brother had caught a sight of this truth."

Of course, especially in the earlier period of my imprisonment, our conversation frequently turned upon "the Wild Zehren."

"As a boy he bore that name," said the superintendent; "everybody called him 'the Wild One,' and it was hardly possible to give him another name. In his fiery nature lay an impulse that he could not resist, to put forth his exuberant strength even to excess, to venture whatever was most hazardous, and to attempt even the impossible. You can judge the field that our paternal estate offered to such a boy. To dash on the wildest horses down the steep heights, to put out to sea in a crazy boat during a raging storm, to roam over the perilous moors by night, to climb the giant beeches of the park to bring down a bird's nest, to dive into the tarn in search of the treasure which they say was thrown into it in the time of the Swedish invasion--these were his favorite sports. I have no idea how often he found himself in danger of death; but in truth it might be said to be every moment, for at any moment the impulse might seize him to do something which put his life in peril. Once we were standing at an upper window and saw an infuriated bull chasing one of the laborers around the court. Malte said, 'I must take that fellow in hand,' sprang down twenty feet into the court as another might arise from a chair, and ran to meet the bull, whose rage had however spent itself, so that he allowed the daring boy to drive him back to the cattle-yard. It was a mere chance here that he did not break his bones and was not gored; but as chance always stood his friend, he grew more and more reckless and daring.

"Chance, however, is a capricious deity, and unexpectedly leaves its greatest favorites in the lurch. A far worse enemy to my brother were the circumstances in which he grew up. The only thing he had been taught, was that the Zehrens were the oldest race on the island, and that he was the first-born. From these two articles of faith he constructed a sort of religion and mystical cultus which was all the more fantastic that his pompous fancies contrasted so glaringly with the threadbare reality.

"Our father was a nobleman of the old lawless school, and of the wild ways of his class in the eighteenth century: a man of all men least fitted to form the character of a haughty, audacious boy like my brother. Our mother had lived at courts, and in this unwholesome sphere frittered away her really remarkable gifts. She yearned for the vanished splendors of her former life; the solitude of a country life wearied, and the rudeness with which she was surrounded, shocked her. Their life was not a happy one: as she knew she was no longer beloved by her husband, she soon ceased to love her children, in whom she fancied--whether rightly or wrongly is of no consequence--that she perceived only the traits of their father. Our father's regard was confined to his first-born alone; and when a wealthy, childless aunt asked to be allowed to take charge of the second son, Arthur, he willingly consented. Indeed I believe he would have been glad to be rid of me also, the youngest son, only no one was willing to take me. Thus I grew up as I best could; sometimes I had a tutor and sometimes I had none; no one cared for me; I should have been left entirely alone, had not my eldest brother, after his fashion, taken me under his charge.

"He loved me, who was ten years his junior, with passionate devotion, with a wild, and, as it now appears to me, a touching tenderness. Strong as I afterwards grew, I was a frail and sickly child. He, the dauntless, shielded me from every shadow of danger; he watched and guarded me as the apple of his eye; played with me, when I was well, for half-days at a time; watched, when I was sick, night after night by my bed. I was the only one who could control 'the Wild One' with a word, a look; but what could such influence avail? It was a thread that snapped, when the youth of twenty, after a scene of unusual violence with our father, left suddenly the paternal house, to enter it no more for ten years.

"He was sent to travel, as the customary phrase then ran; but the always insufficient remittances which he received from our father, whose means were daily diminishing, soon ceased altogether. He had to live as he could; and as he could not live at his own expense, he lived at the expense of others, like many a noble adventurer, to-day a beggar, to-morrow rolling in gold; to-day the comrade of the lowest rabble, tomorrow the companion of princes; with his irresistible power of fascination, conquering all hearts wherever he came, yet himself fixed nowhere, and roaming restlessly from one end of Europe to the other. He was in England, Italy, Spain, and longest in France; in the wild life of Paris he found his natural element, and he revelled in the arms of French ladies, whose brothers and husbands were devastating his native land with fire and sword.

"For five or six years we had heard nothing of him; our mother had died, and we had not known where to send him the news of her death; our father, broken before his time, was tottering to his grave; the devastation of our estates by the enemy, who had penetrated even to us, did not move his apathy--he drank the last bottle of wine in his cellar in a carouse with French officers. I could not endure all this with patience. I challenged the French colonel, a Gascon, who, seated at my father's table, with a guitar in his hands, was singing ribald songs insulting to the Germans. He laughed, and made his men take the sword from the boy of seventeen--it was a dress-sword which hung on the wall by a blue scarf as an ornament, and which I had snatched in my fury--to punish his presumption by having him shot the next morning.

"In the night appeared a deliverer whom I had least reason to expect. At the rumors of an uprising in Germany--at that time the first Frei corps was organizing--the Wild One had hurried back from the arms of his paramours and the salons of the Faubourg St. Germain, and his way had led him to our native place, where just then the flames of war were most fiercely burning. He could not reach the Frei corps, which was in the citadel, so he turned to the island with the plan of stirring up a guerrilla warfare against the invaders. He came just at the right moment to snatch his brother from certain death. With a few trusty followers hastily collected, he broke into the prison under circumstances of the most daring audacity, and carried me away.

"From this time we were together for five years, and first as simple volunteers, then as officers of the line, shared perils and hardships like brothers. I was a good soldier, but my brother's name was known throughout the whole army, and again he was called 'the Wild Zehren,' as if to such a man that was the only fitting epithet. Innumerable were the stories told of his courage and foolhardiness. The general opinion was that he was seeking death; but he was not thinking of death--he only despised life. He laughed when he heard others talking enthusiastically of the regeneration of Germany; how we would rid our native soil both of foreign and native tyrants, in order to establish a kingdom of fraternity and equality in the liberated land. At that time he often had the old phrase of 'hammer and anvil' on his lips, which, as he said, expressed his philosophy in the simplest terms. 'Fraternity! equality!' he scoffed--'away with such empty phrases! This is a world of the strong and the weak; of masters and serfs. You have so long been the anvil under that giant hammer Napoleon, that now you want to play hammer yourselves. See how far you will bring it. Not far, I fear. You have only talents for the part of anvil.'

"'Why did you come to help us fight Napoleon?' I asked.

"'Because I was bored in Paris,' was his reply.

"But he did himself injustice. He was something more than the blasé cavalier of fortune which he pretended to be; he had squandered in a life of wild adventures the treasures of a heart dearer than Plutus' mine; but a fragment of this heart was yet left him, and in this fragment lived--if not genuine patriotism and philanthropy, at least the generous impulse to side with the oppressed and resist the oppressor, whether he be a brilliant conquerer or a stupid native prince ruling by the grace of God.

"And now that the conquerer was chained to the rock of St. Helena, and he saw the heroes of so many battles taking their old accustomed yoke once more upon their patient necks; when he saw that the whole proud torrent of liberty was wasting in the sand of loyal obedience, then he broke his sword, which he had gloriously carried through twenty battles, bestowed a curse upon both despots and slaves, and said that now, as before the war, the world was his home; the only home for a free-born man in a slavish age.

"I know well that his reasoning was strained and unsound; but there was a kernel of truth in it. The result has proven this; the incredibly vapid, idealess time in which we live, a time barren of thought and of deeds, a real age of the Epigoni, has completely confirmed his prediction. And now again he wandered, a homeless adventurer, through the land, only with the difference that before with insolent power he had sported with men, whom he now coldly preyed upon because he despised them. 'I endeavored to purchase with my blood a letter of indulgence for my past: it has been refused me. What now is the present or the future to me?' How often have I thought upon this expression of his to me at the moment of our parting. It has always remained with me a key to his enigmatical character.

"Again for years I heard nothing more of him. Our father was dead; our estate sequestered; my second brother, Arthur, whom his aunt had deceived in his expectations, was toiling in thankless public service; I, who had set my heart upon the regeneration of the public, and thought that I could see that the work must be begun at the very beginning, that is, at the bottom, had managed to obtain this place through my patron, Altenburg; had been here, a crippled man, for four years, and was still studying the rudiments of my vocation; Malte was nowhere heard of. Suddenly he reappeared, and with a wife who had followed the adventurer to his home. He declared his intention to take the paternal estate in hand. I afforded him every facility; Arthur sold his rights for a sum of money, the receipt of which, by the way, he still denies. The creditors were glad to get at all events something, and one of them at least consoled himself with the thought that 'omittance was no quittance,' and the hope--which has not deceived him--that the Zehren estates were as secure to him under the new master as under the old.

"We did not meet at his return; just at that time I could not well leave this place, and he, on his part, felt no desire to renew the old friendship. When we parted, I was about to contract a marriage, in which the first-born of an ancient line saw a criminal mésalliance; now for some years I had been holding an official post; and to hold any post, but especially such a post as this, was in his eyes throwing one's self away, trampling under foot the inborn right of a knight of the hammer, and making one's self a plebeian anvil. That I refused the compensation he had offered me for my interest in the estate, wounded him deeply. By so doing, in his eyes, I renounced my obedience and subordination to the first-born, the chief of the family. He could not forgive me that I had no more need of him; that I had no debts which he must plunge himself into debt to pay; in a word, that I was not like my brother Arthur, who was much more compliant in this point--too compliant, I fear.

"On the other side, what I heard of him--and he took care never to let men's tongues rest about him--confirmed me in the sad conviction that between him and me a gulf had opened, not to be crossed by even the sincere love I still felt for him. I heard of the wild life he was living with the noblemen of his neighborhood, now impoverished by the war; of the drinking and gaming bouts, of mad exploits of which he was the originator. At this time a dark rumor got abroad that he was conducting the smuggling traffic, which during the war had flourished greatly, being then encouraged by the government, but now was strongly repressed. But the worst rumors were those that spoke of the wretched life he led with his unhappy wife. He ill-treated her, it was said; he had imprisoned her in a cellar; it was unaccountable that the authorities did not interfere.

"I could not bear to hear these things, of which I did not believe a word, for the charges were in too glaringly contradiction to the naturally noble and generous nature of my brother. But I felt a natural hesitation to mix myself up in these affairs, until a letter which I received brought me to a decision. The letter was written in bad French, and the very first words informed me that the unhappy woman who wrote it must be out of her right mind. 'I hear you know the road to Spain,' it began, and ended with the words, 'I entreat you to tell me the road to Spain.' In an hour after receiving it I set out, and, after so many years, saw my father's house and my brother again. It was a painful meeting.

"My father's house a ruin, my brother a shadow--worse, a caricature--of his former self. Ah, my friend, the hammer-theory had shown itself cruel to its staunchest maintainer. How had the clumsy anvil beaten out the delicate hammer! How ignoble he had grown in the common world which he so deeply despised! 'Only despise reason and knowledge,' Goethe makes the Spirit of Lies say, 'and I have you then safe.' And I say, only despise men, and you will see how soon you grow despicable to others and to yourself.

"I told him why I had come; he led me in silence into the park, and pointed to a woman, who, in a fantastic dress, flowers and weeds in her glossy-black, half-dishevelled hair, in her hands a guitar with half its chords broken, was wandering under the trees and among the shrubbery, sometimes raising her dark eyes, as if in ecstacy, to heaven, and again dropping them, as in despair, to the earth.

"'You see,' he said, 'it is a lie that I have imprisoned her. Many another would do it, for it is not a pleasant thing to afford the public such an exhibition.'

"Take her to her native place," I said.

"'Try it,' he answered. 'She would leap out of the carriage; she would throw herself into the sea. And if you took her there in fetters and by force, what would be her fate? She would be thrown into the dungeon of a convent, where they would try with hunger and blows to exorcize the devil who tempted her to give her heart to a heretic. Though I love her no longer, I once loved her, or at least she has been mine; and no priest's ungentle hand shall touch what has once belonged to me.'

"I said how terrible it was to hear him speak thus of his wife, the mother of his child.

"'Who says that she is my wife?' was his reply.

"I looked at him amazed and shocked; he shrugged his shoulders.

"'That does not suit your citizen virtue,' he said. 'I would have made her Frau von Zehren, notwithstanding her father is a hidalgo of very doubtful lineage, had the child been a boy. What do I want with a girl? She cannot continue our race; let it then end with me.'

"It was indifferent to him whether these words wounded me or not; he had no desire to wound me; he really looked upon the superintendent of a prison, who had married a poor painter's daughter, as not a Zehren.

"I besought him to give me the child, if, as he said, she was nothing to him. I would bring her up with my Paula, who was then just born. Here she must perish both morally and physically; and there might be a time when he would long for a child, whether son or daughter, legitimate or illegitimate.

"'Then my last hour must have come,' he answered, turning away from me with a contemptuous gesture.

"What was here to be done? I was not here to hunt with my brother, or to join him in his carouses and gaming parties, to which he invited me, with ironical politeness. I spoke with the poor lunatic, who did not understand me, and had no idea that she had written to me, as to many others whose names she had learned by chance. I shook hands with old Christian, who had always been fond of me, and was now the only one who remembered me, and begged him to watch over the poor forsaken creature. I wandered once more through the park and greeted the scenes of my boyish sports; once more saw the sun set behind the house where my cradle had stood, and came sorrowing away. Thus might a tree feel that is torn from the earth with all its roots. But, thank heaven, if man is driven from his home, he can win himself a new one; and when the gates of our childhood's paradise are closed behind us, another world opens to us which we must conquer and possess in the sweat of our brows, but which for this reason alone is truly ours."

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us