Chapter VIII…

Chapter VIII

It was spring once more; the first spring for nine years that I had greeted as a free man. True that fair season had not debarred me the sight of her loveliness in the prison: I recalled with pleasure the bright mornings which I had spent in the superintendent's large garden, and how I had stood at the Belvedere and looked over the high bastion to the reach of sea which flashed a greeting to me under the bright sky. But this pleasure was never without a dash of sadness, like the greeting of a dear friend, who from the deck of an outward bound steamer waves a farewell to us who are standing on the shore--"God be with you!"--"And with you!" A parting word, a regret that we cannot go with him, and then silent and earnest we return to our silent, earnest work.

All was different now; different and far fairer, though I missed the great garden with its trees and flowers, and the sea I loved so well. But, on the other hand, there were no walls here nor bolted doors; and it was no passing greeting that I exchanged with the spring at a distance, but a clasp of the hand and a kindly embrace. We met in the evening, when, after my work was done, I rambled for an hour in the remotest parts of the great city park, regions to which seldom any one extended his wanderings, and where the nightingale sang undisturbed her sweet song in the budding bushes. And we met again when I stood on my balcony before sunrise and looked eastwards, where over the crowd of roofs and chimneys the eastern sky was bordered with purple clouds; and an hour later, as I went to work, when the first rays fell upon the pointed gables of the smoky old factory buildings, and the sparrows twittered so merrily on the eaves and in the crannies of the walls, and the earliest swallows darted over the yard, alert and busy as if the thick black laver of coal-dust that covered it was a sheet of the clearest water.

Yes; spring is here once more. I feel her warm breath playing around my cheeks and in my hair, and her kiss upon my brow, and I said to myself: "All must come right yet! All the snow which was piled up in the long winter nights is melted away, and the ice which then froze is melted; should not the frost which fell upon my heart in those winter nights also vanish away? Kind, gentle spring, and stern, earnest labor, what could resist you both when you go hand in hand? and what heart not beat more courageously that you two have filled?"

So I threw myself into the expanded arms of spring, and I caught the hard, honest hand of labor, and felt almost all my old strength and confidence once more. Almost all--assuredly, I thought, it could not be long before all were restored.

There was work enough in our establishment, and there would have been much more if the commerzienrath could have resolved to undertake the building of locomotives. The matter was one of extreme importance; indeed in my opinion it involved the question of the very existence, or, at least, of the prosperity of the works. If our establishment in this branch of industry did not comply with the requirements of the time, its well-earned reputation was at an end. Rival establishments, that were perhaps less favorably situated than ours, would throw themselves with all their energy into the new movement, and outstrip us, possibly for ever; for in the great departments of industry, if anywhere, not to progress is to retrograde irretrievably. Strangely enough, the man usually so intelligent and enterprising shrank from a resolution which to be sure was not to be carried out without great exertions, great alterations, and some temporary sacrifices. New machinery would have to be procured, the steam-power increased, the staff of the office and the force of workmen enlarged; new buildings would have to be erected, and this could not be done without bringing to a decision that long-pending question of the purchase of the ground on which my lodging stood. All this demanded ample funds, clear insight, and prompt decision.

Now with the commerzienrath there was, at least according to general opinion, no lack of money; but he seemed by no means so well furnished with the two other necessary qualities. All who understood anything of the matter--the manager of the works, a plain but intelligent man, with whom I had several times been brought into contact in matters concerning the workmen, and always found him friendly, the young chief of the Technical Bureau, the head-foreman, even Klaus himself--all were impatient and dissatisfied with their employer, who still held back from saying a decisive word, though every month of delay was an irreparable loss. But probably no one was more impatient and dissatisfied than I. I had carefully studied the recent brilliant history of railways in England and Belgium, and was convinced that the system would expand with us into colossal proportions, with an immense demand for locomotives. Then the locomotive had always been a favorite study of my beloved teacher, whose genius had already invented, even with the limited means at his command, and introduced in his models, the most important improvements which would be demanded by the growth and development of this branch of industry. It had been my good fortune to be allowed to help him in his theoretical studies and in the construction of his models, and my brain glowed as I saw that what had been planned and devised in the quiet closet of the thinker would now become a reality. So must a racer feel when he sees before him the course which he is to run, and yet is held back from the start, however he may champ the bit and paw the ground. I pondered and pondered how it might be possible to overcome this fatal resistance. At last I hit upon this plan: I would draw up a memorial, in which I would set forth in detail the reasons which rendered an enlargement of the establishment an absolute necessity, and at the same time a plan for carrying out this extension. This paper was to be sent to the commerzienrath, and it was to be hoped that it would not be without its effect upon him. The doctor, to whom I communicated my plan, did not exactly disapprove it, but by no means entered into it with the warmth that I had hoped. To be sure he was not qualified to comprehend the theoretical necessity of the case, nor did he share my passion for the locomotive; but it was impossible that he could be blind to the fact that I would open a way to give bread to hundreds and hundreds of workmen, and this was really the chief object with him. Instead, he again pressed me to accept his offer, and even to set up an establishment with his money, and we had very nearly had another quarrel when, for the second time, I felt myself obliged to decline his generous offer.

But how could I rob him, whose whole life was a sacrifice for the poor and miserable, of the means which he so generously and judiciously employed, if my enterprise failed, as well might happen? No! my plans were to be realized, if at all, with other money than the doctor's. But where was I to get it without stealing it, or waiting for the coming of the Javanese aunt, whose speedy arrival was an unconditional article of faith with Klaus and Christel? So my thoughts were compelled to revert to the commerzienrath, and one evening I began to write my memorial, which I completed in a few nights.

But no sooner was it finished than a new and weighty consideration presented itself. If I signed the paper with my name, my incognito was at an end; and, even if I did not sign it, it came to about the same thing, for it could only be the production of some one thoroughly acquainted with the establishment, and the commerzienrath would of course inquire for the author, and after creating much talk it would sooner or later be traced to me, when I should probably find that by a useless secrecy I had injured the cause I was advocating.

It was a perplexing dilemma, and I went about as in a dream, ever pondering over the unlucky memorial which lay finished upon my table, and might just as well have been left unwritten.

"But you must come to some decision," said Paula, "and here there can really be no question what that decision should be."

From a very intelligible feeling of shyness I had refrained from telling Paula what it was that lay so heavy on my mind; but Kurt, who worked in the establishment under Klaus's direction, and almost every evening, when he came from work, spent an hour with me, could not be kept ignorant of what I had in hand, and he had told all to his sister.

"You must not be angry with Kurt for it," said Paula; "he cannot imagine that you would wish to keep anything secret from your sister."

"Have you then no secrets from me?" I said.

"What do you mean?" she asked, with a look in which I thought I detected traces of confusion.

I did not wish to press my question, for this would have brought me to the ticklish point which I had so carefully avoided--whether there was any mention of me in the correspondence between Paula and Hermine; so I muttered something unintelligible in reply, and brought the conversation back to my plans, my hopes, and wishes in reference to the works.

"You have lately kept me so uninformed as to what is going on in your world that I am quite in the dark. Let me read your memorial; give it to Kurt this evening to bring home."

This was on a Sunday, and the next week there was much work to do in the factory, for me especially. A large machine of peculiar construction had been built, intended to operate in a chalk-quarry, which the commerzienrath had opened at Zehrendorf among his other industrial undertakings there. I was employed in mounting the machine. All went smoothly on: the bed-plate had been laid exactly level, and some little unevenness left in planing corrected; the fly-wheel was hung, the journals adjusted, and the bolt-holes drilled; the machine was at last so far finished that all that remained to be done was the arrangement of the guiding-apparatus, and the regulation of the piston-rod. This was also set right; but when the foreman took hold of the flywheel to set the machine in motion to try it, it became evident that the driving-rod did not work with a true motion. The foreman and I looked at each other anxiously; we most carefully compared the dimensions of the various parts by scale with those of the plan, but there was no error discoverable.

"This is a confounded piece of business!" said the foreman.

"What is the matter?" asked the head-foreman, Roland, who came up at the moment.

Head-foreman Roland was a man of Cyclopean stature, whose left leg had once been broken in some machinery, giving him a limping gait, of which he was rather proud after once hearing that the god Vulcan, the patron of his craft, had the same infirmity. Head-foreman Roland had moreover so good an opinion of himself that under the projecting thatch of his thick moustache, around the left corner of his mouth, there was usually playing a consequential smile, which from time to time glided into the dense forest of his bushy beard and whiskers, where it continued its course unseen.

When the matter was explained to him he looked first at the foreman and then at the two workmen, each in turn, let the consequential smile play under the thatch, and said: "There must be some mistake in the execution; give me the plans."

These were handed him, and he began to compare measurements, just as we had done before he came up; but the longer this comparison lasted, and brought no lurking error to light, the feebler grew the smile, and it had vanished entirely in the forest depths when a quarter of an hour later he went with the plans in his hands to the Technical Bureau, muttering in a surly tone that there must be some blunder in the cursed plans.

This had been my own idea at first, but I had changed my opinion. A suspicion began to dawn upon me that the drawings might be all correct, and the measurements exactly followed, and that the cause of the trouble lay deeper.

So I stood with my arms crossed upon my breast while the foreman, with the other workmen, and some few more who had come up to look on, as work was now over for the evening, exchanged opinions on the subject. Some thought that the thread of a screw on one of the shafts had been cut to an erroneous angle, and others had other suggestions to make.

"The thing must be simple enough," said Herr Windfang, of the Technical Bureau, who now entered with the troubled head-foreman.

There was nothing Cyclopean about Herr Windfang; on the contrary, he was an elegant young gentleman, with a touch of dandyism about him.

"It must be simple enough," he repeated; "try it again."

I cannot tell how many times they tried it, but the abominable driving-rod persisted in its false movement.

"Give me the drawings," said Herr Windfang. "Ah, here they are. The error must be in the work."

While they were once more making the comparisons and measurements, which the foreman and myself and then Herr Roland had made in vain, I had studied the matter further, and was so convinced of my view that when Herr Windfang, very much out of countenance, looked at Herr Roland, and Herr Roland, with a faint gleam of a smile playing in the left corner of his mouth, looked at Herr Windfang, I could no longer keep silent, and said:

"It is no use to compare measurements: the dimensions all agree: we shall not get at the error in this way, for it is an error of construction, and lies in the guiding movement."

So bold a speech could not fail to turn the eyes of all present upon me. Young Herr Windfang measured me with his eyes from head to foot, a process which, as he was of rather small stature, occupied some time; the familiar smile came out of the forest of Roland's whiskers, and played quite gaily under the thatch of his moustache; for, if the matter was as I said, the fault fell neither upon him nor any one of his subordinates, but went back to the Technical Bureau--a very gratifying thing, under the circumstances, for the worthy head-foreman. The foreman, who had a high opinion of me, nodded, as if to say: There you have it. The workmen looked at each other and smiled.

"Why do you say that, sir?" asked Herr Windfang, coming up to me, and taking another hasty measurement of me.

"Because I am convinced of the fact," I answered.

"That is a piece of arrogance on your part, sir!" cried the engineer.

"You and the other gentlemen are not infallible, like the pope!" I retorted.

Here the men laughed loudly.

"We will speak of this matter again," said Herr Windfang.

"We will indeed," was my reply.

The irascible young man hurried out of the building in a rage, but the head-foreman shook me by the hand and said: "Thank you, Hartwig; you took him down handsomely;" and the men accompanied me across the yard, loudly taking my part, and giving me to understand that my cause was their own. Klaus and Kurt, who had come out of another shop, now joined me. They had heard of the little skirmish I had had with the Technical Bureau, and wanted to know the facts. I did not go into details, for I was eager to get home to maintain the gauntlet I had thrown. I had all the designs of the machine, in the construction of which I had helped throughout; the necessary works of reference were in my possession; my lamp was trimmed, and a little fire burning on my hearth, as the nights were still chilly.

So I spent all the cool spring night measuring, calculating, comparing, constructing, and when the first rosy morning clouds rose over the throng of roofs and chimneys I had found what I was seeking, and fixed it in irrefragable formulae and figures. There it lay upon my table in a careful drawing, with the measurements all noted, and there it stood fast in my head, and from my head a sense of triumph hurried to my heart, which began to beat violently. But I checked my rising pride by remembering that I owed it all to him, and I fancied I saw the face of my beloved teacher smiling upon me, and tears sprang to my eyes. Then I went back to my room and slept an hour or so, as deeply and sweetly as I ever slept in my life.

"How is it, Malay?" asked my comrades when I appeared among them.

"How is it, Hartwig?" asked the head-foreman, who was again standing before the unlucky machine, without a smile this time.

"How is it, George?" asked Klaus and Kurt, coming over from their shop.

"I will show you," I said. I went up to the machine and gave a sort of little lecture, in which I set forth the result of my night's work in a way, as I think, both clear and connected, for they all listened with the most eager attention; and their faces grew brighter and brighter as I proceeded, until, when my demonstration was finished, Kurt clapped his hands, Klaus looked around with inexpressible pride, the men nodded to each other with expressive looks, and head-foreman Roland, with a really sunny smile under the thatch, shook my hand as he said:

"Go ahead, my son, go ahead; we will give it to them."

"Malay, you must come to the manager," said the office-messenger, coming up.

My audience exchanged expressive looks.

"Go ahead, my son!" said Herr Roland; "give it to them!"

The Manager, Herr Berg, a worthy, modest man, but of no great breadth of views, was alone in his office, which adjoined the Technical Bureau.

"I have heard, Hartwig," he said, "that you think you have discovered the error in the new machine. Although this appears rather more than doubtful to me, still men in your place now and then hit upon things which others search after in vain for days. I worked up from the ranks myself, and know that. What do you believe to be the difficulty?"

"I do not now believe it, Herr Manager; I now know it," I answered.

I said this firmly, but quite modestly, and took my calculation and drawing from my pocket and began to explain them to the manager. The matter was a tolerably complicated one, and so were the calculations, while the formulæ that I had employed were by no means simple. In my eagerness I never thought that while I was displaying my knowledge so lavishly I was dropping the incognito I had maintained so long and so strictly, and was first made aware of it by the singular manner in which the manager was looking at me. He stood there, looking as much amazed as did Menelaus when before his eyes and in his hands the wondrous "Old Man of the Sea" changed into a tawny mountain lion.

"How in the name of heaven did you learn all that?" he cried at last.

"You have yourself just told me, Herr Manager, that you rose from the ranks, and you then must know what can be done with industry and attention."

Herr Berg looked at me with an expression in which it was plainly visible that he did not know precisely what to make of me, but like a sensible man he repressed his surprise, and asked me to leave the drawing and the demonstration with him awhile, upon his pledge that no one should have sight of them but himself. If my views were correct I should have the full credit for them, and in the meantime the gentlemen of the Technical Bureau would hand in their statement.

One, two, three days passed before they did this, however, and by this time the whole establishment was in a fever of expectation. From the head-foreman down to the last hand who wielded the heavy sledge, all knew that "the Malay" had found the defect in the new machine, and that the gentlemen of the Technical Bureau had been working over it for three days and had not found it yet, and that Klaus Pinnow had said he would bet his head that Malay would win, and that young Herr von Zehren, in Klaus Pinnow's shop, had said to Herr Windfang, who was a great friend of his, that it was a piece of extreme folly for Klaus to wager his head against the Technical Bureau, as the latter, though it consisted of six heads, had none to stake against it.

Saturday came. The unlucky machine stood there untouched, an obstinate sphinx that had yielded her riddle to no one but myself. We had taken in hand another job, but the men did not work with their usual spirit. It is an inborn peculiarity of man that he does not willingly undertake anything new until the old has been completed.

"You will have the goodness to come to the manager, Herr Hartwig," said the office-messenger, coming in.

The men looked up from their work, surprised to find that the "Malay" had suddenly become a "Herr Hartwig." They exchanged looks; each one felt that now the decision had arrived, and head-foreman Roland, who happened to be crossing the yard, limped solemnly up to me, offered me his Cyclops-hand, and said: "Go ahead, my son; give it to them; give it to them well!"

Equipped with this benediction I entered the manager's room, who rose from his desk at my entrance, came forward and shook me by the hand. He seemed a little nervous, and his honest face expressed considerable confusion.

"I congratulate you, Herr Hartwig," he said. "You were right. For these three days I have had no doubt of it; but, to be sure, when one has made the egg stand upright, another knows how it is done. And then I was not quite certain that I would have found it out myself, so it was but fair that I should let the gentlemen of the Technical Bureau first try their hands. They have been long getting at it, and your calculation is just three times as simple as theirs. I have already combed their heads for them a little, and there they sit with them hanging down."

The modest man let his own head hang a little also as he finished.

"Well, Herr Manager," I said, "the error has been discovered, and that was the main question; who discovered it is a matter of little consequence."

"Excuse me, Herr Hartwig," he answered, "but I disagree with you here. To the manager of such an establishment as this it cannot be a matter of indifference whether the work of the Technical Bureau is done by its staff, or in the machine-shop, for the main thing is that every man shall stand in the place where he belongs, and after this example"--here he laid his hand upon my drawing, which was on the table--"no other proof is needed that you are altogether in a false position."

"But, Herr Manager," I replied, "that is entirely my own fault, and as a man makes his bed so must he lie."

"Yes," said the manager, "that is my comfort; but I had much rather that you had been candid with me from the first. I might then be able to send back with a protest the snub which the commerzienrath has sent me to-day. There--read for yourself."

I took the paper which the manager offered me, and glanced over a letter four pages long, in which all possible reproaches were heaped upon poor Herr Berg because he had had so long in the works a man like myself, whose mathematical and technical genius had long been known to him, the commerzienrath, and had not reported the fact at once--"and even granting that you considered yourself bound to conceal matters of the highest importance, it was, at the very least, your duty and obligation to give my young friend a position corresponding to his talents and abilities; or did you fear that perhaps this position would, in that event, be no other than your own place, Herr Manager?

"But that is shameful!" I cried, throwing down the letter.

The worthy man shook his head. "His meaning is not so bad as his words," he said, "and if it were, we are used to it. Read further."

"I do not wish to read any more."

"But you must: the most important is to come: see here----"

"Under these circumstances there is but one reparation to my young friend possible. This consists, first, in placing him at once in the Technical Bureau; secondly, in asking him, in my name, to oversee on the spot the erection of the machine at the chalk-quarry at Zehrendorf. I have also written him to this effect myself."

"Now," said the manager, with a good-humored smile, "as for the first point, you have already, by your work, won yourself a place in the Technical Bureau; and as for the second, you will do me a special favor, which perhaps you owe me on account of that snub--you understand me--to undertake the business at Zehrendorf. I had intended to send Herr Windfang. The alterations in the machine will occupy a week at least, and, as I know the commerzienrath, I shall risk my position by this delay, unless there is a friend who will speak a good word for me. And now go home; you will have much to attend to, and you must be off by the last train; but I will come round to see you first."

The manager shook hands with me heartily, and I went home in a rather singular frame of mind.

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Chapter IX

And my perplexity was still further heightened when on reaching home I found a letter from the commerzienrath lying on my table:

"My Dear Young Friend:

"Oh, these women, these women! I just now learn for the first time what you have kept from my knowledge half a year--that you have so long been working, like Samson among the Philistines, in my establishment. Did I not, when I last saw you in the house of our never-to-be-forgotten friend, entreat you again and again to let me know as soon as you recovered your liberty? Why have you not done so? why have you hidden your light so long under a bushel? You always had a great inclination that way, but so much the more is it now time that you should let it shine before men--and, just now, before me. Therefore come here as soon as possible; I have a multitude of things to talk over with you about matters here, as well as at the works, which last--as I now, unfortunately, know for the first time--you thoroughly understand. [These words were underscored.] You will here pass some pleasant days among none but good old acquaintances, of whom none is older nor a better friend of yours than your obedient servant,

"Philip August Streber."

I laid the letter, which was written in a large, round business-hand, somewhat tremulous in places, upon the table, and paced my room in extreme astonishment. How upon earth did the man know that I was here? that I understood these things? Who could have told him? There was but one explanation possible. But why----

"But why torment myself about the matter?" I cried, took my hat, and set out for Paula's house.

"We are a little nervous this morning," my old friend whispered to me at the door of Paula's studio.

"Don't you know what it is?" I asked in the same tone.

The worthy man shook his head, the head which in his opinion was playing so important a part in the history of modern art, and said:

"One would have to have seven senses, like a bear, to know what is in the hearts of the dear creatures."

With these words he opened the door.

Paula was alone, as Süssmilch had told me. She hastily laid pencils and palette aside, and came to me with her hand extended. I saw at the first glance that she had been weeping, and, although her cheeks were flushed at this moment, she looked to me pale and unwell.

"You were expecting me, Paula?" I asked, holding her hand in my own.

"Yes," she answered; "and as you come at an unusual time, I suppose you know why I was expecting you."

"It was your doing, Paula, was it not?" I said.

"Yes," she replied.

She looked me full in the eyes. Her look had that strange, half-sad, half-indignant expression which I had only observed once, on the morning of that fatal day when she disengaged herself from my arms in which I had clasped her to save her from the falling Belvedere. It was a recollection which filled me with an indefinite fear, and so confused me that my glances fell before the maiden's large luminous eyes.

At this moment I heard her draw a long breath, and as I looked up the strange expression had vanished from her eyes, and her voice was soft as ever, as, taking my hand and leading me to a small sofa, she said:

"Come, let us sit down and consult what is to be done right calmly and wisely, as brother and sister should do."

"Did they know then all the time that I was here?" I asked.

"Yes," she answered; "and I would have told you all if you had asked me; but you did not ask; it was a little secret which you, quite unnecessarily, seemed to think yourself bound to keep; a harmless game of hide-and-seek, such as every one plays now and then. She played the same game: I was on no account to let you know that she was resolved, at any price, to have Richard the Lion-heart, and that she inquired after you in every letter, I told her that I would say nothing about it so long as you did not ask. But the commerzienrath, I believe, really did not know, although we cannot altogether trust him. For that he now writes for you so eagerly as you tell me, is no proof: he needs you just now."

"Did you send him my memorial?" I asked.

"That was dreadful, was it not?" said Paula, smiling with pale lips; "but I had to do what you hesitated at doing, and perhaps could not do yourself: I had to do it, even at the risk of your displeasure, for it was a matter in which, as it seemed to me, your whole future was at stake."

"My whole future?"

"Scarcely less. Indeed rather more; for you must know that I am proud of you, George, and convinced that you only need the means to accomplish really important things in your profession. The commerzienrath has these means. You must teach him to employ them; you are the only one who can, for I have long known that he has taken the exact measure of your talents with that acuteness of insight which is peculiar to men of his stamp. And now he has in his hands the proof of what you can do. Then you have the advantage that he is personally well-disposed toward you, so far as such an egotist may be said to be capable of unselfish, genuinely human interest in any one. In a word: the opportunity is a more propitious one than you are likely ever to have again."

"You send me away, Paula," I said, "out of these dear old associations into others altogether new and strange, from which it is scarce possible that I can return as I departed, while it is quite as improbable that I shall find again what I leave. Have you well considered all this? And if, as I must suppose, you have considered it, then----Paula, I wish it were less easy for you to send me away."

"Who says that it is easy for me?" asked Paula, quickly rising and taking a few steps across the room. These steps, by chance apparently, brought her to her easel, and she remained standing before it with her face averted from me.

"I mean," I said, "that I wish you found it harder to do without me, if not on your own account for the sake of your mother and your brothers; that, in a word, I were to them what you are now. But, Paula, you have always been so proud; and in truth you have now more reason than ever."

Paula had found something to do at her easel, and some little time passed before she answered:

"You men are strange creatures: everywhere you wish your influence to be felt; even what you approve does not come to pass satisfactorily unless it is your doing. But this is only a transient feeling of yours, which I can well understand----"

"I do not know whether you quite understand it," I said in a low tone.

"Perfectly, perfectly," she said, bending lower over her easel; "when any one is as much attached to another as you are to us, he desires to be always giving, and feels it a heavy loss if this comes to be out of his power. But I really do not see why we sadden ourselves so unnecessarily. You are not going to be carried away from us forever. You are only moving out of a narrow, wretched channel, unfit for so proud a ship, into the broad ocean. Of course you will of necessity often forget us a little, or perhaps entirely; for the man who wishes to do anything great and complete must have his arms free: he cannot and must not drag the toys of his childhood or the idols of his youth with him through life. I wish that you would see that clearly, George; bring yourself to see it clearly in this moment, of which I repeat that I consider it a decisive one; since now, for the first time in your life, after long years of apprenticeship, you enter on the rights of a master--can for the first time show yourself as you are. At a decision like this, all subordinate interests must stand back: all, George; even we--our mother, your brothers, your sister."

I could not see her face, which she still held down, but there were tears in her voice.

I approached her, but she turned her face away.

"Paula!" I said.

I wished to say more; to tell her all; to tell her that if I were to lose her by my decision, whatever else I might win by it seemed inexpressibly worthless to me; that----

"Paula!" I said once more, but I said it at her feet, with hot tears streaming from my eyes. I strove for words, but they would not come.

A soft hand passed gently over my hair, and it seemed to me--I was not sure then, nor am I now--but it seemed to me that she lightly touched my brow with her lips. Then I heard her voice, and its tone was calm, sweet and clear:

"George, my brother, you must not thus distress your poor sister. Now go and bid our mother farewell. She has long foreseen the approach of this moment, and has impatiently longed for it. In her lives, far more than in us, George, the spirit of the war for freedom. She knows, from her own experience, that a man must give up home and goods and wife and children, and all that is dear to him, to devote his life to a great and good cause. Come, George!"

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Chapter X

A lively breeze was blowing in my face as the carriage in which I was jolted along the road from Fährdorf to Zehrendorf, a bad one in the best of times, but now, in the spring, at its worst. The driver on the box had wrapped himself close in a horse-blanket and sat huddled together, while the strong horses had as much as they could do to drag the light vehicle through the deep miry ruts. It was about eight in the evening, and the moon was an hour high, but only from time to time did a glimpse of her disc peer out through the heavy clouds, throwing a deceitful light, quickly succeeded by darkness, over drenched fields and meadows, with pools of water glistening here and there over the wide expanse of barren heath.

And as lights and shadows chased each other over the wide expanse, so alternated in my soul the memories of joy and grief that I had experienced here. The days that I had spent here came all back, and passed by me with faces beaming with smiles, clouded by grief, or distorted with pain. And there were far fewer of the smiling days than of those with sad and gloomy looks; and at last--for during the whole journey it had seemed to me almost a wickedness that I should dare to return to this spot--this feeling overcame me so strongly that I could scarcely refrain from calling to the driver to stop, that I could go no further to-night.

"We shall reach the top directly," said the man, giving his tired horses a cut with the whip.

I do not know why he thought it necessary to offer me this consolation; perhaps he had thought that the groan which escaped me was extorted by the badness of the road.

But he was right. I knew that as well as he did. The light below us, which seemed to shine out of the earth, came from a little house leaning against the foot of the hill, and those broad white patches, which contrasted so singularly with the black hills, were the great chalk-quarries belonging to Prince Prora, to which the house belonged; and not far from us, on the ridge which we were slowly climbing, was a piece of woods--part of the same woods in which I fled from my pursuers for four days.

The sturdy horses stretched to their work, and now we were on the ridge. Down the other side we went, over a hard sandy road, and the wind came sweeping on its mighty pinions from over the sea, making the driver wrap himself still closer in his blanket. But I drew long deep breaths, and drew in full draughts of deliciousness that I had wanted so long.

Heartily I greeted the loved sea-breeze, that friend of my childhood. Long had I pined for it in the narrow streets of the city, where only a mockery of it blew in fitful puffs and with malicious pranks, and whistled shrill and spitefully around the corners. How often had this mighty sea-wind filled my young heart with inexpressible gladness; and now it chased the dark memories from my soul as it swept away the black clouds from the sky, so that the whole broad expanse of the plateau reaching back from the promontory lay in clear moonlight before my eyes. That great cluster of buildings, with a garden like a park, and short white church-steeple, is Herr von Granow's estate; and that lower down, only distinguishable as a dark patch, is Trantowitz; and beyond Trantowitz, in the direction of the wind, lies Zanowitz among the white dunes at whose feet chafes the everlasting sea. Melchow, Trantowitz, Zanowitz--what memories were attached to these names and these places! But the glad mighty wind would not suffer them. It comes rushing on in vast, regular impulses like the strokes of an eagle's wings, and amidst its rush I fancy I can hear a rough honest voice saying: All that could happen, and you thought you could never endure it, yet you have not been crushed, but stand firm upon your feet, and still carry your head erect between your broad shoulders; and all this is so because I have blown around you from your childhood, and you have drawn me into your blood until your heart beats strong and dauntless within your breast, even though you know that those lights shining on that height to the left come from the windows of the new castle which the new master of Zehrendorf has built in the place of the old which you saw sinking in flames on that terrible night.

Not quite in the place of the old one: the old castle had been built upon the higher ground, so that it looked proudly out over the whole land. The new possessor did not wish a haughty site, but one sheltered from the north and east winds, so he did well to fix his habitation somewhat lower.

"And where are the magnificent old trees of the park, which reached to the old house, and here joined the forest?" I asked.

"They are cut down," said the driver; "the whole park is cleared away; there is hardly enough left to make a coffin of."

I do not know what suggested this melancholy expression to the taciturn man, but it struck me strangely. Did not the Wild Zehren once, when we were standing at the window and looking out into the park, say that not enough of it belonged to him to make him a coffin, and that it all stood only to be cut down and turned into money by his successors? And now it had all come to pass, and that light was shining from the new home which the new master had built on the ruins of the old.

Away, gloomy thoughts! Blow harder, thou glad, strong sea-wind! Gallop, you stout horses, down the hard, smooth road! And now, rattling through the gate, we enter the court before the great, stately house, and as we stop at the door servants come out with lights.

They come rather incited by curiosity than obsequiousness, which last, had it been present, would have suddenly cooled at the unpretending garb of the visitor and the limited amount of his luggage. Indeed, as I crossed the lower hall I caught sight, in a tall mirror, of the face of the servant who preceded me carrying my portmanteau, and who, by dint of thrusting his tongue into his right cheek, was making a frightful grimace, undoubtedly intended to express his disgust at having to carry such a disgraceful old mangy sealskin portmanteau--I had borrowed it from Klaus--up the brilliantly lighted staircase of the great house of Zehrendorf. The honest fellow's feelings were apparently much hurt by the incongruity of the visitor's appearance with the service he had to render, and he found a neat way of exhibiting the fact by tossing the question to me over his shoulder, as he rather flung down my portmanteau than set it down: "I suppose you are a countryman of our Mamselle?"

"Who is your Mamselle?" I asked in a tone of perfect good humor, for I confess to my shame that the contemptuous manner of the man, far from offending me, afforded me considerable amusement.

"Why, the old scarecrow with the----" and he made an undulatory wave of his hand down from his shoulder, a bit of pantomime in which a lively imagination could see the fluttering of long tresses.

"You mean Fräulein Duff, I suppose, friend--what is your name?" I asked.

"William Kluckhuhn," answered he. "You can call me William, for short."

"Thank you. And why do you suppose me to be a countryman of Fräulein Duff, friend William?"

"Well, the old girl made a great fuss about you to me. I was to show you every attention, and you were to have this room which looks on the garden, and is really our young lady's room, and which she, heaven knows why, took a notion three days ago to make a guest-room. It seemed a little queer to us, for you are, after all, a workman in the master's factory in Berlin, as the master himself said at the table today. I am from Berlin myself, you must know, and we know there that a hand in a machine-shop is not exactly the Great Mogul. But what are we to do? After all, we have to dance to the old girl's piping, or she will abuse us to our young lady, and she reports it to the master, and then there is the deuce to pay, of course."

"So that is the way it goes, eh?" I said, laughing; "from Fräulein Duff to your young lady, and from her to the Herr Commerzienrath."

"Well, sometimes it goes the other way," said the philosophic William; "but this is not so bad, for we can hold our own with the old scarecrow; that is an eternal truth."

As I heard the pet phrase of my good friend from the impudent lips of this ironical rascal I had to look another way to avoid laughing.

"Well, and I was to ask you if you wanted any supper. Tea will be served down-stairs in half an hour. But you will get nothing with it but stale biscuit and thin sandwiches, and she thought you would be hungry."

"So I am, my friend," I replied, "and you will oblige me if you will bring me a bit of cold chicken, with a glass of wine, or whatever you happen to have handy. And one thing more, friend William. I am not a countryman of Fräulein Duff, but you will particularly oblige me if in future you never mention that lady in my presence in other than a respectful manner. Now you can go; and you will have the goodness to ask the Herr Commerzienrath if I shall wait upon him before tea."

I said these words in an impressive manner, not with the intention of humbling my friend in livery, but simple because, as a guest of the house, I considered it my duty. The facetious William gave me a look in which astonishment was blended with suspicion, and in his heart, I fancy, he thought that the old proverb, "Do not trust appearances," might also be a scrap of an eternal truth.

While he went to do what I had told him I cast a look of some curiosity round the room which three days before had been that of the beautiful capricious girl. I could hardly believe it, and yet it did not look like a guest-room--certainly not like one intended for so unpretending a guest as myself. A thick soft carpet of a Persian pattern covered the whole floor. The curtains of the windows and lambrequins of the doors were of heavy damask, also of a bright fantastic pattern, and looped with rich cords and tassels. The whole decoration and furniture were in harmony with this, to my eyes, oriental magnificence. A very low broad divan occupied nearly three sides of the room, while on the fourth, where the windows were, low chairs were standing in the recesses, and between the windows stood a costly cabinet of rosewood, inlaid with mother-of-pearl. From the ceiling hung by gilt chains a lamp in a red globe, diffusing, with the two wax candles that were burning upon the table, a soft rosy light throughout the apartment.

On drawing a curtain, behind which I thought there was a door, I discovered a deep alcove, with a wide low bed, with silken pillows and coverlids. I dropped the curtain again.

Again I examined the room, in ever increasing surprise at the singular reception which had been provided for me here. Upon the rosewood cabinet stood a vase with fresh flowers--hyacinths and crocuses. As I bent over the vase to inhale their perfume my eye was caught by a blue ribbon entwined among them which had letters embroidered upon it in gold thread, and upon examining it more closely I read the words "Seek faithfully and thou shalt find."

A sudden change came over my feelings at this discovery, and I broke into a fit of laughter, but checked myself suddenly and dropped the mysterious ribbon again into its fragrant hiding-place, as William Kluckhuhn entered with a large salver, from the contents of which he arranged an excellent collation upon one of the small tables standing before the divan.

"Well, when does the Herr Commerzienrath wish to see me?" I asked, as William, his napkin under his arm, stood before me at the respectful distance of three paces.

"The Herr Commerzienrath will have the honor to meet the Herr Engineer at tea," replied William Kluckhuhn.

I took a closer look at the man, his style of expression and even the tone of his voice had undergone such a change. Was I then suddenly promoted to the rank of engineer? Something must have happened to him that had wrought a revolution in his views of the new guest.

I pondered on what it might be, but it was a superfluous trouble. William Kluckhuhn was not one of those who can keep a secret hidden in the depths of their souls.

He cleared his throat in an emphatic significant manner, and observed:

"The gnädige Fräulein will not be down to tea."

"Ah," I said in an indifferent tone, which was belied by the sudden beating of my heart.

"Yes," went on my communicative friend, "I was just now in the parlor to ask the Herr Commerzienrath when he wished to see the Herr Engineer--" William Kluckhuhn laid a strong accent upon the last word. "'At tea, of course,' said the commerzienrath. 'I wish to receive him quite familiarly.' 'Do you not wish first to have some private conversation with him?' said the gnädige Fräulein. The gnädige Fräulein had risen quite suddenly from the piano-forte at which she had just been playing and singing, and turned to the door where I was--standing. 'Good heavens, no,' said the commerzienrath. 'Where are you going?' 'To my room,' said the gnädige Fräulein; 'I have been suffering with headache all day.' 'Then you will not be down again, I suppose,' said the Herr Commerzienrath. The gnädige Fräulein said nothing, for she had already gone past me out of the door; and I can tell you, Herr Engineer, she had a pair of cheeks like my shoulder-knots here," and he pointed with his finger to the dark-crimson knot on his left sleeve.

"This is all very remarkable," I said.

"It is, indeed," said William, elevating his eye-brows as high as his long forehead would allow, and drawing down the corners of his mouth into a horse-shoe curve, "very remarkable. And so it seemed to the others, for they looked at one another, so----" and William Kluckhuhn stretched his little eyes as wide open as he could get them, and stared at me so that I thought for a moment he was going out of his senses.

"Who are the others?" I asked.

"Well, the master himself, and Mamselle--I mean Fräulein Duff, and the Herr Steuerrath and his lady----"

"They here too?" I asked, not very agreeably surprised.

"They have been here for three weeks," answered William; "but the day is yet to come when any one of us has seen this from them--" and he made a gesture with the right forefinger and thumb over the palm of his left hand. "And they all looked queer, and the Herr Commerzienrath looked very angry, but restrained himself, which is not his usual way, and said: 'That is unfortunate: but it is not to be helped. I must invite the Herr Engineer to tea.' Apropos!--excuse me, but it is a word we use in Berlin--why did not the Herr Engineer tell me at first that he was the Herr Engineer?"

"Very well, William," I said. "You can take away now, and when it is time, come and call me."

When the talkative William had left me I sprang up from the divan and paced the room in an excitement which I had carefully concealed from the servant. The information which he had just given me afforded me more matter for reflection than I could deal with at the moment. A singular scene must have occurred, or it would never have made so deep an impression upon the by no means susceptible William Kluckhuhn. And why had Hermine's headache grown so intolerable all at once? And why had my old friends, the steuerrath and the born Kippenreiter, seemed so much disturbed!

To all this I could give but one explanation; for a second, that might also have been possible, my modesty rejected at once. The pretty girl had been angry with me ever since our meeting on the steamer. But if this were so, why all those inquiries about me of Paula? Whence came the interest which she manifestly took in my fate? I saw her again before me as I had seen her on the steamboat, her red lips closely compressed, and her blue eyes darting indignant flashes at me. She had told me that I must let her father help me, since her father was rich; and I had replied that for that very reason I did not wish to be helped by him. Was not that the exact state of the case? Did I want anything from him? Had I not rather come to give the rich man some advice of which he seemed to be greatly in want? advice which, if he followed it, was to make him richer than he had ever been? No, I did not come into this house as an asker of favors. I could hold my head proudly erect, as beseems a free man; and if it was meant as an irony upon my humble position that I was here assigned this splendid apartment, I had only to consider myself worthy of the attention, and the solecism vanished.

"Will you please to come now?" said William Kluckhuhn, appearing at the door. I had intended to put on my best suit of clothes, which, with the necessary supply of linen, and a few papers and drawings, formed the entire contents of my portmanteau, but the radical state of mind into which I had happily wrought myself scorned such trivialities, and it was a gratification to me to follow my guide just as I was down the wide staircase to the lower hall, and to a door which he obsequiously threw open for me, and through which, without the least confusion, I entered a large parlor, richly furnished and brilliantly lighted by lamps standing on various tables.

At one of these tables, at the further end of the room, sat the company, consisting of the commerzienrath, his brother-in-law the steuerrath, the steuerrath's lady, and Fräulein Duff. The commerzienrath came to meet me with outstretched hand, crying in his loud voice that he was unspeakably delighted to welcome his dear young friend to his house.

"To be sure I have had you in my house a long time already," he went on, after he had grasped my hand--"a half year already, and I never knew it! It is outrageous; but these girls never will learn reason. For the merest nothing they will make a secret of things that we would cheerfully pay a thousand thalers to know."

He said this with so much warmth that if I had ever doubted whether he had really known that I was in his establishment, that doubt now entirely disappeared. He had known it all along, but had no interest in appearing to know it until I could be of real profitable use to him.

Perhaps it was this observation that made me receive so coolly the friendly protestations of the rich man; but I had to smile, and I felt real pleasure when now the kind-hearted Fräulein Duff put down the tea-pot, at which she had been officiating, and came gliding towards me with a coy smile upon her thin lips, and her eyes lifted to express the emotions of her soul. She held out her hand with the fingers bent and drooping, in precisely the style of a tragedy-queen who expects it kissed by a loyal vassal. But the good lady was thinking of nothing of the sort; it was merely her way of offering her hand; and I took the thin pale hand and pressed it cordially, though cautiously. The sensitive nature of the excellent Fräulein felt at once the sincere good-feeling that my pressure implied, and she returned it with nervous force, her pale eyes filled with tears, and she whispered up to reach my ear: "Do not be annoyed, and do not be angry with her; it is not hate, it is maidenly coyness; do not despair--wait and trust--seek faithfully----"

Fräulein Duff had not time to complete her favorite phrase, for the commerzienrath turned again to me and drew me to the table, by which the steuerrath and his lady had been standing straight as candlesticks from the moment I entered the room without moving from their places, like a pair of wax-figures in a cabinet.

"You have no idea how glad my brother and sister-in-law are to see you again!"' said the commerzienrath, malicious joy sparkling in his small glittering eyes.

"Delighted!" said the steuerrath, offering me two fingers of his long white hand, which I did not take.

"Delighted!" said his lady, with a fixed look at the lamp on the table.

I was not especially glad myself, so I did not say so, but I looked closely at the amiable pair, whom time had certainly not passed by without leaving marks upon them. The steuerrath's high forehead was now bald to the crown, and deep ugly furrows were ploughed in his long smooth aristocratic face. His eyes seemed to me smaller and more expressionless, and his mouth larger.

Still more rudely had the ungallant years dealt with the born Kippenreiter. Her hair indeed was thicker and more lustrous than of old, but the unkind suspicion that she owed this gratifying luxuriance to the beneficent skill of the perruquier was confirmed at a second glance. Nor had her face been deprived of the ingenious resources of art: her hollow cheeks were flushed with a bloom too delicate to be altogether natural, and her thin pale lips disclosed two rows of teeth of irreproachable whiteness. In a word, the Born had made herself younger by twice the number of years that had passed since I last saw her, only the expression of her small piercing eyes, which could not possibly be worse, had remained the same, and the wide red ribbon of her cap, which she tied in a large bow under her chin, apparently to hide her hollow cheeks, nodded at every word she spoke in the old exasperating way.

They had taken their seats again at the tea-table. The commerzienrath led the conversation in a style less adapted to the gratification of his brother-in-law than to his own entertainment and my instruction. So I learned in five minutes that the young Prince of Prora was residing at Rossow again, and that Arthur was keeping him company in his exile.

"For it is an exile," cried the commerzienrath to his brother-in-law, "you may say what you please; I know it from Justizrath Heckepfennig, whom, as his Justitiarius, the old prince had to summon to the family council, in which the question was handled in all its length and breadth, whether his son should or should not be declared a spendthrift. The old prince at last yielded so far as to grant his son a probation of half a year more, which he is to pass in the country, while they make some arrangement with his creditors. A nice position for a prince, is it not?"

"Crowned heads are seldom happy," said with a sigh Fräulein Duff, who had taken her seat by us with some work in her hands.

"I thought that princes only wore hats," remarked the commerzienrath with a sardonic grin, "though of such matters a poor plebeian like myself is incompetent to judge: you understand those things better, brother-in-law."

"Doubtless, doubtless," replied the latter absently.

"No doubt you are thinking of your amiable son," continued the commerzienrath, "and whether, for a young man of his stamp, a better companion could not be found than a young prince who is in a fair way to ruin himself. I can easily understand that the thought causes you to make a face like a tanner who sees his hides floating down the stream."

"Excuse me, brother-in-law, but I was not thinking of Arthur at that moment," replied the steuerrath, "but whether the negotiations for the sale of Zehrendorf, which you have recently opened with his highness--and which, by the way, would seem to indicate that you give his highness credit for more acuteness and business knowledge than your words imply--will come to any result."

"What has that to do with his wisdom or his folly?" cried the commerzienrath. "Yes, so far that the greater fool he is the dearer will I be able to sell it to him. But I am not sure that I shall have my daughter's permission to sell, for she has set her heart upon not letting it pass into other hands. To be sure she has noble blood in her veins--is that not so, sister-in-law!--and naturally looks at the matter in a different light from a poor roturier like myself. I might have sold it long ago to Herr von Granow, among others, who made me a very handsome offer, who, as one of our nearest neighbors, can put it to the best advantage. But Hermine insists that Frau von Granow is too vulgar a person--of course she is not a Born Anything, sister-in-law, for the Born can never be vulgar, can they, sister-in-law?--but what I was going to say is this: Hermine insists that I shall not give her such a successor as that. But good heaven! she will find nobody she thinks worthy of it, unless it be Herr von Trantow."

"How is he?" I exclaimed.

"O, very well. He eats and drinks and sleeps: why should he not be well? He is a great favorite of my Hermine; and I believe she could find it in her heart to marry him if she could only see him sober once."

At such horrible words Fräulein Duff could only clasp her hands and cast a look at me, while the steuerrath and his wife exchanged a look of intelligence with the quickness of lightning. I observed a slight encouraging twinkle of the steuerrath's eyelashes, upon which followed a slight attack of coughing on the part of the Born, and then the following observation:

"There is an old proverb, my dear brother-in-law, which always comes to my mind when I hear sportive allusions, such as that which you have just uttered."

"You mean that 'we shouldn't paint the devil on the wall?'" exclaimed the commerzienrath; "but you need not be uneasy on that score, for even if the devil does not come, neither will your Arthur; no, not by a great way!" and the commerzienrath broke into a boisterous laugh at his own wit.

"I am conscious of my innocence of all covetous plans of that sort, brother-in-law," replied the Born, whose cheeks at the moment had no need of any supplementary carmine.

"So!" cried the commerzienrath. "Well that is a very good thing. Are you conscious of your innocence too, brother-in-law? If your son can say as much, then you are all three conscious, and no one can ask more of you than that. Besides, sister-in-law, the Trantows are so old a family, that, for this reason, if for no other, you should think twice before you compare the last descendant of their race with Old Nick."

"If family antiquity is in question," said the steuerrath, "you must know, brother-in-law, that while it is true that the Trantows trace back their pedigree to the fourteenth century, the Zehrens----"

"I know! I know! I have heard it a hundred thousand million times!" cried the commerzienrath, hastily, rising from his chair. "You are a frightfully old family; yes, sister-in-law, frightfully old! But content yourselves; old as you are, you may grow a year or two older yet. And now come with me to my room, my young friend, and let us have at least a little sensible talk."

He preceded me, through another parlor as brilliantly lighted as the first, into a smaller room, which, to judge by the comfortable horsehair-covered furniture, bookcases with docketed papers, and other tokens, was his own especial apartment, which he had fitted out exactly to his own taste.

Several eminently bad copies of celebrated old masters, with sundry still worse originals of modern date, animal-pieces and landscapes, covered the walls, and corresponded exactly in artistic merit with several busts of the reigning sovereigns and other princely personages, placed appropriately or inappropriately, just as it happened. A lamp hung from the ceiling over a round table, upon which were various papers, a lighted candle, and an open box of cigars.

"Now, my dear young friend," cried the commerzienrath, throwing himself into a chair and stretching out his legs, which time had made still leaner, in a fashion meant to express supreme comfort, "help yourself; here is something superior, just from Havana, brought me by one of my captains a week ago; duty-free as I have them, they are 'worth a hundred and twenty thalers, between brothers. So! Now what do you think of that ridiculous old ass of a steuerrath and his scarecrow of a wife? They have been sponging upon me now for three weeks, but I show them no quarter; was it not good fun?"

"I cannot say that I found it so, Herr Commerzienrath."

"No? Why not? You must be hard to amuse."

"On the contrary, Herr Commerzienrath, no one loves a bit of harmless fun more than I do; but I cannot find it harmless when the host--you must excuse my plain speaking--makes fools of his guests, be they who they may."

"So, so! This is something new!" said my host, and fixed an evil look upon me.

"Yet it is a very old doctrine, Herr Commerzienrath, known and practiced in the earliest times, and, as I am told, still sacredly observed at this day by even the rudest nations--unless indeed they are cannibals."

"Cannibals is good! Cannibals! very good indeed!" cried the commerzienrath, throwing himself back in his easy-chair and laughing obstreperously, as though he had not but the moment before been on the point of quarrelling with me. "Capital! How do you like the cigars? I want your honest opinion."

"By no means so superior, if you insist upon a candid expression of my opinion."

"Not--not superior? Well, young man, you must be hard to please. Such a cigar as this nothing superior! When and where did you ever smoke a better?"

And the commerzienrath, with an appearance of intense enjoyment, exhaled the smoke slowly through the nostrils.

"To tell you the candid truth, very often; but I must confess that I am a little dainty in this particular point. Probably my old stay at Zehrendorf made me fastidious."

"I dare say," said my host, with a sneer. "He could afford it: he did not have to pay duties as we do."

"I thought you said, Herr Commerzienrath, that these cigars were duty free?"

He looked at me again as if strongly moved to ring for a servant to turn me out the house. He did not ring, however, but said:

"So! If you are such a judge of the weed, what do you estimate these to be worth?"

"Twenty thalers I should consider a full price."

"They cost eighteen!" cried the commerzienrath, giving the table a thump. "Why should a man set costly cigars before his guests until he knows whether they can appreciate them or not? And now I will give you some that----"

"Are worth a hundred and twenty thalers, between brothers."

"Exactly so! exactly so! you ironical fellow!" cried the little old man as he sprang up and took from a cupboard a box containing cigars, of which I am bound to say that I never smoked better, even with the Wild Zehren.

My amiable host had been brought into so good a humor by this bit of comedy that he insisted on having in a bottle of Steinberg Cabinet, from which he replenished my glass with great liberality while he only sipped at his own, making pretence all the time of drinking glass for glass with me, both from this and a second bottle which he had in, in the course of the evening. I had seen the old gentleman behind a bottle in my earlier days, and also when he was a visitor at the superintendent's, and knew that he was what used to be called a three-bottle-man; so if he was so abstemious now he had some especial reason for it. Nor was this reason long concealed. It was soon evident to me that he wanted to make me talk, and to get at my sincere opinions upon a multitude of things, and the heavy wine of a noble vintage was to assist my candor if it faltered. I have in later years too often seen this man use the same stratagem, in similar cases, to leave me any doubt of the accuracy of the observation I made on this occasion.

There was also another man[oe]uvre, which I learned now for the first time, in which this old man of business was a master. It was this: leaning far back in his chair, his eyes half shut, he talked in an apparently disconnected way of this and that, rambling from one topic to another, until he suddenly, like a flash, touched upon the point which he had still been approaching in all his gyrations without his hearer perceiving it. He hid himself in a black cloud, so to speak, as the cuttlefish eludes its pursuers--only with this difference, that this cunning old pike, in the shape of a royal counsellor of commerce, used this stratagem in order unexpectedly to snap out of his cloud at an unsuspicious gudgeon.

It was past midnight when William Kluckhuhn showed me to my room. He lighted the two wax candles on the table before the divan, asked me if he should extinguish the hanging lamp, to which I assented, and inquired at what hour I wished to be called in the morning, to which I could only answer that I had the habit of awaking at the proper time, and then left me with a most respectful bow, which stood in ludicrous contrast to the extremely free and easy way in which he had received me but a few hours before.

I had no thought of sleeping yet. My brain was swarming with thoughts which the long conversation with the master of the house had excited in me; my heart was full of tumultuous emotions, awakened by the novel position in which I found myself; and, as well might happen in such an hour, after a couple of bottles of heavy wine, and in an entirely new situation, the events of the evening arranged themselves in a sort of wild, fantastic dance, surrounding me with figures now graceful and now grotesque--figures of which I could now and then fix one for a moment: the commerzienrath, with his half-shut eyes and his sharp pikelike snap at that point in the conversation towards which he had been man[oe]uvring all the while; good Fräulein Duff, with the sentimental quivering of her sallow eyelids; the steuerrath, with the white crafty face and the white slender hand on which sparkled his immense signet-ring; the born Kippenreiter, with the false teeth and the false smile; and, lastly, her whom I had not seen, and yet in the eye of my mind perpetually saw--her in whose room I was, who certainly had often rested in this corner of the divan where I now was reclining--the slight elastic form of the beauteous young maiden, with the saucy twitch in the red lips, and the sunny light in the cornflower-blue eyes.

And, stranger than all this--behind this foreground of scenes and figures, changing like the forms of a kaleidoscope, and shifting like wreaths of mist, there arose a background of the circumstances with which I had to do for the moment, and which I believed that I penetrated in their most secret relations, as if an enchanter had given me that magic unguent with which if one anoint his eyes he can see all the treasures that sleep in the depths of the earth. Once before in my life had I had a similar feeling: on that day after my arrival at Zehrendorf when I strolled in the afternoon in the park and under the softly-rustling trees, in the sight of the venerable castle over which sunshine and shadow were chasing each other, I knew on a sudden that the master of this park and this castle was a desperate smuggler. And just so, or nearly so, I just now felt an intuitive conviction that this new house stood upon as treacherous a foundation, which might at any moment cave in and bury the proud and envied fortune of the man under the ruins of a gigantic bankruptcy. And yet for such an inference I had apparently no ground whatever. And even as before the thought seemed to me just as extravagant, just as insane; but I did not reproach myself as before; I rather sought in all earnestness to find the points which had possibly given rise to a suspicion so ridiculously at variance with the splendor of this room, the magnificence of the house, with everything which from childhood I had heard of the wealth of our provincial Cr[oe]sus. What could it have been? A peculiar quiver in his voice as he spoke of the immense stock of corn in his warehouses from the previous harvest, and of the unexampled fall in the price of bread-stuffs owing to the altered position of affairs in England;--this and the nervous excitability which he showed when I pointed out to him the necessity of enlarging the machine-works in the city to double their present extent, if he did not wish to be hopelessly distanced in the competition with other establishments on the introduction of the railway system into our country. A third point was his urgent wish, to which he continually recurred, to sell Zehrendorf for as high a sum as possible--he spoke of five hundred thousand thalers--to Prince Prora.

The strange thought had almost taken my breath, so I went to the window and looked dreamingly out upon the garden, whose gravelled walks and dark beds and shrubbery were dimly defined in the pallid moonlight.

"Why should it not be so?" I said to myself, holding with a sort of pertinacity to my unreasonable fancy. "And if it were so, would it not be a righteous Nemesis? Those old freebooter knights kept on their evil courses so long, and despised the signs of the time so thoroughly, that at last the time turned against them and flung them off, as a spirited horse hurls from the saddle the rider who has lost his stirrups. And in our time the dead ride fast, and this man here, the shop-keeper, who has mounted the knight's charger, I reckon already among the dead. Shameless rapacity and naked selfishness--have these not been the food of the one as of the other? Have they not both borne as motto on their shields: 'All for me--I for myself?' Has any one of them ever thought of the poor people, except to press hard upon it, by way of feeling that it is there? Ay, is it not more than mere chance that that criminal traffic into which the freebooter threw himself merely to gain his living, became the means by which the shopkeeper amassed his riches? Has he not just told me, with a chuckle of satisfaction, how adroitly his father and he availed themselves of the fabulously advantageous opportunities afforded by Napoleon's continental embargo, and how they had carried on the business for years and years, and made thousands and thousands, and how they slipped out of it at the very moment it began to grow hazardous? Is it not just, then, that the shopkeeper who turned freebooter should have his part in the same fate that befell the freebooter turned shopkeeper?--only that the lordship of the former will not endure so long as that of the latter, and rightly so, for 'the dead ride fast.'"

I looked up to the night sky, where a keen night wind was driving great masses of black cloud from west to east across the shining disc of the moon now near the full. Strange fantastic figures; long trailing dragons with expanded jaws, colossal fishes with greedy rows of teeth, horrible crustacean shapes with long nippers and crooked crawling legs, giants with heads towering high and bearing masses of rock in their uplifted arms, cunning hunchbacked dwarfs with protruding gluttonous paunches--monsters and deformities of all sorts, and not a single bright fair figure. In a strange freak of fancy I seemed to see in these frightful clouds the races of men who had held dominion upon earth, and borne the sceptre and the trenchant sword, who had had no pity for the oppressed multitude whose life they drained, until it was like that attenuated green-gray film timidly floating under the giants, which no sooner came into the bright neighborhood of the moon than it dispersed and dissolved away. Should it go on so in unbroken succession forever? Must race of oppressors follow race of oppressors without end: the knights of the hammer ever smite upon the wretched anvil? Would that time never come--that other time, that better time--which the eye of my glorious teacher had seen in vision, to hasten whose coming he had given his life, and to which I had devoted myself with all the might of my soul?

"It will come, be assured this time will come," I said. "Is it not come even now? Is it not already within yourself, since you have recognized that it will and must come? Is it not already in all those who think as you, and have the power to give their thoughts form and color and flesh and blood?

"Ah, to have that power! Were it not a glorious thing to be master here, and yonder in the great works, and in all his other factories and stores? To be able to be a helper--a benefactor to thousands and thousands--and not to be it! To be a monster with vast engulfing jaws, like that hideous spectre up yonder in the clouds, because, as Doctor Willibrod says, so soon as we attain power and wealth Fate hangs a flintstone or a gold nugget in our breast instead of a heart!"

I closed the window, lowered the curtain, and went towards my bed. But the train of thought I had been following had escaped me, and I stopped and surveyed once more all the magnificence of the luxurious room.

"And to all this she has been accustomed from her childhood," I said to myself. "Upon such soft carpets has her dainty foot always trod; her hand has always touched fabrics of this voluptuous texture; she has always breathed this perfumed atmosphere. And if shameless selfishness should meet with such a fate as brutal arrogance--this house should fall as fell that older one--it would be hard, cruelly hard for her. The other called me once her George, her dragon-slayer. But she did not wish to be rescued, and I, still half a boy, could not have rescued her. With this one it might perhaps be otherwise; perhaps she would rather be rescued than perish--and in any event, I am no longer a boy."

And here my eye fell upon the little mangy seal-skin portmanteau which William Kluckhuhn had carefully placed at the foot of the bed whose voluminous curtains he had looped back, and I had to laugh aloud. For it was ridiculous, when I possessed hardly more than was contained in this little shabby wallet, a borrowed one at that, to talk of rescuing a house like this--to worry my brains about the fate of men who lived in a house like this! So I betook myself to bed, and, as I was just falling asleep, awakened myself again by laughing at something--I did not know what.

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Chapter XI

But when I awoke the next morning at early dawn I knew what it was. It was the embroidered ribbon which I had discovered the evening before in the bunch of flowers, and in which my fancy, half asleep, seemed to catch a delightful solution of all the enigmas that surrounded me here: but now, with senses wide awake, I saw nothing in it but a bit of sentimental silliness on the part of good-hearted Fräulein Duff. Still a feeling of disquiet seized me that compelled me to get up and dress myself hastily. A pair of sparrows that had their nest somewhere close at hand under the eaves began an animated conversation, and then stopped suddenly, finding that it was earlier than they had supposed.

So I found it myself: when I stepped to the window, with the ribbon in my hand, I could not distinguish the gold letters of the embroidery from the blue ground of the silk. I was vexed at myself for my childish curiosity. Had I come here to puzzle at riddles?

But I held the ribbon still in my hand as the sky began to grow brighter and the first rosy morning light tinged the eastern clouds. Already I could distinguish the garden beds from the gravelled walks beneath me, and in the beds even the yellow crocuses from the blue hyacinths, and now again I looked at the magic ribbon and could plainly read the motto I so well knew.

"Anyhow," I said to myself, "whether it be meant in earnest or in joke; whether it be the silly sentimentality of the duenna or a saucy jest of the maiden, it is a good word and I will lay it to heart. I will seek faithfully: and as for what I shall find, I will not puzzle my brains beforehand with guessing."

I took the ribbon with me, that it might not meet the prying eyes of William Kluckhuhn, and left the room. Passing through the roomy house, where darkness and silence still reigned through all the carpeted corridors and stairs, I sought and found a door leading from the lower hall into the open air.

It was a small side-door, like that which in the old house opened into the neglected back-yard. The back-yard had disappeared, of course, and everything else was so changed that I found myself in an entirely new and strange region. But I soon discovered that it was not merely that all things were here new and different, but that they were in perfect contrast to the old. While the ruinous and obviously uninhabitable old castle had towered aloft in great masses, bare of all ornament, the new building presented itself of moderate size but judiciously proportioned, evidently planned for comfort and convenience, and in a neat if not altogether pure style of architecture. The court-yard, with kitchen and other outbuildings which formerly had adjoined the castle, was now removed to the distance of a hundred yards or so, and the house had handsome grounds all around it, adorned with trees and shrubbery, evidently of recent planting. The intention was to separate a small blooming oasis, the centre of which was the house, from the rest of the ground devoted to cultivation--a pretty device, which would only require twenty years or so for its perfect realization.

A new time had come altogether. In what brilliant newness glittered the tiled roofs between the young poplars! To the right, where formerly wide fallow lands had in vain waited for cultivation, broad fields, green with young grain, now shone in the sunlight; and further to the right--a strange and almost incredible sight in this region--further still to the right was a cluster of red brick buildings, from the midst of which sprang a gigantic chimney sending out a black cloud of smoke against the bright morning sky. This was the distillery, built about two years before, and for which we had delivered some machinery in the course of the past winter. As I judged, the park must formerly have extended to that spot; and now there was not a tree to be seen, not a tree anywhere, as I satisfied myself by walking around the house until I reached that part of the grounds which I had seen from my window. I convinced myself that this must have been the place of the great lawn; but in vain did my eye seek for the circle of magnificent beeches surrounding this expanse of waving grass. As far as the hills which one crossed to reach the promontory all the woods had been cleared away, and the stumps, which were everywhere left standing, gave the ground the look of a vast neglected graveyard. Here and there were well-cleared spaces where they had begun new plantations, but the young trees looked poorly, and by no means promised to yield such trunks as those which were still lying in some places among the stumps, but already cut into lengths.

I went on along the well-kept road which ascended the hills towards the promontory, following nearly the direction of the old path which led through the forest to the tarn. This, then, must have been its place; this circular hollow, at the bottom of which, nearly overgrown with grass, were still some small pools of black water. The story used to run that this gloomy tarn was of unfathomable depth, and now behold at the deepest place it was not over thirty feet! They had simply cut the bank on the side towards the coast and let the water off, in order to obtain the compost formed by the leaves which for centuries had fallen into it and sunk to the bottom. The manure was doubtless very serviceable to the exhausted fields; but they had made a frightfully ugly place of what used to be, in its mysterious loneliness and seclusion, the sweetest spot in all the forest. A single one of the old giants had been left standing midway up the slope. It was an immense beech, the growth of centuries, which I believed I recognized again, though it looked strangely standing there alone. And I was not mistaken: upon its bark I found in letters nearly overgrown, but still legible, my name and a date, the date of the day on which, in that sunny autumn morning, I first saw Constance von Zehren under this very tree.

It was a singular chance that of all the stately trees just this one had been left standing.

A feeling of sadness begun to arise in my breast, but I suppressed it, and looked up to the cheerful blue sky. That morning was fair, but the leaves were already falling, and the winter that was to sweep away all the beauty already stood at the door; while to-day the morning was as fair, and it was spring, and the long sunny summer days were coming, the days of work of which the harvest would not fail.

"Yes," I said to myself, as I strode actively up the hill and along the crest of the promontory, "yes, that world had to pass, with its rustling forests, its mysterious dark lakes of ancient time, its crumbling castles, its ruinous courts, and fields all lying fallow. Even you had to go, old ruin of a tower, gray with antiquity, and make way for this little pavilion, from whose windows there must be a lovely outlook over the unchangeable sea."

Here it was the tower had stood. A gay butterfly had alighted on the spot where the fierce eagle had so long had its eyrie. I walked around the pretty little building, of which the door was fastened and the silk curtains of the windows lowered. On the south side the roof projected, boldly, and under it were several tables and benches.

While I sat here, leaning my head on my hand and gazing at the landscape, the sun rose--rose out of the sea in a blaze of tremulous light; but it was not this dazzling brilliancy that compelled me to close my eyes. From this spot I had seen the sun rise once before, and here, where I was sitting, sat a corpse with glazed eyes, on which lay the everlasting night, staring sightless at all the splendor.

Once more I resisted the sadness that threatened to unman me. This was all past; it should not return to darken the day, the bright day, which I had long been in the habit of meeting and welcoming as a precious boon from heaven.

I arose and went to the ravine which I had climbed with the Wild Zehren that night by scarcely accessible paths, and where now a long flight of stairs led easily down to the sawmill of which the commerzienrath had spoken to me the evening before, and whose clatter I could now hear coming up from the depths. It was a small but admirably planned arrangement, and had done its duty so well that the whole Zehrendorf forest, except a very trifling remainder, had been cut up by its saws.

"I wish we had not gone ahead quite so fast," said the foreman, whom I found in the mill; "for in cutting down the forest we cut off the water also, so that we can only work one day out of three, and cannot begin to fill the orders that come in from all quarters. Now the commerzienrath has set the example, all are following it, and are felling timber at such a rate that soon there will not be a tree to be seen on this part of the island. I have often told the commerzienrath what would be the result; but he would not listen to me, and now he must suffer for it."

"A small steam engine would help the difficulty, would it not?" I asked.

"Yes; but you see water is cheaper than steam. But the profits never came in fast enough, so he killed the goose for the sake of the golden egg. All that understood the matter advised him not to clear off all the wood at once, but to leave enough to protect the undergrowth from the winds that blow too strong up there on the height. Now nothing will grow on the bare soil thoroughly dried by the wind, as you probably noticed if you came over the ridge from the castle. No, no; you can't treat nature as you please: she is not so patient as men."

The foreman was a small man with a shrewd thoughtful face. He was born, as he told me, on another part of the island, and knew the country and the people well, but had not long been in this region. I introduced myself to him as the person who was to set up the new machinery in the chalk-quarry, and asked him his opinion of this undertaking.

"It will not turn out much better than this," he replied, "though for another reason. The quarry has always been a tolerably productive one, but the commerzienrath took the notion that he had only to quarry deeper and it would yield more abundantly. It has yielded in great abundance--water, which will ruin the whole quarry if your machinery cannot get the upper hand of it."

"That is an ugly state of things," I said, seriously disturbed by what he told me.

"It is indeed," he answered.

"And the kilns," I asked again, "can you give no better report of them?"

The man shrugged his shoulders.

"There are several things to be said on that subject. The arrangements are good enough, but immensely too expensive, and the transportation is too heavy in winter upon our frightful roads. And even during the summer they sometimes come to a stand-still, because all along the coast here our communication with the sea is so bad; although the commerzienrath has had a great breakwater built with the stones of the old tower. You can see it from here--there where that line of surf is. But we might get along if the commerzienrath knew how to make himself liked among the people."

"How so?" I asked.

The man looked at me with some hesitation from under his bushy eyebrows.

"You may speak quite openly," I said. "But a few days ago I was no more than an ordinary workman in the commerzienrath's machine-shops, and have not lost my sympathy with my comrades in this short time."

"Well," said he, "to speak freely, my notion of the matter is this: the people about here, the seafaring men as well as the cotters, and those in the villages on the coast and up the country, all look upon the commerzienrath as a man who has pushed himself into a place where better men than himself have sat and should sit. As to their being better, there may be two sides to that question; but I am not speaking my own thoughts, but those of the people. Then many of them remember that the commerzienrath was not always the rich man he is now; and what is the worst, two or three know very well how he got together such a monstrous heap of money, for he worked for it himself, and risked his skin in the year '10, and thereabouts, when there were queer doings along this coast and up as high as Uselin and Woldom. Why, not so many years ago there was a grand hunt made here after smugglers, of which perhaps you may have heard something. Well, all that might have been, and nobody think anything the worse of the commerzienrath for it, if he were a man to live and let live, and who tried to make up for anything he had done amiss, and did not bear too hard on the poor men. But he is just the opposite of that. He grinds and drives them all he can, and only thinks of how much work is to be got out of them, as they have got to work. But he is mistaken. They work for him, it is true; but only such of them as can get nothing else to do; and what sort of workmen they are, and the kind of work they do, you know as well as I could tell you."

"I see," I said.

A workman came up. New logs were to be laid for sawing, and the foreman must be there. I shook his hand. He looked at me with his melancholy eyes, and said with a smile:

"You have' me now in your power if you choose to tell the commerzienrath what you have heard from me. But it is no matter: in any event I shall not stay here much longer."

"I am sorry to hear you say so," I answered. "I trust on the contrary we shall have many a friendly talk together, and hit upon more than one good plan between us. Don't throw away your musket too soon; there is a better time coming I fancy."

The man looked at me in some surprise, but answered nothing, and went into the mill, while I descended the stairs all the way down to the strand.

Here lay my sea, my dearly loved sea, which I had always greeted with tears of joy when a dream carried me to the shore and it lay before me in all its grandeur and beauty. Rolling in they came, the great glorious waves with white breaking crests, flinging the foam of the surf to my feet; and when they rolled back there was a fierce roar from the millions of pebbles grinding together on the beach. Over the chalk-cliffs above me a pair of gulls wheeled in lazy flight, and in the offing glittered the sails of two fishing-boats which were bound home after heavy night-work. With what anticipation I had looked forward to seeing once more what I had not seen for so long, and I saw it almost with indifference.

But it was not my fault. My feelings were as strong as ever, and my heart had not grown so much older in the eight or nine years; but I could not drive away the anxious thoughts aroused by the words of the honest intelligent foreman of the mill.

How accurately his views tallied with the observation which I had made during my morning walk! With what a sharp outline he had sketched the portrait of the commerzienrath, just as I had always known him, and as he appeared last night. Then he was full of boasting and bragging in how short a time he had trebled and quintupled the value of the estate, and all that he was doing for the people around. He had meant to show Messieurs the noblemen, who in matters of farming were all some fifty years behind the time, what a man of business like himself could make out of a ruined estate. This was the only real interest he took in the whole business, and if the young prince had a fancy to the property he had better hasten his decision or he would come too late.

Five hundred thousand thalers--half a million! How was such a sum to be got out of it? The estate was of vast extent, it was true, and exhausted and ruined as it was at the Wild Zehren's death, was still worth a hundred and fifty thousand, and at this price the commerzienrath took it at the settlement. Now when it was in a better state of cultivation, when all the buildings were new, a handsome residence built, and the various industrial arrangements, even if not doing so well as was hoped, still enhanced the value of the property, it might be worth twice the money; but on the other hand all the valuable timber was cut down and sold--I could not raise it to that price, reckon as I might; there was always more than the half that I could not account for. If the commerzienrath's statements of his affairs were all as loose as this--in just the same proportion he had over-estimated the value of his machine-works in Berlin, in our talk the previous night--if he only played the millionaire because perhaps he had once been one; if he--I paused, looking out at the sea, and drew a long breath. Again, in this clear morning, here in the fresh sea-air, the gloomy presentiment came over me, that yesterday evening in the close room I had held for the offspring of my excited fancy, heated with the fiery wine; and once more, as yesterday, my thoughts reverted to the fair girl, the wayward, envied heiress of wealth, which possibly had no existence but in her father's idle boasting.

"But, after all, what does it concern me?" I said to myself, as I waded with rapid strides through the deep sand of the beach; "it does not concern me at all; not the least."

At my feet lay a large fish which the waves must just have flung ashore. It seemed dead, but showed no marks of injury; its expanded gills were still brilliantly red; probably the surf had dashed it against a rock, or a blow from the paddle of a seal stunned it. I carried it, not without wetting my feet, over the great stones, and threw it into deeper water. It floated, turning up its white belly. "Poor creature," I said, "I would fain have helped you; now the gulls will eat you; your death furnishes them a feast."

"And how did the dead fish concern me?" I went on philosophizing, as after knocking the wet sand off my boots, I pursued my way. "Not in the least, either. A man should have in his breast the heart of one of these gulls, with sharp talons, and a strong keen beak, and hack gaily into every prey that a favoring wave casts up on the strand. George, George, be ashamed of yourself! But it all does no good; I cannot make myself other than I am. But neither can I make others different from what they are. The commerzienrath for instance: could I ever teach that man the doctrines of my master? The doctrine of love--of mutual help? Never. Or at least only if I could prove that his profit went with it hand in hand: that he will work his own ruin if he makes rapacity the ruling principle of his life. Did not my teacher predict all this to me? The turn of this man and those like him is now come: they are now the knights of the hammer: it is the old game in a somewhat different form. And he added--and a bright light glowed in his splendid eyes,--'It will not be long before our time comes, we who have comprehended that there is a justice that cannot be mocked.'

"'That time--our time--it will never come,' Doctor Willibrod used to say, 'or only for him who can conquer it, and hold it fast by the fluttering robe.'"

A gull gave a hoarse cry overhead: I looked up and saw something white, like the skirt of a dress, fluttering above the bushes fringing the cliff which here was steep and at least fifty feet high. It was not a dress, it was a veil which floated from the hat of a horsewoman, for presently I saw the hat itself, then the head of the horse, and soon the rider herself, or at least her head and shoulders for a moment, as she leaned over to look down at the narrow strip of beach.

It gave me a beating of the heart--it looked so very dangerous, although I knew that it was not quite so dangerous as it seemed from below: and I called out to her to take care; but she hardly could have heard it. Her white veil had disappeared, and my heart beat still more strongly--it was Paula's fault if I could not look on calmly and see the fair Hermine fall fifty feet down a precipice, even though it were into my arms.

"How now," I cried, in scorn to myself, "is there anything more to rescue or to protect? Cunning old commerzienraths, stupid dead fishes, pretty capricious girls--it is all the same to you, if you can only burn your fingers or wet your feet for your trouble. How long has it been since you hastened along this beach with the Wild Zehren at your side and the coast-guard on your heels? You might still see the foot-prints if winds and waves had not effaced them; but stupid idiot that you are, you can find the old track without that!"

Thus I chided myself, and made up my mind to return at once to the house and there to tell the commerzienrath that I--no matter for what reason--had resolved to return, and nothing could induce me to stay. And while I formed this resolution, which, if carried into effect, would have changed the whole course of my life, and therefore was not to be, I was already looking with awakening interest at the arrangements at the chalk-quarry, which lay before me, in a moderately deep ravine, as I turned a sharp angle of the cliff. It would have been worse than unbecoming if I had so abruptly abandoned the work which I had been sent for and had come expressly to carry out.

So I ascended the wooden staircase which ran up the chalk-cliff until I reached a small platform, where behind the watchman's hut was the opening to the galleries which had been pushed horizontally into the chalk, and which could not now be worked further because they had come upon springs of water which they were in vain trying to master with rude temporary pumping machinery.

"And it is very doubtful whether your machines will do it," said the old weatherbeaten overseer, who showed it to me.

"But how did it happen?" I asked.

"How did it happen?" echoed he, shrugging his shoulders--"Why you see, behind the chalk, which comes just to here--" we were walking on the top of the cliff, and took hold of a stake driven into the ground as a mark--"there is a stratum of sand, old sea-sand and dune-sand, which runs alongside the chalk at about the same depth, and at the other end reaches the great morass where it sucks up the water like a sponge. We all knew that very well, but the master would not believe it, and thought we wanted to cheat him out of his profits when we advised him to go no deeper on that side, when the chalk happened just there to be especially fine. Now he has to suffer for it."

Just the same thing that the foreman in the saw-mill had said, and both seemed to be intelligent honest men, who took a sincere interest in the prosperity of the works and were really grieved at their ill success. Why had he not followed their advice while it was yet time? Why? For the same reason that he had steadily opposed all Doctor Snellius's proposition for the formation of beneficial and burial societies; for the same reason that he had scornfully rejected the suggestions of our manager to raise the wages of the workmen in proportion to the increased cost of living. It was always the same reason: boundless selfishness, which gazes on the one object of its desires with such greedy eyes that it can see neither to the right nor to the left, and is at last dazzled and blinded to its own real interests.

"Now he has to suffer for it," the old man repeated, as if in confirmation of my thoughts, then turned slowly away and descended the wooden stair which led from the edge of the cliff down to the quarry.

I remained alone, in profound thought, as if the creation of a new world had been entrusted to me. And was there not a world to create here, of which as yet only the foundation had been laid? Sawmills, chalk-quarries, lime-kilns, the draining of the great morass--what might not have been made of all these undertakings? Nay, what might not still be made of them, if they were taken up in the right spirit and with the right intention?--the intention of providing for the poor, perishing, wretched people here, new and permanent sources of subsistence. One had only to win their confidence by letting them see that while they seemed to be working for their employer, they were really working for themselves.

"If I were but master here!"

From the point where I stood, I could overlook a good part of the country; my view extending to the left up as far as the heights of Zehrendorf, and on the right descending to the great morass and along the line of coast as far as Zanowitz, whose miserable huts were visible here and there between the barren dunes. And I saw in fancy the waste land waving with golden harvests, the great moor drained and giving place to rich meadows on which grazed great herds of cattle, while handsome fishing-smacks sailed out from the wretched village, now the port of a rich and fruitful territory.

Once before I had had a similar dream, and once before my eyes had roved over this land and my fancy would have created a paradise, if such a power resided in fancies or in wishes. Since then many a year had passed; I was another man, richer in understanding and sagacity, stronger in will; must it still remain only a longing wish? Must I again, as so often before in my life, stand with empty hands before the famishing who were crying for bread?

And as I walked backwards and forwards on the cliff, thinking and thinking how I should get away, for go away I must, suddenly the white veil that I had before seen fluttering from the summit, now fluttered over the bushes that edged the beach to my right. I heard the rapid tread of a galloping horse on the sandy road behind the bushes, and in the next moment the rider came round the corner upon a handsome black horse, with an enormous yellow mastiff galloping by his side with an almost equal length of stride. The instant the lady saw me, with a quick firm hand she swerved the well-trained horse to one side, but the dog came bounding to me with evidently hostile intentions. As I was ready for him the moment he sprang at me, I clutched him by the throat and one fore-leg, and hurled him to the ground.

"Leo! Leo!" cried Hermine, urging on her horse with whip and rein. "Here, Leo! Down, Sir!"

But Leo had prudently decided to beat a retreat after the failure of his attack. It seemed that in my haste I had handled him rather roughly, for he limped slowly towards his mistress, whining and holding up his right fore-paw.

"Served you right," said she, bending down to pat him. "How could you be so stupid as to attack that gentleman? Don't you know he can conquer lions?"

She said this in a tone through which there evidently enough pierced a certain scorn, and a trace of contempt, or vexation, or pride, or all together, lay upon her beautiful lips, as she now looked at me sharply with her large clear blue eyes, as I bowed in salutation, and said:

"You need not be surprised, sir: the dog has been trained to protect his mistress. I do not know for what he can have taken you."

These unfriendly words were also spoken in a very far from kindly tone, and I am not sure that an elegant young gentleman who should be thus treated by a beautiful girl would in all cases preserve the repose of manner that marks his caste.

But I only saw in the fair Amazon who behaved so haughtily, the pretty blue-eyed girl of nine or ten years before, when we used to tease each other; so I felt in nowise wounded by her behavior, and I fear that I very calmly remarked that at the worst the dog could only have taken me for a workman, and that I hardly supposed he had been trained to attack a class of persons as useful as they were numerous.

At this answer, which was probably not of the nature she expected, she looked at me with an embarrassed indignant glance, and said, with more temper than logic:

"I do not know why you should be taken for anything else, since you are always occupied with such useful and important matters that of course you cannot care about your external appearance, as do we small every-day people. The last time I had this pleasure, you looked, if I remember right, like a chimney-sweeper; and now--for the sake of contrast probably--you present yourself in the garb of a miller."

I glanced down at myself, involuntarily, and perceived that in creeping about in the narrow galleries of the chalk-quarry, I had rubbed my broad shoulders and other projecting angles of my person against the walls, and that with great white patches all over my clothes, I did really present a singular and ludicrous appearance. I took off my hat, and said with a profound bow, turning to the dog who was now sitting on his haunches with an air of extreme despondency, holding up his damaged fore-paw:

"I most heartily beg pardon, and I solemnly promise that if I have the happy fortune to meet you again, I shall appear as neat as it is possible for soap and brush to make me, when I trust you will have as little doubt of my friendly intentions as I have of yours."

"Come, Leo! Come along if you can; or else stay where you are."

She gave her horse, who had been impatiently tossing his head and pawing the sand, so sharp a cut across the neck that he bounded with surprise and went off at full gallop. The dog galloped after, as fast as his available legs would carry him.

I did not feel that in this odd rencontre, which almost seemed a combat, I had come off second best. I believe I even looked after her as she galloped off and her white veil quickly disappeared behind the bushes, with a kind of triumphant smile, and muttered to myself, "'The first best man'--in truth the man were not to be pitied who should be the first and best for you!"

It was time that I had returned to the house, where the commerzienrath was certainly awaiting me by this time. So I walked rapidly back from the cliffs, along a road too well known to me of old, which led between the morass on the left and the heath on the right, in the direction of Trantowitz, where quite near the house a path branched off through the fields to Zehrendorf. I do not know how it happened, but my meeting with the pretty girl who exhibited so much hostility to me, without bringing me really to believe in its sincerity, had entirely restored my good humor.

All things that had seemed to me so gloomy and fraught with evil, now appeared in a more cheerful light. Here was certainly a possibility of doing good on a large scale; and I blessed my star that, as it seemed, it had fallen to my lot to bring this possibility to a reality. The commerzienrath, if not a good, was at least a shrewd man, who would not act against the interests of others when he was shown that these interests ran parallel with his own. And who was better prepared to give him this proof than I--I, whose disinterestedness he must be convinced of, and who, heaven knows why, rejoiced in his regard for me, so far as such a feeling could be said to exist in his cold breast. It is possible that he only liked me because he needed me, or thought he did. Be it so: I must make myself necessary to him, and I believed I could do this: and then let the fair Hermine treat me as superciliously as she pleased, I stood firmly on my feet and could hold my head as high as nature had placed it.

So I strode valiantly along the narrow path to the gap in the alder thicket which here grew between the moor and the heath; the same gap through which I had fled with the Wild Zehren on that night nine years before. Once more I battled with my sad recollections, for I had firmly resolved to meet the present as it was, and let the past be past. How, indeed, without this resolution, could I ever have brought myself to return to this place? And the sun was shining so brightly in the blue sky, and the birds singing so merrily in the branches whose buds were now beginning to open, and in the bushes that were now in full leaf; in the brown water of the ditches and pools long-legged water-beetles were gaily rowing about, and in the distance, in the Trantowitz woods apparently, resounded the call of the cuckoo. No; one could not be melancholy on so bright a day; and when I thought of the pretty angry face of the charming girl, I could not refrain from laughing so loud that a man, who had been lying asleep in the young grass on the edge of a trench under the overhanging boughs of an alder a few paces from me, raised himself slowly on his elbow and stared at me, as I came round the thicket, with great astonished blue eyes. I only needed one look at these good-natured big blue eyes--"Herr von Trantow!" I cried--"Hans, my dear Hans!" and I held out my hands to my old friend, who in the meantime had risen to his feet, and offered me his great brown knightly hand with a friendly smile.

"How are you dear friend?" I said.

"As usual," he answered.

It was the old tone, but it was no longer the old Hans. His blue eyes were more expressionless, his brown cheeks sunken, and his formerly well-shaped handsome nose was red and swollen; and when we seated ourselves side by side on the edge of the trench, and he took off his cap, I saw that his thick dark-blond hair was greatly thinned.

"I knew that you would come," he said, taking flint and steel from his hunting pouch and lighting a cigar, after first supplying me: "I was to go there to dinner to-day, but I do not know whether I should have gone; so I am all the more glad that I have met you here. I had much rather be here."

And he puffed great clouds of smoke from his cigar and gazed at the water in the trench, where the lively long-legged water-beetles were busily rowing about.

"Much rather," he repeated.

"And are you still living as lonely as ever?" I asked.

"Naturally," said Hans.

"I do not find that so natural," I replied, with some animation, for Hans's whole appearance and voice bespoke a carelessness and desolation which cut me to the heart--"by no means natural. What! a man like you, a dear, good, brave fellow like you, go mooning and wasting his life in solitude because a coquette has chosen to lead him in her string for a year or so? Yes, Herr von Trantow, a heartless coquette, who never was worth the regards of an honest man and now--no, she is hardly worth our compassion. I can tell you, I have learned that truth to my cost."

"So have I," said Hans.

"I know it."

Hans shook his head as if to say, that is not what I mean. I knew of old how to translate his gestures.

"Have you seen her since?" I asked.

He nodded.

"Where and when?"

"Eight or nine years ago, in--what do they call the hole?--Naples."

"That was the time that you disappeared from here, and no one knew what had become of you."

"Yes," said Hans.

"In Naples?"

"Yes."

It quite taxed the imagination to fancy Hans von Trantow in Naples, the northern bear among the southern jackals, and a most urgent impulse must it have been which drove him for the first and only time in his life from the Penates of his ruined home, and his native heaths and moors, out into the wide world.

It was in December nine years before--I had then been a month in detention under examination--that Hans had received a letter which caused him to lay game-bag and gun aside--he was just going out shooting--harness up his sledge and drive off to Fährdorf, where he crossed the ice to Uselin, and from Uselin travelled day and night, until after many hinderances--he at first thought he must look for Naples in Turkey, and only found the right direction after extreme difficulties and some lost time--at the end of about a month he happily reached the city he was in search of. Here, after some trouble--for the good Hans spoke and understood no language but his own honest German--he discovered the hotel mentioned in the letter, and found her whom he was looking for. But not as he expected to find her; not as the letter had represented her. She had spoken of herself as "betrayed," "forsaken," one who looked to him as her only refuge, her preserver from the direst misery and a certain death. Hans had naturally taken all this literally, and was somewhat astounded to find her in one of the grandest hotels on the Toledo, in luxuriously furnished apartments, and splendidly dressed, looking more lovely than ever, though not a little confused--indeed, even turning pale--at sight of him. She had probably not supposed that her appeal would receive so instantaneous a response, and that she would have no notice beforehand, and in consequence she was taken unprepared. So it had to be that a German princess, who was really in Naples at the time, had interested herself in her, and insisted that the daughter of so ancient and distinguished a family should accept her assistance. But the favor of the great is inconstant, and often clogged with conditions hard to be complied with by a proud spirit. The princess had demanded, as the price of her favor, that Constance should marry off-hand a certain young Baron, who, it was said, had stood a little too high in the exalted favor of the princess herself; and she, Constance, was one of those who may err, and err grievously, but will never act against the voice of their heart.

This story the fair Circe had told the true-hearted Hans, with many tears and sighs, and blushes and smiles, and convulsive sobbings, and he, who did not possess the sceptical spirit of the much-enduring man, believed every word, and had returned to his modest lodgings, pondering and racking his brain to find out what he could do to help her.

To marry her was out of the question. A Trantow could take no woman to wife who was not as chaste as he himself was brave; not though she were a hundred times fairer and he had loved her a hundred times more dearly. But to share with her what he had, to protect her and care for her and do for her what in a similar case a brother might do for an unfortunate but dearly loved sister--this Hans could do and would do; and the next morning he went to lay his plans before her. But in the night Circe had taken other counsel, and left her palace under the protection of the aforesaid young Baron, who in reality stood in no connection whatever with the high lady she had referred to, but in a very intimate one with young Prince Prora, and since the young prince had left Naples a month before, by his father's orders, in quite an intimate relation to Constance herself, who had been transferred to him as an equivalent for a considerable sum of money which the prince had lost to him at play. So at least Hans was told--and much beside which he neither asked nor wanted to know--by a German waiter at the hotel, who seemed to have taken a very active, if not very creditable part in the whole affair. As Hans had not come to Naples to lounge along the Toledo, or visit Capri, or climb Vesuvius, he shook the dust from his feet and set out on his homeward journey. But the good faithful fellow did not get far. The unusual exertion and excitement of so long a journey made in such furious haste, the change of climate and mode of living, the fiery Italian wine, which from old habits he had drunk in great quantity, and more than all else the deep grief at this second atrocious treachery, which was far worse than the first, were too much for even his strong constitution, and one day a compassionate vetturino brought to the gate of a monastery near Rome a traveller who had fallen sick by the way, and who really seemed to have reached the end of all his journeys.

But it was not fated that the good Hans should exhale his free brave soul in the narrow cell of a Roman monastery; despite the extremely irrational treatment of Fra Antonio, the celebrated physician to the convent, he recovered, and in six weeks could walk about the garden. The garden was a very fine one, with a magnificent view of the Eternal City, and the monks, if not particularly clean, were very kind and hospitable, and very urgently pressed the worthy Hans to consider whether it would not be for the welfare of his soul to return no more to his barbarian home, but come rather to the bosom of the true Church, to die perhaps, if it were heaven's will, some day in that very monastery in the odor of sanctity. A singular proposal to the good Hans, who in his life had never given a moment's thought to the present or future welfare of his soul; but it was quite clear to him that however salutary it might be for his immortal part, to follow the counsel of the good fathers, he would have in doing so to renounce all the comfort of his life. The convent wine was right good of its kind, but it had a peculiar flavor to which he could never get accustomed, any more than he could to seeing the trees in blossom at the end of February, as if at this time there were no keen gusty north-east wind in the world, and no pine-woods whose boughs bent with their weight of pendent icicles; and when one night a comforting dream had conveyed him to Trantowitz, and by the feeble light of the northern stars and of the snow had let him shoot six hares in his cabbages out of his bedroom window, there was no holding him any longer after he awoke; he shook the brown dirty hands of his friendly hosts, one after the other, received the Prior's benediction upon his heretical head, and returned to his old home.

All this Hans told me in his monotonous way, while we sat on the edge of the trench. And the long-legged beetles shot back and forth in the brown water, and the birds twittered in the branches, and the call of the cuckoo came from the far-off woods.

I felt very sad. I believe I should have been less affected if Hans had exhibited the least emotion in the recital of the most eventful and certainly most painful passage of his life; but of this there was not the slightest trace. He felt no hatred towards Constance, no grudge against the young prince, who was now living at Rossow in the immediate neighborhood: in all that he said there lay a perfect resignation, an utter hopelessness; and this it was that made me so sad.

There was a rustling in the coppice behind us, and an old pointer trotting up greeted first Hans and then me with a melancholy wag of his tail.

"God bless me! that is not Caro, is it?" I asked.

"Yes it is," said Hans. "I believe he knows you."

"Poor old fellow!" I said, patting the dog; "and does he still do his duty?"

"So, so," said Hans. "He has been of no use with pheasants for a long time; and with ducks, that used to be his great point, he will not go into the water any more, so that I usually have to get them myself. But that is only natural: we are neither of us so young as we once were."

Caro had seated himself on the edge of the trench, staring with pricked-up ears at the beetles in the water, and evidently thinking of nothing at all; Hans sat with his left elbow propped on his knee, blowing thick clouds from his cigar, also staring into the trench, and apparently thinking of nothing also. I felt sadder and sadder. The contrast between the active life I had just been picturing to myself, and the melancholy of this stagnant, purposeless existence, was too great.

"Suppose we go," I said, suddenly rising.

"Very well," said Hans, slowly following my example.

Not much was said between us as we crossed the heath, until we reached the point where the path to Zehrendorf branched off near Trantowitz whose buildings looked forlorner and more dilapidated than ever.

"So you are going to live here always," said Hans, as we were about to separate.

"Always?" I said. "How came you to think that?"

"I?" he said, in evident surprise that I should suspect him of originating any idea--"I did not think it: Fräulein Duff told me so."

"And did she tell you why I was to stay here always?"

"Of course; and I wish you joy with all my heart."

"Wish me joy of what?" I asked, taking with some hesitation his offered hand.

Hans blushed and stammered, "Excuse me: I had no intention of being indiscreet; but I thought it was no secret, or at least none between us."

"In the name of heaven, what are you talking about?" I asked, and I think I turned even redder than Hans, if that were possible.

"Why, are you not betrothed to Fräulein Hermine or about to be?" he stammered out.

I laughed loud; louder than any one who laughs honestly, and Hans, who took this for an indirect confession, again seized my hand and said:

"I wish you joy with all my heart: I do not know any one in the whole world whom I would so gladly see win her as yourself. And the people here need a good master."

He pressed my hand again, and then went on, Caro trotting after him with drooping head. I looked after them. "Indeed," I said to myself, "it would be a better lot than has fallen to your share, you good faithful fellow."

I turned. There lay before me the new mansion and grounds of Zehrendorf, and lower down, nearer to me, there crouched close to the earth the same little dilapidated, dirty cottages that I remembered of old; and in the fields, splendid in their vernal beauty, I saw working the same care-worn, poverty-stricken men, and I thought of all I had seen and heard this morning, and said to myself, "Yes, indeed, you need a good master!"

Then I walked slowly, almost hesitatingly, along the footpaths through the green corn-fields to Zehrendorf.

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Chapter XII

I had now been more than a week at Zehrendorf. A letter written in those days now lies before me, a letter several pages long, upon which there are spots as if tears had fallen upon the paper, and yet it is a cheerful, even a merry letter, and these are the words of it:

"Nobody knows better than you, dear Paula, that I did not come here to amuse myself; but were I to say that in all these days I have done little else than amuse myself, or at least seem to be doing it, I should tell the honest truth. It really seems as if I were making up for lost time by perpetrating all the follies I have left undone during the last nine or ten years; and as taking my earlier exploits in that line as a standard, their amount and magnitude can by no means be insignificant, so my incentives to achieve them are proportionately strong. They still tell here of my performances in choral singing in our old parties on the water; of the dancing parties where I had ever the most inventive head for new figures in the cotillon, of the walks and drives in the pine-wood, where I was the leader in every frolic, and where in the evening the darkness of the forest would be lighted up by the fireworks that my friend and protégé, Fritz Amsberg, the apothecary's hunchbacked apprentice, used to make for me as his appointed tribute. Yes indeed, there are persons who remember only too well my exploits in those days; and what is the worst, some of these live in my immediate neighborhood, and are but too ready to say at all times, fitting or unfitting, 'Don't you remember, George--excuse me for calling you by the dear old name--don't you remember what a glorious time we had at such a place, where you had arranged so and so?' Not once in ten times can I remember it, and then only vaguely; and I marvel at the extraordinary tenacity with which the female memory retains certain things, which, with us men, the rougher waves of life ruthlessly wash away.

"Poor Emilie! What can have brought her here? Quite unexpectedly to me, I can assure you, and by no means agreeably either; but her father, my great enemy of old, is Justitiarius to Prince Prora, and the commerzienrath's solicitor; and as the prince and the commerzienrath are still in treaty about Zehrendorf, nothing of course can be done without the legal factotum of the two high contracting powers. Now wherever the legal factotum is, Fräulein Emilie is not far off, especially when in addition to business, a little innocent pleasure is to be had, as here with us in the country, where business and pleasure, whenever possible, go hand in hand. And now too, when the worthy lady, the Frau Justizräthin, has acted so unmotherly as to leave Emilie 'a helpless, unprotected orphan,' to use her own expression. And wherever Emilie is, one has not to look far for our mayor's lovely daughter, her bosom-friend, Elsie Kohl. Really I ought to be ashamed of making fun of these poor girls, for in truth it is not their fault that they have never been outside of the good town of Uselin and its three-mile circuit of estates and domains, so that their conceptions of the world and men's doings in it are not very comprehensive, but rather a little confused; and especially is it not Fräulein Emilie's fault that she did not find the person she was looking for--no, I ought not to laugh at them; and yet never could I have believed that my risible faculties could be brought into such play as happens when I look at the pair--the two Eleonoras somebody here has christened them--clasping each other in a girlish embrace, as they swim into the parlor through the door which William Kluckhuhn, with a malicious grin on his impudent face, has obsequiously thrown open for them. The attitude has, doubtless, been most carefully studied before the glass, or it could not always be so exact down to the very minutest detail. Here you have the group, which I recommend to you for one of your charming saloon-pieces:--Emilie, as the smaller and bolder, is naturally the second Eleonora, and is the worldly protector of the other who is a head taller and even in my time had a little romance with a poetical young schoolmaster who was a trifle out of his senses, so she has the superiority over her friend which riper experience and early sorrows bestow, especially as ten years ago she bewailed in elegiac verses her hapless fate, to fade, in the bloom of her youth, to the silent tomb.

"This sport of cruel destiny, the victim destined to an early grave, clasps her right arm around the shoulders of her friend, gazing down upon her with a loving look as if to say, Happy, guileless child! thou canst sing and sport in life's bright morning! while the guileless child looks up at her with two eyes, blue as two skies, at least, and with a provoking smile on her saucy lips. It is a touching sight, I assure you; and more than ever when one thinks that the combined ages of the two Eleonoras amount to some sixty-two or sixty-three years; for I remember quite distinctly that as a very little boy I would not play with Elise any more because she was too old for me, and as for Emilie I know certainly that she is exactly one year older than I am, for our birthdays fell on the same day, and used often to be celebrated together.

"Yes, the tenacity of Fräulein Emilie's memory is great, but there is one hour of her life of which she affirms that it is ever clouded in her recollections with a thick mist. And this very hour is so clear to me, that I can almost venture to name the exact number of curl-papers that quivered around her head when she lifted both her hands to me and supplicated me to spare her aged father, the same aged father who now nods confidentially to me across the table, with his full glass in his hand, and after dinner calls to me 'Prosit Mahlzeit,[8] my young friend! I would have liked to touch glasses with you, but I sat too far off; but you must really let me take your hand, you must indeed!' upon which follows a half embrace, if not a whole one. I assure you I sometimes take hold of my head to convince myself that this is not all an extraordinary dream. For you must know, Paula, that if I am not the fool of these festivities, I am not far from being the king of them; everything being done with reference to me, every one flattering me, and every one competing for my favor--with a single exception, of course. It is really edifying. There is my old friend, the little Herr von Granow, who has grown so much fatter with time that even in his best moments he can no longer lift his head from between his shoulders. Least of all can he when his spouse is by, a stout buxom brewer's daughter from S., who brought him a couple of hundred thousand thalers, which he takes care to get the good of, and a pair of slippers under whose heavy strokes they say the poor little fellow weeps many a hot secret tear. But disagree as they may on other points, the pair agree on this one of paying court to me in the most ridiculous manner in the world. The little man recalls with emotion 'The bright, the precious hours' that he once spent in my society, and sighing wishes those happy days back again, and that too in the presence of his over-buxom wife, who with a mock threat lifts a warning finger and says: 'O, you bad, bad man! But indeed I can understand how for such a friend one could even sacrifice the peace of the domestic hearth.'

"And then the steuerrath and the Born! I wrote you how they received me. Well, since then a grand council must have been held, and the decision come to to try other plans. The result is that the steuerrath, so soon as he sees me, holds out his hand to me, saying 'Glad to see you, George! You do not mind my calling the son of an old and too early lost colleague and friend, by his first name!' at which words the Born smiles benignant, and if the opportunity permits, takes my arm, draws me on one side and holds a long consultation with me about the apple of her eye, Arthur. Alas, the apple of her eye is giving her so much pain again, and grieves her so that, if one believed her assurances, she is often on the point of plucking it out of its aristocratic socket. But one must'nt believe her assurances, and I never do. It is just the old litany that I have known since I was a child: how Arthur is the best, cleverest, handsomest, wittiest, charmingest youth in the world, and has but one fault, that of hiding his thousand and one lights under the bushel of his frivolity, where, as is natural, they cannot produce their proper effect. Only that verse of the litany that referred to me, has taken an altogether different form. They used to be quite certain that I was at the bottom of all the unlucky scrapes that Arthur got into: now they are perfectly assured that I and I alone can save this stray lamb from the abyss. 'One who like you has borne the inevitable with dignity, one who like you has won the hardest victory, that over yourself, one who ----' well, I do not doubt that she is really anxious about her son's future, and as far as I can see, she has every reason to be; but so much the more do I doubt her good disposition towards me. I know too well what she and the steuerrath want of me! I know too well what Arthur, who comes over for awhile every day from Rossow, wants of me, when he sets all the fountains of his amiability to playing, and sprinkles me with a heavy spray of flatteries and protestations of friendship. And the worst of all--or should I say the best?--is that I know just as well what all the rest want; the little Herr von Granow, for instance, who would like to have the great estate of Zehrendorf, and wants me to speak a good word for him to the commerzienrath: William Kluckhuhn, who has received warning from his master, and wants me to ask that he may keep his place; and so they all have their special interests in persuading poor George that, all things considered, he is a young man of singular talents and remarkable influence, whose favor is very well worth winning.

"But seriously, dear Paula, it is a very curious position in which I find myself here; and I really do not know if they would not turn my head altogether, were not--well, were not a certain person here whose especial task it seems to be to set it right for me again. Or that is possibly the wrong expression: it would be more correct to say--to turn it in the other direction:--I am by no means an important personage whom any one need to consider; I am a quite obscure insignificant person, whom her father, heaven knows by what caprice, has invited to his house, and who therefore cannot exactly be shown the door, but who must be given to understand that people of his class really belong to very different society. I must be given to understand this by any and every means, some of the queerest in the world. I will tell you more about this when I come back: I fear the faces that they make here to me would look by far less handsome on the paper than they are in reality, and the little extravagances which they let themselves be drawn into, would, on the contrary, seem almost insane. Or are they really out of their senses? Sometimes it seems so to me, and I often cannot trust myself to pass a judgment on them, and wish that I had Benno here, or were myself Benno with his nineteen years, and his bright illusions. For his brown, enthusiastic eyes, I fancy, the blue-eyed enigma would be easier of solution than for an old lumpish fellow like me, with my nearly thirty years, my rough hands, and sluggish brain. Well, they will have to take the old fellow as they find him; and if they don't, they may worry and sulk and make pretty faces or ugly ones as they choose, it does not matter to me, does it, Paula?"

So ran the letter, which I wanted to seem a right cheerful, even merry one; and how well I attained my object the traces of the tears it drew from Paula's eyes may testify.

Well had she cause to weep over this letter! Had she deserved it at my hands that I should intentionally and artfully seek to conceal from her what really caused me so much inward emotion? And was not this letter from beginning to end a clumsy unsuccessful attempt to mislead her as to the real state of my feelings? How much of all this letter was the honest truth? Scarcely anything.

The whirl of amusements into which I was drawn here, had by no means left me so sober as I pretended. It was as if with breathing the same air I had breathed as a youth here ten years before I inhaled something of the buoyancy and love of pleasure of those days. The handsome rich house, the liberal easy life, the light joyous existence from day to day, the life in the open air, the wanderings over the heaths, on the cliffs, through the woods, and with all these the glorious spring weather, with warm gales, the forerunners of summer, now and then sweeping through the blossoms all this charmed and intoxicated me. No, I was not the sober, cheerful, untroubled fellow, that I represented myself to Paula, and tried to make the company believe me. I was not sober, and far less was I cheerful and careless--quite the contrary. A restless, passionate humor, now depressed and now over-excited, had taken possession of me, to such an extent that sleep, my true comrade from childhood, now forsook me, just as it forsook me at the commencement of my imprisonment; and this perhaps was in part the cause of another feeling of that old time often coming over me: the feeling of one who knows that a decision involving his life or death, is now hanging by a hair.

What of all this had I written to Paula? But how could I write to her? Could I write to her that I believed that I knew the reason why Hermine kept playing, in ever strange and more fantastic form, the game which she had commenced with me on my arrival at Zehrendorf? And if something in me continually recoiled from giving the right explanation to Hermine's singular conduct, could I really altogether shut my eyes when all took pains to show me and make clear to me that they saw perfectly well what I was determined not to see, or at least gave myself the appearance of not seeing? Yes, it was a singular and unnatural position in which I found myself, a position in which we write that kind of merry letters to our friends over which our friends weep hot tears.

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Chapter XIII

I came back from the chalk-quarry, where I had been busy all the morning with setting up the new machine. The work under my direction, owing to good luck and the good will of the men, had succeeded so well, and the phlegmatic old master miner had said at last, with a kind of inspiration: "I believe we shall manage it yet!" I was in a very cheerful frame of mind. The old delight in accomplishing anything had possessed me once more, and while I strode rapidly through the fields, revolving in my thoughts various plans and the means for their accomplishment, I had again come to the conclusion that all might end well yet if but the right will were here, and again I said to myself, "what a chance for the master here!"

But I did not say it as I had said it a week before. Then it was a wish to which nothing personal was attached, and the goal appeared to me utterly unattainable. Now my heart was as much excited, but it no longer beat as freely as then, and the goal no longer seemed at an inaccessible distance--indeed it sometimes seemed so near that I might touch it with my hand. And when this thought came into my mind, and I suddenly saw in fancy the fair young face with the angry cloud on the white firm brow surrounded with its mass of clear-brown curls, and the full, red, saucily-defiant lips, I stood gazing blankly at the green wheat whose spears were nodding in the morning breeze, or at the distant sea-horizon glittering beyond the edge of the cliffs, while I saw all the time nothing but the sweet defiant face; and then I breathed deeply, and bethought myself that the commerzienrath had sent for me, and was probably expecting me with impatience.

I found him in his room in such animated conversation with the justizrath, that I could hear the voices of both talking together, before William Kluckhuhn opened the door. They were both sitting at the round table that was covered with ground plans, designs of buildings, and specifications.

"Are you here at last?" cried the commerzienrath to me in such a tone, that I felt justified in looking over my shoulder at the door, and remarking to him that William was no longer in the room.

The commerzienrath cast at me one of those evil glances which one sees in the eyes of an old tiger when he is undecided whether or not to respect the steel rod in the hand of his keeper, and then cried in the most pleasant tone:

"Yes, yes, the rascal; I sent him for you an hour ago and now he brings you at last. We cannot get along without you at all; at least I cannot, though this gentleman can do better without you than with you."

"Allow me, Herr Commerzienrath----" began the other.

"No, I allow nothing," he replied; "and least of all that you shall consider yourself my friend in this affair."

"I am also the friend of the other party, so to speak," replied the justizrath, pushing up with great dignity the stiff grizzled hair from both sides of his head towards the crown, where it stood up in a comb, something like that of a clown in a circus.

"Then you should at least be impartial!" cried the commerzienrath.

"Ask our friend here if he has ever known me otherwise," said the justizrath, with a dignified look at me.

"Oh, ay," cried the commerzienrath, "but fine words butter no parsnips, and my parsnips get poorer the longer you keep them at the fire. A week ago, that is before you came, the prince was willing to give four hundred thousand thalers; after you have had three conferences with him, he abated fifty thousand of his offer, making sixteen thousand six hundred and sixty-six and two-thirds thalers per conference. I am much obliged to you! You have always been a dear guest to me, but I never would have believed that you would be so dear as that!"

Emilie's father made a movement as if he would fain wrap himself up from the sharp arrows of his antagonist, in the old flowered dressing-gown he used to wear at home; but bethinking himself that he was in a black dress-coat, he pulled up his collar, felt to see if the comb on the top of his head was in good condition, and looked at me with a sly smile, as if to say: "Whoever expects to get the better of Justizrath Heckepfennig, has got to get up early: you have found that out, young man, eh?"

"Yes, my dear friend, this is the way I am treated here," continued the commerzienrath, turning to me, and, for a change, falling to a lachrymose tone: "it is enough to drive a man out of his senses; and none know it better than you, George, for you understand the whole thing--which is more than I can say of some people--you know well that the property is worth five hundred thousand thalers between brothers, now especially, when we have the certainty of draining the chalk quarries."

The commerzienrath accompanied these words with an expressive look at me, meaning, "Now George, keep up the ball!"

"And indeed that is a very reasonable price," he went on, "when we consider that in this way we have found a plan for draining the great morass, by carrying the pipes to the sand-bed which came so near ruining the chalk-quarry, and which is a drain-trench provided by nature itself for the water of the swamp."

Here the commerzienrath gave me a furious look, because I had not yet come to his assistance.

Now this last plan he had mentioned, was one I had suggested myself, and I considered it therefore my duty to remark here that it was true I had the strongest hopes of the success of the scheme referred to, but that it could only be demonstrated by trial, and even were it perfectly successful, the land thus gained would at furthest only compensate for the forest, which was apparently lost beyond recovery, and thus the original value of Zehrendorf would in this respect remain unaltered.

"What in the devil do you mean, sir!" cried the commerzienrath, springing up and storming about the room. "Did you come here for this? What do you mean?"

"I came, Herr Commerzienrath, at your own request," I replied calmly, while in violent excitement he paced the room with quick short steps, still darting venomous looks at me, until suddenly he threw himself back in his easy chair, crying:

"What a fellow this George Hartwig is! O what a fellow! What answers the man has! Came here at my request! What a fellow, what a fellow!"

And the old gentleman slapped me on the knee, and said, resuming a serious tone:

"But to come back to our business, the fact is that I can have five hundred thousand from Von Granow any day. Is that not so, George? Did he not say so to you yesterday evening?"

Herr von Granow had said nothing of the sort to me, but on the contrary that he was ready to negotiate on any reasonable terms, but that the commerzienrath's demands were simply unreasonable, not to say ridiculous.

As I could not do the commerzienrath the favor to tell a falsehood, and would not afford the justizrath, who seemed to be waiting for it, the pleasure an admission of the truth would afford him, I arose from my chair, saying that if I could be of no other service to them, I would, with their permission, go to my own room where I had a little work to do.

"No, no; stay here, stay here!" cried the commerzienrath eagerly; "I must speak with you on matters of importance. And as for us, my dear old friend, go now and tell his highness whatever you choose; but if you tell him that we cannot succeed in draining the chalk-quarry, I shall send him George here, who will open his eyes on that point. And now farewell, my old friend, and come back at noon punctually. I have found a couple more bottles of '22 Hock, that you will like I know, gourmand that you are!"

And the commerzienrath poked the corpulent justizrath in the ribs with his thumb, in a jocular fashion, and in this way poked him, so to speak, out at the door, then turned shortly on his heel, came with quick steps and stood before me, and cried in a rage that sent the blood to his bald temples:

"Now will you tell me,--are you going to help me in this business, or are you not?"

"First tell me, Herr Commerzienrath,--will you take another tone with me, or will you not?" I answered.

"Bah! leave your fooleries! We are alone now. I have no notion of playing blindman's-buff with you, do you understand me, sir?"

"Not in the least," I answered; "or only so far that I have no notion of being a minute longer the guest of a man who knows so little--or rather, who is so entirely ignorant of what is due to a guest."

I said this in a very calm tone, but I was far from feeling the calmness that I assumed. On the contrary, the thought that in this moment the grand plans I had been cherishing, were probably dissolving in smoke; that this angry, foolish, selfish old man was trampling into the earth the young green crop of my fairest hopes,--this thought made my heart beat, and gave my last words a bitterness unusual to me.

The commerzienrath's sharp ears must have heard that he had driven me to the limit of my patience, for as I laid my hand on the knob of the door I felt myself held fast by my coat-tails, and turning round, saw the face of the queer old man lifted to me with such an extraordinary grimace, that, sad as I felt, I had to burst out laughing.

"Ay, that is right, laugh away, bad man, and sit down again. Yes; that was all that was wanting, that you should run away from me. A nice mess I should have had at dinner-time after that! No, no, sit down. It is necessary that I should talk with you, and I will speak as if you were my own son. Heaven has not thought fit to grant me one, so I must look to others, who, naturally enough, cannot pardon an old man's little infirmities of temper."

I had soon returned to a placable mood, and the commerzienrath need not have adopted quite so lamentable a tone. But he kept it up, while he went into a long explanation how he had taken Zehrendorf originally in the hope of selling it to advantage; that the proper time had now arrived, and he needed the money, imperatively needed it, and that it was absolutely necessary that I should help him to close the bargain with the prince. I understood the matter better than either he, the justizrath, or the young prince, and the last had written to him repeatedly, and even this morning again, that he would rather treat through me than the justizrath, who was an old ass--"and heaven help him!" the commerzienrath here cried, "an old ass he most truly is: he is indeed!"

"What has put it into the prince's head to mix me up in the matter?" I asked, in amazement.

"Because he takes an interest in you, as everybody else does, you confounded fellow! Now will you? say, will you?"

"Herr Commerzienrath," I said, after a short pause in which I had striven to concentrate upon one point the thoughts that were whirling in my brain, "I will own to you that it grieves me to think that Zehrendorf should pass into other hands, into the hands of a master of whom I know not but that he may let all that has been called into existence here with so much labor and cost, fall to neglect and ruin, so that the poor people about here may sink into a worse condition than that in which you found them. For in spite of everything, your new undertakings have drawn many here who cannot get away again so easily, but must remain here to suffer and to increase the sufferings of the rest. Now I have frankly told you, more than once, Herr Commerzienrath, that I by no means consider you the good master that I wish for Zehrendorf; and if, despite this, I had rather see you here than another, it is simply because for your own interest you will have to try to complete what has been begun, and I have not yet given up the hope of making you a convert to my views. Still, since you say that you are compelled to sell the property, and your resolution seems fixed, I will help you in the matter, but only under two conditions. The first is, that you authorize me, as your friend, but also as a man of honor, to take the negotiation into my own hands, that is to say, to aim at a good, or we will say the best price, but not to make demands which the prince can only consent to if he is a fool, and which, if he is not a fool, he will reject with contempt. One moment's patience, Herr Commerzienrath!--I said I had two conditions. The second is, that so soon as I have effected the sale of Zehrendorf, you will agree to the plan for extending our works in the city, and will place at my disposal the sums which I have calculated as necessary for that purpose."

"Are you clear out of your senses, sir!" cried the commerzienrath, smiting with his fist the arm of his chair, "to say such things to me here, in my own house, in my own room, as if you were a Pacha of three tails, or I don't know what, instead of being----"

"Your most obedient servant," I said, rising, and making him a polite bow.

"Eh! what?" he exclaimed, "Do you want to frighten me? You are not going, I know; why all these fooleries?"

"And you will agree with me at last, so why all this noise?" I replied laughing.

"But I tell you for the hundredth time that if I sell Zehrendorf ever so well, I need the money for other things than your cursed factory!" shouted the commerzienrath.

I looked him steadily in the eye, and said, "Do you know what I have lately dreamed, Herr Commerzienrath? It is that you are really very far from being the rich man you are generally believed to be."

"You confounded fellow! you humorous dog! you funny rascal!" cried the commerzienrath. "I suppose you will tell me next that I have stolen the boots I am wearing. Couldn't you lend me five thalers for a day or two? you----"

And he poked me in the ribs with his thumb, and held his sides with laughter at his capital joke.

"If you are a rich man, then," I continued very seriously, and it cost me no effort to be serious now--"then say yes, and the thing is settled."

I held out my hand, and he struck his own into it, laughing still like mad.

"The thing is settled then," I said, drawing a deep breath.

"Settled," he said. "And I shall hold you to your word, Herr Commerzienrath," I said: "You may count surely upon that."

"And I count upon you," he answered, still holding my hand fast in one of his own, while with the other he gave me little raps upon the knuckles. "If you were not a man to be relied upon, would I have taken so much pains about you, do you suppose? you--Oh! murder!"

In my excitement I must have pressed the old man's hand a little too hard, for he gave a loud outcry and made a horrible grimace: I begged his pardon, and he laughed and shook his hand, and again cried "Murder! you man of iron! you confounded fellow!" and poked me out at the door, with his thumb, just as he had poked out the justizrath.

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Chapter XIV

I had spent the rest of the forenoon in my room, in order to finish a calculation necessary to the proper adjustment of the machine at the quarry. But I had not got beyond the statement of the problem. The new, almost certain prospect of being able to carry out my great wish to enlarge our works, almost made me dizzy. In fancy I saw the space of ground where my lodging was, covered with buildings; I saw the flames springing from the great furnaces and smoke pouring from the tall chimneys; I heard the clang of hammer on anvil, and saw the crowd of dingy workmen thronging the wide yards in the evening, and scattering in the streets of a new quarter where in cleanly houses cheerful homes awaited them, where they could rest from the toils of the day. And a change had passed over the desolate house in which I lived; fresh green sward surrounded it, a Triton spouted a jet of water high into the air from the old basin of sandstone into which it fell plashing back, where a host of goldfish played merrily, or darted back from the margin at the approach of a pair who came up hand in hand and bent over the water to see their own faces reflected. But the reflection quivered and broke, so that only now and then could be seen two bright blue eyes and two full red lips, nor was it clear whether the eyes flashed with anger or with love, or whether the lips were pouted to a scornful word or to a kiss.

"Dinner will soon be served, Herr Engineer," said William Kluckhuhn, entering. "Can I assist the Herr Engineer to dress?"

William regularly came with this polite offer of his services, although I just as regularly declined them. But to-day he would not take any dismissal, and helped me on with my best coat so actively, and brushed and touched me up with such zealous pertinacity, that I had to ask him if he had any request to make of me.

"Oh, no," he answered; "but you were so kind as to get me back into favor with the master, who was in the wrong altogether, for even if I drank champagne----"

"Very well, William," I said.

"So I only wanted to tell you," he went on in a confidential tone, "that they have had a terrible quarrel, and I very plainly heard----"

"But I do not wish to hear it, William."

"But you need not mind my telling you, for if I listened at the door a little bit, that was not your doing, and it was not my doing that the door was ajar, and I plainly heard our lady say that she would never forgive it you----"

"Well," I muttered.

"And when she said it, she looked----"

"So you could see too?"

"O, the door was pretty wide open," William answered, shrugging his shoulders, "and I made a rattling with the plates on purpose, but the Fräulein was in such a rage----"

And William here made a face, apparently intended to represent the one he had seen through the crack of the door, but so absurdly incredible that I burst out laughing.

"Very good," he said; "I wanted to give you the hint; for when she is angry----but you can laugh."

And William sighed deeply and looked at me in a supplicating manner. "Well?" I said.

"And I wanted to beg you," he went on, "that if--ahem! you know what I mean--you would be so good as to help me and my Louise too, for we have been waiting now six years, and it is easy for you, Herr Engineer. Is it not, now, Herr Engineer?"

"William, I firmly believe you have taken leave of your senses," I answered, and strode past him out of the room with a look intended to express majestic indignation.

But William's ears had served him faithfully, as I presently learned at table. The company was small; no one besides the inmates, except Arthur, who had come over in the justizrath's carriage from Rossow, and greeted me as usual with excessive friendliness. The two Eleonoras, owing to the warmth of the day, appeared in virgin white, and as a group, of course. Hermine kept us waiting awhile. The commerzienrath drew me aside and whispered to me that the prince had sent him word that he must be quite satisfied about the chalk-quarry before the negotiation went any further, and that he would send over his carriage this afternoon to bring me to Rossow.

I had no time to answer this communication, which for more than one reason was unacceptable to me, for at this moment Hermine entered and I saw plainly that she had been weeping, although she tried hard to appear as gay and careless as possible. The day was so charming--so delicious! and to-morrow it would be finer still, and the party to the Schlachtensee would be too delightful! The company was to be the very nicest that could be; all young people, not an old one among them. After dinner they would go over to Trantow to pick up Hans, who could not be dispensed with, then to Sulitz, where Herr von Zarrentin and his charming wife would join them; then arrive between five and six at the coast-village Sassitz; a stroll through the dunes and the beech forest as far as the Schlachtensee; supper, with pine-apple-punch, and moonrise there; return through the wood to the cross-roads at the Rossow pines, where their carriage and horses would be ready for them; return of the whole company without exception to Zehrendorf; and wind up all with tea and punch, and, if possible, a dance for such as were very nice.

"Bravo! bravo! That is a plan!" cried Arthur, enthusiastically clapping his hands.

"I knew it would have your approval, dear Arthur," said the fair designer, stretching her hand to him over the table, with her sweetest smile; "you understand these things, and I count upon you especially."

"I did not count upon you," she added, turning suddenly to me.

"I neither said, nor supposed anything of the kind, Fräulein Hermine," I replied.

"That is the very reason why one cannot count upon you in such things. You don't think about them. Of course! How can any one whose mind is occupied with matters of so much more importance?"

Hermine was never particularly amiable in her behavior to me, but her conduct to-day was so pointedly unkind, and her vehemence too void of any visible cause, not to strike the most indifferent spectator, not to mention the steuerrath and the Born, who were very far from indifferent, and now cast meaning looks at Arthur, as if urging him to strike while the iron was hot. Arthur was evidently quite disposed to follow their counsel, but did not precisely know how to go about it; so he contented himself with giving Hermine a languishing look, and curling his little black beard. The others seemed to gather from Hermine's last words, and still more from the excited tone in which she had spoken, that there was something unusual in the air. Fräulein Duff, who had been all the time looking remarkably pale and agitated, raised her eyes, as if in despair, to the ceiling, while the justizrath riveted his gaze on a dish of salad, and drummed lightly on the table; Emilie looked at her friend Elise, and Elise at Emilie, Emilie's look inquiring "Does an innocent child like me need to understand these things?" and Elise's replying "Sport peacefully, sweet cherub! Leave this to us experienced ones!" Even William Kluckhuhn, who stood waiter in hand at the sideboard, pulled a long face, as if the turn things had taken was not altogether to his satisfaction, and the commerzienrath alone was so busy with the other waiter, who was uncorking under his eyes a bottle of the famous hock, that he had not the least idea as to the cause of the sudden silence that had fallen upon the company. He looked up in the most unconscious manner in the world, and asked innocently--"I beg your pardon, but what were you speaking about?"

The peculiar expression which I had noticed in so many different shades on the faces of the guests, grew several tints deeper. The silence was more profound; the second waiter John, who was in the act of uncorking the '22 hock, stopped with the cork half-drawn, and the plates which William was handling rattled nervously, as the steuerrath pouring out with unsteady hand a glass of wine, replied:

"Our dear Hermine was remarking that in the innocent amusements which youth loves, one could not count upon our excellent George--you will excuse me, George, for calling you by the old familiar name--because our young friend has so many other, and, we will admit, more important things on his mind."

The commerzienrath poured out with his own hands the precious wine into the large hock-glasses--only a thumb's breadth deep, as otherwise one lost the perfect bouquet--and probably took advantage of this pause to collect himself, so that he was able to reply in a peculiar drawling tone:

"More important things? Is not that a wine! More important things--the very flower of the Rhine!--on his mind? I should think so: we made a bargain this morning; he is to sell Ziehrendorf for me and I am to buy for him that piece of ground adjoining the works in Berlin. I should think it likely that such a thing as that would be on any one's mind."

I was astonished beyond measure to hear the commerzienrath, whom I knew to be a very cautious man, mention an affair which we had only agreed upon a few hours before, and which I considered a strict business secret, thus openly before all his guests, and especially in the presence of the justizrath, to whom my intervention in the matter was anything but flattering--I was so amazed, I say, at this unbusinesslike, incomprehensible proceeding of the usually so shrewd old man, that I felt a flush of confusion rising hot in my face.

Again silence fell upon the room; the peculiar expression in the countenances of the guests deepened another tone, and now it was Hermine's voice that broke the silence:

"Have I not told you, Emilie, that Herr Hartwig is a frightful aristocrat? He cannot bear to see so old an estate in any other than noble hands. That sort of thing is not for us plebeians. What does it matter that we have to leave a place that we have grown fond of in these seven years? We must take what we can get and be thankful that we are anywhere at all."

There was a quiver in the tone of her voice, and her eyelids reddened as if she restrained her tears with difficulty; the silence grew more oppressive, and there was no need for the commerzienrath's raising his voice so high as he said:

"So it is: God's service goes before lord's service, and our George has the notion that he serves God with every additional farthing that he can make those poor devils of workmen earn; and if he has but few good words for lord's service, woman's service is his downright abomination."

"That is not your device, Arthur!" said the steuerrath, in an encouraging tone.

"Noblesse oblige," said the Born, with emphasis.

"Mon c[oe]ur aux dames!" said Arthur, laying his delicate hand on his heart and bowing to his cousin.

The justizrath and his ladies said nothing, contenting themselves with exchanging significant looks to the effect that this was a family affair, and they have better avoid meddling in it.

Again ensued an embarrassing pause, which was broken, just as the situation seemed to have reached a climax, by William Kluckhuhn using his pocket-handkerchief with an energy altogether unbecoming in a decorous serving-man, even in moments of the most lively concern. Fräulein Duff, who had held her thin hands spasmodically clasped over her breast during the last words of the Commerzienrath with the pale resignation of one whose only remaining hope is in a better hereafter, broke out into a hysterical weeping, and Hermine suddenly rising and pressing her handkerchief to her cheeks and forehead, begged that the company would excuse her if her ill-humor had annoyed them, but that her headache was so violent that she must retire to her room.

I do not believe that any one of those present believed in this headache, but this of course did not hinder the two Eleonoras from springing from their chairs, and approaching the fair sufferer on either side, in the intent to compose a touching group. But Hermine had already seized the arm of her sobbing governess, and left the room with a painful smile upon her lips, which seemed intended for all the company except myself.

Except myself, over whom her look had passed as if my chair were empty, and the rest of the company seemed to entertain the same opinion. No one had a word or look for me, and I have never forgotten it of William Kluckhuhn that at this fateful moment he had the hardihood to step behind my chair, and in a suppressed tone to ask:

"Will the Herr Engineer take another glass of hock?"

I took the glass, and sipped it slowly with the air of a connoisseur, but I cannot say that I was able to do justice to the noble vintage. With all the trouble I took to appear quite at my ease, I was greatly pained and disconcerted. It is an extremely disagreeable thing to be singled out in this way by a young lady before an entire company.

Happily my strength was not tasked too hardly. The company rose from table and hastily separated; I went out into the grounds to think it all over in the soothing companionship of a cigar.

One thing was at once perfectly intelligible: the behavior of the company at this incident. They had let me drop at the instant they thought they saw that my game was lost. I knew well that Arthur's parents had never given up the hope that he would one day marry his cousin, and that their fulsome flatteries and Arthur's deceitful show of friendship were only meant to cloak their real aim, and perhaps to obtain some influence over me, as they probably feared that open enmity would only make their chance worse.

As for the justizrath and the two Eleonoras, they merely swam with the stream. They and the others--the conduct of all was explicable enough; but the commerzienrath? Did it not look as if he had intentionally provoked this scene at table, or at least offered the opportunity? He was usually adroit enough in giving another turn to the conversation when it did not please him. And if he really needed my assistance in effecting the sale, why did he mention the matter to Hermine now when all was still unsettled? Why, when he knew how averse she was from the project, mention me to her as its originator or at all events its chief promoter? Did he simply use me to screen himself? Such a man[oe]uvre was exactly consistent with his character; he had a way of shifting burdens that were uncomfortable for him, to the shoulders of others. Or was this not all? Had the cunning old man tried his cuttle-fish stratagem again, and hidden himself in a cloud of assumed carelessness? He had noticed nothing, not he, of all that was going on around him, and in which he was so much concerned, and thus quite innocently, accidentally indeed, he placed "his young friend" in a quite untenable position towards his pretty passionate daughter.

The blood rose hot to my brow as I came to this conclusion, and a new feeling rose within me and obtained a complete mastery of me. It had always been an easy thing for me to forgive heartily those who had injured me; so easy indeed that I often called myself a weakling, a man with neither heart nor gall; why then was that which I usually found so easy, so difficult for me now? Why did every oblique glance that had been directed at me across the table, the neglect, the indifference which had been suddenly exhibited, now all recur even in their minutest details to my memory? And why did I feel as if I should suffocate at that which I had hitherto borne with such apparent equanimity? I had suddenly struck a new vein in my own nature, a vein from which a bitter, black, poisonous stream flowed into the current of my healthy blood. I felt as an actual physical change what was really only a change in my disposition; the first violent emotion of ambition; the hot desire for personal revenge; the humiliation, the disgrace, if this were baffled; the desperate final resolution to emerge from the contest as victor, to attain my aim in spite of all and everything.

My aim! What was it then? The same which I had in view when I came here, or another? Or this and that both at once? Well might I at this moment have heard the warning voice of that stern wisdom which says that we cannot serve God and Mammon.

I had taken my seat upon a bench which stood in a thick copse of bushes. It was a quiet secret nook. The birds twittered pleasantly, a gentle breeze blowing over the garden brought sweet odors on its soft pinions, and a warm reviving sun beamed from the clear blue sky. The spot was so sweet and the hour so lovely that I had to yield to its soft solicitations, resist them as I might. My blood began to flow more calmly: I commenced to take an interest in a pair of finches that had just set up housekeeping in a knot-hole of a tree, recently transplanted here from the Rossow park, and were incessantly hurrying in and out of their little door. It was a peaceful pretty picture; the little creatures were in such a hurry, and were so unwearyingly busy, and evidently out of mere love--the world after all was not so wretched a place as it had just seemed to me.

With these thoughts flitting through my mind, I must have closed my eyes and fallen asleep; for I saw the bushes in front of me, and behind which ran a walk, bend apart, and a face appear between them; a lovely girlish face upon which the sunbeams and shadows of the leaves were playing, and partly from this, and partly because I was dreaming, I could not see clearly enough to decide if the light in the eye was anger or love. When at last I opened my eyes fairly, I could see the place in the bushes, but the sweet face was no longer there, but at the same moment I heard ringing laughter with shouts and the cracking of a whip, and mingled with the rest, piteous cries as of some one entreating, then suddenly a loud shriek of terror, which caused me to spring from the bench and hurry to the spot.

It was a circular space surrounded with shrubbery, which was used as a race-course and which I had myself used as a riding-school several times during my stay here as I endeavored to improve my imperfect horsemanship under the guidance of the coachman, Anthony, an old cavalryman. My lessons had been taken secretly in the very early morning, because I knew that Hermine, who was passionately fond of riding, was in the habit of practising here for an hour or two in the forenoon. Recently Anthony had told me that Fräulein Duff was also taking lessons, at the request of her young lady, who had suddenly taken into her head to have in her expeditions and visits in the neighborhood, another escort beside her groom, whom she frequently dispensed with anyhow. The thing appeared to me absolutely incredible, although old Anthony, who had nothing of the quiz about him, assured me with the most serious face that it was a literal fact; now I was to have my doubts removed by the evidence of my own eyesight.

In the middle of the track stood Arthur, who kept cracking a long whip incessantly, Hermine, who was laughing in great amusement, the two Eleonoras, in virginal white, clinging to each other as usual, and Anthony, who plainly hesitated whether to obey Arthur's repeated orders to keep away, or yield to the piteous supplications of Fräulein Duff, and help that unhappy lady off the horse. It seemed that for the first time they had let go the halter-rein, and the unskilful and excessively timid rider had been seized with sudden panic. In her desperation she had clasped both arms around the neck of the horse, a small shaggy-maned animal not much larger than a pony, who on his part plunged, kicked, and did his best to throw her entirely out of the saddle, as she was already half out of it. The spectacle was certainly indescribably ludicrous, but I could not bear to see for an instant my good friend in this predicament without coming to her assistance, and in a moment I had sprung to her side, caught the horse's head, and, as she held out her arms to me, lifted her from the saddle. I wished to place her gently on the ground, but in vain did I whisper to her to control herself and not make a scene. As she had previously clung to the horse's neck, so she now clung to mine, and seemed to find the greatest pleasure in swooning in my arms and upon my breast. If a situation of this sort under some circumstances is not destitute of charms for the cavalier, it assumes another character when his fair burden has fully reached those years when she can stand alone, and becomes perfectly intolerable when the spectators instead of commiserating him and hastening to his relief, only move their hands to applaud like mad, and break into inextinguishable laughter.

At least this was what Hermine and Arthur did, while of the two Eleonoras the second only looked at the first to see if she might laugh.

"Duffy, Duffy," cried Hermine, "I have always told you to beware of him!"

"Fräulein Duff," exclaimed Arthur, "do you want to tighten the curb-chain?"

"May I?" signalled the second Eleonora more urgently, and the first replied in the same way, "Laugh, thou innocent cherub!" and herself set the example.

"Come, let us leave them alone; they must have a great deal to say to each other," said Hermine, and hurried off amid peals of laughter, and the rest followed, all laughing like mad, even to the stolid old Anthony, who led away the horse, joyously whinnying, which was probably his way of joining in the general hilarity. The next instant I was standing alone with my fair burthen in my arms, mortified, offended, furious, as I had never been before, so that if a river had chanced to be at hand, I believe I would have pitched the poor Fräulein into it without a moment's hesitation. Happily the temptation was not presented to me, and as the laughter of the departing company grew fainter in the distance, Fräulein Duff recovered consciousness, and unclasping her arms from my neck, murmured: "Richard, you are my preserver!"

Richard was very far from being in the mood to fall in with the sentimentalities of the poor governess, and indeed had at this moment nothing like a lion-heart in his breast, but rather a little, spiteful, vindictive heart; so he let his poor charge slide very unceremoniously to the ground, and stood before her with gloomy brows and probably wrathful looks, for she clasped her hands as if frightened and whispered:

"Richard, for heaven's sake grow not desperate: however clouds obscure the sky, the sun still beams above!"

"Fräulein Duff," I said, "I must confess that at this moment I am in no temper for jesting, far less becoming the jest of others. You will therefore excuse me if I bid you good day."

I sought to extricate my hand from hers, in which I succeeded with some difficulty. But I had scarcely taken three steps when I heard such a lamentable crying and sobbing behind me that I could not help turning round. And there she stood in her green riding-habit, the skirt of which was wound round her feet like a serpent, and upon her pale yellow dishevelled locks a tall hat crushed out of shape, with a green veil, the strings of which were hanging over her face instead of behind.

"Dear, good Fräulein Duff!" I said remorsefully. "Come! I know you meant nothing but kindness." And I drew her arm in mine, and led her, still softly weeping, away from the place of terror, trying with friendly words to comfort her, until we reached the bench upon which I had been sitting, and where I compelled her to sit down, as she was completely overcome. Thus we sat awhile side by side, I staring gloomily at the sand, and she sobbing more and more faintly, until at last she lifted her tearful eyes to me and said:

"How can I requite your kindness, faithful noble friend?"

"By never alluding to it," I answered; "by never by a single word reminding me of this ridiculous scene; which, however, I swear, shall be the last in the wretched comedy which I have let them play with me here so long."

"Comedy?" said Fräulein Duff, pressing her handkerchief to her eyes with one hand, while with the other she held me fast, as I had risen to my feet--"You need calm, dear Carl--your blood is in a tumult--sit here by me--away with these black fever-phantasies!"

I had to laugh, angry as I was, and took my seat again by her side.

"O!" cried Fräulein Duff, "you are joyous and good, and still you understand human nature; and can you really be deceived in this maiden soul which lies before me as clear and transparent as yonder heaven;--yes as yonder heaven," she repeated, raising her arms poetically aloft where in all the sunny clearness of a spring afternoon, the bluest of skies peeped through the thick blossoming branches to our secluded nook.

"How can any one know that which under the best circumstances does not know itself?" I returned.

"You err, my friend," replied the governess. "You take the timid flutterings of this chaste virgin soul for attempts at flight; and yet it would only fly to you, the coy birdling, to you and you alone!"

"In the name of heaven and all the blessed saints, Fräulein Duff, hush! You drive me out of my senses, talking in that way!" I cried, now effectually springing up, and pacing up and down as if demented, which indeed I was; "I will hear nothing more of it and believe nothing more of it, not even if I hear it from her own lips!"

"You will so hear it," said Fräulein Duff.

I broke into derisive laughter.

"You will," she repeated; "only patience, Richard; only patience!"

"To the devil with patience!" I exclaimed.

"What shall be the wager, prince?" said the governess with a sly smile, lifting the thin forefinger of her transparent hand. "I summon old stories back to your heart; old stories. Don't I remember as if it were but yesterday, how she cried when she was but an eight-year-old child, and would not be comforted, when she heard that they had put in prison the handsome tall youth who always swung her so high? how she named all her dolls George, and used to put them in the parrot's cage and say that was her lover who was now in prison, and Poll was the jailor and wanted to snap off her lover's head with his crooked beak? And when I--for, my friend, a faithful educator of youth must be like the good gardener who grafts roses upon the thorny stock--when I tried to substitute for this fantastic form of childish grief, a more poetical one; when I told her of Richard, the Lion-hearted, the renowned in song and legend, and of Blondel the faithful singer, then she saw her ideal in this form alone, and wandered about, her cithern in her hand, until she found him she sought. Chance, or rather I must say the god of love so ordained it that she really saw him in prison, paler than of yore, it is true, but ever fair and stately, and thus has she carried his image in her heart for six, seven years, without being for one moment unfaithful to her Richard. You laugh incredulously, O my friend! You know not how adamantine is the soul of a true woman. Seven years! that seems to you an eternity. My friend, I know hearts that have loved--loved without hope--for five-and-thirty years!"

And the good Fräulein pressed her handkerchief to her eyes and sobbed aloud, but mastered her emotion presently and went on:

"But that is nought to the purpose now; I will not burthen your good heart, at this moment when its own destiny is pressing so heavily upon it, with the tragedy of another life which has been darkened with perpetual gloom by such a misunderstanding as now drifts over the horizon of yours like a passing cloud; nor is 'misunderstanding' the right word in your case: you understand each other as do the two birds there"--and Fräulein Duff pointed to the bush where the pair of finches were carrying on their courtship--"only you are human creatures with human sensitiveness and human pride. Alas, and she is not at all what she seems to be! How has she humbled herself to her love in her hours of solitude! How often has she kneeled before me, her face buried in my lap, and said that her beloved was high above her like a star, and that she could never hope to be worthy of one so strong, so brave, so noble. O my friend, she is proud of you! With what enthusiasm was she not filled when dear Fräulein Paula wrote her how you had acted in that night of the storm, and again 'there is no one like him, no one!' she exclaimed, when you were our preserver on the steamer last autumn. Yes, my friend, you are her religion; and she confesses you before all men, only not before you. Was she not fixed upon having her Richard in a picture at least, whatever her heartless father might say? Has she not adored this picture as if it were the image of a saint, and even fitted up her room in oriental style, that its surroundings might harmonize with it? The same room you now occupy: no other was good enough for her Richard; and her Richard must have it, let people shake their heads as they might, or her tyrannical father bawl in his hateful way, and I myself--I confess it--mildly remonstrate. My friend, to this--to such a step which would be ludicrous were it not sublime--belong courage, inspiration, all the intensest conviction of a great ideal love. The world delights to darken all that's bright--if that be a poet's word it is an eternal truth, and believe me, she herself has had her martyrdom to bear; it is no pigmy's task to maintain one's self against such a father. I will say no evil of him; I will say nothing of him, for where should I begin and where end? And yet she has achieved the impossible: the tiger fawns at the feet of the lamb."

"I learned that to-day," I replied.

"Remind me not," cried Fräulein Duff, "of that terrible hour, which was yet only a further proof of her love. O smile not so sardonically! Has it not been long her cherished hope, here, at this place which is so dear to her, some day to realize with her Richard her dream of love? And now to hear that she shall be driven from this paradise, and that the angel with the sword is none other than the lord of the paradise himself!"

"But," I cried, "am I the one who drives her from it? How can she make me responsible for a thing that she knows to be the cherished scheme and urgent wish of her father, who probably intentionally provoked the scene at the table to-day?"

"Very possibly," replied Fräulein Duff. "Who can fathom the wiles of this labyrinthine old man? Yes, if I rightly remember, she hinted at something of the sort when we were alone in her room, and she relieved her o'erburthened heart in a flood of tears."

"From what we have just seen, the relief appears to have been pretty effectual," I said.

"My friend," replied the governess, "he jests at scars who never felt a wound. Will you be less patient than I, who for all the wayward humors of the lovesick child have only a tear of pity in a smiling eye?"

"It is not given to every one to submit so cheerfully to tyranny as you do, dear Fräulein."

"I am exhausted," said Fräulein Duff, pressing her palm against her brow. "All my evidences glide off from this serpent-smooth eccentric."

"Then let us break off this conversation; besides, it is full time I had started for Rossow."

I had arisen, and the governess also arose, swung the long train of her riding-habit boldly over her left arm, and said, leaning on my right:

"Richard, do not go to Rossow: evil will come of it: trust me; I have Cassandra's foreboding spirit."

"I am, though from other motives, little inclined to go," I replied; "but I am resolved to do my duty and keep the promise I made to the commerzienrath, whether he asked it with a good or an evil intention, and be the consequences what they may."

"'I like the Spaniard proud,'" replied Fräulein Duff with an enthusiastic look, "but it is not always the haughty one who brings home the bride; the crafty one often reaches the goal. 'The monarch's pampered minion seeks her hand--' do you not fear Arthur?"

"To fear, in such cases, one must either hope or wish: I am not aware that I have indulged in either feeling."

Fräulein Duff in sudden terror drew her arm from mine, stopped and exclaimed:

"Great heavens, what do I hear! How am I to understand you? O Roderick, by all our hopes of bliss hereafter I adjure you--do you not love her then? Do you really love Paula, as that insidious Arthur is ever whispering in her ear?"

I was spared the necessity of answering this very ticklish question, for at this moment William appeared, calling me, and saying that the Rossow carriage had been waiting for me half an hour, and that he had been looking for me everywhere.

"Good-by, Fräulein Duff," I said.

"And no answer? None?" cried the governess with a look of agonized expectation.

"This is my answer," I said, pointing to the carriage.

Cassandra possibly found that oracular speeches are sometimes too hard even for seeresses to unriddle, for as the carriage rolled out at the gate I looked back and saw her standing where I had left her, her eyes and hands raised to heaven, in the attitude of the Praying Child.

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Chapter XV

But the deliverers of ambiguous oracles do not always find their avocation an exhilarating one, as I at once discovered while the light, elegant vehicle, drawn by two magnificent blood-horses, rolled over the excellent new road which led from Zehrendorf past Trantowitz to Rossow. It was a glorious afternoon; here and there in the clear blue sky stood great white clouds, whose shadows agreeably diversified the otherwise rather monotonous landscape; larks were singing gaily over the broad fields of young grain waving in the soft west-wind, plovers flew over the great heath, trenched in various parts by turf-cuttings between the beech-woods of Trantow and the pine-forest of Rossow; and from the distance came unceasingly the call of the cuckoo. The whole landscape to its minutest details has remained imprinted on my memory, perhaps because the bright laughing picture was in so marked a contrast with my own gloomy and undecided feelings. The indiscreet question of the governess had lifted the veil from a secret of my heart, which I had hitherto carefully passed with averted face. Only lifted a little, not removed. I had not the courage nor the strength to complete what I had begun, and as in such moments of confusion one usually catches at the first object that presents itself, in order to escape mere distraction, I now clutched the determination not to let my heart, though it should break in the effort, interpose a word in the affair I had undertaken.

In this mood I looked forward to the approaching interview with a calm that would have astonished myself had I reflected where and how I last met the prince, and under what singular circumstances our previous meetings had occurred. But I scarcely thought of this at all, or, if at all, only to shake off the thought and say to myself: I have wandered here into such a labyrinth, that one strange meeting more or less makes no difference. Only forward! have done with it! for it is no longer possible to turn back.

The pines of Rossow--a beautiful piece of woods of fine stately trees--had now closed around us; the road growing sandy, compelled the driver to go at a slower pace, and I sprang from the carriage and walked beside it with long strides, so that I soon left it behind. The trees grew ever larger, the silence ever deeper, the mysterious forest-twilight dimmer, until suddenly I stepped from under the last trees and saw before me a well-proportioned small castle, gray with antiquity, with tall spires on the turrets, numerous balconies and other projections of various kinds, here and there thickly overgrown with ivy, standing in a clear space surrounded by magnificent trees. This was the hunting-lodge Rossow, the temporary residence of the young banished prince.

An old domestic with snow-white hair, who was sitting in the Gothic portal, now approached me, and after respectfully inquiring the object of my coming, and telling me that the prince had been expecting me some time, led me through a small dark hall, singularly decorated with old armor and weapons of all kinds, up several stairs to a Gothic door, artistically ornamented with iron-work, which he threw open with a bow and the whispered words, "His Highness has given orders to admit you unannounced." I stepped into the room and stood before the young prince.

He was rising from a wide sofa upon which he had probably fallen asleep while waiting for me; at least the expression of his handsome, pale, refined face indicated confusion, and it was some moments before he appeared quite to comprehend the situation.

"Ah, yes," he said, at last; "Herr--excuse me, my memory for names is so very bad--Hartig? Oh, excuse me Hartwig--so it is! Now this is very kind of you to come; very kind indeed. I beg you will be seated. Do you smoke? There are cigars; help yourself. Very kind of you indeed!"

He had thrown himself back again in the corner of the sofa, and half closed his eyes as if he wished to go to sleep again. I took advantage of the opportunity to cast a hasty glance around the apartment.

It was a large antique room, not very high, panelled in dark oak, with a ceiling of oak, divided into compartments. Portraits, brown with age, hung around the whole wall, to the solitary wide Gothic window, through the small stained panes of which fell a dim and colored light. The furniture, which was very numerous, was in a correspondingly antique and venerable style: wide-backed chairs, cabinets and tables richly inlaid with mother-of-pearl and ivory; and on the mantelpiece, between elegant pitchers of beaten silver and goblets of cut-crystal, stood a large clock, artistically inlaid, and covered with elaborate and fantastic scroll-work, a master-piece of rococo.

Upon a great bear-skin rug before the fire-place lay a handsome long-haired wolf-hound, who at my entrance had raised his head a little and then laid it between his fore-paws again. The clock on the mantel ticked softly in the silence, a thrush twittered outside of the window, the footsteps of the old domestic resounded on the stone hall, and presently the young prince in the sofa corner opened his large weary eyes and said: "What were we speaking of just now?"

"We?" I asked, in some surprise.

"Ah, to be sure," said the prince, "we have not yet spoken of anything. You must excuse me; but really it would be no marvel if I forgot how to speak altogether; for I have been sitting now two months already in this frightful den, like an owl that dreads the daylight. I sometimes look at my nails to see if they are not turning to talons. How wearisome it all is! But now we will proceed to business. Will you have the goodness to push the cigar-box over this way; and, if it is not too much trouble, touch the bell there to your left?"

I did as he requested, and the old servant entered with a bottle and two glasses.

"You need not wait," said the prince.

The old man placed the waiter between us on the table, and left the room.

"Will you fill your glass?" said the prince; "and mine too, if you will be so good--thank you. We shall need it in this dry business."

But despite this thorough preparation, he seemed to be in no hurry. He examined his nails as attentively as if he now really detected the first sproutings of the owl's talons, then suppressed a slight yawn and seemed to have the question as to what we had been talking about, once more on his lips, but luckily bethought himself, and said, while playing with a large signet on his finger:

"I have always wished to see you sometime at my house; you must know that I take an extraordinary interest in you."

"Indeed?" I said.

"Yes indeed, an extraordinary interest," the prince repeated. "I have retained you in my memory from the time of our first meeting, which, to tell you the truth, is but rarely the case with me. But you seemed to me, and still seem, to be an original, and I take a peculiar interest in originals."

I bowed slightly, and took advantage of the pause to remark, "If it is agreeable to you to hear from me what I think, from careful examination of the chalk-quarry----"

"You see, originals are very scarce," went on the young prince, as if I had not spoken,--"incredibly scarce. No one knows that better than one of our class, who are chased up and down through the world from our youth up. Everlasting sameness: the same stereotyped faces, the same stereotyped manners, the same stereotyped phrases. I could scarcely name more than two or three persons who have produced upon me the impression that I was talking with real human beings and not with puppets. One of these is, as I said, yourself; another is an old decrepit dervish whom I lighted on, if my memory serves me, in Jerusalem, and who told me that after a search of a hundred and four years he had found the philosopher's stone, and that the thing was not worth finding; and the other was perhaps poor Constance von Zehren."

I moved uneasily in my chair, and began again--"The chalk-quarry, about which your Highness----"

"She it was that brought about our acquaintance," went on the prince, who again could not have heard me; "so it is but natural that my memory reverts to her at this moment when I have the pleasure of conversing with you so agreeably. She was a peculiar, a strangely organized being, whose nature has been to me, up to this moment, a perfect riddle, and probably will ever remain so. A mixture of apparently absolute contradictions: proud, without self-respect; bold, even foolhardy, and yet, if I may so express myself, of a catlike timidity; romantic, yet calculating--in a word, I have never been able to comprehend how such characteristics could exist together in one and the same soul. You, as you have yourself known her, will admit the correctness of my judgment; and perhaps will also agree with me in the opinion that one should reflect long before one holds a man who has had the fortune--or misfortune--to be drawn into too close an intimacy with a person of so strange a nature--an intimacy which I may well call perilous--one should reflect long, I say, before holding that man responsible for all the consequences which this perilous intimacy may entail."

The young man was still leaning back in the sofa-corner, playing with his ring, a picture of ennui and indifference. I was in the most painful position imaginable, and inly cursed the chance which had brought the indolent man to speak upon this theme of all others. Or was it then a chance? I fancied that I perceived in the tone with which he spoke the last words, some signs of internal emotion; but I could not be sure of it, and I was about to make a third and decisive attempt to bring the conversation to business matters, when the prince began again in a more animated tone:

"It is not my fault that all happened as it did. I have, it may be, one or two things upon my conscience which I had rather not have there when I sit here all alone, and for very weariness cannot even sleep; but in that affair I am really not the most culpable party. I was very young when I first saw her; she was far the older of the two, if not in years, at least in experience and worldly prudence. How she came by it I know not--with women anyhow we rarely know how they come by it--and she had it all, as I said, in a high degree. It was no slight achievement to blind me to the ruin which lay plainly enough before my eyes; the anger of the prince, my father, upon whom I am altogether dependent, the certainty that I was throwing away the hand of a noble and amiable lady who had been chosen for me: it was no trifling achievement, I say, and yet she succeeded in bringing me to it. And yet, upon my word as a nobleman, I would never have abandoned her, if I had not heard a circumstance connected with Fräulein von Zehren--or at least having reference to her--something of which she was altogether innocent--absolutely and entirely innocent--which I cannot further explain because it is not my secret, but which was of such a nature that from the moment I learned it all thoughts, whether of a lawful or illicit connection between us, became for me at once and forever impossible. Strange things come to pass in life: things which at first appall us like hideous spectres, but which one gradually becomes accustomed to and learns to endure. Do you not think so?"

The prince seemed to be half in slumber again as he put this question; but somehow I could not entirely believe in this half-sleep; on the contrary the impression grew stronger upon my mind that my distinguished host was playing with very laudable skill, a well concerted part. So his confidential communications only made me distrustful, and with a reserve that was otherwise foreign to my nature, I determined to wait and see whither this singular discourse was really tending. The prince probably expected to produce a different effect upon me, for he presently added, with eyelids half closed.

"You once felt an interest in the lady of whom we are speaking, did you not?"

"Yes," I answered.

"Your answer sounds as if you no longer felt that interest."

"Not to my knowledge," I replied.

"Indeed?" said the prince, opening his handsome wearied eyes wide for a moment, and looking me full in the face; "Indeed? that is precisely the opposite of what Zehren has informed me."

"I do not think that Arthur--that Herr von Zehren--can give any information concerning me, that has even the shadow of credibility," I answered.

"Very possible," replied the prince, "very possible: his veracity is by no means beyond the possibility of doubt: indeed I frequently permit myself to assume the exact opposite of what he pleases to tell me. For example, I am perfectly convinced that he was decidedly in error when he assured me that the charming young artist at whose house I had the pleasure of meeting you, would be gratified by my attentions. The reverse seems to have been the case."

The prince looked at me as if he expected an answer, but I replied only by an ambiguous gesture.

"Nor am I any more sure of the final disposal of a certain insignificant sum of money which I entrusted to him on the same day, if I remember rightly, for a special purpose. I beg you! You need not say anything--I am now satisfied. My friend Zehren is very little troubled with over-scrupulousness"--the prince made a slight gesture of contempt--"very little indeed. It is really high time that he had settled himself: such men as he, in a desperate position, are hopelessly ruined. Well, he has at present a capital opportunity for settling himself: I congratulate him upon it!"

I felt how at these words of the prince, which could only be interpreted in one way, the blood rushed to my cheeks and brow; but I controlled myself as well as I could, and only replied:

"I think your highness just remarked that you were disposed in certain cases to take for granted the precise opposite of what Arthur thinks fit to inform you."

"Indeed!" said the prince. "I should be sorry for that in this case. I mean on his account; though I could not exactly congratulate the young lady, whom I have not the honor to know, upon the match. But this time I do believe the statement, because all the circumstances seem to confirm it. I have had several interviews with the old man: he is a horrible--what shall I say?--roturier, and like all the rest of his class, greedy after respectable connections, and distinctions of every kind. This very morning he intimated to me through the justizrath that he would make more favorable propositions in the matter of the sale of Zehrendorf, provided I would obtain for him from my father the title of privy-councillor, or the order of the third class; he has contrived in some way already to get the fourth. For such people it is the height of happiness if they can marry a daughter, and especially an only daughter, into an old family; and the Zehrens are an old family--there is no disputing that fact. How the young lady views the matter, I do not know; probably not differently from other young women in her rank of life. Indeed, it would be a very serious matter if Zehren had deceived me in this affair, and I should not readily forgive him. On this representation I have paid his debts for him; and what is just now more important for me, he has promised to use all his influence with his prospective father-in-law to bring about the sale of Zehrendorf. And on your account also, Herr Hartwig, I should regret it, for I devised a plan which I think it would interest you to hear, and to communicate which to you was the main reason for my requesting the honor of an interview this afternoon. I had the idea, namely, that it would be agreeable for you, and perhaps open you a future career, if I asked you, after the purchase of Zehrendorf has been consummated, to help me in its management, and in that of some other estates here. The prince, my father, insists upon my undertaking the administration of these estates, before he re-admits me to his favor. Now for more than one cause I am very anxious for this reconciliation; but the condition he attaches to it is less easy of accomplishment, and the acquisition of a man of whom I have heard so much that was to his honor, who has borne himself so well in many a trying situation, and--what I consider of most importance--whom I have myself learned to know as a perfect gentleman--the acquisition of such a man I should value highly, yes, inexpressibly."

For the first time during our conversation the prince had spoken with a warmth which was not without an effect upon my susceptible nature, and at his last words he bowed gracefully to me, and a kind and friendly smile brightened his pale refined face. It was a noble and most inviting offer that he made me; I felt that, and I also felt that under other circumstances I would have accepted it without hesitation; but as it was----

"You are a cautious man," said the prince, after politely waiting a little while for my answer. "You are thinking, 'Will Prince Prora keep the promise he makes me? and will he be able to keep it?' On this point I think I can satisfy you. The prince, my father, must be no less desirous of this reconciliation than I am myself; he would eagerly welcome the first advances from my side, and reward me with princely magnanimity for the first results that I was able to produce. I believe even that he would at once place all our estates in this part of the country under my charge. This at the beginning would be a field of action which I should think would be satisfactory to your ambition--you are a little ambitious are you not? As for myself, you would have every reason to be content with me. I am by nature rather indolent, and my training has not done much to eradicate that natural fault; I should give you uncontrolled authority, or, at least you would always find me inclined to agree with whatever was reasonable. Under no circumstances would I be a hard landlord; and as you are unfortunately not in the position to--how shall I express it? you understand what I mean--why should you not give me your service as freely--more freely, I flatter myself--than to that horrible plebeian over yonder? whose affairs, moreover, as I learn on good authority, are by no means in the most prosperous condition."

While the prince was speaking, I had been putting to myself the question with which he concluded, and answered myself that in reality I could see no reason why my activity could not work as effectively for good in this new field as in the old. And yet I could not bring myself to accept the offer. It is so hard for one to renounce a favorite dream.

"I see my proposition appears somewhat to embarrass you," said the prince, a little piqued, as I fancied, by my hesitation. "Well, I will not urge you: think the matter over; you have my word, and I will let it stand for a few days. I am here for the purpose of practising patience, as it seems. Then in a few days I promise myself this pleasure again."

He bowed to me from his sofa-corner as if to intimate that the conversation was at an end, when the rapid tramp of a horse was heard under the window.

"Who can that be?" said the prince, and touched the silver bell on the table. But in the same instant the old servant entered followed by an equerry with a sealed letter in his hand. The old man was very pale and the equerry very red, but both had such agitated faces that the prince exclaimed hastily, "What upon earth is the matter?"

"A letter from his high--I should say from Herr Chancellor Henzel," said the old man, taking the letter from the courier's hand and handing it to the prince without thinking to place it upon the salver which he was holding in his other hand for this purpose. He must have been informed of the contents of the letter by the messenger.

The prince broke open the large seal, and I remarked that while he hastily ran over the contents of the letter, his hands began to tremble violently. Then he looked up and said with a voice which he evidently tried to keep as steady as possible:

"His highness has had an attack of apoplexy. Saddle Lady, or better, Brownlock, he is faster. Albert can take Essex and come with me. Be quick about it!" and he stamped impatiently.

The equerry hurried out of the door, and the old servant ran through another door which I had not observed, into an adjoining room, probably to pack up such things as were necessary for his master to take.

As the prince, who was pacing the room with unsteady steps, did not seem to notice that I was still there, I was about trying to slip away unperceived, when he suddenly stopped before me, and looking at me with an attempt to smile, said:

"Now see how hard it is for one in my position to become an orderly man. I am just about making the attempt, and I am called away in another direction. Now, farewell, and let me soon hear from you. Remember, you have my word, and I shall now probably need you more than ever. Farewell!"

He gave me his hand, which I pressed warmly.

Five minutes later, as I was going back on foot through the pine woods--I had declined the carriage which had been kept harnessed for me--I heard horses behind me. It was the young prince, with a groom following him. As he flew by me at full gallop, he waved his hand in friendly salutation, and in the next instant both riders had disappeared among the thick trunks and the trampling of their horses grew fainter and ceased to sound in the dim forest.

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