XI. THE FIRST NIGHT OF A BARONESS…

XI. THE FIRST NIGHT OF A BARONESS

"Yes, it's all very nice for him, he goes off on his pleasure, and leaves me here alone! What am I to do now?"

Thus Frau Ceres was complaining to Fräulein Perini, when Sonnenkamp, Pranken, and Roland were gone. With the hurry and restlessness of fever she was walking up and down the room, every now and then asking whether there was nothing to be done, and begging Fräulein Perini to tell her what she ought to do. The latter urged her to be composed, and asked her to sit down by her side, and fill out the ground at the other end of her embroidery.

"Yes," exclaimed Frau Ceres suddenly, "now I have it. I'll do something that will please him too; I'll embroider a sofa-cushion with our coat-of-arms. Besides, I have seen hassocks in the church with coats-of-arms embroidered on them; we'll have those too."

Fräulein Perini nodded.

"And something else yet!" said she.

"Really? Do you know of something else?" exclaimed Frau Ceres.

"Yes, it will be something well befitting your pious mind. You have already thought of it, only you have forgotten about it."

"What? what have I forgotten?"

"You intended, when the title was obtained, to embroider an altar-cloth at once."

"Yes, so we will. Did I ever say so? Ah! I forget everything. Ah, dear madame, stay with me always, advise me in everything. Have you a large, frame? Let us begin at once."

Fräulein Perini had everything ready, silk, worsted, gold-thread and silver-thread, frame and patterns. Frau Ceres actually made a few stitches, but then stopped and said:--

"I am trembling to-day; but I have commenced the altar-cloth, and now we will work on at it. You will help me, will you not?"

Fräulein Perini assented; she knew that she would have to do the whole herself, but Frau Ceres had now become somewhat calmer.

"Will you not send for the Priest, or hadn't we better go and visit him ourselves?"

"As you see fit."

"No, we had better be alone. Where is Manna, I wonder? She ought to come, she ought to be with her mother."

She rang and sent for Manna; but received for answer, that she had just gone to rest; she begged her mother to excuse her, she was very tired.

"But where is the Professorin? Oughtn't she to come and congratulate me?"

"She was with Fräulein Manna, and went home again," answered Fräulein Perini.

"She was in the house, and didn't come to see me?" said Frau Ceres, in an angry tone; "she shall come at once--this very moment. Send for her. I am the Mother, to me is honor first due, then to the daughter. Send for her, she must come at once."

Fräulein Perini had to gratify her, but with great caution, she impressed upon Frau Ceres the necessity of being quite composed and dignified in her manner toward the learned court-lady, who must not suppose that people would have to learn from her, at the outset, how to comport themselves in elevated positions.

"You should be rather quiet in your manner, Frau Baroness."

"Frau Baroness! Am I to expect that the Professorin will address me so?"

"Certainly, she is perfectly well bred."

Frau Ceres began once more to walk restlessly up and down the room. Every once in a while, she would stand still before the large mirror, and make a courtesy before some imaginary personage. The courtesy was very successful; she would lay her left hand upon her heart, her right hanging down naturally, and bend very low. On both sides of the mirror four branched candlesticks stood lighted, and once in a while Frau Ceres would put her hand to her brow.

"He has promised me a five-pointed coronet; it will become me, will it not?"

With an exceedingly gracious smile she bowed once more before the mirror.

Fräulein Perini heard outside the arrival of the Professorin; she went to meet her, and begged her to be very forbearing and circumspect with the much agitated Frau Ceres, and not call her anything but Frau Baroness.

"Why did you send me word that she was ill, and call me out in the middle of the night on that account?"

"I beg your pardon; you know that there are sick people who do not go to bed."

The Professorin understood how matters were.

When she entered, Frau Ceres, with her face still turned to the mirror, exclaimed:--

"Ah, that's good! It was gracious in you to come, my dear Professorin, very friendly--very kind. I am a good friend of yours, too."

She then turned round and held out her hand to the new-comer.

The Professorin did not congratulate her, nor did she call her Frau Baroness.

Frau Ceres now wished to know what her husband--but she corrected herself quickly and said: "I should say the Baron now; well--what has the Baron to do in town; must he pass a Knight's examination, and will he be knighted before the assembled multitude?"

The Professorin replied that there was nothing of the kind now, there would be simply a parchment patent delivered to him.

"Parchment--parchment?" repeated Frau Ceres several times to herself. "What is parchment?"

"It is dressed skin," said the Professorin in explanation.

"Ah, a scalp--a scalp. I understand. On it--will the patent be written with ink just the same as everything else that they write?"

She stared a long while before her, then after first shutting and again opening her eyes, she begged the Professorin to choose one of her finest dresses for herself; angry and astonished, the Professorin rose, but she sat down again hastily, and said that she was sensible of the kindness of Frau Sonnenkamp, but she no longer wore such fine dresses.

"Frau Sonnenkamp doesn't wear them any more either. Frau Sonnenkamp, Frau Sonnenkamp!" rejoined Frau Ceres.

She wished to remind the Professorin that she had not called her Frau Baroness.

"Have you ever known of the elevation of an American to the ranks of the nobility?" she asked all at once.

The Professorin said no.

When it was now mentioned that Herr Sonnenkamp had received the name of Baron von Lichtenburg from the castle which was rebuilding, Frau Ceres exclaimed:--

"Ah, that's it! that's it! Now I know! This very evening, this very moment, I will visit the castle--our castle! Then I shall sleep sound. You shall both accompany me."

She rang forthwith, and ordered the horses to be harnessed; both the ladies looked at each other, terror-stricken. What would come of it? Who knows but that on the road she might suddenly become distracted and break out into a fit of insanity?

The Professorin had sufficient presence of mind to say to Frau Ceres, that it would be much better to make the visit to the castle the next morning in the daytime; that if they went there in the night, it would make a great talk in the neighborhood.

"Why so? Is there a legend about our castle?"

There was indeed such a legend, but the Professorin took care not to tell it to her just then; she said she was ready to drive for an hour in the mild night, out on the high road with Frau Ceres; she was in hopes that it would quiet her.

And so the three women set out together through the darkness of that pleasant night. The Professorin had so arranged matters that there was not only a servant sitting beside the coachman, but also another on the back seat. She sought to provide against all contingencies. But this precaution was not necessary, for as soon as Frau Ceres was well seated in the carriage, she became very quiet, nay, she began to speak of her childhood.

She was at an early age left an orphan, the daughter of a captain on one of Sonnenkamp's ships, who had made long and very perilous voyages--yes, very perilous, she repeated more than once. After the death of her parents, Herr Sonnenkamp had taken her under his sole guardianship, and had her brought up by herself under the care of an old female servant, and of one man servant.

"He didn't let me learn anything, not anything at all," she complained once more; "he told me, 'It is better for you to remain as you are.' I was not quite fifteen years old when he married me."

She wept; but then, a moment after, clapping her hands like a child, she exclaimed,--

"It's all a story. It was another creature entirely that went through all this, that used to lie in her hammock all day long and dream out there, and now in Europe--but it is just as well, just as well, isn't it?" she said, and reached out her hands affectionately to the Professorin and Fräulein Perini.

"Do you think," she said, turning to the Professorin mysteriously, "do you think that our noble rank is altogether safe and sure?"

"After the decree is issued, everything is secure, but no one can say that anything is certain before it comes to pass; unforeseen obstacles may arise at the very last moment."

"What obstacles? what do you mean? what? what do you know? Tell me all."

The Professorin shuddered inwardly. The restlessness and terror, the wilful, overbearing, and weak nature of Frau Ceres were now for the first time made clear to her; here was a woman who sought to torment her husband by revealing to her child the father's past life.

With entreaties and commands Frau Ceres endeavored to get a statement of the possible obstacles, and she was only quieted by the Professorin assuring her that she knew of nothing definite. In spite of the darkness, Fräulein Perini noticed how painfully this untruth fell from the lips of the Professorin; in fact she was just able to let it pass her lips, because she felt herself in the situation of the physician who does not venture to tell his fever-stricken patient the bitter truth.

Frau Ceres lay back in the corner of the carriage; she went to sleep like a child that has cried itself out with temper. Fräulein Perini earnestly begged the Professorin to call Frau Ceres 'Baroness' when she woke up. She told the coachman to turn back; they were on their way home to the Villa.

Frau Ceres was hard to wake; they put her to bed. She thanked the two ladies sincerely, and smiled pleasantly, when the Professorin said at last,--

"I hope you'll sleep well, Frau Baroness."

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XII. AN EMPTY NEST AND A HOME FOR ALL

Toiling hard, and still singing lustily, the bird has built his nest from odds and ends from every quarter; restless in his task, he has fed his young while starving himself, contenting himself with the growth of the young birds; and now they have all flown away, the nest is empty and forsaken,--torn to shreds.

Such was the reflection in Eric's mind, as he stood in the evening by Roland's bedside, and felt his heart trembling with anxiety for the beloved youth. He wandered out across the country; he felt as if he must go to some friend, to some human being, on whose breast he could lay his weary head.

He would have gone to Clodwig, to the Doctor, to Weidmann, once more; but they could not change the unchangeable, and who knows but that in another hour he would be needed here? he must not leave his mother, he must not leave the house, he must not think of himself.

Thus he roamed about like a wandering spirit through the night. He saw the carriage with the three ladies in it coming along the road; he hid himself quickly behind a hedge; he could not understand what it meant; he had recognized his mother, Frau Ceres, and Fräulein Perini. Where are they hurrying to? Or had he only fancied that he saw them? He watched a long while, then the carriage returned, and he himself went homeward. He sat for some time on a bench in the field-path, opposite the green cottage; he saw the light go out; at last he went to the villa.

At Manna's window, in which there was no light burning, he thought he saw her looking out; he would like to have called out to her; but he did not venture to; he had no right to disturb her in her sad meditation.

It seemed to him as if a white hand was stretched out of the window; he passed hurriedly by.

With mute lips he walked up and down his room; it seemed to him so strange not to be talking with Roland as he had done every evening, for so long.

Eric thought that he would seek relief from his own thoughts in some book, but he pushed away the book with the hand he had reached out to take it up. Professor Einsiedel was right, he had cut off his soul from the empire of clear ideas; he cannot easily resume the connection. He had devoted himself to a single human being, and now that he had left him, he was undermined, and without support. And still he said again to himself. If thou hadst not sacrificed thyself for Roland, he would not be so well equipped as he is, and as he will yet prove himself to be, in dangers and temptations. I wonder whether he is thinking of and yearning for me at this moment as I am for him? Not now; now the whirlpool of life is laying hold of him; but moments will come when he will turn towards me, and I will be prepared.

Eric was revolving in his mind what would become of himself now; he could not imagine, but consoled himself with the reflection that each coming day would bring its task with it.

It occurred to him now, for the first time, that he had in his possession some of the property which had been earned in such a way. He was determined not to retain it. Where should he bestow it? To whom could he restore it? He knew not, but there was in his soul a certain fullness of freedom, as he thought, and said aloud to himself,--

"Thou art poor once again, thou hast again nothing but thyself; but thou hast thyself."

What fortunes had he not experienced in these rooms! how his soul, his heart had been swayed to and fro with emotion! and to-morrow, within a few days, is this house to be forsaken, left far behind, a remembrance.

And then?

"Come day, come fate, thou shalt find me ready!"

Eric felt utterly forsaken and robbed of his all; he longed after a being outside of himself, to clasp him in her arms, and say to him: Thou art at home, thou art at home, thou art with me. He trembled when he thought: How would it be if Bella should see me? And his cheeks began to glow, for he thought to himself thus: No, Manna, thou alone thou shalt never know, 'twill be better for thee and for me. And how? Should I call thee mine, and bear with thee the burden of this horrid wealth? Wealth! Thou wouldst not be in my way; I have pride enough. But no, it shall be put to death before it has time to live; never shall it cross these lips.

He held his hand for some time pressed against his mouth. At last, shutting his eyes, he said half aloud:--

"Good-night, Roland."

When he woke up--and his first thought was, "How is Roland this morning?"--he heard the church-bells ringing. He left the house and would have gone to his mother's, but he dreaded meeting her, for the remembrance of what Weidmann had imparted to him was reviving in his breast, as if he were listening to it now for the first time. He raised his eyes to heaven and said to himself: O sun, what bringest thou new today?

And wonderful! In the midst of all his forlornness, in the midst of all his sorrow, there came upon him suddenly, as if he were standing on the threshold of fortune, something unspeakable, something undiscernible, and, no one could tell whence it was sent.

The bells were still ringing. There is yet something calling upon men, upon every one, and every one may listen to and follow after it, wherefore not also thou? He did not like to be wandering about in aimless dissipation of thought. "The walk in the open air," as Knopf had called it, came into his mind.

He went to the church, and on the way the good Knopf's words haunted him:--"Our life is not simply a walk in the open air."

He entered the church just as the organ pealed out. Knopf is right, he continued to himself; there are the seats, the candlesticks, the kneeling-stools, and they are waiting peacefully and quietly for the comers. Who knows what his neighbor cherishes in his heart? But it is a meeting-place where we find each other and we find ourselves.

Eric sat down quietly behind a pillar.

As he looked up, he saw Manna kneeling not far from the altar.

So will she soon kneel when she is married to Pranken.

Terrified, as if some one had seized him from behind, Eric looked round; there was no one there. He would have left the church, but the quiet hour and the quiet service did him good. What further he thought of, he knew not. The organ sounded, Manna passed him by, he heard the rustle of her dress, he did not stir. The lights on the altar were extinguished, he left the church.

"Ah, you too were in the church?" was the question put to him in a woman's voice.

He looked up astonished; Fräulein Milch stood before him. He greeted her pleasantly, and said he was not aware that she also was a Catholic.

"I am not one, but there are times when I cannot pray alone, I must go into another house, into one that has been erected to the Most High; then must I be with my fellow-creatures, who, like me, seek consolation and peace in the Eternal, even if they do call upon him in another way than mine. I do not pray as the others do, but I pray with them."

She looked confidingly into his countenance, as if she meant to say, "Thou canst not be alone either." As Eric did not make any answer, she asked after his mother, and begged him to say to her, that she had not been to visit her because she was afraid of disturbing her; but that she herself would always be found at home.

"And you, Captain, must come and see us whenever you feel like it. We have not a great deal to offer, but there is one thing that can always be had at our house, and that is quiet. And you need not even bid good-day when you come, but you can make yourself at home with us, whenever you happen to feel the need."

She now asked how Eric felt since Roland had left him, and she was the first to whom Eric expressed his great longing for the youth.

"Roland has become more to me than my dead brother was!" he exclaimed.

And just as he was uttering these words in a somewhat loud and trembling voice, Manna passed by; she had come out of the Priest's house. She greeted both quietly, and pressed her prayer-book tightly to her heart.

"I would be glad to have her a happy nun, but she will not be a happy nun," said Fräulein Milch.

"Naturally," said Eric, jokingly; "she will be Frau von Pranken."

"Frau von Pranken! Never."

"And are you earnest in saying so?"

"Yes, for Herr von Pranken is going to marry the young widow, the daughter of Herr von Endlich."

"I don't understand this."

"Don't forget, Captain, that I have told you so this day. I know a little something about men. I have never had a word from Baron Pranken except the question, 'Where is the Major?' He never addressed me myself in any way, and I do not take it ill of him, but still, for all that, I know him."

Eric's countenance brightened; he had no reason for putting faith in Fräulein Milch's conjecture, and still he did put faith in it. And now it occurred to him, that he had joyfully anticipated something, he knew not what, to-day; now he had experienced it.

He accompanied Fräulein Milch home. The Major was not in; he had gone to the castle, for there was still a great deal to be done, to be ready for the solemn opening of the castle-which was soon to take place.

Eric turned back and went, to his mother's.

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XIII. A GRACIOUS HAND POURS OUT THE WINE

"Are you, too, down-hearted and meditative?" cried the Doctor, meeting him as he was entering the house. "I find here a whole colony of low-spirited people. What is there then in this whole affair so discouraging? Herr Sonnenkamp is getting new clothes and a new equipage made. In old times, I still remember them, a commoner did not dare to drive out in a coach and four, or, if he did, the horses had to be put in hempen traces. Well, Herr Sonnenkamp is getting leather traces made. What of that? Frau Ceres is sick, Manna is sick, the Professorin is sick, the Captain looks sick; Fräulein Perini and your aunt are the only ones in health in the hospital. Effervescing powders must be the prescription for everybody to-day." The Doctor brought with him a cheerful tone, which, like a spicy breeze from the mountain forests, was sweeping away the mists. The Mother could not tell why she was so uneasy, Eric could not tell why he was. The Doctor counselled Eric to take shares in the new mine; and keep his knowledge as a jewel for himself.

They had discovered a new stratum of manganese in the soil of Mattenheim; his son-in-law had been to see him, and had said a great deal to him about the favorable impression Eric had left behind him in the family there.

The Doctor took Eric back to the villa with him, and just as they were entering the courtyard there came a telegram to Eric. It was from Herr Sonnenkamp, and contained a request that he would let Frau Ceres know that at that very moment he was on his way to court.

The Doctor undertook the responsibility of holding back this news from Frau Ceres; she was near enough to delirium without that; he had ordered her a sleeping potion.

At table appeared Fräulein Perini, Manna, and Eric. After the first course, Fräulein Perini was called to Frau Ceres, and did not come back.

Manna and Eric were left alone.

"You were also in the church to-day," said Manna.

"Yes."

"I must beg your forgiveness, I have done you wrong."

"Done me wrong?"

"Yes, I thought you were without religion."

"So I am, according to strict opinions."

Manna said nothing; she laid the bit she was just raising to her mouth down again on her plate. Both sat silent, opposite each other, for a long while; each was seeking after a safe topic of conversation.

"You had a younger brother whom you have lost? I heard you speaking of him to-day," began Manna, blushing up to her temples.

"Yes, he was of the age of Roland, and this very day I have been wondering why I could not be as much to my dear brother as I have been to our Roland."

"Do not say have been; you are still, and will remain so to him. Roland repeated to me, an expression of yours: 'Friends who can forsake one another were never friends.'"

"Certainly, but what comfort is that thought, if one no longer breaks the daily bread of life with another? I have known, however, that this separation must occur, I have recognized it as necessary; and still, for the first time, I see how almost constantly, for a long while, I have thought of nothing, felt nothing, experienced nothing, but that I forthwith connected Roland with it,--living only for him. Now the whole bent of my thoughts must be changed, a new object found, for the old chain is crushed, severed, cast off, and I feel so homeless and forlorn."

"I understand that perfectly," said Manna, as Eric paused for a moment.

She sipped the wine that stood before her.

Eric continued:--

"I have a poetic friend, a peculiar man, who takes everything terribly hard: he is a man, who, with his whole soul, unreservedly and exclusively, forgetful of all else, loves his calling. He complained to me once how empty, lonely and forsaken he seemed to himself, when he had put the finishing stroke to a work which was then about to go forth from him into the wide world, to find its home everywhere, and to remain with him no more. He had devoted all his thought and feeling, night and day, to the creations of his fancy, and now they had wandered across the sea into another world, there to be no longer his. He could not withdraw his thoughts from them, and yet he could do nothing more for them, for their clearer presentation, for their perfect development. Yes, my dear Fräulein, and these are only creations of the fancy that forsake the man and make him so lonely. How much stronger must the feeling be then, when a living man, who has taken root in our soul, has forsaken us."

Manna was gazing full at him; big tears hung on her long eye-lashes, and she saw a dewy lustre in his; she folded her hands on the table, and quietly looked into Eric's countenance.

He felt this look, and said confusedly:--

"Forgive my egotism in speaking only of myself. I would not put any further burden upon the sister, and I can straightway give you the consolation which I have found for myself, and which will serve for you too. We have no right to give our soul one exclusive interest, and in that way lose sight of all the world beside; our soul must be satisfied to feel that there are other things in the world, of which account must be taken. Only, in the sense of desertion, while this inevitable wound still bleeds, one can do nothing else than wait quietly, and compose one's self in the thought of the fullness of the powers of the world, and the fullness of the duties and joys which lie in our fitness to use those powers. Ah, my dear Fräulein," he said, interrupting himself, "my mother likes to tell of an old parson, who cried out to his congregation:--'Children, I preach not for you alone, I preach also for myself; I have need of it.'"

A smile flitted across Manna's countenance, and Eric smiled too.

"Yes, so it is!" he continued, "it is not to the isolated, to the wandering, to the changeable, but to the Everlasting, we should devote our service; to the Spirit abiding in the universal, that we should be submissive, until he calls us to another post. Whither? Wherefore? Who can say? We experience the death of sweet individual relations, to enter anew into the grand community of the eternal whole."

"You are without religion--no; you shall not say that of yourself, you are not irreligious," exclaimed Manna.

"Many hold me for a laggard, others as cowardly and obsequious, because I believe in God, in a wise consistency and gracious providence, in the events which we meet in the history of mankind in general, and in the course of life of individual men in particular."

Manna's cheeks were glowing, she unfolded her hands, she stretched forth her hand as if she wished to give it to Eric, but, on its way, it seized the flask and she said:--

"We are so grave; and really, am I not a sorry hostess?"

She poured out the wine for him, he drank it at a draught, and while he was drinking, his gaze rested on Manna. She knew that he was contemplating her, she cast down her eyes.

"I must make still another acknowledgment to you," she said. She stopped as if waiting for breath, then she continued:--

"As you were speaking of your being now so sad because you can do nothing more for Roland, it was becoming clearer and clearer to me anew what happiness, what faith I also have lost."

She closed her eyes, she breathed heavily; then she opened her eyes once more, and said:--

"I believed at one time that one could pray for another, for one absent, a distant one, wherever and whatever he might be; I believed that one could sacrifice himself for another, and everything would be atoned for. Ah! now I believe so no more."

Eric made no answer; he knew with what a struggle this acknowledgment was wrung from her lips. Silent they sat opposite each other, and a thrill went through Eric. Now he knew that Manna loved him, for only to the man she loved could she have confided what she had. A spiritual cloud of joy and of grief seemed around him; this maiden loved him and he loved her, her with such a dowry from such a father.

Luckily, a servant entered and told Eric that his mother was expecting him.

"I will accompany you," said Manna, rising. She went to get her hat.

Eric was standing in the dining-hall; the plates and glasses and dishes were dancing before his eyes. Manna returned quickly; her countenance was more serene than ever; she was once more the young maiden, she had the clear voice and the brisk movement of youthfulness, as she made a gentle bow, and invited Eric to go with her. They were detained in the entrance hall; a package for Manna had been received.

"Ah! the silk dress from the Moravians," she said. "I suppose you know, Captain, that these people are not of our church, and still they get their support from the church. Or are you a contemner, of the Moravians, also?"

"'Contemner' is not my word, but I find their conduct inconsistent. They are constantly preaching simplicity, renunciation of self, contempt of show, and of worldly enjoyments, and they trade in silken goods and, Havana cigars; they rely on the sinfulness of other men just like the mendicant friar who says: 'I will not work and earn money, but of course others should earn money for me to beg.'"

"Take in the package," said Manna to the servant.

She walked quietly on with Eric.

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XIV. FROM SIBYLLINE BOOKS

On the way Manna said:--

"Do you know that I had an aversion for you, when I came here?"

"Yes indeed, I knew it."

"And why didn't you try to convert me from it?"

Eric was silent, and Manna asked him once more:--

"Is it then a matter of so much indifference to you what people think of you?"

"No, but I am a servant of your house, and have no right to seek for any special consideration in your sight."

"You are very proud."

"I do not deny it."

"Don't you know that pride is a fault?"

"To be sure, when one makes pretensions and detracts from the worth of others. But I keep my pride for myself alone, or rather, I say with St. Simon:--'If I consider myself I feel dejected, if I consider my fellow-men I feel proud.'"

"You are too: clever for me," said Manna, banteringly.

"I don't like to hear you say so, for those are only empty words. No man is too clever for another, if each one says to himself: 'I have something in my own way too. You should not make use of such expressions. My respect for you rests upon the very fact that I never before heard from you an empty phrase. What you say is not always logically true, but it is true for you."

"I thank you." Said Manna quickly, resting the tips of her fingers upon his hand; and, as if recollecting herself, she added hastily once more:--

"I thank you."

"I know not why it is; I have been delivered from an oppressive melancholy, and I feel as if it was a whole year since I was so sad. We have the good fortune to understand each other in the highest, thoughts, and thought in the highest strain admits no measurement of time."

"Ah yes," rejoined Manna, "in the very midst of all my sorrows the thought has been present to me all day: 'Something is coming that will give you joy.' Now I know what it was. You were the friend and instructor of Roland; take me instead of him; be my friend and instructor. Will you?"

She stretched out her hand to him, and both gazed at each other with a look of joy.

"Ah, there sits your mother," cried Manna all at once; with a swift step she hastened to the Professorin, and kissed her passionately.

The Professorin was astonished to see her. Is this the same maiden at whose bedside she had sat the evening before, whose chilled hands she had warmed, to whom she had spoken the words of encouragement? Youth is an everlasting riddle.

Manna held her hand to her eyes for some time, and as she opened them once more, she said:--

"Ah, if I only were the bird up there in the air!"

The mother made no answer, and Manna continued:--

"I see everything to-day for the first time; there is the Rhine, there are the mountains, there the houses, there the men; a bird of passage,--yes, one that has been hatched in Asia.--is coming towards us, towards you. I am really so sorrowful, so sad; and still there is something within me singing lustily and singing always; 'Thou art merry, do not seek to be otherwise.' Ah, mother, it is dreadfully sinful to be as I am."

"No, my child, you are still a child, and a child, they say, has smiles and tears in the same bag. Rejoice that you are so young; perhaps something of childhood has been repressed in you, and now it is coming out. No one can say when, and no one can say where. We take things too hard altogether; things are not quite so frightful as we women imagine. I am quite cheerful since the Doctor was here. We may become accustomed to look at everything in a gloomy way; then it is well if some one comes and says: 'But just see the world is neither so wicked not so good as we persuade ourselves it! is, and things run on either well or ill, and not in their logical course.' My blessed husband said that many and many a time."

Manna seemed not to have heard what the Mother said; she exclaimed in a merry tone:--

"At this moment we are all ennobled, and still I do not perceive anything of the nobility in me, and yet one ought to be able to perceive something."

There was an unusually light-hearted tone in everything she said, and she continued:--

"Tell me now, how did you feel on the day you laid aside your nobility?"

"No trace of sorrow; it only pained me when my lady friends assured me strongly that they would always remain the same to me; and in this very assurance lay the conviction that it was otherwise; and they were all the time telling me how they had loved me, as if I were no longer living, and indeed to many I was already dead, for to them a human being that has lost the rank of noble, is, as it were, sunk into the realm of the departed spirits."

The Mother and Manna sat trustfully beside each other; for a time every sorrow was forgotten, every care, every anxiety.

Eric had left the Mother and Manna alone; he was standing near a rose-bush and observing how the rose leaves were falling off, so softly, so quietly, as if plucked by a spirit-hand. He gazed at the leaves on the ground, he knew not his thoughts. Roland, Manna, his mother, the terrible past of Sonnenkamp, all was confusion in his mind; he believed that he no longer saw the world as it is. If he only had some one to call him to himself. He felt how his cheeks were glowing, and how he was trembling.

You love and are beloved by this maiden, by the daughter of this man.

What is a daughter?

Every one exists for himself alone.

On the ground floor was his father's library; the windows were open; he went in.

It entered into his mind that there must be something in the manuscripts left by his father that would give him consolation and support; perhaps the spirit of his father would speak to his joyful and sorrowful perplexity. He began to search amongst the papers; everything seemed to be ready for his hand that was not wanted. He untied a bundle of pieces, the superscription of which bore the title, "Sibylline Books;" he took up a leaf.

"That's the thing!" he exclaimed.

He was standing with his back leaned against the open window; he heard his mother advising Manna to adhere right steadfastly and faithfully to her religious convictions. There were, it is true, forms and observances in it which she did not recognize as her own, but there was also in it the indwelling of the Holy Ghost, which alone gives us strength to bear misfortune and sustain joy.

"Mother," he called out, suddenly turning round.

The women started.

"Mother, I bring you something that carries on your idea."

He went out, showed them his father's writing, and said that he would read to them.

"Ah yes," exclaimed Manna; "it is good and kind of you to bring your father here; how I would have liked to know him. Do you not believe that he is now looking down upon us?"

Eric looked at his mother; he did not know what answer to give, and the Mother said:--

"According to the ordinary conception of the word 'looking,' we cannot conceive its being done without eyes. We have no conception how a spirit exists, but there is not a day nor an hour that I do not live in communion with my departed husband; he has come with me here, he will remain with me wherever I go, till my last breath. But let me see--what is it, Eric?"

"It has an odd title," answered the latter; "it treats of these things, which I cannot explain, and which perhaps no one can explain."

"Read, I beg of you," entreated Manna.

Eric began to read:--

"Two things there are which stand firm, while the heart of man is kept vacillating between defiance and despondency, haughtiness and faint-heartedness; they are nature and the ideal within us. The church is also a strong-hold of the ideal, firm and secure; although for me and many like me, it is not the only one.

"You say, nature does not help us. What help is she to me, when the crushing conviction of imperfection, of perdition, of guilt comes upon me and takes me captive? Well, nature does not speak; she simply permits herself to be explained, understood; she gives back the echo of what we call out to her. The church, on the contrary, speaks to us in our individual griefs, she takes us up into the universal; that is the great lesson of the expiatory suffering. We lay our grief aside when we think of the great grief which the greatest of hearts took unto itself.

"And what is the third? you ask.

"A third is, nature and the ideal combined, which together elevate and sustain us.

"What is the third? We call it art, we can also call it love, heroism. In this view of mine, all philosophy also belongs to art. What the genius of a man has created and fashioned out of himself as the evidence of his existence, insight, and will, appears in art as visible forms, looks down upon us in marble and in color, makes itself heard by us in word and in melody, allows us to be conscious and to feel sure that our fractional, half-expressed being has fullness and completion.

"These are the images, these are the deeds of genius, wrought in consecrated moments.

"Art does not console sorrow, it does not heal directly, but it brings before the eyes, it sounds in the ear, saying, 'Attend! there is a life, pure and perfect, that we carry within us. Art is an image of strength, of joy, of content, of courage; it does not reach out its hand to us, it simply enables us to compose ourselves in the knowledge, in the consciousness, in the perception of an existence reposing in itself outside of us; this we comprehend.'"

Eric interrupted himself, saying:--

"Here the remark is made: 'I knew a woman once, who would neither make nor listen to music during her period of mourning, showing what art was to her.'"

A pause followed.

Eric continued his reading:--

"In the hours of deepest tribulation I have found consolation, peace, restoration, solely in wandering among ancient works of art; others may derive the same benefit from music that I have from viewing these forms of antiquity. It was not the thought of the grand world which had here become bronze and marble; it was not the remembrance of the soul speaking out of these forms that held me fast, but something far different from either. Behold here, they seemed to say to me, a blissful repose, which has nothing in common with thee, and yet is with thee. A breath of the Eternal was wafted over me, a peaceful rest flowed into my troubled heart, filled my gaze, and calmed my emotions. In listening to music I could always dwell dreamily upon my own life and thought, but never here.

"If I were only able to unfold whither this led me, how I wandered in the infinite, and then how I went abroad into the tumultuous whirl of life, feeling that I was attended by these steadfast, peaceful, godlike forms; that I was----"

Eric broke off abruptly.

Manna begged:--

"Do read on."

"There is nothing further. My beloved father, alas! left only fragments behind him."

"This is no fragment, it is complete and perfect. No man could say or write anything further," said Manna; "nothing else is needed but to allow it to have its inward work. Ah, I have one request--give me the sheet."

Eric looked towards his mother, who said that she had never yet parted with a single line of her husband's.

"But you, my child," she said, "you shall have it. Eric shall copy it for us so that we may not lose it."

She gave the manuscript to Manna, who pressed it to her heaving breast.

"Oh, I never imagined," she cried, "that there was such a world in the world."

Every drop of blood seemed to have retreated from her face; she begged the Mother to be allowed to go into the house; she would like to be alone, she was so weary.

The Mother accompanied her. Manna reclined upon the sofa, and the curtains were drawn; she fell asleep with the manuscript in her hand.

The Mother and Eric sat together, and Eric determined to make use of this first opportunity, when there was no immediate duty binding him, to publish the incomplete and fragmentary writings left by his father, as there would be found many to make them into a whole within their own souls.

He now felt all at once free and full of life; now there was something for him to do; and he could fulfil at the same time a pious, filial duty, and his duty as a man. He could make essential additions from his own knowledge, and from his father's verbal statements.

He went back to the library, and was deeply engaged in the writings, when Manna entered.

"You here?" she said. "I wanted to take one look at the outside of all the books on which your father's eye has rested. I must now go home, but I have to day received a great deal more than I can tell."

"May I accompany you?"

Manna assented.

They went together across the meadow to the Villa.

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XV. EVERYTHING IN FLAMES

With lingering step they walked by each other's side, Manna often looking aside to survey the landscape, and yet conscious all the time that Eric was observing her. And then Eric would turn away, still feeling that her eye rested upon him.

"You are happy in possessing the thoughts of such a father," said Manna, feelingly.

Eric could make no reply, for the feeling oppressed him, how the poor rich child would be overwhelmed, if she knew what he did concerning her own father; he had no conception that Manna's words were wrung out by this very tribulation.

"I cannot become the heir of my father's thoughts," he said, after an interval. "Each child must live out his own life."

They continued to walk side by side, and it seemed to them, at every step, that they must stop and hold each other in a loving embrace.

"Roland and my father are now on their way home," said Manna.

"And Herr von Pranken also," Eric was about to add, but refrained from doing it.

Manna perhaps felt that he might think strangely of her omitting to mention Pranken's name, and she asked:--

"Were not you and Baron von Pranken formerly intimate friends?"

"We were comrades, never friends."

They were silent again; there were so many things to be spoken of, crowding upon both of them, that they did not seem to know where to begin.

The evening bell tolled, and Manna saw that Eric did not remove his hat. She trembled. Every thing stood as an obstacle between them; even the Church separated them from each other.

Manna wore around her waist, beneath her clothes, a small hempen cord that a nun had given her as a perpetual reminder of her promise to assume in public the hempen girdle. It seemed to her now as if the hidden cord were suddenly tightened, and then it appeared to have become loosened. With her left hand she grasped tightly a tree by the road-side, and breathed heavily.

"What is the matter?" asked Eric.

"Oh, nothing, and every thing. I thank you for remaining with us. Look there--there above--high over the castle-tower, two falcons are flying. Ah, if one could thus mount aloft, and leave behind and forget all that is beneath! What was life to me? A labor, a labor upon our shroud. I wanted to live above the world and do penance, to implore heaven's grace in another's behalf--in behalf of another! Ah, I can do it no longer--no longer."

She passed her hand over her forehead, and what she said she knew not. She continued walking, and yet she felt as if she would like to remain in the same spot.

A woman, who was mowing the third crop of grass in the meadow, called out to Manna, saying that her father had got well, and would help take in the hay to-morrow.

"I wish I was yonder mower," Manna exclaimed.

"Forgive me," answered Eric, "if I cannot help expressing my surprise at your uttering a wish like that."

"I, like that? Why should I not?"

"You have to-day shown such clearness of thought, that I cannot comprehend your giving utterance to an expression so common on the lips of thousands. What does it mean, when one says, 'I would like to be somebody else'? If you were some one else, you would still not be a different person; and if you retain the consciousness you had before, you would not be some one else. To speak in this way is not only unreasonable, but, as I view it, irreligious."

Manna stopped, and Eric continued,--

"We are what we are, not through our own instrumentality, but through an eternal ordination for which we have no other name but God. We must try to reconcile ourselves to what we are, and to be happy in our condition, whether poorer rich, beautiful or ugly."

"Well, I will never again indulge or utter so irrational a thought," replied Manna, extending her hand to Eric. She trembled.

They walked along in silence. It began to be dusk in the shaded paths; neither of them spoke.

"I see my mother yonder," said Manna, sighing deeply as she stopped.

Did she not want to meet her mother while walking with Eric? She had often walked with him, and he seemed like a brother; there was no harm in being alone with him.

"I bid you farewell here," Manna added in a low tone. "What a day this has been! Has it been only a day?"

"And as this sun now going down," interposed Eric, "will again return, and be the same in good days and in evil days, so you have a true friend in me, one whose eye watches over you, and will watch over you until it shall be closed by death."

"I know it! I know it!" cried Manna. "O God, I'm sure of it!"

She trembled violently.

"I entreat you, go now," she added.

Eric turned away, but looking back, he saw that Manna was kneeling at the foot of a large fir-tree, while the descending sun shone upon her countenance, as she stretched her folded hands up towards heaven. Then she rose up; he hastened to meet her as she came towards him, and they were enfolded in each other's arms.

"Heaven and earth, do what ye will!" she cried. "Now come what will!"

They held each other in a close embrace, as if they had but one breath, and were eternally joined in one kiss.

"You are mine! mine! my father, my hope, my world! Oh, Eric, leave me not again,--never again!"

"I leave you?"

"No, you cannot. Heaven will forgive,--no, will bless. See, Eric! Everything is on fire, the trees, the grass, the Rhine, the mountains, the sky, everything is on fire! Ah, Eric, if the whole earth were in flames, I would hold thee in my arms, and in thine arms would I gladly die. Take me, kill me, do with me what you will, I can't do otherwise."

"Come, look up. Is it indeed you?" replied Eric. "You know not how I have struggled. Now you are here, now you are mine! You are, mine, you call me thine. Oh, call me so once more."

In trembling accents, now beginning and now breaking off again, they related to each other their struggles with themselves and with the world around them, and they recognized each other's purity and truthfulness of soul; and in proportion as Manna had hitherto closed her heart to Eric, the whole fountain of her love now welled up and overflowed.

As they stood with hands clasped, Eric said,--

"O Manna, how I wish you could be so happy as to see your own look."

"And you yours. Everyone who sees and knows you must love you. How then can I help it, who see and know you as nobody else can?"

They kissed each other with closed eyes, and over them the trees rustled in the gentle breeze of evening.

On that bench where he had once sat with Bella, Eric now sat by Manna's side, and a thrill passed through him as he thought of that time. He shrank from the recollection. With love's penetrating glance Manna noticed the passing emotion, and asked:--

"Have you too had to wrestle and struggle so sorely, before you saw and acknowledged that it must be?"

"Ah, let us not recall it; care and trouble, conflict and struggle, will be sure to come. Now is the marriage of our spirits; there must be no other thought, no discordant tone. We are blessed, twice blessed. I know that you are mine as I am yours. It must be so."

They embraced; and as she cried, "O, Eric, I. could bear you in my arms over all the mountains!" He saw subdued in her a wild, lawless, passionate strength of nature, such as a daughter of Sonnenkamp must inherit.

No one who had seen the modest, humble, gentle child of the morning could have believed that she could become so impassioned. Eric felt himself taken possession of by a stronger power.

"Ah, yes," she exclaimed, as if she read his soul. "You think I am a passionate child, do you not? You've no idea how untamed I am; but you shall never see it again, never, rely upon that." She sat by his side, stroking his hand, and with an arch glance she said:--

"Ah, dear Eric, you don't know what a foolish child I am, and you are so learned and wise. Now tell me truly without any reserve--you can tell me what you please, for I am yours now--tell me truly, do you honestly believe that I am worthy of you? I am so ignorant and insignificant compared with you!"

"Ignorant and insignificant? You can freely, fearlessly, and without any qualification, match yourself with any one else in sincere aspiration, in pure self-devotion, and in disinterested affection. No one can surpass you here; everything else is of no account. Knowledge, beauty, wealthy--these do not bring love."

"And I will learn a great deal from you," said Manna, gently caressing and kissing his hands. "Ah, keep on talking; say what you will; it is music to me, you cannot think how like music it is to hear you. And do you know that I have heard you sing too? Twice. Once in the great festival, and once here on the Rhine."

"And do you know," he replied, "that I saw you in the twilight at the convent?"

"Yes. You looked at me in this way." She tried to imitate his look.

"And at that time, when we returned from the festival, a dozen of the pupils were in love with you; but I was afraid of you, and yet I cannot now imagine it. What will they say in the convent? They will look upon me as a hypocrite in regard to you, and--oh, Eric, how much I renounce, but I renounce it willingly. And oh, how rejoiced Roland will be!"

"But your parents?"

"Yes, my parents!" said she. "My parents!" Her voice became fainter, her countenance turned suddenly pale, and she drew closer to Eric, as if she were cold. He put his hand upon her head, and played with her tresses, while she held his other hand closely pressed to her lips. No words were needed, they could not speak, for each wanted to say to the other: Do you know what I would say?

"Why do you tremble so, all at once?" asked Manna.

"Ah, I wish you were not rich."

"I wish so too," said she, in a drowsy tone. "Let us be quiet. So--let me sleep here only half a minute. Oh, how like music is the beating of your heart!" She reclined her head for a few moments against his breast, and then said:--

"A hundred years have passed over me, a blissful hundred years. Now I am strong and fresh and wide-awake; now forget all I have done and said, all except one thing, that I am yours, and I love you so long as I breathe, and you are mine."

"You wanted to become a nun, and I--I wanted also to renounce the world."

"But are you not a Huguenot."

"I did not mean that, my Manna. I wanted to renounce what is called the world, and be wholly devoted to a life of thought."

"And can you not do that if I am yours?"

"No. But why speak of this now? I am no longer alone, I am myself and you too!"

"And I too am you as well as myself," repeated Manna. "Now I must go to my mother," she said, raising herself up; "no one is to know about us, neither your mother nor mine, no one."

"Shall I see you this evening in the garden?"

"No, it will be better not to see each other until to-morrow; I cannot--I must first compose myself. Ah, I deny myself. Early to-morrow morning."

She now untied a blue silk scarf that she wore around her neck, and placed it about his.

Another kiss, and still another, and they parted.

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XVI. REJOICE in YOUR LIFE

Eric sat a long time on the bench; night came on, and he saw a light in his mother's house. He knew that she and his aunt were together, and he fancied that he heard the tones of a harp, but yet it was too far off for the sound to roach him. But the tones resounded within him, and the question darted through his mind: How will Manna bear it when she learns the terrible secret? And canst thou share in possessions so acquired? How Sonnenkamp will rave! What will Pranken do? The world will say, it was nicely contrived; while the father and the betrothed were absent, he has with his mother's help stolen away the daughter of the house. Let the world come on! Love conquers everything!

He saw a light in Manna's room, and heard the window shut; he looked for a long time up to it, and then went to the courtyard and ordered the groom to saddle a horse.

The groom said there was none there except Herr Sonnenkamp's black steed.

"Saddle him then."

"I dare not do it. My master allows no one to ride him."

"Do as I order you."

The horse was led out; he opened his large eyes on Eric, distended his nostrils, and tossed back his mane as he neighed.

"That's well!" exclaimed Eric.

He mounted and rode off at a tearing trot. He felt perfectly safe on the horse, who seemed to take delight in his free rider.

Where will he go? Far away--away to the world's end. He felt buoyant, as if the weight of the body were removed, and he could fly away into the wide, wide world.

He rode now down the mountain to the village where Claus lived. All that he had experienced on this road, and all that he had thought, thronged in upon his mind at once, and he even looked to see if Roland were riding by his side.

Roland! How strange! It struck him as an immeasurably long time since Roland had left him; it was the recollection of a far-off event, that he once had instructed a youth on the verge of manhood.

He gazed at the fields, at the vineyards, as if he must ask them: How is it, how will it be when I call you mine--a bit of the world my own! Trees, meadows, vine-hills, fields and vineyards danced before his eyes.

He rode into the village.

Here all was quiet. He drew up at the field-guard's house, he knew not for what reason. The blackbird was singing alone in the still night, 'Rejoice in your life.' She got no farther on in the tune, and this melody, so old and yet so good, now accompanied Eric, and chimed in with the hoof-beats of his swift steed.

From the village he made a bend, and rode up the height where he had formerly sat with Knopf. He had asked Knopf: What would you do if you should come into the possession of millions? And now it seemed to him that a hundred-pound weight lay upon his shoulders. He called out into the night:--

"No, I shall not become the possessor of millions, no, never!"

Now Weidmann's plans rushed into his mind. Above, on the height yonder, hundreds of men were living on their own acres, which once they had never thought of owning, free and happy in the independence secured through that man.

The horse looked round at his rider, as he exclaimed aloud:--

"That would be the thing? But on property so obtained? No!"

Quietly he rode down the mountain, and came in sight of the villa, and the glass of the hot-houses, but he turned his horse's head again. Yes, he must tell one man, one only. He rode to the Major's. Like a wanderer who sees a distant gleam of light, he was glad at heart when he saw the light twinkling in the modest house.

The Major, who had heard the clattering of hoofs--and he knew the black horse's trot--called out of the window:--

"Herr Baron von Lichtenburg, are you here so soon?"

"Up to this time my name has been Eric Dournay," replied the horseman. He dismounted, tied the horse to the garden-fence, entered the house, and was welcomed cordially by both of the inmates.

"What's to pay? Is all well?" asked the Major.

Eric relieved the anxiety of the Major, who kept saying:--

"Just see, Fräulein Milch,--don't be afraid to put on your spectacles,--just see! our Herr Eric looks like another being. You're in a fever; how red your lips are!"

Eric could not reply; he could not say that they were still burning with kisses.

The Major went to a cupboard, and mixing a powder in half a glass of water, returned to Eric. Putting his hand on Eric's forehead he said,--

"You had better take something." He then shook into it another powder, so that it effervesced, and Eric had to drink the hissing draught, without another word. The Major made the sage remark that there was nothing in the world so good for all sorts of excitement as a Rochelle powder.

Fräulein Milch, who saw very plainly that Eric had something to communicate, was about to leave the room, but he called out,--

"You are to hear it too, you and my friend here. I entrust it to your true hearts. I am betrothed."

"To Manna?" said Fräulein Milch.

Eric looked amazed, and the Major cried:--

"God be thanked that she lives in our days; in the past dark ages they would have burnt her for a witch. She knows everything, and sees into the future; nobody could ever believe it. But here you have it. As we were sitting together, she said: This very evening Eric and Manna have been betrothed. And when I laughed, she said: Don't laugh, I'll go for a bottle of wine. Look, comrade, there it stands; and she said: They will come here this very evening together. Well, she isn't yet an infallible prophetess, for you've come alone, comrade. Come here, let me kiss you, my heart's brother."

He gave him a hearty kiss, and went on:--

"You have no father, and I,--I'll go with you to the altar when you're married. Give me your hand. And people say, there are no miracles in these days! Every single day there's a miracle wrought, just exactly as much as in the good old times; only we know how to explain it to-day, and in old times they didn't understand it."

Fräulein Milch had uncorked the bottle and filled the glasses.

"Drink with me, my son!" cried the Major. "Drink! real Johannisberg."

They touched glasses, and the Major, emptying his, kissed Eric again, and then said,--

"Whew! You've learned to kiss. Give one to Fräulein Milch, too,--you've my permission. Fräulein Milch, no flinching! Come here--there--give her a kiss. She's a friend,--you've not a better in the world except your mother,--and you'll find out she's more than the whole world knows; you deserve to."

"I beg, Herr Major," Fräulein Milch interrupted with trepidation.

"Very well," said the Major, in a soothing tone, "I'll say nothing more. But now a kiss."

Eric and Fräulein Milch kissed each other, the Fräulein's face turning red as fire.

They now engaged in a friendly talk together, the Major taking special delight that Pranken would not get the magnificent girl and her millions; but his chief satisfaction arose from the convent's being circumvented.

As Eric returned home, late at night, he heard the blackbird still singing: Rejoice in your life!

There was no light in Manna's chamber, but Manna was standing at the window.

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XVII. THE SERPENT IN EDEN

As Manna stood at the window, looking out into the darkness, she laid her burning bands upon the window-sill, uttering brief exclamations to herself of hope and desolation, of rejoicing and complaint. Only the stars saw her face with its changing expression of rapture and of agony, and her kisses were given to the empty air. She looked up to the well-known stars, and all their glittering host seemed but the reflection of Eric's beaming eyes.

"Why am I alone? Why should I ever be alone again for an instant?" she asked of the night.

A feeling of utter loneliness came over her. She thought of the nun whom she had seen the day before at the station, who looked neither to the right or to the left, going from convent to convent, and from one sick-bed to another, and who wanted nothing that the world could give. How would it be if a voice should now say to her; Thou art mine; turn thy gaze, put off that disfiguring disguise; look around; let others look at thee and greet thee with smiles; hope, despair, be joyous, be sad, be not forgetful of all else in subjection to one fond, painful idea!

It seemed to Manna as if she were standing upon the verge of a dizzy precipice, now about to be dashed over it, and now drawn back; she looked round, for she felt as if Eric's arm were actually about her, and lifting her up into the world. Into the world! What a world! She passed her hand over her face, and the hand seemed no longer to be hers. Turning back into the room, she threw herself on her knees.

"Woe is me! I love!" she cried. "No; I thank thee, O God, that thou hast laid this trial upon me. This trial? no, I cannot help it! Thou, Thou who art Love itself, whom a thousand lips name, and whom yet none can comprehend, forgive and help me, help him, and help us all! May I live in him and in all that is holy and great, all that is beautiful and pure! Here I lie, slay me--slay me, if it is a sin! Heimchen, thou, my sister, a part of my own soul, thou didst flutter a moment in the air, like a blossom fallen from the tree. I, I must, amidst storm and tempest, remain upon the tree of life. O, let the fruit of good deeds ripen in me, O Thou to whom I pray, and whom he reveres, though he prays not, he whose thought is prayer, whose action is prayer, and whose whole life is prayer."

She rose up and stood again at the window, gazing long, in a reverie, up at the starry sky. Out into the night flew something from Manna's window and was caught in the branches of a tree; it was the girdle which she had taken off.

As Eric was sitting alone in his room, he heard a gentle rustling, and was startled as if he had seen a ghost. What is that? He opened the door, and Manna stood before him. They silently embraced, and Manna said:--

"I come to you; I am always with you in my thoughts,--in everything. Oh, Eric! I am so happy, and so miserably wretched. My father--do you know it?"

"I know everything."

"You know, and still love me?"

She kneeled down and embraced his feet. He raised her, and seating himself by her side, they talked together of the dreadful secret.

"Tell me," she asked, "how you have borne it?"

"Ask rather, how Roland will bear it!"

"Do you think he will hear of it?"

"Certainly, who knows how soon the world----"

"The world! the world!" exclaimed Manna. "No, no; the world is good, the world is beautiful. Oh, thanks to the Unsearchable for giving to me my Eric, my world, my whole world!"

Calmly, clearly, and with wonderful insight. Manna apprehended everything; but in the very midst of the recital, she suddenly threw herself upon Eric's breast, and sobbed forth:--

"Oh! why must I have this knowledge so young, so early; why must I experience and overcome all this?"

After Eric had calmed and soothed her, she went away.

An eye had watched, an eye had seen. But they knew not that an eye had watched and an eye had seen.

In an eye had the morning, on awakening, Manna cried, "I am beloved! his beloved! Is he awake yet, I wonder?"

She opened the window. A young starling, that was now, even in the autumn, building its nest, found the thin hempen cord on the tree before Manna's window, snapped it up in its bill, and flew away to weave it into the nest. Eric was below in the garden, and Manna called to him:--

"I'll be down immediately." And in the early dawn they embraced and kissed each other, and spoke words of encouragement to one another, needed for what must be borne to-day, for to-day her father and Pranken were expected to return.

They went towards the green cottage hand in hand, sat down where they had sat with the Mother on the previous day, and waited for her waking. In the midst of all the joy and all the suffering of a secret love, encompassed by perils, they wanted to learn what had taken glace at the capital. They could not anticipate what had really occurred.

Eric let Manna return alone. He told her that he had been at the Major's the evening before, and he, wanted to go again, in order to request him and Fräulein Milch to keep the matter a profound secret.

As Eric was going along the road, a carriage came up; his name was called, and Bella got put.

"I am rejoiced to meet you alone. Do you know that we never see each other alone in these days? But to-day I shall not be with you. Clodwig sends his greeting, and an earnest request that you will visit him at Wolfsgarten. He is lonely and you are lonely, and it will be pleasant for you to pass with him these first days of separation, and to stay with us until you have got somewhat reconciled to the absence of your dear pupil. Clodwig has grand projects in your behalf. You can go back at once in our carriage to Wolfsgarten, and I shall be here with my sister-in-law until matters are arranged. Where is the dear child?"

Eric escorted Bella to the villa, but he could not utter a word. Fortunately, Fräulein Perini came up, and he could hand Bella over to her. He hastened to Manna and informed her in a few hasty words that Bella had arrived. She looked up, half roguishly, half pitifully, and asked:--

"Is it true that you once loved her?"

"Yes and no. Are you jealous?"

"No, for I know that you have never loved, never; you can never have loved any one but me. Come, Eric, let us now go up to her, hand in hand, and acknowledge at once what we are to each other, and also before the world. Let us have no single moment of deception or concealment. I have the courage to confess all, and I am happy to have it to confess. Regard to the world must not deprive us of a moment, of one single moment, in which we can see each other, freely take each other's hand, and appear before the world, as we are in reality, one."

Eric had great difficulty in bringing Manna to use foresight and prudence; he desired her, as the first token of their relation as husband and wife, to conform to his will.

Manna wept, and said peevishly:--

"Very well; I will obey you, but I'll see no one."

Eric tried every means to induce her to see Bella, but she refused, saying:--

"Can you, the pure, the good, allow me to be so debased for an hour? How am I to endure it, how am I to conduct myself, if she salutes me as her sister-in-law?"

Eric told her that Bella wanted him to go at once to Wolfsgarten, in order to spend with Clodwig these few days in which he was unsettled. And when he pointed out the abnormal position of a dependant, Manna tenderly stroked his face, saying:--

"You good man, you have to serve; yes, I know now what this is for you, the pure, lofty soul, whom all ought to serve. Ah, how much have you, dear heart, been obliged to bear! But it is well, for otherwise we should not have become acquainted with one another. Come, I shall be able to do it. I will make myself do it."

She went to receive Bella, and she had self-control enough to do it in an unexceptionable manner.

Eric soon went away, and Bella was amazed to see the glance with which Manna followed him. Manna was desperate, talking much and in an unusually lively way, so that Bella was puzzled afresh.

The Major was now announced; he came to congratulate Manna, and he did it in his cordial and clumsy way.

"Do favor us with congratulations this evening, Herr Major, after my brother has returned."

Manna turned away.

Bella had seen enough; it suddenly flashed across her: She loves Eric. But no, that cannot be! She offered to embrace and kiss Manna, but Manna begged her, with tears, to leave her in quiet to-day.

Bella stood up erect and looked at Manna; it was the Medusa-look, but Manna bore it quietly. Without another word Bella strode out of the house, and left the villa. What she thought, what she meditated, who can tell? She herself did not know, and no one at the villa was at all anxious about it.

After Bella had gone, the Major stepped up to Manna, who was standing motionless, and said:--

"You have done bravely, child--you've stood fire well--that's good! You shall have a backer in me, and in Fräulein Milch too; and if they bother you here in the house, you'll come to us; be easy, you're not all alone in the world. You'll ask her pardon, you'll find out--don't speak--you've a backer in me--and she told me to come here, she'd go to the Professorin; she knows where there's need. I only wish when you've been nine and forty years together you may be to one another what we are--you'll know--you'll have your eyes opened. Very well! Some people can hold out bravely, she's done so. Very well--I haven't blabbed any thing,--have I blabbed?"

Manna smiled amidst her tears at the odd, incomprehensible, and yet affectionate speech of the good Major.

Whilst Manna and the Major were standing together, Bella went through the park.

Hate, deadly hate was excited within her, and her eye seemed to be seeking something on which to vent her rage. What can I destroy here? what can I do to make people angry? Here are pyramids of flowers--if I should throw them all in a heap, if I should nip off the choice plants?--that would be childish! She looked round for something in vain.

She had forced herself to appear friendly, but the constraint was evident. She especially hated Eric and his mother; there was a different tone all through the neighborhood, and she had nothing to do with it; these people had given it. Who are they? sermonizing pedagogues,--nothing but eternal second-hand traders in sublime thoughts! And she, Bella, the brilliant, the admired, who could once confer happiness by a single word, she stood in the background! But they must be off, these parasites, and they should be made to feel who they are, and they should know who has found them out, who has demolished them!

She thought about Eric, about the Mother, about the Aunt, as if looking everywhere for some hook by which to grapple them and dash them to pieces.

She went restlessly to and fro several times between the villa and the green cottage, and at last went into the Professorin's. Here she met Fräulein Milch.

Stop! this is just the person! she shall be the hammer to hit the others.

When Bella entered, Fräulein Milch got up, bowed very politely, and was about to go.

"Do remain," urged the Professorin. "You are already acquainted with the Countess Wolfsgarten?"

"I have the honor."

Bella looked at the modest person whom she was desiring to demolish, and then said:--

"Ah, yes, I recollect. The Major's housekeeper, if I do not mistake?"

"Fräulein Milch is my friend," interposed the Professorin.

"Your friend? I was not aware of that. You are very kind."

"Fräulein Milch is my friend, and is my noble assistant in the work of charity."

"Ah, yes, you peddle out the money of Herr Sonnenkamp."

It was uncertain whether this was addressed to both the ladies present, or solely to Fräulein Milch.

Bella saw how the Professorin's face quivered, and she felt greatly encouraged. Now she had found out the point to begin at. This Professorin had inflicted a wound upon her by means of her son--no, not that, but she had wounded her personally, she had assumed a first part that did not belong to her.

And Bella continued:--

"This wasteful expenditure on the abandoned, on notorious tipplers, will shortly cease."

The Professorin now requested Fräulein Milch to leave her; she had never kissed her yet, but to-day she embraced her affectionately and gave her a kiss. She wanted to calm her wounded feelings, to make her some amends, and show the countess how highly she esteemed the person she had so rudely attacked, who appeared so defenceless, or who did not choose to defend herself. After Fräulein Milch had gone, Bella said,--

"I cannot conceive how you can be so intimate with this person; you dishonor thereby all who stand in relations of friendship with you."

"I think that any one whom I esteem, and whom I unite to myself in friendship, is placed by this fact in a position of respect, and I have a right to expect that every one will show it."

"Of course, of course, so long as you are here. But if you leave the vicinity before long----"

"Leave the vicinity?"

"The work here is now accomplished, and--"

The Professorin had to sit down. Bella's eyes flashed; she had attained what she wished; she had torn off all the tinsel from these people, who were forever making a parade of spirituality, and decking themselves out with sublime ideas, and now here they were naked and helpless.

In a very courteous tone she said,--

"Oh, I assure you, I should be very sorry to anticipate Herr Sonnenkamp's dismissal."

The calm bearing which the Professorin had been accustomed to maintain in all extremities, now failed her for the first time. She had had an extensive observation of life, but never had she seen this, had never regarded it as even possible that there should be such a thing as pure malice, which has no other motive than to be malicious, and derives its joy from the suffering of others. In the feeling that this additional experience must now be hers, and in the endeavour to settle this in her thought and give it lodgment as an actual and accepted truth, she lost all ability to make any resistance.

She cast up a glance at Bella that ought to have overcome her, but Bella was resolved not to give way a single hair's breadth; she must have something to rend in pieces, and as Eric could not be got at, his mother must answer instead. She continued talking for a long time, using very polite phrases, but the Professorin hardly listened, and scarcely noticed when she took her leave.

Bella rushed triumphantly back to the villa across the meadow-path, got into the carriage, which was standing ready in the yard, and returned to Wolfsgarten.

Her passion for destruction was sated, and she felt relieved, and in good spirits.

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I. THE NIGHT BEFORE THE EXECUTION

On the journey to the capital, Sonnenkamp and Pranken were astonished at Roland's fluency and mental activity; he was the only one who expressed himself freely, for both Sonnenkamp and Pranken could not entirely repress a feeling of anxiety. They appeared to be so confidential and open with each other, and yet Sonnenkamp was continually asking himself: Do you know it? and Pranken, on the other hand: Do you know that I know it?

But neither of them spoke out. How were they to do it? Pranken wanted, when the revelation took place, to appear as the innocent, the ignorant, the deluded individual; he had been imposed upon, he as well as the rest of the world, and more than all, the Prince himself. The Prince had conferred the title of nobility--how was Pranken to do otherwise than confide in the man!

Sonnenkamp on the contrary was undecided, and he was glad that Pranken was determining everything; it was no longer a question of will, all was settled and must proceed.

He looked through the coach-door every now and then, and put out his hand, as if he were going to lay hold of the handle, spring out and flee. What a bold game it was he was trying his hand at! He was angry with himself that, close upon the last critical moment, he allowed a feeling of apprehension to come over him. He could not help declaring to Pranken that he felt very much excited. Pranken thought this quite natural, for elevation to the nobility is no small affair. And now, in the conversation that took place, Sonnenkamp discovered the cause of his timidity. Those Huguenots, mother, aunt, and son, with their double-distilled transcendental notions, had brought around him an element of weakness; it would be as well to throw them aside, politely, of course, but they must go their way, like instruments that have done their work, like paid-off workmen.

In this thought of casting something from him, there was a sense of power which restored him to himself once more.

It was not merely allowing others to act for him, he was an active agent himself; he let the puppets dance, for all men are puppets to him who knows how to govern them. He looked smilingly over at Pranken; this man, too, was his puppet now. He began to whistle merrily but inaudibly.

It was late in the evening when they reached the capital. Roland went to bed directly. Pranken took his leave, saying that he had to make a necessary call.

"Don't forget that you are a bridegroom," Sonnenkamp cried out after him with a laugh.

For the first time in his life was Pranken troubled by such a jest; it hurt him because it came from Manna's father, and because he was really going on an errand very serious and moral in its nature and object; he was going to the house of the Dean of the cathedral.

The house was in the garden behind the cathedral, hidden from the whole world, and amidst a quiet that was never broken by the bustle of the capital.

Pranken rang, a servant opened the door, and Pranken was not a little astonished at hearing himself instantly called by name. The servant was the soldier whom he had employed for some little time as an attendant. He received Pranken's commission to inform him personally the next morning, at the Victoria Hotel, whether the Dean could receive him alone at eleven o'clock.

Pranken turned away, and he smiled, when, still thinking of his father-in-law's admonition, he stopped before a certain house. He knew it well, the pretty, quiet house that he himself had once furnished, the carpeted stairs, the banisters with their stuffed velvet, and everything so cosy, the bell up-stairs with its single note, the cool ante-chamber full of green plants, the parlor so cheerful, the carpets, and the furniture of the same pattern of silk throughout, a green ground and yellow garland. Pranken liked the national colors even here. In the corner stands an alabaster angel holding in its hand a fresh bunch of flowers every day. Many a time too, the angel has to bear a woman's jaunty hat, and many a time too a man's hat. And then the door-curtains. Who is laughing behind them? No, he passes on.

He stopped at a shop window with large panes of glass; when going to that cosy little house, he had always brought with him from this shop some trifle, some comical little thing--there are many new things of that kind in it now; he enters and purchases the very latest.

The young salesman looks at him inquiringly, Pranken nods and says:--

"You can show me everything."

And then the hidden treasures of the establishment are shown to him; he does not take anything, however, but says that he will make a purchase some other time, and goes off with his trifle.

No, it is only for a jest, for a farewell. He wishes simply to ask little Nelly what people are saying of him; he is vexed at his being troubled about the matter, and still he is tempted to make the inquiry.

He is not aware that he has rung--he goes up-stairs--he feels for the key in his pocket--he has quite forgotten that he hasn't one any more.

The door is opened, the maid looks at him with astonishment. Nobody is in. A lamp of pale red glass is burning in the balcony room; the little alabaster statue is smiling; Pranken has another lamp brought to him; he will wait. He looks through the rooms, he recognizes the chairs, the sofas, everything is still as he had arranged it.

A perfume strange to him pervades the room; it must be the fashion now,--one always falls a little behind the times in the country.

The clock of the cathedral strikes, the theatre performances must be over. On the table lie photograph albums; Pranken looks through them, he searches for his own picture; it is no longer there, but there are other faces that he does not know. He shuts the albums.

There is a book lying on the table, too; flowers culled from the German poets "for women by a woman's hand." Pranken begins to read it. They are strange beings, these poets! He stands up by the fireplace, glowing coals are sparkling in it; but really there was no fire-place, and no glowing coals; for they never burned, but were always piled up in that way; fire-place and coals were only an elegant ornament of the room.

The cathedral clock strikes again; still no one comes. At length Pranken takes out his card, and leaves it on the bouquet which the alabaster statue holds in its hand; he leaves the place. It is better so. You have acted bravely, as you meant to do--of course.

He smiled at his virtue.

Pah! He would have to laugh and give a little play to his exuberance of spirit again one of these days; this everlasting morality begins to be tiresome. But Manna----

All at once Pranken felt a pang shoot through his heart, as if he had inflicted a wound on Manna.

He shook his head, and laughed outright at the childishness into which he had fallen. And still he could not shake off an impression, that at that hour something was happening to Manna; he knew not what it was, but the feeling possessed him.

He went on hurriedly.

The military club house was still brilliantly lighted, but Pranken passed it by too. He turned back to the hotel. With great satisfaction he retired to rest without having again seen Sonnenkamp. He wanted to read a little while in the little book that was quite filled with a piny odor from the twig which lay in it; the twig was bare, but the falling leaves were preserved like a relic. But he could not endure the words of the book, he felt a certain awe of it to-night.

While Pranken was out in the town, Sonnenkamp grew discontented at being alone. He wanted to be with new people, live men, who could divert his thoughts. He sent for the Cabinetsrath.

The latter came soon, and Sonnenkamp sat down well pleased by his side, and asked what it meant that the Prince had not sent his patent, but chose to give it to him in person.

With much freedom and sarcasm, the Cabinetsrath ironically expressed his admiration of his gracious master, and described his character. He said that no one could really understand a ruler who wished to rule without advice, particularly in the exercise of that prerogative which had been allowed to remain in his hands without the interference of the Chamber of Deputies,--the conferring of orders and of nobility. Sonnenkamp heard with astonishment how the Prince designated everything as "mine"; my manufacturers, my university, my freemason lodge, my agriculturalists, my Chamber of Deputies. The Prince had the best will in the world, but he lived in continual fear of the democrats, communists and liberals, whom he classed together; he was convinced, that every one who did not coincide with the government was a walking barricade from behind which shots might be fired at any moment. He would like to have everything go well with all men, and he had a very fine sentiment which a chamberlain had once composed for him, and which he brought out in moments of elevated feeling. If I knew that all men would be bettered by it, I would renounce the throne and do away with the civil-list. But as he was sure that all men would not be bettered by it, he could remain as he was, in quiet possession of both. He had two hobbies, the theatre and the welfare of the capital. He liked to have very wealthy people attracted to the capital, so that a good deal of money might be made out of them. And he had done a great thing, he had modified essentially the strict rules of ceremony; strangers who formerly were, without exception, debarred of the privilege of appearing at court, had access to it now, if they only spent a good deal of money in the city and were presented by their ambassadors. The Prince does this out of a pure desire for the welfare of his people, for he called all the inhabitants of the capital "my people," even the unyielding democrats contained in it; they had unpleasant peculiarities, it is true; but they were still "my people."

The Prince took a special interest in Sonnenkamp, because he had been told that the latter was intending to build a large palace for his winter-residence in the capital in such a situation that it would be an ornament to the castle park, having it front on an avenue which at present led into a new part of the city. The Prince flattered himself that this would be of great benefit to his people.

The Cabinetsrath related, besides, that Sonnenkamp's affair had taken a particularly decisive turn in consequence of Clodwig's having, in the expression of his opinion, said that, aside from the injudiciousness of creating a new nobility, it appeared doubtful to him whether German sovereigns individually possessed the right to do it. The Prince was beside himself at this remark of the old diplomat, whom he had always regarded as a concealed democrat; and so, partly in consequence of Clodwig's boldness, Sonnenkamp's affair was decided hastily and without further ado.

Sonnenkamp heard all this with delight, and the Cabinetsrath cautioned him expressly to remember that the Prince was really very modest, and not merely modest in words; he liked to say that he was not a man of genius, and it was very hard to find the best bearing to use towards him. The Prince was offended by the flattery, if any one praised him and combated his opinion of himself, and still it would not do to support him in his modesty. Sonnenkamp was advised to say as little as possible; he might exaggerate the apprehension he really felt: timidity would find favor with their gracious master, who was always secretly pleased at inspiring awe.

Sonnenkamp was quite calm once more. When the Cabinetsrath was gone, he rang, and ordered the newspaper. He read it entirely through, even the advertisements; this put him upon another course of thought. Again and again he read the official news at the head of the paper, official appointments, military promotions, and grants of pardon; such things were sprinkled along through the whole year after the grand distribution of orders was over. He was already thinking to himself how it would appear in that part of the paper in the morning, that His Highness had, in his graciousness, seen fit to elevate Herr James Sonnenkamp and his family, under the title of Baron von Lichtenburg, to the hereditary dignity of nobles. And, what was more, the newspaper of Professor Crutius must publish it.

Proud and erect, he strode for a long time up and down the chamber. Then he recollected that the Cabinetsrath had informed him that the Prince liked certain ceremonies, and that he would have to make oath with his bare hand. He looked at his hand. How would it be if the Prince asked about the ring on his thumb?

"Your Highness, that is an iron ring that I have worn since my eighteenth year," said Sonnenkamp suddenly, as if he were standing in the presence of the Prince.

But then again, he asked himself why he should expose himself to the question. It might still be possible to take the ring off; the scar could no longer be visible. With burning face he put his hand in water until it was nearly numb, but the ring did not come off. He rang; Lootz came, and he ordered him to bring ice. He held his hand on the ice, the ring at last loosened about the thumb; it rubbed hard over the knuckle, but at last came off. Sonnenkamp examined the sear that had been concealed by the ring. Could any one now tell that it had been left by a bite?

He was enraged with himself that he had awakened this remembrance to-day. Of what use was it?

He rang for Lootz; he wanted to ask him what he would take the scar on his thumb to be. But when Lootz came he let the question go, for it might have excited curiosity; he gave the steward a commission for the morrow, and finally sought rest in sleep. He did not find it for a long while; for it seemed to him as if a chilly current of air were continually circulating about the bare thumb. When he doubled up his fist he felt it no longer, and so he finally went to sleep with his fist clinched.

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II. DRILLING UNDER FIRE

The sparrows were twittering with one another on the roof, but the hack-drivers were chattering still more busily before the Hotel Victoria, when, in the morning, Sonnenkamp's horses and double-seated carriage waited before the porch of the hotel.

The little hump-backed driver, who always led the talk, now held the first place, and naturally spoke first. He informed his companions that to-day Sonnenkamp was to be made a count, yes, perhaps even a prince, for he had more money than a prince. Unluckily, the first hack was just then taken by a stranger, and the little driver deeply regretted that he could not be on hand when Herr Sonnenkamp was coming out. He recommended the others to give the Count a cheer when he was getting into the carriage.

But it was a long while before Herr Sonnenkamp came down out of the hotel, for he was walking up and down the spacious hall, clad in black, with white cravat, and with the order on his breast. The Cabinetsrath was walking by his side; he said that he could well understand that Herr Sonnenkamp should be very much excited, but that he would be only so much the more easy in mind at noon. Sonnenkamp was all the time biting his lips, and more than once changed color.

"You are well, are you not?" asked the Cabinetsrath.

Sonnenkamp said yes; he could not say that that bare thumb of his was so painful. When he was not looking at the hand, he had a sensation as if the thumb were swelling up into a monstrous size, and the pulse-beats in it felt like the blows of a red-hot hammer.

He examined his hand frequently, and felt comforted when he found that he was suffering under a delusion.

Lootz came. Sonnenkamp took him aside, and he informed him that Professor Crutius regretted that he was unable to pay him a visit, being obliged at that moment to set about preparing the evening edition.

"Did you bring the morning edition with you?"

"No, it will not be issued until eleven o'clock."

"Why didn't you wait for it? it is nearly eleven now."

"I thought that you might want something else, sir, before going up to the castle."

"Very well, give me my overcoat."

Joseph was standing near at hand all ready with it; Sonnenkamp took leave of Roland and Pranken, who were going to ride out with some companions; he requested them to be back at the hotel at twelve o'clock precisely.

For the last time the commoner Sonnenkamp descended those steps, to ascend them next as a Baron. The Cabinetsrath walked by his side.

When he entered the carriage below, the hack-drivers, as they had been recommended, wanted to raise a cheer, but they could not bring it out: it was of no use to try without the dwarf who knew how to lead off; they stood all together in a knot staring at Sonnenkamp, and took off their hats.

Sonnenkamp acknowledged the salutation most graciously.

The Cabinetsrath regretted that he could not go with him; he simply ordered the coachman to stop before the great gate of the palace.

Pranken left Roland alone, as the Ensign had promised to call for the latter when he got back from the drill ground. With an unusually quiet tone and modest manner, Pranken bade good bye until they met again at table, for Sonnenkamp had ordered an elegant little lunch for four, himself, his son and son-in-law, and the Cabinetsrath.

Sonnenkamp dashed along through the streets of the city; the people on foot stood still. Many who knew him saluted him, and many too, who did not know him; for a foreign prince might sit in such a carriage, and deference must be paid to a foreign prince.

The horses trotted on gaily, as if they knew to what honor they were carrying their master. Sonnenkamp lay back in the carriage, and played awhile with the order upon his breast. This token gave him an encouragement; for why was he apprehensive in taking the second step, when he had felt no apprehension in taking the first, and no danger had yet made its appearance?

The carriage drove past a building with many windows. Sonnenkamp knew it. It was the editing and printing establishment of Professor Crutius. Knots of men were standing in front of it, some of them reading a copy of the paper; they looked up and nodded, as the handsome carriage passed by. Sonnenkamp would have liked to stop to get a paper; he had already grasped the check-string, intending to gives Bertram the signal to stop, but he dropped it again.

Why is this? Why is he so anxious to get the newspaper to-day? Ah, men are better off in the desolate wilderness, where not one human being is to be seen, where there are no newspapers nor anything of the kind. So Sonnenkamp thought to himself, as he drove through the lively capital to the palace of the Prince.

A jolt suddenly startled him; the carriage was stopped. Around the corner, a battalion of soldiers was approaching with loud music. The carriage had to stop until the soldiers had all passed by, and it required some effort to keep the horses in check, on account of the noise.

Now they were all past; Sonnenkamp looked at his watch. It would be a terrible thing if, at the very outset, he should have missed the appointed minute, and have been obliged to excuse himself to the Prince. Are you then so far a prisoner? Are you then so bound to the very minute?

He was almost ready to call out to the coachman to turn back; he would have nothing to do with the whole affair.

Again he was angry with himself at being so powerfully excited without cause. He let down the carriage window, took off his hat, and was delighted to feel the refreshment of the cool breeze.

Bertram proudly drew up the carriage before the grand portal. Both the sentinels stood still; they were waiting to see whether they should shoulder or present arms. The carriage door was opened, the sentinels remained motionless, for only a man in black clothes, with a single order, stepped out.

Joseph accompanied Sonnenkamp to the large high-studded porch, which was white and richly ornamented with stucco work. At the foot of the step were two handsomely chiselled marble wolves; they looked at Sonnenkamp in almost a friendly way; and really, everything looked as splendid as could be imagined. Sonnenkamp made a sign to Joseph that he might give something, suitable to the occasion to the lackeys in attendance here; he had provided him with an uncounted handful of gold for the purpose; he could trust Joseph.

The porter in grand livery, with broad hat and gold-tipped staff, asked whom he should announce.

Sonnenkamp and Joseph looked at each other in embarrassment. Joseph was discreet enough to leave the answer to his master, and Sonnenkamp did not know whether he ought to say Baron von Lichtenburg or Herr Sonnenkamp.

Pooh, what did it signify giving the old name to this lackey? This name appeared to him so repugnant, thrown off for good like a worn-out shoe; it was so hard to understand how he had borne it so long, without being ashamed of it before the whole world. Finally Sonnenkamp answered with evident condescension:--

"I have been ordered to wait upon His Highness."

He felt badly to be obliged to use the word "ordered" before Joseph--he, Sonnenkamp, had been "ordered"--but he wished to show the footman at any rate that he was acquainted with court phraseology.

The footman pressed a telegraphic bell; a valet dressed in black appeared at the head of the staircase, and said that the Herr Baron had been expected for two minutes, and must make all the haste possible. It seemed almost as if an avenging angel from heaven were announcing here below some shortcoming or transgression.

With trembling knees Sonnenkamp stumbled up the carpeted staircase; he had to draw on his gloves on the way up, saying silently to himself meanwhile:--

"Keep yourself easy now."

At the top of the staircase a second valet appeared, white-haired, in short black knee-breeches and high black gaiters, and said:--

"Do not hurry, Herr Sonnenkamp, His Highness has not returned yet from the drill ground."

Sonnenkamp felt like knocking the first valet down for having put him into such a state of anxiety. He regretted that he had commissioned Joseph to give every one of the servants a piece of gold; he hoped that Joseph, after all, was a rogue, and would keep the gold for himself, and give the cursed attendants none of it.

The white-haired valet conversed freely with Sonnenkamp, and informed him, that he had been with Prince Leonhard in America; it was a hateful country, without order and without manners; he thanked God, when he got home again.

Sonnenkamp did not know how he ought to take this freedom; but the best way was to put up with it silently. He listened with assenting nods, and thought to himself, What a way they have of doing things here in the palace! It is just as if the people in it didn't walk on their feet; everything is so mysterious; as if something was going on every moment that had nothing at all in common with the life of other men.

The white-haired valet requested Sonnenkamp to sit down while he waited.

Sonnenkamp did sit down, and drew off his right-hand glove; he wanted to be able to do it without difficulty when the time came to unglove that hand for the oath; and then he presented some gold pieces to the white-haired valet.

The experienced valet withdrew, bowing, to the end of the room; he knew the dread that was felt by those who are not accustomed to the court, and would leave the man to compose himself.

Sonnenkamp sat still; again those wild pulsations began to hammer away in his thumb; he called for a glass of water.

The white-haired valet called to another, this one to a third, and the call for a glass of water went far into the distance.

A very old clock that was standing on the mantle-piece struck the quarter hour. Sonnenkamp compared his watch with it, and found that it was very slow; he determined in future to set his watch, by the clock in the palace.

Sonnenkamp was alone: and yet he little thought that through the clear edges of the ground glass in a door behind him, two eyes were fastened upon him, and that those eyes were rolling savagely in their sockets.

Just as the glass of water made its appearance, it was announced that Herr Sonnenkamp might enter. He could not even once moisten his lips.

He entered the large hall, where it was bright daylight; but he staggered back, for directly opposite to him hung an engraving, a work of Alfred Rethel's. A strong-limbed man with the murderer's knife still in his hand, bending and stooping, was making his escape over a heath; the bushes on the road were blown aside by the wind, and above the fugitive hovers a supernatural shape, holding a sword, with the point downward, directly over the head of the fleeing criminal.

Sonnenkamp rubbed his eyes.

What is the picture here for? Or is it only a creation of his own fancy?

He did not have time to decide this matter for himself, for just then the Prince entered noiselessly from behind the curtain of the door, over the thick heavy carpet. He was dressed in full uniform, with a broad band thrown over the right shoulder and across his breast. He carried himself very erect, and merely nodded slightly. He bade Sonnenkamp welcome, and excused himself for having kept him waiting.

Sonnenkamp bowed low, without uttering a word.

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III. A BLOOD-RED STREAK

"Is your son with you?"

"Yes, your Highness."

"Is he still determined to enter the army?"

"He is anxious to do so."

"I like the noble-looking youth, and will take care that the ladies do not spoil him; they would like to make a plaything of him. Has he already applied for admission?"

"Not yet, your Highness. I wished to have the application made in the name that your Highness is pleased to confer upon me."

"Quite right," answered the Prince. On his writing-table were two telegraphic knobs, a white and a black one; he pressed the white one; the old valet entered, and the Prince said,--

"I desire that there shall be no one in the ante-chamber."

The attendant withdrew. Sonnenkamp gazed questioningly at the Prince, who said:--

"Your elevation to rank has been a difficult matter for me. You have many enemies, of course."

Sonnenkamp's eyes closed for a moment, as if some one were brandishing a dagger before them; and then he gazed at the picture; it was no creation of his fancy, it was hanging there behind the Prince. Why did the Prince have it in his cabinet?

"You are a man of noble ideas," began the Prince anew; "you have shaped your life yourself, I respect you for that; such men deserve the highest honors. I am glad that I can confer them on you, as I can."

Sonnenkamp wanted to say that he was well aware of the opinion of the Count of Wolfsgarten, but that he did not question the absolute power of the Prince; but it seemed better to be silent. Why should he embark in a discussion which would only lengthen out the scene? And besides, the Cabinetsrath had strongly urged upon him the necessity of discretion.

The Prince now went over once more all the noble and good things which Sonnenkamp had done. The latter listened modestly with downcast eyes; he really found it very trying to hear it all now in his present position; the Prince might defer it until a party, or a hunt, or some other occasion would offer a favorable opportunity. Sonnenkamp was of the opinion that the whole court, as well as himself, looked upon all these stories about nobility as nothing more than an excellent necessary humbug; he was astonished to find the Prince so solemn and earnest in a tête-à-tête. Or was this part of the humbug?

But the Prince was going through with what was before him as became a man moved by duty, however unpleasant the duty might be; he evidently considered it proper to declare his motives, in order to exhort the man to strive after things still more noble. He seemed to himself at this moment a kind of priest, who, concealed from the whole world in the inner sanctuary of the temple, is consecrating a novice; he was much moved himself. The first chamberlain had not been wrong; the Prince had returned to the palace some time before the hour appointed, but he had been quietly preparing himself beforehand for this solemn ceremony.

Since Herr von Endlich's elevation to the nobility, the Prince had been in the habit of using certain set phrases; no one knew who had originated them, but he often repeated, like a lesson learned by heart, the words--"Yes, yes, it is an established rule, an excellent rule, that the monumental should not be treated lightly. One should not carve in stone, or cast in bronze, a momentary jest or whim, to look awkward and out of place as time goes on; such things are only fit to enliven the passing moment. The transient should not be transformed into an enduring monument."

He did not show distinctly what was in his mind, but it was easy to see what he meant. He had not done well in making a pun with the name he had conferred upon Herr Ton Endlich, for what is more monumental than elevation to rank? The present occasion, therefore, he wished to make a thoroughly solemn one.

Patiently, and like a child bending forward to receive confirmation, Sonnenkamp bowed his head. Several times the Prince stretched out one hand, several times the other, several times both together, while he was speaking of the blessings which men strongly armed with the knowledge of the higher duties spread around them. Sonnenkamp expected every minute that he would lay both hands upon his head and bless him, and although the Prince was younger than himself, he would have received the blessing with modesty and humility, for this man had been consecrated by the custom of ages for the dispensation of honor.

At this moment Sonnenkamp tried to be right monarchically inclined; if it had been demanded of him, he would, with every prescribed formula, have solemnly foresworn republic, constitution, and whatever was firmly fixed by the power of law.

In the midst of his remarks the Prince took up a roll, covered with blue velvet, that was lying on his table; he took off the covering and drew out a parchment roll that crackled and rustled, and bore a broad glistening seal.

Sonnenkamp took off his right-hand glove; now comes the moment when he must take the oath and receive the parchment that is to make him a new man. He was ready to be made a new man; he tried to be deeply affected, and sought for the only thing in the world that could really affect him deeply and make him tremble. And now in the middle of the Prince's cabinet he saw before him a church-yard covered with snow in a Polish village, and there was his mother's grave; he did not hear what the Prince was saying while he held the parchment in his hand, but his words were undoubtedly very moving.

But now, what does that mean? the Prince laid the parchment down again on the table, and, sitting down, said:--

"I am glad to see, in your eyes, how profoundly you feel this moment. Pray be seated." Sonnenkamp sat down, and the Prince continued:--

"Let us discuss one more subject, in a quiet way. You have held many slaves, have you any still?"

"No, your Highness."

"Was it only a longing for Germany that induced you to return to the Old World, or was it also your finding the condition of affairs in the vaunted Republic unbearable?"

"The latter, your Highness, although the former had something to do with it. I see trouble brewing in the United States, which--I say this only to your Highness--cannot be settled except by the establishment of a monarchy in the New World."

"Good, you must explain the matter to me more fully some other time. I am glad to learn--very glad. It is our duty to receive instruction from those who understand a particular subject thoroughly. What do you think of slavery in general?"

"That is a very extensive subject, your Highness; I have put my views upon it in writing; I shall have the honor----"

"No, just tell me concisely the kernel, the principle of the thing."

"Your Highness, the niggers are an inferior race, that is an established physiological fact; it is idle dreaming--though honestly maintained by many--which leads directly to the ruin of the nigger himself, to set him down as entitled to the same rights with other men."

"And would you--" asked the Prince, "No, I will put another question to you. How do you regard a man who traffics in beings of this inferior race?"

Sonnenkamp started up immediately from his chair, but he sat down again quickly, and said:--

"Creatures, your Highness, who cannot help themselves, and who never will be able to, are protected as they would not otherwise be by being considered as property; that so called generosity, without profit, without material regard either for property or for honor, is like a soul without a body; one can conceive it, but it does not exist, at least in the world we see before us."

"Very fine--very good. You are a thinker. I myself believe that the negro is better off with a master. But how is it when you see with your own eyes the child sold away from the mother, and in that way every tie of family forcibly torn asunder?"

"But, your Highness, that happens very seldom, or rather hardly ever," replied Sonnenkamp with great composure, "for it would be a material disadvantage, and would make the slaves less inclined to work; but should it happen, any sentimental feeling about the matter would be only narrowing the sentimentalism from a wider sphere to a special case. A brute that has outgrown the care of its parents knows the parents no more, mates do not know each other after the brooding time is past. I will not say----"

"What is it?" said the Prince, interrupting him suddenly.

The white-haired valet entered.

"Why am I interrupted?"

"His Excellency the Minister begs your Highness to open this immediately."

The Prince opened the letter, and took out a printed sheet; a red line ran along the margin of it like a streak of blood. The Prince began to read, he looked up from the page towards Sonnenkamp: he read on farther, the paper cracked and trembled in his hand; he laid it down on the table and said:--

"Confounded audacity!" Sonnenkamp was standing at the table, and it seemed to him as if the two telegraphic knobs had changed into eyes, one white and one black, and from the green table a fabulous creature of strange form was shaping itself,--a queer monster with a white and a black eye, and that it was emerging from the deep, moving along sluggishly, and staggering from side to side. As if in the frenzy of fever he sat there collecting all his strength. The Prince, looking now at the paper, now at Sonnenkamp, at last walked up to him and held out the paper; the rustle of it was like the stab of a knife as he said:--

"Here, read it--read it."

Printed in large letters on it were these words marked with red ink:--

"A humble suggestion for a coat-of-arms and escutcheon for the ennobled slave-trader and slave-killer, James Heinrich Sonnenkamp, formerly Banfield, from Louisiana--"

Sonnenkamp read only these words, and then stared up at the Prince, on whose face was a distorted smile.

"Give me your hand," said the Prince, "give me your hand and tell me, on your word of honor, that it is a lie. Give me your hand, and we will then crush the impudent scoundrels."

Sonnenkamp staggered back, as if a shot had struck him. What was all that he had enjoyed in life compared with the anguish of this moment?

He stretched out his hand doubled up, as if he wished to say: I can break you like a slender twig. But he opened his hand, and held it on high with the forefinger pointing to heaven.

Then suddenly there appeared in front of him a large powerful negro, rolling his eyes and showing his teeth.

With a cry more like that of a wild beast than of a human being, Sonnenkamp fell backwards upon his chair.

The figure in front of him gave a yell, and behind him yelled another--it was Adams, who had rushed in.

"Prince! master!" cried the negro, "this is the man who took me, who carried me off as a slave, and pitched me into the water. Let him only show his finger, it still bears the mark of my teeth. Let me have him, let me have him! I'll suck his blood for him, I'll choke him! Only let me have him a minute--let me have him! then kill me!"

Adams caught hold of Sonnenkamp's hand from behind, and clutched it as if he would crush it.

Sonnenkamp struggled with all his might to throw off the powerful hold, wrestling with the negro clinging fast to him; and his anguish was doubled, for he was not only wrestling, but, as he thought, he could see in the mirror opposite two beings, one was himself--was it really he?--the other a devil, a demon.

Is it all only a fever-fancy, or is it reality?

The Prince's finger constantly plied the telegraphic bell on his table; servants began to pour in, in great numbers.

The Prince cried:--

"Take Adams out. See that he keeps quiet; and the rest of you show this man out of the palace."

Adams was torn away from Sonnenkamp; he roared like a bull that has received the fatal stroke, and foamed at the mouth.

The Prince took the parchment with the red seal up from the table, and turned away with it.

Then Sonnenkamp rose up; he glanced at the Prince, his eyes almost starting from their sockets, and shrieked out:--

"What would you have? and what then are you? Your ancestors, or connections, or whatever else they were, sold their subjects away into America, and got a fixed price for a shot-off arm, for a lucky corpse. You have trafficked in white men, and sent them across the sea. And what are you now? Secret proprietors of gambling hells at home. Pah! I bought my slaves from a prince, bought them honorably, but what did you do? You sold off your subjects, and on Sundays those who were left behind had to say amen in the church, when the Lord of lords was supplicated for your welfare. Are you ashamed of this kinship? But I tell you he was a man, and deserved better to reign than----"

He was not sure whether the Prince still heard what he was saying; the servants seized him and gave him to understand that he must be quiet, that such loud talking was not permitted there.

Sonnenkamp had fallen; he was raised again, and led down the staircase. He looked about him often, as if he wanted to say, I shall never tread these halls more.

Below, the carriage was waiting. Sonnenkamp leaned on Joseph and said:--

"Joseph, sit beside me in the carriage."

That was all he said.

When they had reached the hotel, and got out, the little fellow was in the midst of the hackmen; they all had courage enough now, and cried out:--

"Long live the Baron! hurra! again hurra!"

Sonnenkamp could not utter a word. Was the world mocking at him?

He could not tell how he got up the steps. In a moment he was sitting in a large chair; he gazed at the mirror, as if in that room too the reflection of the negro must confront him there.

He sat there, staring, without speaking a word.

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IV. DISSECTED

Sonnenkamp leaned back in the arm-chair and stared before him; then he looked at the chair itself and caught hold of the arms of it, as if he wanted to ask, Does the chair I am sitting on still hold together? Then, as he laid his hand upon his breast, he began to quiver like an aspen; he felt the order, tore it off with vehemence, and cried:--

"So it in, I must struggle with two worlds. I must fight with the old one as I have with the new. Cheer up! the new hunt is beginning. I will not suffer myself to be put down. I must either despise myself, or despise you; we will see who is strongest, who is most worthy."

It breathed new life into him to think that the world so despised him.

"Just so! I can do that too; I despise you all!"

"But the children! the children!" something whispered to him. When he was waging war in America, the children knew nothing of it. He rang and asked:--

"Where is Roland?"

"The young master has not got back yet; he was here at twelve o'clock, and asked for you, but he rode away again with some comrades."

"He should have waited," exclaimed Sonnenkamp. "Well--it is better so," he said, calming himself.

Again he was sitting alone; his mind turned inward on itself, and now the matter was clear to him. So it was that the men outside the printing-office had been reading; it was through mockery that the poor devils in front of the hotel had raised a cheer for him.

He stood up and looked through the window. The hack-drivers were standing together in a group, and the dwarf was reading to them from the newspaper; they may have felt that Sonnenkamp was looking at them, for all at once they turned their gaze upwards, and Sonnenkamp as if struck by a hundred bullets staggered back into the middle of the room; then he sat down and held his open hands together between his knees. He had gazed into an abyss; it had dizzied him, but he was composing himself with courage and decision. He knew how at this moment they were talking about him all over the city, in carpeted hall and plastered stable--they are saying: I wouldn't take all his millions to be in his shoes. Very assiduously did Sonnenkamp picture everything to himself--and what will be in the paper in the morning?

Sonnenkamp sat silent a long time, buried in himself; at length a letter was brought to him, bearing a large seal. Sonnenkamp started; could the Prince have regretted what had happened, and have gone so far as to join with him, and, truly great, thus defy the world? Long he stared at the seal; but it was only that of the newspaper office, and the weighty letter contained several pieces of gold. Crutius, with many thanks, returned what he had received at the time he had gone up to the villa, and explained that he would have sent it back much sooner if he had not desired to pay it with interest.

"Pshaw! how contemptible," cried Sonnenkamp. For sometime he weighed in his hand the gold that had been scornfully returned to him. So it is then! Every one dares to scorn you, and you must be quiet when every one pities you.

He had a revolver with him, he sprang up; he took it up, waved it in the air, turned it over. "Yes, that was the course to take! To the printing-office and shoot down this Professor Crutius like a mad dog! But in this country that cannot go unpunished. And should he, then, shoot himself, be thrown into prison, and have his head cut off?

"No, no! we must work the thing differently," he said to himself. He laid the revolver back again in the case, and rang. Joseph came, he was trembling. Who knows what the man-eater is going to do with him now?

"Ah, master!" said Joseph, "I remain with you. The coachman Bertram has taken service here in the house. I do not want double and treble wages, which people say you will have to give now."

"Good! Who was your father, is he still alive?"

"Yes, indeed; my father is in the School of Anatomy, and when the corpses of the suicides came to the dissecting-house, my father often used to say: Yes, yes, when one has done that most frightful thing in the world, he must be dissected into the bargain. Excuse me, Sir, I too am quite confused. But the Professorin told me once, that every one has done something in his life out of the way, and so we should stand by and be true to one another."

A peculiar smile flitted over Sonnenkamp's countenance; the poor rogue was playing the kind-hearted, and bestowing forgiveness upon him.

"So? the Professorin?" said he. In a moment his thoughts were in the villa, in the park, in the hot-houses, in the greenhouse. He wanted to ask Joseph whether the Professorin had said anything more definite, and whether she knew all about him. But he kept back the words, and simply said that he wanted to send some messengers.

"And do you see to it too, let Roland be hunted up and brought here at once. Let Herr von Pranken be sent for, too," he cried out after Joseph.

Roland was hard to find, but Pranken was not to be found at all, for he was in a place where no one would ever have thought of looking for the life-enjoying Baron.

The head waiter entered and said that dinner was ready, and asked when it should be served up. Sonnenkamp looked hard at the questioner. The creature surely knew that he would eat nothing, and had only come to spy upon him; perhaps there were many people down below who would like to hear how Herr Sonnenkamp bore himself just now. Sonnenkamp rose proudly, looked at the head waiter with a repelling glance, and told him that he need not ask, he would let him know when he wanted what he had ordered; and at the same time he charged him to see to it, that no one should be allowed to enter his room without having been announced.

One thing after another passed in confusion through his brain; Joseph had told him about the suicides who are dissected in the dissecting-room. Sonnenkamp contemplated himself from head to foot, and then opened his mouth as if he must utter the thought that was now running through his soul. He is being dissected, not bodily, but spiritually, by every stinging, scandal-loving tongue.

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V. THE CONFESSION OF A WORLDLING

At the very time that Sonnenkamp was entering the palace, Pranken was going into the deanery; he was detained a few minutes by the passing soldiery, he had to salute many a comrade covered with dust, on foot and on horseback. He was going to that quarter of the city wherein resounded no clang of military music; here all was still, as if everything were holding its breath, except that in the church the organ notes were still swelling. He went in, he saw the Dean, a large powerful man, just returning into the sacristy. Pranken sat awhile in a pew, until he felt sure that the Dean had reached his house; then he left the church. The servant was standing in the open door; he said that the reverend gentleman requested Pranken to walk in and wait a few moments. He was shown up the staircase; it was a fine large staircase of the old chapter house. At the top, a young priest who was just coming out was shutting the door very quietly, even reverently; the young priest came down the left staircase while Pranken went up the right.

Pranken had to wait awhile in the large room where an open book lay on the table. He looked into it; it was a scheme of ecclesiastical preferments; he smiled. Good, the priests, like the military, have a printed list, too. This simile gave him new courage.

The Dean entered; he had a book in his hand, between the leaves of which he had inserted his forefinger. He saluted Pranken, making a gesture with the book, and begged him to sit down; he offered him a seat on the sofa, and seated himself opposite him in a chair on casters.

"What do you bring, Herr Baron?"

With a peculiar smile, Pranken answered that he brought nothing, but on the other hand came to get something. The priest nodded, looked into the book once more at the place where he had his finger inserted, and laying it aside said:--

"I am ready."

Pranken began to explain, that he had chosen the Dean in preference to any one else, to be his confessor in an affair which only a man of noble birth could properly appreciate and give advice about. The Dean grasped his chin with his left hand, and said with great decision, that after ordination and the new birth there was no longer any nobility; he had no different power from that of the son of the poorest day-laborer.

Pranken felt that he had made a mistake at the outset, and went on to say in a very humble way, that above all things he regarded the priestly dignity as the highest, but that still it was well known that the very worthy Dean knew something about the circumstances of life which he wished to lay before him. Then he gave a concise account of his past life; it was that of a son of a noble family until his acquaintance with Sonnenkamp. At this point he went somewhat into detail, and confessed that his thinking of Manna as his wife. Manna the daughter of the millionaire, was at first nothing more than a jest, a pastime. He related how Manna had unexpectedly entered the convent; and with great earnestness he declared that it was Manna that had wakened in him the knowledge of the higher life. He dwelt particularly on his momentary determination to become a priest; but he was now of another way of thinking; he was still too worldly in his views, but he hoped, however, in union with Manna, to lead a life devoted to the highest of ail interests.

With quiet attention, frequently closing his eyes, and again opening them quickly, the Dean listened to the story.

At last Pranken paused, and the reverend father said:--

"That, I suppose, is the introduction. I must now tell you on my part that I know this Herr Sonnenkamp and his daughter. I was staying not long ago with a brother priest in the town which is part of the same parish with Villa Eden--is not the place so called? I have seen the maiden; it was then reported that she was going to become a nun. I have also seen the park and the house; everything is very stately, very beautiful. And now I beg of you, proceed and tell me, without any further digression, what you wish from me."

Pranken went on to say rapidly, that in conjunction with the Cabinetsrath he had brought matters to such a point that Sonnenkamp was at this very hour receiving a patent of nobility.

Again he paused, but the Reverend father asked no more questions, but simply looked at him inquiringly.

Fastening his gaze upon the table-cover, Pranken now went on to tell what he knew of Sonnenkamp's past life; he had, up to this moment, believed that he might regard it with indifference, but at the present time--just since yesterday--when Sonnenkamp and his family were to be made of equal rank with himself, it let him rest no longer.

"I don't understand you," said the Dean. "Do you find yourself overburdened in your conscience, because you, although you knew what the man is, still endeavored successfully to procure for him an honorable and distinguished preferment? in a word, his elevation to the rank of noble?"

"Yes and no," replied Pranken, "I am not clear on that point. I could say that I am innocent, for I have never been asked my opinion on the matter, and still----"

"Go on, I think you are on the right path; 'and still'--you were going to say."

Pranken resumed his speech like a pupil in examination, and collecting his thoughts said:--

"Thank Heaven that there are living beings sent into the world; to whom we can and must tell what we do not acknowledge to ourselves. I must still, however, confess that my open and undisguised relation to Herr Sonnenkamp is perhaps something more than an expression of an opinion."

"Right, quite right! You have come to me then, to learn, at the very last hour, what you ought to do?"

"To tell the honest truth, no. I simply wished to have you give me something, an injunction of some sort to ease this constant torment and fear of discovery."

"Wonderful world!" rejoined the Priest. "Wonderful world! You would like to live in sinful enjoyment, and still, at the same time receive an 'absolving benediction.'"

Pranken's thoughts wandered involuntarily to Nelly's house near by, but with a powerful effort he called back his thoughts.

Both men said nothing for a short time; then the Dean asked:--

"Does this Herr Sonnenkamp know that you are acquainted with his past life?"

"O no, and he must never know it."

Again there was a long pause.

From the cathedral near by came the stroke of noon; the bells rang out the Angelus, the Priest rose and said a low prayer; Pranken did the same. They seated themselves again, but neither spoke. Pranken was becoming indignant; he was angry with himself for having come here; however, there was no help for it now; with repressed anger he said at last:--

"Very Reverend sir, I have confessed everything to you now; I beg of you to advise me."

"Should I advise you to forsake Herr Sonnenkamp and your bride?"

Pranken shrank back.

The Dean proceeded, rising, and walking up and down the parlor:--"That is the way with you. You will have advice, you children of worldly pleasure, but only such advice as enjoins no privation upon you; you will have such counsel only as enables you to accomplish your purpose, whatever it may be, with a pacified conscience. You want mustard for the digestion of heavy dinners, do you not?" said he, turning round suddenly.

His eyes sparkled.

"Reverend sir," said Pranken, in a tremor, "bid me forsake Herr Sonnenkamp and Manna, and I promise you that I will do it forthwith. Only think what will become of the maiden, and shall not what has been so earned be used for higher----"

"Stop!" said the Dean, interrupting him, and extending his hand with a gesture of rebuke, knitting his brows and pressing his lips tight together. "You think that you can bribe us with these millions? You are another of those, who, with outward veneration, still believe within themselves the clergy want nothing but money, nothing but power. No, we want none of your money, so won by marriage or inheritance!"

The Priest was standing at the window, looking up at the sky, in which dark clouds were gathering; he seemed to have quite forgotten that Pranken was there, and the latter finally said to him,--

"Reverend sir, do you wish me to withdraw?"

The Priest turned round quickly and said, motioning with his left hand,--

"Sit down--sit down."

Pranken obeyed.

"Now I will tell you something. What you have done to the nobility, for you have done it, and not simply allowed it to happen, is your concern and that of the nobility; for us, your grades of honor are matters of no moment. Whether a man is a commoner or a noble, it is all the same to us. But I tell you this"--the Priest hesitated, and resting his elbow in the hollow of his right hand took hold of his chin with his left; he seemed to be arranging his words with quiet deliberation--"I tell you this: you must be true now, you must not forsake this man and his daughter. You must share everything with them, whatever the worldly honors may bring; you must consider yourself as linked to them, and thank God in humbleness of heart that you have an opportunity of devoting yourself, and leading your new family to the pure and noble sacrifice of self."

Pranken started up, kissed the Priest's hand, and exclaimed,--

"I will, I promise you. Keep your eye on me; you shall see that I will go through with whatever you enjoin upon me."

"Go then, and God be with you; you have a heavier burden to carry than you now think for. Go, and God be with you."

He laid his hand on the Baron's head; Pranken turned away, and full of humility descended the staircase; at the bottom he gave the soldier a brotherly shake of the hand.

After Pranken had gone, the soldier kept looking at his hand, and then, searching on the floor; he could not imagine that the free and easy Pranken had not given him a gold piece. No, that would have made a ringing; he must surely have given him paper money; but he could not find it on the clean stone-floor.

As if he had anticipated the soldier's thoughts, Pranken returned, and departed after putting a gold piece into his hand.

He came by Nelly's house, where yesterday--it seemed to him a dream--no, it cannot be!--he had waited an hour. He glanced up, and thought he saw some one leaning at the open window, whose eyes followed him; he fixed his look upon the ground, and passed on.

He came to the parade-ground, listened to the music, saw the officers standing in a group, and--who can calculate the sinuous course of thought?--he thought that the watchword was now being given out to the officers; and he had a watchword too, which no one else was to know, given to him by the man behind the cathedral, who had dashed him down as if he would break every one of his bones. A smile went over Pranken's features.

"Thou hast played well, but thou hast only played," he said, recalling to mind the Dean. "You shall see that I can play well too; I know my part, and I will yet show you a little of my skill in playing."

Pride again rose within him, and he could not comprehend that he, Otto von Pranken, had been such a mortified piece of humility. But it is very well to have been so once.

He came to the Hotel Victoria in a half-humble, half-conceited mood, and he now felt a real training-day hunger. Such mental emotions have this advantage, that they make one hungry.

Pranken anticipated with a feeling of satisfaction his dinner with the Baron, his father-in-law.

As he stood at Sonnenkamp's door and was about to ring, he heard some one inside saying in a loud tone:--

"But Where's Herr von Pranken?"

"Here!" cried he, as he went in.

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VI. HONOR LIES BLEEDING

Sonnenkamp's decoration was lying at Pranken's feet as he entered, and the first thing he did was to stoop down and pick it up. Joseph left the room. Pranken balanced the decoration as if it were a heavy weight. Sonnenkamp seemed to be waiting for Pranken to speak first, and when the latter said, "I congratulate you," broke in:--

"No, no--do not. I thank you for coming to me again. I thank you sincerely--very sincerely. You meant well by me."

"What's this? Meant well? I don't comprehend."

Sonnenkamp stared at him; the whole city, the coachmen on the streets knew it, and can this man be ignorant? Does he want to gull him?

"Have you read the Journal?" inquired Sonnenkamp.

"The Journal! No; what's in that?"

Sonnenkamp reached him the paper.

"Here--my diploma of nobility," he said, turning round and looking out of the window while Pranken was reading. He did not want to look at the man's countenance.

There was a long-continued silence in the room, and then Sonnenkamp felt a hand upon his shoulder. He turned round quickly. What's the meaning of this? will the haughty young nobleman have a personal struggle with him?

"Herr Sonnenkamp," said Pranken, "I am a nobleman----"

"I know--I know. Take your hand off of me, you'll soil it."

"And I am your friend," proceeded Pranken calmly. "I cannot approve of what you have done to provoke such a publication."

"Be brief, I've already heard sermonizing enough to-day."

"Herr Sonnenkamp, I always go counter to the public sentiment; I respect you, notwithstanding, and I love your daughter. I am almost glad that I can show you by a sacrifice how my intention----"

"Herr von Pranken, you do not know what you are doing. Your friends, your family----"

"I know the whole. Pooh! the virtuous people may let the stones alone which they would willingly throw at us. Whoever merely winks with the eye shall receive my challenge."

"I admire your courage, but I cannot take advantage of it."

"Not take advantage of it! You have no right to decline it. I am your son as well as Roland; I stand by you, and now it shall be shown who has genuine nobility and bravery. I admire you--but we'll drop this now. Has Roland got back yet?"

"No."

"Then he has gone with the Ensign to the dinner. I will go for him."

Sonnenkamp looked at him in amazement as he drove off; he could not comprehend it. He was now alone again. He mentally accompanied the messengers he had sent round the city, and out to the pleasure-grounds. His thought went out in search of Roland, but did not find him, any more than the messengers did. Roland had gone with the Cabinetsrath's son, as Pranken had conjectured, to the military club-house, where a number of the garrison officers, after the laborious review of the forenoon, had ordered a dinner. There was a great deal of merriment and drinking, and they drank the young American's health. Roland was one of the liveliest among them. There came in a straggling guest, and cried, out in the midst of the uproar,--

"Have you heard? The slave-trader has been caught with a paper lasso."

"What's to pay?" was, called out.

The new-comer read out of the paper:--

"A proposal, with all due deference, for a coat of arms and a device for the ennobled slave-trader and slave-murderer, James Henry Sonnenkamp, alias Banfield, of Louisiana.

"It would give us peculiar satisfaction to run a parallel between the young nobility in the two hemispheres; to live on the labor of others is their motto; 'thou art born to do nothing,' say the young nobility of the Old as well as of the New World. The Americans have also a superstitious belief that there is some peculiar honor in being ennobled. Not because we share in this belief, but rather in order to do something towards removing it, we have written to America for information about a certain Herr Sonnenkamp. We have hitherto been silent, and we should have been silent longer and forever, out of regard for the children of this outcast, for they do not deserve to bear the load of guilt. We are no friends of the nobility: we regard this institution as of the past and as dead; but the nobles are our German fellow-citizens, also, and a part of our nation. As citizens, merely, we have no power to thrust out a man from our community, and we should have felt obliged to let this man alone; but now, we are ready to furnish the evidence that the man who calls himself Sonnenkamp, and lives at Villa Eden, has been one of the most merciless slave-traders and slave-murderers. Then proceed, O German nobles, and ennoble him,--give him a coat-of-arms. The heralds of our editorial office recommend as a device----"

"Stop!" screamed out the Ensign, for Roland had fallen senseless from his chair.

He was carried out of the room, and restored to consciousness. Fortunately, a carriage now drove up, from which Pranken got out. Roland was lifted into it, and they drove to the hotel.

Shaking with a fever fit, and wrapped up in a soldier's cloak, Roland sat in one corner of the carriage. He would occasionally open his eyes, and then close them again.

Pranken told him that he ought to despise the world, but Roland was silent; once only he heaved a deep sigh and exclaimed,--

"O Eric!" They reached the hotel. Joseph was waiting before the door. The first word that Roland spoke was a request to be left alone. He went up the steps with Joseph.

"You are to go to your father," said Joseph.

Roland nodded, but when he had gone up-stairs he hastened to his room and locked the door.

Joseph went to Sonnenkamp and told him that Roland had returned.

"He is to come to me," he said.

"He has locked himself in."

"Has he his pistols with him?"

"No, I have them with me."

Sonnenkamp went to Roland's room and knocked; but there was no answer. He begged and entreated Roland to answer him, but Roland made no sound.

"If you do not open immediately, I will shoot myself before your door!" cried Sonnenkamp.

Pranken, who was with him, said:--

"Roland! Roland! will you be guilty of the death of your father?"

"Open! open!" moaned Sonnenkamp before the door.

The bolt was drawn back, and Roland stood rigid, looking at his father, who stretched out his arms toward him; but Roland remained motionless, with lips pressed together, and eyes glaring like one insane.

"My son!" cried Sonnenkamp. "My only son! my beloved son! my child! forgive me! forgive me!"

Roland rushed toward his father, grasped his hand, and wept over it.

"Oh, my child, your tears on my hand! Look,--this wound, this scar,--look, the tears of my child heal it, the tears of my child alone!"

Throwing himself upon Roland's breast, he exclaimed:--

"You, my son, you will not despise your father!"

While he spoke, his heart throbbed violently, and, for the first time in his life, Roland saw his father weep. He embraced him and wept with him.

Father and son then sat opposite each other speechless and motionless, until at last Roland said:--

"Father, there is one way of salvation--only one way of salvation!"

"I am ready, speak, my son."

"I know it, father--I know it! That sublimest One said to the youth, 'Go and give away all that thou hast, and follow me.' And Parker has said that this disgrace must be wiped out; and Benjamin Franklin would say: 'Thou art free, be not a slave to thyself!' Cast all away from you, father, let us be poor--poor! Will you?"

"I thank you, my son," replied Sonnenkamp; he was easier when he saw that Roland had relieved his feelings. "You have a stout heart, a bold spirit, you have noble courage; Herr Eric has taught you well--grand--brave--I thank him--I thank you--that is fine--that is right--the best!"

"Then you agree to it, father?"

"My son, I do not wish to make any pledges--not any; but I promise you, that you shall be satisfied with what I shall do; just in this moment I cannot determine anything."

"No, now; this very moment! it is the grandest, the only moment! It must be done now! After this moment is death, night, damnation, distraction, misery! Oh, father, you must be strong! I will work for you, for my mother, for Manna, for myself! And Eric will be with us! I know not what can be done, but it will----do cast everything away from you!"

"My son, whatever I have of unrighteous possessions, so called, those I will put away. I consider you, my son, no longer in your minority, you are more, you are my brother, you are a man, you are judge of my actions, you are to give your directions--everything with you, through you, out of your pure, your blessed heart, out of your unbroken--yes, your friend Eric, our friend Eric, shall also determine--but let us not come to the final determination at this moment."

And again father and son sat opposite to each other in silence, until Roland began:--

"Father, let us go home to-day."

"No, not to-day. We must both, first of all, get some strength."

Pranken had withdrawn into the adjoining room; he now sent Joseph to say that it was time for dinner. Roland was shocked at the idea of eating anything now; but Sonnenkamp swore that he would not put a morsel into his mouth, although he was almost famishing, if Roland did not sit with them at table, and eat at least a few mouthfuls. Roland yielded.

The Cabinetsrath's place was empty, showing what henceforth would be wanting to their table-enjoyment. Pranken beckoned to Joseph, who understood what he meant and quickly removed the plate.

Sonnenkamp now said that he expected the Cabinetsrath would probably give up the Villa he had received; and Roland now learned how bribery had been employed, and how corrupt and selfish men were. Sonnenkamp took particular notice what an impression this made upon Roland, and a triumphant expression passed over his countenance. It's well so! Roland is to become acquainted with the whole baseness of human beings, to find out that all people are more or less abject, and then what his father has done will gradually seem to him of less account, and be painted in fainter colors.

A choice table was set, but the three ate as if they were at a funeral repast, with the corpse lying in the next room--the mortal remains of worldly honor. Neither gave expression to the feeling which each of them had; they ate and drank, for the body must have nourishment, in order to bear up under this new heart-ache.

Father and son slept in the same chamber, but neither spoke, for neither of them wanted to keep the other from sleep, which would alone wrap them in oblivion.

"Don't give up!" said Sonnenkamp at last, as he fell asleep. Roland slept also, but after an hour he awoke and tossed about restlessly. The darkness seemed to stand like a black wall before him, and he sat up as if in delirium.

To lose one's senses, one's reason--yes, to lose them! they are suddenly gone, you know not when, you know not where; you only know they are not here, and they are no longer in your power. But if you could only find them! Your thoughts are no longer under your own control; they come and go, they combine and disperse according to their own pleasure; and yet you inwardly feel that this will not last, it cannot last; that the time must come when you will once more have the mastery.

"If it were not night! if it were only not night!" groaned Roland to himself, as he awakened in a wandering mood from a short hour's sleep. For the first time in his life, he awoke in the night distressed and sad at heart, with the whole world dark and impenetrable before him.

"Oh, if it were not night! if it only were not night!" he said to himself again. He thought of what Eric's mother had once said: "In the night-time everything is more terrible; day comes, and with the daylight all sufferings, both of the body as well as those of the mind, are less formidable; the eye then looks upon the things of the world, and the sunlight illumines and enlivens everything."

"It will be day again!" he comforted himself at last, and sank away into sleep out of all his brooding fancies.

Early in the morning they started with Pranken for the Villa.

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VII. SICK AT HEART

The morning air was fresh and cool. Bertram was not on the box of the carriage, but a hired coachman sat next to Lootz. Roland knew the horses, and wanted to take the stranger's place, but Sonnenkamp said in a hoarse voice:--

"No, my child, don't leave me. Sit with me. Stay with me."

Roland obeyed, and took a seat in the close carriage, with his father and Pranken. They drove in silence through the city, each thinking: When, and under what circumstances, will you ever come here again? Roland looked out as they were passing the pleasure-grounds, where in the summer they had excited so much attention at the officers' entertainment. Withered leaves were lying on the tables, and everything was bare and desolate. Sighing and shutting his eyes, Roland leaned back in the corner of the carriage. The bloom of youth had faded out of his countenance over night, and everything was wilted like a flower touched by the frost.

They drove along, for a time, without speaking. Roland, however, soon heard his father making himself merry over the unadulterated rascality of mankind, and one and another person who were generally spoken of with respect and held in high estimation were spoken of as hardly fit to associate with galley-slaves. A beginning was made with the Cabinetsrath, who had allowed himself to be bribed in such a way, and yet could act as if there had never been anything of the kind. And so, in succession, the good name of everybody was torn into shreds.

Pranken let Sonnenkamp expend his violence and rage, not saying a word even when Clodwig was attacked. What was the use! It is the delight of one suffering under mortification, above all one who is suffering through his own fault, to bring down others to his own level. Roland was deeply, troubled, and his heart grew cold at the thought of being able to hold his own position only by being made thoroughly acquainted with, and keeping constantly before his eyes, the darker side of all human beings.

Tenderly and cautiously, Pranken began to bring into notice the idea that a firm religious belief was the only adequate support, and he openly inveighed against those who would withdraw this support, the only real one, and the highest, from one who relied upon it. Roland knew that Eric was intended, but he did not let it be seen. Pranken went farther, and said that Eric's father, whom mother and son decked out as a demi-god, was a man who at the university had no scholars, and at whom all the learned men had shrugged their shoulders.

Gloomy thoughts, like cloudy forms, thronging in succession, overcast the soul of the youth. One thought prevailed over all others, and allowed him no rest:--Yesterday, honor was everything; to-day, it has no existence. What is honor? It is the seasoning in each particle of life's food, and without it existence is tasteless. This thought startled Roland as if he had seen some terrific vision. He saw the clouds actually before him, in the shape of dense volumes of smoke from Sonnenkamp's cigar. A voice cried out, in mock-merriment, from the midst of the cloud: The people in the whole region round ought to give him a special vote of thanks, for now they were, in comparison with him, snow-white angels, and all that they needed was a pair of wings. All the little men and little woman could say: Lord, I thank thee that I am not like this Sonnenkamp here. "I am truly a godsend to you; thank me, O world!"

This humor pleased Pranken, and he said, laughing, that no one, a year hence, after one had become accustomed to it, would think anything of the present troubles; and he would urgently entreat that not a word should be said about selling the villa and moving away.

Sonnenkamp gave Pranken a nudge, but he had no idea that this communication, although it gave Roland anew the feeling of homelessness, affected him far less than the jeering outburst of his father concerning the thanks due him from the world.

A disintegration of the thoughts and feelings of the youth had taken place, and it was impossible to anticipate what changes might be brought about in these different elements through the introduction of a new agency. A feeling had been awakened within him, that he must bear an indelible stain for his whole lifetime.

The mists dissolved, the day was bright, the sun shone warmly, but Sonnenkamp was chilly, and wrapped himself in his cloak. He sat in the carriage, staring out upon the road, but he saw nothing except the shadow of one of the horses, and this shadow was moving its legs to and fro. Is everything only a shadow in like manner? Is what moves you and draws you onward just such a shadow as this?

A vehicle coming towards them raised a cloud of dust, at which Sonnenkamp stared. Whenever you look at this dust, you feel as if you must be smothered by it; but when you are in the midst of it, turn your face away, and it is not so bad after all. Perhaps what has now happened is just such a whirling cloud of dust. Turn your face away.

He saw the shepherds with their sheep upon the stubble-field, and asked himself: Is that a better life? He wanted to sleep; he threw away his cigar and shut his eyes. It seemed to him as if the carriage were all the time going down hill. But when he opened his eyes, they were on the level road.

Again he shut his eyes, for this was the only way he could be alone.

And now he really went to sleep. Roland gazed in silence out into the bright sunshine. Ah, the sight of nature is helpful only to the joyous, or to one who is beginning to rally from sorrow; she brings no consolation to the heavy laden and the deeply saddened spirit; her changelessness, her unsympathizing and steadfast life, seem almost insulting.

Up to this time, Roland had lived in that twilight realm which separates youth from manhood, and now the period of youth was closed. His pride had been turned to shame, but he was mature enough to forget himself soon, and to direct his regards to his father, who is doubly unhappy; unhappy on his own account, and on account of having brought harm upon others--upon those nearest to him.

Sonnenkamp slept; but in his dreamy state between wakefulness and sleep, the rattling carriage-wheels seemed to him the clanking chains of fettered slaves.

He woke suddenly, and stared as if bewildered. Where was he? What had happened? He wrapped himself in his cloak again, and hid his face.

Pranken bent toward Roland, whispering to him:--

"I know how you are inwardly shattered, but there is one cure for you, a grand act, the most sublime deed."

"What is it?"

"Speak lower, don't wake up your father. The one thing for you to do,---it is grand,--the great and noble thing for you is to enter the Papal army; this is the only thing to be done. This is the last, the highest tower to be defended now, and if that falls, the atheists and communists have won the day. I would do it myself, if----"

"Yes," interrupted Roland, "that would be the thing! We give away all our property to the Holy Father, and he issues a bull in favor of the abolition of slavery."

Sonnenkamp could not keep asleep any longer.

"That's right, my young fellow," he cried. "That's right! the Pope ought to do it. But do you believe that he will do now for money--even were it ten times as much--what he has not done of himself? The idea is a grand one, Herr von Pranken, very grand and very--very shrewd."

There was a little raillery in this commendation, for he thought: You want to get the whole inheritance, and hand over my son to the knife.

"But my dear, noble, high-aspiring young friend," was what he said aloud, "honestly, do you believe that the Pope will do what our Roland expects?"

"No."

They drove on in silence. They saw the Villa in the distance, and on the tower the banner of the American Union was flying, together with the green and yellow flag of the country.

When they came to the green cottage, Roland asked to got out of the carriage, and permission was given.

Roland went into the garden, where a bright voice called to him:--

"Mutual congratulations! we congratulate you, and you should congratulate us, too; we are betrothed."

Lina and the Architect were coming, holding each other's hand, through the meadow from the Villa. Lina left her lover and came up to Roland, saying:--

"We didn't want to wait until the dedication of the castle, we have our celebration by ourselves. Oh, Roland, how beautiful and how happy everything is in the world! But why don't you speak? Why do you make up such a melancholy face?"

Roland could only wave her off, and hurried into the house. The betrothed remained standing in the garden, sorely puzzled, when Lina said:--

"Oh, Albert, there's no good in being here. Nobody welcomed us at the Villa, Manna was not to be seen, Herr Dournay isn't there, and Roland runs away. Come, we'll quit the whole premises. Forgive me for having brought you here before going anywhere else. I thought these were the people to whom I should make known my happiness in the very first place. Come, we'll go to your castle, and spend the whole day for once; you shall be a solitary knight, and I'll be a castle-maiden. Come, I thought there was to be a betrothal here to-day, too; but it doesn't look like it at all, and there's something frightful the matter."

Lina and her betrothed went together to the castle, up through the vineyard, but they were detained at the Major's, who was standing utterly helpless by the garden-hedge.

Such a thing had never happened as took place to-day.

Fräulein Milch had locked herself in her room; she must have met with something very extraordinary.

The Major was perfectly delighted to hear of the betrothal, but he only said:--

"Ah, there might be one down therein the Villa, too; but I'm afraid--I'm afraid we'll hear some bad news from there."

The Major insisted upon the betrothed couple taking a seat in his arbor, saying that Fräulein Milch would soon be down.

The Fräulein was sitting in her chamber alone, for the first time in a sore struggle. The world had been a matter of indifference to her, and only of account so far as some thing could be obtained from it agreeable to the Major. She found the neighborhood very friendly, and she was grateful to the soil, for the Major had a good digestion, and elsewhere he suffered from dyspepsia. She was also grateful to the Rhine, which occasionally furnished a nice fish, and she would nod to the mountains, as if she would say: That's right! just produce good wine; the Major likes to drink it when new, but he mustn't drink too mach of it. Thus was the Fräulein kindly disposed towards man and beast, towards water and plants; it was a matter of indifference that nobody troubled himself about her. She had strenuously declined every intimate connection, and now, through the Professorin, she had been drawn more among people, and had to-day been so deeply mortified. She had known Bella for a long time, although very distantly, and she had disliked her for a long time, although very distantly; but what she had experienced to-day was something wholly novel, and it grieved her sorely.

"O," said she to herself, "O, Frau Countess, you are highly virtuous, virtuous in the extreme, most respectfully virtuous, and beautiful too, you are; but I was once young and beautiful, and no one has ever ventured to give me an uncivil word; I have gone through the streets unattended by a servant, I was my own attendant, my own protector, and my own support. O Frau Countess, you stand very far up on the list of rank, I don't know but that you ought to be addressed as Your Highness! O Frau Countess, take care, there is another list of nobility which the Major ought to give you a glimpse of; no, not he; it would mortify him to death; but Herr Dournay, he must do it. No--nobody--only myself."

And just as she had become composed, the Major again knocked, crying:--

"Fräulein Milch! dear good Rosa," he added in a whisper, "Rosie, Rosalie!"

"What do you want?" the Major heard laughingly asked.

"Oh heavens! it's all right now you are laughing again. There are two good people here, the Architect, and Lina the Justice's daughter; they are betrothed, and have come to receive our congratulations. Do come, join us in the garden, and bring right off a bottle and four glasses."

Fräulein Milch opened the door. The Major asked:--

"Mayn't I know what has been the matter with you?"

"You shall know, sure enough, but don't ask me any more now. So the young people are betrothed, and at the house? I must dress myself up a little, and I'll come down immediately."

"So do. That's nice."

Fräulein Milch was delivered from all her own trouble, when the duty was enjoined upon her of rejoicing with the joyful; and the betrothed couple forgot the castle, and remained for hours sitting with the Major and Fräulein Milch in the arbor.

Then the journal came, and the Major begged to be excused for reading it before his guests; he received the paper after the burgomaster, the school-master, and the barber had read it, and so he could keep it. As he had nothing more to do with the world, it made no difference whether he learned an hour or two sooner or later what had happened.

"Oh, here's a great black mark," exclaimed Lina.

"That's the burgomaster's mark," said the Major. "Fräulein Milch, would you read to me? There must be something very special."

The Fräulein took the paper, but she covered her face with her hand after she had looked into it.

"What's the matter? You read, dear Lina."

Lina read the bitter paragraph by Professor Crutius; she wanted to stop after the first few lines, but the Major begged:

"Read on; do read on."

She read on to the end.

"O Thou really good Builder of all the worlds, what queer material you've put into the construction of the world! Good heavens! there's something frightful about a newspaper; now everybody knows about this."

Fräulein Milch was just on the point of saying that this was no news to her, but she had the self-command, doubly difficult for a woman, to keep from telling what she knew. It was better to say nothing, as she would thus escape a long explanation to the Major why she had said nothing about it a long time ago. Not till the Major begged her to go to the Professorin, who would be greatly troubled by this communication, did she say:--

"The Professorin, as well as I, knew it a long time ago."

In his bewilderment, the Major did not ask how it happened that she knew; he only opened his eyes wider. He had said to her a great many good and kind things, but the best of all was when he observed:--

"Yes. You might belong to our Brotherhood, you can keep a secret."

After a while the Major continued:--

"Look, children, down below there is the wonderfully beautiful Villa with its parks, its gardens, and with its millions inside the house--ha! and Roland and Manna. Fräulein Milch, don't try to prevent me. I must go down there, for nobody knows what's going on there, and I must do something to help them. Don't say anything against it, Fräulein Milch, I entreat you."

"I haven't said anything to hinder you; on the contrary, I think you ought to go."

Before she had finished speaking, a messenger came from the Villa for the Major to go there.

Lina wanted to join him, thinking she might be of some assistance to Manna; but the Major said that the Professorin and Aunt Claudine were enough already, and Lina ought not to spoil now any of her happiness.

Just as the Major was about to set off, a voice cried:--

"Herr Major, just stop. I'm coming."

With flushed face, and out of breath, Knopf came up.

"Do you know it?" asked the Major.

"Yes, indeed, and that's the reason I've come. Perhaps I can do something at the Villa."

"Good! I'm going, so come with me. No, you stay here, stay with the Fräulein. I'll have you sent for if you're needed."

And so the Major walked down the mountain, and the four who remained followed him with affectionate looks.

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VIII. THE TRIUMPH OF THE OPPRESSED

Roland entered the cottage, and found the Professorin, Eric, and Manna in grave conversation together; they had imparted the dreadful secret to each other, and what weighed the most heavily upon them was the thought how Roland would bear it when he should learn of it. He now came in and said:--

"Manna, we are disgraced children!"

The three hastened to him, and affectionately embraced and kissed him.

"Be strong, brother!" said Eric, throwing his arms around him. "I can blow you strong, my brother."

Hiawatha's saying echoed in Roland's soul, and he looked around on all sides, as if bewildered. He sat down speechless on a chair, and the three dear to him sat in silence near him.

Sonnenkamp, meanwhile, had got out at the entrance of the park, and walked towards the villa; it seemed to him as if the ground would give way under his feet, and the house and trees vanish. Are you sick? he asked himself. You are not to be sick! He whistled softly to himself; his gigantic strength still held out.

Here everything is as it was, and you yourself are here, too, he said, exerting a powerful control over himself, as he stood upon his property and grounds. He seemed to be wrestling with a hostile world enlisted against him, and he repelled the encompassing foes with heroic strength; they should not cut off the sources of his confidence and power. He felt himself well armed and equipped. Pranken is right; one must not let himself be cowed, one must bid defiance to the world, and then it will bow itself in humility, and in a year--no, much sooner, all will come and flatter him.

He remained standing on the steps, holding on by the railing, for all his strength seemed exhausted; but drawing a deep breath, and plucking up his courage, as it were, he soon recovered his self-possession. He looked about without constraint, he had become so accustomed to feigning, that he was determined no one should see in him any trace of disturbance.

He went up the steps with a firm and steady stride. He took Pranken's arm, and told him in a candid tone how highly he esteemed him and admired his strength, of which he already felt the effect in himself.

He went with Pranken to his room, nodding to everything, which still held its place here, and should hold it firmly for the time to come. He requested his son--so he called Pranken--his son, of whom he was proud, to impart what had happened to Frau Ceres, the very first thing, in his quiet and self-possessed, his easy, his all-subduing manner that he so much admired.

"Make no reply if she storms. This stormy outburst is no longer formidable."

In this declaration there was a sort of tranquillizing influence which Sonnenkamp himself felt. It is better that the whole world should stand up in arms against him, than to be forever and forever under the dominion of this crafty, threatening, and annoying woman. Now her weapon was gone, and the dagger which she had always kept hidden was now unsheathed in the eyes of all the world, and was in every hand.

Pranken went to Frau Ceres; he had to wait a long time in the ante-room, but at last Fräulein Perini came out.

Pranken briefly told her that the secret she had confided to him, and which he had kept so faithfully, was now made public.

"So soon?" said Fräulein Perini; and when Pranken inquired how Frau Ceres would be likely to receive the annihilation of her hopes of being ennobled, and the whole detestable uproar in the world, she replied, smiling, that she could not tell, for Frau Ceres was now suffering under a terrible trial of a wholly different kind.

She could hardly go on, she was so choked with laughter, but finally it came out.

Yesterday morning, Frau Ceres in some incomprehensible way had broken off her most beautiful nail, a real prodigy of most careful cherishing, and she was utterly inconsolable.

Pranken could not help joining in the laugh. He accompanied Fräulein Perini into the room.

Frau Ceres gave him her left hand to kiss, holding the right carefully concealed. She asked whether Pranken had brought with him the armorial device, and pointed to an embroidery frame on which she wanted at once to work the coat-of-arms, and also to an altar-cloth, whose border was already completed.

Pranken now broke the news to her in a very careful manner.

"And he always said I was stupid! I am cleverer than he," Frau Ceres burst out; "I always told him that Europe was no place for us, and that we ought to have remained where we were. Hasn't he caught it now? He's ashamed to come himself, and so he has sent you. He's ashamed, because I, the simpleton, who had never learned anything, knew the affair so much better than he did."

In this first moment, a mischievous joy seemed to be Frau Ceres' predominant feeling; the man who had always treated her as a feeble plaything must now see that her ideas were more correct than his.

She sat long in silence, moving her lips, and with a scornful, exultant expression, as if she were uttering to her husband all her present thoughts. Pranken thought it incumbent on him to add, that in a short time the family would be as much respected as before.

"Do you believe that we shall be ennobled then?"

Pranken was perplexed what reply to make, for it seemed as if the woman did not yet comprehend what had happened. He evaded a direct answer, and only said that he remained true to the family, and regarded himself as a son of the house.

"Yes, to-morrow ought to be the wedding. Here in Europe, you have so many formalities. I'll drive to church with you. But where's Manna? She has horribly neglected me."

"But, my dear Baron, it is well, this connection with the tutor's family will now come to an end. Don't let it continue any longer, dear Baron."

She requested Fräulein Perini to tell Manna to come to her.

Pranken could not comprehend how this woman, half childish, half cunning, sometimes malicious, sometimes peevish, could be also sometimes so affectionate; but there was no time now to try to solve the riddle. He besought the Mother--such was the appellation he now gave to Frau Ceres--to leave Manna alone for a few days; he would first see her alone, and then they would come together to the mother and ask her blessing.

"I give you my blessing now," said Frau Ceres, forgetting herself so far as to give him both hands.

She told him that Bella had been there, and had hardly shown herself to her; that she had come, and then had driven away again in a manner that she couldn't comprehend at all.

Here a shot was heard.

"He has shot himself; he has done it now!" cried Frau Ceres, in a singular tone; it was not lamentation, nor laughter, but something peculiar, utterly inexplicable.

Pranken hurried away.

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IX. THE HAND-WRITING ON THE WALL

Sonnenkamp had seated himself in his room, and the letter-bag lay before him, but he did not open it. What matters it what the outside world desired! One thought was uppermost, that he must do something, something startling, something that would shatter the whole world to pieces. What? He did not yet know. He sat speechless in the midst of the fairest landscape, with the windows darkened, as in a cellar.

No, not harm thyself, that wouldn't do! anything but weakness, cried he to himself. Why be afraid of this old sentimental spinster, Europe, with her fine modes of speech! What hast thou done? Thou hast acted with due reflection, and thou standest by what thou hast done. It is well that there's nothing more to conceal, that everything is known.

He rose and went into the park. From a lofty acacia-tree one of the main branches was hanging down, which had been broken, so that the tree was like a bird that had lost one of its wings. The head-gardener told Sonnenkamp that a gust of wind had swept over the park the night before. Sonnenkamp nodded several times as he looked at the tree, and then indulged in his inaudible whistle.

A gust of wind may break down a tree like this, but a man like him stands firm.

He went farther on, and coming to the fruit-garden, saw the splendid show of fruit upon the trees; glass bell-shaped vessels, filled with water, were hung by wires underneath the different fruits, so that they might be continually supplied with moisture, and be made to grow. All this you can effect; you can direct nature, why not man? why not destiny? He gazed at the huge fruits as if they could give him an answer, but they remained dumb. He stood for a long time before one tree, that had been trained to the shape of a coronet, and stared at the branches.

In a spider's-web stretched between two twigs a fly was struggling--whew! how convulsively it struggled! perhaps it moaned also, but we couldn't hear it. Yes, high and noble fly, you have a fate no different from that of the human fly. Everywhere spiders--yes, spiders! And you are better off, you will be speedily eaten.

Sonnenkamp struck his forehead with his clenched fist: he was angry with his brain, that led him into such subtile speculations.

He turned away and went back to his room. The best thing you can do, he said to himself, is to make a speedy exit; then are your children free, and you are free too. He took a revolver from the wall just as some one knocked at the door.

"What's the matter? what do you want?" A groom gave his name, and Sonnenkamp opened the door. The groom informed him that his black horse rattled in the throat and foamed at the mouth; that he was sick, and they could not tell what ailed him.

"Indeed?" cried Sonnenkamp. "Have you not walked the horse out for exercise? Has any one ridden him?"

"Yes; the Herr Captain ordered the horse to be saddled the night before, and was a long time gone with him."

"So! Come, I'll cure him speedily." He went down to the stable, looked grimly at the horse, and then shot him through the head. The horse gave one hoarse rattle, and fell headlong.

"So! it's all over now!" cried Sonnenkamp. "Now you are free!"

As he was leaving the stable, Pranken came up.

"What have you done?"

"Pooh! I've shot a horse, and every one who doesn't mind," he said in a loud tone, so that all the servants might hear, "knows what to expect."

He ordered the groom to saddle another horse.

Joseph came with the inquiry from Frau Ceres as to what had happened.

Sonnenkamp sent word to Frau Ceres that he had shot the black horse. He smiled when he heard Pranken's report of his wife's state of feeling; he avoided going to her, and he experienced a sort of grateful joy towards destiny, that the large house rendered it possible for each of the inmates to live by himself.

He went to see the Professorin; it was hard for him to meet her eye and that of Eric, but it must be done; he must arm himself to look all men boldly in the face. Was he a coward? had he not bid defiance to the world, and was he now to be afraid of this tutor's family?

He entered the green cottage. He extended his hand neither to Eric nor his mother, and only asked where the children were. He received the answer that they had locked themselves in the library.

He said in a light way to Eric and his mother that he had been especially desirous for them to know the whole; it would now be seen who was faithful. Turning to Eric, he said:--

"I have shot the black horse, which you rode last night. What is mine is mine."

He went quietly away; he stood some time near the library door, and heard Roland and Manna talking, but without distinguishing a word.

He knocked twice, but there was no answer, and he turned away. Returning to the villa, and mounting a horse, he rode to the Cabinetsrath's villa, for he wished to give these people a piece of his mind. And as he was riding along, it seemed to him as if the groom behind him suddenly reined up, and then as if there were two following him. Who is this unknown companion? He forced himself not to look round. The horse trembled under the pressure of his legs. He reached the country-house of the Cabinetsrath, stopped at the gate, and asked after the minister's wife.

The gardener said that she was not there, and that she would not be there any more.

What does this mean? He laughed aloud when he was informed that the villa, with all its appurtenances, had been sold the day before to the American consul at the capital. He is outwitted; these people are his neighbors no longer, and there can nothing be said about demanding back the property bought at a merely nominal sum. And after the first flush of anger, Sonnenkamp experienced a peculiar satisfaction in the thought that there were so many sagacious people in the world; it is a pleasant thing that there are so many foxes and lynxes to be found everywhere, and under their own particular masks.

A court-lackey rode up. Sonnenkamp reined in. Could it be possible that they repented and were sending a courier after him?

"Where are you going?" he asked of the court-lackey as he stopped.

"To Villa Eden."

"To whom?"

"To the Professorin Dournay."

"Might I ask who sends you, and what your errand is?"

"Why not?"

"Well, what's the errand?"

"The Professorin was formerly a lady in waiting on the gracious mother of the Prince, and the gracious Princess was very fond of her."

"Very well, very well. And now?"

"Well, now, the Professorin is living there with a horrible man who has deceived the whole world, and is a slave-trader, and one's life isn't safe there a single minute, and now the gracious Princess sends me there, and I am to say to the Professorin--and if she will, to take her along with me at once--that she can be delivered from this monster."

The lackey was astonished to see the man who had questioned him ride away without speaking another word.

Sonnenkamp boiled with rage; but he shortly laughed out loud again.

"That's all right! afraid,--the whole world is afraid of him. This confers strength; this is far better than the silly honor, with which one must behave himself."

He felt a profound contempt for those in high station. Now they take up the neglected widow, now,--why not before?

He rode to the castle. Here were the laborers who were erecting a wing of the building; they saluted their employer with evident reluctance. Sonnenkamp smiled; at any rate, they had to salute him. He would have liked to get the whole world together, in order to look it, once for all, defiantly in the face.

He rode to the Major's. Fräulein Milch was standing at the window, and before he said anything, she called down:--

"The Herr Major is not at home." And now he turned homeward.

When he came to the garden-wall, he noticed some large letters, and riding nearer, he saw written in many different ways: Slave-trader! Slave-murderer! An artist, with no very practised hand, had drawn the picture of a gallows on which a figure was hanging with protruding tongue, and on the tongue was the word Slave-trader! He ordered the porter to keep better watch, and to shoot down the insolent fellows who should do any such thing.

The porter said:--

"I'll not shoot; I shall leave the service on St. Martin's day, anyhow."

Sonnenkamp rode back toward the green cottage; he wanted to take away his children, and he wanted to tell the Professorin not to give any more charity to the rabble that dared to write such words on the white wall of his garden. But he turned about again. The best way would be to take no notice of it.

Panting with rage he returned to his room, and he wondered at the thought which came over him, that this house was his own no longer; every one in the neighborhood was thronging in, scoffing, pitying, and he was living, as it were, in the street, for every one was speaking about him, and he could not help himself. He stamped his foot on the floor.

"Here 'tis! You wanted honor,--you wanted to be talked about, and now they do talk,--but how? I despise the whole of you!" he exclaimed.

He turned over all manner of plans in his mind, how he should get the better of the world. But what was there that he could do? He could not hit upon anything.

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X. ROLAND'S MOAN

Roland and Manna sat in the library, holding each other's hand; they were like two children who had taken refuge from the storm in a strange hut. For a long time they were unable to speak. Manna was the first to gain composure, and in a tone of forced cheerfulness, passing her hand over her brother's face, she said:--

"Do you know the story of the little brother and the little sister? They lost themselves in the wood, and then found their way home again. And we are like two children in the wild forest. But we are children no longer; you are grown up, you are strong, you must be so."

"Oh, don't speak," replied Roland, "every word goes through my brain, even the sound of your voice. O sister! no, there's none like it! Do you think in all these hundreds and hundreds of books there's one single fate like ours? No, there can't be."

After a longer interval, Manna again began:--

"Now I can tell you what I meant, when I said that I would be an Iphigenia; I wanted to sacrifice myself for you all, in order to take the expiation from you."

"Oh, don't speak. What do these stories of the children in the wood, of Orestes and Iphigenia, have to do with us? Orestes was happy, he could consult the gods at Delphi; at that time the gods could be offended and appeased; they were obliged to give a response--but now? we? Where, in these times, is there a single mouth which gives a response in the name of the gods? The Greeks had slaves too; and we? Now they tell us that love has come into the world, and that all men are the children of God! Is this love? And the priests blessed the marriage of a man who held slaves--children of God as slaves,--and they baptized these children, letting them still be slaves! Alas! I'm getting crazed! O, my youth! O, my youth! Alas! I am still so young, and I must bear for a long, long life-time--must bear this--everything! There's a blackness before my eyes, a spot upon everything I see--all is black--black! At the time when Claus was imprisoned--Children do not suffer for the crime of their father; they can have no part in it, but they do suffer from it a whole lifetime. Where is justice--help me, sister!--do help me!"

"I cannot, I do not comprehend it! O, it was that drove me out of the sanctuary! I don't comprehend it!"

The brother and sister sat together in silence, until Roland suddenly threw himself into Manna's arms, and hiding his head on her bosom, said:--

"Manna, I wanted to kill myself, I could not bear it. Yesterday, everything so beautiful--and here on your heart I cry--I must live--I don't know what I am to do--I must live! Were the children to kill themselves for their parent's guilt, that guilt would be made still greater."

Again Roland leaned his head on the arm of the sofa, murmuring to himself:--

"He did not carry it out at once, and now it will never be done."

"What do you mean?" asked Manna. Roland gave her a glassy stare, but he kept it to himself that he had exhorted his father to put away all his property, and that the father had led him to believe it should be done; but now he seemed to see clearly that nothing of the kind would ever take place. He closed his eyes, opened them again, and lay there paralyzed as in an awful void, everything crushed and shattered within him.

Manna understood how he felt, and kneeling by the sofa, she cried:--

"Roland, I have a great secret to tell you; Eric and I----"

"What?" exclaimed Roland, sitting upright.

"Eric and I are betrothed."

"You? you two?"

He sprang up, pressed her in his arms, exclaiming again:--

"You? you two?"

"Yes, Roland; and he has known everything for a long time."

"He has known everything? And he has not rejected you with disdain?--and he has instructed me so faithfully?--Oh!"

Roland and Manna held each other in a long embrace. There was a knock at the door, and they separated, looking at each other in dismay. They knew it was their father's knock, but neither of them said so. There was another rap, and they still were silent. Retreating footsteps were heard, and they knew their father's step. Both knew what it meant not to open when their father knocked, but each refrained from speaking of it.

Roland's thoughts must have gone from one person to the other, for he now said:--

"Herr von Pranken has advised me to enter the Papal army. O, if I only knew a battle-field where human brotherhood was to be fought for! O, if I knew where that was, how gladly would I die on it! But that cannot be won upon the field of battle. Oh, sister! I don't know what I'm thinking, what I'm saying. Hiawatha fasted, and we must fast too."

"Let us go home!" said Manna, finally.

"Home! home! What is home to us? What can be our home?"

Roland, however, rose up and went hand in hand with Manna through the meadow to the villa.

The sun shone bright, the hay exhaled so sweet a fragrance, the vessels were rushing up and down the stream, and just then a merry procession was moving towards them on the road; it was a so-called harvest mummery. On a cask sat the second son of the Huntsman crowned as Bacchus with vine-leaves; around him stood maidens clad in white, with dishevelled hair; they were swinging jugs, shouting and rejoicing. On the horses rode shapes disguised with moss.

Everybody was shouting and screaming amidst the loud report of fire-arms.

Brother and sister stood and gazed after the merry train, which disappeared behind the trees, and each knew the other's thoughts. Yes, all others can be merry, but we! They went on farther, and at last Roland said:--

"I know not how it is with me, I feel as if I were not really experiencing all this; I am only dreaming of it, and looking at it like a departed spirit. Everything is so distant, so inacessible, so dim, so shadowy. When I look upon you, I feel all the time that we cannot approach each other at all, that there lies between us a dreadful immensity of distance, and father--mother!"

With a wild stare he looked around him, as if he saw ghosts everywhere. Manna held his hand more firmly; he became more tranquil; nay, he even smiled thankfully.

Griffin came bounding along just at this moment; he was overjoyed to see his young master once more, and jumped up on him again and again. Roland caressed him and said:--

"Yes, dear Griffin, when I had lost and forgotten you, then you found your way home. Ah, dear Griffin, don't you know a way home for me now? I am not your master, I am nothing."

The dog seemed to understand Roland's sad looks and words; he looked up at him so affectionately, as if he wanted to say:--Ah! do not pine thy young life away.

Brother and sister stood side by side on the bank of the Rhine. Roland exclaimed,--

"I see my face in the water, sister, there is no brand upon my forehead--no brand--and still----"

He wept bitterly, for the first time.

"Come, let us go on," said Manna consolingly.

"On, on! Yes, our path is long, unendingly long," rejoined Roland, as he allowed himself to be led away by his sister.

They entered the courtyard of the villa. The servants were slowly leading away the horses with their blankets on.

Roland opened his mouth: he wanted to cry out: Take off the blankets! Take off the blankets, and hide the shame with them! Let the horses all spring out into the open air. We have no more right over them, they are no longer ours! But he could not utter the words.

Then he looked up at the green-houses, at the trees, as if he wanted to ask them all if they knew to whom they belonged.

He asked Manna to go into the stable with him. He looked into the servants' faces as if begging respect from them, and he thanked them for saluting him, and for asking him what his commands were. Men still saluted him, men still obeyed him! In the stable, he caressed his pony and wept upon his neck.

"O Puck! shall you ever carry such a light-hearted youth again?"

The dogs were jumping round him; he nodded to them, and said sorrowfully to Manna:--

"The brutes are altogether the happiest creatures in the world; they inherit nothing from their parents, nothing but life--no house, no garden, no money, no clothes. Ah, my good Puck, what a fine long mane you have!"

There was something rising almost to frenzy in Roland's thought and speech, as, tugging at the beast's long mane, he exclaimed:--

"If slaves could not speak, could not pray, they would be happy like you, and like you, my faithful dogs!"

Manna was becoming uneasy at the unwearying tenor of Roland's thoughts; she said:--

"You must now remain all the time with our friend Eric, and not leave him a moment."

"No, not now--not now! Those are no arrows of Apollo, for the pedagogue to ward off!"

Manna did not understand what Roland was saying; his mind seemed to her distracted, and he did not explain how it was that the Niobe group rose before his eyes. At length, after some time, he said:--

"Yes, so it is! The maiden hides in her mother's lap, but the boy holds up his own hands and wards off the fatal shaft. And at night, when I was wandering off to Eric, I listened to the story of the laughing sprite. It takes a long while for an acorn to grow into a tree, and a cradle to be made out of the tree, and a child that lies in the cradle to open the door. Don't you hear? he laughs; he must go through his transformation."

Manna begged him to be quiet, and said:--

"I must go to father."

"And I to mother."

Pranken met them on the steps; he held out his hand to Manna, and she said:

"I am unspeakably thankful to you for the great loyalty you have shown to my father."

"Stop a while, I beg of you."

"No, I cannot now--no longer."

The brother and sister separated, and as Roland entered his mother's room, the latter said:--

"Don't trouble yourself about this Old World, we are going back again to the New, to your real home."

Roland caught these words as if they came from afar off; and he exclaimed:--

"That's it! that's it! It is the Delphic oracle!"

"What do you say? I am not learned." Roland did not answer. Something was beginning to emerge out of the chaos around him, but it sank quickly out of sight again.

"Wait a moment, it is time to go to dinner," said the mother.

She put on a shawl and went with Roland to the dining-room.

Here, also, were Pranken and Fräulein Perini; the two were standing talking together in a low tone.

Roland went for Eric.

"Isn't it dreadful to have to eat again?" he said. "What bits of slaves do we eat to-day? Ah, Eric! lay your hand upon my forehead. So--so--now that's good."

They had to wait some time before Sonnenkamp came, and Manna did not appear until some time afterwards.

Her cheeks were glowing.

They sat there at table so near together, and so far--far apart were they from each other. Eric and Manna looked at each other only once; there was in their glance an expression full of intelligence. Roland said softly to Eric,--

"When the huntsman came home from court there were potatoes on his table."

Eric laid his hand consolingly on his shoulder; he knew everything that was going on in the soul of the youth from this reminiscence. The huntsman was innocent, and here?

Pranken displayed all his tact in managing to bring forward every safe subject of conversation; the building of the castle furnished him abundant material.

They rose from the table, and all separated as before. Roland requested Eric to allow him to remain alone by himself for that day.

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XI. THE BOND OF HONOR

It was evening. Roland was going through the village. In the streets floated an odor of the May wine; everybody was merry and bustling; the wine-presses were creaking and dripping in the streets, men were moving along slowly with full heavy tubs on their backs.

Roland gazed at everybody with questioning look; he would have liked to cry out,--

See, here is a beggar, he begs of you something of love, of kindness, of pity for him and his father. Ah, only a little charity!

He saw the houses to which on his births day he had carried joy-bringing gifts; the people returned his greetings, but they were not, as formerly, gladdened and honored by them; he left the village.

Outside of it, on the river-bank, he sat behind a hedge, as he did before he ran away to Eric. Now he was sitting in unspeakable sadness, that bade fair to wither his life-strength. A water-ousel flew up near him. With childish self-forgetfulness, he bent the boughs away from each other, and saw a nest with five young ones stretching out their bills. How happy he would have been in by-gone days to have made such a discovery! Now, he stood there, and said to himself sadly,--

Ah! you are at home.

He heard a carriage come rattling towards him on the road, and he thought of that poor servant in the night, who would rather hunger and beg than possess property unjustly acquired.

Not far from him on the bank a boat was loosened from its chain; he heard the chain rattle, and at the same moment he felt in his heart as if he heard the slaves, who, bound in one long chain, were coming towards him; and this again transformed itself in his imagination, and he saw the dwarf, fettered as he had once seen him, and the groom; they were walking along the road, and behind them the constable, with his loaded gun gleaming in the sun.

He looked, up.

There, indeed, was a constable walking along. What if he were coming to arrest his father?

O no, there was no fear of that!

What was the matter, then?

And while his eye was still fastened on the bush behind which the constable disappeared, he became, as it were, clairvoyant, his sight reaching out to all things instinctively. His thought stretched away to Clodwig, to the Doctor, to the Major, to the Huntsman. What are they all saying? Profoundly it came upon him: Man does not live for himself alone. There is an invisible and inseparable community, whose bond is respect and honor. He could bear no longer to sit alone with his confused thoughts; he said to himself almost aloud;--

"To the Huntsman's."

With nimble foot and beating heart, as if he expected to find something there, he knew not what, he ascended the mountain. Before reaching the town he was met by the second son of the Huntsman; he too was slowly plodding: he was carrying a heavy tub of young wine. The lad was of the same age with Roland, and while still at some distance, he cried out:--

"Father said that you would come. Just go right in, he is expecting you."

Roland thanked him and went on. As he entered the Huntsman's house, the latter cried out to him:--

"Knew you were coming. Have a salve for you. Needn't tell me anything, know everything this long while. Can give you something."

"What?"

"Boy, there are two things in the world that help; praying and drinking. If you can't pray, drink till you have enough. Come, that's the best thing."

"Shame on you," rejoined Roland, "shame on you, there is another thing."

"What now? What?"

"Why, thinking. I cannot yet do it well at all, and I know not what will come of it, but still help must come of it."

"Huzza!" cried the Huntsman, "you're a splendid lad! Say, have you decided yet what you'll do with the big pile of money, when you've once got it in your hand?"

"No."

"Very well. No doubt you'll learn. Now, I tell you, don't fret your young life away. Have pity on your father; he is a poor man, with all his millions. Show that you're a lad who deserves to have the sun shine on him.

"Listen! mind!" he said, interrupting himself suddenly.

The black-bird was singing the melody: "Rejoice in your life." Roland and the Huntsman looked at each other, and Roland smiled.

"Just so!" cried the Huntsman. "Learn that by heart, too. Rejoice In your life, all else is silly stuff. The bird is sensible. You've done your part well." He nodded to the black-bird, which was regarding the man and the boy with a wise look, as if it knew what it had done, and was sure of applause; and turning to Roland, he continued merrily;--

"So--just so!--just so! Hold up your head, and if you need any one, call on me. You got me out of prison; that I'll never forget. Now come and be merry, as your dogs are."

He took out a loaf of bread, which Roland was to give to the dogs to eat; but Roland ate first with great zest.

"Hurrah! victory!" shouted Claus, "you're hungry. The battle's won! Now let the water run down the Rhine, there's another day to-morrow."

Eric had had a presentiment that Roland would be at the field-guard's; he went after him, and was rejoiced to find him calm once more. They went home together, and Roland said:--

"Over there at the Huntsman's it came into my head all at once: What would Benjamin Franklin say to me now? Do you know, Eric, what he would say?"

"Not entirely, but I think he would say that a man who does nothing but grieve stands on a level with the brute, which in a mishap cannot help itself. The power of man has its beginning in this, that he can grasp, comprehend, and direct his misfortune in such a way as to make something out of it for his own good. If you suffer yourself to fall asleep in affliction, you are responsible for your own injury. Rouse yourself. As long as there is anything which you can esteem in yourself, you have aright to the esteem of others."

"Thanks," exclaimed Roland. "For my part, I have been thinking what Benjamin Franklin would say. I saw him before me with his genial countenance, his long snow-white hair, and he said:--Mark you, the worst thing is not what shames us in the eyes of the world, but to allow the shame so to pervert your mind that you look upon all men as base."

What he had listened to on the way he had shaped into a strong pillar of thought for himself.

Eric could not tell how it gladdened his heart to feel that he had fashioned this youth for such things; he wanted to cry out to him, You are a man; but he repressed it. It would not do to say it aloud. With a tranquillity wrung from the most profound grief, they both returned to the villa.

They reached the garden wall, from the face of which the porter was scraping something.

"There it is! there it is!" exclaimed Roland. "I have read it!"

The porter was scraping the mortar with a sharp iron, and this scraping went through Roland's soul as if the work were done on his own heart. All the coolness and composure that he had gained disappeared.

"There it is!" he exclaimed. "It will have to be scraped off again to-morrow, and the day after to-morrow, and forever. Ah, Eric, why are men so wicked! What good does it do them to insult us?"

Eric consoled him by saying that men are not so wicked, they merely liked to irritate and mock one another.

He accompanied Roland to his room, and there the youth sat still, his hand clenched and pressed against his lip, till his teeth left their mark on his fingers. For a long while he spoke not a word. He looked at the stuffed bird, and said softly to himself once more, "Hiawatha!"

He stood at the window, and looked down into the park, up into the sky, where the swallows were gathering in great flocks, getting ready to cross the sea into warmer lands. Everything, everything has its home, something was saying in the heart of this youth; the plant that cannot stir is carried to a secure shelter, and the swallow draws to a place where it can still be happy. O, if some one could only tell us now where we might be happy!

All at once he shrank back from the window, for he saw the Russian prince entering the courtyard; behind the Prince came the Doctor in his carriage. Roland begged Eric to leave him alone, and not bring any one to see him.

Eric went away, and Roland locked himself up in his room.

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XII. SONNENKAMP FINDS A CONGENIAL SPIRIT

Sonnenkamp was sitting alone in his large room; he looked up towards the castle, which was nearly completed. Who will dwell in it? He turned his eye away. He stood for a long time in front of Roland's picture.

"One should have no children, know nothing of them," he exclaimed. He was terrified at the sound of his own voice.

He opened the money-safe; he contemplated the neatly-arranged papers, and the drawers that contained the coined and uncoined gold.

"What help are you to me? and still----"

There was a knock at the door.

"Who is it?" he asked.

Joseph answered:--

"His Highness the Prince is here, and wishes----"

The Prince? Could it be possible? Was it all only a dream? Is the Prince coming to ask his pardon? Does he feel----?

Sonnenkamp went to the door; he opened it; there stood the Russian Prince Valerian. He said, with friendly words, that he had come to see if he could, in any way, be of assistance, and Herr Weidmann also----

"I need no assistance! I need no one," broke in Sonnenkamp, shutting the door and locking it once more.

"I have no pity, and want no pity," said he to himself, holding both his clenched hands on his breast. There was another knock.

"What is it? Why don't they leave me in peace?"

Through the key-hole came the sound of a gentle voice:--

"It is I, the Countess Bella."

Sonnenkamp shivered.

Is it a trick? It is some one who insists on speaking to him, assuming that name and that voice.

Well! At any rate, the person who puts on that mask is very cunning. Let us see who it is that is so shrewd!

He opened the door and stood transfixed; it was indeed Bella.

"Give me your hand!" she cried. "Your hand! You are a hero, I have never before seen a hero. And what are all these puppets around you? Stuffing for uniforms, nothing more; cowardly professors and newspaper hacks! There is still a bugbear which they call humanity, of which they are all in fear; before which they creep away, like children from the wolf. You alone are a man!"

"Sit down," at last said Sonnenkamp in astonishment; he did, not in the least understand what all this could mean. Bella kept up the same strain, saying:--

"I knew that you were a conqueror, but I did not know that you were such a mighty one."

Still Sonnenkamp was not able to understand. What does this woman want? Is this a kind of mockery? But he was disposed to think otherwise, when she exclaimed:--

"They are weaklings--cowards, all of them, the world of rank particularly! They ought to have created you a count, an ordinary baron is altogether too small a thing for you. You have done what they all would have liked to do--no, not all, but only certain ones who have the mettle within them. But they are ashamed before the man who accomplishes what they had not the energy, or the courage, or the daring to accomplish. They have swords, they carry fancy daggers, and are frightened at the rattan of the school-master, who raps them on the fingers with it and says to them: 'Know ye not that we are living in the epoch--or do they call it the century, the age--of humanity?' By good right, all the nobles of the land should leave their cards for you, and congratulate you. How many of these puppets would be in possession of nobility, if they had to win it by heroism like yours? Look at me; were I young, had you come in my youth, I would have gone out with you into the wide world; you have in you a Napoleonic vein. Give me your hand!"

She reached out both her hands and pressed his passionately.

"You do not recollect, but I have kept it in mind," said she in a haughty tone, "when you and Prince Valerian dined with us, you said: 'There is a priestcraft of Humanity.' You were right. Before the flimsy humanity of Jean Jacques Rousseau, they all bow down in fear, strong free men; they are dreaming of a paradise of equality, where black and white, noble and mean, the genius and the blockhead, shall be brewed into a mass together; they have a new faith in a book, the 'Contrat Social' is their Bible. I am not afraid of Jean Jacques Rousseau----"

With a joyful look, Sonnenkamp interrupted her:--

"A cause is not lost, no, it is victorious, if highminded women are enthusiastic over it."

"Thanks--thanks," continued Bella.

She seized his hand and stroked his thumb with her delicate fingers.

"So one of the pets of the school-masters has sunk his teeth in here? Be proud of it; it is a mark of honor, more so than if it had been won in battle. Now let nothing in the world subdue you; enjoy yourself; you have nothing more to conceal; now stand your ground and show that you are the only one that is not afraid of the school-masters. The dauntless man acknowledges and conforms to the inevitable."

Bella had risen; her eye was blazing, her cheeks were glowing, and her countenance wore a look of mysterious and terrible fascination.

So must Medusa have appeared, so must she have breathed, so must she have trembled.

And in the midst of this deep emotion, Bella felt that it was a fine scene: here are the sublime tones of voice at her command, here is majesty, here is passion. She suddenly stood still like a living picture, as soon as she became conscious of this conception, and her eye sought for a mirror in which to behold herself.

She shook her head, and turned back as if she were coming upon the stage out of one of the side scenes.

"Will you tell me how you have become so great and daring, so free--the only free man?"

Sonnenkamp, the strong man, trembled within himself. He had an avowal upon his lips, but he dared not utter it; he had a demoniacal smile upon his face, as Bella said to him:--

"There is one thing only you must not do; speak not to me of love: anything but the 'fable convenue;' that is nothing--for you nothing and to me nothing. Still another thing. You will learn it now too, if you do not know it already,--the greatest tyranny in the world is the family. Grieve not for your family; a hero has no family, and besides, it is only a sentimental tradition that the heroes used to play with their children on the floor. You must be alone, think of yourself alone; then you are strong, you are like a man born of Byron's fancy, and such a man actually stands before me. You have made only one mistake; a man like you, such a hero, should have no family, should not want to have any. Be firm, do not suffer yourself to be cleft in twain and crushed to atoms through this mistake."

Sonnenkamp was still too much shaken not to feel a shudder creep over him at the sight of this apparition, that seemed to have sprung out from the world of fable; he said that he had had an idea, of the mere existence of which he had only been conscious in a shadowy way, but now it was clear; he was resolved to continue the struggle, to wage open war, that is, covert but decisive war; he would bring the virtuous people hereabouts to a different way of thinking, this next would be his task. He had a plan that was not yet clear to him, but it would become clear.

Bella said that she did not wish to speak to any one in the house beside himself; she was going back at once, but she trusted that he would be firm and stand his ground, for otherwise she would have to despise all men, and among them the only one who had ever won her respect by real power.

Sonnenkamp opened the seed-room, accompanied Bella through it, and opened the door that led to the private stair overrun with climbing plants. Here he kissed her hand at parting. But while still on the steps, Bella called after him:--

"And one thing more! The first thing for you to do is to free yourself from slavery; you must send away this teacher's family."

She made a repellant gesture, and added:--

"This teacher's family should establish their transcendental distillery in the little University town once more."

When Sonnenkamp returned to his room after Bella's departure, it seemed to him as if everything had been only a dream; but he still breathed the odor of the delicate perfumery which Bella's garments had left behind in his room; he still saw the chair on which she had been sitting; she had actually been there.

But Bella did not reach home unseen. In the park she met her brother. She confessed to him frankly that she had been to see Sonnenkamp, to cheer him up; she praised Otto for his constancy, and for despising the miserable, weak world.

"I could love this man!" she exclaimed; "he is a conqueror, he has won for himself a bit of the world. Pshaw! Let them grub for remains from the Roman world, which was so powerful and despised every one that spoke of justice for the slaves--and what are they themselves?"

"Sister," said Pranken playfully, "you are still too young and handsome to dress yourself up with those ingenious whims; you do not need such cosmetic contrivances."

Bella drew back a step from him, and then said:--

"No, I wanted to say a word to you; but no. Only persevere, and bring your designs with Manna to a point soon. How does the little cloister-plant do?"

"I beg of you, Bella----"

"Well, well, I'm going directly, I can do none of you any good."

She turned away quickly, and went back to Wolfsgarten.

Pranken looked after her with astonishment. He composed himself, for the Priest came up. He reached out his hand to him humbly, and spoke very gratefully of his having come voluntarily to build up anew the house of sorrow.

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