XIII. COUNTER-POISON…

XIII. COUNTER-POISON

Prince Valerian, who had met with such a rough rebuff from Sonnenkamp, had himself announced to Eric. Roland, who was in the next room, heard him say, the first thing as he entered:--

"Where is Roland?"

"He desires to be left alone," answered Eric; and then the Prince declared that Eric was best able to form an opinion as to what might be good for Roland; but for his part, he could not help thinking that intercourse with men in whose eyes he could behold the love they bore him, would be of greater assistance than anything else in this unspeakable sorrow.

Roland rose to his feet in the next room. Would this really be better than musing by one's self? He kept quiet, and heard the Prince ask how the daughter and how the wife had received the exposure of the dreadful secret.

The Prince spoke in a loud, Eric in a low tone, and Roland did not understand Eric's answer.

The Prince continued in the same loud tone. Herr Weidmann was indignant at the manner in which Professor Crutius had brought this matter before the public, and the statement that Doctor Fritz might have had a share in this malicious publication, was, without doubt, a falsehood. Doctor Fritz had said again and again, when he came to take away his child, that he hoped the whole affair would remain concealed, on account of Sonnenkamp's children.

Roland trembled.

Does Lilian know it over the sea? Or when will she hear of it? How will she bear it? And will she cry about him? And she told him, that time in the garden, that he must come home and help to deliver the world from wrong.

He stretched his arms upwards, as if he must hasten from that spot, and do something at that very moment.

The Prince, in the neighboring room, went on to say that Herr Weidmann had seriously considered whether he himself ought not to go over to Villa Eden, then and there to offer his assistance, but he had, after thinking the matter over, perceived that this would be of no practical benefit, and therefore he had counselled the Prince to carry out his own purpose.

"Ah!" he exclaimed, "for the first time in a long while has the high social position I am permitted to occupy brought me joy, or, rather joy is not the right word. I thought to myself that, on this account, I should be able to effect here more than any one else, and particularly for your pupil Roland, whom I love so dearly, and whose afflictions give me not a moment's peace."

In the next room, Roland folded his outstretched hands, and the thought passed through his mind:--

Oh; the world is good; no, it is not so bad as you on the journey wished to make me believe. Here is one man who feels for me.

The Prince continued:--

"Ah, Captain, what are we, who are set in high places? Our way of living is just the same as yours is here, only it is historically superannuated, overgrown with moss. On the way here, I have seen everything anew. Our serfs were sold with the land and soil. It is the same thing, or rather, worse, for they were men of the same race. And, Captain, on my way here I became a terrible heretic. I asked myself what have those done who were sent into the world to preach, and never to stop preaching, love and brotherhood. They have looked quietly upon the fact that there are thousands and thousands of slaves, thousands and thousands of serfs. And then the thought struck me. Who is freeing the serfs and the slaves? Pure humanity is unloosing their chains."

Again the thought flashed through Roland's mind: Is not that the same thing that he himself had already thought of--and Manna too? The youth's eyes opened wide, as Eric now answered:--

"I am far away from what is called the church, but the doctrine of Christ is still a root of that humanity which is now fast ripening into maturity."

"You are like Herr Weidmann, who also----" exclaimed the Prince. He could not finish the sentence, for the Doctor entered.

"Where is Roland?" he also inquired, after the greeting was over.

He too got the answer that Roland wished to be alone, and the Doctor said,--

"I approve of that. Is he very much agitated? Mind, days will come when he will fall into dulness and apathy; let it have its course with him, and at the same time have the greatest patience with him. The noblest gift of nature is stupor; it is part of the soul's sleep; the simpleton and the brute have it constantly; they consequently never reach that pitch of intense excitement that endangers all existence; and nature, too, takes pity on the sensitive man, and gives him stupor. In the first place, when he begins to give way under his grief, then, I beg of you, give Roland to understand then the affair is not so terrible as it seems; there is a good deal of depravity right under, our very eyes; and where is it that this depravity does not exist! Do you remember my asking you when you came here first, how long since you had been a believer in depravity?"

Eric said he did.

The Doctor continued in a cheerful tone:--

"Now that evil is here, don't lose heart; you have done nobly so long as you have put faith in human purity; I hope, now that you have become a convert to the new faith, you will still remain equally strong. Yes, Captain, we think we are teachers when we are only pupils. Do you know what vexed me most in the publication of this story?"

"How could I?"

"I was indignant that the sated, self-sufficient portion of the community, pluming itself upon its external white-wash of decency, should now give itself a treat. Each person looks at himself: Ah, I am a magnificent being, compared with this monster. And still the vileness of the slave trade is only more notorious than that of a thousand other occupations. In the Jockey Club the 'Jeunesse dorée' are railing at the monster Sonnenkamp, and what are they themselves? Hundreds of occupations are constantly hanging on the verge of crime. Yes, the old theology teaches me that as Sodom might in old times have stood, if only just so many righteous men were to be found in it, so it is to-day. The sun shines only for the few just men; and in every human being there is a complete Sodom; but there is also in him something of righteousness, and because of that he continues to live."

Eric and the Prince looked in surprise at the Doctor, who in they had never before really known. Within, in the next room, Roland had seized hold of his forehead, as if questioning whether he comprehended all this, and in what it would all end.

The Doctor seemed to enjoy his triumph, or rather the perplexity he had caused, and he exclaimed in a loud voice, louder even than before,--

"For all that, I have for this Herr Sonnenkamp great respect."

He paused, and then continued:--

"This Herr Sonnenkamp, or, for aught I care, Banfield, has kept pretty stiff, he has not bowed down before the priesthood; if he had, this would have been covered up. That he has not done so, shows power; and, besides, I think I have kept myself free from the sentimental epidemic. These niggers are not my fellow creatures; human beings of a black complexion have no high destiny; from their whole physical conformation, they belong out in the heat of the sun, at hard work. Slavery is not such a bad thing, after all; we would not find it ill, if we, too, had slaves for servants. When serving people know that their place is to serve and that they can not play the master, they are more faithful in their work, and one can take better care of them. And I have many a time thought to myself how it would be, if my men-servants and maid-servants were all at once transformed into Africans; it would be a surprise, but one would have to get reconciled to it. I am loth to accept these darkies as my brothers. And can you think of a negro as a painter? A nigger cannot even see himself in the looking-glass. And can you picture to yourself a nigger statesman, a nigger professor?"

Eric was full of indignation at all this, but he had to listen to it; there was no chance for him to say anything, as the Doctor cried out in a still louder voice,--

"Don't let Roland fall into sentimentality. You, as philologist, must know the story of that--wasn't it a Roman emperor?--who had made a great deal of money by the slave-trade, and whose son took up a piece of the gold acquired by this means, held it to his nose, and asked: 'num olet?' Roland should not continue to carry on the slave-trade; it isn't just the thing; it's always unpleasant and dirty; but he mustn't let what has happened ruin him; he should know that he's the legitimate owner of the property, and needn't ask how the money was obtained--the legitimate owner," he repeated once again in a loud voice.

Eric now noticed for the first time that the Doctor was speaking neither to him nor to the Prince.

The Doctor was aware that Roland was listening to everything, in the next room, and everything was directed to him. Should he by a protest interfere with the healing skill of the Doctor, who sought to cure the effect of the poison by a counter poison?

"Ah! you come in good time," cried the Doctor to the Priest, as he entered. "I have been fore-stalling you a little in your office, and now you can give me some assistance."

He repeated hurriedly to the Priest what he had been saying, and he was surprised when the Priest rejoined:--

"I do not agree with you. Yes, you gentlemen of philosophy and the self-government of mankind--remember Captain, I told you so the first time we met--you have nothing but arrogance or dejection; you know no such thing as equanimity, because the firmly fixed rock of the Positive is lacking in you."

Eric, who had been holding his breath while the Doctor was holding forth, was on the point of replying sharply to the Priest, when the door was thrown open and Roland entered.

"No Doctor," exclaimed he, "you have not converted me. I still know--I still know--and you, Herr Priest, it does not become me to dispute with you, but I will not suffer my friend, my brother, my Eric, to be assailed here. He has given me the Positive, the belief in our duty, in our activity, in our never-ceasing self-devotion. I will show for his sake, and for my sake, what I can yet do in life."

The Prince embraced Roland; the Doctor took the Priest outside, and said to him in a low tone:--

"Don't trouble the young man, a favorable crisis has set in. Come with me, I beg of you."

He drew the Priest away almost by force.

Eric, Roland, and the Prince still sat a long while together; then they had the horses saddled, Eric and Roland accompanying the Prince a part of the way.

After they had ridden a short distance, they saw a strange shape on the road; Roland cried out suddenly:--

"There's something walking, I think--I think--no, I am not mistaken, it's our friend Knopf!"

It was no other than Knopf. He was going along quietly in the dark, quizzing himself sorely why it was he did not understand the world; it really ought to explain itself to him, for he held the world so dear. Why is it so reserved and full of secresy? What would now become of Roland? And amongst the rest entered a lighter and more trifling sorrow, that the Major had utterly forgotten him. Knopf did not think ill of him for it, not in the least; for Heaven knows that in such confusion one had his head full enough; who can think of everything? He confessed modestly to himself that he, of course, could not have been of any assistance whatever, he was so awkward; there was Herr Dournay, and Pranken--he knew nothing at all about Prince Valerian. Thus he was trudging along in the dark, and questioning himself in every way, and then looking up at the stars.

"Herr Knopf! Herr Knopf! Herr Magister!" was shouted out by different voices. Knopf stopped. Roland sprang quickly off his horse, embraced the old teacher, and exclaimed:--

"Ah, forgive me for what I have done to you; I've been wanting to say it to you--long ago----" At the words, "long ago," Roland's voice trembled violently.

"You have already, and it has been forgiven for a long time; but how does it happen that you are here?"

Everything was soon explained. Knopf rested his hand on Roland's shoulder all the while, as if he could lend him some of his strength; and he pressed back the spectacles very close to his eyes, when he heard and saw how the youth was beginning to bear up manfully under the terrible event. He pressed Eric's hand as if he would say:--

You can be happy, you have imparted to the boy genuine strength.

When at last they were bidding good-bye, Roland begged Knopf to ride home on the pony. Knopf assured him repeatedly that it was a pleasure to him to roam about in the dark on foot; Roland asserted that Puck was a right gentle beast, so tractable, so easy and intelligent; and he said to the little horse:--

"I want you to be good now, and make up for all the trouble I gave to my old teacher; do be well-behaved."

Knopf continued to object, and at last he brought out, in a plaintive tone, that he had no straps to his pants. Everybody laughed, and Roland in the midst of his sorrow laughed too. Knopf was extremely happy to find that Roland could laugh, and now he yielded. Roland helped him mount, stroking the arm of his former teacher, and stroking the horse; Knopf and the Prince rode off together. But Eric did not mount again; leading his horse by the bridle, he went hand in hand with Roland to the Villa.

And now, in the still night, Eric was incessantly occupied in thinking of what the Doctor had said; how great was the discord in the whole modern world, so that the life of states, and even many of the occupations of private life, were not regulated by ethical principles. Not in the way prescribed by the Doctor,--besides, it had left no impression whatever on Roland,--would the youth gain rest and strength, nor in any way but in the acknowledgment that each one must strive earnestly to conform to the moral law, and make it an integral part of his actual life.

Roland listened to him quietly, occasionally clasping the speaker's hand with a firmer hold.

When they were approaching the Villa, Roland said, sighing deeply:--

"Ah, Eric, now the house is robbed in a very different way from what it was when we came back from Wolfsgarten."

No change had been wrought in the dejected feelings of Roland by what the Doctor had said, nor by Eric's utterances; the only effect was to enable him to express himself freely.

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XIV. A NEW PILLORY AT THE CHURCH DOOR

The swallows were flocking together and twittering over Villa Eden, over the jail not far from the house of the Justice, over the military club-house in the capital, and wherever they flocked, everybody was talking of Sonnenkamp, of what had happened and of what would happen to him.

In the basement, in the large room near the kitchen, Sonnenkamp's domestics were sitting at table. Bertram's chair was vacant. Somebody was saying that the porter would have to scrape the writing off the wall, and that he had already given the master notice that he should leave. The "chief," who spoke German quite fluently when he was in anger, was cursing the rascality of domestics in leaving their master, who had no farther to concern themselves than to get their regular pay. The Cooper contested this, Of course, the honor of the master was the honor of the servant, but they ought still to remain with Sonnenkamp; if there was a good deal in him that was bad, there was also much that was good. Joseph, whose personal opinion did not have its just weight, on account of his confidential relations with Sonnenkamp, was glad that the Cooper had hit the right point.

The second coachman, the Englishman, who also wanted to give notice of leaving, now said that he should not do it; but of course he must always be ready for a boxing-match.

The Squirrel expressed his fear that some one would set fire to the place, for the whole neighborhood was possessed by the devil. Lootz was not there, and nobody knew where the master had sent him. Old Ursel mourned over the innocent children, at the same time eating away with a fearful appetite, and uttering loudest lamentations with her mouth full.

The stuttering gardener made the proposal that they should remain, but should make a joint demand for higher wages. All agreed to do this, except Joseph and the Cooper, but were puzzled how it could be brought about.

The subterraneans were unanimous in their eulogies of Pranken. He was a nobleman whose like could not be found, who did not desert the master for a single moment. He had ridden out with him in the broad daylight, and did not concern himself as to what his noble relatives might say of him.

Here, underground, they were also glad to know that men were ungrateful and base. It was even known here that Sonnenkamp had made a present of the Villa to the Cabinetsrath, for what the latter had given for it was only a trifling sum; and now the gardener of the Cabinetsrath had reported that the country-house and the vineyard had just been sold to the American Consul, as a sort of gibe at Sonnenkamp; for the family of the Cabinetsrath wished to have no more intercourse with Villa Eden.

In just the same way, although by men of a different position in society, were Sonnenkamp's circumstances discussed in the military club-house of the capital, as well as in the beer-houses. For some time, Adams, the negro servant of the Prince, had everywhere been the topic of conversation. There were various wonderful stories how five men were hardly able to restrain the raving negro; that he had tried to choke Sonnenkamp,--only with the greatest difficulty had they succeeded in getting him out of the capital, and removing him to a hunting-seat. Then the conversation would turn upon Sonnenkamp. Everybody asked what he would do now; no one could understand how it was that Pranken stood by him, and how the family permitted such a thing. In the military club-house there was also an Ursel, but here she took the form of a pensioned lady of high rank, who also ate heartily, and, while eating, spoke very compassionately of the poor children of the millionaire.

But the conversation took a very peculiar turn in the house of Dr. Richard, where they were to-day giving a great coffee-party in honor of Frau Weidmann, who had come on a visit; it had been arranged several days before, and the Professorin, Aunt Claudine, Frau Ceres, and Manna had been invited; of course they did not come. Here and there they were earnestly discussing how they should treat the Sonnenkamp family, if they had the audacity not to leave the country as soon as possible.

Lina, who had returned from the trip with her betrothed, said that she would be the same in Sonnenkamp's family that she had always been, and that she would remain Manna's friend; for wherever the Professorin was, there any one might maintain social intercourse without detriment to one's honor.

The tone of the conversation became kindly as Frau Weidmann gave unreserved support to Lina; she spoke of the noble character of Roland, who had been on a visit to her house, and of the solid worth of Eric, whom her husband held in very high esteem.

Thus every one in the house, as well as in the neighborhood, seemed to be putting himself right, and adopting a moderate, kindly tone towards the Sonnenkamp family. But the bitter, detestable consequences of the occurrence manifested themselves in the green cottage on Sunday morning.

During the hour before mass, the indigent neighbors used to come for their regular weekly allowance; to-day there came only one solitary woman, in a sorry plight. She was a drunkard's wife, who was forever complaining and lamenting; she was constantly fretting about two children, one of which she held in her arms, and the other she led by her side.

It was only with some difficulty that the Professorin had brought herself to furnish assistance to this woman, because she was afraid that the drunkard would only be made more shiftless by so doing; she had yielded to the persuasion of Fräulein Milch, though she generally cut the talkative woman short. But she had to listen patiently to-day, now that the woman came alone and no others were there. The Professorin trembled when the woman said to her:--

"Yes, yes, such is the world! It's a topsy-turvy world. My husband makes wife and children unhappy because he squanders everything, and Herr Sonnenkamp makes wife and children unhappy because he has got everything. Yes, just so! It's a world turned upside down."

She assured the Professorin that she would take none of the gold of the slave-trader, if she could help herself in any other way.

And out of this gold my son is to enrich himself, said the Professorin, to herself, sitting there alone soon afterwards, as the bells were ringing. She sat quiet for a long time. Then Eric came in and said:

"Ah mother, another dreadful thing has happened!"

"Something new? Still another dreadful thing? What has happened?"

"He was bold and defiant; he went to church with Pranken."

"Who did?"

"Herr Sonnenkamp. And when he came out of the church, there stood all the people in a row, looking at him. He went up to a poor man and handed him a gold piece; the poor man took the money, and then threw it away, exclaiming: 'I will have nothing from you!' And they all cried out: 'We want nothing more from you! Take yourself out of the country.' Sonnenkamp went away, the piece of gold is still lying there before the church door, and no one will pick it up. O mother, the people are great and horrible at the same time."

"Did you see it too? Where did you hear about it? Were you too at the church?"

"No; Manna and Roland told me, and now they are sitting in the garden together, and weeping. I have hastened to you, for you only can help us. Comfort them, strengthen them."

"I have done all I can," said the Mother; "I am too weak, and I am afraid I shall be ill."

Eric called his aunt to remain with his mother, and returned to Roland and Manna.

The Doctor was sent for that very afternoon. The Professorin was sick.

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XV. A WHOLESOME ILLNESS

She whom all depended upon, to whom every one repaired, sure of care and assistance,--she was now unexpectedly in want of assistance herself, and was in a dangerous condition. The remarkable events and vicissitudes some had begun to overcome by means of their youthful strength, by stern defiance, and others by indifference; the Professorin alone felt a constant gnawing at her heart day and night.

Eric had remarked several days before, although he ascribed it to the sudden shock she had received, that his mother, when he was walking before her hand in hand with Manna, took everything cordially and kindly, but still dully, and as if weighed down by some feeling of depression. His mother was in the habit of seeking help from no one, she had always the power of assisting others, and in this doing for others she always found renewed strength.

From the day on which Fräulein Milch made that communication to her, it had been different; she performed only mechanically the duties which had previously been executed with such freedom and animation.

From that day forth, she had determined to keep clear of every luxurious indulgence which this ostentatious man might feel like putting in her way, and this she would do in a modest and retiring manner; from that day forth she looked upon herself as a traveller receiving temporary hospitalities, for all the home feeling of comfort had been taken away from her. She was prepared at any hour to pack up all that she possessed, and all that was arranged in such a quiet way about her, and remove to some other place.

She had never in her life been troubled by regret, she had done nothing for which she could reproach herself, or the memory of which was to be effaced; but now she was beset by a constant feeling of regret.

Why had she been so thoughtless as to connect herself with such a mysterious and disintegrated family?

Joy and grief affected her by turns, like one suffering under the delirium of fever.

Eric's happiness in loving Manna and being so deeply loved, which before had excited within her such a blissful pleasure, she now listened to and looked upon with an almost forced interest; and when Bella had so deeply mortified her, she could scarcely make any resistance, for it seemed to her as if it concerned someone else, and had no relation to herself. Thus she lived estranged from herself, but made no complaint, hoping that everything would right itself. She had no idea that there was an inward disturbance and distraction which would show itself on the first favorable opportunity. Now, when the needy declined charity at her hands, that inexpressible sadness, so long hidden and repressed, broke forth. It seemed to her inexplicable that her only son, her all in this world, was to be engrafted into this family.

The Doctor had found the Mother in a state of febrile excitement; he gave her a composing draught; but the opinion which he expressed before Eric, Manna, and Roland, had a still more quieting effect. The Mother complained that she had never known how much people could be at variance with themselves and with others. The Doctor replied, with a smile, that people were not generally so nice in their housekeeping as she was, and, referring to Sonnenkamp, said that there is such a thing as a zone of mind, or whatever else you may choose to call it, which furnishes organizations entirely exotic, but which nevertheless have their natural conditions, as our customary, everyday ones have. The constant solitary speculation and refining of thought, the recurring to her life with her husband, there thoroughly deep-seated melancholy of the noble woman showed itself in an increased sensitiveness and irritability; and it had reached such a point that fears were entertained for her life; something might occur which would be the occasion of suddenly extinguishing this flickering flame of life.

Eric, Manna, and Roland, trembling and apprehensive, surrounded the Mother with constant care, and in this anxiety for another, there was a great deliverance for themselves. The Doctor once said in the library to Eric:--

"If your mother had become sick on purpose, it would have been one of the wisest things she could have done; for it helps you all to get possession of yourselves."

Sonnenkamp also expressed profound sympathy, but he felt provoked; it is not now the time for sickness, every one must now stand erect so as to bear up under the storm. After some days, however, he found the Professorin's illness very opportune; it took some time to get accustomed to the new order of things; he even admitted to himself directly, that he would not regret it much if the Professorin should die; that would produce a change of feeling, and in the mean while everything was getting better very fast.

Fräulein Milch did not suffer Manna to devote herself entirely to the Professorin as she wished to do, and she herself was the best of nurses.

The Major went about in utter desolation. More than any one else, not even excepting the children, he was the most deeply affected, perhaps, by the disclosure of Sonnenkamp's past life.

"The world is right; that is, Fräulein Milch is right," he was all the time saying. "She has told me all along that I don't know men, and she's right."

In the mean while, he found a good place of refuge; he went to see Weidmann, at Mattenheim, for a couple of days.

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XVI. A BLACK WAVE

On Sunday evening a bustling crowd was streaming along the white road, up and down the banks of the river, and to and fro between the vineyards, all seeming to have one end in view.

Sonnenkamp, wrapped in his cloak, was sitting on the flat roof of his house, gazing with a sensation of dizziness upon the surrounding landscape. Once he walked to the eaves. His brain reeled, and he wanted to throw himself off.

So then it was all over, the hard thinking and everything! Nevertheless he stepped back again, and sat upon the flat roof until nightfall.

Suddenly his ear was struck by howls, cat-calls, hootings, rattling and clashing, as though hell itself had been let loose.

He sprang to his feet. Are these sounds within him? Is this all imagination? He hears them distinctly; the noise comes from beneath. It rises from the road, and he descries by the torchlight fantastic figures with black faces. Is that, too, only imagination? Have they come hither from the other world, those creatures with human forms?

"You must leave the country!"

"Begone to your blacks!"

"We'll fetch him out, and paint him black too!"

"And we'll tie him on his black nag, and lead him through the country, shouting: 'Look at him!'"

Then followed more whistling, bawling, crashing, rattling, and a sharp, jangling sound, produced by banging pots and kettles together. It was a most infernal din.

Then arose in Sonnenkamp's memory a vision of the past,--the image of a man accused of having incited slaves to revolt, driven through the streets, naked, tarred and feathered, pelted with rotten apples and cabbage stumps. The scene changed, and on the gallows hung John Brown.

The report of a gun was heard, and the voice of Pranken, crying:--

"Shoot the dogs down! I'll take the responsibility!"

Only one more shot resounded; then the raging mob came surging against the gate, which gave way with a crash, and in rushed the frantic rabble, all with black faces, and the cry arose:--

"We'll choke the whole of 'em!"

"Where is he?"

"Give him up, or we'll smash everything to pieces!" Sonnenkamp hastened down from the roof through the house, and, standing on the open balcony, heard Eric's voice, warning the crowd in powerful tones:--

"Are you men? Are you Germans? Who has made judges of you? Speak! I will answer you. You are bringing misery upon yourselves. You will be recognized and detected, in spite of your blackened faces. To-morrow will come the appointed judge; for we live in a well-governed country, and you are all of you amenable to the law."

"We don't want to touch the Captain!" cried a voice from the crowd.

Eric continued,--

"If there is one among you who can tell what you want, let him come forward."

A man with blackened face, whom Eric did not recognize, stepped forth and said,--

"Captain, it's me, the Screamer; let me speak. The new wine has got into our folks' heads below there. I'm as sober as a cat," added he, stammering.

"But what do they want?"

"They wish that Herr Sonnenkamp, or whatever his name is, should leave our part of the country, and go where he belongs."

"Yes! Let him take himself off!"

"And give me back my meadow!"

"And me my vineyard!"

"And me my house!"

Such were the cries uttered by the mob.

Claus quickly joined Eric on the steps, and called to the rabble,--

"If you go on shouting out such crazy stuff, and speaking all together, I'll be the first to choke any one who tries to get into the house."

"Let him be off!"

"Let him clear out!" "Hustle him out!" was the general cry.

Just as this was yelled forth, Sonnenkamp appeared on the steps. The howling, shrieking, and kettle-banging began anew; stones crashed through the great window-panes.

The Screamer, hastening up the steps, placed himself before Sonnenkamp, saying.--

"Keep still: I'll protect you."

Then he shouted, yet more violently,--

"If you say one word more, and if every man doesn't hold his neighbor, so that he can't move his arms, I'll be the first to shoot you down, without caring whether I hit the innocent or the guilty."

"Men, what have I done to you?" cried Sonnenkamp.

"Cannibal!"

"Kidnapper!"

"Slave dealer!"

"And if I were," exclaimed Sonnenkamp, "what gives you the right to judge me?"

"You must clear out of this!"

"Make yourself scarce!" was the cry from beneath.

"Herr Sonnenkamp, and you, Captain," said Claus, hastily addressing them both, "I only joined this savage troop, because I saw it was no use trying to hold them back, but I've caught them by the halter, and if you'll just leave everything to me, we'll make a carnival-sport out of the whole concern. You speak first, Captain, and I beg you to keep still, Herr Sonnenkamp."

"My men," began Eric, "let the stones alone. Do you know the great word,--'He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone!' Has not every one of you done something that----"

"We've never sold men! Oh! the ogre!" they cried from below.

Eric could say no more. At this juncture Manna appeared, holding a branched candlestick with two lighted candles. A cry of astonishment went through the crowd; then all was still for a second, all eyes being rivetted on the girl as she stood there, pale, with sparkling eyes and dishevelled hair.

Roland, placing himself beside Eric, called out in a voice which resounded far and wide,--

"Stone us! Tear us in pieces! Come on; we are unarmed!"

"We don't want to hurt the children!"

"But the man-seller must begone!"

"Yes, he must clear out!"

"Be off!"

Again the tumult seemed increasing, the rioters pushing one another forward. All at once they recoiled, even those upon the steps shrinking back. Beneath the great door-way a white-robed form appeared, and her hair was gray.

The noisy wretches in the court were struck dumb, gazing upward with glances of amazement. Those assembled on the steps, turning round, saw the Professorin, standing there like a being from another world, from the boundless space of Eternity. Stepping quietly to the balustrade, she first raised and then lowered her hands as in blessing, as if calming the stormy waves. Profound silence reigned, and she spoke in tones which might be heard a great way off:

"No man can expiate his brother's sin by wrong-doing. Do not sin yourselves. Restrain yourselves, lest to-morrow you weep over to-day."

Her voice grew more powerful, as she said:--

"Conquer yourselves!"

Laying her hand on Sonnenkamp's shoulder, she said, in sonorous tones:--

"I promise you that this man, who has already done good, shall perform a deed so great as to reconcile you all to him. Do you believe me?"

"Yes, we believe the Professorin!"

"Hurrah for the Professorin! Huzza! Huzza!"

"Come along home! It's enough!"

A man carrying a drum struck up a march, when, just as the mob was about to depart, something came rattling along, helmets gleamed, the fire-engine came up, and a jet of water suddenly spurted over them all. A like shower came from the other side; for Joseph had hastened to the head-gardener's, and the hose was now used with effect. The stream from either side rose high into the air, and they all went off, grumbling, laughing, and cursing.

The men were still standing on the steps, and Eric was the first to speak, saying:--

"Mother, you here? And from your sick-bed? This may cause your death."

"No, my son, it has given life to me, to you, to all, and purity to all. I am ill no longer; a great and beautiful and fortunate deed has saved me."

Sonnenkamp, taking off his cloak, wrapped the Professorin in it, and they led the old lady, whose eyes shone wonderfully, into the great hall, where she sat down, while they all stood around her as about a saint.

Manna, kneeling before her, took her hands, and wept copious tears upon them.

"Now I only beg for quiet," said the Professorin. "I am calm; give me no further excitement now. I heard it, I know not how; I came hither, I know not how. Something called and impelled me, and it has ended well. Oh, believe that everything will yet turn out for the best. Herr Sonnenkamp, give me your hand. I have something to say to you."

"I will fulfil whatever you may command."

"You must do something, although I do not yet know what, in order to pacify the minds of these people."

"I will. I will summon a jury, in the choice of which you must assist me. To them I will unfold my life, and into their hands I will leave the decision of what is to be done."

"That is a happy idea. To-morrow we will carry it out. Now it is enough," said the Professorin, in a tone soothing to the others and to herself. "Manna, go to your mother," added she.

Manna left the room.

It was late before those assembled in the Villa separated. The Professorin must spend the night there. Sonnenkamp would not have it otherwise. He gave her the best room in the house, and Eric sat by his mother's bed until she fell asleep.

But without, on the banks of the Rhine, stood a multitude, washing their black faces clean again, and recovering from the effects of the new wine. In the night a black wave rolled past the Villa, and down the river to the sea.

Oh! If the black deed could only be thus wiped off, and sunk in the ocean of Eternity!

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I. OBLITERATED TRACES

The gardeners raked smooth the footpaths: they bound up the down-trodden shrubs again, removing the broken ones. Even the grooms assisted to-day in the garden, while up in the house the glaziers were already busy, putting in new squares of plate-glass. When the gentlemen and ladies wake up, they shall see as little as possible of last night's tumult.

No one in the whole house awoke until the morning was far spent. Even Manna was not visible. Perhaps this was the first time in her life that she had omitted going to church. The night's experience had been hard for her to bear; for when, after the riot, she came to her mother, the latter kept crying out,--

"They will tar and feather him! They will tar and feather him! Oh! why did he go among our enemies?"

Her mother put her fingers in her ears; and when Manna tried to describe how the Professorin had appeared as a rescuing angel, Frau Ceres broke into loud laughter.

"Yes, indeed! Europeans allow old women to tame them!"

Manna was silent, and buried her face in her hands. She had heard this not long beforehand in spirit; and, as she stood on the steps, she had felt that all this had previously been made known to her in dreams, and that it would vanish like a dream.

Then, remembering her love, she realized that life cannot be sacrificed to another as an expiation, but that it can be exalted for another's sake. Once again horror seized upon her soul. She heard the voices of hell, and a hell opened within her. Hast thou sinned in proving faithless? Would every thing have been better, would the dreadful thing not have happened, if thou hadst remained true? Who knows whether, through some secret working, every thing did not become publicly known in the capital in the very hour of thy perfidy?

She wished to make her thoughts like those of the martyrs, who endured stoning with bowed heads; but, in the midst of this violent soul-torment, she only saw Eric's image again; and rising, as though he had called her, she felt as if his hand were laid upon her head.

Thus had Manna returned to her room, full of fear, and yet rising again as upon a wave of happiness: and thus she slept far into the day, hearing nothing of the voice of the bell which called her, and with no suspicion of what was now being said about her; for not far from the church stood Pranken with Fräulein Perini.

Ever since his return from town, Pranken had felt a fresh irritation, which directed itself more and more against Eric; and, at the arrival of Prince Valerian, he was highly incensed on observing how every one went instantly to Eric's chamber, as though Eric were the centre of the house. "This shall be changed," he said to himself "This teacher must find out who he is." By reason of the riot, however, this teacher's, family had again become conspicuous; the pitiful canaille having allowed themselves to be soothed by an old woman.

Pranken had walked furiously through the park, and finally took the road leading to the church. Here on this road, now, on this morning, he would bring Manna to a decision; then he would have his own way with the house, and discharge the teacher's family. He waited long; but Manna did not come. At last, seeing Fräulein Perini alone, he greeted her, and asked where Manna was, and whether she was well.

"Why don't you ask after my health?" replied she somewhat tartly. "I have something of great importance to impart to you; but you do not seem to think it worth while to trouble yourself about me."

"Indeed I do; but you should reflect"--

"I do reflect that you ought to reflect that I too have an existence. However, I have something of great importance to impart to you."

"Oh! please, you were always so kind"--

"Yes, yes, only too kind; but you forget me too quickly. Well, then, what would you do if you were told that that arrogant tutor aspired to win the hand of your betrothed?"

Fräulein Perini laughed, and Pranken was frightened, terrified. He had never heard her laugh so; and now she laughed in exactly the same tone, and made precisely the same bending of the neck, as little Nelly. How ridiculous, how inconceivable, that she should occur to his mind at this juncture!

"You seem in a very good humor after the riot," said he, trying to appear jocose. "You must tell me the rest after church: the third bell is just ringing."

"Oh, no! I can neglect church for this matter. A work of mercy absolves"--

"A work of mercy?"

"Yes."

And now Fräulein Perini told how she had seen Manna coming out of Eric's room; and how every thing had evidently been arranged in the green cottage, and was now settled; also how the maid-servant of the green cottage had even said that Manna had taken with her the marriage-contract, which had been drawn up in the library.

Pranken shook his head incredulously. Fräulein Perini, however, stung him again by asking whether he would promise, in case he came into possession of Manna and of all her property, to consecrate the Villa as a convent. He shrugged his shoulders; and the look came again into Fräulein Perini's eyes, which she had once given to Bella after she had turned away. She stung and irritated Pranken; for she saw that he still despised her, and she wished to ruin him. He must promise her, that, if the affair proved inevitable, he would challenge this Herr Dournay, and shoot him if possible.

Pranken looked bewildered. Again an old memory arose within him; at the time that he had travelled with Eric to Wolfsgarten, he had seen this as in a vision. Must it then take place? He demurred, he hung back; he said that then he should certainly lose Manna. If he fell, then all would naturally be over. If he killed Eric, Manna would never become the wife of a man who had killed another on her account.

Fräulein Perini cast down her eyes, in order to hide her malicious smile. Things were now taking exactly the turn she had wished; Manna should lose them both, and find in the convent her only refuge.

They had talked so long that church was over, and as the clergyman came out, Fräulein Perini went with him, and Pranken turned back towards the Villa. He met the Doctor and Eric, walking together and engaged in earnest conversation.

The Doctor was in as good spirits as ever, and was expounding to Eric how the fresh must, which is so joyously drunk and which tastes so deliciously, is, according to the assertion of old people, a real cure, building the whole body anew, so that it is taken both for enjoyment and for the health. "Thus the crisis caused by the intoxication of the new wine is really good. So it is with this riot. It has been beneficial in many ways. The anger of the inhabitants of the neighborhood has exceeded all reasonable bounds, and has thus lost all pretension of justice. On this side there is nothing more to be feared. But even in the house itself it is clear that life will henceforth be more vigorous. That they are all sleeping is a good sign."

They met the Cooper, and the Doctor would hear the whole story over again, growing very merry over the account of the effect produced in the park by the fire-engine and the water-works. The Cooper narrated how the engine had been quickly made ready, as Herr Sonnenkamp had presented it with the very best hose.

They soon met a group of men, delegates sent by the different communities to assure Herr Sonnenkamp of their readiness to protect him in any emergency, if he would only abstain from bringing an action for what had occurred.

The Doctor begged the men to come back on Sunday, saying that he would previously inform Herr Sonnenkamp.

He turned back with Eric, and they were not a little surprised at finding the Professorin already on the terrace with Manna. The Doctor joked very merrily over the genius of accident, which could accomplish more than all science. He declared the Professorin to be entirely cured. The Professorin had recovered the best part of herself, namely, her calmness, her courage, and the steadfast firmness of her character, and she said,--

"There is a wonderful power of healing in being at one with the great common heart. That which all men know is no longer so heavy and horrible; the hardest part of a criminal's fate must be the feeling of isolation, of separation; in the midst of all society he must feel like a secluded prisoner, for he has something locked and hidden within himself, which no one else must know of."

As soon as the Professorin could transpose an event and its consequences into the sphere of abstract thought, it seemed no longer to weigh upon her. Above all she exhorted her son not to take it for granted that something must be instantly done, saying that it was of the first importance to keep still.

The Doctor, on inquiring whether the Countess Bella had not been there as yet, was told that she had spoken with none of the inhabitants of the Villa, except Herr Sonnenkamp.

"If I am not much mistaken," said the doctor, "Countess Bella will henceforth feel an especial sympathy with the bold Herr Sonnenkamp. It corresponds with her nature, which defies the world and inclines to whatever is exceptional and extreme."

The Professorin, although Bella had deeply wounded her, endeavored to correct the doctor's opinion.

Eric was silent; he was amazed at the persistency with which the physician pursued and explained the Countess's peculiar nature.

The Doctor sent to ask Sonnenkamp whether he wished to speak with him. The reply was, that he would like to have him first visit Frau Ceres.

"How do I look?"

Sonnenkamp had put this question to Joseph, his valet, before rising; indeed, on first awaking.

"As usual, sir."

He asked for a hand-glass, then giving it again to the servant, lay back among the pillows with closed eyes. He must have had the strange idea that the emotions of the past night could be read upon his features. It was long ere he left his chamber. He had told Joseph that he wished to be alone. He heard the raking of the paths, outside, and the steps of men going to and fro. He would wait until the traces of devastation without were removed, as far as possible; he would wait until he was able to obliterate the traces left within him by this experience. He sat long alone; only his favorite dog was with him. His heavy head weighed him down like a cannon ball; yet he repeated to himself,--

"I must recover my composure; for I alone can help myself."

"Thou alone?" he asked again, and his thoughts passed to Bella. There is a woman such as he has never found before. There is courage, power, genius. But in what can even she help him? Nothing. No one.

Then, laying his hand on the dog's head, he thought: "Two bugbears are the worst enemies we have in the world,--fear before the deed, and repentance after it. With these quackeries we squander our existence. He alone is free who fears no future and rues no past."

"I will be free!" cried he.

"I am so within myself; but where will freedom be allowed me? I must go back to America. No, to Italy, to Paris, to new surroundings.

"But the children, the children! They are filled with thoughts which take from them home and parents. Thy best course, after all, is to remain here, to despise mankind, whose hatred will gradually be blunted. Perhaps, too, there may be found some means of appeasing their wrath, which will have a penitent aspect. Was it the Professorin, or I myself, who spoke yesterday of a jury? That's the thing! Come on, World! I am myself again, and nothing else."

High above all these recent occurrences arose again in him the hatred of Crutius.

"How he is now rubbing his hands in his editorial office, where the little gas-jet burns! How he will rejoice at the signal-rocket which has roused the masses! How the riot will figure in the newspapers!"

He now rang, and, sending for Eric, reminded him how he had formerly publicly exalted the gratitude and good manners of the people. Now, he said with a laugh, he must also properly expose their misbehavior; he must, anticipating all other reports, describe the whole thing naturally as an extravagance inspired by the new and effervescent wine. At the close, he must add that Herr Sonnenkamp (for that was his name, lawfully derived from the maternal side of the house) would do something which should correct and satisfy public opinion.

He thought Eric pedantic, for wishing to know at once whether any thing was to be done.

What's the use?

We show the public something prospective; but it is not necessary that this should be brought to pass; men forget what has been promised them.

This he wished to say to Eric, but withheld it, merely telling him that he might let the whole thing alone if he chose.

Just as Eric had left the room, came the dog-keeper, exclaiming,--

"Oh, sir, she is poisoned!"

"Who is poisoned?"

"The good beastie, Nora; in the night, during the riot, the shameful men gave her something, apparently a toadstool roasted in grease. She is dying now."

"Where is she?"

"Before the kennel."

Sonnenkamp went with the keeper to the enclosure where the dogs were. There lay Nora, with her loosened chain beside her.

"Nora!" he cried.

The dog wagged its tail once more, raised its head, and blinked. Then the head fell, and she was dead.

The glance of the beast was piteous. Sonnenkamp seemed to wish to torture himself with gazing at her.

"Bury the dog before Roland sees her, he said at last.

"Where shall we bury her?"

Yonder, by the ash. But first skin her: the hide is worth something.

"No, sir, I cannot: I loved the dog too well to skin it."

"Very well. Then bury it skin and all."

He turned away and wandered about the garden; yet he could not refrain from returning to the spot where the dog was being buried.

"Yes," he said aloud to himself: "that's the way. The world gives us a toadstool roasted in fat. The world is a toadstool roasted in fat--palatable, but poisonous!"

He returned to the house.

The other dogs were howling quite frightfully, as though they knew that one of their comrades had departed.

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II. TWELVE MEN

Pranken, who remained true to Sonnenkamp, was often full of solicitude. At times he looked very strangely at his friends, but did not give utterance to his projects. Sonnenkamp knew that something was going on. He knew through Lootz that Pranken had several times received letters with large seals, one bearing the seal of the Court-Marshal's office, another that of the Ministry of State. He would have liked to ask him whether negotiations were pending, with a view to the attainment of the longed-for dignity. He looked at him inquiringly; but Pranken remained reticent. Sonnenkamp even pressed him not to disdain his assistance, saying that he was wise in some things, even though he had acted imprudently.

Pranken said that there were things which he must decide for himself, and which he hoped to put through successfully. He hinted that the world, even the little world of the city, was made up of different factions.

As he condescended to say no more, Sonnenkamp resolved to have recourse to an old method, and one which could here be very easily employed. He would obtain by theft, through the agency of Lootz, the letters which Pranken had received. He rejected this course, however. Yet once, when Pranken had ridden in haste to the railway station, just after he had received another large letter, he went toward his room. He would have no go-between. He could surely get possession of the letters, and Pranken was no doubt careless enough to render unnecessary breaking open any locks or picking them.

In a sudden attack of loyalty, however, he turned away from the threshold.

Pranken returned, bringing the news that he was in danger; but earnestly begged to be excused from giving any particulars.

Sonnenkamp embraced the excited young man, and made him promise not to engage in any duel without his knowledge.

Reluctantly Pranken gave him his hand upon this, and departed.

While Eric was yet at his mother's, Sonnenkamp came thither with a letter in his hand. He first expressed his joy at seeing the Professorin so full of new life; then, saying that he had a letter from her friend, he handed her one written by Professor Einsiedel, and added with a smile:

"These learned gentlemen have very good memories. I had forgotten having invited the man."

The Professorin read Einsiedel's letter, in which he said that he should not be lecturing next winter, and was ready to accept Sonnenkamp's invitation, and to take up his abode for some time at Villa Eden.

As the Professorin smilingly gave back the letter, a gleam of furtive triumph shot from Sonnenkamp's eyes. Then this new specimen of humanity, this puritanic infidel, has her own private affinity. Perhaps she felt the malicious glance; for she said, in a very decided manner,--

"I should be very glad to have the noble man come to us. His visit would be a great deal to me, and, perhaps, to others also. In the first place, I know of nothing better for Roland; for you, Eric, are so entirely accustomed to him, that you do not now offer him that support which he, perhaps, may need for a long time yet."

Sonnenkamp's countenance relaxed. It was nothing after all. This woman seemed in truth noble and pure; for she was not so prudent, no one could be so prudent, as to assume forthwith such a mask of virtue. He was not a little astonished, however, when Eric, with all sorts of excuses and pretexts, gave it as his opinion that it was not wise to transport the Professor's delicately organized nature at this time into their stormy life.

Just because Eric sought so earnestly to defend himself against such a suspicion, it became clearer to Sonnenkamp that he did not feel justified in bringing any new person into close relations with his family.

Inwardly chafing, but yet smiling with an excess of friendliness, he said that he would invite the Professor, and would leave him free to stay either at the green cottage or at the villa.

The mother gave her voice for the former.

Sonnenkamp nodded very approvingly. He summoned a servant, and ordered that no one should interrupt them. Then, addressing both, he said that he had something momentous to discuss with them; that it was a step which concerned his inmost soul, and which alone could make him wholly free.

Eric and his mother trembled. Did Sonnenkamp already know? He, meanwhile, seated himself calmly and began:

"Noble lady, you have done a great thing for me, and now I commit into your hands, and your keeping, my fate and that of those who belong to me."

He made a pause and then proceeded:

"From out of the midst of the riot one thought has remained with me. It was of sudden birth; and now the question is, how to carry it out. Already on Sunday, when I was going to church, where the beggar insulted me, it was my intention"--

"Pray, do not forget what you were going to say," interposed the Professorin. "Permit me to interrupt you with a question."

"Go on. I am ready."

"Does the source of all your wealth lie in that?"

"No, not a sixth of it. Even my enemies know that."

"Then please proceed. You had begun, 'as you were going to church'"--

"Yes, then it was my intention, in spite of my unbelief, to confess to a priest. I acknowledge, Herr von Pranken was not without influence in this matter; but it originated, nevertheless, with me. This institution of the confession in our church is a grand thing. Offences for which no earthly judge can punish, for which no clause is to be found in the law, are blotted out; we are absolved from them by a man filled with the divine grace by consecration, sympathetic, considerate, who neither knows nor sees the penitent, yet who hears the breath of his quivering confession; who is so far from him, and yet so near!"

The Mother looked down.

"Wonderful and ever new, how the man can speak of such acts!" she thought.

Sonnenkamp felt what the lady thought of him, and exclaimed,--

"Look me in the face! Yes, noble lady, you hindered the execution of my purpose."

"I?"

"Yes, you; for, thinking better of it, I said to myself that I would tell you all, gazing at your open face, and that you had the power to absolve and to blot out; but no, you, too, have it not."

The Professorin breathed more freely.

Sonnenkamp continued,--

"You once let fall the word--I know not whether you spoke it or I--but it was uttered, and so it stands. 'In the new world, where the laws are not yet so firmly established, they summon a jury of neighbors.' I wish to summon a jury of free men, before whom I will stand openly. They shall judge me freely. I wish to unite trial by jury with confession, and I vow to fulfil what these men shall enjoin upon me as a means of expiation. Having returned to Europe, I owe the European world either a deed of atonement, or else the endeavor to convert it. Do you comprehend my meaning?"

"Perfectly. Here must be something redeeming, in submission to the verdict of an assemblage of free men."

"I see that you understand me fully," said Sonnenkamp with great serenity. "And now give me your advice. Whom do you propose as members of this moral jury, as we may call it? In the first place, I must refuse Herr von Pranken. He is my son, and cannot be my judge."

"I should not be able to name any one without reflection. Please--I am yet too weak. This deliberation, this seeking, this thought-travelling, causes me physical pain."

"Then calm yourself. Herr Dournay, you have heard all--Have you, though?" he repeated, on observing Eric's abstracted glance.

"Yes, indeed, every thing."

"And now, whom would you propose?"

"First of all, the most sensible of men has to-day himself announced his arrival."

"Well, well, I accept him. And then?"

"Herr Weidmann."

"Weidmann? He is the uncle of my most bitter enemy."

"But on that very account he will be just."

"He was an abettor in the production of Herr Crutius' newspaper article."

"From that imputation he is cleared. He charged Prince Valerian expressly to tell you that he disapproved of Herr Crutius' conduct throughout."

"And even if Herr Weidmann were your enemy," put in the Professorin: "it is just your enemies whom you must seek to conciliate."

"You are a wonderful woman: you shall have your way. You shall see how thoroughly in earnest I am. So, then, Herr Weidmann; and who else?"

"Count Wolfsgarten."

"Accepted without opposition. Go on!"

"The Justice."

"Also accepted."

"Then I should like to plead for a man whom you, perhaps"--

"Only speak out plainly. Who is it?" cried Sonnenkamp impatiently.

"The field-guard."

"The field-guard?" laughed Sonnenkamp. "For all I care! And I give you the Doctor at once, into the bargain. But now, Herr Dournay, set about it at once: the business must be begun immediately."

"Who will remain with Roland meanwhile?" Eric would have asked, but restrained himself, in obedience to a sign from his mother, who seemed to have divined the question he would fain have asked. She nodded. "You can leave Roland and Manna to me," she seemed to say.

"You have entirely forgotten our good Major," she said aloud, in a cheerful tone.

"Because he is understood as a matter of course, and also the Priest," replied Sonnenkamp.

Eric named, besides, Prince Valerian, the Banker, and Knopf. The number was full.

Sonnenkamp urged that not an hour should be lost, and Eric ordered a horse saddled.

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III. THE HAND OF RECONCILIATION IS NOT GRASPED

Before Eric started, Manna came to him, saying that she must immediately go to the convent; that she thought it her duty, above all, to confess the truth there, and that she did not wish to postpone any thing so difficult, but to undertake it at once.

Eric was perplexed. Why should Manna wish to re-enter the convent? He soon recognized in this desire, however, the impulse to do something, not to remain in inactivity; and, moreover, the manner in which she sought to sever the old ties in peace was thoroughly noble: so he merely said,--

"Only do not forget that you are no longer justified in imposing castigations and mortifications upon yourself, or in allowing them to be enjoined upon you by others; for you no longer belong to yourself, Manna, you are mine: you must neither torture my Manna, nor allow others to torture her."

Manna looked at him with beaming eyes, and from out of all her tribulation sounded a serene voice, as she said,--

"It was through you, Eric, that I came to this resolution."

"Through me?"

"Yes. You told me how much good it did you, when one of your comrades, after you had taken leave of him, came to you and said, 'Do not think hardly of me if I ignore you. You could not do otherwise; and I neither can nor dare do otherwise.' I am going to imitate you and your comrade. The souls of those in the convent shall not be burdened with my desertion, which they must consider as apostasy."

Manna wished that Aunt Claudine should accompany her; but Eric thought it more fitting that she should travel with Roland. The brother and sister would thus be alone together, out in the world; and Roland would have to protect his sister, to render her services which would lift him out of his state of dead dejection, out of his heavy, monotonous sorrow.

"You can scarcely imagine how happy it makes me to let you command me," said Manna, as Eric arranged every thing.

Roland agreed at once.

"But you must ask your parents' leave," was the next order; and the children felt painfully that this was but a form: every thing was torn asunder and rent to shreds; all obedience and all dependence.

"Manna, now is the time," said Roland, in great agitation.

"For what?"

"You ask father; perhaps he will tell you whether we have no blood-relations in Europe. Whoever they may be, they ought to come to us now. It is hard enough that we have never troubled ourselves about them."

Manna looked imploringly up to Eric, who, rightly discerning in the youth the instinctive longing for family ties, begged them to abstain from urging the matter for the present, saying that the time for it would come by and by.

Manna went to her father, and said that she wished to go to the convent.

Sonnenkamp was alarmed, but quickly regained his composure on Manna's adding that she went thither for the last time, in order to bid farewell forever, as she had decided never to become a nun.

In spite of all its distortion, a gleam of triumphant satisfaction lighted up Sonnenkamp's face.

"Do you see at last? They knew--I now have certain evidence that they knew--what money, and in what manner earned, you brought them. Did they ever say a word to you about being unable to accept it?"

Manna avoided this view of the question. She would gladly have confessed all to her father at once, but had not yet the courage. Moreover, she had promised Eric to follow his guidance implicitly.

The weather was foggy and cold, as the brother and sister, and Fräulein Perini, went down the river: yet the journey refreshed them, for Roland said after a short time,--

"Ah! There is a world outside after all!"

Towards noon, the sun pierced through the mist, which melted away, and every thing became suddenly bright. The vessel steamed down the stream, shooting rapidly along over the clear water, between the sun-illumined mountains, on which, here and there, harvests were still being gathered.

The passengers stood or walked on deck, enjoying the wide prospect; but below in the cabin, lay Manna, with closed eyes, not heeding Fräulein Perini's injunction to come up and refresh herself with the view and the free air, only begging to be left alone. And so she lay and thought, half dreaming, half awake, of all that had happened to her and hers. How utterly different it was when she went up the river, with Roland, last spring! Eric's warning came into her mind, how wealth, and the ease with which it enables one to make disposition of external means and of those who serve, seduce us into healing ourselves with amusements and outward remedies.

This reproach did not now trouble her: she only wished to part peacefully from a Past, under obligations contracted in her soul to the friendly souls there, which she wished to fulfil, even though outwardly separating herself from them. Her soul lay bound by obligations to the women yonder: she wanted to take care to be truly comprehended, even though she was outwardly cutting herself off from them.

The difference of faith between Eric and herself again arose before her. But what course remained to her? To become untrue there to the pious sisters, or here to Eric; but no, that was no longer possible. She hoped that the great soul of the Superior would give her calmness; and thus she lay, sunk in a half-slumber during the whole trip.

On deck, Fräulein Perini was glad, on the whole, that Manna had remained unseen; for here and there among the passengers Sonnenkamp was mentioned, and the report was, that the Prince's negro had lifted him up with both hands, and had carried him, struggling, down the staircase, until he was set at liberty by the servants, who brought him to the carriage. An agent, whom Fräulein Perini knew, was already wondering who would buy the Villa, for it was absolutely certain that the man would not remain there.

In the forward cabin, where Lootz had ensconced himself, he was obliged to hear the fruiterers who were carrying to the Lower. Rhine the fruit which they had brought from Sonnenkamp's head-gardener, saying one to another, that they would not be willing to take a mouthful of fruit cultivated by this man. They granted him the merit, however, of having done much toward the introduction of a species of apples which grew easily and bore well.

At the last stopping-place but one before the Island Cloister, two black-robed nuns came on board. Fräulein Perini, who knew one of them, went down with them into the cabin where Manna was sleeping. Both nuns placed themselves opposite to her, took out their prayer-books, and prayed for the poor soul lying there in the sleep of sorrow.

Manna opened her eyes and gazed around in astonishment. She knew not where she was. One of the nuns--it was the shy one, who always kept in the background--welcomed her in the French language, and bade her comfortingly, resign herself to all that she must endure.

Manna sat up. So, then, the news had already reached even their ears! She went on deck with Roland and the three ladies. The Island cloister came into view. Every thing was so clear and bright, that she felt as though she had now suddenly returned to earth. There was every thing, just as it used to be, seeming to look at her with the question, "Where hast thou been this long time?"

They got into the boat, and were rowed toward the island. Every tree, every bench, every shrub, greeted her like a long-vanished Past. She cast a melancholy glance at the beautiful round seat on the landing-place, where she had so often sat with Heimchen. Now wet leaves lay upon the bench.

They reached the convent.

Manna sent her name at once to the Superior, but received the answer that she must first remain an hour in the church, and then come to her.

Manna understood what this meant; but did the Superior, then, already know of her defection? She went towards the church, but remained standing at the door, without entering. She feared the picture within, knowing that she could not do otherwise than raise her eyes towards it, and yet that must not be. She turned round again, and went out towards the park. She heard the children in the house playing together; she heard singing in another class; she knew how all were sitting; she knew every bench; approaching the fir-tree where she had so often sat, she saw that the seat was no longer there. On the kneeling-stool where Heimchen used to sit, lay withered leaves. "To Heimchen," said a voice within her. Turning back, it seemed to her, in passing the convent, as though she were guilty of rebellion and sin in not having obeyed the Superior's command. She came into the churchyard. On Heimchen's grave stood a cross with this inscription in golden letters:--

"The child is not dead, but sleepeth."--Mark v. 39.

"How?" cried Manna. "Why these words here? They are spoken in Scripture of that child who was re-awakened on its death-bed, but not of a buried one."

She sank down upon the grave, and her thoughts grew confused: she lost all consciousness of the passage of time. At last, composing herself, she turned back toward the convent. Admitted into the reception-room, she was still obliged to wait alone; the pictures on the wall seeming to withdraw into the distance if she looked up at them.

At last came the Superior. Manna, hastening toward her, would have thrown herself upon her neck; but she stood rigid, winding both ends of her hempen girdle around the forefingers of her right and left hand, so that the rope cut into the flesh.

Manna sank down at her feet.

"Rise," said the Superior severely. "We suffer no vehemence here. It is to be hoped you yet remember this. Have you been in the church?"

"No," said Manna, rising.

It was long ere the Superior spoke. She probably-expected Manna to acknowledge her transgression; but Manna could not utter a sound. Every thing that she had experienced, and that was now within her, seemed to crowd upon her at once.

"I came hither," she began at last, "in order to leave no sorrow in your heart, Reverend mother, at my ingratitude. Your treatment of me has been most noble: you have"--

"No praise. Nothing about me. Speak of yourself."

"My memory must not be a grief to you. I came to beseech you"--

"Why do you hesitate so long? Speak out! What do you wish?"

"Nothing save your faith in the honorable struggle through which I have passed. I could not do otherwise. I am betrothed to Eric Dournay."

"How, to whom? Did I rightly understand you? Is Herr von Pranken dead? You are--But no. Speak!"

Faithfully and openly did Manna acquaint her with all that had happened, standing erect, and speaking in a firm voice. When she had ended, the Superior said,--

"So you have not come to do penance?"

"No."

"For what, then?"

Manna, grasping her brow, said,--

"Have I then not clearly confessed that I do not feel myself culpable? I came in order to offer you thanks, heartfelt thanks, for the good which you did me in time of need, and my memory must not be a sorrow to you. You yourself once told me that the battle which I must fight with life would be a hard one. I have not sustained it, or rather--only, I implore you, be not wounded. Grant me a peaceful resting-place in your memory."

"Do you wish that, even now? Yes, that is the way with the children of this world. Even the suicides demand a consecrated grave. You are dead, and can have no grave in our holy ground. You stretch out your hand for reconciliation, but of what sort? Your hand is not clasped."

A lay sister entered, bearing a request from Fräulein Perini to be admitted into the presence of the Superior and Manna.

She entered.

"Have you any thing to say?" asked the Superior, turning towards Fräulein Perini.

"Yes. Here stands Fräulein Manna. I remind her before you, worthy mother, of a sacred promise which Fräulein Manna obtained from me."

"A promise? From you?

"Yes. You, Fräulein Manna, extorted from me a promise to hold you fast with all manner of punishments and of bonds, if the spirit of apostasy should ever gain a foothold in your soul. Did you not. Manna?"

"I did."

"And now?" asked the Superior.

"Now I belong to myself no longer. I no longer call any thing my own: no possession, not even myself. I cannot give in expiation what is not mine."

The three women stood long in silence. Finally the Superior said,--

"Have you confessed to the Priest?"

"No."

The Superior had turned away, and spoke with averted face:--

"We force you not. We bind you not. We could; but we do not wish to. Go, go! I will see your face no more! Go! Alas, what a hell you bear within you! The trace of your footsteps here shall disappear. No, I will hear nothing more. Go! Has she gone? Do not answer me. Dear Perini, tell me--is she gone?"

"She is going," replied Fräulein Perini.

"Where is my sister?" they suddenly heard Roland's loud voice saying.

The door was thrown violently open. Roland, quickly perceiving what had been going on, cried,--

"You have humiliated yourself sufficiently: come with me." He seized Manna by the hand, and left the convent with her.

When they were in the open air, Roland said he had been unable to endure the suspense any longer. He had feared lest Manna would allow herself to be maltreated, enduring unkindness as a penance.

"And that you must not do, even if you could bear it yourself, for Eric's sake. You must not allow Eric's betrothed to be insulted and abused."

How Manna's eyes shone as she gazed into Roland's glowing countenance!

"It is over," she said. "A whole world is swallowed up behind me. It is well that it is over."

Fräulein Perini remained some time longer with the Superior, then followed Manna. Sitting beside her in the boat, she said in a peculiar low whisper,--

"I was obliged to say that. I could not do otherwise."

Manna held out her hand, saying,--

"You only did your duty. I am not angry with you. Forgive me."

Manna knew not how she had left the convent. Only when she embraced Roland did her tears begin to fall. On their homeward journey she did not go below, but sat on the deck beside Roland, looking at the landscape with her great black eyes wide open.

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IV. TRANQUILLITY ON THE ROAD, AND UNREST AT HOME

On his way to Mattenheim, Eric met the Major. He felt cheerful enough to tell him that he was scouring the country as if enlisting a corps of firemen; and, when he explained this meaning of his words, the Major needed no urging to agree to his part. He looked on the affair in the light of a court of honor, from which no one should shrink.

"Poor man! Poor man!" he repeated, over and over again, "He was not open with me; but then, neither was she. I do not take it ill of him. She was not so either: it was the first time in her life. She"--this was of course, Fräulein Milch--"knew that I could not endure it. I can do much, comrade: you would not believe how much I can do. But there is one thing of which I am incapable; and that is hypocrisy. I cannot have friendly intercourse with a man whom I neither love nor esteem. I knew that the man had been a slaveholder; and I have always said that no one who associates with poodles can keep off the fleas: and who would believe that the man could utter so many kindly words? And with you, comrade, he talked like a sage, like a saint. I, with my dull brains, cannot make out, and even Herr Weidmann could not help me, why the good children must suffer all this. But now I will explain it to you. Now I know the reason. It came into my head on the road. This is how it is. I have not learned much. I used to be a drummer: I'll tell you my story some time."

"Yes; but what have you discovered?"

"Just so she always reminds me when I wander off from what I was saying. This is it. You see, man, as it says in Scripture, is born in pain, trouble; and the human soul is also born in pain, want, and misery. We poor fellows know that; and that is why rich and distinguished people are not fairly in the world. I mean--you know--and now our Roland is born anew, into true nobility, for the first time. The Prince can ennoble the name, but not the soul, you understand; so it is. And our Roland is now the real nobleman. To endure evil and do good, that is the motto which he has now received; and that is a device which has yet been engraved upon no knightly shield: but you see it stands written within, and there it will remain."

The Major pointed to his heart with a trembling hand. Eric listened in astonishment, as this timid man, so slow of speech, uttered all this, with many interruptions, it is true, but with great fervor; and now the Major reminded him how they had tormented themselves with the problem of what Roland should do with so much money, and said that it was now decided, once for all, he must do nothing but good with it.

When, at last, Eric was about to separate from the Major, the latter held him fast once again, saying,--

"Listen only to this one thing more. I was a drummer: I'll tell you the story some day. I became an officer; and my comrades did not dream how they honored me, when they used secretly, thinking I did not hear it, to call me Capt. Drumsticks, or, for shortness, even Sticks. Yes: they did honor to the Capt. Sticks; for, from that time forward, it became clear to me. I was unable to explain it so to myself, but she made me understand: she knows every thing. Yes: so it is. He is only half alive whom Fortune has made into something. Misfortune is the Holy Spirit, saying to mankind, 'Arise and walk.' You understand me?"

"Yes," said Eric earnestly, pressing the old man's valiant hand and riding on.

Looking back, he saw the veteran still standing on the same spot. He nodded to the horseman, as though he would have said to him, in the distance. Yes: to you I have given good baggage,--my best. You will not lose it; and now, if I die, it is in the possession of one who will keep it, and not give it away. He thanked the Builder of all the worlds, that he had caused him to pass through so much that was hard, and yet always to come out of it unharmed.

Meanwhile, Eric was riding cheerfully towards Mattenheim. On the way, however, he turned round. It seemed to him that he was bound in honor to summon Clodwig first. That in forming this resolution he was also influenced by an impulse of curiosity as to how Bella was now behaving, he frankly acknowledged to himself: nevertheless, he rode first to Wolfsgarten.

The parrot shrieked from the open window, as though wishing to inform all the inhabitants of the arrival of so unusual a guest; for it was long since Eric had been there. He thought he had discerned the form of Bella in the room adjoining that at whose open window the parrot hung; but she did not show herself again.

Entering Clodwig's room, he found him, for the first time, in a state of despondency. He must also have had some bodily ailment; since he did not rise, as had always been his wont, greeting his young friend with as much formality as heartiness.

"I knew that you would come to me," said Clodwig, breathing hard, but speaking in a mild voice.

"If one spirit can influence another at a distance, you and your mother must have felt most clearly that I was with you at this time. And now, if you please, let us talk very quietly, as I am somewhat indisposed. Let us forget, first of all, that we are starved by intercourse with that man. I think we ought, in this case, to think of him, and not of ourselves. See,"--taking up a phial,--"look at this. I take a childish delight in this new chemical stuff, which looks exactly like clear water, and yet serves to efface a written word without scratching the paper at all; and now I am thinking, ought we not to be able to find some moral agency similar to this?"

Eric, seeing the matter which he had in hand immediately referred to, laid the plan of the jury before Clodwig, and called upon him to bear his part in it. Clodwig declined, with the remark that Herr Sonnenkamp, or whatever his name was, must have a court of his peers,--men of similar rank, or, rather, of a similar profession with himself. He, for his part, was no peer of Herr Sonnenkamp, or whatever he called himself.

Eric reminded his friend, with great caution, of his having dwelt on the equality of privileges at Heilingthal; but Clodwig seemed to give no heed to these words.

There must have been a great weight on the soul of this man, usually so attentive; for, without noticing Eric's reminder, he related how much he had exerted himself in these latter days for the American, some hot heads at court having wished to summon him before a tribunal on a charge of high treason. This idea had been very repulsive to the Prince, who had written Clodwig a letter with his own hand, thanking him for having given his counsel against any elevation to the ranks of the nobility. Clodwig had thereupon advised the Prince to desist from any further proceedings against the man, who, he said, had been allured and seduced into things with which he should have nothing to do.

Again Eric expressed his wish that Clodwig would assist at the trial.

He merely replied,--

"I will inform the Court that the man summons a tribunal of his own accord. It will have a good effect there; and to oblige you"--here he sat upright, and his expression of languor changed to one of resolution. He passed his hand over his whole face, as though feeling that he must wipe away its look of distress--"yes, on your account, in the belief that your connection with that house may be, by this means, severed, or that light may be thrown upon it, I do not shrink from the appeal."

It was hard to Eric that this consent should be given for his sake, and not with a view to serving the cause. He was on the point of announcing his intention of becoming the man's son, when approaching footsteps were heard. Clodwig rose hastily, and, seizing Eric's hand, said, in a low but decided voice,--

"Well, I yield. The man wishes a court of honor: he shall have one."

Clodwig had uttered these words quickly and precipitately, for at that moment Bella entered.

She greeted Eric with Latin words; and it was with a strange confusion of sensations that he perceived in her a sudden defiance, utterly out of keeping with the present state of things, and, above all, with Clodwig's dejected mood.

"Pray tell me," she asked, "did you ever pass through a phase in which you admired men of force, like Ezzelin von Romano? There is, after all, something great in such violent natures, especially when contrasted with men of petty interests and weak dilettanteism"--,

Eric could not understand what this meant. It did not occur to him that Bella, screened by the presence of a stranger, was discharging arrows, none of which missed their mark.

Clodwig gently closed his eyes, nodded, and then opened them again.

"Oh, yes," she continued, more calmly, "I am glad that I remember a question which I wished to put to you. Tell me, what would Cicero or Socrates have said, on reading Lord Byron's 'Cain'?" Eric looked at her with a puzzled air. This question was so extravagantly odd, that he did not know whether it was intended as a sneer, or whether she was insane. Bella, however, went on:--

"Has Roland ever yet read Byron's 'Cain'?"

"I believe not."

"Give him the book now. It must have an effect upon him. He, too, is a son, who has a right to revolt at his father's banishment from Eden. It is wonderful, the correspondence between the two stories,--is it not? Do you know that we are all, strictly speaking, children of Cain? Abel was childless; yes, the pious Abel had no children: we are all descended from Cain. A grand pedigree! One more question, dear Herr Doctor, Have you never got out of the savants the form and color of the mark branded on Cain's brow by God the Father?"

"I do not understand you," Eric answered,

"Neither do I understand myself," laughed Bella, It was a dismal laugh.

She then continued:--

"I began to read Cicero, 'De Summo Bono,' with the help of a translation, of course; but I did not get far, and took up Byron's 'Cain,' instead: that is the finest thing the modern world has produced."

Eric still know not what to reply, and only gazed into the faces of Bella and Clodwig. "What is going on here?" he said to himself.

Bella began again,--

"Were not the female slaves who served the Roman ladies obliged to puff out their cheeks, when a noble matron wished to strike them in the face? A propos, how is Fräulein Sonnenkamp?"

"She has gone to the convent," replied Eric with downcast eyes.

It oppressed him to be obliged to answer Bella's questions with regard to Manna.

"That seems to me very sensible," was the rejoinder.

"Such a cloister is a shelter where the sensitive child will best find repose until the storm is past. What will Roland now do? What are your intentions, and those of your mother?"

These questions were put in a manner so superficial, so distant, and so conventional, that Eric was able to reply with a certain degree of cheerfulness,--

"In the interim, we have recourse to the great deed which is so universal."

"The great deed?"

"Yes: in the mean time, we are doing nothing."

In the midst of this conversation, Eric's thoughts were in the convent with Manna. There she, too, was now confronting people who had once been such near friends to her. How did they now appear in their new character of enemies and antagonists? Surely they had not assumed this cold, indifferent tone. He felt as though he must stretch out his hand protectingly over Manna, who was now bearing crushing reproaches, and, perhaps, even allowing a penance to be laid upon herself. He grieved that he had let her travel alone with Roland and Fräulein Perini. He felt that he ought not to have left her.

Such was his absorbing thought; and so he absently took leave, saying that he must go on to Weidmann's. Again he rode through the wood which he had traversed on Clodwig's horse the first time that he went to Villa Eden. How utterly different was the Villa to-day! And here at Wolfsgarten,--here he felt that there was some mystery which he could not unravel. How extremely happy had Bella and Clodwig then seemed to him! and now, what were they? Bella's strange, wandering talk, jumbling together Cicero and Byron's 'Cain,' showed that she must have passed hours in dragging herself restlessly through all sorts of things. Then Clodwig seemed overwhelmed by melancholy from which even his universal kindness could only temporarily rouse him.

Eric felt that he must forget all this, since he had in view an end which he must pursue for others and himself,--more than for himself, for Manna. Only he who is personally free from care can devote himself fully and freely to the service of others.

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V. ACQUIESCENCE AND RELUCTANCE

It was already night when Eric reached Mattenheim. The Weidmann family had entered their winter residence, as they called the beautiful, bright rooms on the upper story of their house, with pictures on the walls, and open fires burning on the tasteful hearths.

Frau Weidmann was sitting with her daughter-in-law behind the table on which stood the lamp, while her son was reading aloud. Herr Weidmann was in his study.

Eric begged leave to seek him there, and found him among the alembics and retorts of his laboratory.

"I cannot shake hands," cried he gayly; "but, first of all, turn your mind from the weight which oppresses you. That will help matters. You see you find me in a cheerful mood. We are trying to profit by a new discovery. We have found that a new sort of printer's ink can be prepared from the skins and grounds of grapes. The matter promises well, and our friend Knopf is probably already writing a poem on this subject. He wishes, that, in future, all lyrics, but especially drinking songs, should be printed only with ink prepared in this manner. Look, here is the new stuff boiling. But you had better wait in the next room, where you will find some very interesting newspapers. Wait a little while, and I will be with you."

Eric, going into the adjoining apartment, found the table strewn with American newspapers, containing accounts of violent election struggles between the Republicans and the Democrats. The latter name had been assumed by those who wished to enforce State rights so far as to be incompatible with the existing Union; their true and chief object being the preservation of slavery. On the other hand, the Republican party was united in the name and spirit of Abraham Lincoln.

"In these days in which we live," thought Eric, "the great cause is being decided in the New World. In what state of mind is Sonnenkamp awaiting the result of this struggle?" He read on without knowing what he read.

Weidmann came in, saying that he had expected Eric, and asked how Sonnenkamp's children had endured the publicity of this affair. He declared his readiness to serve, as soon as Eric had explained to him the plan of the jury. He added, that he could not as yet foresee any permanent result that could come from it, but that at least a clearer insight into the matter would be obtained by this means, and, perhaps, the power of putting the children in the position due to them.

Weidmann was the first person out of the family, with the exception of the Major, to whom Eric communicated his connection with Manna. He was not in the least surprised, having looked upon this relationship as inevitable, from all that he had heard of Manna, in connection with what he knew of Eric. He even added, that it was on Eric's account that he had instantly acquiesced in the plan proposed, knowing how nearly the restoration of the honor of the house, in such measure as was possible, must concern him, and feeling that it was the duty of his friends to stand by him.

"Oh, I was so proud of my integrity!" lamented Eric; "and now"--

"You may remain so," interrupted Weidmann; "and I can put your mind at ease on one point. It is certain that the greater part of the wealth of this man at Villa Eden was not gained through the slave-trade. That I know from my nephew."

"Pray, assure our Roland of that, first of all."

"I will. Send him to me as soon as possible."

He asked how it happened that Herr von Pranken continued to consider himself as the son of the house, clinging to this connection with inexplicable tenacity.

Eric could only say that he and Manna, in order not to cause more confusion at this juncture, had kept their affection a secret with the greatest care.

Weidmann urged that it should be made known before the trial; and Eric gave him his word that it should.

His friend then returned at once to the preparations for the jury, saying,--

"One other thing will be hard to arrange. I think that we ought to include the negro Adams."

Eric doubted whether Sonnenkamp would consent to this; but Weidmann repeated that the blacks had precisely the same right to judge the whites, as the latter had to judge them. Eric promised to propose this, but begged Weidmann, meanwhile, not to make his participation in the business dependent on this.

While they were sitting cheerfully at the table, came a new guest, the Doctor. He had been attending a patient in the neighborhood, and was in high spirits, having just performed a successful operation. Soon turning to Eric, he said,--

"There you have an example. Oh, if we could only prescribe a sedative that would quiet for weeks or months!"

He told them about the man whom he had just left, adding,--

"See how much the fine doings of nobility and virtue signify. The man from whose estate I came is an illegitimate Royal son, and his children are already allied by marriage with the clan of high society. So, in twenty years, no one will ask whence came the wealth of our Roland."

When he had heard of the jury, and how his assistance was taken for granted, and as a fixed fact, he cried,--

"Yes! That is the way with the old tyrants! They love a mock burial. But you won't see me in the funeral-procession. Do you really believe that he will submit to your decree? His only object is to compromise other men. He is deceiving you all; and you, dear Dournay, have interfered enough on this man's behalf. I advise you to leave matters as they are. You are trying to help a negro, no, a negro-dealer, to wash himself white."

The Doctor, as he proclaimed his opinion, gave his jolly laugh, which no one could hear without laughing too.

"The fellow would be quite to my taste," he went on; "he would have been a good, healthy scoundrel of the old sort, only that rascals nowadays, alas! are all so reflective, so self-conscious. They are not satisfied to act as one of Nature's elementary forces, but they are constantly making outrageous attempts at logical self-justification. If this Herr Sonnenkamp really wished to change himself, it would be despicable cowardice."

"Cowardice?" interrupted Weidmann. "He who has not a good conscience can easily be overthrown, and has no persevering fortitude. He can be bold, he can be foolhardy; but temerity is not courage."

"Ho, ho!" interrupted the Doctor. "Have I not already told you that I have an aversion to all this sentimental fuss on behalf of the negroes? I have a natural repugnance for negroes. I don't see why my reason should brand such an innate physiological antipathy as a prejudice. It shows prejudice, moreover, to say that all prejudices are groundless. I could wish that we had more of such inborn dislikes, and that we did not permit so-called civilization to rob us of those which we have. The slave-trade is not a fine thing, it is true. If I had been a prince, I should, after all, have ennobled the man. I should have said, 'Good friend, take a bath; but then be merry, and the Devil take orthodoxy!' The thing which vexes me most is, that this Professor Crutius has obliged the nobles by firing off his article beforehand. Could he not have waited a day longer? Then Sonnenkamp would have been one of the nobility, and they would have been obliged to swallow it as they could. Would not that have been much better?"

The Doctor seemed determined not to regard the matter in a serious light. When they were leaving, however, and he had insisted on Eric's sitting beside him in the carriage, and tying his horse on behind, he said,--

"As for the rest of it, I acquiesce, and, to tell you the truth, on account of your faith. You believe that the past can be atoned for by an effort of the will; and do you really believe this man will repent? Well, your faith shall remove me, the mountain of unbelief. We will see."

Eric told him that he had been at Wolfsgarten, and was not a little astonished when the Doctor said that the incongruity and want of harmony between Clodwig and Bella had reached a crisis.

"Bella," he said, "seeks a narcotic. She studies Latin, and, while smaller natures intoxicate themselves with brandy, she strives to stun herself with Lord Byron's poetry. I ought not to speak of Byron. I was once too much inspired by him, and now go to the other extreme. I consider this sort of writing to be not wine, but--But then, as I said, I am a heretic, and, indeed, a renegade heretic."

Seeing that Eric shrank back, he added,--

"You are horrified by my heresy; but then, it is only my individual opinion."

The Doctor was going on to abuse Bella again in his old way. Eric said involuntarily, how strange it seemed to him that the Doctor should be so imbittered against her, for whom he had once shown a preference.

"Ah, bravo!" cried the Doctor in a loud voice. "My respects! I admire that woman. So, then, she told you that I had once paid her my addresses? Excellent! A stroke of genius! I admire the adroitness with which she would fain have deprived my opinion of all weight in your eyes. What bunglers we men are! Shall I make you a solemn protestation? No. Do you believe me capable of the villany of speaking so of a woman whom I had loved, even for a minute, or liked even for a second? But I thank you. I am enriched by a goodly addition to my knowledge of humanity. I thank you. My conscience is soothed, for I have not judged this woman too harshly. Recall this day's ride to my mind at, some future time. I tell you, that woman will yet earn some notoriety. How--what? That I cannot tell you; but such a wealth of inventive power will yet bring, something to pass."

All this jarred on Eric's mood. Why must it come at such a time? Was there not a sufficient weight on his spirits? He scarcely heard the Doctor, as he went on to relate how hard a struggle Pranken had had with his noble connections, and to keep his place at court, owing to his refusal to renounce Sonnenkamp.

When they had reached the valley, Eric took leave of the Doctor, unfastened his horse, and rode back to the Villa.

In Sonnenkamp's room there was still a light. He sent for Eric, who informed him that all had agreed to the plan. He said not a word about Adams being proposed as a juryman.

"I thank you, I thank you heartily," said Sonnenkamp, who was seated in his armchair. His voice sounded like an old man's. "One thing more," he said, sitting upright. "Does the Countess Bella know of this?"

"I cannot say; but I do not doubt that the Count will inform her of it.

"Did she say nothing about me?"

"No."

"Nothing at all? Did she speak of no member of this household?"

"Oh! yes. Of the children."

"Indeed! Of the children? Well, I thank you. Pleasant dreams."

Eric went to his chamber. He stood long at the window, gazing out upon the landscape.

The reign of Nature continues through all human revolutions; and happy is he, who, in contemplation of this, can forget himself.

It was a dark night. A black, wide-spreading cloud hung over the mountains. Then a bright streak of light appeared on the edge of the ridge, and stood between the mountains and the cloud, which grew lighter. The moon rose, the black cloud ingulfed it, and now the light shone out on both sides, above and below; but the dark mass was darker than before, while detached masses of a leaden color floated on the right and left.

Eric closed his eyes, and lost himself in thought. When he looked up again, the moon was standing above the dark cloud, and the landscape was bathed in its light, which quivered on the stream. And again, after a time, the moon was hidden by another cloud. Eric looked out long and fixedly, till the cloud had vanished. The whole sky was as clear and bright as steel undimmed by a breath; and peacefully shone the mild sphere of light, high in heaven.

Nature, fixed on firm foundations, works on according to eternal laws. Must it not be so too with human life?

Eric thought of Manna, and with the thought a soft light was spread over every thing, like the radiance now diffused from on high.

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VI. THE BROKEN-OFF TWIG

While Sonnenkamp was carrying on the arrangements for the trial by jury, Pranken returned looking ill; and, on Sonnenkamp's urging him to tell him what was the matter, he drew forth the letters from his pocket.

He first laid before him the one in which he had been notified by the marshal of the Prince's household, that it was impossible for him, as chamberlain to his Highness, to retain any connection with a man who had not only forfeited his honor, but had behaved so wrongly towards the Prince, that the question was still being agitated whether he should not be openly arraigned on a charge of high treason.

Sonnenkamp trembled, but laughed at the same time, in a way peculiar to himself.

"Let me see the letter again," said he.

He read it; then, giving it back in silence, asked what the other letter contained.

Pranken said it was yet more decided; and handed him the document of the military court of honor, calling upon him to give up all intercourse with Sonnenkamp.

"And what do you intend to do?" asked Sonnenkamp. "I release you."

"I shall stand by you," replied Pranken.

Sonnenkamp embraced him. There was a pause, a strange silence between these two men.

"I defy them all," exclaimed Pranken; "but here is another letter. It is for you," giving him the letter of the Cabinetsrath.

Sonnenkamp read it.

The document was drawn up in very polite terms, and contained the request that he would travel for a time, until an opportunity should offer for putting down the party which was now urging his indictment before a court on a charge of treason.

"Do you know the purport of this letter?" he asked.

"Certainly. The Heir Cabinetsrath chose to give it to me unsealed."

"And what do you advise?"

"I second his request."

A convulsive twitching passed over Sonnenkamp's face.

"Prudent, very prudent," he said to himself. "You wish to banish me, and retain my estate."

A horror began "to creep over him as he saw a vision of himself seated in prison; but he drove it off.

"So you are of the same opinion?"

"Yes. But, before you leave for any length of time, allow me to point out a means by which you may earn new honors for us both."

"Is there such a means?"

"Yes. I have already told you that there is another faction, quiet but powerful, which is ours, and we, or, rather, you, have the means of binding it to you yet more closely."

And now Pranken told how he had promised to be present, almost immediately, at a council held by the nobles of this ecclesiastical province (which extended beyond the limits of the principality), in the archiepiscopal palace. The proceedings of this convocation were to be strictly confidential. Its object was to confer on the ways and means of rendering the Pope military assistance.

"You do not intend entering the papal army?" asked Sonnenkamp.

"I would, if I were not bound by the ties of duty, of honor, of love, to remain here at my post."

"That is fine, very fine. Excuse my interruption. And why do you impart this to me? I am not of the nobility, and have no place in this council."

"You belong to them, and will be present."

"I belong to them? I shall be present?"

"I will be brief. You will give a sum sufficient for the formation of a regiment, and I can assure you, I have security for your being not only unmolested, but crowned with honors."

"And, having given the money, can I remain here in honor?" Sonnenkamp said with a smile.

"It would be better, if you were absent for a time."

A look of exultation passed over the face of the questioner. This was better still, he thought. They wished to deprive him at once of a portion of his property, and to get rid of him, into the bargain. He looked at Pranken with an expression of great friendliness, and said,--

"Excellent! Does the priest of this parish know of this?"

"No. I have won over the Dean of the cathedral, though?"

"Will you allow me to send for the Priest?"

"Certainly, I will bring him myself."

"No! Remain here."

He gave through the speaking-tube an order that the Priest should be requested to come to him; then, turning again to Pranken, said,--

"And so you second the request? Most excellent! They sell blacks, buying whites instead, and the whites become snow-white. They even become saints."

"I do not understand you."

"Very likely. I am only pleased at the excellent arrangement of this world. My young friend, I believe that the thing called virtue is taught by means of a system in the Universities: they have a system of morality. We, my young friend, will work out a system of criminality. We will establish a chair in the University: Thousands of auditors will come flocking around us, whom we alone can instruct in the Truth, the real Truth. The world is magnificent! It must nominate me for the professorship of worldly wisdom, which is a science differing widely from the idea hitherto entertained of it. It is time that this moral rouge should be rubbed off. I know, thus far, but one human being whom I shall admit as my colleague into this faculty, and that one, alas! is a woman; but we must overcome this prejudice also. Magnificent!"

"You have not yet told me whether you accede to the plan"--

"Have I not? My young friend, you cannot yet become a professor. You are still a school-boy, learning the elements, the rudiments. I would fain found a new Rome, and, as once the Rome of Antiquity was peopled with a community of mere vagabonds, so I would fill my city from the houses of correction. No nation can equal their inhabitants. They are the really vigorous men."

"I do not understand you."

"You are right," said Sonnenkamp at last in a gentle tone. "We will be very upright and discreet, very moral and delicate. My young friend, I have something very different in view. The mouse-trap of your cathedral dean is too clumsy for me. I shall not snap at this bait cooked in lard."

Pranken was full of wrath. Sonnenkamp's manner of treating him like a boy still in his school-jacket roused his indignation.

He stood up very straight, and looked down at himself from head to foot, to see whether he were indeed a little boy. At last he said, throwing back his head,--

"Respected father, I beg you to desist from this pleasantry."

"Pleasantry?"

"Yes. I have united myself to you--you cannot deny it--with a loyalty that--I have wished to make you my equal in--no, I did not mean to say that at such a time--only I must beseech you not to withhold your concurrence from this project. We have obligations. We, have great obligations; and I demand that you should"--

"Why do you hesitate? Obey! Pray say the word. Yes, my noble young friend, I will obey you. It is fine, very fine. What uniform have you chosen? Shall we raise a regiment of cavalry or of infantry? Of course, we will make Roland an officer at once. Better say cavalry: he sits well on horseback. Look here, revered fanatic, I, too, have my fancy. We will ride over the Campagna. Ha! That is jolly! And we will have the best arms of the newest sort. I understand a little of that sort of thing. I have shipped many to America,--more than any of you know. What do you think of my raising the whole regiment in America?"

"That would be so much the better."

"Ha, ha, ha!" laughed Sonnenkamp. "A morning dream! They are said to be the sweetest. Haven't you slept almost enough? Haven't you dreamed out your dream?"

Pranken felt as though chains were being wound around and around him. His sensations were those of a man confined in a lion's cave. He must be gentle, yielding, conciliatory. He dares not rouse the lion. He must allow the brute to play with him, expecting every instant to be torn to pieces by his claws. Oh for some means of escape!

Pranken put his hand to his head. What manner of man was this? What did he want of him?

Sonnenkamp said, with his hand on the young man's shoulder,--

"I have nothing against your piety or your pious acts. It is to me a matter of indifference; but, my young friend, none of my money shall be thrown to those cowled fellows. Fine economy, that! Manna builds a convent; you raise a regiment. And is it for this that I have undergone so much? No, you were only joking; were you not? And now let us say no more about it. Be shrewd, and deceive those who think themselves the most so. You will find that the daintiest morsel. Ah! There is Manna coming into the court! We will call her here instantly."

He called through the speaking-tube that Manna was to come to him at once.

Before Pranken had time to say any thing, the door was opened without a knock, and Manna entered.

"You sent for me, father?"

"Yes. How did you get on at the convent?"

"I have taken leave of it forever."

"Thank you, my child, thank you. You do me good, and you know how much I need it now. So now let me arrange every thing on the spot. You look so fresh, so animated! I have never seen you so much so. Herr von Pranken," turning to him, "you see how Manna has freed herself, and I have your promise to give up the matter of which we have been speaking; have I not?"

Pranken made no answer.

"I did not know that you were here, Herr von Pranken," began Manna, "but now, now it is best that it is so."

"Certainly," said Sonnenkamp decidedly. "You can have nothing to say to me which our faithful friend may not hear. Sit down."

He took, according to his wont, a little peg of wood, and began to whittle.

Manna did not sit down: with her hand on the back of a chair, she said,--

"Herr von Pranken, I wish to prove to you my gratitude for your faithful"--.

"That you will, that you can," interrupted her father, looking up from his peg. "It is well. I need joy, I need rest, I need serenity. You are right. A cordial would now be doubly refreshing. Give our friend your hand now."

"I give it in farewell."

"In farewell?" cried Sonnenkamp, making a deep cut in the peg. He went up to Manna, and caught her hand.

"Pray, father," she interrupted. "Herr von Pranken, you are a nobleman whom I honor and esteem. You have proved yourself loyal to my father: as his child, I shall value you, and remember you with gratitude; but"--

"But what?" demanded Sonnenkamp.

"I owe it to you to speak the truth. I cannot become your wife. I love Herr Dournay, and he loves me. We are one; and no power of earth or heaven can part us."

"You and the teacher, that Huguenot, that word-huckster, that hypocrite? I will strangle him with my own hands, the thief"--

"Father," returned Manna, drawing herself up to her full height, while the heroic courage which shone from her eyes made her appear taller and stronger than she was in reality,--"father, Herr Dournay is a teacher and a Huguenot. It is only your anger that speaks the rest."

"My anger shall speak no more. You do not know me yet. I stake my life on this"--

"That you will not do, father. We children have enough to bear already."

A cry, horrible as that of some monster, burst from Sonnenkamp's breast.

Turning to Pranken, he cried,--

"Leave us! Herr von Pranken. Leave me alone with her!"

"No," was the reply. "I will not leave you alone with your daughter. I have loved her. I have a right to protect her."

Sonnenkamp supported himself by grasping the table. A vertigo seemed to seize him, and he cried,--

"Do you hear, Manna? Do you hear? And will you reject such a nobleman? Revoke your decision, my child; I will implore you on my knees. See, how perverted your mind is! I have enough to bear already. Do not heap this upon me, too. Look at this man! can you refuse such a one? Manna, you are a sensible, good child. You have only been playing with us; you have only wished to test us. See, you are smiling. I thank you, I thank you for this trial. By means of it, you have obtained a fresh proof of his nobleness. Manna, there he stands. Take him in your arms. I will gladly die; I will do whatever the world demands: only fulfil this one request."

"I cannot, father, I cannot."

"You can, and you will."

"Believe me, father"--

"Believe you?--you, who but lately declared with such firmness, 'I will become a nun!' The infirm of purpose cannot be trusted."

"Father, it pains me unspeakably to be obliged to wound you and Herr von Pranken thus."

"Well--it is well: I must bear this too. You can cut my heart out; for, alas! I have a heart. Fie! And is it for this that I have defied the world, old and new? is it for this that I am thrust out of both,--to call a hypocritical rascal my son? Oh these philosophers! these idealists! these humanitarian fanatics! He smuggles himself into my house as a tutor, in order to marry millions. Oh, most practical philosophers, and rascally liars and hypocrites, into the bargain! I will not bear it!"

He bent his fingers like claws, and moved his hands rapidly, crying,--

"Give me something to tear in pieces, or I do not know what I shall do. You"--

Pranken laid his hand on his shoulder. The three stood facing each other in silence. All breathed hard, but Pranken the hardest.

Manna endured her father's gaze calmly; but she had no foreboding of its real meaning. He again called through the speaking tube,--

"Let Herr Dournay come here."

Then he went on.

"Manna, I do not force you; but I desire you to renounce this teacher, Yet more. Did you not tell me that you had sent word to the priest to come hither?"

"Certainly: you ordered that he should be summoned."

"I hear him in the ante-room. Admit him."

The Priest entered, and Sonnenkamp addressed him thus:--

"Sir priest, I announce to you, before these witnesses, my resolution to give my Villa for the foundation of a convent, provided my daughter Manna, here, takes the veil, as she has always wished to do."

Manna could not comprehend this. She could not suspect the cruel game which her father was playing with her, with Pranken, with Eric, with the Villa, with every thing. She knew not how to help herself, when, just as the Priest, turning toward her, offered his hand, Eric entered. He saw at once what had happened.

"Do you know who I am?" were the words with which Sonnenkamp turned upon him.

Eric bowed.

"And do you know who this man here is, and this girl? And when you look into that mirror, do you know whose image you see?"

Then, pointing to the wall where the hunting-whip hung, he cried,--

"And do you know what that is yonder? The back of many a slave"--He broke off suddenly:

Eric looked proudly around him, then said in a calm voice,--

"To be whipped by men of a certain sort is no dishonor."

Sonnenkamp gave a hollow groan, and Eric went on--

"I beseech thee, Manna, to leave the room."

"Thee!--Manna!--" yelled Sonnenkamp, and would have sprung upon him, had not Pranken caught his arm, saying,--

"Herr Sonnenkamp, if any one here is to demand satisfaction from Herr Dournay, I have the first right."

"Very good!" cried Sonnenkamp, throwing himself into a chair. "Yours is the revenge, yours the honor, yours the life, and yours every thing else. Speak yourself; I've nothing more to say."

"Herr Dournay," began Pranken, "I brought you into this family; and I told you in so many words what relation I held to the daughter. Up to this time, I have had a degree of respect for you; and I regret to be compelled to withdraw it."

Eric jumped up.

"I shall not challenge you to fight," Pranken continued. "You have put on a coat of mail that makes you invulnerable to me. Your life rests under Fräulein Manna's protection, and so your life is inviolable, as far as I am concerned. This is my last word to you so long as my tongue can speak. Herr Sonnenkamp, I have one request only to make of you. Give me your hand, promise to grant it to me."

"I promise you every thing but the regiment, every thing else but that."

"Very well: I have your word that you will not harm this man."

He felt about with trembling hands, and then taking out of his pocket a little book, he handed it to Manna. His voice was filled with emotion, as he said,--

"Fräulein Manna, you once gave this to me: the twig is still lying in it, and it is bare. Take it again. As this twig, broken off from the tree, can never grow to it again: so am I detached from you and from every one here."

He looked Manna full in the face; and then closed by saying,--

"Now we are parted forever."

He drew on his gloves quietly, buttoned them, took up his hat, bowed, and left the room.

Manna looked after him with a humble glance, and then seized Eric's hand. The two stood before Sonnenkamp, who had covered his face with his hand, and who now said,--

"Are you waiting for my blessing? To be horse-whipped by a man like me is no disgrace; and such a man as I am can give no blessing. Go, go! or have I no longer any right to command, that you remain so motionless?"

"Herr Sonnenkamp," Eric began, "I might say, and it would be to some extent true, that I intended those severe words for Herr von Pranken, and not for you; but, as they were also applicable to you, I ask your pardon. I was not master of myself, and it was wrong in me to provoke and grieve you so sorely; not merely because you are Manna's father, but because you are a man who has had to endure so much. It was sinful in me"--

"Very well, very well; I know all about sermonizing; it's sufficient. And has not your whole life been a lie? Have you not been a thief? Did I not ask you if you had any such views when I was conducting you over the house? And could you so long play the hypocrite and retail your fine speeches? Curse upon all faith in mankind! I had faith in you, I believed you incapable of a breach of trust; and you've been a hypocrite from that first hour I went with you over the house until the present moment. As to the future--I've torn away the mask."

"Herr Sonnenkamp," replied Eric, "I have wrestled long and desperately with myself, before yielding to this love; but it is stronger than I am, stronger than every thing besides. That I am not seeking for your wealth, I prove by declaring to you that I shall take none of your possessions. I can add no farther assurance; for if you do not believe my simple word, how are you to believe an oath!"

"Indeed? Then you expect still to be believed? Yes, fine, noble, good, magnanimous man, I possess a great deal, but not what you ask,--faith in you. I had this faith once, it was my last illusion. I don't swear it; but I know that it's my last illusion."

"I entreat Roland's father and Manna's father"--Eric's voice trembled,--"I entreat him, as a child, to be just towards me. You will yet learn that I spoke the truth at that time, and speak it now."

"Truth? Whew, truth! Leave me, I wish to be alone: I must be alone."

Eric and Manna left the room, holding each other by the hand. They waited outside for a long time. Joseph, who had been summoned, now entered Sonnenkamp's room. When he came out, he told Manna that Herr Sonnenkamp had sent to the city for a notary.

Eric and Manna went into the garden. And this is the power of love: in the midst of the most direful pain and suffering, they were inwardly cheerful as if all misery had been removed far away from them.

"You must take it from me," said Manna, after they had walked together for a long time in silence. "I don't know what it signifies; but it will not leave me. At that time, when the Prince visited us, his kind message to you affected me as if he had bestowed a benefit upon myself Do you remember? I delivered the message to you. At that time he said you were to remember that you had been the companion of his boyhood, and that he would like to prove to you that he was not forgetful of the fact. Now, don't you believe that you could do something for us? I don't know what; but I think--well, I don't know what I do think."

"It's the same with me," replied Eric. "I remember it as if it were the present moment; but I have no idea how to begin to avail myself of this gracious favor. O Manna! that was the first time it broke upon me how you felt towards me."

And the lovers lost all idea of their anxieties in recalling the past, how they wanted to avoid each other, and could not. All present sorrow vanished away.

On Manna's face there was a light as of an inextinguishable gleam of sunshine: her large dark-eyes glowed, for a free and strong soul shone through them.

"What are you smiling at now?" she suddenly asked Eric.

"Because an image has occurred to me."

"An image?"

"Yes. I've heard that a precious stone is distinguished from an imitation of one, by the fact that the dimness of lustre caused by breathing upon it immediately disappears. You, my Manna, you, are such a genuine pearl."

Whilst the lovers were promenading in the garden, Sonnenkamp sat alone, almost congratulating himself that he had something new to trouble him; and in the midst of his vexation there was a degree of pride, of pleasure, when he thought how courageously his child stood up there before him. She was his daughter, his proud, inflexible child. And his thoughts went further: Your child forsakes you, follows her own inclination, and your duty is done: your duty was to the daughter, for the son will build up an independent life. Frau Ceres--poh!--let them supply her with dresses and ornaments, and lull her to sleep with a pretty story. He went into the garden, into the green-house, where the black mould was lying in a heap. He put on his gray sack, grubbed in the dirt, smelt the fresh earth; but to-day there seemed to be no odor to it. He rent the garment in pieces as he took it off.

"Away forever!" he exclaimed. "Childish folly! It's all over!" He stood for a while before the spot where Eric had taken breakfast on the first morning. So this was the man, and he to be sole master here for the future? He to possess all this,--a schoolmaster?

The Cooper came along the road. Sonnenkamp called out to him, and commended his bringing up the fire-engine, adding, with a zest, that the settlers in the far West found this their best weapon against the savages, spurting hot water upon them; and it was still more effective to put in a trifle of sulphuric acid, and blind every one hit in the face. The cooper stared, with eyes and mouth wide open, at the man who could say these horrible things in such a free and easy way.

Sonnenkamp left him standing there, and, going into the orchard, helped very carefully and tenderly to gather the fruit. He thought of the days when this fruit was growing, of the spring when Roland was convalescent, of the visit of the Prince, the journey to the springs, the days of sunshine until now, the dewy nights; and he thought silently, when will there be another crop of fruit? how will it be with you then? where? perhaps under ground; then you cannot turn over the black mould: then his head swam.

It is a shame that we must die, and a double shame to know that we must.

He stared fixedly as if he were bewildered, for it came over him that on this very spot he had said something like this to Eric, the first morning he had come there. Has this place a peculiar power to awaken thoughts of death? Are you standing over the spot of earth which shall be your grave?

He was called away; for the notary with his two assistants had arrived just at the dinner hour. He sat down with him at the table, and appeared in as good spirits as if nothing had happened. The notary occupied Pranken's usual seat. After dinner, he transacted business with the notary, being long and busily engaged in writing. The two assistants signed as witnesses: so that nobody except those under oath knew any thing of the contents of the will.

After this was done, a letter came from Bella. She wrote to Sonnenkamp that she and Clodwig would come to the jury-trial, and he must bring it about that she should be among the twelve. Sonnenkamp smiled, for he had almost forgotten about it: it was all very well. Eric requested Roland and Manna to accompany the Mother, who wanted to make a visit at Mattenheim. They consented, and so the house was now perfectly still, almost entirely deserted.

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VII. PRELIMINARIES

The days passed away quiet and dull. Sonnenkamp sent off many letters, and read the newspapers, without sending them to Frau Ceres, as was his former custom.

The men came who had declared themselves ready to constitute the jury.

Sonnenkamp sent word to them that he would see no one until the time came for appearing before the tribunal. But an exception was made in regard to one person. Lootz was made the confidential agent, and Bella came to Sonnenkamp's room, through the climbing mistaria and the seed-room.

"Just a few words," Sonnenkamp said. "You could not form one of the jury; but I assure you, because such a being lives with me on the earth, I will live, and will yet show what constitutes a man. Here, in this room, will I speak."

He escorted her back through the seed-room: she knew that the door would be left open.

Bella went restlessly about the Villa, and she saw Lina who had come with her father, and who wanted to keep Manna company at this terrible time; but Lina was at a loss what to do with herself, when she found how the family was scattered.

She entreated Bella to go with her to Aunt Claudine, who was the only one left at home.

Bella said that she would come by and by.

Lina went to Aunt Claudine, and afforded her some real consolation, and even pleasure.

"Oh," asked Lina, "are Africans and negroes the same thing?"

"Most certainly."

"Well, I can't tell you how much I dislike Africans and negroes. I've nothing to say against their being free, why shouldn't they be? But they might have become so before this or afterwards: why, just at this very time? Why must they deprive me of my beautiful season of betrothal? Nobody is disposed to be merry, nobody talks of any thing else, by reason of these negroes. It's the fashion even to wear chains now, called Châines d'esclaves,--Oh, I wanted to ask you something--what was it--yes, I know now. Just tell me what they're going to do when the negroes get to be good people just like everybody else, what they're going to do then with the Devil?"

"What has the Devil to do with it?"

"Why, how are they going to paint the Devil, if he's not to be black any longer?"

Aunt Claudine had to indulge in a most hearty laugh, and she was very much rejoiced to be reminded that, in the midst of this monotonously sombre life, there was some liveliness still left in the world.

She was ready to go with Lina to the Castle, but just as they were leaving the house, Bella came. She begged that Aunt Claudine and Lina would not put off their excursion on her account, and shut herself up in the library, while the Aunt and Lina proceeded to the castle. They remained there until the afternoon, and often looked down to the Villa where "the men were all engaged in such a queer business," as Lina expressed herself.

Bella did not stay long in the library, but quickly returned to the villa, and noiselessly went up the steps overgrown with mistaria.

Sonnenkamp went to his wife, thinking that he must inform her of what was now going on. She tauntingly reminded him of his promise to return to America; she did not want the decision to be in the hands of strangers.

Sonnenkamp's practice was to let Frau Ceres speak just as long and as much as she pleased; for it was a matter of perfect indifference to him what she said.

When he had got through with this, he returned to his room, and sent word to those who arrived, that he would extend a welcome to them when he appeared before the tribunal.

Weidmann came first with the Prince Valerian and Knopf, then Clodwig with the Banker, and the Doctor with the Justice. Professor Einsiedel stopped a while at the dog-house, and talked very earnestly with the field-guard, and was highly delighted at the sound views of the man in dog-training. Once he tapped upon his forehead with the fore and middle fingers, wishing to impress upon his memory one observation of Claus, which explained to him a passage in the eighth book of Pliny, treating of land-animals.

The Major came in full uniform, wearing all his decorations; and when he saw that Clodwig had come in plain citizen's clothes, without a single decoration, he said to himself in vexation,--

"She was right here, too; but I thought as it was a tribunal of honor--well, no matter; it's no harm, anyhow."

Eric had made all the requisite arrangements in the music-saloon; but by Sonnenkamp's order, the chairs, the side-board set out with eatables and drinkables, and every thing else needful, were removed to Sonnenkamp's room. He placed his chair with a table before it near the door leading into the seed-room, to which he then withdrew.

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VIII. THE NEW CAIN

After the men had assembled, Eric knocked at the door, according to a pre-concerted arrangement; and, as it opened, Sonnenkamp came forward. A bluish pallor rested on his countenance, as he stepped up to the little table where two sticks for whittling and a pocket-knife were placed. Resting one hand upon the table, he began,--

"Gentlemen of honor and worth!"--here pausing a moment, he continued, "I use the words worth and honor, because they are not always, and, in fact, are very seldom, united together,--you fulfil a human duty in coming here at my call, and bestowing upon me a portion of your life, these hours, your feelings, and your thoughts. I acknowledge this favor. On the Western prairies, in the lonely log-house, in order to form an opinion of a man from whom wrong has been suffered, and in order to pronounce a verdict thereupon, and to execute it, we call in the neighbors living on the solitary farms for miles around; and I have done this now, and you have come here in obedience to the call. You are to pass a judgment, you are to decide upon what penalty shall be inflicted in reference to acts that cannot be weighed in the balances of legal statutes. I shall lay open to you, without reserve, my past life. I can do this the more easily, as you know already the worst in my case. You are to see how I have grown up from childhood, and then to decide and to judge. I have never felt pity myself, and I ask no pity from you: I ask for justice."

Sonnenkamp had begun in a depressed tone, and with downcast eyes; but he soon grew more animated, his countenance became more intent, and his eye lighted up.

"I make the declaration, therefore, that I accept your finding, and submit myself to whatever expiation you may determine upon. I have only one request. Let each one of you, within a week, write out his opinion, and render in his verdict; then let the paper be given into the hands of Herr Captain Doctor Eric Dournay, who will break the seal in the presence of two other persons.

"I will now withdraw a moment, in order that you may determine whether you will undertake the service under this condition, and, if you think it expedient, may choose a foreman."

He bowed. There was something theatrical and yet gravely composed in his manner of speaking, and in the way in which he now withdrew for a moment into the adjoining apartment.

The assembled gentlemen looked at one another; but no one spoke: all eyes were turned upon Clodwig, from whom an opinion was first expected.

He said now in a quiet and low tone,--

"Herr Weidmann will be so good as to undertake the office of foreman. We need one to make, in the first place, the necessary preliminary arrangements."

Weidmann at once accepted the position, and announced that he agreed to the proposal for a written verdict. The rest were also ready; but Professor Einsiedel, beginning timidly, and gaining more and more confidence as he proceeded, said that this ought not to exclude consultation together in order to elucidate and confirm the individual opinion: otherwise, all the effect of a common tribunal would be lost, and it would be superfluous for them to sit there together.

This opinion was acceded to, and Eric was deputed to call Sonnenkamp again into the room.

As Eric opened the door, he thought he noticed a nestling like that made by a silk dress, and he was at a loss what to make of it.

He found Sonnenkamp in the seed-room, hurriedly smoking a cigar: he laid it down, and went back to the audience-room.

Weidmann informed Sonnenkamp of the conclusion they had come to, and the remarks of Professor Einsiedel. Sonnenkamp nodded assent. "Before I resume," he said, taking one of the pieces of wood with a smile, "I must beg indulgence for a habit which I am sorry to say I cannot drop. I am in the habit, when I am alone, busy in thought--and I shall address you as if I were alone--as I remarked, I am accustomed either to smoke or to whittle, oftentimes both together. I can compose myself better if my accustomed practice is now indulged in."

He seated himself, took one of the bits of wood, and, cutting a deep notch around it, began,--

"I beg that any one of you will interrupt me with questions if involuntarily I leave any thing obscure or unexplained. Now then: I am the only son of the richest man in Warsaw. If I tell you of my youth, it is not because I wish to throw the responsibility of my acts upon circumstances or upon fate. My father had the largest business in wood and grain. When I was six years old, he removed to a large German town, for in clearing a forest my older brother had been killed by a falling tree; My mother died soon after, and lies buried with him in the village near by. I was often told that I should have a step-mother; but it was not so. My father--I speak as openly of him as of myself--was one of the most popular of men, but felt no affection for any person or thing on earth. He gave both hands to every one who approached him, and was extremely complaisant, kind, cordial, and expressive; but, as soon as a man had turned his back; he spoke slightingly of him. He was a hypocrite from choice, even where there was no necessity of being so. He was so even towards the beggar. This, however, I did not perceive until at a later period. At my father's table there were present state officials, artists, and learned men: they liked good eating, and, in order to get it, were obliged to set off our table with their decorations and titles. We gave great parties, and had no social visiting. There were grand banquets in the house, and there sat down at them men decorated with stars, and women with bare shoulders: at the dessert I was brought in, passed from lap to lap, carressed and flattered, and fed with ices and confectionery. I was dressed handsomely, and in some old lumber-room there must be a portrait,--I would give a great deal to come across it again,--painted life-size, and with crisped locks, by the first court-painter, and afterwards sold with the rest of our household stuff. We had no relatives. I had a private tutor; for my father did not want to send me to a public school. I grew up the idol of my father, and he always kissed me warmly when I was carried to him by his order. My tutor indulged me in every thing, and taught me to regard myself alone as the central point of all, and never to pay any regard to my dear fellow human beings. This helped me more than he could imagine. The capital thing is to blunt the conscience, as it is termed: all men do it, but some more superficially than others. The world is nothing but a collection of egoisms hanging loosely together. When I was sixteen years old, I had already fallen into the hands of usurers; for I was the heir of a million, and that was a larger sum then than seven times as much to-day. My father's solicitor settled with them, and, as soon as that was done, I ran up new bills, delighted that my credit was so good. In short, I was a fast youth, and I continued to be so. I have already said, I believe, that I had no love, no respect even, for my father, who was--the truth must be told--one of the most exquisite hypocrites that ever wore the white cravat of respectability. My father was a very honest hypocrite. Others dissemble, and whitewash it over with a coating of ideality, persuading themselves that there is something real and actual in other things than money and pleasure. My father was also a philosopher, and used to say, My son, the world belongs to him who has strength or cunning enough to conquer it; and whoever takes a sentimental view has the pleasure of taking it, and nothing more."

Sonnenkamp scraped energetically at the bit of wood which he held in his hand, and for a moment nothing was heard but the scratching of the knife rounding off the end.

"This being said," he resumed, "I can continue with calmness. At seventeen years of age, I was a spendthrift, inducted into all kinds of respectable iniquities. I was a jolly comrade, a good-for-nothing fellow; but I was respectable, rich, and therefore very popular; for nature and destiny had been terribly lavish in securing this result. My father regularly paid my gambling debts and other debts also. He went with me to the ballet, and often handed me his more powerful opera glass, that I might get a better view of the sylph-like Cortini, who was no stranger to me, as he very well knew. Yes, we were a jovial set. My father gave me only one counsel, and that was, Don't confine yourself to one. Every Sunday I must dissemble, and say I was going to church; but my father knew well enough, and took a secret satisfaction in the knowledge, that I went elsewhere. Our carriage stood every other Sunday at the church where the most pious and celebrated preacher held forth; and on the alternate Sunday we did not drive, but walked, for then our coachmen also went, and our horses, too, had a Sunday. Our very servants must appear pious. My father was Protestant, and I was Catholic out of regard to my mother. I leave it for others to decide in which confession hypocrisy is cultivated the more successfully.

"Now the question came up what was I to do? I had no fancy for sitting at the accountant's desk, and wanted to be a soldier; but I was not of noble rank, and was not willing to be received at the Jockey Club simply on sufferance. I dropped off from my youthful companions, and from that time played the gentleman. I went to Paris. I enjoyed a superfluity of the pleasures furnished by the world. Most people plume themselves upon their virtue, and their virtue is nothing more than a feebleness of constitution; they make a virtue of necessity. When I had sowed enough wild oats, my father sent for me. I lived at home, and the specimens I saw before me of what was termed virtue were nothing but cowardice, and fear of not being respected. To be virtuous is a bore; to appear virtuous is amusing and profitable at the same time. Every thing that can be done without detection is allowable: the main thing is to belong to society. I often went from the most brilliant assemblies into the wretchedest dens; and the lowest vice seemed to me the most worthy of respect. I was a roué, and remained so. We were proud of being a rollicking and reckless crew. It had a sort of poetic tinge. Let one be a poet like Byron, be a genius, an exception to the ordinary crowd, and what in lower conditions would be crime is then regarded as a gallant feat. I saw that the whole world was vice under a mask, and I think there is no vice; the name is given, poison is written on the phial, so that the bulk of mankind may not drink out of it. I was made acquainted, whether accidentally or designedly I do not know, with a beautiful girl, fresh as a rose. It was time that I, at one and twenty, should settle down as a married man. All congratulated me on having sowed my wild oats, as it is termed, and that I was now to become a respectable husband and the head of a family. My betrothed was an enthusiastic child, and I don't understand it to this day, how she could make light of my past as she did, probably under the direction of her mother. Why I married the child I do not know. As I was going to church, and returning from it, as I was making the wedding trip, in which every thing was very modest and proper, it seemed to be somebody else, and not myself, who was the actor. We returned, and--but I will spin out the story no further than to say, that I discovered an earlier attachment of the sweet child. The only thing that vexed me was to be laughed at. I left her, and while the arrangements were being made for a separation, she died, and with her an unborn life. I was again free, free! That means that I was in Paris. I wanted to enjoy life: to drain the cup to the very dregs. Dissipation, dissipation, was my sole end: I yearned for distracting pleasure--I wanted to exhaust life, and every morning it was new born. My soul was a void, a void everywhere. I despised life, and yet did not fling it from me. What has life to offer? Reputation or riches--the former I could not strive after, the latter was open to me. My father wanted to hold me within a narrow range. I operated on the Exchange. I gained considerable sums, and lost them again, but still had enough left to keep afloat by means of gambling. I was at Marseilles, among a jolly set, when I heard of my father's death. The largest part of my inheritance was seized upon by my creditors, and, because I wanted to have no recollections of home, I wrote to the attorney to sell off every thing. A malicious saying went the rounds after his death. We had had no idea how well he was known; now it was said, 'There was one good thing about him, and that is, he was better than his son.'

"The Germans say that God and the Devil are wrestling with one another for the dominion of the world. I have hitherto only heard of these two mighty potencies, they have never yet presented themselves before me; but I was convinced that there were two things engaged in a strong tussle, and these were Work and Ennui. Men benumb themselves in work, in pleasure, in the foolery of morality, as it is termed. All is vanity, the wise king has said; but it ought to be said, All is stale, tedious, flat, a long-drawn yawn, that ends only in the death-rattle. I have run over the whole sandy desert of ennui, and there is no remedy there but opium, hashish, gambling, and adventure. I took lessons of a juggler, and acquired great skill, for which I stood in high repute among my companions; I had the most splendid apparatus. I lived in Italy at a later period, out of pure wantonness, as a juggler by profession. I was in Paris at the time of Louis Philippe; there's nothing merrier than these frequent émeutes: they are the people's games of chance."

Sonnenkamp stopped, and now, boring with his knife very delicately, he said,--

"Do you look at me in astonishment, because I impart wisdom? Well, that is also insipid like every thing else: honor, gold, music, friendship, glory, all is emptiness. The men of virtue, the men of honor, are all like those augurs who could not look into each other's faces without laughing at the idle tale which they impose upon the world. The gods of to-day, in the church as well as in the world, say, we know that you are only hypocrites; but that you must play the hypocrite is an evidence of our authority. And the so-called delight in nature, in mountain and valley, in water and forest, sunlight and moonlight and starry brightness--what does it all amount to? a mere cheat, a curtain to hide the grave you are to lie in. What is a man to do in the world? Do you know that millions have lived before him, and have looked at the stars? Is he to be proud of playing the same old tune over and over again, like the man with his hurdy-gurdy, grinding out the same melody to-day and to-morrow that he did yesterday? You see I had learned my Byron by heart. The misfortune was, that I was neither a poet nor a highly interesting pirate. I was disgusted with the world and with myself. I did not want to kill myself. I wanted to live, and to despise every thing. I had madly, as if in mockery of myself, lost every thing at play; and now came the merriest thing of all. It was a cold, wet night; but it suited me well, as I went through the streets, completely plucked as I was. Whew! How lustily the wind blew! it was cooling. Here was I traversing the ant-hill of the great city; my money I had gambled away, and my love had been unfaithful. A nice, prudent little fellow there was, who proved to me over a bottle of canary, that I possessed a capital which I didn't understand how to put at interest; that I was a born diplomatist. I knew the decoy-duck at the first whistle. I was to be a diplomatist, and so I sported that character. New horses, new servants, a new love, and a large new house, were now mine. I was an attaché; in good German, I was a spy. I cover the word with no nice little moral cloak. The life was a merry one. This time the discovery had been made: now dissembling had a definite end. The praise which the ambassador lavished upon me I deserved more than he was aware. Did you ever hear of being insured against the insurance company? I brought the ambassador most important information; but I had an after appointment with the minister of police, and gave him secret notice of the ambassador's machinations. The ambassador gave me false information; but we could extract from this what his real intention was."

A smile passed over the countenances of the hearers, and Sonnenkamp continued,--

"A day came when I must flee. I had the choice of five passports with five different names under which to travel. I wanted, first of all, concealment; and one is best concealed among so called honest people. I came to Nice, where I was a gardener. All my senses were paralyzed. I seemed to myself a corpse, and as if I with my thoughts were only the companion of this corpse. Here I and the gardener became one again; the odor of the moist earth was the first thing that, for a long time, had given me any pleasure, no, that made me feel I was alive. Chemistry can imitate every thing; but the fragrance that rises out of the fresh earth no perfume ever possessed. Herr Dournay surprised me on the first hour of his arrival, just as I was digging in the fresh mould. It gave me strength. The masquerade pleased me; I had good sleep, a good appetite. The gardener's daughter wanted to marry me. I had again a reason for flight. I had laid away a good sum of money; now I dug it up. I began a new life of pleasure at Naples. I confess I was proud of assuming all sorts of transformations: I was entirely afloat, in good health and good spirits. I had a good circulation, and social talent: the world was mine. I had friends wherever I went: how long were they my friends? Perhaps only so long as I stuck fast to my money. That was a matter of indifference to me. I desired no loyalty, for I gave none. I was always thankful to my parents for one thing; they had given me an indestructible constitution. I had a body of steel, a heart of marble, and unshakable nerves; I knew no sickness and no pity. I have experienced many provocations to pity"--

He paused. It was the only time during his whole speech that he smiled; and a peculiar smack of satisfaction proceeded from him.

Then he continued:--

"A strange trait of sentimentalism stuck fast to me, however. It was at Naples, on a wonderfully beautiful evening, we were sailing in a miscellaneous and merry party on the sea, and I was the merriest of the whole. We disembarked. Who can tell what transpires in a human being? At this time, there, under the bright Italian sky, in the midst of laughing, singing, jesting men and women, the thought darted through my mind: What hast thou in the wide world? Nothing. Yet there is one thing: yonder in Poland thy mother's grave. And out of laughing, wanton Italy, I travelled without halt through the different countries, saw nothing, journeying on and on towards dreary, dirty Poland. I came to the village that I had not seen since my sixteenth year. And such is man--no, such am I! I did not want to undergo the pain of seeing my mother's grave. I looked over the burial-ground hedge; but I did not go inside, and travelled back again without having seen the grave. Such am I, so good or so bad; I believe they are one and the same thing. I travelled through Greece and Egypt, and was in Algiers. I have led a life of utterly unbridled excess, and have done every thing to undermine my vital power, but have failed to accomplish it. I have an iron, indestructible constitution. I was in England, the land of respectability. It may be that I have a special eye to see them; but I saw everywhere nothing but masks, hypocrisy, conventionalism. I took ship for America. You will laugh when I tell you that I meant to join the Mormons, and yet such is the fact. These people have the courage and honesty to ordain polygamy by law, while in the rest of the world it exists under a lying disguise. But I was not suited to that community. I soon returned to New York, and there I found the high-school and the Olympus of gamblers. The fast livers of Paris and London are bunglers compared with the Yankees. It was the fashion to declaim against the Southern chivalry; but I have found among them truly heroic natures, of the stuff out of which conquering Rome was built up. Only he who has been in America knows what the being that calls himself man is in reality. Every thing there is reckless, untramelled. They only dissemble in the matter of religion, that's respectable."

Eric and Weidmann looked at each other. Weidmann had given expression to the same thought a few days before at Mattenheim, but in a wholly different connection.

Sonnenkamp went on.

"My five passes were still good. I went here under the name of Count Gronau: the Americans are fond of intercourse with noblemen. After a wild night, I shot a man who had insulted me on the public street. I fled, and lived for a time among the horse-thieves of Arkansas. It was a droll life, a life of craft and adventure that nowhere else has its like. Man becomes there a lurking beast of prey, and my body underwent the most monstrous experiences. I left this partnership, and became a sailor on a whaling-ship. I had shot lions and leopards in Algiers, and now I was hunting the king of the ocean. The whole world is here only to be captured and subdued. I have been through all sorts of experience. I soon gained dexterity enough to reach the position of boat-steerer, and I was appointed to this. There was one thing more; to hunt men, the merriest of all. This was adventure worth engaging in, this man-hunting: here was a new excitement, a novel attraction. We sailed for Madagascar through many perils. We caught men and bought men; boldness and cunning were called into activity, and the business pleased me. Great risk, great profits. In Louisiana, where the great sugar plantations have each three, four, and five thousand slaves, and in Charleston, South Carolina, are the chief slave-markets; for the most part, boys are carried there, and no elderly men. You will consider it contemptible; but it does appear to me a triumph of human freedom and power for one man to steal and sell another. No animal can so seize and serve his kind, always supposing, though by no means granting the fact, that negroes are men. Yes, I have been a slave-trader: they called me the sea-eagle. That bird has the sharpest scent, he flies off, and cannot be caught. It was a bold and beautiful pastime. I have even stolen the chief who was selling me his subjects. These talking black beasts are equal to their so-called fellow-men in one respect, perhaps,--I say perhaps,--they can play the hypocrite like white men. No beast can dissemble, and, if dissembling can give a title to human rights, then the blacks deserve that title. After the first burst of rage, the chief was very tractable; but one day I was pursued, with my cargo on board, by an English ship, and had to pitch the whole human dust-heap into the sea. This gave food to the sharks. Look here, this is the finger which the chief tried to bite off: you know how he has made his appearance in these days. From that time I left off going to sea, and carried on the business through others; finally I gave it up altogether. I had enough, I had large plantations, and the child of the boat-steerer, who had died in the whale-fishery, had been brought up by me, and I married her. Such a being, only half-awake, prattling like a child in every thought, or, rather, with no thought at all, was pleasing to me. I had at that time no idea that there were women with great, heroic, world-conquering souls."

Sonnenkamp spoke these last words in a very loud tone. After a short pause, he continued,--

"I was living in quiet retirement when the insane party of the North arose, whose object was to abolish slavery. And when my own countrymen entered into the front ranks as the magnanimous friends of man, I came forward in the newspapers and acknowledged myself a German, in order to say that all were not like these shriekers about humanity. I showed that it was madness to desire to free the slave. Humane men wanted to render benevolent aid; but the wretchedness of the world is not cured by benevolence, nor the poverty, nor the crime. The works of mercy, all seven together, do not help the world, they are all quack-remedies: the only real benevolence to the lower orders of men is slavery. They want to be nothing else than what they are: the best thing is for them to be taken care of by their masters--for the blacks certainly, and no less so, perhaps, for the whites. Herr Weidmann knows that his nephew has been my bitterest enemy. I was in the Southern States, and there I and my compeers were nobles. We are the privileged class. There are privileged races, and privileged persons among those races. The barons of the Southern States seemed to me the only honest men I had become acquainted with; everywhere else there was hypocrisy. I was displeased, indeed, that they wanted to get for their cause the cover of religion; but it was a rich joke that the ministers of religion volunteered their aid in this attempt.

"But I soon learned to have less regard even for this Southern chivalry. They are hypocrites, too; for they hold slaves, and yet despise him who imports the slaves. This is a remnant of the old hypocrisy of setting up a standard of virtue. Why deny the natural, open, pitiless mastership? Why not openly acknowledge that which they acknowledge in secret? Because the English worshippers of rank place slave-traders in the category of pirates? Even the freemen of the South are themselves the slaves of a vulgar notion. Now it came over me. When I had a son, a longing was awakened within me which I could not appease. I know not whether I have already told you, that, in my early days, the thought often occurred to me, had I been a noble, had I with my courage and my ability entered the military service, I should have become a steady man like the rest; I might have been for a time dissipated; but then I should have managed my estate, and been the founder of an honorable line. The fundamental cause of my adventurous, restless life always seemed to me to be the fact that I was a commoner, having every claim to a privileged station, and yet always thrust into the back-ground. I know that it is an inconsistency; I despise the world, and I strive after honor. This proceeds from a youthful impression of what was meant by the nobility. The only guaranty for the world's smile is rank and genius; without one of these you do not escape from mediocrity and sufferance. I pictured to my wife what a grand life was led at some little court in Germany, and it became a fixed idea in her mind. One can tear out the heart more easily than root out from it a thought. I see the struggle coming in the New World: courage and strength are on our side. There will be a slaughter unparalleled; but we shall be victorious. The Southern States want independence, and this is the only, the highest thing. I have labored in Europe for our cause. We lived in England, in Italy, in Switzerland. I thought, for a time, of becoming what is called a free, sober citizen of Switzerland. But I hated Switzerland: it suffers the foreigner to be free, so long as he is a foreigner; if he becomes a citizen of the State, he can no longer be a free man, but must take part in all their petty concerns. He who is not earning money, and who will not be pious--one can do both at the same time without much trouble--he who doesn't want to live frugally, will not do for Switzerland. No court, no nobility, no barracks there!--nothing but church, school, and hospital, things that are of no account to me. I didn't want to remain in Switzerland, with inaccessible heights before my eyes; it's oppressive, and for that reason, here on the Rhine it's cozy and homelike. Germany is and will be the only land for free men. Here one pays his tax, and is let alone. No one has any claim, and in his position the nobleman is liable to no interference. I returned to Germany, because I wished to acquire for myself and for my son a brilliant position in society. The regard of one's neighbors, one's fellow-men, is a fine luxury, perhaps the very finest: this, I wanted to have too. I wanted to give my son what only the German perfectly knows, dutiful service; and with this view there was perpetually ringing in my ears one melody--the only sentimentalism I can reproach myself with--a villa on the Rhine. This was the dream of my childhood, this, of my mature life, and this has been my ruin. When I looked the whole world over, and asked myself where life could be passed most happily, then I had to confess, as I said before, that it is the highest pinnacle of enjoyment to be a rich baron of some small German state. Here one may have a life fraught with enjoyment without any claim of duty, and receive all honor in a limited circle, and enjoyment besides. I have become familiar with all the different strata of existence. I have caroused and scuffled with the red-skins, and more than once have been in danger of adorning some Indian with my scalp, and I wanted now to make trial of the red-collars and their chief. I did not want to leave the world without knowing what court life was. I cherished still one idyllic dream--something of the German romance hangs by me yet--and, not without reason, I called my house Villa Eden. Here it was my purpose to live in enjoyment with my plants, and like my plants; but I have been dragged again into the world, more by the thought of my children than any thing else. Enough; you are well aware that I wanted to be ennobled. Let it be. I have now come to the end. But"--

He paused, and looked at what he had whittled out; it was an African's head, with the tongue lolling from his mouth. With one sharp cut, Sonnenkamp suddenly cut off tongue and mouth, so that they fell down into his lap; then, grinning like the figure in his hand, he went on:--

"I have placed myself and mine under the protection of civilization; I have taken refuge, not in the savage wilderness, but in the bosom of cultivated life, as it is termed. To be honest, I do not repent it. I am no milk-sop; my soul has been tempered in the fire of hell. I made no concealment of my past history, because I considered it bad. What in this world is bad? I concealed myself from folly and weakness. Thousands repent without becoming any better. Had I been a soldier in a successful war, perhaps I should have been a hero. I am a man without superstition: I haven't even the superstition of the so-called humanity. I live and die in the conviction that what is called equal rights is a fable; to free the negro will never do a particle of good, they will be exterminated, when it comes to the pass that a negro may sit in the White House at Washington. The world is full of hypocrisy, and my only pride is, that I am no hypocrite.

"But now, honorable and worthy gentlemen, is there any question you would like to ask? I am ready to answer it."

He made a pause.

No one made any response.

"Well, then," was his close, "gentlemen of honor and of virtue, I demand of you, not for my own sake, but for the sake of my children, to impose upon me some sort of reparation. If you demand that I should kill myself, I will do it; if you enjoin banishment, I will go away; if you require the half of my property, which is far more than I have ever acquired from the negroes, my fellow-men, as they are called, I will resign it. I thank you, and await your verdict on the appointed day."

He retired, and left the men by themselves.

Clodwig whispered to Eric,--

"Cain slew his brother: the Cain of today sells his brother."

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IX. CONSULTATION OF THE MEN, AND A WOMAN'S VERDICT

Who could describe the various changes of expression in the features of the judges during Sonnenkamp's speech!

After he had retired, they sat together in silence.

Weidmann looked bright and unmoved: his clear blue eye was calm, and he seemed surprised by nothing he had heard.

The Major was busy with an internal struggle, passing, in review before him, his neglected youth. He often struck his breast with his clenched hand, thinking to himself,--

"Yes, who knows but that you might have become just like this!"

And he was overpowered by the emotion caused by considering his own case, and that of the man who had spoken so defiantly. He wanted to keep from shedding tears, but did not succeed. He wiped off the perspiration from his face with his handkerchief, and at the same time got rid of the tears. He longed to go to the poor rich man, embrace him, and call out to him, "Brother, brother, you have been a very bad brother; but now you are going to be a good brother: you will be?" But he did not venture to give way to the impulse of his heart. He looked round, to see whether any one would begin; but no glance was directed towards him, except the kindly one of Professor Einsiedel, to whom the Major nodded, as if he would say,--

"Yes, in all your books, you have never seen any thing like this. It is horrible, that a man can think and do all this; but I pity him from the bottom of my heart, and you pity him too: I see you do."

The Doctor was the first to speak aloud, and he said to Clodwig,--

"We have been, without meaning it, the listeners to a comic performance. A simple-minded transgressor, a transgressor from the impulse of passion, can, perhaps, be converted; a cunning and hardened one, never."

"With all my detestation," replied Clodwig, "I admire this power, which can so lay bare the hypocrisy of the world. Oh,"--

His mouth seemed parched; and he moved his tongue frequently, this side and that, appearing unable to say any thing further. He looked at the expressive countenance of the Banker, and, nodding to him, said,--

"I see you have a word to say. Pray say it."

The Banker, coloring very red, responded,--

"Certainly. I will not speak of the emotion this life-history has excited in me. It is--I know not what to call it; but I think it is a history of humiliation: and perhaps a Jew ought to be inclined to judge righteously, I will say mercifully, of all sins and transgressions which proceed from being slighted and contemned. Humiliation, placing the matter in a social point of view, awakens bitterness, hardness, recklessness; and it must be a peculiar nature, which becomes, under its influence, mild, even to faint-heartedness and weakness."

The Doctor respected the man's point of view; but he did not seem disposed to accede to it. He urged a decision, asking,--

"Have you any method of punishment or reparation to propose?"

"First of all," replied the Banker, "I don't know any thing else, except to take away from this man all parental power over his children; and we must devise some delicate way of doing this, in order not to inflict suffering upon them."

"We Germans," cried the Doctor briskly, "are for ever and ever schoolmasters. This hard, seared villain of a Sonnenkamp wants to teach that his villany is pure wisdom and logic; and he contemptuously garnishes his cynicism with ideas."

"Exile," began Professor Einsiedel,--"exile would be the only sentence we, like the ancients, could pronounce upon him who has desecrated and insulted all the blessings of civilization; but there is no land to which we could banish him, where, stripped of all the conquests won by civilization, he could atone for his past life."

Professor Einsiedel seemed not to take it amiss that he had an opportunity to put to a practical use the studies he had made of the history of slavery, and to show how the Greeks had no perception of its iniquity; but the Doctor laid his hand upon the professor's shoulder, as much as to say,--

"Some other time, I pray."

The Professor gave him a nod.

"Every punishment we suspend over him," said Prince Valerian, "is a punishment of his children: he is protected by an invulnerable shield."

There was now a longer pause. "And yet we shall and must find one," cried Weidmann. "I beg you to come together here, a week from to-day, at the opening of the sealed opinions; and then we will come to a decision. It is our duty to find some punishment that will make atonement without striking the guiltless."

In a faltering voice, the Major entreated the friends not to separate: they had, as yet, come to no proper decision; and he could not help himself out of the difficulty. He would have been very glad to ask that he might be allowed to take Fräulein Milch into counsel, for he was sure that she could help him; but in a jury one must make up an opinion for himself.

The heavy head of the Major swayed this side and that, and seemed to be almost too heavy for him to hold up.

Those assembled seemed to desire to be freed from the painful situation; and Weidmann exclaimed,--

"I pronounce the meeting adjourned."

They all rose as if they must escape from imprisonment, or from an infected atmosphere. They would have liked to go out into the fresh air; but it rained steadily, and there were puddles and small rills in the garden walks. They went into a spacious apartment, and Claus said,--

"How would it answer--allow me, gentlemen, to ask--how would it answer, if we sentenced Herr Sonnenkamp to go back home, and sell himself for a slave?"

As no one replied, he went on timidly,--

"I don't know whether that would be just the thing; but 'twould be something, anyhow."

Weidmann told him that no white man could be made a slave.

"This Herr Sonnenkamp," said Clodwig with quivering lips to Eric, "is nothing but a victim of the distracted condition of our age. The whole of humanity at the present time has a troubled conscience; it knows that it is not in harmony with, itself, and this creates a universal unrest. This individual man, driving hither and thither, prosecuting iniquity by night, and extremely respectable by day, this is the outbirth of our life. Ah! excuse me, I feel quite sick."

Clodwig requested the Doctor to accompany him to Wolfsgarten, as he felt very unwell; but, just as the Doctor was getting into the carriage with him, he was called to Frau Ceres.

Joseph came, in a short time, and informed Clodwig that the Doctor could not leave his patient.

The Doctor remained with Frau Ceres, who had strangled the parrot in a paroxysm of madness, and smashed every thing in the room.

He opened a vein, from which the blood flowed very dark; and she became more quiet.

Sonnenkamp did not leave his room when the account of his wife's illness was brought to him.

The doctor again sent word to Clodwig, that he had better remain here, especially as it was raining very hard, and the Rhine was beginning to rise; but Clodwig insisted on returning home.

Now the Doctor came himself, and begged the banker to drive with Clodwig to Wolfsgarten, and Clodwig himself entreated this favor of his old friend. The latter agreed at once, only saying that he would first drive speedily to the town to send a telegram, that they need not expect him at home until some further notice. He drove away.

Bella had gone to the green cottage to see Aunt Claudine, and behaved there very amiably towards her and Lina; but she could not help letting fall some severe expressions in reference to the Professorin and Manna, who had so selfishly taken themselves out of the way whilst such a terrible transaction was taking place in the house.

When a servant came and informed her that Clodwig wanted to set out immediately, she exclaimed, stamping with her foot,--

"I will not!"

And then she added:--

"Very well, let him take me up here."

The carriage drove up; and Bella seated herself by Clodwig's side without his getting out: he sat shivering in one corner.

"Why do you not ask how I am?" said he, in a feeble, trembling voice.

Bella made no reply. She was internally struggling; but suddenly she exclaimed,--

"Foh! You ought all to be ashamed of yourselves! What are the whole of you in comparison with this man? He alone is a man, he alone. Here is something grand and strong among this lint-scraping, humanitary set. You are all imbeciles, cowards! This Sonnenkamp is the only great man, a strong man, a real man. Oh! if such a man"--

"Well? If such a man"--

"Ask me no more questions. I will drive home with you, home,--you have the right to command,--what more do you want? Not another word, not a word, or I shall not mind the pouring rain, not the least: I shall jump out of the carriage, I shall go off, I don't know where; but I won't be imprisoned any longer; I won't be banished to your miserable, old, pot-digging, pretty-spoken, vaporing, freedom-vaunting, humanity-gouged, world!"

"Wife, what are you saying? Are good and evil then"--

"Pooh! Good and evil, these are the crutches on which you lean, because you have nothing to lean on in yourselves. A man must be strong, and have good grit: whether he is good or bad is a matter of indifference. Any thing but weak and sentimental; any thing but hiding behind your humanity with its blissful tears. A man who is not made of iron ought to be a woman--no, he ought to be a nun. You are nothing but a set of soft-hearted nuns. Yes, it must be so; it is so. A Jew to sit in judgment on such a man, and an atheist like this Herr Dournay! Yes, the atheists are the only consistent democrats. All are equal: there's no longer any higher being, no longer any God; then there's equality, and you are everybody's equal. Dastards, loafers! May you find goodly fellowship together! He is the only man. He has done you too much honor in wanting to belong to you, you are not worthy of him. You are all of you afraid of Jean Jacques Rousseau, of the fool of equal rights. It is still to be seen whether the world smothers itself in this mixed mass of equality, or whether there are heights for it to climb. You ought to go across the ocean; there's the last decisive battle-field; you are nothing but a nobility in a holiday uniform. The Southern States stand erect, and if they fall, there's no more aristocracy; then you'll all be clipped by the shears of equal rights. Just call the coachman in here, your brother-man! Don't let him be out there in the rain, he ought to be sitting with us in the carriage. Or shall I call him for you?"

She seized the cord, and the coachman reined in. After letting Clodwig wait in torture for a while, she cried,--

"Drive on, it's nothing."

She turned her head restlessly, this way and that. Her eyes wildly rolling, and grinding her teeth, she exclaimed in a loud tone:

"Fie upon all the cowards! Oh! if I were only a man!"

Clodwig sat in the corner, shivering. At this moment something clinked in Bella's mouth, and she put her hand up to it. What is that? Yes, she took it out--it is so. In her angry gnashing of her teeth, she had broken a front tooth, which had been tender for a long time, and required careful treatment. Bella clinched the hand in which she held the tooth, and pressed her lips together. What has happened to her? The thought rapidly shot through her, How vexatious it was that she could no longer ridicule those who wear false teeth; but yet she can, for nobody will believe that she, Bella, has a false tooth.

They met the Banker waiting for them in the town: he said that he had sent the message to his house, and was ready.

Bella got out of the carriage, and holding a handkerchief before her mouth, and speaking in muffled tones, requested the Banker to accompany her husband, and a servant to stay with her. She hurried towards the railroad. Arrived at the station, she was perplexed; and without taking the handkerchief from her mouth, she told the servant to take tickets for the Fortress. Then she sat still in a corner of the passenger-room, with two thicknesses of veil over her face. She rode to the Fortress-City. No one was to know that she wore a false tooth, no one was to see her with a gap in her teeth.

Clodwig drove homewards, and often wiped his eyes. Above all, his pride was wounded; he, Clodwig, was scorned, and by whom? By his wife. And on whose account? On account of this hollow-hearted adventurer. She has never loved me one single instant: that was a stab to his very heart, and this stab never ceased to be felt; for what he suffered bodily was transmuted into a suffering of the soul. Who is there that can measure this action and re-action of body and soul?

The rain had ceased; but a mist seemed before Clodwig's eyes, and a heavy gloom. He reached Wolfsgarten; but all the apartments seemed full of smoke, full of haze. He seated himself in his chair.

"I am lonely, lonely," he said to himself continually.

The Banker spoke to him in gentle words; but Clodwig shook his head; he knew that Bella had never loved him, that she hated him. He felt himself humiliated, scourged. Bella's words had wounded him to the heart's core, wounded him to the death.

They drew off his coat: he looked for a long time at the coat, and nodded with a sad smile.

Did he forebode that he would never put it on again?

When Bella returned home early the next morning, he looked at her with a ghostlike countenance: he perceived the coldness and hardness of her face.

"Medusa, Medusa!" shrieked Clodwig.

Without knowing he had uttered the words, he fell back on the pillows.

They restored him to consciousness. Hours of the severest pain elapsed before the Doctor came. Clodwig had also desired Eric to be sent for.

The Doctor came, and declared Clodwig to be dangerously sick; the jury trial had excited him too violently, and the drive home through the rain--"and perhaps something else," he added to Bella, who gazed at him without changing a muscle of her face.

Bella sent for her brother; but no one knew precisely where he was.

"I am lonely," said she, too.

She was terrified when she said this; for she felt that she would soon be really alone.

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X. A KNIGHT ERRANT

It was difficult to hunt up Pranken, for he had lost himself when he left Villa Eden. No man ever walked with a firmer and a prouder step, while at the same time he was inwardly crushed, than Pranken. It was something more than external assumption, it was an habitual assurance that sustained him.

Pranken would have taken it hard if Manna had rejected him in order to become a nun. But to reject him on account of preference for another, reject him,--Otto von Pranken!--He was touched to the quick. Otto von Pranken had been refused; and he was very deeply in love. Can Otto von Pranken offer love, and not have it reciprocated? If the girl had taken the veil, and renounced the world, she would have renounced him with the rest, for he was a part of the world; but to be refused in this way, and dismissed on account of another man!--. Otto von Pranken loves, and his suit is not accepted!

"Unprecedented!" He ground his teeth with rage. He never thought of what he had been guilty of in his life: he only felt his dignity insulted, his pride mortified, and his love scorned; for he loved Manna, and wanted to be united to her, and naturally, also, to her money; then he would be all right, and indulge his passion for handsome horses.

What should now become of him? For the first time in his life, Pranken felt a pity for himself: it seemed to him that he was misunderstood, misappreciated virtue, but, more than all, as if nobleness of bearing had been insulted, and fidelity rewarded with ingratitude. How great sacrifices he had made for this family! And now? It appeared to him as if there were a black funeral-procession passing along in his thoughts: you cannot crowd through it, you must wait until it has all gone by.

He rode away as if he had been thrust out of the world. Where shall he turn? To whom shall he complain?

Is Otto von Pranken to complain to a man, to appear in a helpless condition before any one?

He laughed outright as he now called to mind that he had contracted large debts, in anticipation of the millions which would certainly be his. What next?

Involuntarily he turned round once more, and looked back at Villa Eden.

There was only a single line needed, only a brief interview: yes, he had but to ride back, and represent this to Sonnenkamp, in order to come away with hundreds of thousands. But no, it must not be done.

"Fie!" said he to himself, "how could you ever have such a thought as that?"

He rode on, and came to the country-house of Herr von Endlich. There was a young widow here: should he now go in? He knew that his proposal would not be rejected here. No, not yet. But he reined in and dismounted. He asked after the gracious lady, and was told that she was travelling in Italy with her brother.

Sneering contemptuously at himself, he again mounted his horse.

He would tell Bella and Clodwig,--no, not even that. He had not taken them into his counsel: in opposition to the rest of the world, he had connected himself with Sonnenkamp, and was he now to be pitied by Clodwig, and stuffed with wise saws?

He turned his horse, and, riding up along the river, he came to Villa Eden again, and the horse wanted to turn in at the gate; but with whip and spur he urged him on.

He rode to the Priest's, and sent for Fräulein Perini, who came.

First he asked her if she wished to remain any longer in the family.

Fräulein Perini, looking him full in the face, declared that she hoped she had not mistaken him in supposing that he would not abandon every thing to the Huguenots. She asserted that she was the daughter of a man who had fallen in a duel caused by a less provocation.

The Priest here said,--

"My noble young friend! Not that, no, not that: what does it signify, this petty duel in a corner of the wood, and you killing one man even, according to the code of honor? You sons of the nobility must wage, under the banner of the Pope, the great contest with the revolution. Also for your own sake. On that field will be fought the great duel between faith and irreligion, between eternal law and frivolous self-deification, and the victory is yours."

Pranken smiled to himself; but he did not express how odd it seemed to him, when the Priest went on to state, that, before it was known how Sonnenkamp's money had been acquired, they might have applied a part of it to holy ends; but now it could not be done.

Pranken looked at the Priest, and smiled. Did not the Priest know the origin of the money before this?

He had it on his lips to say, "It is very amiable and prudent in you now, when nothing can be got, to act as if you had declined it." But it was not necessary; and why should he imbitter against him the only parties who remained his friends? Yes, he was here still an honored personage, not the solitary, abandoned one, who rode outside there on the road, up and down, not knowing which way to turn. He would now be prudent, he would play with men. He said he had separated from Sonnenkamp, because the latter would not give up to him, and devote a large sum for a pious purpose. He had the right to say this, he thought, for he had desired that it should be done. This was what he would now maintain; Manna's refusal was by this means put out of sight, and his obstinate adherence to Sonnenkamp had in it a sort of religious consecration.

The Priest reminded Pranken that to-day was the time for the church conference, and he was expected to be there.

Pranken took leave.

Fräulein Perini returned to the Villa, wearing a proud smile. Odd people, these Germans! She would at any rate stay until she had got enough for herself; she did not want to leave empty-handed.

Pranken rode off. He passed the villa which had belonged to the Cabinetsrath. Ah! they were prudent, they had secured their part of the booty before the decision. Why were you so simple, so considerate, and so trustful?

He put up his horse at the station, and rode in the cars to the city where the Bishop lived. He was expected there; but how was he to present himself to the company? He came, luckily, just as the meeting had broken up. He was received with marked consideration at the palace of the Bishop; and he was glad to feel that there was still honor for him in the world: and here he came to a hurried resolve.

Here, also, Bella's messenger overtook him.

He set out, and reached Wolfsgarten. The first person he met was the Banker, who told him, with great emotion, that Clodwig was very ill. Pranken looked haughtily at the man; but he had good breeding enough to address him civilly.

He came to Bella. After she had told him of Clodwig's illness, she lauded Pranken as the only true freeman in remaining true to Sonnenkamp.

Pranken pressed his lips together, but made no reply. It was not the time now to make known what had happened, and the conclusion he had formed. And, when Bella asked him why he seemed so disturbed, he could give no answer.

"Why were you not at the trial? Have you come from Villa Eden? How are they there?" asked Bella.

"I don't know," Pranken finally replied.

Yes, how are they at Villa Eden!

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XI. SMOKE AND DESOLATION AT THE VILLA

Sonnenkamp sat alone. He seemed to hear in his solitude a crackling, a low, almost inaudible gnawing, like a tongue of flame lapping the beams and joists, devouring more and more, and increasing as it devoured its prey. Such a low crackling, and such a lapping, he believed that he heard in his solitude.

He was mistaken, and yet he was well aware that there was a spark kindled, and it was burning noiselessly; it ran along the floor of the room, it reached the walls; the chairs, the closets, the books, are all on fire; the painted faces on the canvas are grotesquely distorted, and blaze up; and the flames spread on and on, creeping through all the apartments, enveloping at last the roof and the whole house, and flaring up into the sky.

Suppose that one should burn it all up, and every thing in it? No, there is another, a better means of deliverance, an energetic deed, a splendid, grand--here came a knock. It must be Bella coming to explain why she was not there when he returned from the trial to the seed-room. He opened the door quickly, and Weidmann, not Bella, entered.

"Have you any thing to ask me in private?" asked Sonnenkamp angrily.

"I have only a favor to beg of you."

"A favor? you?"

"Yes. Give me your son"--

"My son?" cried Sonnenkamp in astonishment.

"Will you be so good as to let me finish my sentence. Let your son come into my family for days, weeks, months, as long as you please; only let it be long enough for him to get a new hold in a different sphere. He needs an energetic and free activity. When your son passed a short time with me before this thing happened, I perceived with satisfaction that he had very little personal vanity with all his beauty. He takes pleasure in looking at others rather than at himself. This would be of help; and I would like to aid him still further. As your son will not become a soldier, perhaps it will be well for him to be instructed in husbandry."

"Is this a plan which you have agreed upon with Herr Dournay?"

"Yes, it is his wish; and it seems to me a very good plan."

"Indeed?" said Sonnenkamp. "Perhaps Roland has already been informed of this wish, and of how well it suits?"

"I cannot blame you for this bitter feeling, I can very well understand it; for it is no trifling matter to be placed in a situation where others undertake to dispose of us and ours."

"I thank you, I thank you very kindly.'"

"If you decline, then no one knows any thing about it, except Herr Dournay and myself."

"Have I said that I was going to decline? You will yet receive one proof how much confidence I place in you: I have made you one of my executors."

"I am much older than you." Sonnenkamp made no reply to this remark, and Weidmann continued,--

"What conclusion have you come to about my request concerning your son?"

"If he will go with you, he has my consent. Allow me one question. Is this the expiation you would exact of me, or a part of it?"

Weidmann said it was not.

The carriage in which the Professorin, Roland, and Manna returned, now entered the court-yard. Weidmann welcomed the Professorin very cordially, having known her a long time ago. He saw now for the first time, as a matron, the once blooming beauty. The three brought from Mattenheim a fresh strength for all that lay before them.

As they were sitting together in the green cottage, a messenger on horseback came from Clodwig to summon Eric to his side.

Weidmann now renewed the proposal for Roland to go with him to Mattenheim. Roland was advised by them all to go. Declaring that he needed no inducement, he readily assented, and drove away with Weidmann, Prince Valerian, and Knopf. He was protected and sheltered by such a number of good men.

Mattenheim was situated on the other bank of the Rhine; and, while the carriage was being ferried across, Roland stood at the stern of the boat, and gazed in silence for a long time at the parental home. Tears came into his eyes; but he restrained them.

A tornado swept through the park, eddying around the house; and the fires just kindled in it were extinguished. The many fire-places were of no avail, the whole house was full of smoke; and a whirling gust of wind seemed to tear all the inmates of Villa Eden away from each other. Roland was gone, Pranken was seen there no more, Manna lived with the Professorin in the green cottage, and Eric had ridden away. Only Sonnenkamp and Frau Ceres were there. Fräulein Perini came, and informed Sonnenkamp that his wife desired to speak with him instantly: she was in a state wholly beyond her control.

Sonnenkamp hurried to Frau Ceres' apartment; but she was not there. The maid said that as soon as Fräulein Perini had left the room, she had hurried through the house into the park. They went after her immediately, calling her by name. They found her, at last, sitting on the river bank, in the midst of the storm, splendidly dressed, with a coronet on her head, thick rows of pearls on her bare neck, heavy bracelets on her arms, and a girdle of glittering emeralds around her waist. She looked at Sonnenkamp with a strange smile, and then said,--

"You have given me rich and beautiful ornaments."

She seemed to grow taller: she threw back her black hair.

"Look, here is the dagger! I wanted to kill myself with it; but I hurl it away from me."

The hilt of precious stones and pearls sparkled through the air, plunged into the water, and sank.

"What are you doing? What does this mean?"

"Come back with me!" she cried, "or, look, I will throw myself into the river, and take with me these ornaments, the half of your riches."

"You are a deluded child," said Sonnenkamp contemptuously. "You think, do you, that these are genuine stones? I have never given into your keeping, you simple child, any but imitation jewels: the genuine ones, in a like setting and case, I have fast enough in my own possession, in the burglar-proof safe."

"So! You are shrewd," replied Frau Ceres.

"And you, my wild child, you are not crazy."

"No, I am not, if I'm not made so. I shall remain with you, and never leave you for a single instant. Oh! I know you--Oh! I know you, you will forsake me."

Sonnenkamp shuddered.

What does this mean? How does it come to pass that this simple-minded creature has called out his slumbering thoughts, and brought them up from the depths of his soul? He addressed the kindest words to Frau Ceres, and, bringing her back to the house, kissed her. She became quieter; but the determination was fixed in him to become free. There was only one thing to be won, and then away into the wide, wide world! But first of all, he must go to the capital, and shoot down Professor Crutius. He struggled and wrestled with the thought, and at last he was obliged to give it up. But the other thing must be. In confirmation of this hidden impression of his soul, there came a messenger from Eric, with the tidings that he could not leave Wolfsgarten, for Count Clodwig was at the point of death.

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XII. A TRYING INTERVIEW

Eric rode to Wolfsgarten. He met on the way the Major and Fräulein Milch, who were walking close together under one large umbrella.

Eric told them that Clodwig was dangerously sick, and the Major said,--

"Don't let him have any other nurse. Fräulein Milch will come and take care of him. Herr Captain, one ought to be sick for once, so as to have Fräulein Milch nurse him."

Fräulein Milch declared herself ready to come to Clodwig, if she were called upon.

Eric rode on, and now sought to put in a right point of view all that he had experienced, so that he might gain the strength necessary to bear up under coming events. How much had happened to him and to others since he rode out from Wolfsgarten to Villa Eden? Every thing passed through his soul, and he breathed deep in silent satisfaction as he thought what would have been his condition now, if he had not exerted all his strength to bring himself into right relations with Bella. How different would it be, were he riding now with a soul torn by conflicting feelings, unable to help wishing for Clodwig's death in order that he might get possession of Bella, and obliged to stand like the most abject hypocrite by the bedside of the dying one. No poet yet has ventured to depict the mental state of two people who expect to base their happiness on the news of another's death; and these, no criminals but cultivated, and intelligent.

Eric looked upon himself as one rescued from destruction. Never was a man possessed by more pious emotions than Eric was now, as, stopping, he said to himself,--

"I thank thee, thou Eternal and Ineffable Spirit; for it is not I who have, through my education and inherited tendencies, become what I am. I am now pure; I will not be unworthy of it, but keep myself pure and innocent."

Wanting to get rid, finally, of his thoughts and speculations, he spoke to the messenger, an old confidential servant of the Wolfsgarten family. The messenger related how Clodwig had come home from Villa Eden in company with the Banker, and how they had thought he would have died at that time.

The servant turned round, and, pointing with his whip to Villa Eden, said, "There's no queerer state of things anywhere than in this world." In the midst of his deep distress, Eric could not help laughing aloud at this odd remark.

"Is any one of the relatives at Wolfsgarten?"

"No: the Jew is the only one there. But he is a friend of our master."

Eric regretted that he had entered into conversation with the servant, for he could not restrain him from talking about what he thought would be done, if the gracious master should die.

At the last hill, Eric dismounted, and walked over the wooded height. It was all still. The hornbeam tree, which first leaves out, was now the first to let fall its yellow leaves: there was a rustling and a low crackling in the wood, and only the hawk screeched above on the height.

Eric came in front of the manor-house, and entered the courtyard. He went to Bella, who looked pale and as if suffering severely. He entered just at the moment that Bella was asking her brother of the news at Villa Eden.

Eric was startled to meet Pranken here. Both had to use the strongest self-control in order to stand up under the interview.

Bella thanked Eric for being the first one to come to her.

"He is now asleep," said she: "he talks constantly of you. Be composed: you will hardly know him; give in to him in every thing, he is very excitable."

Bella's voice was hoarse; and, covering her eyes with a white handkerchief, she asked,--

"Were you present when your father died?"

Eric said that he was.

Bella went to inform Clodwig of Eric's arrival. Pranken and Eric were by themselves. For a long time neither spoke: at last, Pranken began,--

"I never thought that I should speak again to Herr Dournay; but we are now at a sick-bed, and for the sake of the invalid"--

"I thank you."

"I beg you to give me no thanks, and to speak to me just as little as possible,--just enough to excite no remark and nothing more."

He turned round and was about to go.

"Just one word," Eric requested. "We shall soon see an eye closed in death that has always beamed with gentle and noble feeling; let all bitterness toward me disappear, or, for a time, be suspended. Let us not, at such an hour as this, stand in hostility to each other."

"You can talk well: I know that."

"And I want to say what it is well for you to listen to. It troubles me that I appear to you ungrateful; but now, in this mysterious presence which awaits us all, I repeat"--

Bella returned and said,--

"He is still asleep. O Herr Dournay! Clodwig loves you more than he loves any other person in the world."

She gave Eric her hand, and it was cold as ice. The three were speechless for some time, until Eric asked,--

"Is there no hope?"

"No. The Doctor says that he has probably only a few hours to live. Do you hear any thing? The Doctor has promised to come,--to return immediately. Oh, if I could only induce Clodwig to call in another physician! Do urge him to do it: I have no confidence in Doctor Richard."

Eric made no reply.

"Ah, my God!" lamented Bella, "how forsaken we are in our need. You will remain with us, will you not? You will not abandon us?"

Eric promised to remain.

It had a strange sound, a reminiscence out of the past, with its forms of courtesy, as Bella now asked pardon for not having inquired after Eric's mother, Frau Ceres, and Manna; and, with a peculiar jerking out of the words, she asked,--

"How is Herr Sonnenkamp?"

A servant came, and announced that the Herr Count had waked up, and had asked immediately, if Herr Captain Dournay had not yet come.

"Go to him," said Bella, laying her hand upon Eric's shoulder. "Go to him, I beg you; but let it come as if from you, and not from me, that another physician should be called in."

Eric went; and, as soon as he had gone, "Bella said hurriedly to Pranken,--

"Otto, get rid of the Jew as politely as you can. What does he want here?"

Pranken went to the Banker.

Bella was alone, and could not control her feeling of unrest. She had already arranged in thought the announcement of the decease, and had even written the words,--

"To relatives and friends I make the painful announcement, that my beloved husband, Count von Wolfsgarten of Wolfsgarten, formerly ambassador of his royal Highness at Rome, Knight of the first rank, has died after a short illness, at the age of sixty-five. I beg their silent sympathy.

"BELLA COUNTESS VON WOLFSGARTEN (née, Von Pranken)."

A demon continually whispered to her this announcement: she saw it before her eyes with a black border, even while Clodwig was still living. Why is this? What suggests these words, and brings them so clearly before her eyes? She could not get away from them. She took up the sheet of paper, tore it up, and threw the pieces out of the window into the rain.

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XIII. THE LAST BLUE FLOWER

Eric, meanwhile, had entered the sick-chamber.

"Are you here at last?" cried Clodwig. His voice was faint; and the small childlike hand which the sick man extended toward him appeared more delicate than ever.

"Sit down," said he; "don't be so broken down: you are young and strong, and have a good conscience. Let me take your hand. It is a happiness to die in the full possession of my senses: I have often desired to die a sudden death. Better as it is. Tell me, how is your mother? Are you really betrothed to the daughter of that terrible man."

Eric could not yet utter a word: he only nodded without speaking, and Clodwig continued,--

"That is fine, an instance of the grand truth of compensation in the world. Once, you were to become my son--my son! It is better as it is. I am to have no son. But tell me, how is Roland? Did he not want to come with you? I see him, the splendid youth! he is present all the time. You have done well, Eric, entirely well. You will stay with the young man. If we could only know what will become of the father!"

Before Eric could answer, the invalid lay back upon the pillow. He seemed to have fallen asleep. Nothing was heard but the ticking of the clock; and now a carriage drove into the court-yard, the wheels cutting into the gravel.

Clodwig awoke.

"That is the Doctor," he said aloud. He requested the attendant to say to the physician that he would like to be left with Eric alone for a time. The nurse gave the commission to the servant, and remained in the anteroom. Sitting upright, Clodwig said,--

"Shut the door: I want to speak to you in private."

Eric sat by the bedside, and Clodwig began,--

"This Sonnenkamp, so audacious, and yet--hypocrisy, it is everywhere; a jumble of grimaces, of masks who do not know one another. A sentence upon Sonnenkamp? I have let him off entirely. His path is zigzag, his goal horrible. Who shall judge? I say it here to you, my brain received a fatal lesion when the fearful thought entered into it. When I look over my own life, what is it? I have filled out a uniform: we are walking, empty sentry-boxes, painted with the national color. If a discharge comes, we think it something very mysterious; we whisper--all a farce. The life of most persons is hypocrisy, and so is mine, so long, so honorable! We have no courage, we do not confess what we are. We are encumbered with forms, compliances, courtesies, conformities; and all is false inside. We never tell each other what we are as we acknowledge it to ourselves. Don't be afraid. I have no crime, no transgression, now, to acknowledge and to feel remorse for. I have been all my life pure as thousands, as millions, by my side; but I have not been the person that I really am. Do you know that grand word which God spake when he revealed himself in the desert to the holy Shepherd? It is this. This is God. 'I am that I am.' This is the truth, truthfulness, the divine in every man; and men deny it. Who can say I am that I am? I never could, and millions by my side could not. We are all glossed over outside, all and everywhere over-refined--no, not all, but most of us: were all so, the sun would never again rise upon the earth. But the time will come, and you are one of those awaiting its coming, you will share in its life,--the time will come, when men shall dissemble no more, shall lie no more, shall pass themselves off for no more than they are, and shall be what they profess to be. Do you comprehend me?"

"Perfectly, perfectly."

"Know, then, I tell you that I have not done what I ought to have done. I have not gone from hour to hour into the presence of those in power, and said, 'Thus am I, and thus must you be.' I have lulled myself with a false philosophy; I have persuaded myself that all would be spontaneously unfolded of itself; that we are in the direct line of the developing tendencies, and we have nothing to do in furtherance thereof. Ha, ha! unfold of itself! Yes, death comes of itself, death comes, and takes away the life that was no real life, no candid revealment, no genuine self. I once knew a great actor. To an actor, death will always be the hardest, not only because he has so often counterfeited death, but because he knows that he leaves behind him his parts, his masks, his paints, his wilted wreaths, his rounds of applause, and he can never be called out again. My son, we diplomatists, we die the death of the actor. I have led an unprofitable life. I had no fatherland to give me other than diplomatic farces to perform. My life has been a busy inactivity: I have spent the greatest part of my life in the livery and the defence of a cause which I did not respect, scarcely had any regard for. Here is this slave-trader. Fie! the whole world calls out in horror: and yet, in circles held in high estimation, there are far worse than slave-traders. Others, again, are not in the house of correction, because they were under no necessity of stealing, and because they were bought off by money from being positively immoral. There, give me now, I beg, a cooling draught, my mouth is parched."

Eric gave Clodwig a draught; but they were both so awkward, that it was almost all spilled.

"No matter, no matter," said Clodwig, smiling, "that's the way in this world: only the smaller part is really drunk, the larger part gets spilled, wasted. There, now go, and let the Doctor come, but come back again afterwards."

Eric went and called the physician. Bella asked what Clodwig had been talking about. He could only answer in general terms, and begged to be allowed to go into the open air for refreshment.

Eric went into the garden. The November wind was raging, and the rain driving fiercely. Eric wrapped himself in his cloak, and went into the wood: it did him good to walk in the midst of the uproar of the elements. He went through the park and the wood, by the game path which he had followed on the morning after telling the story of his life to his newly-won friend Clodwig. Now he could not stride on in exultant mood, as if borne onward by an external force; now he must battle with the storm which roared over him through the tree-tops. Now, as then, he stood under the covered pavilion; but in the wide landscape he could see nothing but clouds of driving rain. Close to the wall of the building there was still one beautiful blue-bell: unconsciously he broke it off, and, as he returned to the house, it occurred to him to carry the flower to the invalid. He entered the sick-chamber, and Clodwig cried,--

"Ah, the blue flower! You gather it and bring it to me. We have dreamed of them often in my youth. Youth, youth!" repeated the sick man often.

He seized the flower, then leaned far out of bed, and smelled of Eric's clothes, saying,--

"Ah I my son, why do the Bible pictures come up before me now? The patriarch Isaac said to his son as he came to his sickbed, 'The smell of my son is as the smell of a field which the Lord hath blessed.' Yes, Eric, you bring all the free air of the fields into my sick-room. When I am no more, remember that you have done me good."

Eric wept.

"Yes, weep, it is well, it will do you no harm that I make your heart heavy. You will be happy and active on the earth whose clods will soon rest on me. Only, I pray you, stay by me when I die; and when I am dead, and they prepare me for the grave, take something from my heart which must stay there till it has stopped beating. Stay with me, Eric, I will not think of petty, individual interests. I will not leave the world in hatred and anger--no, not in hatred and anger against any man. Help me to attain to the universal, the grand: in those I will live and die."

He lay back on his pillows; and, as Eric leaned over him, his breath came quietly, and on his face was a gentle smile. What thoughts might now be stirring this soul?

Eric wanted to send a messenger to Villa Eden, to say that he must remain where he was. Lootz, who had been sent by Herr Sonnenkamp to inquire for the Count, carried the message back.

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