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Dame Care

by Hermann Sudermann · English · Gutenberg #8487 · 403,331 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Dame Care

Author: Hermann Sudermann

Translator: Bertha Overbeck


        
Release date: July 1, 2005 [eBook #8487]
                Most recently updated: November 19, 2016

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DAME CARE ***




Produced by Ted Garvin, David Widger and the Distributed
Proofreading Team









DAME CARE

By Hermann Sudermann

Translated By Bertha Overbeck


{Illustration: HERMANN SUDERMANN}



CHAPTER I.

Just when Meyerhofer’s estate was to be sold by auction, his third son
Paul was born.

That was a hard time indeed.

Frau Elsbeth, with her haggard face and melancholy smile, lay in her
big four-post bed, with the cradle of the new-born child near her, and
listened to every noise that reached her in her sad sickroom from the
yard and the house.

At each suspicious sound she started up, and each time, when a strange
man’s voice was heard, or a vehicle came driving along with a rolling
sound, she asked, clinging with great anxiety to the bedposts:

“Has it come to the worst? Has it come to the worst?”

Nobody answered her. The doctor had given strict orders to keep every
excitement from her, but little he thought, good man, that this constant
suspense would torment her a thousand times more than the most terrible
certainty.

One morning, the fifth day after her child’s birth, she heard her
husband, whom she had scarcely seen during this trying time, pacing
up and down in the next room, swearing and sighing. She could only
understand one word, only one; that he repeated over and over again: the
word “Homeless.”

Then she knew. It had come to the worst.

She put her feeble hand on the little head of the new-born child, who
with his little serious face was quietly dozing, hid her face in her
pillow and wept.

After a while she said to the servant who attended the little one,

“Tell your master I want to speak to him.”

And he came. With loud steps he approached the bed of the sick woman,
and looked at her with a face that seemed doubly distorted and desperate
in his endeavor to look unconcerned.

“Max,” she said, timidly, for she always feared him--“Max, don’t hide
anything from me; I am prepared for the worst, anyhow.”

“Are you?” he asked, distrustfully, for he remembered the doctor’s
warning.

“When have we to go?”

As he saw that she took their misfortune so calmly, he thought it no
longer necessary to be careful, and broke out, with an oath:

“To-day--to-morrow--just as it pleases the new owner. By his charity
only we are still here, and, if it pleased him, we might have to lodge
in the streets this very night.”

“It won’t be as bad as that, Max,” she said, painfully striving to keep
her composure, “if he hears that, only a few days ago, a little one
arrived--”

“Oh, I suppose I shall have to beg of him--shall I?”

“Oh no; he will do it without that. Who is it?”

“Douglas, he is called. He comes from Insterburg. He seemed to swagger
very much, this gentleman--very much. I should have liked to have driven
him from the premises.”

“Is anything left us?” she asked, softly, looking hesitatingly down on
the new-born child, for his young, tender life might be depending on the
answer.

He broke out into a hard laugh. “Yes; a wretched pittance: full two
thousand thalers.”

She sighed with relief, for she almost felt as if she had already heard
that terrible “Nothing” hissed from his lips.

“What good are two thousand thalers to us?” he continued, “after we
have thrown fifty thousand into the swamp? Perhaps I shall open a
public-house in the town, or trade in buttons and ribbons. Perhaps you
might help me, if you were to do the sewing in some aristocratic houses;
and the children might sell matches in the streets. Ha, ha, ha!”

He thrust his hand through his gray and bushyhair, and inadvertently
kicked the cradle with his foot, so that it swayed to and fro violently.

“Why has this brat been born?” he murmured, gloomily. He knelt down near
the cradle and buried the tiny little fists in his big red hands, and
talked to his child: “If you had known, my boy, how bad and vile this
world is, how impudence triumphs, and honesty goes to ruin in it, you
would really have stayed where you were. What fate will yours be? Your
father is a sort of vagabond, a ruined man, who has to roam about the
streets with his wife and his three children till he has found a place
where he can completely ruin himself and his family.”

“Max, do not speak thus; you break my heart!” called out Frau Elsbeth,
crying, and stretching out her hand to lay it round her husband’s
neck; but her hand sank down without strength ere it had reached its
destination.

He sprang up. “You are right; enough of these lamentations. Yes; if I
were alone now--a bachelor, as in former days--I should go to America,
or the Russian Steppes--there one can get rich; or I should speculate on
the Exchange--to-day up, to-morrow down. Oh, there one could earn money;
but so tied as one is!” He threw a lamentable glance at his wife and
child; then he pointed with his hand towards the yard, from whence
resounded the laughing voices of the two elder children.

“Yes; I know we must be a burden to you now,” said the woman, meekly.

“Don’t talk to me of burdens,” he answered, gruffly; “what I said was
not meant angrily. I love you, and that’s enough. Now the question only
is, Where to go? If at least this baby had not come, the chance of an
uncertain existence might be borne for some time. But now, you ill, the
child requiring careful nursing, the end of it is there is nothing
for it but to buy a farm, and to give the two thousand thalers for a
premium. Hurrah! that will be a nice sort of life: I with the
beggar’s wallet, you with the knapsack; I with the spade, you with the
milk-pail.”

“That would not be the worst, after all,” said the woman, softly.

“No?” he laughed, bitterly. “Well, that I can get for you. There is
Mussainen, for instance, which is to be sold--the wretched moorland on
the heath yonder.”

“Oh, why that of all places?” she asked, shuddering.

He immediately fell in love with the idea.

“Yes; that would be emptying the cup to the dregs. The lost magnificence
always in view--for, you must know, the manor-house of Helenenthal
exactly overlooks it. It is surrounded by moor and fen--wellnigh two
hundred acres. Perhaps one could cultivate some of it--one might be the
pioneer of progress. What could people say?

“‘Meyerhofer is a brave fellow,’ they would say; ‘he is not ashamed of
his misfortune; he looks at it with a certain irony.’ Pah, really one
_should_ look at it with irony; that is the only sublime view of the
world--one should whistle at it!” and he uttered a shrill whistle, so
that the sick woman started up in her bed.

“Forgive me, my darling,” he pleaded, caressing her hand suddenly in
the rosiest of humors; “but am I not right? One should whistle at it. As
long as one has the consciousness of being an honest man, one can bear
all adversity with a certain relish. Relish is the right word. The
ground is to be sold any day, for the owner has lately gained a rich
estate by marriage, and leaves this rubbish entirely uncultivated.”

“Think well over it first, Max,” the woman pleaded, in great anxiety.

“What is the good of hesitating?” he replied, violently. “We must not be
a burden to this Mr. Douglas, and we cannot lay claim to anything better
with our miserable two thousand thalers; therefore, let us seize upon it
promptly.” And without taking time to say good-bye to the sick woman, he
strode away.

A few minutes later she heard his dog-cart driving away through the
gate.

In the afternoon of the same day a strange visitor was announced. A
beautiful, distinguished lady was said to have driven into the yard in
a smart carriage, who wished to pay a visit to the mistress in her
sick-room.

“Who was it?” She had refused to give her name.

“How strange!” thought Frau Elsbeth; but as in her grief she was
beginning to believe in special providences, she did not say no.

The door opened. A slender, delicate figure, with gentle, refined
features, approached the bed of the sick woman with gliding steps.
Without speaking a word she seized her hand and said, in a soft,
slightly veiled voice:

“I have concealed my name, dear Mrs. Meyerhofer, for I feared you would
refuse to see me if I had given it beforehand. And I should like best
even now to remain unknown. Unfortunately, I fear that you will not look
at me with kindness any longer when you know who I am.”

“I hate no one in the world,” replied Frau Elsbeth, “least of all a
name.”

“I am called Helene Douglas,” said the lady, gently, and she pressed the
invalid’s hand closer.

Frau Elsbeth began at once to cry, while the visitor, as if she had been
an old friend, put her arm round her neck, kissed her on the brow, and
said, with a soft, comforting voice:

“Do not be angry with me. Fate has ordained that I should drive you from
this house; but it is no fault of mine. My husband wanted to give me
a pleasant surprise, for the name of this estate is identical with
my Christian-name. My joy vanished directly when I heard under what
circumstances he had acquired it, and how you, especially, dear Mrs.
Meyerhofer, must have suffered in this doubly trying time. Then I felt
compelled to unburden my heart by asking your pardon personally for the
sorrow which I have caused you, and shall still have to cause you, for
your time of suffering is not over yet.”

Frau Elsbeth had bent her head on the stranger’s shoulder, as if that
was the most natural thing in the world, and went on softly crying to
herself.

“And perhaps I can also be of use to you,” she continued; “at least,
so far as I can take part of the bitterness from your soul. We women
understand each other better than those hard, passionate men. The common
sufferings that weigh on all of us bring us nearer to each other. And,
above all, one thing: I have spoken to my husband, and beg you, in my
name and his, to look on this house as your property for as long as
ever it pleases you. We generally pass the winter in town, and we have
another estate besides which we intend to let an inspector manage.
You see, therefore, that you do not in any way disturb us, but, on the
contrary, do us a favor if you will stay on here as before for another
half year or longer.”

Frau Elsbeth did not thank her, but the tearful glance she gave the
stranger was thanks enough.

“Now be cheerful again, dearest Mrs. Meyerhofer,” she continued, “and
if in future you need advice or help, always remember that there is
some one who has to make amends to you for much--And what a splendid
baby!”--she turned towards the cradle--“a boy or a little girl?”

“A boy,” said Frau Elsbeth, with a feeble smile.

“Has he found any brothers or sisters already? But why do I ask? The two
little stalwart fellows outside, who received my carriage--may I hope
to know them better? No, not here,” she interposed, quickly; “it might
excite you still more. Later on, later on. This little citizen of the
world interests us most for the moment.”

She bent over the cradle and arranged the baby-clothes.

“He has quite a knowing little face,” she said, jestingly.

“Care stood at his cradle,” answered Frau Elsbeth, gently and sadly;
“that’s why he has that old face.”

“Oh, you must not be superstitious, dear friend,” answered the visitor.
“I have been told that newborn babes often have something old in their
features; they soon lose that.”

“Surely you, too, have children?” asked Frau Elsbeth.

“Oh, I am still such a young wife,” answered her visitor, blushing.
“Scarcely six months married. But--” and she blushed still more.

“God be with you in your time of trouble,” said Frau Elsbeth; “I will
pray for you.”

The stranger’s eyes grew moist. “Thanks, a thousand thanks,” she said.
“And let us be friends, I entreat you, with all my heart. Shall I
propose something? Take me as godmother for your youngest child, and do
me the same favor when Heaven blesses me.”

The two women pressed each other’s hands silently. The bond of
friendship was sealed.

When the visitor had left her, Frau Elsbeth looked round with a shy,
sad look. “Just now everything here was bright and sunny,” she murmured,
“and now it has become so dark again.”

After a short time, in spite of the nurse’s opposition, the two eldest
boys rushed into the sickroom with joyful clamor. Each had a bag with
sweets in his hand.

“The strange lady has given us this,” they shouted.

Frau Elsbeth smiled. “Hush, children,” she said, “an angel has been with
us.”

The two little boys opened anxious eyes, and asked,

“Mamma, an angel?”




CHAPTER II.

So Mrs. Douglas became Paul’s godmother.

Meyerhofer, indeed, was not a little indignant at the new friendship,
for “I don’t want the pity of happy people,” he often used to say; but
when the mild, gentle woman appeared in the manor-house for the second
time, and tried to persuade him, he did not dare to say “No” any longer.

He also gave his consent to their prolonged stay in the old home, though
he did it with repugnance. The farm Mussainen, which in fact he had
bought that same day, was in so desolate a condition that it seemed
dangerous for wife and children to stay there in the cold autumn days.
Above all, the most needful repairs had to be made. Carpenter, mason,
and builder had to be fetched ere it was possible to think of moving.

Nevertheless, Frau Elsbeth, through her husband’s obstinacy, was
forced to move into the new dwelling long before the arrangements were
finished. One day when an inspector from the new master appeared with
a number of workmen and asked for shelter in his name, he declared this
proceeding to be an intentional insult, and was firmly resolved not to
stay a day longer on the ground which once had been his property.

It was a cold, dull November day when Frau Elsbeth and her children had
to say farewell to the dear house. A fine, drizzling rain came from the
sky, making everything damp.

The heath, shrouded in gray mist, lay desolate and comfortless before
their eyes.

The youngest at her breast, the two other children crying near her, she
stepped into the vehicle which was to lead her towards her new fate,
which, alas! seemed so dark.

When they drove out of the gate, the cold winds from the heath whipped
their faces with icy scourges. Then the little one, who for so long had
been lying peaceful and quiet, began to cry bitterly. She wrapped him
closer in her cloak and bent down low over the shivering little form,
in order to hide the tears, which were streaming down her cheeks
incessantly.

After half an hour’s drive over the heavy rain-soaked clay roads, they
reached their destination. She could have shrieked aloud when she saw
the new house before her in all its desolation and ruin.

Wretched mud farm-buildings; a swampy yard; a low dwelling-house with
a shingle roof, from the walls of which the chalk had crumbled down and
showed the bare wall underneath; a wilderness of a garden, in which
the last sad remains of the summer asters and sunflowers stood among
half-decayed vegetables, round about a gaudy painted fence, which seemed
to have received extreme unction just before its end--this was the place
where the family of the ruined squire had to live henceforth.

This was the place where little Paul grew up, and to which the love of
his childhood, the care of half his life was devoted.

He was in his early years a delicate, sickly creature, and many a
night his mother trembled lest the feeble light of his life should be
extinguished before dawn. At such times she would sit in the dark, low
bedroom, leaning her elbow on the edge of his little bed, gazing with
feverish eyes at his little thin body, which was painfully convulsed by
spasms.

But he passed all the crises of his early childhood, and at five years
old, though pale and weak of limb and almost careworn in face--for he
had really retained the old look--he was a healthy boy, who gave promise
of long life.

At this time his first recollections begin. The earliest, which in
after-years he often recalled, was as follows:

The room is half dark. Icicles are clinging to the windows, and through
the curtains shines the red glow of the sunset. The elder brothers
have gone skating, but he is in his little bed--for he has to go to bed
early--and near him sits his mother, one hand encircling his neck, and
the other on the edge of the cradle, in which the two little sisters
sleep, which Master Stork brought a year ago, both on the same day.

“Mamma, tell me a fairy tale,” he pleads.

And his mother told him one. What? He could only remember very faintly,
but there was something in it about a gray woman who had visited his
mother in all her sad hours, a woman with a pale and haggard face, and
dark, tear-stained eyes. She had come like a shadow, like a shadow she
had gone, had extended her hands over his mother’s head, she knew not
whether for a blessing or for a curse, and had spoken words which
had reference to him--little Paul. In them there was the question of
sacrifice and of redemption; the words he had forgotten again--probably
he was too stupid to understand them. But one thing still remained
clearly enough: while he listened to his mother’s words, breathless
with terror and expectation, he suddenly saw the gray figure of whom
she spoke, bodily standing at the door--exactly the same, with her arms
uplifted, and her pale, sad face. He hid his head on his mother’s arm;
his heart beat, his breath began to fail him, and, in deadly terror, he
screamed out,

“Mamma, there she is, there she is!”

“Who? Dame Care?” asked his mother.

He did not answer, but began to cry.

“Where, then?” continued his mother.

“There, at the door,” he replied, raising himself and clutching her
round the neck, for he was dreadfully frightened.

“Oh, you silly little one,” said his mother; “that is papa’s long
travelling-cloak.” And she fetched it, and made him feel the lining and
the stuff, so that he should be thoroughly convinced; and he gave in.
But inwardly he was all the more firmly persuaded that he had seen the
gray woman face to face. And now he also knew what she was called.

“Dame Care,” she was called.

But his mother had grown thoughtful, and was not to be moved to tell
the end of the fairy tale. Neither would she in later times, however
urgently he might plead.

He had only a vague remembrance of his father in those days: a man with
high Wellington boots, who scolded his mother and whipped his brothers,
while he overlooked him altogether. Only at rare times he got a look
askance, which did not seem to bode any good. Sometimes, especially when
his father had been in the town, his face was dark red in color, like
an overheated kettle, and his steps swayed from side to side when he
crossed the room. Then the same thing was always enacted over again.

First he fondled the twins, whom he seemed to be particularly fond of,
and rocked them in his arms, while his mother stood close beside him,
following each of his movements with anxious looks. Then he sat down to
eat, turned over what was in the dishes, pushed them aside, calling them
poor and unsavory food, only fit for beasts. Occasionally he would hit
Max or Gottfried with the rod, was angry with their mother, and finally
went out to pick a quarrel with the servants. His bullying voice
resounded in the yard, so that even Caro, chained up, hid his tail
between his legs, and retired to the farthest corner of the kennel. If
after a while he returned to the room, his humor had generally changed
from anger to despair. He wrung his hands, lamented the misery in which
he had to live there, talked to himself of all sorts of great things
which he would have undertaken if one thing or another had not prevented
him, and if heaven and earth had not conspired together to ruin him.
Then he would often go to the window, and shake his fist at the White
House yonder, which looked so attractive in the distance.

“Ah, the White House!”

His father abused it and knitted his brow if he only glanced in that
direction; and he himself--he loved it, as if part of his soul lingered
there. Why? He did not know. Perhaps only because his mother loved it.
She, too, stood often at the window, gazing at it; but she did not knit
her brow, not she; her face grew soft and melancholy, and from her eyes
there shone a longing so ardent that he, standing near her, often felt a
sensation of awe steal over him.

Was not his little heart filled with the same longing? Did not that
home, ever since he could think at all, appear to him as the embodiment
of everything beautiful and magnificent? Did it not always stand before
him when he shut his eyes and even creep into his dreams?

“Have you ever been in the White House?” he asked his mother one day,
when he could restrain his curiosity no longer.

“Oh yes, my son,” she answered, and her voice sounded sad and unsteady.

“Often, mamma?”

“Very often, my boy. Your parents once lived there, and you were born
there.”

Ever since then the “White House” was to him what “Paradise Lost” is to
mankind.

“Who lives in the White House now?” he asked another time.

“A beautiful kind woman, who loves everybody, and you especially,
because you are her godchild.”

He felt as if an endless fountain of happiness streamed upon his head.
He was so excited that he trembled.

“Why do you not drive, then, to the beautiful kind woman?” he asked,
after a while.

“Papa won’t let us,” she answered, and her voice had a strangely sharp
tone which struck him.

He did not ask any more, for his father’s wish was regarded as a law of
which nobody had a right to ask the reason, but from that day the secret
of the White House formed a new tie between mother and son. They could
not speak about it openly.

His father was furious if one only hinted at its existence, and his
brothers also did not like to talk about it with him, the younger one;
very likely they feared that he would repeat it in his foolishness. But
his mother--his mother trusted him.

When they were alone together--and they were nearly always alone during
school-time--she would open her mouth and her heart, too, and the White
House arose higher and brighter before his eyes from her description
of it. Soon he knew each room, each arbor in the garden, the pond,
surrounded by green bushes and shrubs, before it the shining glass
balls, and the sundial on the terrace: only fancy, a clock on which the
sun itself had to mark the hours.

What a marvel!

He could have walked about in Helenenthal with his eyes closed, and not
have lost his way.

And when he played with his bricks, he built a White House for himself
with terraces and sundials--two dozen at a time. He dug ponds in the
sand and fastened pebbles on little posts to represent the glass balls.
But, of course, they did not reflect anything.




CHAPTER III.

At this time he made the plan to pay a visit to the White House quite on
his own account. He put it off till spring, but when spring came he did
not find the necessary courage; he put it off till summer, but even then
all sorts of hindrance came between plan and execution. Once he had seen
a big dog roving alone in the meadow--who could know whether it might
not be a mad one? and at another time a bull had made straight for him
with his horns lowered.

“Yes; when I am big like my brothers,” he consoled himself by thinking,
“and when I go to school, then I’ll take a stick and kill the mad dog,
and the bull I’ll seize by the horns so that he cannot harm me any
more.” He put it off until next year, for then he was to begin going to
school, just like his big brothers.

These brothers were the objects of his veneration. To be like them
seemed to him the brightest aim of all earthly wishes--to ride on
horses, on big real ones, to skate, to swim quite without the help of
either floats or bladders, and to wear shirt-fronts, white starched
ones, which were fastened with ribbons round the waist--oh, if he could
do all that! But for that one must first grow big, he comforted himself
by thinking. He kept these thoughts quite to himself; he did not like to
tell his mother, and, as to his brothers, they occupied themselves with
him very little.

He was a little manikin in their eyes, and when their mother told them
to take him with them anywhere they were angry, because then they had to
take care of him, and on account of his silliness could not play so many
tricks. Paul felt that very well, and in order to escape their angry
faces and still more angry blows, he generally said he wanted to stay at
home, however sore his heart might feel. Then he seated himself on the
pump-handle, and, rocking himself to and fro, dreamed of the time when
he could do as his brothers did.

In learning, too, and that was no small matter; for both of them, Max as
well as Gottfried, were always the highest in their school, and always
brought home for the holidays excellent testimonials of good conduct;
how excellent they were was quite evident, for their father always gave
them a silver groschen and their mother a honey-cake in consequence.

On such joyful days he used to hear his father say:

“Yes; if only the two eldest could go to a good school, something might
be made of them, for they have clear heads; but beggars as we are, I
suppose we shall have to bring them up like beggars.”

Paul reflected a good deal about this, for he already knew that Max
was born to be a Field-marshal, and Gottfried to be Chief Master of the
Ordnance.

The fact was that once a Rapine picture-book, with pictures of the
Austrian army, had found its way into the Howdahs, and on that day the
brothers had agreed to divide the two highest dignities in the
army between themselves, while to him, the younger, the place of a
non-commissioned officer was assigned. Since then, indeed, there had
been periods when one of them had inclined to the vocation of a trapper,
and the other to that of an Indian chief, but Paul’s thoughts clung
to those gold-braided uniforms, with which the wooden spears, and the
patched rag sandals, which the brothers wore in their games--the latter
they called moccasins--could by no means bear comparison; also, why
they afterwards wanted to be naturalist and superintendent was
incomprehensible to him; the new Rapine pictures always remained the
best.

At this time the twins began to walk; Katie, the elder one--she was born
three-quarters of an hour before her sister--made the beginning, and
Greta followed her three days after.

That was an important event in Paul’s life.

He suddenly found himself in a round of duties from which he could not
easily get free. Nobody had ordered him to watch his little sisters’
first steps, but just as it had always been natural to him to clean his
boots in the evening, and his brothers’ into the bargain, to fold his
little frock in a square, and to put it at the head of his bed, with
his stockings across it, never to make a spot on the tablecloth, and
to receive the punishment from his father when the self-same accidents
happened to his brothers--so it became just as natural that he should
henceforth look after his little sisters, and, with premature care,
watch over their most rash attempts to stand and walk.

He appeared to himself so full of importance in this office that even
the longing to go to school became less, and if by a lucky chance he had
only been able to whistle, there would have been no wish left him.

Ah! to be able to whistle, like Jones, the farm-servant, or like his
elder brothers; that was now the goal of all his wishes, the object of
incessant practice. But however much he might point his lips, however
much he might moisten them to make them flexible, no sound came forth.
If he drew in the air, then accidentally he would do it. Once he had
even succeeded in producing the first notes of “IST in J.D. im Washer
gefallen” (A Jew Tumbled into the Water); but each professional whistler
knows that the air must be blown from the mouth, and this was just what
he could not learn.

Here also the thought comforted him: “When I am big.”

Christmas this year brought glad tidings. There arrived a big box from
his “good aunt” out of the town, a sister of his mother’s, with all
sorts of beautiful and useful things: books, linen for his brothers’
shirts, little frocks for his sisters, and for himself a velvet coat--a
real velvet coat, with military braidings and big shining buttons. That
was a delight. But the most beautiful Christmas-box was contained in the
letter, which his mother read aloud with tears of emotion. The good
aunt wrote that she had seen from Elsbeth’s last letters that it was her
husband’s dearest wish to be able to give a better education to his two
eldest boys, and that in consequence she had decided to receive them
in her own house, and to let them go to college at her expense. His
brothers shouted with joy, his mother cried, his father walked up and
down the room, passed his hand through his hair, and muttered excited
words.

He meanwhile sat quietly at his sisters’ little bed, rejoicing inwardly.

Then his mother came to him, buried her face in his hair, and said,

“Will _you_ ever have such luck, my boy?”

“Oh, he,” said his father--“he never understands anything!”

“He is so young still!” answered his mother, stroking his cheeks; and
then she dressed him in his beautiful velvet coat, and he was allowed to
wear it till night because it was a holiday. And his brothers came and
fondled him, partly because their hearts were so full of joy, partly on
account of the beautiful velvet coat.

They had never been so good to him before.

Ah, that was a Christmas!

And as spring drew near a great deal of sewing and embroidering for the
outfit began. Paul was allowed to help with the cutting-out: to hold the
yard-measure and to hand the scissors; and the twins lay on the ground,
rummaging among the white linen. The brothers were fitted out like two
princes. Nothing was forgotten. They even received neckties, which his
mother had manufactured from an old silk bodice.

The brothers meanwhile were immensely proud. They already played at
being gentlemen in every possible way. Max rolled cigarettes by putting
the tobacco from his father’s canister into little paper bags, which
he lighted at the thick end, and Gottfried put on a pair of spectacles,
which he had purchased at school for six trouser buttons.

“Does this suit me?” he asked, strutting up and down before Paul, and as
the latter said “Yes,” he was caressed; had he said “No,” he would have
had a box on the ear.

Soon after Easter the two brothers went away. There was much weeping
in the house, but when the dog-cart had rolled out of the yard gate
his mother pressed her tear-stained face against Paul’s cheeks and
whispered,

“You have long been neglected, my poor child; now we two are together
again as before.”

“Mamma, tiss me, too!” screamed little Kate, stretching out her tiny
arms, and her sister did the same.

“Yes; of course you are there as well!” their mother cried, and bright
sunshine lighted up her pale face.

And then she took one on each arm and approached the window with them,
and gazed a long time at the White House.

Paul hid his head in the folds of her dress and did the same.

His mother looked down upon him, and as she met the prematurely wise
look in the child’s eyes she blushed a little and smiled, but neither
spoke a word.

When his father came back from the town he wanted Paul to begin going to
school.

His mother grew very sad, and begged that he might be left at home for
one half-year longer, so that she should not miss the two eldest ones
too much. She would teach him herself, and surely get him on more than
the school-master would do. But his father would not listen to anything
of the sort, and called her “a weeping fool.”

Paul was terrified. The longing for school that he had formerly felt had
now quite disappeared; but then of course the brothers, whom he wished
to emulate, were no longer there.

The following day his father took his hand and led him into the village,
the first houses of which were a few hundred yards from Meyerhofer’s
farm--at all events, a tolerable distance for such a little fellow.

But Paul kept up bravely. He had such fear of a thrashing from his
father that he would have marched to the end of the world.

The school was a low, thatched building, not very different from a
peasant’s hut; but near it there stood all sorts of long poles, ladders,
and scaffoldings.

“That’s where lazy children are hanged,” explained his father.

Paul’s anxiety rose still higher; but when the teacher, a kind old man
with a white stubby beard and greasy waistcoat, took him on his knee and
showed him a beautiful, many-colored picture-book, he felt calmer; only
the many strange faces that stared at him from the benches seemed to
forebode no good to him.

He had to take the lowest place, and during two hours made pothooks on a
slate.

During the time for recreation the big boys came up to him and asked
about his luncheon, and when they saw that it was a sausage sandwich
they took it away from him. He quietly yielded, for he thought it must
needs be so. On the way home they beat him, and one stuffed some nettles
inside his collar. He thought that, too, was only to be expected because
he was the smallest; but when he had left the village behind him and was
walking alone across the sunny heath, he began to cry. He threw himself
down underneath a juniper-tree and gazed up at the blue sky, where the
swallows flitted to and fro.

“Oh, if only one could fly like that, too,” he thought. Then the White
House came into his mind; he raised himself up, and strained his eyes to
look for it; it shone from afar (like the enchanted castles of which his
mother spoke in her fairy tales); the windows sparkled like carbuncles,
and the green bushes surrounded it like a hedge of thorns of a hundred
years’ growth.

A feeling of pride and self-importance mixed with his grief. “You are
big now,” he said to himself, “for you go to school. And if you were to
undertake your pilgrimage now, nobody could say anything against it.”

And then fear overcame him again. The wicked bull and the mad dogs--one
never knew. He resolved to consider the matter till next Sunday.

But henceforth the White House left him no peace. Each time when he went
across the heath he asked himself what could really be in that road more
than on the road to school. The high-road, indeed, ran across a dark
fir-wood, and in such woods all sorts of goblins and witches live; even
wolves are no rare occurrence, as the Story of Little Red Ridinghood
clearly shows; but if he were to go over the fields he could always keep
his home in view and be sure of the way back.

It seemed to him he was in honor bound to undertake this journey,
because he was “big” now, and when his fears arose anew he called
himself a coward. This word in school was considered a great insult.

When Sunday came he resolved to risk the expedition. He crept along the
fence, and ran as quickly as he could across his father’s meadows, in
the direction of the White House.

Then came a stile which could be easily climbed over, and then a piece
of unknown heath-land, on which he had never yet been. But there was
nothing dangerous here, either. The heath glittered in the sun, the
withered hawkweed crackled at his feet, a warm wind blew softly towards
him. He tried to whistle, but still he had to draw in the air to produce
any sound. At that he was ashamed, and a feeling of despondency seized
him. Then came a swampy moor that again belonged to his father. Of this
the latter often spoke; he meditated the idea of cutting peat there,
but he only wanted to begin on a large scale, and for that he lacked the
necessary capital. Paul sank up to his ankles in the marsh, and now for
the first time the thought occurred to him that he might, perhaps, dirty
his new boots. He was terrified, for he remembered his mother saying:
“Be very careful of them, my boy; I have saved them from my milk money.”

He was also wearing his beautiful velvet coat, because it was Sunday.
He looked down at the shining silk braid, and for a moment hesitated
whether he had not better return, not for the sake of the velvet coat,
but only in order not to grieve his mother.

“But perhaps I shall get through unhurt,” he consoled himself by
thinking, and began to run on. The ground gave under his feet, and at
every step a squashy sound was heard, as if the handle were being drawn
out of a churn.

Then came a black morass, at the edge of which stood white-haired
cotton-grass, and on which swam a layer of dissolved iron, shining like
verdigris.

He carefully avoided it, though he got into the morass after all,
but finally struggled back to dry land. The boots were ruined, but he
thought perhaps he could wash them secretly at the pump.

He marched on. He was no longer in the mood to whistle, and the clearer
the White House rose from the bushes, the more embarrassed he felt. He
could already distinguish a kind of rampart, which was surrounded by
trees, and through a breach in the foliage he saw a long, low building,
which from a distance he had never noticed; behind that another one, and
in a black hollow a high flame which quivered up and down. “That must be
a forge; but did they work even on Sundays?”

An incomprehensible desire to cry seized him, and while he blindly ran
on tears gushed from his eyes.

Suddenly he saw a wide ditch before him filled to the edge with water.
He knew very well he could not get across, but obstinacy compelled him
to prepare for a spring, and the next moment the thick and dirty water
closed over him.

He reached land wet to the skin, covered with a layer of morass and
weeds.

He tried to let his clothes dry, sat down on the grass, and looked over
at the White House. He had grown quite despondent, and as he began to
shiver very much, he turned sadly and slowly homeward.




CHAPTER IV.

The summer which followed brought nothing but grief and care to
Meyerhofer’s house. The former owner wished to have the mortgage paid
off, and there was no prospect of any one lending the necessary sum.

Meyerhofer drove to the town three or four times weekly, and returned
home late at night dead drunk. Sometimes he stayed away for the whole
night.

Frau Elsbeth meanwhile sat upright in her bed and stared into the
darkness. Paul often woke when he heard her low sobs; then for a while
he would lie as quiet as a mouse, because he did not want her to know
that he was awake, but at last he would begin to cry, too.

Then his mother became quiet; and if he could not stop crying she got
up, kissed him, and stroked his cheek; or she said,

“Come to me, my boy.”

Then he sprang up, slipped into her bed, and went to sleep on her
shoulder again.

His father often beat him--he seldom knew why; but he took the blows for
granted.

One day he heard his father scolding his mother.

“Do not cry, you blubbering fool,” he said; “you are only here to make
my misery worse.”

“But, Max,” she answered, softly, “will you prevent your family from
bearing your misfortune with you? Must we not keep closer together when
we are so unhappy?”

Then he was moved, said she was his brave wife, and called himself bad
names.

Frau Elsbeth tried to pacify him, bade him confide in her, and be brave.

“Yes, be brave--be brave!” he cried, getting angry again. “It is all
very fine for you women to speak so; you sit at home, and spread your
apron out, waiting humbly for fortune or misfortune to fall into your
laps, just as kind Fate may send it. But we men must go forth into
hostile life; we must struggle and strive and fight with all sorts of
rogues. Away with your warnings! Be brave; yes, indeed, be brave!”

Then he walked out of the room with heavy steps, and ordered the trap to
be got ready, in order to set off on his usual pilgrimage.

When he came back, and had slept off his intoxication, he said:

“There, now my last hope is gone. The d--d Jew, who wanted to advance
the money at twenty-five per cent., declares he will have nothing more
to do with me. Well, let him do the other thing. I don’t care a straw
for him. And at Michaelmas we may really go a-begging, for this time
nothing remains to us but what we stand up in. But this I tell you: this
time I shall not survive the blow. An honorable man must set some
value on himself, and if one fine morning you see me swinging from the
rafters, don’t be astonished.”

The mother uttered a piercing cry, and clung with both arms round his
neck.

“Well, well, well!” he calmed her; “it was not meant so seriously. You
women-folk are all the same deplorable creatures, a mere word upsets
you.”

The mother started and stepped back from him, but when he had gone out
she seated herself at the window, and looked after him anxiously, as
if she feared he might already be thinking of doing himself a mischief.
From time to time a shudder ran through her frame, as if she were cold.

In the following night, Paul, waking, observed that she got up, put on
a petticoat, and went to the window from which the White House could
be seen. It was bright moonlight--perhaps she really gazed at it. For
wellnigh two hours she sat there, looking out fixedly. Paul did not
stir, and when, with the approach of dawn, she came back from the window
and stepped to her children’s bedsides, he closed his eyes firmly and
feigned to sleep. She first kissed the twins, who were sleeping with
their arms entwined; then she came to him, and as she bent down over
him he heard her whisper, “God give me strength. It must be.” Then he
guessed that something extraordinary was in preparation.

When, the following afternoon, he came home from school, he saw his
mother sitting in the arbor in her hat and cloak and Sunday clothes; her
cheeks were paler than usual; her hands, which lay in her lap, trembled.

She seemed to have been waiting for him, for when she saw him she
breathed more freely.

“Are you going out, mamma?” he asked, wonderingly.

“Yes, my boy,” she answered, “and you shall go with me.”

“To the village, mamma?”

“No, my boy”--her voice quivered--“not to the village. You must put on
your Sunday clothes; the velvet coat, of course, is spoiled, but I have
taken the stains out of your gray jacket--it will still do; and you must
polish your boots quickly.”

“Where are we going, then, mamma?”

Then she laid her arms round him, and said, softly,

“To the White House.”

He felt a sudden fever of excitement. The exultant joy which welled
up from his heart nearly choked him; he jumped on his mother’s lap and
kissed her impetuously.

“But you must tell nobody,” she whispered--“nobody; do you understand?”

He nodded, full of importance. He was such a clever fellow. He knew what
it was all about.

“And now dress yourself quickly.”

Paul flew up-stairs to the room where his clothes were kept, and
suddenly--he never clearly knew on which step it was--a long-drawn
shrill sound escaped his mouth; there was no doubt any more--he could
whistle! he tried for the second, the third time--it went splendidly.

When he came back to his mother in all his finery he shouted,
jubilantly, “Mamma, I can whistle!” and was astonished that she showed
so little interest in his art. She only pulled his collar straight and
said, “You happy children!”

Then she took his hand, and their pilgrimage began. When they reached
the dark fir-wood in which the wolves and goblins lived he had just
finished his studies for “Kommt in Vogel geflogen” (A Bird Comes
A-flying), and when they came out again into the open field he could be
sure that “Heil Dir im Siegerkranz” (God Save the Queen) went without a
flaw.

His mother looked down at him with a sad smile; each shrill note made
her start, but she said nothing. The White House now stood close before
them. He no longer thought of his new art. All his faculties were
absorbed in what he saw.

First there came a high red-brick wall with a gate in it, on the posts
of which stood two stone heads; then farther on a large grass-grown
court; whole rows of wagons stood in it, and it was flanked by low gray
farm buildings, forming a big square. In the middle lay a sort of pool,
surrounded by a low hedge of may, in which a troop of quacking ducks
were making merry.

“And where is the White House, mamma?” asked Paul, whom this did not
please at all.

“Behind the garden,” replied his mother. Her voice had a strange, husky
sound, and her hand clasped his so firmly that he almost screamed with
pain.

Now they turned the corner of the garden fence, and before Paul’s eyes
lay a simple two-storied house, closely shaded by lime-trees, and having
little or nothing remarkable about it. It did not look nearly as white,
either, as from the distance.

“Is this it?” asked Paul, drawling out the words.

“Yes; this is it,” answered his mother.

“And where are the glass balls and the sundial?” he asked.

A desire to cry came over him suddenly. He had imagined everything a
thousand times more beautiful; if they had cheated him regarding the
glass balls and the sundial as well, he would not have been surprised.

At this moment two Newfoundland dogs, as black as coal, came rushing up
to them with suppressed barks. He took refuge behind his mother’s dress
and began to scream.

“Caro! Nero!” called a sweet childish voice from the house door, and the
two monsters, howling joyfully, rushed off in the direction whence the
voice came.

A little girl, smaller still than Paul, in a pink-flowered frock, round
which a kind of Scotch sash was tied, appeared before the house. She had
long, golden curls, which were drawn back from her forehead by a round
comb, and a small, delicate little nose, which she carried rather high.

“Do you wish to speak to mamma?” she asked in her gentle, soft voice,
and smiled at the same time.

“Are you called Elsbeth, my child?” inquired his mother, in return.

“Yes; I am called Elsbeth.”

His mother made a movement as if she wanted to clasp the strange child
in her arms, but she mastered herself, and said,

“Will you lead us to your mother?”

“Mamma is in the garden; she is just drinking coffee,” said the little
girl, with much importance. “I would rather lead you round the front of
the house, because if we open the door on the sunny side so many flies
come in directly.”

His mother smiled. Paul wondered that this had never struck him at home.

“She is much cleverer than you are,” he thought.

Now they entered the garden. It was much larger and more beautiful than
the one at Mussainen, but there was nothing to be seen of a sundial.
Paul had formed a vague idea of it as a great golden tower, on which a
round, sparkling disk of the sun formed the dial-plate.

“Where is the sundial, mamma?” he asked.

“I will show it to you afterwards,” said the little girl, eagerly.

From the arbor came a tall, slender lady, with a pale, delicate face, on
which shone an inexpressibly sweet smile.

His mother gave a cry, and threw herself on her breast, sobbing loudly.

“Thank God that I have you with me once again!” said the stranger, and
kissed his mother on her brow and cheeks.

“Believe me, all will now be well; you will tell me what weighs upon
your mind, and it will be strange if I cannot help you.”

His mother dried her eyes and smiled.

“Oh, this is pure joy,” she said; “I feel already so relieved and happy
because I am near you. I have longed for you so much.”

“And could you really not come?”

His mother shook her head sadly.

“Poor woman!” said the lady, and both looked for a long time into each
other’s eyes.

“And this, I suppose, is my godchild?” the lady exclaimed, pointing
towards Paul, who clung to his mother’s dress and sucked his thumb.

“Oh, fie! take your finger from your mouth,” said his mother. And the
beautiful, kind lady took him on her lap, gave him a teaspoonful of
honey--“as a sort of foretaste,” she said--and asked him after his
little sisters, about school, and all sorts of other things which it
was not at all difficult to answer, so that at last he almost felt
comfortable on her lap.

“And what things do you know already, you little man?” she asked him at
last.

“I can whistle,” he answered, proudly.

The kind woman laughed heartily, and said, “Well, then, whistle us
something.”

He pointed his lips and tried to whistle, but the sound would not come;
he had forgotten it again.

Then they laughed--the kind lady, the little girl, and even his mother;
but tears rose to his eyes with shame; he struggled and kicked, so that
the lady had to let him glide down from her lap, and his mother said,
reproachfully,

“You are naughty, Paul.”

But he went behind the arbor and cried, until the little girl came to
him and said:

“Oh dear, you must not cry. God does not like naughty children.” Then
he was ashamed again, and rubbed his eyes with his hands till they were
dry.

“And now I will show you the sundial,” continued the child.

“Oh yes, and the glass balls,” he said.

“They were broken a long time ago,” she replied; “a stone I threw flew
by accident into one of them, and the other was blown down by a storm.”
 And then she showed him the spots where they had stood.

“And this is the sundial,” she went on.

“Where?” he asked, looking round, wonderingly.

They were standing before a gray, unpretending post, on which was
fastened a sort of wooden plate. The child laughed, and said that this
was the sundial.

“Oh, fie!” he retorted, angrily; “you are mocking me.”

“Why should I want to mock you?” she asked; “you have never done me any
harm.” And then she repeated her assertion that this was the sundial,
and nothing else, and she also pointed out to him the hand, a miserable
rusty piece of metal, which stuck out from the middle of the dial and
threw its shadow just on number six, which was written there among other
figures.

“Oh, this is too stupid,” he said, and turned away. The sundial in the
garden of the White House was the first great disappointment of his
life.

When he returned to the arbor with his new friend, he found a tall,
broad-shouldered gentleman with bushy whiskers there, who wore a gray
shooting-coat, and whose eyes seemed to twinkle merrily.

“Who is that?” asked Paul, timidly, hiding behind his friend.

She laughed and said, “That is my papa; you need not be afraid of him.”

And, shouting with joy, she jumped on the strange man’s knee.

Then he thought to himself, would he ever dare to jump on _his_ papa’s
knee, and from this he concluded that all fathers were not alike.

But the man in the shooting-coat caressed his child, kissed her on both
cheeks, and let her ride on his knees.

“See! Elsbeth has got a playfellow,” said the kind, strange lady,
pointing towards Paul, who, hidden by the foliage, glanced shyly towards
the arbor.

“Just come here, my boy,” the man called out merrily and snapped his
fingers.

“Come--here, on the other knee; there is room enough for you,” called
out the child; and when, with a questioning glance at his mother, he
crept timidly nearer, the strange man seized him, put him on his other
knee, and then they had a merry race.

He had lost all fear, and when freshly-baked cakes were put on the
table, he fell to bravely. His mother stroked his hair and warned him
not to eat too much. She spoke very softly, and kept looking down upon
the ground before her. And then the children were allowed to go to the
bushes and pick gooseberries for themselves.

“Are you really called Elsbeth?” he asked his friend, and as she said
“Yes,” he expressed his astonishment that she had the same name as his
mother.

“But I have been christened after her,” said the child; “she is my
godmother.”

“Why didn’t she kiss you, then?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” said Elsbeth, sadly, “perhaps she does not like me.”

But that she had not had the courage to do it never occurred to either
of them.

It already began to grow dark when the children were called back.

“We must go home,” said his mother.

He was very sorry, because he had just now begun to like it. His mother
pulled his collar straight, and said: “There, now kiss the lady’s hand
and thank her.”

He did as he was ordered, the kind lady kissed his forehead, and the man
in the shooting-coat lifted him high up into the air, so that he thought
he could fly.

And now his mother took Elsbeth in her arms, and kissed her several
times on her mouth and cheeks, and said: “May Heaven some day reward
you, my child, for what your parents have done for your godmother.”

A heavy burden seemed to be taken from her soul; she breathed more
freely and her eyes shone.

Elsbeth and her parents went with the two as far as the gate, when his
mother took leave of them there over again, and stammered all sorts of
things about compensation and divine blessings. The man interrupted her
laughingly, and said the whole affair was not worth mentioning and did
not require any thanks at all. And the kind woman kissed her warmly, and
asked her to come again very soon, or at least to send the children.

The mother smiled sadly and was silent. Elsbeth was allowed to go a few
steps farther; then she took leave with a little courtesy. Paul’s heart
was heavy; he felt there was still something he had to tell her, so he
ran after her, and, when he had caught up to her, whispered into her
ear,

“You know--I _can_ whistle all the same!”

When, mother and son entered the wood, night was closing in. It was
pitch-dark all round, but he was not afraid in the least. If a wolf had
come in their way now he would soon have shown him who had the best of
it.

His mother did not speak; the hand which clasped his so firmly burned
feverishly, and her breath came from her breast like a sigh.

And when they both stepped out onto the heath the moon rose pale and
majestic on the horizon. A blue veil spread over the distance. Thyme and
juniper sent forth their perfume, here and there a little bird twittered
on the ground.

The mother sat down at the edge of the ditch, and looked across at
their sad home to which all her care was devoted. The outlines of the
buildings stood out clearly against the evening sky. One lonely light
twinkled from the kitchen.

Suddenly she spread out her arms, and called out over the silent heath,
“Oh, I am happy!”

Paul clung to her side almost anxiously, for never yet had he heard a
similar cry from her. He was so much accustomed to her tears and her
sorrow that this exultant joy seemed to him quite uncanny.

And then it occurred to him: “What will father say when he hears of
this walk? Will he not scold mother and be even more angry with her than
usual?” A sullen defiance took possession of him; he set his teeth, then
he stroked his mother’s hand consolingly, kissed her, and whispered,

“He shall not harm you!”

“Who?” she asked, with a shudder.

“Father,” he said, softly and hesitatingly.

She sighed deeply but answered nothing, and silently and sadly they went
on.

The gray woman had flitted across their path and spoiled the moment
of joy, and it was the only one that Fate had still in store for Frau
Elsbeth.

Next day there was a bad hour between herself and her husband. He called
her undutiful and dishonorable. By her begging she had added disgrace to
poverty.

However, he took the money.




CHAPTER V.

Years passed away.

Paul grew up a quiet, unpretending boy, with a shy look and awkward
behavior.

Generally he kept apart, and, while he took care of the twins, would sit
for hours working at some wood-carving without saying a single word. He
was what one calls in his part of the country “fussy:” a nature inclined
to worry about details and brooding anxiously by himself.

He had no intercourse with any boys of his age, not even in school. Not
that he avoided them on purpose; on the contrary, he liked to help
them, and more than one used to copy, in the morning before prayers, his
arithmetic problems or his German composition; but their interests were
not his, and therefore he could not befriend them.

He also got an abundance of thrashings; especially from the brothers
Erdmann--two saucy, wild-eyed fellows, loved and feared as the strongest
and most daring--he had much to suffer. They were inexhaustible in
the invention of new tricks which imbittered his life: they threw his
copy-books on the top of the stove, filled his satchel with sand, and
let his cap, in which they put a stick for a mast, float down the river
like a boat. Most of these injuries he bore patiently; only once or
twice a blind fury came over him. Then he bit and scratched like a
madman, so that even those companions who were much stronger than he
wisely took to flight. The first time one of the boys had called his
father a drunkard, and another time they wanted to lock him up in a dark
cow-shed with a little girl.

Afterwards he was ashamed, and came of his own accord to beg pardon.
Then they only laughed at him the more, and the hardly-won respect was
lost again.

Learning went on with great difficulty. The task for which his comrades
hardly needed fifteen minutes he required an hour or two to finish. On
the other hand, his handwriting was like copper-plate and there never
was a mistake in his sums.

All the same, no work seemed done well enough to satisfy himself, and
often his mother surprised him as he got up at night on the sly, because
he was afraid that what he had learned by heart had escaped his memory.

That he should go to a better school, like his brothers, was not to be
thought of. His mother had for some time cherished the plan of
letting him follow the two elder ones as soon as they had passed their
examination, for it pained her mother’s heart that he should be behind
the others; but in the end she gave in, and that was certainly for the
best.

Paul himself had never expected anything else. He considered himself as
a creature totally subordinate compared to his brothers, and had long
since given up trying ever to be like them. When they came home for
their holidays--velvet caps on their wavy hair, many-colored ribbons
on their breasts, for they belonged to some forbidden school
corporation--he looked up to them as to beings from a higher world.
Eagerly he listened when they began to talk to each other about Sallust
and Cicero, and the tragedies of Aeschylus--and they liked to speak
about them a great deal, if only to impress him. But the object of his
highest admiration was the thick book, on the first page of which was
written “Table of Logarithms,” and which from the first page to the last
contained nothing but figures--figures in long, close rows, the mere
sight of which made him giddy. “How learned he must be, to have all that
in his head,” he said to himself, caressing the cover of the book, for
he imagined that they had to do no less than learn all those figures by
heart.

The brothers were unusually affable and condescending to him; when they
wished to have anything in the house, when they desired a saddled
horse or an extra stiff glass of grog, they always addressed him
confidentially, and he felt highly honored to be allowed to help them.

As regards farming matters, he was as well acquainted with them as if
he were the master of the house himself; to them were devoted all his
efforts and his care.

What was it that had made him so prematurely serious?

Was it the helplessness of his lonely mother, who had initiated him so
early into all her cares? Was it the brooding, striving spirit, ever
looking to the future, which was peculiar to him?

Very often when he sat musing, his elbows leaning on the table--in his
manners, too, he was quite like a grown-up person--his mother stroked
his hair, and said,

“Let us see a bright face, my boy; be glad that you have no cares yet.”
 Oh, he had cares enough! Care cleaved to him like his own flesh and
blood: whether the hen which had strayed to-day would be found again
to-morrow; whether the ointment which his father had brought from the
town yesterday would agree with a dun-colored horse; whether the hay
had been dry enough before it was turned; and how the starlings in the
gutter on the roof would bring up their little ones without the cat
getting at them.

And he had to care about everything. Care had been born with him; only
for himself he never took any care.

The older and more reasonable he grew, the deeper, too, grew his
understanding of the mismanagement which his father had allowed to
prevail, and often a deep sigh came from his breast: “Oh, if I were only
big already!” The fear of his father’s wrath did not let him express
his anxieties, and if ever he dared to speak his mind to his mother, she
looked with fearful eyes all around the room, and said, anxiously, “Be
quiet.”

And yet his father saw very well whither his son’s thoughts tended. He
had given him the nickname of “Cotquean,” and jeered at him whenever
he saw him. That naturally was in his good moments; in his bad ones he
thrashed him with the yard measure, with the handle of the whip, with
the straps of the harness--with whatever was nearest his hand. Paul
feared his hand itself most of all, the blows of which hurt more than
all the sticks in the world. His father had a strange manner of boxing
his ears. He flung his hand into his face with the knuckles outward, so
that the nails and joints left bruises on his cheeks. This kind of blow
he called his “cheek-comforter,” and when he intended beating Paul he
called out to him in the most affable tone, “Come here, my son, I want
to comfort you.”

When he had received his beating he used to run out trembling onto the
heath in shame and pain, and while he made faces and drummed with his
fists, to choke down his tears, he whistled.

In whistling he manifested not only all his longings, his childish
dreams, but also his anger and indignation. The feelings for which his
uncouth mind did not find any expression, for which he lacked words or
even thoughts, he dared in this loneliness to pour forth unchecked by
means of whistling. So his depressed, timid soul found an outlet. Whole
symphonies he executed, shrill and harsh at the beginning, growing
softer and softer, and at last melting away in sadness and resignation.

Nobody guessed the art he practised by himself, and how much consolation
and exultation he owed to that same art--not even his mother.

Since he had seen her break into tears, one winter’s night, as he,
without heeding her, had softly whistled to himself--since that time
he left off as soon as she came near him; he thought it hurt her. What
power was given him in those sounds he little knew.

Only at times he was proud--looking towards the White House--that he
had after all learned to whistle; and when some melody seemed to him
especially good, he thought within himself, “Who knows if you would
laugh at me if you were to hear this?”

But never had he met any of them again.




CHAPTER VI.

For some time past Mr. Meyerhofer had gone about with great plans in his
head. He had discovered that the turf moor which surrounded the farm in
a wide circle was in a condition to afford a sure profit. Already, twice
or thrice, when need had been sorest, he had, to make shift, ordered
peat to be cut, and sent five cart-loads to the town.

Secretly, quite secretly--for he was too proud to be considered as
nothing better than a common peat-cutting farmer. His people had each
time brought home twenty to twenty-five marks clear gain, and said that
there was far more to be gained still in this way, because black, firm
peat was an article much in demand in the market.

But Meyerhofer was not to be induced to utilize the moor in this manner.
“I have never bothered about such trifles,” he said; “I’d rather be
ruined wholesale than earn in detail,” and then he drew himself up like
a hero.

But the moor did not let him rest. It was in September, after an
unusually favorable harvest, when Lob Levy, the complaisant friend of
all farmers in debt, appeared on the farm twice or thrice weekly, and
had much to negotiate with the master. Frau Elsbeth trembled with fear
as soon as the Jew, in his dirty caftan, appeared at the gate. She
seated herself at the window and followed untiringly every movement of
the negotiators. If her husband assumed a thoughtful air she felt a cold
shiver, and only when he smiled again she dared to breathe freely, too.

She anticipated no good, but did not venture to ask what kind of
business her husband had to transact with this usurer.

She was soon to be enlightened. One afternoon Paul saw how a strange
vehicle came rumbling along on the road from the town, which looked
in the distance like an immense black copper on wheels. Something
that appeared to be a chimney stuck out beyond it, and when the wheels
staggered on the uneven ground bent to the right and the left like a
man politely bowing. He gazed at the wonder for a while, then ran to his
mother, whom he eagerly pulled to the door by her dress.

She shaded her eyes with her hand and looked down the road. “That is a
locomobile,” she said at last.

Paul knew as much as before. “What is a locomobile?” he asked.

“A steam-engine which can be moved anywhere, and which great land-owners
use to turn their thrashing-machines; one can also harrow and plough
with it, for such a thing has more strength than ten horses.”

“But why is it drawn by horses, then?” he asked.

“Because by itself it cannot move anywhere,” was the answer.

He did not understand that. “Anyhow,” he thought, “it must be a great
happiness to possess such a thing with that strange name, and if we ever
become rich--”

At this moment his father came rushing out of the house in great
excitement; he had a slipper on one foot, a boot on the other, and his
necktie had turned to the back of his neck.

“They are coming! they are coming!” he cried, clapping his hands; then
he caught his wife round the waist and danced with her into the middle
of the road.

She looked at him with great anxious eyes, as if she wanted to say,
“What fresh nonsense have you contrived now?” But he would not let
her go, and when the twins in their pink cotton frocks and dark little
pigtails came running out of the garden, he made for them, took them in
his arms, let them dance on his shoulders, and pretended to throw them
over the ditch, so that the mother could only stop this nonsense by most
ardent pleading.

“There, you little rogues,” he cried, “rejoice and dance. All poverty
is ended now; next spring we shall measure our money by the bushel.” The
mother looked at him askance, but said nothing.

The monster came nearer and nearer. Paul stood there motionless--all
eyes. Then he looked up at his mother, whose face was care-worn, and a
certain fear came over him as if now the devil had come into the house;
but then he remembered how his wish of a moment ago was fulfilled, and
he resolved to meet the black guest with full confidence.

Meanwhile all the farm-servants and maids came hurrying from the stables
and kitchen. All the inmates of the Howdahs stood in a row by the fence
and gazed at the approaching wonder.

“But tell me, what do you want to do with it?” Frau Elsbeth at last
asked her husband.

He threw a pitying glance at her; then he laughed shortly, and said,
“Drive about in it.”

Frau Elsbeth asked no more. Her husband, turning to the upper
farm-servant, expounded his plans: how he would begin peat-cutting on
a large scale; cutting and pressing machines were also on the way, and
to-morrow, early, work could begin. Then he gave him orders to go to the
village to engage the necessary workmen. Ten men would suffice for the
beginning, but he hoped soon to need as many as twenty or thirty.

Frau Elsbeth mutely shook her head, and went into the house just as
the locomobile arrived before the gate. Paul never tired of looking and
admiring. Behind the yellow screws and crooked handles there seemed
to lie a world of mystery; the place for the fire, with the grate and
ash-box beneath, seemed to him like the entrance to that fiery furnace,
in which the well-known three holy men had once intoned their song of
praise; and the chimney above all, standing threateningly upright, with
its wreath of pine soot at its mouth, which seemed to lead down into
blackness and fathomless depths!

Paul did not heed the little basket-carriage that drove behind the
monster, in which sat Lob Levy, with his shaggy, reddish beard, and his
merry, twinkling eyes; he did not heed the screaming of the carmen, and
the exultation of his two little sisters, who danced like mad round the
wheels. He stood there dazed with wonder, as if he could not understand
yet what was happening around him.

When, later on, he entered the big room, he found his mother crouching
in the corner of the sofa, crying.

He put his arm round her neck; but she kept him gently off, and said,
“Go and look after the little ones, so that they do not get under the
wheels.”

“But why do you cry, mamma?”

“You will see in time, my boy,” she said, stroking his hair. “Lob Levy
is in it--you will see in time.”

Then he felt angry with his mother! When all were joyful why should she
sit moping in a corner and cry? But the joy was now over for him;
and when he saw Lob Levy loiter about the yard, in his long black
“heel-warmer,” he would have liked most to favor Caro with a hint
towards his calves.

The twins were quite beside themselves with joy. They took a cord, and
crying “gee” and “whoa,” raced wildly through the garden. One of them
was the locomobile, the other the horse, but each wanted to be the
locomobile, because then she got father’s black hat put on for the
chimney.

Before going to sleep they had already given a name to the new monster.

They maintained that it resembled the fat servant-girl with a long
neck, who a short time ago had been dismissed on account of her
slatternliness, and they called it, after her, “Black Susy.”

The locomobile kept this name forever after in Meyerhofer’s house.

Next morning the noise began afresh. The ten hired workmen stood in the
yard and did not know what to do. Meyerhofer wanted to have the engine
heated, but Lob Levy, who had passed the night in a shed in order to
be at hand the first thing in the morning, wanted first to receive his
price, as it had been settled in the agreement, because the grain had to
be delivered in town by noon.

“What grain?” the mother asked, turning pale.

Well, it could not be denied any longer: Meyerhofer had sold almost
the whole harvest--the thrashed corn as well as the amount still to
be thrashed--to the Jew for the old worn-out engine. Triumphantly the
latter drove away with the beautiful full sacks. And this was only a
sort of premium; towards Christmas he would come and fetch the rest.

A feeling of discouragement overcame for a moment even the light-minded
Meyerhofer himself when he saw the high-piled carts disappear behind
the woods; but in the next he put his hands defiantly into his
trousers-pockets, and ordered that the machine should be got ready
without delay.

At the same time as the monster a man in a blue blouse and with a
brandy-nose had come to the farm; he called himself “stoker,” and
distinguished himself by constantly eating onions; he said that this was
good for the digestion. This man fancied himself the hero of the
day. Puffed up with pride, he stood near the engine, called it his
foster-child, and stroked the rusty iron walls with his black, knotty
hand, that sounded as if two graters were rubbed together. With a great
show of foreign words he explained to every one who came near him the
inner arrangement of the “lookmanbile,” as he called his foster-child,
only he had to have some drink; otherwise he was abusive. But if he got
the amount of brandy which he wanted, he was deeply moved, and swore he
would rather have his hands and feet cut off than ever separate himself
from his foster-child. He had got to love it like his own flesh and
blood, and thought a thousand times more of it than of any human being
in the world. Meyerhofer walked proudly round him, for this pearl was
now his property, too, and he declared over and over again that here one
could see what German faithfulness meant.

But when the engine was to be heated, the very faithful man could
nowhere be found. At last he was discovered on a hay-stack asleep.
When he was awakened, he called this proceeding ill-treatment of human
beings, and could only with great trouble be induced to come out of his
corner.

The heating of the engine was a new festival. Paul stood before the
fire, and stared with dreamy eyes into the glowing depths which opened
yawning, as if it wished to swallow something alive. He thought of the
old heathenish idol Moloch, about whom he had heard in his biblical
history, and every moment he expected to see a pair of red, glowing
arms stretch themselves forth. And then in the body of the monster there
arose a mysterious singing, at times hollow, like the distant roar of a
forest, then again delicate and high, like soft angels’ voices. Then
it began to hiss in the valves--steam clouds rose, the iron shovel
clattered, and fresh heaps of coal sank rattling into the furnace. There
was such a noise all round that one could hardly hear one’s own voice.
The stoker with the red nose stood there like a king; he drank from a
flat-bodied flask, and from time to time he handled the valves, sending
forth a loud, imperious bellowing like a tamer of wild beasts. And
then the big wheel began to turn--surr, surr, surr--always quicker and
quicker. One became quite giddy by merely looking on, and then there was
a crack--a clatter--a hissing--the great wheel stood still forever.

At first the stoker gave himself great airs, and declared in half an
hour the whole damage would be repaired, but when Meyerhofer, after two
days’ work, urged him to have done with his repairs, he became abusive,
and declared that this old heap of rubbish could not be repaired any
more, and that it was just good enough to be sold to the dealer for old
iron.

“Foster-child?” he thanked you for such a foster-child; he was still a
little too good to look after such a heap of rubbish. And then it came
out: Lob Levy had picked him up three days ago in some low den, and had
asked him whether he would like to live like a king for a week--longer
the joke would not last, anyhow. And only on this assurance he had gone
with him, for to stay in one place longer than eight days was against
his principles.

Hereupon he was driven from the farm.

Next day Meyerhofer sent for the village blacksmith, that he might look
at the damage. He again fumbled about the engine for a few days, ate and
drank for two, and declared in the end that if it was not all right now
the devil was in it.

The heating was repeated; but “Black Susy” was not to be brought to life
again.

When, towards Christmas, Lob Levy came to the farm to fetch the rest of
the grain, Myerhofer thrashed him with the handle of his own whip.
The Jew screamed “Murder!” and drove away hastily. But soon a lawyer’s
messenger with a big red-sealed letter appeared. Myerhofer swore and
drank more than ever, and the end of it all was that he was sentenced
to pay all costs of the case and compensation money as well. Only with
great difficulty he escaped the punishment of imprisonment.

Since that day he would not see “Black Susy” any longer. She was put
into the farthest shed, and stood there in concealment many a year
without anybody ever looking at her.

Only Paul from time to time secretly took the key of the shed and crept
in to the black monster that he loved more and more, and which at last
appeared to him like a dumb, ill-treated friend.




CHAPTER VII.

When Paul was fourteen years old his father decided to send him to
confirmation-classes.

“He will never learn anything decent in school, anyhow,” he said; “time
and money are thrown away upon him. Therefore, he shall be confirmed at
once, so that he can make himself useful on the farm. He will never be
anything better than a peasant, anyhow.”

Paul was satisfied, for he was longing to take a part of the care which
pressed on his mother upon his own shoulders. He thought of making
himself a sort of inspector, who could at any time replace the absent
master, and work himself where the farm-servants needed a good example.
He hoped this activity might be the beginning of a new, prosperous time,
and when he lay in his bed at night he dreamed of waving cornfields and
brand-new massive barns. The resolution to use all his strength to bring
the neglected Haidehof into good repute became stronger and stronger.

The brothers one day should be able to say of him: “He has been of
some good, after all, even if he could not follow us in our brilliant
careers.”

Yes; the brothers! How tall and distinguished they had grown meanwhile.
One of them studied philology, and the other had entered a big bank as
clerk. In spite of their good aunt, both wanted money, much money--far,
far more than their father could send them. Paul hoped that for them
also, as a result of his beginning farming, a better time would come.
All surplus money should be sent to them, and he! oh, he would save and
scrape, so that they might strive for their lofty aims, free from need
and care.

With these pious thoughts Paul made his way to the first confirmation
class. It was a sunny spring morning at the beginning of the month of
April.

The fresh grass on the heath shone in greenish lights, juniper and
heather budded with new tender shoots, anemones and ranunculus were
blooming at the edge of the wood.

A warm wind waved over the heath towards him; he could have shouted
aloud, and his heart was quite filled with rapture.

“There must be something sad in store,” he said to himself, “for on
earth one may not feel so happy.”

Before the rectory garden there stood a long row of conveyances, only a
few of which he knew. There was also aristocratic carriages among them.
The coachmen with their shining buttons sat on their boxes with proud
smiles and threw contemptuous glances all around.

In the garden were assembled a big troop of children. The boys and girls
stood apart. Among the boys were the two brothers from whom he had had
to suffer so much formerly, and who had ceased going to school for the
last year. They gave him a friendly greeting, and while one of them
shook hands with him the other tripped him up.

Some of the girls walked arm in arm on the paths. Some also had put
their arms round each other’s waists and giggled. Most of them were
strangers to him. Some seemed especially aristocratic; they wore fine
gray ulsters, and had hats with feathers on their heads. The carriages
outside must belong to them.

He looked down at his jacket, to assure himself that he had nothing to
be ashamed of. It was made of fine black cloth, from an old evening suit
of his student brother’s, and looked as good as new, only that the seams
were a little shiny. Taken altogether, he did not need to be ashamed of
himself.

A bell sounded. The candidates were called into the church. Paul felt
light-hearted and pious in the solemn twilight of the house of God. He
did not think of his jacket any longer; the forms of the boys around
grew shadowy.

At both sides of the altar benches were placed. On the right the boys
were to have their seats, and on the left the girls.

Paul was pushed into the back row, where the little ones and the poor
sat. Between two barefooted cottage children, who wore coarse, ragged
jackets, he took his seat. Past the shoulders of the boys before him
he saw how the girls on the other side ranged themselves: the most
distinguished in front, and then the more poorly clad.

He was thinking whether in heaven the order of rank would be a similar
one, and the verse occurred to him:

“Blessed are the meek and lowly, for they shall be exalted.”

The vicar came.

He was a comfortable-looking man, with a double chin and light, spare
whiskers. His upper lip shone from frequent shaving. He did not wear his
robe, but a simple black coat; nevertheless, he looked very dignified
and solemn.

He first spoke a long prayer on the text, “Suffer little children to
come unto Me,” and added an exhortation to consider the coming year as a
time of consecration, not to romp wildly or to dance, for that would not
be in keeping with a student of religion.

“I have never romped or danced,” thought Paul, and for a moment he was
filled with pride over his pious conduct. “But it was a pity all the
same--” he thought afterwards.

Then the vicar praised as the highest of all Christian virtues:
humility. None of these children should feel above the others because
their parents happened to be richer and more distinguished than those
of their humbler brethren and sisters, because before God’s throne they
were all equal.

“That’s for you,” thought Paul, and lovingly seized the arm of his
ragged neighbor. The latter thought he wanted to pinch him, and said,
“Ow, don’t!”

Then the vicar took from his pocket a piece of paper, and said, “Now
I will read you the order of rank in which you will have to sit
henceforth.”

“Why this order of rank,” thought Paul, “if before God’s throne we are
all equal?”

The very first name startled Paul, for it was “Elsbeth Douglas.” He
saw a tall, pale girl, with a gentle face and fair hair smoothly combed
back, rise and walk towards the first place.

“So that’s you,” thought Paul, “and we shall be confirmed together.” His
heart beat with joy, but also with fear, because he was anxious at the
same time lest she should think him too much beneath her. “Perhaps she
does not remember me any more,” he thought.

He watched her as she took her seat with downcast eyes and a kind smile.

“No; she is not proud,” he said softly to himself; but to make sure he
looked at his jacket.

Then the boys were called up. The brothers Erdmann came first. Without
asking, they had already placed themselves comfortably on the first
seats, and then his own name was called out. At this moment Elsbeth
Douglas did exactly as he had done before. She raised her head quickly
and scrutinized the ranks of the boys.

When he had seated himself in his place he also looked down on the
ground, for he wanted to imitate her humility; and when he looked up
again he saw her eyes on him, full of curiosity. He blushed and picked a
little feather from the sleeve of his jacket.

And then the lesson began. The vicar explained passages from the Bible
and heard verses of hymns. It was Elsbeth’s turn first. She raised her
head a little, and repeated her verses quietly and modestly.

“Oh golly! the hussy has courage,” mumbled the younger Erdmann, who was
at his left side.

Paul felt sudden anger rise within him. He could have cudgelled him
in open church. “If he calls her ‘hussy’ again I shall thrash him
afterwards.” He promised this solemnly to himself. But the younger
Erdmann no longer thought of her; he was busy sticking pins into the
calves of the boys sitting behind him.

When the lesson was over, the girls left the church first, marching
in couples. Only when the last were outside, the boys were allowed to
follow. Just outside the church he met Elsbeth, who was walking towards
her carriage. Both looked a little askance at each other and passed on.
An old lady, with little gray curls and a Persian shawl, stood near her
carriage; she probably had waited for her at the vicarage. She kissed
Elsbeth’s forehead, and both seated themselves on the back seat. The
carriage was the finest one in the whole row. The coachman wore a
beautiful fur cap with a red tassel; he had also smart braid on his
collar and cuffs.

Just as the carriage had started, Paul was attacked by the two Erdmanns,
who thrashed him a little.

“You ought to be ashamed, two against one,” he said, and they let him
go.

He went home very contentedly. The midday sun glittered on the open
heath, and in misty distance the carriage rolled before him; it grew
smaller and smaller, and at last disappeared as a black spot in the
fir-wood.

When he arrived home his mother kissed him on both cheeks, and asked,
“Well, was it nice?”

“Quite nice,” he answered, “and, mamma, Elsbeth from the White House was
there, too.”

Then she blushed with joy and asked all sorts of things: how she looked,
whether she had grown pretty, and what she had said to him.

“Nothing at all,” he answered, ashamed; and as his mother looked at him
surprised, he added, eagerly, “but you know she is not proud.”

Next Monday when he entered the church he found her already sitting in
her place. She had the Bible lying on her knee, and was learning the
verses they had been given as their task.

There were not many children there, and when he sat down opposite to her
she made a half movement as if she meant to get up and come over to him;
but she sat down again immediately and went on learning.

His mother had told him before he left just to address Elsbeth. She had
charged him with many greetings for her mother, and he was to ask, too,
how she was. On his way he had studied a long speech, only he was not
quite decided yet whether to address her with “_Du_” or “_Sie_.” “_Du_”
 would have been the simplest; his mother took it for granted. But the
“_Sie_” sounded decidedly more distinguished--so nice and grown up. And
as he could come to no decision he avoided addressing her at all. He,
too, took out his Bible, and both put their elbows on their knees and
studied as if for a wager.

It was not of much use to him, because when the vicar questioned him
afterwards he had forgotten every word of it.

A painful silence ensued; the Erdmanns laughed viciously, and he had to
sit down again, his face burning with shame. He dared not look up any
more, and when, on leaving the church, he saw Elsbeth standing at the
porch as if she was waiting for something, he lowered his eyes and tried
to pass her quickly. However, she stepped forward and spoke to him.

“My mother has charged me--I am to ask you--how your mother is?”

He answered that she was well.

“And she sends her many kind regards,” continued Elsbeth.

“And my mother also sends many kind regards to yours,” he answered,
turning the Bible and hymn-book between his fingers, “and I was to ask
you, too, how she is?”

“Mamma told me to say,” she replied, like something learned by heart,
“that she is often ill, and has to keep in-doors very much; but now that
spring is here she is better; and would you not like to drive in our
carriage as far as your house? I was to ask you, she said.”

“Just look, Meyerhofer is sweethearting!” cried the elder Erdmann, who
had hidden behind the church door, through the crack of which he wanted
to tickle his companions with a little straw.

Elsbeth and Paul looked at each other in surprise, for they did not
know the meaning of this phrase; but as they felt that it must signify
something very bad they blushed and separated.

Paul looked after her as she got into the carriage and drove away. This
time the old lady was not waiting for her. It was her governess, he had
heard. Yes; she was of such high rank that she even had a governess of
her own.

“The Erdmanns will get a good licking yet;” with that he ended his
reflections.

The next week passed without his speaking to Elsbeth. When he entered
the church she was generally already in her seat. Then she would nod to
him kindly, but that was all.

And then came a Monday when her carriage was not waiting for her. He
noticed it at once, and as he walked towards the church-yard he breathed
more freely, for the proud coachman with his fur cap, which he wore even
in summer, always caused him a feeling of oppression. He had only to
think of this coachman when he sat opposite to her and she appeared to
him like a being from another world.

To-day he ventured to nod to her almost familiarly, and it seemed to him
as if she answered more kindly than usual.

And when the lesson was ended she came towards him of her own accord,
and said, “I must walk home to-day, for our horses are all in the
fields. Mamma thought you might walk with me part of the way, as we go
the same road.”

He felt very happy, but did not dare to walk by her side as long as they
were in the village. He also looked back anxiously from time to time,
to see whether the two Erdmanns were lurking anywhere with their mocking
remarks. But when they went through the open fields it was quite natural
that they should walk side by side.

It was a sunny forenoon in June. The white sand on the road glittered;
round about golden hawkweed was blooming and meadowsweet waved in the
warm wind; the midday bell sounded from the village; no human creature
was to be seen far and wide; the heath seemed quite deserted.

Elsbeth wore a wide-brimmed straw-hat on her head as a protection
against the sun’s rays. She took it off now, and swung it to and fro by
the elastic.

“You will be too hot,” he said; but as she laughed at him a little he
took his off also and threw it high in the air.

“You are quite a merry fellow,” she said, nodding approvingly.

He shook his head, and the lines of care which always made him look old
appeared again upon his brow.

“Oh no,” he said; “merry I am certainly not.”

“Why not?” she asked.

“I have always so many things to think of,” he answered, “and if ever I
want to be really happy something always goes wrong.”

“But what do you always have to think about?” she asked.

He reflected for a while, but nothing occurred to him. “Oh, it is all
nonsense,” he said; “clever thoughts never come to me, by any means.”

And then he told her about his brothers, of the thick books, which were
quite filled with figures (the name he had forgotten), and which they
had already known by heart when they were only as old as he was now.

“Why don’t you learn that as well, if it gives you pleasure?” she asked.

“But it gives me no pleasure,” he answered; “I have such a dull head.”

“But _something_ you know, surely?” she went on.

“I know absolutely nothing at all,” he replied, sadly; “father says that
I am too stupid.”

“Oh, you must not heed that,” she replied, consolingly. “My Fraulein
Rothmaier also finds fault with many things I do. But I--pah, I--” she
was silent, and pulled up a sorrel-plant which she began to chew.

“Has your father still such sparkling eyes?” he asked.

She nodded, and her face brightened.

“You love him very much--your father?”

She looked at him wonderingly, as if she had not understood his
question, then answered, “Oh yes; I love him very much.”

“And he loves you, too?”

“Well, I should think so.”

Now he also rooted up a sorrel-plant and sighed.

“Why do you sigh?” she asked.

Something was just crossing his mind, he said, and then asked,
laughingly, if her father still took her on his knee sometimes, as on
the day when he had been in the White House.

She laughed and said she was a big girl now, and he should not ask such
silly questions; but afterwards it came out that all the same she still
sat on her father’s knee--“Of course, not astride any more!” she added,
laughing.

“Yes, that was a nice day,” he said, “and I sat on his other knee. How
small we must have been then.”

“And we were so pitifully stupid,” she answered, “when I think now how
you wanted to whistle, and could not.”

“Do you remember that?” he asked, and his eyes sparkled in the
consciousness of his present attainments in the art.

“Of course,” she replied; “and when you went away you came running back
and--do you still remember?”

He remembered very well.

“Now you can whistle, of course,” she laughed; “at our age that is no
longer an accomplishment--even I can do it,” and she pointed her lips in
a very funny manner.

He was sad that she spoke so slightingly of his art, and reflected
whether it would not be better to give up whistling altogether.

“Why are you so silent?” she asked. “Are you tired, too?”

“Oh no, but you--eh?”

Yes; the walk through the sand and the noontide heat had tired her.

“Then come into our house and rest,” he cried, with sparkling eyes, for
he thought what joy his mother would feel at seeing her.

But she refused. “Your father is not kindly disposed towards us, mamma
said, and that’s why you may not come for a visit to Helenenthal. Your
father would perhaps send me away.”

He replied, with a deep blush, “My father would not do that,” and felt
much ashamed.

She cast a glance towards the Haidehof, which lay scarcely a hundred
yards from the road. The red fence shone in the sunshine, and even the
gray half-ruined barns looked more cheerful than usual.

“Your house looks very nice,” she said, shading her eyes with her left
hand.

“Oh yes,” he answered, his heart swelling with pride, “and there is an
owl nailed to the door of one of the sheds. But it shall become much
nicer still,” he added after a little while, seriously, “only let me
begin to rule.” And then he set to work to explain to her all his plans
for the future. She listened attentively, but when he had finished she
said again,

“I am tired--I must rest;” and she wanted to sit down on the edge of the
ditch.

“Not here in the blazing sun,” he cautioned her; “we’ll look out for the
first juniper-bush we can find.”

She gave him her hand, and let him drag her wearily over the heath,
which undulated with molehills like the waves on a lake, and near the
edge of the wood there were some solitary juniper-bushes, which stood
out like a group of black dwarfs above the level plain.

Under the first of these bushes she cowered down, so that its shadow
almost entirely shrouded her slight, delicate figure.

“Here is just room enough for your head,” she said, pointing to a
mole-hill which was just within the range of shade.

He stretched himself out on the grass, his head resting on the
mole-hill, his forehead covered by the hem of her dress.

She leaned back on the bush in order to find support in its branches.

“The needles don’t prick at all,” she said; “they mean well by us. I
believe we could pass through the Sleeping Beauty’s hedge of thorns.”

“You--not I,” he answered, lifting his eyes to her from his recumbent
position; “every thorn has pricked me. I am no fairy prince, not even a
simple Hans in luck, am I?”

“That will all come in time,” she replied, consolingly, “you must not
always have sad thoughts.”

He wanted to reply, but he lacked the right words; and as he looked up,
meditatively, a swallow flitted through the blue sky. Then involuntarily
he uttered a whistle as if he wanted to call it, and as it did not come,
he whistled again, and for a second and third time.

Elsbeth laughed, but he went on whistling--first without knowing how,
and without reflecting why; but when one tone after the other flowed
from his lips, he felt as if he had become very eloquent all of a
sudden, and as if in this manner he could say all that weighed on his
heart and for which in words he never could have found courage. All that
which made him sad, all that which he cared about came pouring forth. He
shut his eyes and listened, so to speak, to what the tones were saying
for him. He thought that the good God in heaven spoke for him, and was
relating all that concerned him, even that which he had never been clear
about himself.

When he looked up he did not know how long he had been lying there
whistling, but he saw that Elsbeth was crying.

“Why do you cry?” he asked.

She did not answer him, but dried her eyes with her handkerchief and
rose.

Silently they walked side by side for a while. When they reached the
wood, which lay thick and dark before them, she stopped and asked,

“Who has taught you that?”

“Nobody,” he said; “it came to me quite naturally.”

“Can you also play the flute?” she went on.

No, he could not; he had never even heard it; he only knew that it was
the favorite pastime of “old Fritz.”

“You must learn it,” she said.

He thought it would probably be too difficult for him.

“You should try all the same,” she counselled him; “you must be an
artist--a great artist.”

He was startled when she said that; he scarcely dared to follow out her
thoughts.

When they had reached the other side of the wood they separated. She
went towards the White House and he went back. When he passed the
juniper-bush where they had both been sitting all seemed to him like a
dream, and henceforth it always remained so to him. Two or three days
elapsed before he dared to say anything of his adventure to his mother,
but then he could contain himself no longer; he confessed everything to
her.

His mother looked at him for a long time and then went out; but from
that time she used to listen secretly to catch, if possible, some notes
of his whistling.

The two children often walked home together, but such an hour as the one
beneath the juniper-bush never came to them again.

When they passed it they used to look at each other and smile, but
neither of them dared to propose sitting down again beneath it.

There was also no further mention of the flute-playing between them,
but Paul thought of it often enough in secret. It seemed to him like
something divine, unheard of--like the science which taught the table of
logarithms. Ah, if he had been clever and gifted like his two brothers;
but he was only a dull, stupid boy, who might be glad if others allowed
him to help them.

He often asked himself what such flute-playing sounded like, and what
kind of people they were who were initiated into the mysteries of it. He
formed a high opinion of them, and thought that they must always cherish
high and holy thoughts, such as arose in his own mind occasionally when
he was deeply absorbed in his whistling.

And then came the day when he was to see a flute-player face to face.

It was a dreary, stormy afternoon in the month of November. It began to
get dark already as he left school and slowly walked along the village
road to-go home. Issuing from the public-house, which used to be
frequented by all the rogues of the neighborhood, wonderful sounds met
his ear. He had never heard the like, but he immediately knew this must
be a flute-player. Eagerly listening, he stopped at the door of the
public-house. His heart beat loudly, his limbs trembled. The sounds were
very much like his whistling, only much fuller and softer. “Such music
the angels of God must make at His throne,” he thought to himself.

Only one thing was inexplicable to him: how this flute-playing,
which sounded so sad and plaintive, could come from such a place of
ill-repute. The shouts and the clinking of glasses which sounded in
between filled his soul with horror. Sudden rage seized him; if he had
been tall and strong he would have sprung into the house and turned all
these noisy and drunken people out into the street, so that the holy
sounds should not be profaned.

At this moment the door was thrown open; a drunken workman reeled past
him, an obnoxious odor issued forth. Louder still grew the noise; the
tones of the flute could scarcely make themselves heard above it.

Then he took courage, and before the door was closed pressed through the
narrow opening into the inner room of the public-house.

He stood there, squeezed behind an empty brandy-cask. Nobody heeded him.

During the first few moments he could not distinguish anything.

The oppressive atmosphere and the noise had overwhelmed his senses, and
the tones of the flute grew harsh and unmelodious, so that they hurt his
ears.

In the midst of the yelling and stamping people sat a ragged fellow
on an upturned cask; he had a bloated, pimply face, a brandy-nose, and
black, greasy hair--a figure, the sight of which made Paul shudder. It
was he who had played the flute.

Petrified with horror, the boy stared at him. It seemed to him as if the
heavens were falling and the world going to ruin.

The musician now put down his flute, uttered a few coarse words in a
rough, hoarse voice, greedily swallowed the brandy which was handed to
him by the by-standers, and, beating time with his feet, began playing a
vulgar ballad, which the listeners accompanied with loud brawling.

Then Paul fled from the den, and ran and ran till he was perfectly
dizzy, as if he wished to escape from his own thoughts.

When he was alone on the storm-swept heath, from the extremity of which
a sulphurous streak of evening light was shining, he stopped, hid his
face in his hands, and cried bitterly.

In the winter which followed, Paul stopped whistling altogether, and
flute-playing disgusted him even more. When he thought of it there stood
before his eyes the figure of the outcast who had profaned his yearnings
for art.

He did not see Elsbeth any more. With the beginning of the cold weather
the confirmation-classes had been transferred from the church to the
vicarage, and as there was no room there large enough to hold all the
candidates, the boys and girls were taught separately. Sometimes he saw
Elsbeth’s carriage pass, but she herself was so wrapped up in furs
and shawls that her face could not be recognized. He did not even know
whether she had seen him.

At this time he had to suffer much vexation from the brothers Erdmann,
who knew how to torment him beyond endurance. He was perfectly powerless
against them, for each of them was twice as strong as he; besides, they
always attacked him both at the same time, and while one held him the
other pinched. Not that they were thoroughly vicious; on the contrary,
they knew how to practise benevolence and generosity towards others;
but his quiet, reserved nature was just what they hated with all their
heart. They called him a hypocrite and a Puritan, and when they had
thrashed him would say, “There, now go and tell tales of us; that would
be just like you.”

His rancor against these antagonists grew stronger and stronger. He
often reproached himself with behaving in a cowardly and dishonorable
manner, and accused himself of having a low, servile nature. One day,
when he ran up and down in the snow, he worked himself into such a fury
that he resolved to rid himself of these two wicked brothers were it
at the risk of his own life. He ran to the stables where the
grindstone stood, thawed the frozen water in the tub, and sharpened his
pocket-knife till it cut a piece of the thinnest tissue-paper. But when,
on the following Monday, he was again thrashed, he had not the courage
to draw it from his pocket, and had once more to reproach himself with
cowardice. He put it off till the next time; but that was the end of it.
From his father, too, he had much to endure. The latter was again taken
up with grand plans, and when this was the case he always felt very
superior, and in an especially bad humor with Paul, whom he despised for
his narrow-mindedness.

“Why has not the tiniest spark of my genius been transmitted to that
boy?” he would remark; “how beautifully I could educate him to assist in
my plans. But he is too stupid--everything is lost upon him.” It was now
his intention to found a company to make his moor profitable, to bring
capital together, and to be himself named director of it all, with a
salary of several thousand thalers. Every week he drove into town two or
three times, and often did not come home even on the following day.
“It is difficult enough,” he would say, when he had slept off his
intoxication, “but I’ll be even with the niggards! That Douglas, too,
insolent fellow, shall pay for it. If I only knew how to tackle him. I
will never enter Helenenthal again, were it only that I might not see
how the fellow has neglected it--for that he certainly has done--and in
town I never get sight of him. But pay for it--pay for it he shall. If
he does not immediately sign a whole bushel of shares, the devil take
him.”

Frau Elsbeth listened sadly to all this without saying a word, but Paul
used secretly to take down the key of the shed from its shelf, and go
off to have mute intercourse with “Black Susy.” He stuck to the belief
that she would be the means of saving them.

When the Easter holidays were over, the confirmation-classes were again
held in the church. Boys and girls met together after a half year’s
separation.

Elsbeth had changed very much during the winter. She almost looked like
a grown-up lady now.

She wore a longer dress and her hair was arranged in little curls on her
forehead.

Paul saluted her very shyly; he felt as if he were no longer fit for
her; but she rose from her seat, walked a few steps towards him, and
shook his hand heartily before everybody’s eyes. During the ensuing
lesson a sheet of paper was circulated among the boys which caused much
mirth. On it was written, with all sorts of flourishes:

  “_Paul Meyerhofer,
  Elsbeth Douglas,
  Betrothed.”_

The writing was that of the younger Erdmann. Paul’s hand searched for
his knife; for a moment he felt as if he could draw it on his neighbor
here in the open church. He snatched the paper from his hand and tore it
into little pieces.

Elsbeth looked at him wonderingly, and the vicar called him to order.
Then he became terrified at his own audacity. The Erdmanns must have
understood that on this subject he would not stand any joking, and made
no further attempts to tease him about Elsbeth.

The confirmation took place on the last Sunday before Whitsuntide. The
night before, Paul could not sleep, and at sunrise quietly got up, put
on the new clothes which his good aunt had sent him for this occasion,
and took a walk through the quiet yard and over the dewy fields, till he
reached the moor, which in its flowery garb lay brightly extended before
him.

At the sight of the rising sun he folded his hands and said an ardent
prayer. From this day forth he resolved to begin a new and better
life, forgive all offences, and love his enemies, as Jesus Christ had
commanded. Then he thought of the knife which he had once ground with
a view to the Erdmanns; he pulled it out of his pocket and threw it
far away over the moor, where it sank down in the swamp with a gurgling
sound. Hot tears streamed from his eyes; he thought himself bad and
reprobate, and totally unworthy to stand before God’s altar; he scarcely
dared to go home to the farm; only when the twins came rushing towards
him in their brand-new muslin dresses did he feel happier and easier
in his mind. He embraced his sisters, and vowed in silence to be a true
friend and support to them.

Then came his mother, dressed in a faded silk gown, kissed him on his
forehead and cheeks, and held his face between her two hands for a long
while, looking fixedly into his eyes. She wanted to say something to
him, but she could get out nothing more than “My boy, my dear boy!”

Even his father was in the rosiest humor to-day. He took both Paul’s
hands in his, and made him a long speech as to how he must learn to look
out for what was great in human life, and to emulate him, his father,
who, though always pursued by misfortune and plundered by the wickedness
of men, had never allowed himself to be discouraged from aspiring to the
stars, even in this miserable hole into which adverse fate had let him
sink. And he knitted his brows and ruffled his hair, every inch of him
grandeur and importance.

Paul kissed both his hands and promised everything. At eight o’clock he
saw on the high-road which led across the heath a carriage roll by, the
silver ornaments of which sparkled in the morning sun.

For a long time he looked after it. Everything seemed to him like a
dream. He felt so exultantly glad that he was almost overpowered by
happiness. “How have I deserved all this?” he asked himself; and then he
began brooding over what the first trouble would be which would drag him
down from this bliss. When the twins announced to him that the carriage
stood ready for the drive to church he felt sad and depressed.

In the vicarage garden, where syringa and lilac were in bloom, and where
the sunbeams glittered on the lawn, stood two little groups of human
beings apart from each other--one black, the other white. The former
were the boys, the latter the girls.

Elsbeth, in her snowy muslin dress with a lace handkerchief crossed over
her bosom, looked white and graceful as a hawthorn blossom.

Her cheeks were very pale, and she kept her eyes lowered, and played
alternately with her hymn-book and a twig of lilac, both of which she
held in her hand.

Paul looked at her for a long time, but she did not see him. She would
not be disturbed in her devotion by any worldly thought.

And then the vicar came; the bells pealed, the organ resounded, and the
procession, ranged in couples, advanced slowly towards the altar.

Paul walked close behind the two Erdmanns, who in their long black coats
looked very solemn and demure. Suddenly the consciousness of his guilt
overcame him more forcibly than ever. He bent forward a little, touched
them softly on the shoulder, and whispered, with moist eyes,

“Forgive me, I have behaved so badly to you.”

They nudged each other and smiled maliciously. One of them half turned
round, and whispered, with a face of pathetic misery and a look of
injured innocence,

“My son, we forgive you.”

Paul felt very well that they were mocking him, but his heart was so
full of devotion and love that no mocking could affect him.

The children ranged themselves on both sides of the altar.

Paul sent a shy glance into the body of the church, which was crammed
with people, but he could not distinguish anybody.

The hour for the sermon was past. He gazed down before him. All seemed
like a dream.

A little later he felt his knees resting on a soft cushion and the hand
of the vicar on his head. What he said to him he did not hear. He saw
Elsbeth on the other side, crying quietly with her handkerchief to her
eyes, and thought,

“Ah, cry away, cry away, you will soon laugh again.”

And then he asked himself why people always laughed so much, while on
the whole there were so few laughable things in the world.

The organ now intoned the hymn, “Praise ye the Lord, the mighty King of
Glory.” The chorus of the congregation sounded jubilant, and his gaze
wandered up to the sunbeams which fell in iridescent light through the
painted church windows like a rainbow.

And while he was gazing at it he suddenly started. Just opposite the
cross which crowned the altar stood a dark woman clad in gray, of
supernatural stature, looking down upon him with big, hollow eyes. It
was the penitent Magdalene.

He felt a cold shudder run through his frame.

“Dame Care,” he murmured, and bent his head as if he wished to accept
with humility what she might grant him for life.

And when he lifted his eyes again the sun shone more magnificently than
before.

Fiery red and emerald green sparkled the rays, weaving a radiant halo
round the gray dame’s head.

But she stood there sadly in the midst of all the brilliant radiance,
and stared down upon him with her big, hollow eyes.

Then the organ began the finale with swelling chords. A joyful thrill
passed through the congregation. The troop of children hastened to throw
themselves into the arms of their parents, and a kindly glance greeted
him from Elsbeth’s eyes.




CHAPTER VIII.

Paul now began to help with the farming. He faithfully kept the vow
which he had made on the morning of his confirmation. He worked like
the meanest of his servants, and when his mother begged him to spare
himself, he kissed her hand and replied, “You know we have a great deal
to make good.”

In the evening, when the servants had retired to rest and the twins had
frollicked till they fell asleep, mother and son often sat together for
hours and planned and calculated; but when some resolution had ripened
within them and a gleam of hope shone from their eyes, it often happened
that they would suddenly start and let their heads droop with a sigh;
but neither of them gave utterance to that which weighed on their minds.

About this time Frau Elsbeth began to age rapidly. Long, deep furrows
lined her face, her chin became very prominent, and silver streaks
appeared in her hair. Only from the depths of her sorrowful eyes one
could still see how beautiful she had once been.

“Yes, you see, I am quite an old woman now,” she said to her son one
morning, as she combed her hair before the looking-glass, “and luck has
never yet come.”

“Hush, mother, what else am I here for?” he answered, though he did not
feel hopeful at all.

Then she smiled sadly, stroked his cheeks and his brow, and said, “Yes,
you certainly look as if you had caught luck in its flight! but I won’t
speak like this,” she continued; “what should I do without you?”

Such moments of overflowing love had to satisfy them for a long time,
for often months passed by without mother or son daring to say any
loving words to each other; their hearts were too sorrowful.

The twins meanwhile grew up--two frolicksome, apple-cheeked tomboys,
for whom no tree was too high, no ditch too deep. Their curly brown hair
fell over their foreheads in a thousand little ringlets, and beneath
them two pairs of eyes peeped out, as full of mischief and as sparkling,
both with shyness and impudence, as if a stray sunbeam were laughing out
of black forest depths.

The laughter of these two resounded from morning to night through the
lonely Howdahs, and the quietness when they were at school or running
about in the open fields was the more oppressive.

It was all the same to the twins whether there was sunshine or storm
in the house; their heads were always full of tricks, and when at times
their father’s storming grew too insupportable and they deemed it more
prudent to, hide behind the stove, they made up for it there by pinching
one another’s legs.

They were devoted to Paul, which, however, did not prevent them from
quietly claiming as their property the best morsels from his plate, the
whitest sheets of paper from his writing-case, and the finest buttons
off his trousers, for they used to steal like magpies.

He was very anxious about them, for he feared they would become wilder
and wilder, especially as his mother grew more tired and despondent,
and left matters to take their own course. But he began his educational
experiments at the wrong end. His warnings were of no avail, and once as
he was in the middle of a beautiful sermon one of them suddenly jumped
on his knee, pulled his nose, and called out to his sister, “Fanny, he
is getting a beard.”

Then the other one climbed after her, and both of them tried who could
pinch him the most. But when he got seriously angry with them, they
began to sulk, and said, “Fie, we won’t speak to you any more.”

He had not seen Elsbeth again since the day of their confirmation,
though a whole year had elapsed meanwhile.

It was said she had been sent to town to learn there how to move in
society. This word had given his heart a pang; he scarcely knew what it
meant, but he vaguely felt that she was farther and farther removed from
him.

But it happened one day about Easter-tide that he had to work on a piece
of ground which lay removed from the other fields and far away at the
edge of the wood. He was sowing the seed himself, and a servant with two
horses went harrowing after him.

He wore a big seed-cloth round his shoulders, and watched with quiet
pleasure how the grains sparkled like a golden fountain as they sank
into the earth. Then it seemed to him that he saw something bright
between the dark trunks of the trees, rocking up and down like a cradle
suspended in the air. But he scarcely allowed himself time to notice it,
for sowing is the kind of work which requires all one’s attention.

At length the pause for breakfast came. The servant sat down on a sack
of corn, but he himself, feeling hot, went towards the wood to be in the
shade.

He threw a passing glance at the suspended cradle, and thought, “That
must be a hammock;” but he little cared who was lying in it.

Then suddenly it seemed to him as if he heard his name called.

“Paul, Paul!” It sounded sweet and familiar, and in a soft, clear voice,
which he seem to know.

He started and looked up.

“Paul, do come here,” the voice called again.

He turned hot and cold, for now he well knew who it was.

He cast a shy look at his working-suit, and began to untie the knots of
his seed-cloth; but it slipped round to the back of his neck, so that he
could not reach it.

“Do come as you are,” called out the voice; and now he could see how
the upper part of her body raised itself from the hammock, while a book,
bound in red and gold, glided from her hands and fell to the ground.

Hesitatingly he approached, trying secretly to wipe his boots in the
moss, for the soil of the fields was sticking to them.

She on her part had only this moment perceived that her feet and white
stockings showed beneath her dress, and hastily tried to cover them with
the shawl which had been put round her shoulders. But she could not pull
it from under her arms, and she could think of nothing better than to
crouch down quickly so that she looked like a hen, while the hammock
swayed to and fro.

Perhaps she might have had the intention to impress him a little with
her elegance and freshly-acquired social education, but now, as fate
would have it, she did not look at him less blushingly or shyly than he
at her.

On his side he observed nothing of her state of mind; he only saw that
she had grown very beautiful, that her hair was twisted up into a very
aristocratic knot, and that the bow at her bosom trembled slightly on
her rounded form. It was quite clear to him that she had now grown into
a lady.

A long while elapsed before either of them spoke a word.

“Good-day,” she said, at last, with a little laugh, and stretched out
her right hand to him, for she soon saw that she had the best of it.

He was silent and smiled at her.

“Help me to pull out my shawl,” she continued.

He did so.

“That’s it; now turn round.”

He did that, too.

“Now it’s all right.” She had made herself comfortable, thrown the shawl
quickly over her feet again, and was looking up at him roguishly through
the meshes of the hammock. “It’s really delightful to be with you
again,” she said; “you are the best of them all. Have you also been
longing for me?”

“No,” he answered, truthfully.

“Oh, get away with you!” she replied, and, pouting, tried to turn over
to the other side; but the hammock began to sway too much again, so she
laughed and remained lying as she was.

He wondered inwardly at her being so merry. He never heard any one laugh
like that, except the twins, and they were children. But this laugh gave
him back his self-possession, for he felt instinctively how much older
than she he had grown during the interval.

“I suppose you have been very happy all this time?” he asked.

“Thank God, yes!” she replied. “Mamma is always rather delicate, but
that is all.” A shadow passed over her face, but disappeared again the
next moment, and then she chatted on: “I have been in town--oh dear,
what I have gone through there! I must tell you about it at the first
opportunity. I have had dancing lessons. I have also had admirers--you
can fancy that! They serenaded me under my windows, sent me anonymous
bouquets, and verses, too--original verses! There was a student, among
others, with a white-braided coat, and a green, white, and red cap; oh,
he understood it! The things he would say to you! Afterwards he
engaged himself to Betty Schirrmacher, one of my friends, but quite in
secret--nobody knows it but myself.”

Paul breathed freely again, for the student had already begun to make
him uncomfortable.

“And were you not vexed?” he asked.

“Why?”

“At his being fickle to you.”

“No; we are above such things,” she replied, shugging her shoulders.
“Oh, you know--they are all stupid boys in comparison with you!”

He felt quite frightened at the idea of calling a student a stupid boy,
and, above all, in comparison with him.

“My brother is no stupid boy,” he retorted.

“I don’t know your brother,” she said, with philosophic calmness;
“perhaps he is not. Oh, I have grown ever so much older,” she went
on. “I took literature lessons, and from that I learned many beautiful
things.”

Tormenting envy awoke in him.

“Do pick up that book.”

He did so.

“Do you know that?”

In gold letters he read on the red cover the words, “Heine’s Buch der
Lieder” (Heine’s Book of Songs), and shook his head sadly.

“Ah, then you don’t know anything! Oh, how much there is in that book! I
must lend it to you. There, read that; it teaches one a great deal. And
after reading it for a little while one generally begins to cry.”

“Is it so sad, then?” he asked, looking at the cover with shy curiosity.

“Yes, very sad; as beautiful and as sad as--as--It only speaks of love,
of nothing else; but you feel such a great longing overpower you, and
that you would like to fly off to the Ganges, where the lotus blossoms,
and where--” She stopped, and then she laughed merrily and said, “Oh,
that is too stupid; is it not?”

“What?”

“What I am chattering about.”

“No; I could listen to you for my whole life.”

“No! could you? Oh, you know--it is so cosey here; I feel so secure when
you are near me,” and she stretched herself out in the net-work as if
she wanted to lean her head on his shoulder.

A strange feeling of happiness and peace came over him, such as he had
not felt for a long time.

“Why do you look away?” she asked.

“I don’t look away.”

“Yes, you do.... You must look at me. I like that.... You have such
earnest, faithful eyes. Oh, I know now what to compare those poems
with!”

“Well, with what?”

“With your whistling. That is also so--so--well, you know what I
mean.... Do you still whistle sometimes?”

“Very seldom.”

“And you have not learned to play the flute either, I suppose?”

“No.”

“Oh, fie! If you love me, you will learn it.... I will give you a
beautiful flute next time.”

“I have nothing to give you in return.”

“Oh yes--you shall give me all the songs which you play. And when
your heart is very sad ... well, only read that book; everything is in
there.”

Paul looked at it from all sides. “What a wonderful book it must be!” he
thought.

“And now tell me something about yourself,” she said. “What are you
doing? What are you working at? How is your dear mamma?”

Paul gave her a grateful glance. He felt he could speak to-day of all
that was in his heart; then it suddenly occurred to him that the pause
for breakfast was long over, and that the servant was waiting for him
with the horses. By noon he must finish, for after dinner the cart was
to drive to the town with a load of peat which he had had secretly cut.

“I must go to work,” he faltered.

“Oh, what a pity! And when will you have done?”

“At dinner-time.”

“I can’t wait so long as that or mamma will be uneasy. But in the next
few days do come and look here again--perhaps you’ll find me. Now I
shall lie here for another hour or so and watch you. It looks quite
splendid when you walk up and down in your big snowy white cloth and the
grain flies round you.”

He gave her his hand silently and went away.

“I shall leave the book here,” she called after him; “fetch it when you
have finished.”

The servant smiled knowingly when he saw him come, and Paul hardly dared
to raise his eyes to him.

Each time when he passed at his work the place where she was resting
in the wood she raised herself up a little and waved to him with her
pocket-handkerchief. About twelve o’clock she rolled up her hammock,
stepped to the edge of the wood, and called out a farewell to him
through her folded hands.

He took off his cap to thank her, but the servant looked the other way
and whistled softly, as if he had seen nothing.

During dinner that day his mother could not take her eyes from her son,
and when they were alone she went up to him, took his head in both her
hands, and said,

“What has happened to you, my boy?”

“Why?” he asked, with embarrassment.

“Your eyes sparkle so suspiciously.”

He laughed loudly and ran away; but when at supper she still looked at
him--inquiringly and sadly--he was sorry that he had not given her his
confidence, and went after her and confessed all that had happened to
him.

Then her haggard face suddenly lit up as by a ray of sunshine, and while
he crept away ashamed, with glowing cheeks, she looked after him with
moist eyes and folded her hands as if in prayer.

He sat up in his room till nearly midnight, his head leaning on his
hands. The mysterious book was lying on his knee; but he could not read
it, because his father had forbidden him to burn a light at night. He
had to wait till Sunday.

He was musing on how she had altered. If only she had not laughed so
often; her mirth estranged her from him, and the full blooming life by
which she was surrounded removed her far away into that distant country
where happy people live. And although she appeared as good and kind as
ever, she could not fail to despise him sooner or later because he was
nothing but a peasant, and stupid and awkward into the bargain.

A wild tumult of happiness, shame, and self-reproach raged within him,
for he thought he might have behaved in a much more dignified manner.
An unaccountable fear was mixed up with it all which almost choked
him, though in vain he racked his mind to find out whom this fear was
connected with.

The next afternoon he could see from the yard, where he was putting up
some poles, something white moving to and fro at the edge of the wood.
He set his teeth with pain and vexation, but could not make up his mind
to abandon his work.

For two days more the white was to be seen there--then it disappeared
altogether.

On Sunday morning he took the book of poems out of his box and went
with it towards the wood. At dinner-time he was still absent, and in the
evening the twins, who were playing at hide-and-seek on the heath, found
him whistling under a juniper-bush with the tears streaming down his
cheeks.

Thus he translated the “Buch der Lieder” into his own language.

       *       *       *       *       *

A short time afterwards he heard that Mrs. Douglas had been ordered by
the doctor to make a prolonged stay in the South, and that Elsbeth would
accompany her thither.

“It is all right so,” he said to himself. “She will no longer haunt me,
then.” For a long time he was uncertain whether to send her book back or
not; he would have liked to keep it, but his conscience would not allow
him. He waited for a favorable opportunity of returning it till he heard
that they had gone. Then he was satisfied.




CHAPTER IX.

Five years passed away; five years full of care and trouble.

Paul toiled and moiled; he worked from early morning till late at night;
his busy hands were occupied with every sort of labor, and whatever he
touched throve. But he scarcely noticed this, for his mind was always
taken up with the future.

The same lines of care were on his brow at all times; his eyes were cast
down with the same thoughtful brooding expression as if he were looking
into his own soul, and often days would pass without his having spoken a
single word either at his work or at table.

He went about with the conviction that in reality all his labor was
hopeless. He never could reckon on his father’s gratitude, and he soon
learned to do without it; but it was more difficult to have patience
when a whim of his father’s spoiled in one hour what he had been working
at with great trouble for many weeks.

When his father came home from his journeys it was not seldom that he
called him a simpleton and a blockhead in the hearing of the servants,
and would complain bitterly at being obliged to leave his farm in
hands as incapable as his, when his duty--nobody knew what that duty
was--called him away.

Paul was silent at such times, for deep in his heart he kept the
commandment: “HONOR thy father and thy mother”--“his father for his
mother’s sake;” so he had reconstructed it. But his eyes passed with a
sombre, searching gaze from one servant to the other, and whomever he
caught smiling or nudging his neighbor in secret malice he dismissed
next morning.

There was one of the farm-servants who had been working almost the whole
time at the Howdahs. His name was Michel Raudszus, and he came from
Littau. He lived in a miserable hovel not far from Helenenthal, the
walls of which were surrounded by piles of turf, so that the storms
should not blow it down. He had a slatternly wife who had already been
in prison twice, and who sent her children out to beg.

He was a silent, surly fellow, who did his work faultlessly and went off
without grumbling when he was not wanted any more, but appeared again
punctually as soon as there was fresh work. Paul did not like him at
first, he was so laconic and reserved, and his sullen behavior had made
an uncomfortable impression upon him; but then it suddenly occurred to
him that he behaved in much the same way himself, and from that hour he
had begun to like him heartily.

Even his father seemed to have a certain amount of respect for him, for
though, when drunk, he used to beat the servants, he had never attempted
to touch him. It seemed as if the look which the man cast at him from
underneath his bushy brows kept him at bay.

This servant was Paul’s most faithful helper. He could even trust him to
sell the grain in the market, for he always knew how to get the highest
prices.

Imperceptibly a great change had come over the silent Howdahs in these
five years. The traces of poverty became more and more rare, and want
was less often their guest at table. In the garden, where were pretty
flower-beds, the pease and asparagus stood in long rows, and the
defective fence had long since been replaced by a new one. The cattle
were augmented every year by two or three valuable milking cows, and the
milk-cart which drove into the town every morning brought home many a
groschen on the first of the month.

That there was no sign of any comfort yet in spite of all this was
entirely the fault of his father, who speculated with the greater part
of their earnings when he did not spend it in drink.

Paul had secretly contrived that a few thalers at least were saved for
his brothers and sisters every month.

His brothers needed money more than ever. Max had passed his last
examination, and was now beginning his first year’s tutorship at college
without salary; and Gottfried, the clerk, was out of situation for
several months every year. The two wrote begging letters in every
possible key, from the jovial “Fork me out thirty thalers immediately,”
 to the heartrending supplication, “If you don’t want me to be ruined,
have mercy,” etc.

Paul passed many a sleepless night thinking how to help them, and it
frequently happened that he deprived himself of something necessary so
as to be able to send them the money.

Once Gottfried had written that he had no decent clothes and urgently
needed a summer suit. Paul just wanted a summer suit himself, for he had
outgrown his old one; sighing, he put the money which he had saved up
for himself into an envelope and sent it to his brother; but in the
letter accompanying it he mentioned that he was not less reduced in his
wardrobe than himself. His brother showed himself magnanimous, and a
fortnight later sent him a parcel of clothes and a letter, in which he
said: “I enclose an old suit of mine. You, in your humble position, will
probably be able to use it still.”

Paul had also enabled the twins to have a better education than was
to be expected from the very reduced circumstances of his home. He had
urged the vicar’s wife, who had formerly been a governess, to take them
into the private school which she had established for the daughters of
well-to-do landowners from the neighboring villages.

The money for the schooling was not the worst of it, and he could manage
also to procure their books and copy-books; but it was difficult, very
difficult, to keep them nicely dressed, for his pride would not allow
his sisters to be behind their friends, and perhaps to be considered as
beggar children.

He himself knew too well the feeling of being looked down upon to let
his sisters experience the same.

His mother did not offer him any help even in these little feminine
cares. She was so much cowed by her husband’s abuse that she lacked the
courage to buy the smallest trifle on her own responsibility.

“What you do, my son, is sure to be right,” she said, and Paul drove to
town and was cheated, both by the draper and the dress-maker.

The twins grew up blooming, careless, and saucily merry, without the
faintest idea what a tragedy was being enacted in their immediate
neighborhood. At ten years old they romped and fought with the village
boys, at twelve they went with them to steal pears, and at fifteen
graciously accepted bunches of violets from them.

They were known far and wide as the most beautiful girls of the
neighborhood. Paul knew this well, and was not a little proud of it;
but what he did not know was that they had rendezvous behind the garden
fence, and that half the boys who were to be confirmed with them could
boast of having kissed their sweet red lips.




CHAPTER X.

It was in the month of June on a sunny Sunday afternoon.

Trumpet music sounded softly out of the wood. A great festival was to be
held there to-day. A wandering band had consented to be hired to give
a concert. The country people had come from far and wide, and even the
squires had not refused to participate in it, for such a thing did not
often happen in this quiet part of the world.

Since the middle of the day a long row of carriages had passed the
Haidehof, and old Meyerhofer, who did not like staying at home when
anything was going on, had suddenly been overcome by a fit of kindness,
and called out to his womenfolk to get ready as quickly as possible; he
would sacrifice himself and take them to the festivity.

The twins, who had already for a long time been standing at the
window, looking out with eager sparkling eyes, broke out into a loud
demonstration of joy. Frau Elsbeth gave them a quiet smile and turned to
Paul, who sat silently in his corner and went on cutting little sticks
to tie up the flowers, as if all this did not concern him at all. “Will
you not come, too?” she asked.

“Paul can drive,” cried Meyerhofer, carelessly.

He thanked them and said that his coat was too shabby, and also he
wanted to look after the workmen, who were to come at sunset. The next
morning haymaking was to begin.

The twins looked at him, laid their heads together, and giggled; then,
when he went towards the door, they hung round him, and Katie whispered,

“Listen; we know something.”

“Well, what is it?”

“Something nice,” said Greta, mysteriously.

“Out with it.”

“Elsbeth Douglas has come home again.”

And breaking out into merry laughter they ran away.

Paul at first felt very angry that they dared to mock him; then he
sighed and smiled, and wondered why his heart had suddenly begun to beat
so loudly.

Half an hour later his family drove away.

“Do join us soon,” his mother called down to him from the carriage, and
Katie getting into it whispered into his ear,

“I believe they will be there, too.”

Now he stood quite alone in the deserted courtyard. The servants had
gone to the fields to milk--no human being was to be seen far and wide.
The ducks in their pool had put their heads under their wings, and the
kennel-dog snapped sleepily at the flies.

Paul seated himself on the garden fence and gazed towards the wood, at
the edge of which gay light dresses flitted to and fro, while now and
then there was a bright glitter, when the sunbeams were reflected in the
harness of the waiting carriage-horses.

The evening came; he was still undecided whether he should venture to
follow his family.

A thousand reasons occurred to him which made his staying at home
absolutely necessary, and when it was quite clear to him that he ought
to remain at home and not go anywhere else he put on his Sunday coat and
went to the festival.

It began already to grow dusk as he walked across the sweet-scented
heather. His heart was weighed down with secret fear. He did not dare
to think out the cause, but as he walked past the juniper-bush, beneath
which he once had whistled his most beautiful song to Elsbeth, a pain
shot through his breast as if he had been stabbed.

He stopped and reconsidered whether it would not be better to turn back.
“My coat is much too shabby,” he said to himself; “I can’t show myself
in any decent society.” He took it off and looked at it on all sides.
The back was getting shiny at the seams; at the elbows there was a dull
silver gloss, and the border on the flaps of the breast even showed a
little fringe.

“It won’t do with the best will in the world,” he said, and then he sat
down beneath the juniper-bush and dreamed how smart and elegant he
would look if only he could afford a new coat. “But that won’t be yet
a while,” he continued; “first Max and Gottfried must have permanent
places, and Greta and Katie must have the ball-dresses they wish for,
and mother’s arm-chair must be newly done up--” and the more he thought
the more other things came to his mind which had a prior claim.

Then again he saw himself in a brand-new black suit, patent-leather
shoes on his feet, a fashionable tie round his neck, entering the
dancing-room with a careless, distinguished air, while Elsbeth smiled at
him very respectfully.

Suddenly he started from his dreams. “Oh, fie! what a fop I am growing!”
 he scolded himself. “What have I to do with patent-leather shoes and
fashionable ties? And now I will just go in my old coat to the wood.
Besides, it has almost grown dark,” he added, prudently.

Louder sounded the trumpets, and through the branches of the fir-trees
joyful laughter met his ears.

A turfy spot in the wood had been selected for the principal scene of
the festival. In the middle of it stood the platform for the musicians,
on the right the tent of the village innkeeper, who sold sour beer and
sweet cake, and on the left a place for dancing was fenced off, the
entrance to which cost a groschen more, as one might read on a white
board.

Round about in a big circle tables and benches had been placed where the
different families enjoyed the supper they had brought with them, and
through it all a jubilant, giggling, staring crowd was pressing, eager
for either love or a good hand-to-hand fight.

The concert was already finished, the dancing had begun; on the firm,
trodden-down moss the couples circled round breathless and stumbling.

The glow of the sunset lay on the open space, while the wood bordering
it was already buried in darkness. Here were the farm-servants and
maids from the neighboring hamlets; even the coachmen had left their
carriages, because it would have broken their hearts to have looked on
at these love-makings from the distance. Every bush, every small tree
seemed alive, and out of the darkness came low, amorous tittering.

Shyly, like a criminal, Paul slunk round the festive scene. A fear of
strangers had always been his peculiarity, but never yet had his heart
fluttered so anxiously as at this moment.

“Is Elsbeth there?” Nowhere in all the crowd were there any traces of
the inmates of the White House, but then his family also seemed to
have disappeared without leaving any trace. Once he thought the cooing
laughter of the twins caught his ear, but the next moment the noise had
drowned it.

Twice he had already made the round; then suddenly--his heart threatened
to stop from surprise and rapture--he saw, quite close before him, his
mother and father sitting in peaceful intercourse at the same table with
the Douglas family.

His father rested his elbows on the table, and, red with excitement,
talked eagerly to Mr. Douglas. The broad-shouldered giant with the bushy
gray beard listened to him silently, at times nodding and smiling to
himself. The slender, delicate figure with the sunken cheeks and the
blue rings round her eyes, who leaned wearily against the trunk of a
tree and clasped his mother’s hand with her thin white fingers, that was
his godmother, who had always seemed to him like an angel from the other
world. But next to her--next to her, the lady in the modest gray dress,
her fair hair simply combed back--

“Elsbeth! Elsbeth!” cried a voice within him; and then suddenly a wall
of clouds sank down between him and her, and froze his innermost soul,
and veiled his eyes with a damp mist.

Opposite to her sat a gentleman with a saucy-looking fair mustache, and
still more saucy blue eyes, who bent towards her familiarly, while a
smile flitted over her quiet face.

“She will marry that man,” he said to himself, with a conviction which
seemed to be more than a jealous foreboding. With the clear-sightedness
of love he had understood that these two natures harmonized and must
seek each other. And perhaps they had already found one another while he
himself wasted his days in idle dreams.

He stood there as if stunned, and scrutinized the man who suddenly had
rendered it clear to him what he had lost--lost, indeed, without ever
having possessed it.

How could he ever have dared to compare himself to this man that, to a
hair, was the ideal man of whom he had always dreamed?

Bold and energetic and triumphant (that’s what he had meant to be one
day), exactly like the strange young man who looked at Elsbeth with his
frivolous smile. He also wore patent-leather boots and a fashionable
colored necktie, and his suit was made of the finest shining black
cloth.

Almost for an hour Paul stood there without daring to move from his
position, devouring Elsbeth and her vis-à-vis with his eyes.

The night came. He scarcely perceived it. Long rows of lanterns were
lighted, and shed forth an uncertain light on the gay crowd.

“How well I am hidden,” thought Paul, and was glad of the darkness into
which he had crept. He did not see that two men came walking towards him
and were occupying themselves close to him with something on the ground.
Then suddenly, not ten steps away from him, a purple red flame flared up
and flooded all around in a sea of dazzling light.

He wanted to take refuge quickly in the shade of a tree, but it was too
late.

“Isn’t that Paul standing there?” called out his mother.

“Where?” asked Elsbeth, turning with curiosity.

“Boy, why are you hanging about in the dark?” shouted his father.

Then he had to come out, in spite of all; and burning with shame, his
cap in his hand, he stood before Elsbeth, who leaned her head on her
hand and looked up at him smilingly.

“Yes, that’s what he always is: a real sneaker,” said his father, giving
him a clap on the shoulder, and the unknown young gentleman pushed his
hair from his forehead and smiled half good-naturedly, half ironically.

Then old Douglas rose, went up to him, and seized both his hands. “Hold
up your head, young friend,” he called out, with his lion’s voice. “You
have no reason to lower your eyes--you, least of all the world. He who
can at the age of twenty do what you do is a capital fellow and need not
hide himself. I won’t make you conceited, but just ask who could bear
comparison with you. You, perhaps, Leo?” He turned to the young fop, who
answered, with a merry laugh,

“You must make the best of me as I am, dear uncle.”

“If only there was anything in you to make the best of, you
good-for-nothing!” replied Douglas. “This, you must know, is my nephew,
Leo Heller, a new edition of ‘Fritz Triddlefitz.’”

“Uncle, I’ll have my revenge.”

“Be quiet, you scoundrel.”

“Uncle, I’ll wager twenty glasses which of us lies under the table
first.”

“That’s what he calls respect.”

“Uncle, you are pinching me.”

“Be quiet; just look at this young farmer, twenty years old, who keeps
the whole farm going.”

“Well, Mr. Douglas, _I_ count for something, too,” cried Meyerhofer,
with a somewhat lengthened face.

“No offence to you,” the former answered; “but you have so much to do
with your company you naturally cannot bother about such trifles.”

Meyerhofer bowed, flattered, and Paul felt ashamed for him, for he well
understood the irony of these words.

Mrs. Douglas, smiling, beckoned him to come to her. She seized his hand
and stroked it. “You have grown tall and good-looking,” she said, in her
weak, kind voice, “and you have a beautiful beard.”

“But do call him ‘_Du_,’” interrupted his mother, who seemed to be much
easier in her mind than usual. “Paul, ask your godmother.”

“Yes--I entreat you,” said Paul, stammering and blushing anew.

“God bless you, my son,” said Mrs. Douglas; “you have deserved it,” and
then her head again sank against the trunk of the tree.

Paul stood behind the bench and did not know what to do. For the first
time since he was grown up he happened to find himself in strange
society.

His glance met Elsbeth’s, who, resting her head on her hand, looked
round at him.

“I suppose you won’t say ‘How do you do’ to me at all?” she added,
mischievously.

The familiar “_Du_” gave him courage. He stretched his hand out to her,
and asked how she had fared during all this long time.

A shade of sadness flitted across her face. “Not well,” she said,
softly; “but more of that later on when we are alone.”

She made room at her side, and said, “Come.” And as he sat down near her
his elbow touched her neck. Then a thrill went through his body, such as
he had never felt in all his life.

Leo Heller shook hands with him across the table, and said, laughing,
“To our good friendship, you pattern boy, you!”

“I am, unfortunately, not worthy to be taken for a pattern boy,” he
answered, innocently.

“Then be glad; I am not one, either. Nothing is more disgusting to me
than such a pattern boy.”

“Why, then, did you call me so?”

Leo looked at him quite surprised. “Oh, you seem to take everything
literally,” he said.

“Pardon me, I am so little accustomed to joking,” he replied, and a
blush of shame rose to his face. In turning towards Elsbeth he saw that
she was gazing at him with a strangely earnest, searching look. Then a
sudden feeling of bliss rose in his soul. He felt here was one who did
not think him stupid or ridiculous, who understood his nature and the
laws according to which it manifested itself.

While the three were silent his father, at the other end of the table,
continued to expound the plans of his company to Mr. Douglas.

“And if you trust me, sir--but no, you need not even do that--I mean to
say, if you will not frivolously forfeit your own chance--one must never
stand in the way of one’s chance, sir--if you have only just a little
spirit of enterprise--oh, then, yes, then, you know, there are hundreds
and thousands to be earned; the moor is inexhaustible--why let others
grow rich in your stead, sir? On through darkness to light; that’s my
device. I will strive and fight to the last breath; it is not my own
interest which is at stake. It seems to me to be a question for the
welfare of humanity. The aim is to win this barren soil for cultivation,
to give new life-blood to this whole district, to change the poverty of
this country into prosperity--to be a benefactor to humanity, sir.”

And in this tone he swaggered on.

Then suddenly he came quite close to Douglas, as if he wanted to put a
pistol to his head, crying,

“Then will you take shares in it sir?”

Douglas caught a glance from his wife, who quietly pointed towards Frau
Elsbeth, and made him a beseeching sign; then he said, half amused, half
angry, “I don’t mind.”

Paul was again ashamed, for he read in Douglas’s face that for him it
was only a question of the fun of throwing a few hundred thalers out of
the window. He himself knew, too well, that no sensible man could take
his father’s plans in earnest.

“Have you not seen our girls, Paul?” asked his mother, who now seemed no
less constrained than he.

No; he had not seen them anywhere.

“Do go and look about for them; they have gone to the dancing-ground.
Tell them not to be too wild, or else they will catch cold.”

Paul rose.

“I will go with you,” said Elsbeth.

“May I not come too, little cousin?” asked cousin Leo.

“You had better remain here,” she answered, lightly, whereupon he
declared he should be obliged to kill himself for grief.

“A merry bird,” said Paul, with a sigh of envy, as he walked at her side
through the crowd.

“Yes; but nothing more,” she replied.

“Do you like him?”

“Certainly; very much.

“She will marry him, after all,” Paul meditated.

All around people screamed and shouted. A lantern had caught fire, and
a troop of young fellows endeavored to tear it from the cord. Flaming
pieces of paper were flying through the air, and the liquid was spirted
in all directions.

Elsbeth put her arm in his and bent her head on his shoulder. Again that
blissful thrill which he could not explain ran through him.

“There, now I am safe,” she said, in a whisper. “Come to the wood
afterwards, Paul, I have so much to tell you; there we shall be
undisturbed.”

And as she said this he felt quite anxious, out of pure joy.

They had come to the dancing-place. The trumpets resounded, and the
dancers were spinning round and round.

“Shall we dance, too?” she asked, smiling.

“I cannot,” he answered.

“That does not matter,” she said; “for those sort of things Leo does
well enough.”

His foolish dreams which he had had under the juniper-bush to-day
occurred to him.

“So it is with everything that I fancy to myself,” he thought. “I have
still one of your books, Elsbeth,” he said then.

“I know, I know,” she answered, looking up at him with a smile.

“Pardon me that I--”

“Oh, what a fidget you are,” she jested. “Leo meanwhile has ruined my
whole library for me, and wants me now to replenish it for him, because
he has nothing more to read.”

Leo, and still Leo over again.

“Have you read much that is beautiful in it?” she asked him.

“Once I knew everything by heart.”

“And now?”

“Now? Oh, good heavens, I have so much to think of in every-day
life--they won’t fit into my head any longer.”

“Nor into mine, either, Paul. It is because we have seen too much of
life; poetry is lost to us.”

“To you, too?”

She sighed. “My poor mother,” she said.

“What is it?”

“You see, for five years I have been sick-nurse; there are many sad
hours, and when the night-light burns, and one’s eyes hurt with watching
so much, and outside the storm rattles the shutters, many thoughts come
to one about life and death, about love and loneliness--well, in short,
one makes a book of poetry in one’s own head and does not read other
people’s any more. But come away from this noise; I should like to ask
you so much, and here one can hardly hear one’s own voice.”

“Directly,” he said; “I only wanted--”

His eyes wandered searchingly over the dancing-ground, then he heard a
man’s voice behind him, saying:

“Just look at those two little minxes, mad after men.”

Instinctively he turned round, and saw the brothers Erdmann, whom he had
not met for years. They had meanwhile been at an agricultural college
and become grand gentlemen.

“We’ll have fun with them,” said the other.

Thereupon they laughingly mixed among the dancers.

Immediately after, Paul, too, saw his sisters. Their mass of brown curls
hung loose about their faces, their cheeks were aflame, their bosoms
heaved, and their eyes looked wild and eager for love.

“How happy they look--the sweet creatures,” said Elsbeth.

Paul gave them a little sermon. They scarcely heeded him, but looked
over his shoulders, giggling. And when he turned round he saw the two
Erdmanns, who had hidden behind the musicians’ platform and were making
clandestine signs to them.

The twins by this time had escaped him, and the Erdmanns disappeared as
well.

“Come away from here,” said Elsbeth.

He consented, but remained as if rooted to the ground.

“What is the matter?” she asked.

He passed his hand across his brow; he could not get those contemptuous
words which he had overheard out of his head. The sisters were young,
merry, inexperienced, nobody looked after them; if they should lower
themselves in any way, if they--an icy shudder passed through him.

And he, who had vowed to be their faithful guardian, he was going after
his own pleasure, he--

“Come to the wood,” Elsbeth pleaded again.

“I can’t,” he gasped.

She looked at him wonderingly.

“I must--my sisters--nobody is with them. Do not be angry.”

“Take me back to the table,” she said.

He did so. Neither spoke a word.

Five minutes later he came upon his sisters, who, arm in arm with the
Erdmanns, were trying to slip off to the wood.

“Where are you going?” he asked, stepping between them.

They lowered their eyes in embarrassment, and Katie stammered,
“We--wanted to go for a little walk.”

The brothers Erdmann took the tone of good-fellowship, shook hands with
him heartily, and wished most ardently to renew the friendship of their
youthful days. Behind his back they shook their fists at him.

“You will go at once to your mother,” he said to the twins, and as they
began to sulk he took their arms and drew them away. The table was half
deserted. The Douglas family had left the festival.

Then he went into the wood and reflected on what Elsbeth might have
wished to tell him.

But it was not to be--something always came between them.




CHAPTER XI.

It was a midsummer night. The alder-tree sent forth its perfume. The
moonlight lay in silver veils upon the earth. There was great rejoicing
in the village. Tar-barrels were lighted, and the farm-servants and
maids were dancing on the green. The flames sent their glare far over
the heath, and the shrill sounds of the fiddle came sadly through the
night.

Paul stood at the garden fence and looked out into the distance. The
servants had gone to the midsummer-night’s fire, and his sisters had not
come home yet, either.

They had asked permission to visit the vicar’s daughter Hedwig, their
playmate, who was an unpretending, quiet girl, in whose company he
gladly trusted them.

Now he thought he would wait till they had all come home.

The moonlight drew him out onto the heath. It lay there in midnight
silence; only in the heather a linnet chirped from time to time, as if
in its sleep. The wild-pinks bent their red heads, and the golden-rod
shone as if it wanted to compete with the moonbeams. Slowly, with
hesitating steps, he walked on, sometimes stumbling over a mole-hill
or entangling himself in the tendrils of the plants. The dew sparkled
before him in shining drops. Thus he came to the region of the
juniper-bushes, which looked more elf-like than usual.

The wood stood silent like a black wall, and the moonbeams rested on it
like freshly-fallen snow. He found the place where years ago the hammock
had hung; in the weird twilight the open space showed through the dark
branches. It drew him on and on. Like a palace of dazzling marble the
White House, with its balconies and gables, rose before his eyes. Deep
silence enshrouded the manor-house; only here and there a dog barked and
relapsed into silence directly.

He stood before the trellised gate, not knowing how he had come there.
He grasped the bars with both hands and looked in. The wide yard lay
yonder before him, bathed in the light of the moon; the big farm-wagons,
which were ranged in a row before the stables, stood there in black
outline; a white cat crept along the garden fence; everything else lay
in deep sleep.

He walked on along the fence. On the ash-heap behind the forge lay some
fragments of glimmering coals, which looked in the darkness like burning
eyes. Here the garden began. High elm-trees bent their branches over
him, and an overpowering perfume of laburnums and early roses floated
through the trellis-work towards him. The gravel-strewn paths shone like
silver threads through the branches, and the sundial, which had been the
dream of his childhood, stood out darkly behind them.

The White House came nearer and nearer. Now he could almost look into
the windows. Here, too, all seemed asleep.

He had read here and there in the Liederbuch, too, that the lover used
to sing serenades to the queen of his heart on moonlight nights, to
the accompaniment of either the guitar or mandolin if this was at all
feasible. It had been thus in the beautiful days of chivalry, and in
Spain or Italy might still be so. That occurred to him now, and he
pictured to himself how it would look if he, Paul the simpleton, were to
play the lute here as a knight-errant, crowing longing love-songs at the
same time.

At this thought he laughed out loud, and then he remembered that he
carried his instrument about with him everywhere. He seated himself on
the grass, his back leaning against a post of the fence, and began to
whistle--shyly and softly at first, then ever bolder and louder, and as
usual when he was entirely given up to his feelings, he at last forgot
everything around him.

He awoke as out of a dream when he heard a rustling and creaking of
branches at the other side of the fence. He looked round amazed. Yonder
stood Elsbeth in her white dressing-gown with a dark ulster hastily
thrown over it.

At the first moment he felt as if he must run away, but all his limbs
seemed to be lamed.

“Elsbeth--what are you doing here?” he stammered.

“Ah! what are _you_ doing here?” she retorted, smiling.

“I--I was whistling a little.”

“And you came here for that?”

“Why should I not?”

“You are right--I am not going to forbid you.”

She had pressed her forehead against the trellis-work and looked at him.
Both were silent.

“Will you come in?” she asked then--probably not knowing what she said.

“Shall I climb the fence?” he retorted, quite innocently.

She smiled. “No,” she said, shaking her head; “they could see you from
the window, and that would not do. But I must speak to you. Wait; I will
come out and walk a little way with you.”

She pushed a loose bar aside and slipped out; then she gave him her
hand, and said, “You were right to have come; I have often longed to
speak to you, but you were never there.” And she sighed deeply, as if
the remembrance of sad hours overpowered her.

His whole body trembled. The sight of the maidenly figure, who in her
night-garb stood before him so chaste and unconscious, almost took away
his breath. His temples hammered, he bent his eyes to the ground.

“Why do you not speak to me?” she asked.

A confused smile passed over his face.

“Do not be angry,” he gasped.

“Why should I be angry?” she asked. “I am so glad to have you for
once quite to myself. But it is strange--quite like a fairy tale. I
am standing at the window, looking at the moon. Mamma has just gone to
sleep, and I consider whether I, too, might venture to go to bed, but my
thoughts are so restless and my forehead burns--I feel so uneasy. Then
suddenly I hear somebody whistling in the garden, so beautifully, so
plaintively, as I have only once heard it in my life, and that a long
time ago. ‘That can only be Paul,’ I say to myself, and the more I
listen the clearer it is to me. ‘But how does he come here?’ I ask
myself, and as I want above all things to make certain, I put on my
cloak and creep down--so--here I am now, and now come, let us go into
the wood; there no one can see us.”

She laid her arm in his. Silently they walked across the moonlit meadow.
And then suddenly she put both her hands up to her face and began to cry
bitterly.

“Elsbeth, what is the matter?” he asked, terrified.

She trembled; her soft figure shook with noiseless sobs.

“Elsbeth, can’t I help you?” he pleaded.

She shook her head hastily. “It’s all right,” she gasped; “it will soon
be over.” She tried to walk on, but her strength failed her. Sighing,
she sank down into the damp grass.

He remained standing before her, looking down at her. “Let tears have
their course;” that was the rule which he had already often experienced
in life. All his timidity had left him. Here was somebody to be
consoled, and he was a master at consoling.

When she had grown a little quieter he sat near her, and said, gently,
“Will you unburden your heart to me, Elsbeth?”

“Yes, I will,” she cried; “I have waited to do so these three long
years. So long have I borne it, Paul, and I was almost choked with the
burden, and have found no pitying soul in whom I could confide. Yonder
in Italy and at beautiful Capri, where everything laughs and rejoices,
I have often crept down to the sea in the middle of the night and cried
out in my agony, and in the morning I have come back and laughed, even
more than the others, for my mother--oh, mother, mother!” she cried,
sobbing afresh.

“Be calm; you have me now, to whom you can tell it,” he whispered to
her.

“Yes, I have you, I have you,” she gasped, and leaned her face on his
shoulder. “You see I have always known that; but what good did that do
me? You were far away, I was often nearly writing to you, but I feared
you might have become a stranger to me and would misunderstand me. And
since we are back I have only one thought: ‘I must confide in him, he is
the only one who has known grief, he will understand me.’”

“Tell me what it is, Elsbeth,” he urged.

“She will die,” she cried out aloud.

“Your mother?”

“Yes.”

“Who told you so?”

“The professor in Vienna who examined her. He wore quite a cheerful face
before her, and said, ‘If you are careful, you can live to a hundred
years old,’ but afterwards he sent for me, and asked me, ‘Are you
strong, young lady? Can you bear the truth?’ ‘I beg you to tell me all,’
I answered, ‘I must confide it to you,’ he said, ‘for you are the
only one who nurses her.’ And then he told me that she might die any
day--unless--and then he gave me a number of rules which she must
observe about eating and drinking and climate and excitement, and much
more. Since that day I tremble from morning to night, and tend her and
watch and find no rest. Sometimes the feeling comes over me, and I say
to myself, ‘You are young and want to enjoy life,’ and then I try to
be merry and sing, but every note chokes me and I collapse again. Of
course, I must show a cheerful face to mother, and to father as well.”
 “But why do you not confide in him?” he interrupted her.

“Shall his life be poisoned as well?” she replied. “No, I had rather
bear it alone than see him suffer, too. He has a happy nature, and loves
her with all his soul--otherwise he is sometimes hasty and excitable,
but to her he has never said an angry word--let him hope as long as he
can--I will not undeceive him.”

She leaned her head on her hands and stared straight before her.

He remembered his mother’s fairy tale.

“Dame Care--Dame Care,” he murmured to himself.

“What do you say?” she asked, and looked at him with great, eager eyes,
hungry for consolation.

“Oh, nothing,” he replied, with a sad smile, “I wish I could help you.”

“Who could do that?”

“And yet perhaps I can,” he said, “you have only wanted somebody to
confide in, you are not so badly off as you think--indeed, Dame Care has
blessed you, too.”

“What does that mean?” she asked

And then he told her the beginning of that fairy tale which he had kept
in his memory so well.

“And how can one be freed from her blessings?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” he replied, “mother never would tell me the end of
the fairy tale. I don’t think, either, there is any deliverance. Such
creatures as we are must renounce happiness of our own free will, and
however near it may be to us we may not see it--something sad always
comes between us and happiness. The only thing we can do is to watch
over the happiness of others and to make them as happy as possible.”

“But I should like to be a little happy myself,” she said, raising her
eyes to him trustfully.

“I wish I were as happy as you are,” he answered.

“If only this anxiety were not always with me,” she complained.

“Anxiety! you must let her be your friend, I have known her all my life,
and when I did not know why I quickly found some reason. It is not
so bad, either--if there were no anxiety, one would not know for what
purpose one lives. But only think how contented you might be. You see
nothing but merry faces surrounding you. Your mother feels happy in
spite of all her sufferings, does she not?”

“Yes, thank God,” she replied, “she has no idea how ill she is.”

“There you see! and your father has no idea of it, either. No care
weighs on them, they love each other, and love you as well. No angry
word is spoken among you, and when your mother at last closes her eyes
she will perhaps do so with a smile on her lips, and be able to say, ‘I
have always been very happy.’ Do tell me--what more can you wish for?”

“But she shall not die,’ cried Elsbeth.

“Why not? he asked, ‘is death so terrible?”

“Not for her but for myself.

“There must not be any question of one’s self,” he replied, pressing his
lips firmly together, “one must just try to bear it the best one can.
Death is only terrible when one has waited for happiness all through
life and it has not come. Then one must feel as if one had to get up
hungry from a richly spread table, and I should like to save any one
I love from that. You see I have a mother, too, she also wished to be
happy once, and even yet would like far too much to be so. I am the only
one who could take care from her shoulders, and I am not able to do so.
What do you think I must feel in this case? I see how she grows old in
sorrow and need, I can count the wrinkles on her forehead and cheeks.
Her mouth falls in and her chin grows long. It is a long time since
she spoke any loud word, from day to day she becomes quieter, and so,
quietly, she will die one day, and I shall be standing by and shall
say, ‘It is my fault, I have not been able to give her one single day of
happiness.”

“Poor fellow,” she whispered, “can’t I help you at all?”

“No one can help me as long as my father--” he stopped, terrified at the
course of his own thoughts.

Both were silent They sat there for a long time without moving, their
twenty year old heads leaning on their hands bowed with care. The
moonbeams lay like silver on their hair, which the soft wind of the
heath ruffled gently.

Then the shadow of a cloud passed over them They both trembled. They
felt as if the sad fairy whom they called Dame Care were spreading her
sombre wings over them.

“I will go home,” Elsbeth said, rising.

“Go, with God’s blessing,” he answered, solemnly.

She seized both his hands “Thank you,” she said, softly, “you have done
me much, much good.”

“And if you need me again--”

“Then I shall come and whistle for you,” she answered, smiling.

And then they parted.

As in a dream Paul walked through the dark wood. The fir trees rustled
softly, the moonbeams were dancing on the moss.

“It is strange,” he thought, “that they all tell me their woes,” and
he concluded from that that he was the happiest of them all. “Or the
unhappiest,” he added, meditatively, but then he laughed mysteriously
and threw his cap high in the air.

When he stepped out into the light on the heath he saw two shadows
flitting before him which disappeared in the misty distance.

Immediately after he heard something rustle in the juniper bushes.

He turned quickly round and saw another shadowy couple, who seemed to
sink into the ground behind a bush.

“The whole heath seems alive to-day,” he murmured, and added, smiling,
“of course, it is mid summer night.”

Soon after him the twins came home with wild hair and flushed faces.
They declared the vicar had told them their fortunes by cards till
midnight. They would soon get husbands.

Giggling, they slipped away into their bedroom.




CHAPTER XII

Old Meyerhofer revelled in happiness. The promise of the rich Douglas
to participate in his undertakings had raised his chances suddenly to a
giddy height. The ears which for him heretofore had been closed began
to listen to his explanations with eagerness, and in the public houses,
where until now he had been received with a half ironical, half pitying
smile, he was now considered a great man.

“He will join me with half his fortune,” he related, “we are already in
communication with Borsig, in Berlin, who is going to furnish us with
the necessary machines, we have written to Oldenburg for a technical
director, and every day we have inquiries at what price we are able to
sell the peat blocks per million.”

The consequence was that they pressed him to begin issuing his shares
and when they gathered round him and asked him to reserve so and so many
shares for each, he drew himself up proudly and said they would probably
remain in private hands.

At home he was busy designing the new headings for the note paper of the
future firm, and the borrowed money jingled in all his pockets.

Four weeks had passed since that midsummer night, when there came from
Helenenthal two cards of invitation one for Meyerhofer junior and the
other for the young ladies.

“For a garden party,” they said.

“Aha! they court our favor already,” the old man cried, “the rats smell
the bacon.”

Paul went with his card--which bore Elsbeth’s hand-writing--behind a
haystack, and there studied each letter of it in solitude for wellnigh
an hour.

Then he went up to his garret and stood before the looking glass.

He found that his whiskers had grown in fulness and only at the cheeks
still showed thin places.

“It will do very well,” he said, in an attack of vanity, but when he saw
himself smile he wondered at the deep sad lines which ran from his eyes,
past his nose, down to the corners of his mouth.

“Wrinkles make one interesting,” he consoled himself by thinking.

From this hour he exclusively thought about what role he was to play at
the party.

He practised before the looking glass making stylish bows, and every
morning looked at his Sunday suit, and tried to hide the shabbiness of
his coat by brushing some black color over it.

The invitation had caused a great revolution in his mind It was for
him a greeting from the promised land of joy, which he, like Moses,
had never seen but from afar. It was not for nothing that he was twenty
years old.

The day of the party arrived. His sisters had put on their white muslin
dresses and fastened dark roses in their hair. They skipped up and down
before the looking glass and asked each other, “Am I beautiful?’ And
though each willingly replied” Yes,’ to this question, they hardly knew
how beautiful they were.

His mother sat in a corner, looked at them and smiled.

Paul ran hither and thither in confusion. He inwardly wondered how such
a joyful event could cause one such great anxiety. He had prepared all
sorts of beautiful speeches which he intended to hold at the party
about the welfare of humanity, about peat-culture, and Heine’s “Buch
der Lieder”. They should see that he was able to converse amiably with
ladies.

The open carriage, a remainder of past splendor, took the brother and
sisters to the party. They were to return on foot.

As they approached, Paul saw behind the fence bright colored dresses
flitting through the shrubs and heard the giggling of merry girls’
voices. His uncomfortable feeling was considerably augmented by this.

In the veranda Mr Douglas received them with a merry laugh. He pinched
the sisters’ cheeks, slapped him on the shoulder, and said,

“Well, young knight, to day we are going to win our spurs.”

Paul turned his cap in his hand and broke into a silly laugh, at which
he felt angry with himself.

“Now _allons_ to the ladies!” cried Mr Douglas, taking the sisters one
on each arm, while he himself had to trot behind them.

The giggling came nearer and nearer. Gay men’s voices were intermingled
with it--he felt as if he were going to be beheaded. And then a sort of
veil came over his eyes, indistinctly he saw the crowd of strange faces,
which seemed to stare at him from the clouds. His speeches about the
turf-culture came to his mind, but there was nothing to be done with
them at this moment.

Then he saw Elsbeth’s face rise in the mist. She wore a brooch of blue
stones and smiled at him kindly. In spite of this smile she never had
appeared so strange to him as at that moment.

“Mr Paul Meyerhofer, the companion of my childhood,’ she said, taking
his hand, and leading him round. He bowed to all sides, and had a vague
feeling that he was making himself ridiculous.

“Eh, there is my pattern boy,” the cousin’s merry voice called out, and
all the ladies giggled.

Then he was asked to sit down and was offered a cup of coffee.

“Mamma has gone to lie down a little,” Elsbeth whispered to him, “she is
not quite well to day.”

“Isn’t she?” he said, and smiled in a silly manner Cousin Leo had
gathered a circle of young ladies round himself, and told them a story
about a young lawyer who had been so fond of sweets that, seeing a bag
_pralines_ which he was not allowed to have, he had been crystallized
into a sugar loaf. They almost died with laughter over this.

“Oh, if only I could tell such stories,” thought Paul to himself and,
as nothing better occurred to him, he ate one piece of cake after the
other.

Ihe sisters had immediately been laid hold of by several strange
gentlemen, they laughed boldly in their faces while the quickest
repartees flowed from their mouths.

The sisters suddenly appeared to him like beings from a higher world.

“Now we are going to play a nice game, ladies,” said Cousin Leo putting
one knee across the other, and leaning back negligently in his arm
chair. “The game is called ‘Proposing.’ The ladies walk about singly and
the gentlemen, too. The gentleman asks the lady he meets, ‘_Est ce que
vous m’armez?_’ and the lady either answers ‘_Je vous adore_’--then
she is his wife--or she silently refuses him. He who receives the most
refusals receives a nightcap, which he has to wear during the rest of
the whole evening.”

The ladies thought this game very amusing, and all rose to set to work
directly Paul rose, too, though he would have liked best to remain in
his dark corner.

“What can those foreign words be?” he asked himself, he would have liked
to inquire of one of the gentlemen, but he was ashamed to betray his
ignorance and so to disgrace his sisters. Elsbeth had gone away with the
other girls, he would have liked best to confide in her.

He went after the others, quite depressed, but when he saw the first
lady coming towards him his anxiety was so great that he quickly left
the path and hid in the thickest shrubs.

There was a little wilderness there, as if it might have been in the
deepest part of the wood Nettles and ferns raised their slender stalks,
and the uncanny wolf’s milk was competing for supremacy with the
burdock. In the midst of this tangled undergrowth he crouched down, put
his elbows on his knees, and meditated.

“So that was what people called amusing themselves? It was a good thing
that he should learn it for once, but like it he could not. Anyhow, it
was nicer at home, and, besides, who could know whether the servants
had finished weeding in time--whether the peat had not been piled up too
damp? There was much to do at home, while he was lingering about
here, entering into silly games like a fool. If it had not been for
Elsbeth--but, indeed, what good was she to him? As she smiled at him so
she smiled at them all, and if Cousin Leo began with his jokes how bold
he was, how he flattered them all. Oh the world is bad, and they are all
false--all, all!”

He heard his name being called from the path, but he pressed himself
the closer into his hiding place. Here at least he was sheltered from
mockery. An oppressive sultriness was in the air, sleepy buzzing drones
were creeping about on the ground. A thunder storm seemed at hand.

“It’s all the same to me,” thought Paul, “I have nothing to lose
and--the winter rye is in.”

It had grown quiet outside--from the distance the clatter of glasses,
glass plates, and teaspoons could be heard, and from time to time it was
intermingled with a suppressed laugh.

Paul drew in his breath. The longer he remained in his hiding place the
more dejected he felt, at last he appeared to himself like a school
boy who hides to escape his master’s punishment. The smell of the weeds
became more intense and more unbearable, an unpleasant moisture came up
from the damp ground, like a pale fog it rose before his eyes Steel blue
clouds rolled up in the sky, the thunder began to resound afar.

“That’s what they call pleasure,” thought Paul.

There was a rustling in the branches. Heavy drops came splashing down on
the leaves, then Paul crept out of his hiding place like a criminal.

Shouts of laughter--welcomed him from the veranda.

“There comes August” one of the gentlemen called out, softly. He had
been in Berlin and had seen the circus there, and the others joined him.

“My honored guests,’ cried Leo, climbing on a chair,” this pattern boy,
called Paul Meyerhofer, has in the most inconsiderate manner withdrawn
from the verdict of the assembly. As he foresaw, in his feeling of
unworthiness, that most of the refusals would be gathered upon his
undignified head, he has in most reprehensible cowardice--”

“I don’t know why you speak so badly of me,” said Paul, hurt, for he
took everything seriously.

A fresh peal of laughter answered him

“I make the proposition to confer the nightcap on him as a punishment
for his crime, and to form a jury for this purpose.”

“If you please, I’ll take the cap without that,” Paul answered,
irritated. By this time he had only to open his mouth to call forth
fresh mirth.

Solemnly he was crowned with the nightcap.

“I must look very funny, after all,’ he thought, for they were all dying
with laughter. Only his sisters did not laugh, blushing deeply, they
looked down in their laps, and Elsbeth looked it him with embarrassment,
as if she wanted to ask his pardon.

“August,” was again softly whispered from the circle of gentlemen.

Immediately after, the thunder storm broke forth

In troops they all took refuge in the house. The young ladies turned
pale, most of them were afraid of the thunder, one even fainted.

Leo proposed they should form a circle, and that each of them should
tell a story, he who did not know any had to give a forfeit.

They agreed to this. The order of precedence was appointed by lot, and
one of the gentlemen made the beginning with a merry student’s anecdote,
which he declared he had experienced himself. Then it was the turn of
some young girls, who preferred to pay forfeits, and then he himself was
called out.

The gentlemen cleared their throats mockingly, and the girls nudged each
other and giggled. Then anger overpowered him, and, knitting his brow,
he began at random,

“Once upon a time there was some one who was so ridiculous that people
had only to look at him when they wanted to laugh to their hearts
content. He himself did not know how this was, for he had never laughed
in his life.”

There was a deep silence all round. The smiles froze on their faces,
first one and then the other looked down upon the ground.

“Go on,” cried Elsbeth, nodding to him gently. But a feeling of shame
came over him that he thus dared to show his innermost self to these
strange people.

“I can’t go on,” he said, and rose.

This time no one laughed, and for a while there was only a deep,
oppressive silence, and then the girl who had been chosen to collect the
forfeits came up to him and said, with a polite courtesy,

“Then you must pay a forfeit.”

“Willingly,” he answered, and detached his watch from the chain.

“An uncomfortable fellow,” he heard one of the young gentlemen say low
to his neighbor. It was he who had first called up that nickname.

Then it was Leo’s turn, who treated them to one of his most racy
anecdotes, but the gayety would not come back again.

The rain splashed against the window panes with a hollow sound, the
shadow of black clouds filled the room. It was as if the gray Dame was
gliding through the air and touching the laughing young faces with her
wings, so that they looked serious and old.

Only when Elsbeth opened the piano and began a merry dance the frozen
gayety recommenced.

Paul stood in a corner and gazed at the merrymaking. They left him quite
to himself, only now and then a shy glance met him.

The twins were flying round the room, their curls were loose, and a wild
light sparkled in their eyes.

“Let them romp about,” thought Paul, “they must return to misery soon
enough.” But that there was no misery for them never occurred to him.

When Elsbeth was replaced at the piano by somebody else, she came
towards him and said, “You are very much bored, are you not?”

“Oh no,” he said. “Everything is still so new to me.”

“Be merry,” she pleaded; “we only live once.”

And at that moment Leo came rushing up to her, seized her round the
waist, and danced away with her.

“Nevertheless, she is still a stranger to you,” thought Paul.

As she passed him again she whispered to him, “Go into the next room; I
have something to tell you.”

“What can she mean to tell me?” he thought; but he did as he was told.

Half hidden by the curtain, he waited, but as she did not come, every
minute the bitterness of his soul increased. He remembered his beautiful
speeches about the peat-culture and Heine’s “Buch der Lieder,” and
shrugged his shoulders contemptuously over his own stupidity. He felt
as if he had grown years older and maturer in the course of this one
afternoon.

And then the questions suddenly arose within him, “What business have
you here? What are all those merry people, who laugh and want to please
each other, and live thoughtlessly from one day to another--what are all
those to you? You were a fool, a miserable fool, when you thought that
you had a right to be merry; that you, too, could be what they are.”

The ground burned under his feet. He felt as if he were committing a sin
by remaining a minute longer in this place.

He slipped out into the hall, where his cap hung.

“Tell my sisters,” he said to the servant who was waiting there, “that I
am going home to order a carriage for them.”

And he breathed as if relieved when the door closed behind him.

The storm had abated: a soft rain came drizzling from the sky, the wind
blew refreshingly over the heath, and at the verge of the horizon, where
the evening glow paled away, the sheet-lightning of the far-distant
thunder-storm shot from fiery, glowing clouds.

As if the wild hunters were behind him, he ran across the rain-soaked
road to the wood, whose branches closed above his head with a peaceful
murmur. The damp moss sent out its perfume, and sparkling drops fell
from the needles of the fir-trees.

When he stepped out onto the heath, and saw the dark outline of his
home before his eyes, he stretched out his arms, and cried out into the
storm:

“Here is my place--here I belong, and I shall be a rogue if ever again
I try to find my happiness among strangers. I swear here that I will
reject all vanities and foolish hankerings. I know now what I am, and
what is unfit for me shall be lost to me. Amen.”

So he took leave of his youth and of his youthful dreams.




CHAPTER XIII.

When he awoke next morning he found his mother sitting near his bed.

“You up already?” he asked, wonderingly.

“I have not been able to sleep,” she said, in her low voice, which
always sounded as if she were asking pardon for what she said.

“Why not?” he asked.

She did not answer, but stroked his hair and smiled at him sadly. Then
he knew that the twins had been telling tales, and that it was grief for
him which did not let her rest.

“It was not so bad, mother,” he said, consolingly; “they made fun of me
a little, nothing more.”

“Elsbeth, too?” she asked, with big, anxious eyes.

“No, not she,” he replied, “but--” he was silent and turned to the wall.

“But what?” asked his mother.

“I don’t know,” he answered, “but there is a ‘but’ in it--”

“You wrong her, perhaps,” said his mother, “and look, she sent you
this by the girls.” She drew from her pocket a long object which was
carefully wrapped in tissue-paper.

In it was a flute, made of black ebony, with sparkling silver keys.

Paul blushed with shame and joy; but his joy soon vanished, and after he
had looked at the instrument for a while he said, softly, “What must I
do with it now?”

“You must learn to play it,” answered his mother, with a touch of pride.

“It is too late,” he replied, shaking his head sadly; “there are other
things for me to do.” He felt as if he had been made to drag something
dead out of its grave.

“Well, it seems that you cut a nice figure yesterday,” said his father,
when they met at the breakfast-table.

He quietly smiled to himself, and his father muttered something about
lack of feeling of honor.

The twins had big dreamy eyes, and when they looked at each other a
blissful smile crossed their faces. They, at least, were happy.

Weeks passed. The harvest was got in unharmed, thanks to Paul’s untiring
care. It was a better year than it had been for a long time. But his
father was already calculating how he could use the profits for his peat
speculation.

He bragged on in his usual manner, and the less Mr. Douglas seemed to
pay attention to the proceedings, the more he boasted at the inns about
the advantage of his partnership.

Having once consented to swindle, he had to outvie every lie by a new
and bigger one. Mr. Douglas might be as patient as he liked; the abuse
which was made of his name at last became too much for him.

It was one morning towards the end of August that Paul, who was working
in the yard with Michel Raudszus, saw the tall figure of their neighbor
walking across the fields straight to the Haidehof.

He was startled--that could not bode any good.

Mr. Douglas shook hands with him kindly, but from under his iron-gray,
bushy brows shot an ill-boding look.

“Is your father at home?” he asked, and his voice sounded angry and
threatening.

“He is in the parlor,” Paul said, depressed; “if you will allow me, I
will take you to him.”

At the sight of the unexpected guest, his father jumped up embarrassed
from his chair; but he recovered himself immediately, and began, in his
boasting tone, “Oh, it is a good thing that you are here, sir; I have
something urgent to say to you.”

“And I not less to you,” retorted Mr. Douglas, planting his massive
figure close before him. “How is it, my dear friend, that you abuse my
name in this manner?”

“I--your name--sir? What do you mean? Paul, go out.”

“He may stay here,” retorted Mr. Douglas, turning to Paul.

“He shall go out, sir!” cried the old man. “I suppose I am still master
in my own house, sir?”

Paul left the room.

In the dark passage he found his mother, who had folded her hands and
was gazing towards the door with a fixed look. At the sight of him she
broke into tears and wrung her hands.

“He will lose us the only friend we have still on earth,” she sobbed;
then she sank down in his arms, starting convulsively when the
threatening voices of the two men fell louder on her ear.

“Come away, mother,” he urged; “it excites you too much, and we can’t
help matters, anyhow.”

She let him drag her to her bedroom without resistance.

“Give me a little vinegar,” she entreated, “or I shall drop.”

He did as she asked, and while he rubbed her temples with it, spoke to
her in a loud tone, so that she should not hear the raised voices of the
two men.

Suddenly the doors banged; for a while all was quiet--uncomfortably
quiet; then the clattering of a chain and the cry of his father, hoarse
with fury,

“Sultan--at him!”

“For God’s sake, he is setting the dog at him!” shrieked Paul, and
rushed into the yard.

He came just in time to see how Sultan, a big fierce mastiff, sprang at
Douglas’s neck, while his father, brandishing his whip, ran after him.

Michel Raudszus had thrust his hands into his pockets and was looking
on.

“Father, what are you doing?” he shouted, tore the whip from his hand,
and wanted to go after the dog, but before he could reach the struggling
group the beast, strangled by the powerful hand of the giant, lay on the
ground stretching out its four paws.

The blood ran down from Douglas’s arm and neck. His anger seemed
over. He remained standing still, wiping his hands with his
pocket-handkerchief, and said, with a good-natured smile,

“The poor beast has had to pay for it.”

“You are wounded, Mr. Douglas!” Paul cried, clasping his hands.

“He has taken my neck for a joint of veal,” he said. “Come with me for
a few steps, and help me to wash myself, so that my womenkind may not be
too much frightened.”

“Forgive him,” Paul entreated; “he did not know what he was doing.”

“Will you come back, you wretch?” shrieked his father’s voice from
the yard. “I suppose you want to make common cause with that forsworn
scoundrel!”

There was a convulsive twitch in his neighbor’s clinched fists; but he
mastered himself, and said with a forced smile,

“Go back; the son ought to stay with the father.”

“But I want to make amends,” Paul stammered.

“The swindler, the rogue,” was heard from the background.

“Go back,” said Douglas, with set teeth; “make him keep quiet, or he
will do for himself.”

Then he began to whistle a march with all his might, in order not to
hear the abuse, and walked off with a measured tread.

The old man was raging in the yard like a madman; he threw the stones
about, swung the cart-pole in the air, and kicked with his feet right
and left.

When he met Paul he wanted to seize him by the throat, but at that
moment his mother rushed out of doors with a piercing cry and threw
herself between them. She clung to Paul with both arms; she wanted to
speak, but the fear of her husband lamed her tongue. She could only look
at him.

“Pack of women!” he cried, shrugging his shoulders contemptuously, and
turned away; but feeling obliged to vent his rage on somebody, he walked
up to Michel Raudszus, who was slowly returning to his work.

“You dog, what are you gaping here for?” he shouted at him.

“I am working, sir,” he answered, and gave him a cutting glance from
under his black brows.

“What should prevent me, you dog, from grinding you to powder?” the old
man shrieked, shaking his fists under his nose.

The servant shrank back, and at that moment both his master’s fists
struck him in the face. He staggered back--every drop of blood left his
dark face; without uttering a sound, he seized upon an axe.

But at this moment, Paul, who had been watching the scene with growing
anxiety, grasped his arm from behind, wrested the weapon from his hand,
and threw it into the well.

His father tried to clutch the servant by the throat again, but with
quick resolution Paul seized him round the body, and although the old
man kicked and struggled, gathering up all strength, carried him in his
arms into the parlor, the door of which he locked from the outside.

“What have you done to your father?” his mother whimpered. She had
beheld this deed of violence petrified with horror, for that her son
could attack his father was to her perfectly incomprehensible. She
looked shyly up at him, and repeated, wofully, “What have you done to
your father?”

Paul bent down to her, kissed her hand, and said, “Be calm, mother, I
had to save his life.”

“And now you have locked him up? Paul, Paul!”

“He must remain there till Michel has gone,” he replied. “Don’t open the
door for him, or there will be an accident.”

Then he walked out into the yard. The servant was leaning against the
stable door, chewing his black beard, and leering at him viciously.

“Michel Raudszus!” he called out to him.

The man approached. The veins on his forehead had swollen like blue
cords. He did not dare look at him.

“Your surplus wages are five marks and fifty pfennigs. Here they are. In
five minutes you must be gone.”

The servant gave him such a terribly sinister glance that Paul was
alarmed at the thought that he had suffered this man near him so long
without any foreboding; he kept his eyes fixed upon him, for he feared
every moment to be attacked by him.

But the servant turned away in silence, went to the stables, where he
tied up his bundle, and two minutes later walked out at the gate. During
the whole terrible scene he had not uttered a single word.

“That’s done! now to father,” said Paul, firmly resolved to bear all
blows and abuse calmly.

He unlocked the door, and expected that his father would rush upon him.

The old man was sitting huddled up in the corner of the sofa, staring
before him. He did not move, either, when Paul came up to him and said,
beseechingly,

“I did not like doing it, father, but it had to be done.”

He only gave him a shy look askance; then said, bitterly,

“You can do what you like; I am an old man, and you are the strongest.”

Then he sank back again.

From that day forward Paul was master in the house.




CHAPTER XIV.

Three weeks had passed since then. Paul worked like a galley-slave. In
spite of that a strange unrest was upon him. When he allowed himself a
few moments’ repose he could not bear to stay at home. He felt as if the
walls were falling in upon him. Then he rambled about on the heath or in
the wood, or he lingered near Helenenthal.

“If I should meet Elsbeth I think I should sink into the ground with
shame,” he said to himself, and yet he looked about for her everywhere,
and trembled with fear and joy when he saw a female figure coming
towards him in the distance.

He also began to neglect his night’s rest. As soon as all in the house
were asleep he crept away, and often returned only in the bright morning
to go to work again with swimming head and weary limbs.

“I will make amends--amends,” he murmured often to himself; and when
his scythe hissed through the corn, he said, keeping time with it, “make
amends--make amends.” But how to do so was totally vague to him; he did
not even know if Douglas had been seriously hurt by the dog’s bite.

Once when he was roving about at twilight on the other side of the wood
he saw Michel Raudszus coming from Helenenthal. He carried a spade over
his shoulder, on which hung a bundle. Paul looked at him fixedly; he
expected to be attacked by him, but the servant only gave him a shy
side-glance and a wide berth.

“That fellow looks as if he were brooding over some evil,” he thought,
looking after him.

Douglas had taken the expelled workman into his service, so one of the
laborers said, and when his father heard this he laughed, and said,
“That’s just like the hypocrite--he will brew something nice for me.”

He was firmly convinced that Douglas had given his case into the hands
of the law; indeed, he found a certain satisfaction in the thought that
he would be judged “unjustly,” of course, and as from one day to the
other the summons never came, he explained, scornfully,

“The noble lord is fond of respites.”

But Douglas seemed willing totally to ignore the ignominy he had
suffered; he did not even demand the capital lent on mortgage.

Paul’s soul was overflowing with gratitude, and the less he found means
to show it the deeper he felt the shame--the more his unrest haunted
him.

So one night he again stood motionless at the garden fence of
Helenenthal.

Early autumn mists lay on the ground, and the withering grass quivered
lightly.

The White House disappeared in the shadows of the night, and only from
one of the windows there shone a dull, dark-red light.

“There she is, watching near her sick mother,” Paul thought. And as
he found no other means to call her he began to whistle. Twice, three
times, he stopped to listen. Nobody came, and anxiety rose within him.

With groping hand he searched for the gap in the fence which Elsbeth
had shown him once, and when he had found it he penetrated to the inner
garden. The branches tore his clothes as, in a sort of wilderness, he
crept along the ground to find a path. At last he came to an open place.
The white gravel threw out a dim light which shone brighter than the
little lamp in the sick-room.

He seated himself on a bench and looked thither. He thought he saw a
shadow moving behind the curtains.

Then suddenly all around grew light; the rose-trees were visible in the
night; the gravel sparkled, and the gables of the dwelling-house, which
had just before stood out in a dark mass, now showed in dark reddish
tints, as if the light of dawn had fallen upon it.

Wonderingly he turned round; the blood froze in his veins; a purple
flash of fire shot up in the dark sky. The black clouds were outlined
with edges of fire, white flames whirled upward, and high above shot the
glowing beams, as if there was an _aurora borealis_ in the sky.

“Father’s house is burning!”

His head fell heavily against the back of the bench; the next moment he
raised himself up, his knees shook, the blood hammered in his temples.
“On, on! save what is to be saved!” cried a voice within him; and with
a wild rush he broke through the bushes, climbed the garden fence, and
sank down into the ditch on the other side.

The burning farm glared over the heath like the rising sun. The stubble
shone, and the black wood was dipped in a red glow.

The dwelling-house was as yet unhurt; its walls shone like marble, its
windows sparkled like carbuncles. The yard was as bright as in daylight.
It was the barn that was burning--the barn, filled to the roof with the
harvest. His work, his happiness, his hope, lost like this in smoke and
flames.

He gathered himself up again; in wild haste he rushed across the heath.
When he passed the wood he thought he saw a shadow flitting away which,
at his approach, sank flat on the ground. He scarcely heeded it.

“On, on! save what is to be saved!”

Tumultuous screams greeted him from the yard. The farm-servants were
rushing about wildly, the maids were wringing their hands, his sisters
ran about calling his name.

The village had just awakened.... The high-road filled with people....
Water-buckets were dragged forth, and a rotten fire--engine came also
rattling along.

“Where is your master?” he shouted to the servants.

“Just being carried in; he has broken his leg,” was the reply.
Misfortune upon misfortune.

“Let the barn burn,” he called out to others who, losing their heads
entirely, were pouring tiny buckets of water into the flames.

“Save the cattle--take care that they do not run into the flames.”

Three or four men hurried to the stables.

“You others to the house; don’t carry anything out of it.”

“Don’t carry anything out,” he repeated, tearing the objects out of the
hands of some strangers who were just dragging them out of the house.

“But we want to save the things.”

“Save the house!”

He hurried up the staircase. In passing he saw his mother sitting mute
and tearless near his father, who lay on the sofa, whimpering.

Through a trap-door he jumped onto the roof.

“Give me the hose.”

On a pitchfork they handed him the metal point of the hose. The column
of water fell hissing upon the hot bricks.

He sat astride on the ridge of the roof. His clothes became hot;
glimmering sparks, which came flying from the barn, settled on his hair.
Burning wounds covered his face and hands.

He felt nothing that happened to his person, but he saw and heard
everything around him--his senses seemed doubled.

He saw how the sheaves flew up to the sky in fier

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