The Undying Past Part 22

Johanna watched him with a sour smile. "It would serve her right," said she. "But what can you do? You are powerless before her."

"I? What do you take me for? Am I a cur? A slave of women? Her charm is for me completely broken, years ago. To-day I should confront her only as a judge."

Again she shrugged her shoulders, but this time compa.s.sionately. "You poor boy! She would only have to ask, 'Who has made me what I am?' and your occupation of the judgment-seat would come to an end."

He sank into a chair, the tears falling fast over his sunburnt cheeks, in which excitement had dug deep furrows. He sat motionless, crushed, and annihilated.

She drew nearer to him and wiped his forehead, from which the perspiration poured.

"Poor, poor boy!" she said; and then, close to his ear, "I think I understand what can be done."

A long silence ensued. He glowered at the ground, the corners of his mouth working. Then a desperate resolve fought its way slowly upwards within him. At last he murmured--

"I see nothing for it but to open his eyes."

"Good heavens!" she cried. "Do you think he would believe you? He would say that she had already told him herself."

He recalled the tone of gentle consideration in which his friend had spoken of his wife's bizarre moods. It would not be very difficult for a pure mind like Ulrich's to put the worst in a harmless light. And besides, how was he to summon up the courage to tell his friend what all the country-side was gossiping about? He, who himself in the past had afforded the gravest material for such gossip?

His sister, taking hold of his hands, went on, "No, Leo, that won't do.

There is only one course to pursue. We two must keep watch on her. Only thus can we, you as well as I, make amends for the wrong we have done him. For you are at present the only person of whom she is afraid, the only one who has any power over her. And you must use this power to bring her back into the right path. You understand what I mean?"

He understood only too well! What she demanded was the total destruction of all his vigorous plans. There was no doubt that if he became reconciled with his former mistress, she would be willing to receive him. But then the guilt which lay buried in silence must be dragged again into the light of day. If he crossed his friend's sacred threshold, the unholy secret must bear him company. Significant glances would be exchanged at the table, and guilty whispers echo from the listening walls. Would that be anything more or less than reviving the sin? How could he dare meet the questioning look of his friend if at the same time the eyes of the once-beloved rested tenderly upon him?

And then there was the child. How could he ever bear to listen again to that innocent prattle? How could he endure to feel the pressure of the delicate little body as he came to be swung on to his knee, the sound of the dear childish voice as it called him by pet names? No! a thousand times no! He sprang to his feet.

She threw herself in his way. "You won't?" she cried, in an agony of anxiety.

But he, seeing further conversation was useless, turned to go. And she, apparently beside herself with mortification at the collapse (through his reawakened defiance) of her well-laid scheme at the moment when its success had seemed a.s.sured, caught him by the arm and tried to hold him back by force. Like a spirit of vengeance she clung to him.

As he looked down on her, he recoiled in horror from the mad glitter in her eye.

"Oh, you coward, you dishonourable coward!" she hissed. "I despise you!

How I despise you!"

He shook her off and walked out of the room in silence, not the same man as he came in, of that he was fully aware. For he had barely succeeded in holding on to his highest resolution out of the wreck of his character as non-repentant. Behind him he heard his sister give a sharp cry as she fell swooning to the floor. But he did not turn round.

The next morning his mother begged of him the services of half a dozen workmen to move Johanna's goods and chattels to the dower-house. She had decided not to stay another night under their roof. He breathed a sigh of relief. Now he need not meet her any more.

XII

His cares as a landlord multiplied. It was true there was a prospect of the harvest being carried in good time, and the grain, which could be quickest turned into money, had succeeded splendidly, but after all, what were the few groschens that would come into the exchequer by this means? The work of undoing root and branch the mischief of previous mismanagement needed several thousands in hand.

Leo worked with all his might. From the first sound of the call-bell in the morning to the extinguis.h.i.+ng of the last stable lantern at night, he was on his legs, and when all the windows of the house showed a dark front, he sat bowed over the old writing-table, where he calculated and reckoned till the papers became dim and the figures swam before his eyes.

But what good did it all do? Capital was lacking, and capital could not be manufactured. To begin with, Ulrich's gifts of love must be yielded as mortgages; as a man of honour, he owed this step to himself and his friend. And after that, any one who would make further loans would deserve to be incarcerated in an asylum. So, for weal or woe, things must jog along in the old way, till the first economies allowed of starting improvements or galvanizing dead investments into life. And at this time, when he went to bed and closed his eyes in sleep, he did not dream, as once he was wont to do, of the fine figure of a girl, a thoroughbred, or some bold escapade. Instead, there would hover before his eyes, as the goal of his yearning desires, a ma.s.sive vaulted roof for the piggery, six new covered carts, a thres.h.i.+ng-machine after the latest Zimmermann pattern, and an unending procession of similar objects which stretched their distorted shadows over the borders of dreamland. The pungent humour which it was a peculiarity in his temperament to exercise at his own expense never deserted him, and made it easy to put away from him the memory of even recent occurrences of an unpleasant description.

"Where should I be now without work?" he said, thinking of the interview with his sister. Ulrich's fate loomed largely in his soul, and he could not silence the impulse to help and save him. He surprised himself sometimes, as he rode over the fields, with his pipe gone out in his mouth and his hand slackening on the reins, deaf and blind to all around, while his imagination painted the hour which would give him back again the companion of his youth in new and unalterably happy circ.u.mstances.

Oh, how he hated the woman and hated himself, when he was riding thus on his grey mare over fields of yellow stubble--in the blue distance the s.h.i.+ning reed-fringed stream which in a few minutes might be crossed, but which, nevertheless, lay wider than the ocean between him and his friend!

Although he had vowed to himself that a future meeting was not to be thought of, he now and then hit on a pretext for ferrying across the river at Wengern, and by riding up the high-road to Munsterberg, clutched at the mere chance of it. Twice he had caught sight of him in the distance on horseback in his meadows. He still rode the roan which Leo had broken in for him six years ago; which, when the rider on its back swayed to one side, stood firm as a rock.

He drew up under one of the trees by the roadside, and watched him as he ambled away in the direction of Uhlenfelde. Once, too, he thought he had seen her. A lightly clad figure in an open landau had driven along the road. The servants wore the Uhlenfelde livery. Who else could it be but she?

This time he did not draw rein. He dug his spurs into his mare and galloped off at headlong speed. He thought with a shudder of the moment, which must inevitably come, when they could not avoid meeting.

Should he greet her silently, or would he pa.s.s her with averted eyes?

He did not know. That they would one day come face to face was certain, but he prayed that the day might be far off. The most likely place to meet in would have been Munsterberg, where he hardly ever went. He avoided the town, because he had made no formal calls on the neighbours since his return, and he was afraid of their cold looks.

Yet it was imperative that, with the harvest progressing, the right opportunity for selling should not be missed. So in the middle of August he paid the "Jew" a visit. "The Jew"--as the landowners called him for short--was an influential merchant, Jacobi by name, who was the medium by which the produce of the estates round Munsterberg was brought into the markets of the world. He gave and lent wherever credit was possible, and many a proud knight's inheritance belonged by rights to his pocket.

He never misused his power, and a single case in which he had played the shark was unknown. "To give is the best policy," he used to say, and, acting on this precept, he enjoyed unbounded confidence, and became richer year by year.

He was sitting at the oak desk in his counting-house in the same corner, and looking the same, with his grey mutton-chop whiskers, and gla.s.ses on the flattened tip of his nose, as he had done five years ago when Leo had said good-bye to him.

"Ah, so it is you, Herr Baron," he said, getting up, and he took off his pince-nez. He addressed all n.o.bly born landed proprietors with whom he did business as "Herr Baron," and all the bourgeoise as "Herr Lieutenant." An almost paternal smile flitted over his yellow, haggard, Hebrew countenance as he looked up at Leo with his red-rimmed eyes, which had a clever and penetrating twinkle in them.

"Have you had an enjoyable tour, Herr Baron?" he continued, and opened the little door in the part.i.tion, which was an invitation to Leo to enter his inner sanctum. "Now, please be seated, Herr Baron. I was half afraid that the Herr Baron was never to sit on this chair again. But the crops are good, Herr Baron. Good crops, and one could see certain signs of smartening up, which told of the Herr Baron being at home once more. Not sold the grain yet? Next week prices will rise, and the Herr Baron should let it wait till prices rise. For this year, I will make nothing out of the Herr Baron."

"You are a good fellow, Jacobi," said Leo, shaking the old Jew's hand.

He was conscious that here was a person that knew better than himself how things stood with him. And then, taking heart, he asked--

"What do you think, Jacobi? Shall I be able to hold on?"

"If you don't mind my saying it, Herr Baron," replied the old man, "when a man is what the Herr Baron is, such a question is ridiculous. A man like the Herr Baron has only to say, 'I'll do this or that,' and he can compa.s.s what he likes. And in addition, when he has a friend like the Herr Baron of Uhlenfelde, who is the wealthiest man in the district, well, then, he can hold on to the day of judgment."

Leo felt the blood mount to his temples. It was taken for granted, then, by those who knew the circ.u.mstances, that he had been living on his friend. And the old Jew went on--

"Only five minutes ago, as the Herr Baron von Kletzingk drove by, I said to myself----"

Leo started up, and asked hastily in which direction he had driven.

"Towards the station," was the answer.

"Was he alone?"

The old man tried to look politely blank, as if he had not understood the real drift of the question, and replied that, so far as he could see, the Herr Baron had been alone.

Leo seized his cap, promised to come back, and rushed out. The desire to overtake Ulrich, to hold his hand for a second in his, gained such sudden ascendency over him, that everything else receded into the background. The station was ten minutes' walk from the market-place.

Already he could see Ulrich's yellow basket-carriage waiting at the foot of the stone steps. He could not evade him.

The Herr Baron had gone to the waiting-room, he was informed by Wilhelm, who reigned on the box, as worthy and dignified a coachman as thirty years ago. He found the waiting-room empty, except for the presence of a boy in the window-seat. Leo scarcely noticed him, for he recognised amongst the packages thrown on the table, Ulrich's old travelling gear, his plaid rug, tan hand-bag and hat-box. Beside them were articles strange to him. So he was going away? for a long time perhaps. He was all the more glad to think that he had caught him.

Should he go out and find him? No, it would be better to await him here, where there was no one to look on curiously at their meeting. No one but that small boy, who gazed up at him with the great brown eyes set in a pale, delicate little face.