The Son of His Mother Part 43

"Madame." The chambermaid stuck her head in. And a man's head was visible above the chambermaid's.

"Madame."

Kate did not hear.

"Here is somebody--the gentleman--the gentleman has arrived."

"My husband?"

Paul Schlieben had pushed the girl aside and had entered, pale, hurriedly, in great agitation. His wife, his poor wife. What a lot she had had to go through alone. The lad dead! They had met him with the news as he arrived unsuspectingly to surprise them at their breakfast.

"Paul!" It was a cry of the most joyful surprise, the utmost relief.

She fled from the cold dead into his warm arms. "Paul, Paul--Wolfgang is dead!" Now she found tears. Streaming tears that would not cease and that were still so beneficial.

All the bitterness she had felt whilst her son was still alive disappeared with them. "Poor boy--our poor dear boy." These tears washed him clean, so clean that he again became the little innocent boy that had lain in the blooming heather and laughed at the bright sun with transparent eyes. Oh, if she had only left him there. She would always reproach herself for not having done so.

"Paul, Paul," she sobbed aloud. "Thank G.o.d, you are here. Had you any idea of it? Yes, you had. You know how miserable, how unhappy I feel." The elderly woman clasped her arms round the elderly man with almost youthful fervour: "If I had not you--oh, the child, the poor child."

"Don't cry so much." He wanted to console her, but the tears rolled down his lined face too. He had travelled there as quickly as he could, urged on by a sudden anxiety--he had had no letters from her--he had come full of joy to surprise them, and now he found things like this.

He strove for composure.

"If only I had left him there--oh, if only I had left him there!"

The man entered into his wife's feelings of torture and self-reproach, but he pointed to the dead boy, whose face above the white s.h.i.+rt looked peculiarly refined, almost perfect, young and smooth and quite peaceful, and then drew her more closely towards him with the other hand. "Don't cry. You were the one to make a man of him--don't forget that."

"Do you think so?--Oh Paul!"--she bowed the face that was covered with tears in deep pain--"I did not make him any happier by it."

She had to weep, weep unceasingly in deep acknowledgment of worldly error. She grasped her husband's hands tremulously and drew him down with her at the side of the bed.

The hands of husband and wife were clasped together over the son they had lost. They whispered, deeply repentant and as though it came from one mouth:

"_Forgive us our trespa.s.ses._"