The Breaking of the Storm Volume Ii Part 11

"Yes, father."

"Good-night, then."

He had himself extinguished the lamp in front of the looking-gla.s.s and taken up the other one. "You may go."

Ottomar longed to ask for his hand, but he dared not, and with a good-night that sounded defiant, because he was ready to burst into tears, he moved towards the door. His father stopped at the door of his bedroom: "One thing more! I had forgotten to say that I reserve to myself the right of taking the next step. As you have delayed so long in taking the initiative, you will not refuse to grant me this favour.

I shall of course keep you _au courant_. I beg that you will meantime take no step without my knowledge. We must at least act in concert, now we have come to an understanding."

He said the last words with a sort of melancholy smile that cut Ottomar to the heart. He could bear it no longer and rushed out of the room.

The General also had his hand on the door; but when Ottomar had disappeared he drew it back, carried the lamp to the writing-table, and took out a casket in which he kept, amongst other ornaments of little value that had belonged to his dead wife and his mother, the iron rings that his parents had worn during the war of liberation.

He took out the rings.

"Times have altered," he said, "not improved. What, ah! what has become of your piety, your dutifulness, your chaste simplicity, your holy self-sacrifice? I have honestly endeavoured to emulate you, to be the worthy son of a race that knew no fame but the courage of its men and the virtue of its women. How have I sinned that I should be so punished?"

He kissed the rings and laid them in the casket; and took from amongst several miniatures on ivory, one of a beautiful brown-eyed, brown-haired boy about six years old.

He gazed long and immovably at it.

"The male line of the Werbens would die out with him, and--he was my darling. Perhaps I am punished because I was so unspeakably proud of him."

CHAPTER XI.

"Why did my brother ring for his coffee at four o'clock!" asked Aunt Rikchen in the kitchen.

"I do not know," answered Grollmann.

"You never do know anything," said Aunt Rikchen.

Grollmann shrugged his shoulders, took the tray on which the second breakfast was prepared for his master and left the room, but came back in a few minutes and set down the tray, as he had taken it away, on the dresser.

"Well?" asked Aunt Rikchen irritably, "is it wrong again?"

"My master is asleep," said Grollmann.

Aunt Rikchen in her astonishment almost dropped the coffee-pot from which she had just poured Reinhold's coffee. "Good heavens!" she exclaimed, "how can my brother sleep at this hour! He has never in his whole life done such a thing before. Is he ill?"

"I don't think so," said Grollmann.

"Has anything happened this morning?"

"This morning, no."

"Or yesterday evening?" asked Aunt Rikchen, whose sharp ears had detected the short pause which Grollmann had made between "this morning" and "no."

"I suppose so," said Grollmann, staring before him, while the wrinkles in his weather-beaten face seemed to deepen every moment.

"Miserable man, tell me at once!" exclaimed Aunt Rikchen, seizing the old man by the arm and shaking him, as if she wished to shake his secret out of him.

"I know nothing," said Grollmann, freeing himself; "is the coffee ready for the Captain?"

"Why does my nephew want it in his room to-day?" asked Aunt Rikchen.

"I don't know," answered Grollmann, slipping away with the coffee, as he had done before with the breakfast-tray.

"He is a horrid man," said Aunt Rikchen; "he will be the death of me some day, with his mysteries. He shall tell me when he comes back."

But Grollmann did not come back, although Aunt Rikchen almost tore down the bell-rope. Aunt Rikchen was very angry, and would have been furious if she had heard Grollmann relating above to Reinhold unasked, with the minutest details, what he would not have told her for any money.

"For you see, sir," said Grollmann, "she is so good in other respects, Fraulein Frederike; but what she knows she must tell, sooner or later, if it cost her her life; and the master cannot bear that, especially from his sister, and we are the sufferers."

"What did happen?" asked Reinhold.

"This was it," said the old man. "About twelve o'clock last night he came back from the second meeting of the manufacturers; I lighted him to his room, as usual, turned up the lamps in his study, and went into his bedroom to shut the windows, which always stay open till he goes to bed, winter and summer; and there, close to the window, on the floor, lay, what I took at first for a piece of paper, till I took it up and found that it was a regular letter, which somebody must have thrown in from the street, and the small stone that had been fastened to it by a bit of packthread lay close by. I hesitated for a minute or two whether I would not hide the letter, without saying anything to the master, till it occurred to me that the letter might possibly be from a friend, and contain information of something which the master ought to know--a fire, an attempt at murder, or G.o.d knows what, of which the rabble are quite capable; so I took it in to the master and told him where and how I had just found it. The master just looked at the address and said: 'That is written in a disguised hand; I will have nothing to do with it; throw it into the fire.' But I urged him so that he at length gave way and opened the letter. The master was standing at one side of the table and I at the other, and of course I could see his face while he was reading; and I was terribly alarmed, for the blood rushed to his head, and the hand in which he held the letter trembled so, that I thought, begging your pardon, that he was going to have a fit. But it pa.s.sed off; the master only let fall the letter and said: 'It is nonsense; I knew it before. They will not burn the house over our heads; you may go to bed in peace.' I went, but I was not in peace, and was not much surprised when the master rang for me this morning at half-past three--he is always particularly early when he has had any trouble or annoyance in the evening, or if he has anything in particular on his mind. This time it must have been something very bad; the master was in exactly the same dress in which he had come home yesterday evening, and the bed had not been touched. On the other hand, the bottle of wine which I always put in his room at night, and out of which he generally drinks only a gla.s.s or two, sometimes nothing at all, was empty to the very last drop; and he looked so wild and strange that I was naturally alarmed, and asked the same question that the Fraulein asked just now, if he was ill. He denied it however, said he had been very much vexed yesterday evening, and added something about the gentlemen who would not hear reason and were going to spoil all by their cowardice, and so on; but it all sounded confused and strange, as if, begging your pardon, he were not quite right in his head. I asked him if he would sleep now for a few hours, and was relieved when he lay down on the sofa and let me cover him up, saying, 'I wish to be woke at half-past eight, Grollmann.' And at half-past eight I went back again, but the coverlet lay on the ground near the sofa, and I saw at a glance that the master had not slept a minute. He had however washed and dressed himself, and now looked very ill. He said he had not been able to sleep, and had no time now. He wanted his breakfast in half an hour; at ten he had to be at another meeting, to which the workmen were going to send delegates. 'I promised to be there,' he said, 'though I had rather not go; I might meet some one there whom I had rather not meet to-day.' I did not dare to ask who the some one was, but I thought to myself, I am glad it is not me, for he gave a look, Captain, that filled me with terror. If he would only go to sleep now, thought I to myself, for while he was speaking he had sat down on the sofa and stared before him as if he were half asleep already. Well, Captain, and sure enough when I went in just now with the breakfast, quite quietly, he was sitting asleep in the corner of the sofa. For heaven's sake, let him sleep, thought I, slipping gently out of the room with my breakfast; and now I only ask, Captain, shall I wake him when it is time, or shall I let him sleep? He wants it, G.o.d knows."

"Let him sleep, Grollmann," said Reinhold, after a short pause; "I will take the blame on myself."

"He won't blame you," said Grollmann, pa.s.sing his hand through his grey hair; "he thinks too much of you; I will risk it."

"Do so," said Reinhold, "on my authority, and do not trouble yourself any more about it. I am convinced that your first idea was correct, and that it was a threatening letter. You know my uncle; he fears nothing."

"G.o.d knows it," said Grollmann.

"But it has vexed and excited him still more, when he had already come back vexed and excited from the meeting. These are troublesome times for him, which must be gone through. We must be prepared for bad days till the good ones come again."

"If they ever do come," said Grollmann.

The old man had left the room; Reinhold tried to return to the work he had begun, but he could not collect his thoughts. He had tried to comfort the old man, yet he himself now felt uneasy and troubled.

If his uncle did not learn to moderate himself, if he continued to look and to treat in this pa.s.sionately tragical way an affair which, near as it lay to his heart, was in fact a matter of business and must be considered from a sober, business-like point of view, the bad days might indeed last long, inconveniently long, for all concerned--"to whom I myself belong now," said Reinhold.

He stood up and went to the window. It was a raw, disagreeable day.

From the low-hanging clouds was falling a fine, cold rain; the tall trees rustled in the wind, and withered leaves were driven through the grey mist. How different had it looked when a few days ago--it was only a very few, though it seemed to him an eternity--he had looked down here one morning, for the first time. The sky had been such a lovely blue, and white clouds had stood in that blue sky so still, it seemed as if they could not weary of contemplating the beautiful sun-lighted earth, on which men, surrounded, indeed, by the smoke of chimneys and distracted by the noise of wheels and saws, must earn their bread in the sweat of their brow, though the sun shone brightly and the birds sang cheerily in the thick branches--that earth on which there was so much pleasure, and love, and blessed hope, even in the heart of a poor blind girl, and a thousand times more for him who saw all this beauty spread out before him, doubly glorious in the reflection of the love which shone and glittered through his heart as the sun through the dewdrops on the leaves. And because the sun was now for a time hidden behind a cloud, was all the glory pa.s.sed away? Because a few hundred idle men had cast their tools from their h.o.r.n.y hands, must every one feel life a burden, and refuse to carry that burden any longer? No; a thousand times no! The sun will s.h.i.+ne again; the men will return to their duty; and you, happy man--thrice happy man--for whom the sun s.h.i.+nes in spite of all in your innermost heart, return to your work, which for you is no hard duty, but rather a joy and an honour.

Reinhold greeted with eyes and hand the neighbouring house, one window of which he had long ago discovered between the branches of the plane trees, which he watched more eagerly than any star; and then hoped that Ferdinanda, whom he suddenly perceived in the garden, would take his greeting to herself if she had seen him.

She could hardly have seen the greeting, and could not even have seen him at the window as she walked up and down between the shrubs, under the rustling trees, without appearing to notice the rain which was falling on her. At any rate she was without hat, without umbrella, in her working dress, without even a shawl; sometimes standing still and gazing up into the driving clouds, then walking on again, her eyes turned to the ground, evidently sunk in the deepest thought.

"Curious people, those artists," thought Reinhold, while he seated himself again at his work. "What a fool you were to think that her heart could beat for any creature of flesh or blood, or, indeed, for anything but her Reaping Girl and Boy, if she has a heart at all."

In the meantime Grollmann was standing undecided at the top of the staircase, before the door leading to his master's room.

His conscience was not quite satisfied by Reinhold's a.s.surance that he would take the responsibility on himself, if the master overslept himself. Should he go downstairs? should he go in? He must make up his mind; it was a quarter past nine. "If only something would occur to oblige me to wake him," said Grollmann.