Dame Care Part 25

CHAPTER XV.

Unspeakable misery had descended on the Haidehof. The father lay in the parlor, on his sickbed, and groaned and complained and cursed the hour of his birth. In milder moments he seized his wife's hand with tearful eyes, and asked her forgiveness for having united her fate to his ruined life, and promised to make her rich and happy in future. Rich--above all things, rich.

It was too late. Mild words from him now made no impression on her. In her tormented heart she already heard the abuse which would inevitably follow them. With withered cheeks and l.u.s.treless eyes she walked about, never uttering a sound of complaint, doubly pitiful in her silence.

But no one had pity on her--not even G.o.d and eternal fate. She grew more tired from day to day; on her pale, blue-veined forehead the stamp of death seemed already to burn, and the happiness she had longed for through all her life was farther away than ever.

The only one who would have been able to give her some relief was Paul, and he avoided her like a criminal. He scarcely dared to shake hands with her in the morning, and when she looked at him he looked down. If she had been less torpid and less grief-laden she might have had some suspicion, but all she felt in her misery was that she lacked consolation.

Once at twilight, when he was rummaging about as usual after work in the ruins of the spot where the fire had been, she went after him, sat down near him on the crumbling foundation, and tried to enter into conversation, but he avoided her, as he had done before.

"Paul, don't be so hard to me," she pleaded, and her eyes filled with tears.

"I am not doing anything to you, mother," he said, setting his teeth.

"Paul, you have something against me?"

"No, mother."

"Do you think that the fire was caused by my fault?"

Then he cried out loud, clasped her knees, and wept like a child; but when she wanted to stroke his hair--the only caress which had been usual between them--he sprang up, pushed her back, and cried,

"Do not touch me, mother; I am not worthy of it."

Then he turned his back on her, and walked out onto the heath.

Since the moment of his first waking after the fire a fixed idea possessed him which would not leave go of him; the fixed idea that he alone had been guilty of it all.

"If I had not been roaming about," he said to himself--"if I had watched the house, as was my duty, this misfortune could never have happened."

All his secret yearnings appeared to him now like a crime committed against his father's house.

Like Jesus in Gethsemane, he struggled with his own heart, seeking expiation and forgiveness. But his self-torment did not let him rest anywhere. At all hours the flames were dancing before his eyes, and when he went to bed at night and stared into the darkness, it seemed as if from every c.h.i.n.k fiery tongues were jutting forth, as if clouds of black smoke surrounded him instead of the shadows of the night.

He had not been able yet to think about the cause of the fire; the cares which were overwhelming him again were too great to leave any room for thoughts of revenge. The very necessities of life failed them; money for the chemist could scarcely be sc.r.a.ped together. He meditated and calculated day and night, and formed great plans of campaign to collect the most absolutely necessary cash. He also wrote to his brothers, to know whether they could not procure him by their influence a few hundred thalers at moderate interest. They answered, deeply grieved, that they themselves were so overrun with debts that it was impossible for them to reckon on any further credit. Gottfried, the teacher had, indeed, engaged himself a short time ago to a wealthy young lady, and Paul was convinced that it could not have been difficult for him to induce her family to lend him a small sum, but he was of opinion that the dignity of his position would suffer by such a request; he said he should be afraid of compromising himself with his father-in-law if he disclosed his real circ.u.mstances too early.

With all this it was a blessing that the ripe harvest had already been sold and delivered, and that the potatoes, for the greater part, were still in the ground; so he could get some ready money, which would be sufficient to cover the most necessary expenses; but how, indeed, was the rebuilding of the barn ever to be contemplated?

In the middle of the ruins--melancholy ruins of charred beams and charred walls--"Black Susy" stood erect with her sooty body and slender neck, the only thing which, except for a few miserable carts, had been saved from destruction.

The twins, who during this sad time had lost much of their merriment, and only in quiet corners still prattled and giggled, went about timidly; and his father, when he for the first time sat upright in his bed and saw the black monster glaring through the window, clinched his fist, and cried,

"Why did they not let that beast be burned?"

But Paul loved her in his heart only the more tenderly. "Now would be the time for you to come to life again," he said, and pulled out the wheel and looked into the boiler. He began to cut little models of lime-wood in the evenings, and one day he wrote to Gottfried:

"Send me a few books out of the school-library on the working of steam-engines. I feel as if much depended on them for our home."

Gottfried was solicited in vain. In the first place, it went against his principles to take books from the library which he did not use himself; and, secondly, they would not be of any good to Paul, as he was not up in the theory of physics. Then he wrote to Max. The latter immediately sent him a packet, weighing ten pounds, of brand-new volumes, enclosing a bill for fifty marks. He decided to keep the books and slowly to save up the fifty marks. "Nothing is too dear for 'Black Susy,'" he said.

But fresh cause for uneasiness was to befall him.

One morning a carriage came driving up to the farm, in which two unknown gentlemen were sitting with a gendarme, one of whom, a comfortable-looking man, of about forty years old, wearing golden spectacles on his nose, introduced himself as a police-magistrate.

Paul was terrified, for he felt very well that he had been concealing many things.

The magistrate first examined the scene of the fire, took a sketch of the foundations, and asked where the doors and windows had been; then he had all the servants called out, whom he questioned most closely as to what they had done on the day before, and up to the moment when the fire had broken out.

Paul stood near him, pale and trembling, and when the magistrate dismissed the servants to examine Paul himself, he felt as if the end of the world had come.

"Were you in the barn the day before the fire?" the magistrate asked.

"Yes."

"Do you smoke?"

"No."

"Do you remember whether in any way you had anything to do with fire, matches, or such things?"

"Oh no, I am much too careful for that."

"When were you last in the barn?"

"At eight o'clock in the evening."

"What were you doing there?"

"I made my usual evening round before I locked the gates."

"Do you always lock the gates yourself?"

"Yes, always."

"Did you notice anything on that particular evening?"

"No."

"Did you see any one lurking in the neighborhood?"

It flashed like lightning upon him. He only remembered at this moment the shadow which he had seen disappearing into the wood at the beginning of the fire. But that was not in the neighborhood, and, drawing a long breath, he answered,

"No."

"Well, now it will come out," he thought; the very next question would bring his night wanderings to the light of day--would betray the secret that hitherto he had kept in his inmost heart.

But no. The magistrate broke off suddenly, and said, after a little pause,

"Was not a servant called Raudszus in your service till a short time ago?"