CHAPTER X.
A lively breeze was blowing in my face as the carriage in which I was jolted along the road from Fährdorf to Zehrendorf, a bad one in the best of times, but now, in the spring, at its worst. The driver on the box had wrapped himself close in a horse-blanket and sat huddled together, while the strong horses had as much as they could do to drag the light vehicle through the deep miry ruts. It was about eight in the evening, and the moon was an hour high, but only from time to time did a glimpse of her disc peer out through the heavy clouds, throwing a deceitful light, quickly succeeded by darkness, over drenched fields and meadows, with pools of water glistening here and there over the wide expanse of barren heath.
And as lights and shadows chased each other over the wide expanse, so alternated in my soul the memories of joy and grief that I had experienced here. The days that I had spent here came all back, and passed by me with faces beaming with smiles, clouded by grief, or distorted with pain. And there were far fewer of the smiling days than of those with sad and gloomy looks; and at last--for during the whole journey it had seemed to me almost a wickedness that I should dare to return to this spot--this feeling overcame me so strongly that I could scarcely refrain from calling to the driver to stop, that I could go no further to-night.
"We shall reach the top directly," said the man, giving his tired horses a cut with the whip.
I do not know why he thought it necessary to offer me this consolation; perhaps he had thought that the groan which escaped me was extorted by the badness of the road.
But he was right. I knew that as well as he did. The light below us, which seemed to shine out of the earth, came from a little house leaning against the foot of the hill, and those broad white patches, which contrasted so singularly with the black hills, were the great chalk-quarries belonging to Prince Prora, to which the house belonged; and not far from us, on the ridge which we were slowly climbing, was a piece of woods--part of the same woods in which I fled from my pursuers for four days.
The sturdy horses stretched to their work, and now we were on the ridge. Down the other side we went, over a hard sandy road, and the wind came sweeping on its mighty pinions from over the sea, making the driver wrap himself still closer in his blanket. But I drew long deep breaths, and drew in full draughts of deliciousness that I had wanted so long.
Heartily I greeted the loved sea-breeze, that friend of my childhood. Long had I pined for it in the narrow streets of the city, where only a mockery of it blew in fitful puffs and with malicious pranks, and whistled shrill and spitefully around the corners. How often had this mighty sea-wind filled my young heart with inexpressible gladness; and now it chased the dark memories from my soul as it swept away the black clouds from the sky, so that the whole broad expanse of the plateau reaching back from the promontory lay in clear moonlight before my eyes. That great cluster of buildings, with a garden like a park, and short white church-steeple, is Herr von Granow's estate; and that lower down, only distinguishable as a dark patch, is Trantowitz; and beyond Trantowitz, in the direction of the wind, lies Zanowitz among the white dunes at whose feet chafes the everlasting sea. Melchow, Trantowitz, Zanowitz--what memories were attached to these names and these places! But the glad mighty wind would not suffer them. It comes rushing on in vast, regular impulses like the strokes of an eagle's wings, and amidst its rush I fancy I can hear a rough honest voice saying: All that could happen, and you thought you could never endure it, yet you have not been crushed, but stand firm upon your feet, and still carry your head erect between your broad shoulders; and all this is so because I have blown around you from your childhood, and you have drawn me into your blood until your heart beats strong and dauntless within your breast, even though you know that those lights shining on that height to the left come from the windows of the new castle which the new master of Zehrendorf has built in the place of the old which you saw sinking in flames on that terrible night.
Not quite in the place of the old one: the old castle had been built upon the higher ground, so that it looked proudly out over the whole land. The new possessor did not wish a haughty site, but one sheltered from the north and east winds, so he did well to fix his habitation somewhat lower.
"And where are the magnificent old trees of the park, which reached to the old house, and here joined the forest?" I asked.
"They are cut down," said the driver; "the whole park is cleared away; there is hardly enough left to make a coffin of."
I do not know what suggested this melancholy expression to the taciturn man, but it struck me strangely. Did not the Wild Zehren once, when we were standing at the window and looking out into the park, say that not enough of it belonged to him to make him a coffin, and that it all stood only to be cut down and turned into money by his successors? And now it had all come to pass, and that light was shining from the new home which the new master had built on the ruins of the old.
Away, gloomy thoughts! Blow harder, thou glad, strong sea-wind! Gallop, you stout horses, down the hard, smooth road! And now, rattling through the gate, we enter the court before the great, stately house, and as we stop at the door servants come out with lights.
They come rather incited by curiosity than obsequiousness, which last, had it been present, would have suddenly cooled at the unpretending garb of the visitor and the limited amount of his luggage. Indeed, as I crossed the lower hall I caught sight, in a tall mirror, of the face of the servant who preceded me carrying my portmanteau, and who, by dint of thrusting his tongue into his right cheek, was making a frightful grimace, undoubtedly intended to express his disgust at having to carry such a disgraceful old mangy sealskin portmanteau--I had borrowed it from Klaus--up the brilliantly lighted staircase of the great house of Zehrendorf. The honest fellow's feelings were apparently much hurt by the incongruity of the visitor's appearance with the service he had to render, and he found a neat way of exhibiting the fact by tossing the question to me over his shoulder, as he rather flung down my portmanteau than set it down: "I suppose you are a countryman of our Mamselle?"
"Who is your Mamselle?" I asked in a tone of perfect good humor, for I confess to my shame that the contemptuous manner of the man, far from offending me, afforded me considerable amusement.
"Why, the old scarecrow with the----" and he made an undulatory wave of his hand down from his shoulder, a bit of pantomime in which a lively imagination could see the fluttering of long tresses.
"You mean Fräulein Duff, I suppose, friend--what is your name?" I asked.
"William Kluckhuhn," answered he. "You can call me William, for short."
"Thank you. And why do you suppose me to be a countryman of Fräulein Duff, friend William?"
"Well, the old girl made a great fuss about you to me. I was to show you every attention, and you were to have this room which looks on the garden, and is really our young lady's room, and which she, heaven knows why, took a notion three days ago to make a guest-room. It seemed a little queer to us, for you are, after all, a workman in the master's factory in Berlin, as the master himself said at the table today. I am from Berlin myself, you must know, and we know there that a hand in a machine-shop is not exactly the Great Mogul. But what are we to do? After all, we have to dance to the old girl's piping, or she will abuse us to our young lady, and she reports it to the master, and then there is the deuce to pay, of course."
"So that is the way it goes, eh?" I said, laughing; "from Fräulein Duff to your young lady, and from her to the Herr Commerzienrath."
"Well, sometimes it goes the other way," said the philosophic William; "but this is not so bad, for we can hold our own with the old scarecrow; that is an eternal truth."
As I heard the pet phrase of my good friend from the impudent lips of this ironical rascal I had to look another way to avoid laughing.
"Well, and I was to ask you if you wanted any supper. Tea will be served down-stairs in half an hour. But you will get nothing with it but stale biscuit and thin sandwiches, and she thought you would be hungry."
"So I am, my friend," I replied, "and you will oblige me if you will bring me a bit of cold chicken, with a glass of wine, or whatever you happen to have handy. And one thing more, friend William. I am not a countryman of Fräulein Duff, but you will particularly oblige me if in future you never mention that lady in my presence in other than a respectful manner. Now you can go; and you will have the goodness to ask the Herr Commerzienrath if I shall wait upon him before tea."
I said these words in an impressive manner, not with the intention of humbling my friend in livery, but simple because, as a guest of the house, I considered it my duty. The facetious William gave me a look in which astonishment was blended with suspicion, and in his heart, I fancy, he thought that the old proverb, "Do not trust appearances," might also be a scrap of an eternal truth.
While he went to do what I had told him I cast a look of some curiosity round the room which three days before had been that of the beautiful capricious girl. I could hardly believe it, and yet it did not look like a guest-room--certainly not like one intended for so unpretending a guest as myself. A thick soft carpet of a Persian pattern covered the whole floor. The curtains of the windows and lambrequins of the doors were of heavy damask, also of a bright fantastic pattern, and looped with rich cords and tassels. The whole decoration and furniture were in harmony with this, to my eyes, oriental magnificence. A very low broad divan occupied nearly three sides of the room, while on the fourth, where the windows were, low chairs were standing in the recesses, and between the windows stood a costly cabinet of rosewood, inlaid with mother-of-pearl. From the ceiling hung by gilt chains a lamp in a red globe, diffusing, with the two wax candles that were burning upon the table, a soft rosy light throughout the apartment.
On drawing a curtain, behind which I thought there was a door, I discovered a deep alcove, with a wide low bed, with silken pillows and coverlids. I dropped the curtain again.
Again I examined the room, in ever increasing surprise at the singular reception which had been provided for me here. Upon the rosewood cabinet stood a vase with fresh flowers--hyacinths and crocuses. As I bent over the vase to inhale their perfume my eye was caught by a blue ribbon entwined among them which had letters embroidered upon it in gold thread, and upon examining it more closely I read the words "Seek faithfully and thou shalt find."
A sudden change came over my feelings at this discovery, and I broke into a fit of laughter, but checked myself suddenly and dropped the mysterious ribbon again into its fragrant hiding-place, as William Kluckhuhn entered with a large salver, from the contents of which he arranged an excellent collation upon one of the small tables standing before the divan.
"Well, when does the Herr Commerzienrath wish to see me?" I asked, as William, his napkin under his arm, stood before me at the respectful distance of three paces.
"The Herr Commerzienrath will have the honor to meet the Herr Engineer at tea," replied William Kluckhuhn.
I took a closer look at the man, his style of expression and even the tone of his voice had undergone such a change. Was I then suddenly promoted to the rank of engineer? Something must have happened to him that had wrought a revolution in his views of the new guest.
I pondered on what it might be, but it was a superfluous trouble. William Kluckhuhn was not one of those who can keep a secret hidden in the depths of their souls.
He cleared his throat in an emphatic significant manner, and observed:
"The gnädige Fräulein will not be down to tea."
"Ah," I said in an indifferent tone, which was belied by the sudden beating of my heart.
"Yes," went on my communicative friend, "I was just now in the parlor to ask the Herr Commerzienrath when he wished to see the Herr Engineer--" William Kluckhuhn laid a strong accent upon the last word. "'At tea, of course,' said the commerzienrath. 'I wish to receive him quite familiarly.' 'Do you not wish first to have some private conversation with him?' said the gnädige Fräulein. The gnädige Fräulein had risen quite suddenly from the piano-forte at which she had just been playing and singing, and turned to the door where I was--standing. 'Good heavens, no,' said the commerzienrath. 'Where are you going?' 'To my room,' said the gnädige Fräulein; 'I have been suffering with headache all day.' 'Then you will not be down again, I suppose,' said the Herr Commerzienrath. The gnädige Fräulein said nothing, for she had already gone past me out of the door; and I can tell you, Herr Engineer, she had a pair of cheeks like my shoulder-knots here," and he pointed with his finger to the dark-crimson knot on his left sleeve.
"This is all very remarkable," I said.
"It is, indeed," said William, elevating his eye-brows as high as his long forehead would allow, and drawing down the corners of his mouth into a horse-shoe curve, "very remarkable. And so it seemed to the others, for they looked at one another, so----" and William Kluckhuhn stretched his little eyes as wide open as he could get them, and stared at me so that I thought for a moment he was going out of his senses.
"Who are the others?" I asked.
"Well, the master himself, and Mamselle--I mean Fräulein Duff, and the Herr Steuerrath and his lady----"
"They here too?" I asked, not very agreeably surprised.
"They have been here for three weeks," answered William; "but the day is yet to come when any one of us has seen this from them--" and he made a gesture with the right forefinger and thumb over the palm of his left hand. "And they all looked queer, and the Herr Commerzienrath looked very angry, but restrained himself, which is not his usual way, and said: 'That is unfortunate: but it is not to be helped. I must invite the Herr Engineer to tea.' Apropos!--excuse me, but it is a word we use in Berlin--why did not the Herr Engineer tell me at first that he was the Herr Engineer?"
"Very well, William," I said. "You can take away now, and when it is time, come and call me."
When the talkative William had left me I sprang up from the divan and paced the room in an excitement which I had carefully concealed from the servant. The information which he had just given me afforded me more matter for reflection than I could deal with at the moment. A singular scene must have occurred, or it would never have made so deep an impression upon the by no means susceptible William Kluckhuhn. And why had Hermine's headache grown so intolerable all at once? And why had my old friends, the steuerrath and the born Kippenreiter, seemed so much disturbed!
To all this I could give but one explanation; for a second, that might also have been possible, my modesty rejected at once. The pretty girl had been angry with me ever since our meeting on the steamer. But if this were so, why all those inquiries about me of Paula? Whence came the interest which she manifestly took in my fate? I saw her again before me as I had seen her on the steamboat, her red lips closely compressed, and her blue eyes darting indignant flashes at me. She had told me that I must let her father help me, since her father was rich; and I had replied that for that very reason I did not wish to be helped by him. Was not that the exact state of the case? Did I want anything from him? Had I not rather come to give the rich man some advice of which he seemed to be greatly in want? advice which, if he followed it, was to make him richer than he had ever been? No, I did not come into this house as an asker of favors. I could hold my head proudly erect, as beseems a free man; and if it was meant as an irony upon my humble position that I was here assigned this splendid apartment, I had only to consider myself worthy of the attention, and the solecism vanished.
"Will you please to come now?" said William Kluckhuhn, appearing at the door. I had intended to put on my best suit of clothes, which, with the necessary supply of linen, and a few papers and drawings, formed the entire contents of my portmanteau, but the radical state of mind into which I had happily wrought myself scorned such trivialities, and it was a gratification to me to follow my guide just as I was down the wide staircase to the lower hall, and to a door which he obsequiously threw open for me, and through which, without the least confusion, I entered a large parlor, richly furnished and brilliantly lighted by lamps standing on various tables.
At one of these tables, at the further end of the room, sat the company, consisting of the commerzienrath, his brother-in-law the steuerrath, the steuerrath's lady, and Fräulein Duff. The commerzienrath came to meet me with outstretched hand, crying in his loud voice that he was unspeakably delighted to welcome his dear young friend to his house.
"To be sure I have had you in my house a long time already," he went on, after he had grasped my hand--"a half year already, and I never knew it! It is outrageous; but these girls never will learn reason. For the merest nothing they will make a secret of things that we would cheerfully pay a thousand thalers to know."
He said this with so much warmth that if I had ever doubted whether he had really known that I was in his establishment, that doubt now entirely disappeared. He had known it all along, but had no interest in appearing to know it until I could be of real profitable use to him.
Perhaps it was this observation that made me receive so coolly the friendly protestations of the rich man; but I had to smile, and I felt real pleasure when now the kind-hearted Fräulein Duff put down the tea-pot, at which she had been officiating, and came gliding towards me with a coy smile upon her thin lips, and her eyes lifted to express the emotions of her soul. She held out her hand with the fingers bent and drooping, in precisely the style of a tragedy-queen who expects it kissed by a loyal vassal. But the good lady was thinking of nothing of the sort; it was merely her way of offering her hand; and I took the thin pale hand and pressed it cordially, though cautiously. The sensitive nature of the excellent Fräulein felt at once the sincere good-feeling that my pressure implied, and she returned it with nervous force, her pale eyes filled with tears, and she whispered up to reach my ear: "Do not be annoyed, and do not be angry with her; it is not hate, it is maidenly coyness; do not despair--wait and trust--seek faithfully----"
Fräulein Duff had not time to complete her favorite phrase, for the commerzienrath turned again to me and drew me to the table, by which the steuerrath and his lady had been standing straight as candlesticks from the moment I entered the room without moving from their places, like a pair of wax-figures in a cabinet.
"You have no idea how glad my brother and sister-in-law are to see you again!"' said the commerzienrath, malicious joy sparkling in his small glittering eyes.
"Delighted!" said the steuerrath, offering me two fingers of his long white hand, which I did not take.
"Delighted!" said his lady, with a fixed look at the lamp on the table.
I was not especially glad myself, so I did not say so, but I looked closely at the amiable pair, whom time had certainly not passed by without leaving marks upon them. The steuerrath's high forehead was now bald to the crown, and deep ugly furrows were ploughed in his long smooth aristocratic face. His eyes seemed to me smaller and more expressionless, and his mouth larger.
Still more rudely had the ungallant years dealt with the born Kippenreiter. Her hair indeed was thicker and more lustrous than of old, but the unkind suspicion that she owed this gratifying luxuriance to the beneficent skill of the perruquier was confirmed at a second glance. Nor had her face been deprived of the ingenious resources of art: her hollow cheeks were flushed with a bloom too delicate to be altogether natural, and her thin pale lips disclosed two rows of teeth of irreproachable whiteness. In a word, the Born had made herself younger by twice the number of years that had passed since I last saw her, only the expression of her small piercing eyes, which could not possibly be worse, had remained the same, and the wide red ribbon of her cap, which she tied in a large bow under her chin, apparently to hide her hollow cheeks, nodded at every word she spoke in the old exasperating way.
They had taken their seats again at the tea-table. The commerzienrath led the conversation in a style less adapted to the gratification of his brother-in-law than to his own entertainment and my instruction. So I learned in five minutes that the young Prince of Prora was residing at Rossow again, and that Arthur was keeping him company in his exile.
"For it is an exile," cried the commerzienrath to his brother-in-law, "you may say what you please; I know it from Justizrath Heckepfennig, whom, as his Justitiarius, the old prince had to summon to the family council, in which the question was handled in all its length and breadth, whether his son should or should not be declared a spendthrift. The old prince at last yielded so far as to grant his son a probation of half a year more, which he is to pass in the country, while they make some arrangement with his creditors. A nice position for a prince, is it not?"
"Crowned heads are seldom happy," said with a sigh Fräulein Duff, who had taken her seat by us with some work in her hands.
"I thought that princes only wore hats," remarked the commerzienrath with a sardonic grin, "though of such matters a poor plebeian like myself is incompetent to judge: you understand those things better, brother-in-law."
"Doubtless, doubtless," replied the latter absently.
"No doubt you are thinking of your amiable son," continued the commerzienrath, "and whether, for a young man of his stamp, a better companion could not be found than a young prince who is in a fair way to ruin himself. I can easily understand that the thought causes you to make a face like a tanner who sees his hides floating down the stream."
"Excuse me, brother-in-law, but I was not thinking of Arthur at that moment," replied the steuerrath, "but whether the negotiations for the sale of Zehrendorf, which you have recently opened with his highness--and which, by the way, would seem to indicate that you give his highness credit for more acuteness and business knowledge than your words imply--will come to any result."
"What has that to do with his wisdom or his folly?" cried the commerzienrath. "Yes, so far that the greater fool he is the dearer will I be able to sell it to him. But I am not sure that I shall have my daughter's permission to sell, for she has set her heart upon not letting it pass into other hands. To be sure she has noble blood in her veins--is that not so, sister-in-law!--and naturally looks at the matter in a different light from a poor roturier like myself. I might have sold it long ago to Herr von Granow, among others, who made me a very handsome offer, who, as one of our nearest neighbors, can put it to the best advantage. But Hermine insists that Frau von Granow is too vulgar a person--of course she is not a Born Anything, sister-in-law, for the Born can never be vulgar, can they, sister-in-law?--but what I was going to say is this: Hermine insists that I shall not give her such a successor as that. But good heaven! she will find nobody she thinks worthy of it, unless it be Herr von Trantow."
"How is he?" I exclaimed.
"O, very well. He eats and drinks and sleeps: why should he not be well? He is a great favorite of my Hermine; and I believe she could find it in her heart to marry him if she could only see him sober once."
At such horrible words Fräulein Duff could only clasp her hands and cast a look at me, while the steuerrath and his wife exchanged a look of intelligence with the quickness of lightning. I observed a slight encouraging twinkle of the steuerrath's eyelashes, upon which followed a slight attack of coughing on the part of the Born, and then the following observation:
"There is an old proverb, my dear brother-in-law, which always comes to my mind when I hear sportive allusions, such as that which you have just uttered."
"You mean that 'we shouldn't paint the devil on the wall?'" exclaimed the commerzienrath; "but you need not be uneasy on that score, for even if the devil does not come, neither will your Arthur; no, not by a great way!" and the commerzienrath broke into a boisterous laugh at his own wit.
"I am conscious of my innocence of all covetous plans of that sort, brother-in-law," replied the Born, whose cheeks at the moment had no need of any supplementary carmine.
"So!" cried the commerzienrath. "Well that is a very good thing. Are you conscious of your innocence too, brother-in-law? If your son can say as much, then you are all three conscious, and no one can ask more of you than that. Besides, sister-in-law, the Trantows are so old a family, that, for this reason, if for no other, you should think twice before you compare the last descendant of their race with Old Nick."
"If family antiquity is in question," said the steuerrath, "you must know, brother-in-law, that while it is true that the Trantows trace back their pedigree to the fourteenth century, the Zehrens----"
"I know! I know! I have heard it a hundred thousand million times!" cried the commerzienrath, hastily, rising from his chair. "You are a frightfully old family; yes, sister-in-law, frightfully old! But content yourselves; old as you are, you may grow a year or two older yet. And now come with me to my room, my young friend, and let us have at least a little sensible talk."
He preceded me, through another parlor as brilliantly lighted as the first, into a smaller room, which, to judge by the comfortable horsehair-covered furniture, bookcases with docketed papers, and other tokens, was his own especial apartment, which he had fitted out exactly to his own taste.
Several eminently bad copies of celebrated old masters, with sundry still worse originals of modern date, animal-pieces and landscapes, covered the walls, and corresponded exactly in artistic merit with several busts of the reigning sovereigns and other princely personages, placed appropriately or inappropriately, just as it happened. A lamp hung from the ceiling over a round table, upon which were various papers, a lighted candle, and an open box of cigars.
"Now, my dear young friend," cried the commerzienrath, throwing himself into a chair and stretching out his legs, which time had made still leaner, in a fashion meant to express supreme comfort, "help yourself; here is something superior, just from Havana, brought me by one of my captains a week ago; duty-free as I have them, they are 'worth a hundred and twenty thalers, between brothers. So! Now what do you think of that ridiculous old ass of a steuerrath and his scarecrow of a wife? They have been sponging upon me now for three weeks, but I show them no quarter; was it not good fun?"
"I cannot say that I found it so, Herr Commerzienrath."
"No? Why not? You must be hard to amuse."
"On the contrary, Herr Commerzienrath, no one loves a bit of harmless fun more than I do; but I cannot find it harmless when the host--you must excuse my plain speaking--makes fools of his guests, be they who they may."
"So, so! This is something new!" said my host, and fixed an evil look upon me.
"Yet it is a very old doctrine, Herr Commerzienrath, known and practiced in the earliest times, and, as I am told, still sacredly observed at this day by even the rudest nations--unless indeed they are cannibals."
"Cannibals is good! Cannibals! very good indeed!" cried the commerzienrath, throwing himself back in his easy-chair and laughing obstreperously, as though he had not but the moment before been on the point of quarrelling with me. "Capital! How do you like the cigars? I want your honest opinion."
"By no means so superior, if you insist upon a candid expression of my opinion."
"Not--not superior? Well, young man, you must be hard to please. Such a cigar as this nothing superior! When and where did you ever smoke a better?"
And the commerzienrath, with an appearance of intense enjoyment, exhaled the smoke slowly through the nostrils.
"To tell you the candid truth, very often; but I must confess that I am a little dainty in this particular point. Probably my old stay at Zehrendorf made me fastidious."
"I dare say," said my host, with a sneer. "He could afford it: he did not have to pay duties as we do."
"I thought you said, Herr Commerzienrath, that these cigars were duty free?"
He looked at me again as if strongly moved to ring for a servant to turn me out the house. He did not ring, however, but said:
"So! If you are such a judge of the weed, what do you estimate these to be worth?"
"Twenty thalers I should consider a full price."
"They cost eighteen!" cried the commerzienrath, giving the table a thump. "Why should a man set costly cigars before his guests until he knows whether they can appreciate them or not? And now I will give you some that----"
"Are worth a hundred and twenty thalers, between brothers."
"Exactly so! exactly so! you ironical fellow!" cried the little old man as he sprang up and took from a cupboard a box containing cigars, of which I am bound to say that I never smoked better, even with the Wild Zehren.
My amiable host had been brought into so good a humor by this bit of comedy that he insisted on having in a bottle of Steinberg Cabinet, from which he replenished my glass with great liberality while he only sipped at his own, making pretence all the time of drinking glass for glass with me, both from this and a second bottle which he had in, in the course of the evening. I had seen the old gentleman behind a bottle in my earlier days, and also when he was a visitor at the superintendent's, and knew that he was what used to be called a three-bottle-man; so if he was so abstemious now he had some especial reason for it. Nor was this reason long concealed. It was soon evident to me that he wanted to make me talk, and to get at my sincere opinions upon a multitude of things, and the heavy wine of a noble vintage was to assist my candor if it faltered. I have in later years too often seen this man use the same stratagem, in similar cases, to leave me any doubt of the accuracy of the observation I made on this occasion.
There was also another manœuvre, which I learned now for the first time, in which this old man of business was a master. It was this: leaning far back in his chair, his eyes half shut, he talked in an apparently disconnected way of this and that, rambling from one topic to another, until he suddenly, like a flash, touched upon the point which he had still been approaching in all his gyrations without his hearer perceiving it. He hid himself in a black cloud, so to speak, as the cuttlefish eludes its pursuers--only with this difference, that this cunning old pike, in the shape of a royal counsellor of commerce, used this stratagem in order unexpectedly to snap out of his cloud at an unsuspicious gudgeon.
It was past midnight when William Kluckhuhn showed me to my room. He lighted the two wax candles on the table before the divan, asked me if he should extinguish the hanging lamp, to which I assented, and inquired at what hour I wished to be called in the morning, to which I could only answer that I had the habit of awaking at the proper time, and then left me with a most respectful bow, which stood in ludicrous contrast to the extremely free and easy way in which he had received me but a few hours before.
I had no thought of sleeping yet. My brain was swarming with thoughts which the long conversation with the master of the house had excited in me; my heart was full of tumultuous emotions, awakened by the novel position in which I found myself; and, as well might happen in such an hour, after a couple of bottles of heavy wine, and in an entirely new situation, the events of the evening arranged themselves in a sort of wild, fantastic dance, surrounding me with figures now graceful and now grotesque--figures of which I could now and then fix one for a moment: the commerzienrath, with his half-shut eyes and his sharp pikelike snap at that point in the conversation towards which he had been manœuvring all the while; good Fräulein Duff, with the sentimental quivering of her sallow eyelids; the steuerrath, with the white crafty face and the white slender hand on which sparkled his immense signet-ring; the born Kippenreiter, with the false teeth and the false smile; and, lastly, her whom I had not seen, and yet in the eye of my mind perpetually saw--her in whose room I was, who certainly had often rested in this corner of the divan where I now was reclining--the slight elastic form of the beauteous young maiden, with the saucy twitch in the red lips, and the sunny light in the cornflower-blue eyes.
And, stranger than all this--behind this foreground of scenes and figures, changing like the forms of a kaleidoscope, and shifting like wreaths of mist, there arose a background of the circumstances with which I had to do for the moment, and which I believed that I penetrated in their most secret relations, as if an enchanter had given me that magic unguent with which if one anoint his eyes he can see all the treasures that sleep in the depths of the earth. Once before in my life had I had a similar feeling: on that day after my arrival at Zehrendorf when I strolled in the afternoon in the park and under the softly-rustling trees, in the sight of the venerable castle over which sunshine and shadow were chasing each other, I knew on a sudden that the master of this park and this castle was a desperate smuggler. And just so, or nearly so, I just now felt an intuitive conviction that this new house stood upon as treacherous a foundation, which might at any moment cave in and bury the proud and envied fortune of the man under the ruins of a gigantic bankruptcy. And yet for such an inference I had apparently no ground whatever. And even as before the thought seemed to me just as extravagant, just as insane; but I did not reproach myself as before; I rather sought in all earnestness to find the points which had possibly given rise to a suspicion so ridiculously at variance with the splendor of this room, the magnificence of the house, with everything which from childhood I had heard of the wealth of our provincial Crœsus. What could it have been? A peculiar quiver in his voice as he spoke of the immense stock of corn in his warehouses from the previous harvest, and of the unexampled fall in the price of bread-stuffs owing to the altered position of affairs in England;--this and the nervous excitability which he showed when I pointed out to him the necessity of enlarging the machine-works in the city to double their present extent, if he did not wish to be hopelessly distanced in the competition with other establishments on the introduction of the railway system into our country. A third point was his urgent wish, to which he continually recurred, to sell Zehrendorf for as high a sum as possible--he spoke of five hundred thousand thalers--to Prince Prora.
The strange thought had almost taken my breath, so I went to the window and looked dreamingly out upon the garden, whose gravelled walks and dark beds and shrubbery were dimly defined in the pallid moonlight.
"Why should it not be so?" I said to myself, holding with a sort of pertinacity to my unreasonable fancy. "And if it were so, would it not be a righteous Nemesis? Those old freebooter knights kept on their evil courses so long, and despised the signs of the time so thoroughly, that at last the time turned against them and flung them off, as a spirited horse hurls from the saddle the rider who has lost his stirrups. And in our time the dead ride fast, and this man here, the shop-keeper, who has mounted the knight's charger, I reckon already among the dead. Shameless rapacity and naked selfishness--have these not been the food of the one as of the other? Have they not both borne as motto on their shields: 'All for me--I for myself?' Has any one of them ever thought of the poor people, except to press hard upon it, by way of feeling that it is there? Ay, is it not more than mere chance that that criminal traffic into which the freebooter threw himself merely to gain his living, became the means by which the shopkeeper amassed his riches? Has he not just told me, with a chuckle of satisfaction, how adroitly his father and he availed themselves of the fabulously advantageous opportunities afforded by Napoleon's continental embargo, and how they had carried on the business for years and years, and made thousands and thousands, and how they slipped out of it at the very moment it began to grow hazardous? Is it not just, then, that the shopkeeper who turned freebooter should have his part in the same fate that befell the freebooter turned shopkeeper?--only that the lordship of the former will not endure so long as that of the latter, and rightly so, for 'the dead ride fast.'"
I looked up to the night sky, where a keen night wind was driving great masses of black cloud from west to east across the shining disc of the moon now near the full. Strange fantastic figures; long trailing dragons with expanded jaws, colossal fishes with greedy rows of teeth, horrible crustacean shapes with long nippers and crooked crawling legs, giants with heads towering high and bearing masses of rock in their uplifted arms, cunning hunchbacked dwarfs with protruding gluttonous paunches--monsters and deformities of all sorts, and not a single bright fair figure. In a strange freak of fancy I seemed to see in these frightful clouds the races of men who had held dominion upon earth, and borne the sceptre and the trenchant sword, who had had no pity for the oppressed multitude whose life they drained, until it was like that attenuated green-gray film timidly floating under the giants, which no sooner came into the bright neighborhood of the moon than it dispersed and dissolved away. Should it go on so in unbroken succession forever? Must race of oppressors follow race of oppressors without end: the knights of the hammer ever smite upon the wretched anvil? Would that time never come--that other time, that better time--which the eye of my glorious teacher had seen in vision, to hasten whose coming he had given his life, and to which I had devoted myself with all the might of my soul?
"It will come, be assured this time will come," I said. "Is it not come even now? Is it not already within yourself, since you have recognized that it will and must come? Is it not already in all those who think as you, and have the power to give their thoughts form and color and flesh and blood?
"Ah, to have that power! Were it not a glorious thing to be master here, and yonder in the great works, and in all his other factories and stores? To be able to be a helper--a benefactor to thousands and thousands--and not to be it! To be a monster with vast engulfing jaws, like that hideous spectre up yonder in the clouds, because, as Doctor Willibrod says, so soon as we attain power and wealth Fate hangs a flintstone or a gold nugget in our breast instead of a heart!"
I closed the window, lowered the curtain, and went towards my bed. But the train of thought I had been following had escaped me, and I stopped and surveyed once more all the magnificence of the luxurious room.
"And to all this she has been accustomed from her childhood," I said to myself. "Upon such soft carpets has her dainty foot always trod; her hand has always touched fabrics of this voluptuous texture; she has always breathed this perfumed atmosphere. And if shameless selfishness should meet with such a fate as brutal arrogance--this house should fall as fell that older one--it would be hard, cruelly hard for her. The other called me once her George, her dragon-slayer. But she did not wish to be rescued, and I, still half a boy, could not have rescued her. With this one it might perhaps be otherwise; perhaps she would rather be rescued than perish--and in any event, I am no longer a boy."
And here my eye fell upon the little mangy seal-skin portmanteau which William Kluckhuhn had carefully placed at the foot of the bed whose voluminous curtains he had looped back, and I had to laugh aloud. For it was ridiculous, when I possessed hardly more than was contained in this little shabby wallet, a borrowed one at that, to talk of rescuing a house like this--to worry my brains about the fate of men who lived in a house like this! So I betook myself to bed, and, as I was just falling asleep, awakened myself again by laughing at something--I did not know what.