CHAPTER XVII.
It was a year after these events that a solitary traveller was ascending the slope of one of the hills of the heath which surrounded the town of Uselin on the land side. He journeyed slowly, like one who is wearied with a long march, and laboriously dragged his feet through that coarse sand with which the sea loves to bestrew its threshold. But the traveller was not by any means weary; he had journeyed but few miles that day, and for him twice the exertion had been but child's play. The little bundle which was slung from a stick over his shoulder could not overburden him; and yet he went slower and slower as he approached the three pines which crowned the summit of the hill; indeed he stopped from time to time and pressed his hand upon his heart, as though his breath failed him for the few steps that were yet to be taken. And now he stood on the summit under the pines; the stick with the bundle slipped from his grasp, and he stretched out his arms toward the little town which from the strand glittered in a light blended with the glitter of the sea. Then he threw himself--tall and powerful man as he was--upon the heather under the pines, weeping and sobbing like a child, but presently half raised himself, and lay for a long time, propped by his elbow, steadily gazing at the little sea-port at his feet, with its peaked gables and steep roofs reddened by the sunset.
What thoughts were passing through the mind of this solitary man? What emotions were filling his heaving breast?
Many a poet who has carelessly brought his hero into a similar situation probably finds the answer to this question no such easy task; but fortunately for me I myself am the wanderer lying under the pines, and since that time not so many years have flown that the place, the hour, and what they brought me, could have escaped my memory.
What did they bring?
A host of memories from the years when the man was a light-hearted boy, and all that he saw around him now but the scenes of his wild sports: the town, from the depth of the half-filled-up fosse to the tops of the spires; the gardens, fields, meadows and heaths that surrounded it as far as these very hills; the harbor with its ships, and the glistening sea on which he loved to row in a frail boat when the towers, as now, glowed ruddy in the evening light.
Hither and thither strayed my looks, and everywhere they encountered objects that greeted me as old acquaintances; but they did not dwell long upon any one; just as when we search a well-known book for some especial passage, turning leaf after leaf, and every line that meets the eye is familiar, and yet we can not light upon the place we are looking for.
But in truth it was so small and lowly, the old one-storied house with the painted gable on the narrow harbor-street, and the street lay so low, covered by the larger houses of the higher part of the town,--how could I expect from this spot to distinguish the little house with the narrow gable?
And yet for what other purpose had I made the journey hither, the sixteen miles from the prison--my first journey after regaining my freedom--but to see that house, and, if fortune would permit, perhaps through a crack in the shutter to catch a glimpse of its occupant? For to go to him, to gaze into his eyes, to throw my arms about his neck, as my heart yearned to do--this, after what had happened, I dared not hope. In the short notes with which he had answered my letters, there had never been, during all the seven years of my imprisonment, one single word of love, of comfort, of forgiveness.
And my last letter, written a week before, in which I congratulated him in advance on his sixty-seventh birth-day, told him that this would be the day of my liberation, and asked if I--now another, and, I hoped, a better man--might venture to come to him on that day--this letter, which I had written with wet eyes and a trembling hand, had never been answered.
The red glow had at last vanished from the high roofs and peaked gables, from the fluttering pennons of the ships in the outer harbor, and from the two church-towers; a light mist arose from the meadows and fields which stretched from the hills upon the heath to the city. The mail-coach came along the road lined with stunted fruit trees; and I watched it as it slowly passed tree after tree, until it disappeared behind the first houses of the suburb. Here and there upon the narrow foot-path between the fields were seen the figures of laborers moving toward the town, and these also disappeared. The twilight faded away; denser grew the mists in the hollows; nothing living was to be seen except a brace of hares sitting up on their haunches in a stubble-field, and a great flock of crows, which came croaking from the pine-forest where I used to play "Robbers and Soldiers" with my comrades, their black bodies flapping distinct against the lighter sky, as they bent their course to the old church-towers.
The hour had now come.
I arose, hung my bundle once more over my stick, slowly descended the hill and took my way through the misty fields to the town. In an obscure spot in the suburbs I stopped again for awhile--it was not dark enough for me yet. I neither feared nor had reason to fear any one. Even before my great enemy, Justizrath Heckepfennig, or those redoubtable public servants Luz and Bolljahn, had I met them, I need not have cast down my eyes, or stepped aside; and yet it was not dark enough.
Now the night breeze rustled louder in the half-stripped boughs of the maple against which I was leaning, and looking up I saw a star twinkling through the sprays--now it would do.
How hollow sounded my footsteps in the empty streets, and how heavily beat my heart in my anxious breast! As I passed the Rathhaus, Father Rüterbusch, the night-watchman, was standing, bare-headed and without his weapons, at his post, and looking pensively at the empty table and barrel-chair of Mother Möller's cake stand, while above us the clock in the tower of St. Nicholas's church struck eight. Was Mother Möller dead, that Father Rüterbusch thus gazed at the empty barrel, and had not even a glance for his old acquaintance from the guard-house?
Dead? Why not? She was an old woman when I last saw her--just the age of my father, as she told me once when I was spending my pocket money at her stall. As old as my father! A chill wind blew through the hall; I shivered from head to foot, and with a rapid stride, almost a run, I hurried over the little market-place down the sloping streets leading to the harbor.
Here was the Harbor-street, and here was the house! Thank heaven! A light was glimmering through the shutters of both windows on the left. Thank heaven once more!
And now would I do and must do what on that other evening I wished to do and should have done, and yet did not: go in and say to him "forgive me!"
I grasped the brass knob of the door--again it felt cold as ice to my hot hand. The door-bell gave a sharp clang, and at its summons appeared at the door of the right-hand chamber--just as on that evening--the faithful Friederike. No, not just as on that evening; her little figure, bent with age, was dressed in black, and a black ribbon fastened the snow-white cap with its broad ruffle, which formed a ring of points around her wrinkled face. And out of the wrinkled face two eyes, red with weeping, stared at the strange visitor.
"Rike," I said--it was all that I could utter.
"George! good heaven!" the old women cried, tottering towards me with uplifted hands.
She grasped both my hands, and gazed at me, sobbing and speechless, with quivering lips, while the tears streamed down her furrowed cheeks. She had no need to speak: I did not ask what had happened: I only asked "When?"
"A week ago to-day," sobbed the old woman. "He did not even live to see his birth-day."
"What did he die of?"
"I do not know. Nobody knows. Doctor Balthasar says he cannot understand it. He has never been quite well since you have been away; and kept growing worse and worse, though he would never own it; and two weeks ago he took to his bed, and kept perfectly still, looking always just before him, only that sometimes he would write in his house-book, and that on the very evening before; and when I came in the morning he was dead, and the book was lying on the bed, and I took it myself and showed it to nobody when they came and sealed up everything. I thought I ought to keep it for you: he used so often to say your name to himself when he was writing. What he wrote I don't know; I cannot read; but I will get it for you."
She opened the door into my father's room. It was neat as ever--painfully neat, but even more uninhabitable. The white slips of parchment, fastened with seals over the keyholes of the secretary and the old brown press in the corner, had a spectral look to me.
"Why is the lamp burning on the table?" I asked.
"They are coming this evening."
"Who are coming?"
"Sarah and her husband, and the children, I believe. Did you not know?"
"I know of nothing--nothing whatever. And there still lies my letter--unbroken! He never read it!"
I sank into the chair that stood by the writing table. I had never sat in this chair, had scarcely dared to touch it. A king's throne had seemed less venerable to me. This thought at once struck me, and was followed by many, many other painful thoughts: my head sank into my hands: gladly would I have wept, but I could not weep.
The old woman returned with the book of which she had spoken. I knew it well; it was a thick quarto volume, bound in leather, with clasps, and I had often seen it in my father's hands of an evening when he had done his work; but never had I ventured to cast a look into it, even had I had the opportunity, which but rarely happened, as my father always kept it carefully locked up. Now it lay open before me: one after another I turned the thick leaves of the rough coarse paper, their pages covered with the neat, pedantically straight hand-writing of my father, which I knew so well. The hand had not changed, although the entries extended over more than forty years, and the ink on the first pages was entirely faded. Only upon the last did this steady strength seen to fail. The traces of the pen grew ever more angular, feebler; they were but the ruin of what had formerly been; the last word was just legible and no more. It was my name.
And everywhere upon the first leaves, those of some twenty-seven years back, stood my name.
"To-day a son has been born to me--a sturdy little fellow. The nurse says she never saw in her life so stout a babe, and that he is like St. George. So he shall be called George, and shall be the joy of my life and the staff of my old age. May God grant it!"
"George comes on finely," was on another page. "He is already larger than the Herr Steuerrath's Arthur, who is not small either. He seems to have a good head of his own. Though only three years old, it is wonderful what ideas he has. He must soon go to school."
And again on another:
"Clerk Volland is full of praise of my George. 'He might get on better with his learning,' the old man says; 'but his heart is in the right place; he will be a fine man some day. I shall not live to see it, but you will, and then do you remember that I said so.'"
And so it went on, page after page--"George that splendid fellow! My noble boy, George!"
Then came other times. George's name was not now in almost every line, and George was no longer the splendid fellow and noble boy. George would not do right, neither in school, nor at home, nor on the street, nor anywhere. George was a good-for-nothing! No, no; that was too much to say; only he could do better if he would, and he certainly would do better--he certainly would!
Then came many pages and George's name was not mentioned at all. Many a family event was noted; my mother's death; the terrible news of my brother's loss; that his daughter Sarah had again--for the third--for the fourth time--presented him with a grandson or a grand-daughter; that he had been promoted to an accountant's place; that his salary had been raised; but George's name appeared no more.
Not even upon the last leaves, which again had references to "him;" that "he" was so well liked by all in the prison, and that the Herr Superintendent von Zehren had asked today again if "he" was not yet found worthy of his father's forgiveness.
"I have tried to-day to write to him what the feelings of my heart are; but I cannot bring myself to it. I will tell him all when he comes back, if he cares for the love of an old broken man; but write it I cannot."
And upon the last page were the words:
"It is not true! It certainly is not true. Six years and a half he has behaved well, yes, exemplarily, and in the second half of the seventh to become worthless at once! I hear little good of the new superintendent. The one that is gone was a noble-spirited man, and he was always full of praise of him--no, no, whatever they may say of him, my boy is not worthless, not worthless!"
And last of all:
"In a week he will be free; he will find me upon a sick bed if he finds me at all. For his sake I wish it; for it would be a great sorrow to him to see me no more. I have thought all these years that my boy did not love me, or he would never have given me so much pain; but I had just now a dream that he was here and I held him in my arms. I said to him, George----"
I stared with burning eyes at the blank which followed, as if there must appear upon it the words which my father had said to me in his dream; but gaze as I might, the words appeared not, and at last I saw nothing more for the flood of tears that burst from my eyes.
"You must not cry so, George," said the good old woman. "I know he always loved you more than the rest--very much more. And if he died of grief and heart-break on your account, why he was an old man, and now he is dead and with our Heavenly Father, and he is well there, much better than here, though the good Lord knows that I have had no other thought these twenty years than to make it all right with him."
"I know it, I know it, and I thank you a thousand times," I cried, seizing her brown withered bands. "And now tell me, what are you going to do, and what can I do for you?"
She looked at me and shook her head; it probably seemed strange to her that George, just out of the prison, should offer to do anything for her.
I repeated my question.
"Poor boy," she said, "you will have enough to do to provide for yourself, for what he has left does not amount to much; he was too good; he would help everywhere that he could, and he bought a place in the Beguines for me, for the year or two I may still be spared. This will come out of it, and Sarah made fuss enough when she heard it. They thought they would get it all'; but it is to be divided equally between you both. I have that from his own mouth, and I can swear it, and will swear it, if they raise any dispute, because he left no will."
At this moment there was a loud ring at the front door.
"Good heavens!" cried the old woman, clapping her hands together, "there they are already!"
She hurried out of the room, leaving the door open after her. I remembered that I had never loved my sister--that I had parted from her with unfriendly feelings long years before, and that in the interval I had by no means learned to love her--but what difference did that make now? Now, when she and I had lost our father, when we might lean and take each other's hand across his grave?
I went into the little hall, which was nearly filled by the newcomers--a tall, lean, pale woman in black; a short, fat, red-faced man, in the uniform of an officer of the customs; and so far as I could make out at a glance, a half-dozen children, from ten or twelve years old to an infant, which the tall, pale woman clutched more firmly as I appeared at the door, and looked at me with a hostile rather than a startled look in her large cold eyes. The short, fat man in uniform stepped between me and the group of mother and children with a confused expression in his face, and, rubbing his plump hands in an embarrassed manner, said:
"We were not expecting you--ahem!--brother-in-law ahem! but we are very glad to meet you here--ahem! My dear wife will only put herself to rights a little--ahem! In the meantime, suppose we go into our late father's room, where we can talk over matters undisturbed. Don't you think so, my dear?"
The little man turned upon his heel to face his dear wife, who, instead of answering, pushed the children before her into old Friederike's little room. He turned back to me, rubbed his hands with still more embarrassment than before, and said again "Ahem!"
We entered my father's room. I took my seat in his chair, but my brother-in-law was too disturbed in spirit to be able to sit down. He paced up and down the room with short quick steps, stopping for a moment every time he passed the door, with his head thrust forward a little on one side, listening if his dear wife had called him, and every time, to fill up the pause with propriety, he said "Ahem?"
It was a long detail that the little man went into during his restless wandering from door to stove and from stove to door, and what he said was as clumsy and awkward as himself. It seemed that he and his dear wife had cherished a half hope that I would never be discharged from prison, especially since I had been detained half a year over my time for alleged breaches of discipline. He rejoiced exceedingly, he said, that his fears and those of his dear wife had not been justified; but that I must admit that it was a hard thing for a public officer to have a brother-in-law who had been in the House of Correction. Did I think, now, that an officer with such kindred was likely to gain promotion? It was frightful, unpardonable, so to speak, and if he could have foreseen it----
The little man suddenly gave me a furtive look. I was standing perfectly still, looking steadily at him, was a giant in comparison with him, and had just come out of prison. It seemed to strike him that it was not altogether prudent to take this tone with me, so now there came a long litany of the dolorous life that a petty subaltern with a large family has to lead on the Polish frontier. True, in conformity with the wishes of his dear wife, who wanted to nurse her old father, he had procured his removal to this place; but now the old gentleman, who no doubt would have taken it kindly of them, must needs die, and living here was so much more expensive, and then the journey had cost so much with all these children, and the baby was only sixteen weeks old, and though the inheritance was left, still two was a heavy divisor when the dividend was not large, and----
I had heard enough, and more than enough.
"Do you know this book?" I asked, laying my hand on the cover of my father's diary.
"No," replied the little man.
"Give me this book, and I make no other claim upon my father's estate. It is his diary, which has no interest for you. Do you consent?"
"Certainly--that is, ahem! I don't know whether my dear wife--we must first see about it--," answered my brother-in-law, rubbing his hands in an undecided way, and looking askance at the book out of his little puffy eyes.
"Then see about it"
I now commenced on my side pacing up and down the room, while the husband of his dear wife seated himself at the table, to submit this mysterious book to a closer inspection.
It seemed to excite no especial interest in him by the ordinary process of reading; so he tried another plan with it, taking it by the two covers and letting the leaves hang down, which he shook vigorously for half a minute. As this proceeding also led to no result, he gave up the matter as hopeless, laid down the book again, and said "Ahem!"
"Are you agreed!" I asked.
"Yes, certainly--to be sure--so to speak--of course; that is, we must put it down in writing--only a couple of lines--just by way of a memorandum--we might have it afterwards drawn up by a notary----"
"Whatever you wish, whatever you wish," I said. "Here then!"
The little man glanced at the paper and glanced at me, while I tied up the book in my bundle, and took bundle and stick in my hand. Either he did not know what to make of me, or--as from the expression of his countenance was more probable--considered me simply insane; in either case he was beyond measure glad to be rid of me.
"Off so soon?" he said. "There's my dear wife, won't you----"
He checked his invitation to see his dear wife. I muttered something that might pass for an excuse, left the room, pressed old Friederike's hand as I passed through the hall, and stood in the street.
I have but a dim recollection of the hour that followed. It is not a dream, and yet it seems like a dream, that I went to the grave-yard in the mill-suburb, roused up the old sexton, who was just going to bed; that I kneeled by a recent grave, and afterwards gave the old man, who stood by me with a lantern, money to cover the hillock next morning with fresh sods; that I went back again, and near the gate passed the villa of the commerzienrath, where all the windows were illuminated, and I could see couples gliding past them in the dance to a music which I could not hear, and that I thought the little Hermine might be among the dancers, and then remembered that the pretty child would now be seventeen years old, if she were still alive.
I felt an irrepressible sadness; it seemed as if all the world had died, and I was the only living being left, and the shades of the dead were dancing round me to inaudible music.
Thus I went back with unsteady steps to the town, and passed along the empty silent streets towards the harbor, mechanically following the way which I had always taken when a boy.
The sea-breeze blew in my face, and cooled my fevered brow, and I inhaled deep draughts of the invigorating air. No, the world was not dead, nor was I the only living being left; and there was a music, a delicious music, sweeter to me than any other: the music of the wind whistling through spars and cordage, and the waves plashing upon the harbor-bar and before the prow of the ship. Yes, there were still those who loved me, and whom I with all my soul could love again.
Upon the wharf, where the steamboat for St. ---- was now lying at her moorings, there was standing a crowd of people. It struck me that I could best commence my journey to the capital by this steamer.
Considering this, I was standing at the head of the pier, when a litter, such as is used to transport the sick, was carried past me towards the crowd. The litter was without the usual cover, which had probably been forgotten in their haste, or, as it was night, not considered necessary.
"What is the matter?" I asked the men.
"The fireman of the Elizabeth has broken his leg." growled one in reply, in whom I now recognized my old friend, officer Luz.
"And we are to take him to the hospital," said the other, who was no other than the redoubtable Bolljahn.
"Poor fellow!" I exclaimed.
"Yes," said Luz, "and his wife has just been brought to bed."
"And they had eight already," growled Bolljahn.
"No, seven," said Luz.
"No, eight," said Bolljahn.
The group upon the pier began to move.
"There he lies now," said Luz.
"No, eight," said Bolljahn, who was not the man to drop a disputed point so soon.
They had brought the man out of the ship to the pier. He was a remarkably large and powerful man, whom six found it no easy task to carry, and who, strong as he was, groaned and cried with pain. The two men put down the litter; the bearers set about lifting the man into it, very awkwardly as it seemed, for he screamed with anguish. I thrust a couple of gapers aside and came up. They had laid him upon the ground again; I asked him how he wanted to be placed, and took hold myself with the others, showing them what to do.
"Thank God!" murmured the poor fellow, "here is one man with some sense."
They carried him off, and I went a little distance with them to see how they got on. Was he warm enough? Yes he was. Did they carry him well? Well, they might shake him a little less.
"Here is something for you too," I said, putting a piece of money into the hand of each of my old acquaintances, "and now carry him as if he were your brother or your child;" and then I bent over the injured man and whispered something in his ear that it was not necessary for Luz and Bolljahn to hear, and gave him something which it was equally unnecessary for them to see; and then I turned again to the group which was standing by the gang-plank of the steamer, discussing the remarkable accident.
At this moment the captain came out upon the gang-plank, and called to the group:
"Will any one of you take Karl Riekmann's place for this trip? I will pay him good wages."
The men looked at each other. "I can't, Karl," said one, "can't you?" "No, Karl," said the one addressed, "but can't you, Karl?" "Neither can I," said the third Karl.
"I will," said I, stepping up to the captain.
The captain, a short, square-built man, looked up at me.
"Oh, you will do," he said.
"I think so."
"Can you go on board at once?"
"There is nothing to detain me here."