"It is high time that this farce were ended," Egon murmured. "I must leave this house, and break the spell that has been cast about me!"
He had often of late made this resolve; almost nightly, after he had retired to his solitary apartment, and thought over the events of the day, he had determined to tear asunder the bonds that were being woven about him, but the next morning found him powerless to carry his determination into execution. Yes, a spell had been cast upon him which paralyzed his will, and whose this spell was, he could not rightly tell.
When Bertha's wondrous beauty filled his mind, a wild feeling of delight thrilled through him, his pulses throbbed, his thoughts made chaos within him, he longed to clasp in his arms as his own her whom he had so foolishly insulted and scorned.
But in the midst of this rapturous intoxication he was recalled to a sober certainty of waking disgust when he remembered various expressions of Bertha's which had revealed to him her true self; he turned away from the thought of her, chilled and repelled, and in her place there was a very different image,--Lieschen gazed at him with a look of reproach, and yet of love! In thought of her he was calmed and cheered, she incited him to continued exertion, she called forth all his better nature,--she, the good angel who had led him out from the slough of an existence into which the beautiful fiend with the glowing eyes would fain drag him back!
Did he love Bertha? Did he love Lieschen? He did not know. Bertha exercised a demoniac influence upon him, Lieschen's spell was fairy-like, but mighty. His soul hovered between the two, in a conflict which robbed him of repose, subjugated his will, and made any firm resolve impossible for him.
Perhaps chance would befriend him.
CHAPTER XV.
[RENEWED CONFIDENCE].
Herr Von Osternau passed a miserable night. Pastor Widman's letter had excited him more than he cared to confess to himself. If he could have told his faithful partner of the wretched epistle, he would soon have been soothed to rest, but he could not do this for fear lest his Emma should find in the Pastor's letter fresh reasons for urging her oft-repeated desire for the tutor's dismissal. Herr von Osternau's sense of justice revolted against condemning the accused without allowing him a hearing.
As he had frankly confessed, his faith in the Candidate was shaken, and the more he thought, during his sleepless night, of the Pastor's letter, the more he suspected that he had bestowed his confidence upon one quite unworthy of it. The Pastor's accusation of his nephew did not seem like an invention, and if it were well grounded, Pigglewitch could no longer be retained as Fritzchen's tutor. The man who could lose at play money not his own was unfit for such an office, whatever might be his intellectual acquirements. But perhaps he was not so guilty as he seemed. He should not be judged before he had been allowed to speak in his own defence.