"But if you know all about it----"
"That is no affair of yours. I want to hear it from you, and I advise you not to try to deceive me. I have already meditated whether to offer my services to Herr Delmar or to stick to you. If you lie to me you will force me for my own sake to go over to the enemy's camp, and you know best what that means!"
"For the love of heaven, doctor, you would not betray me?"
"Not unless you force me to it by lies or concealment. Come, begin! Tell me all that you know of this Herr Delmar, from the moment when I saw the boy for the last time until the present day."
Herr von Heydeck sprang up from his seat and paced the room to and fro in the wildest distress. He tried to reflect, to come to some determination, but his mind was confused; the doctor's threat had so terrified him that he could think of nothing but the wretched consequences of such a betrayal, and he lost sight of the fact that his guilty accomplice had an equal interest with himself in preserving his secret.
The doctor allowed him no time for reflection. "Will you do as I say, or not?" he asked roughly. And his threatening manner was, as ever, effectual.
Incapable of further resistance, the old man again sank into his arm-chair, and, in the fear of offending the doctor by suppressing some fact that he might have learned from other sources, gave him the full and circumstantial account that he demanded.
After Herr von Heydeck had, with the help of the doctor and of the woman who afterwards became Frau Putzer, established the fact of the death of the child of his late wife by means of the mock funeral and the false certificate of death, he kept the boy, whom he loathed doubly as the child of Count Menotti and as the obstacle to his own fortune, in the basement of the old tower, tended by Melcher and his half-idiot sister. Herr von Heydeck never saw it, but, as he sat in his study at night, he could frequently hear its cries, and they not only awakened in him the stings of conscience, but tortured him with the dread lest, if heard by other ears, they should lead to detection and punishment. The false certificate of death had given him all the wealth that should have been the child's.
Again and again the doctor's offer to rid him forever of the detested infant recurred to him, but he recoiled from a crime that seemed to him far more odious than the child's concealment.
Thus a year passed amid pangs unspeakable for the lord of the castle. He had cherished a secret hope that the child would not live long in the gloomy tower, but this hope was blighted by Melcher's account of the boy's thriving condition. He was almost in despair. He had not sufficient courage for a fresh crime; and yet it would be impossible to keep a growing child in the basement of the tower much longer without discovery. His cries had already been heard by the villagers in the silence of night, but superstition had lent its aid to protect the guilty.