Roland had eaten forbidden fruit from the tree of knowledge, and Eric was surprised to see how deep an impression had been made upon the youth. A new and difficult task was before him, to keep the youth from saying anything in his father's presence.
"Who is Brown?" inquired Roland. "Can you tell me about him?" Eric told him. He narrated the martyr's history, and dwelt with emphasis on the fact, that even in our day life is offered as a sacrifice, and that a pure self-surrender raises to the sublime even the man wearing a captain's gay uniform of the present day. He wanted to show, incidentally, that the costume of every age and every condition in life could be the symbolic expression of the highest greatness; but Roland did not go along with him, and he had the apparently difficult task of justifying, or, at least, of explaining the position of Sonnenkamp, who had incontrovertibly taken the opposite side.
"Yes, yes," exclaimed Roland; "now I remember you said, when we were with the Russian at Wolfsgarten, 'You could not imagine that a white boy and a negro boy could be comrades.' Are you, too, a friend of slavery?"
Eric tried to explain his meaning; and, while striving to reconcile the difference, he was pleased to notice how open the youth's soul was to every impression, and how tenaciously it clung to things spoken of only in a cursory and incidental way.
Eric sat with Roland until it was very late; he was obliged to satisfy his ingenuous mind, and this was almost the hardest task that had ever been laid upon him. The youth was to be made to perceive that there was another way of considering the question, one that regarded slavery as justifiable and a righteous necessity; he was never to let his father know that he considered him in the wrong, and that he had happened to become acquainted, through the Professorin, with a spirit that ought not to have been conjured up in this house. Eric called to mind his mother, who had admonished him, with reason, that he was to adopt that course of instruction for Roland which was necessary, and not that which the youth himself preferred. Circumstances now rendered it necessary to follow only that track which the youth had entered upon for himself. It was a matter of rejoicing that he had of himself struck out the path; it was just what all education proposed: and now was he to turn aside from this track, and to shatter in pieces the abiding fundamental principle. Thou shalt, and thou shalt not?
"It seems to me like a dream," Roland went on to say; "a great negro once held me in his arms; I remember distinctly all about him; I remember his woolly hair, and how I pulled him by it; his face was smooth, without any beard at all."
"The negroes have no growth of beard," added Eric, and the youth continued, dreamily:—
"I have been carried by negroes—by negroes."
He continued to repeat the word in a lower and lower tone, and then became silent. Suddenly he passed his hand over his brow, and asked,—
"Are the people who are slaves fond of their children? Do you know any song they sing?"