A Noble Name; or, Dönninghausen

by Claire von Glümer

"Ah, thank you!" she said, kissing his burning hand.

He drew his daughter closer to him. "My dear, good child!" he said, pressing his feverish lips to her forehead. She did not dream that it was a farewell caress.

The disease progressed rapidly, and was pronounced by the physician the next day to be a nervous fever. He was quite content with Johanna's calm, careful treatment of his patient, but he begged Helena, who could not control her agitation, to spare her own delicate health for the sake of her child, and to be as little as possible in the sick-room. She sighed and submitted.

But, indeed, neither she nor any one else could have disturbed the sick man after a few days had passed; he lay in a state of entire unconsciousness.

The whole city was interested in the artist's condition; the inquiries after his health were countless; the door was besieged by friends and acquaintances. He had always been a kind, ungrudging comrade to his fellow-actors, and now when he could no longer excite their envy, they remembered his own freedom from it, and did all in their power to testify their esteem and friendship for him.

For Helena it was a kind of consolation to receive their visits; her nature was of those for which distraction is possible. After she had with many tears given an account of the sick man's state, she would listen with interest to theatrical gossip, and forget for a while her own sorrow. It overcame her, indeed, with redoubled violence when she was once more alone. Often, when she had been laughing with a visitor at some jest, Johanna would find her in a state of most pitiable distress.

"He is going to die, I know he is; such happiness as ours was too great for this world of misery," she would declare, sobbing as if her heart would break; or she would cry out as if bereft of her senses, "O God, you cannot take him from me! He must be spared for me and for his art."

She was most helpless and hopeless in the sick-room, where she would throw herself on her knees by Roderich's bedside, cover his hand with kisses, and exhaust every passionate term of endearment, nearly fainting when there was no response from her unconscious husband. But if one of the physicians or a friend wished to speak to her, she would arise, and, with a look of anguish as she left the room, involuntarily adjust artistically the soft folds of her white cachemire peignoir.

Johanna was too young and unsophisticated to appreciate her step-mother. She did her injustice when she accused her of heartlessness, and she added to her own burden by a daily increasing dislike for Helena.

But she could not help it. The sleep of exhaustion, which now and then overcame her, was all the rest and forgetfulness that she had. If she forced herself to talk with little Lisbeth, she had to struggle continually with rising tears, and when she heard others speaking of the events of the day, she could hardly comprehend how the affairs of the world could pursue their usual course outside of the sick-room. That was her realm, and her father's death seemed to her the end of all things.