Wolfgang did not mind the scoldings he got, he had no ambition to become head of his form. He laughed at the master, and could not even get himself to lower his head and look sad when his mother waved a bad report in his face in her nervous excitement: "So that's all one gets in return for all one's worry?"
How ambitious women are! Paul Schlieben smiled; he took it more calmly. Well, he had not had the hard work that Käte had had. As the boy had missed so many lessons owing to his illness, she had sat with him every day, and written and read and done sums and learnt words and rules and repeated them with him indefatigably, and set him exercises herself besides the schoolwork, and in this manner he had succeeded in getting his remove into the fourth form with the others at Easter, in spite of the weeks and weeks he had been away from school. She had drawn a deep breath of relief: ah, a mountain had been climbed. But still the road was not straight by any means. When the first blackbirds began to sing in the garden he became No. 15 in his form--that is to say, an average pupil--when the first nightingale trilled he was not even among the average, and when summer came he was among the last in his form.
It was too tempting to sow, plant, and water the garden, to lie on the grass in the warm sunshine and have a sun bath. And still better to rove about out of doors along the edges of the wood or bathe in the lake and swim far out, so far that the other boys would call out to him: "Come back, Schlieben, you'll be drowned."
"Be thankful that there is so much life in him," said Paul to his wife. "Who would have thought only six months ago that he would ever be like this? It is fortunate that he isn't fond of sitting indoors. 'Plenty of fresh air,' Hofmann said, 'plenty of movement. Such a severe illness always does some harm to the constitution.' So let us choose the lesser of two evils. But still the rascal must remember that he has duties to perform as well."
It was difficult to combine the two. Käte felt she was becoming powerless. When the boy's eyes, which were as bright as sloes, implored her to let him go out, she dared not keep him back. She knew he had not finished his school-work, had perhaps not even commenced it; but had not Paul said: "One must choose the lesser of two evils," and the doctor: "Such a severe illness always leaves some weakness behind, therefore a good deal of liberty"?
She suddenly trembled for his life; the horror of his illness was still fresh in her mind. Oh, those nights! Those last terrible hours in which the fever had risen higher and higher after the hot bath, the pulse and the poor heart had rushed along at a mad pace, until the ice from the lake had at last, at last brought coolness, and he had fallen into a sound sleep, which, when the sky commenced to glow in the east and a new day had looked in through the window, had turned into a beneficial, miraculous perspiration.
So she had to let the boy run about.
But that he hung on Cilia's arm when she had to go an errand in the evening, that he hurried after her when she only took a letter to the box, or that he brought her a chair when she wanted to sit with her mending-basket under the elderberry bush near the kitchen door was not to be tolerated. When Käte heard that Cilia had not gone further than the nearest pines on the edge of the wood when it was her Sunday out, and had sat there for hours with the boy on the grass, there was a scene.
Cilia wept bitter tears. What had she done? She had only told Wölfchen about her home.
"What's your home to him? He is to mind his own business and you yours." Käte was about to say still more, to cry out: "Leave off telling him your private concerns, I won't have it," but she controlled herself, although with difficulty. She could have boxed this round-cheeked girl's ears, as she looked at her so boldly with her bright eyes. Even Frida Lämke was preferable to her.