Calming his disordered nerves once more, he glanced furtively up toward Willem's room in the bedroom gallery above his head. Then he picked up the photograph and looked at it long with eyes full of trouble and apprehension. It was the full-length cabinet likeness of a plainly dressed young woman with a pretty, slack face. And the face's weakness was half redeemed by a stamp of settled sadness that was not devoid of a certain dignity.
Frederik turned the photograph over. On the back he read:
"For my little boy, from Anne Marie."
His mouth twitched. Throngs of memories were crowding in upon him. And the eyes of the Dead Man were boring to his very soul. Something very like Conscience was stirring within him. He laid the photograph face downward on the table and he bent his head forward upon his hands.
The young man was not a melodrama villain. He was not even a scoundrel, in the broad sense of the term. Weak, lazy, pleasure loving, he was what Peter Grimm had all unconsciously made him. As a dilettante, a man of leisure, or even comfortably engaged in some easy, congenial life work and with pleasant home surroundings, he would probably have developed few undesirable traits.
From boyhood he had been under the influence and orders of Peter Grimm. To be under Peter Grimm's supervision entailed one of three courses, according to the character of the person concerned: either to yield gracefully and gratefully to the old man's kindly but iron domination and find therein love and protection,—as had Kathrien; or to use the right of personal thought and individuality, and therefore to clash forever with Peter,—as had James Hartmann; or to seem for policy's sake to bend, while really living one's own life;—as had Frederik.
Peter Grimm was the slave and apostle of Order, Work, and Method. Frederik loved ease, luxury, artistic surroundings. Yet he was too wise to antagonise his uncle, who had the power to leave him one day the master of all these pleasant things he craved. So he had adapted himself outwardly to a path he loathed. And, by the wayside, he had secretly sought such pleasures as his nature craved.
Anne Marie had chanced to be by the wayside.
What had followed was rendered tragic chiefly by Anne Marie's innate goodness and by Peter Grimm's fierce morality.
Frederik dared not risk the loss of a future fortune by admitting his fault or by marrying the woman for whom, at the time, he had really cared. In a shiftless way and with straitly limited income, he had done what he could do for her. The sacrifices these helps had entailed and the constant fear of exposure and of consequent disinheritance had in time made the thought of Anne Marie a horror to him.