Atkins seemed just to have recovered from the consternation into which this scene had thrown him. "That was the father once again! Mr. Forest just as he lived and moved! That was the very tone, the very glance with which he so imperiously felled down all that opposed him! I have never before encountered this in Jane; have you, Henry?"
Alison was silent; his eyes, with a consuming glow, had rested upon Jane during the whole, time she had stood before Atkins; they now seemed fixed upon the place where she had vanished, and there was far, very far more of admiration than of anger in their glance.
"I thought Mr. Forest hated his fatherland," he said at last, slowly, "and that he educated his daughter in that hatred."
"Oh, yes, he quarrelled with Germany his whole life long, and in his dying hour, like a despairing man, clung to its remembrance. We never thoroughly learn to know this people, Henry! I was for twenty years in Forest's house, I shared sorrow and joy with him, I knew his most secret affairs; and still, forever and eternally, one thing lay between us, this one which the most bitter experiences, the most energetic will, which the associations of twenty years could not banish from the father's heart, and which now bursts its barriers in the daughter who has inherited all this, whose education is American through and through:--this German blood!"
They were interrupted. The officer they had been expecting now appeared in the village street, accompanied by a soldier. Henry advanced some steps to meet him, and saluted him politely; then summoning all his bad French he began to explain his embarrassments; but after the first hasty words, he spoke more slowly, then stopped, began anew, and stopped again, and at last was wholly silent; his eyes fixed, staring, and immovable, upon the face of the officer.
He too was equally surprised; he stepped back a few paces, but in so doing, he had also approached Mr. Atkins, who now, with an expression of mingled surprise and terror, cried:
"Professor Fernow!"
Henry trembled; this outcry gave him a certainty as to whose eyes they were which had beamed upon him from under the helmet. Every drop of blood vanished from the face of the young American; with one single glance he took in the whole appearance of the officer standing before him; a second flew back to the house where Jane still lingered. He seemed to comprehend something. A wild half suppressed "Ah!" broke from his lips, then he set his teeth firmly, and was silent. Atkins had meantime saluted Lieutenant Fernow, who with calm politeness now turned to both gentlemen.
"I regret that it must be I who announce to you unpleasant tidings; but the desired continuation of your journey is impossible. No one can pass; the guards have strict orders to make everyone turn back, whoever he may be."
"But, Professor Fernow, we must go on!" said Atkins in vexation, "and you know us well enough to assure the authorities that we are not spies."