"True," was the short, energetic reply.
"I have proofs of it," continued Raven. "But a short time ago I was marvelling how one of my youngest subalterns had found courage to hurl insults at me openly, in the face of all the world. I forgot that he had been in your school. Of course! Winterfeld was staying at your house; he is your son's friend and yours. Well, he has shown himself an apt scholar. The thrusts he essays against me betray the master who instructed him."
"You are mistaken. George Winterfeld is displaying his own powers--admirable powers, certainly, which astonish myself. He kept his secret from me, as from others, and the book, which he forwarded to me two days ago, took me altogether by surprise. But I do not deny that my heart endorses every word that stands in it, and there are thousands who will agree with me. Beware, Arno! He is the first who ventures to defy the omnipotent Baron von Raven; this is the first storm menacing your high estate. Others will follow in its wake, and they will shake and undermine the ground on which you stand, until it trembles and yawns beneath your feet, and you will sink to depths great as the height to which you have risen."
"You think so?" asked the Baron, disdainfully. "You should know me better. I may be overthrown, and in my fall mortally injure myself and crush others. To sink would in this case imply a craven surrender, and that is not in my nature. Besides, we have not reached that point yet. I know all the enmities which this attack will let loose upon me; my foes have long waited for some such occasion; but they shall not taste the triumph of seeing me abandon a position which I have so long maintained and will never voluntarily quit. Men do not readily forgive success such as I have achieved."
"It was dearly bought," said Brunnow, coldly. "You paid for it with your honour."
"Rudolph!" thundered the Baron, with terrible vehemence.
"With your honour, I repeat it. Must I remind you of the day when our association was betrayed, our papers seized, ourselves arrested and cast into prison? Must I name to you the traitor to whom we owed all this, and who was arrested with us, merely as a matter of form? I and the others were put on our trial, and sentenced to long years of captivity, from which fate a foolhardy escape alone delivered me. After a short imprisonment that traitor was set at liberty, no charge being preferred against him. Weathering the storm which cost his friends and fellow-thinkers their freedom and their means of existence, Arno Raven emerged from it as the secretary, the familiar, the future son-in-law of the Minister in power, and commenced his brilliant career in the service of the cause he had sworn to combat with all his strength. That was the end of our dreams of liberty, of all our youthful hopes and illusions."
Every drop of blood had receded from the Baron's face. His breast heaved with a short, quick, panting movement, and his hands were clenched convulsively.
"And if I tell you now that this so-called treachery was nothing more than an imprudent act, an unhappy error of judgment, for which I have bitterly, cruelly atoned? If I tell you that you yourselves, with your over-hasty condemnation, your mad mistrust, drove me into the ranks of your enemies?"
"I make answer that you have forfeited all claim to be believed."