Involuntarily he stopped and tried to turn back; but the non-com, took his arm and pushed him forward, not roughly, yet in such fashion that the prisoner gave up his attempt.
"You fool, you!" said his companion; "if you had said you were quite sick with shame for your silly behaviour, you'd have got off with a month!"
After endless questions the turnpike-keeper had managed to find his way to the court-house of the army-corps. He had been wandering through street after street; the busy traffic of the capital had made his head spin, and he was tired to death with this unwonted tramping over hard stone pavements.
He had arrived before the court-room door just as the witnesses were leaving. He had recognised Captain von Wegstetten immediately--his boy had so often described the little man with his gigantic red moustache and sparkling eyes--and he was not afraid of addressing him on the spot.
Wegstetten was at first not particularly pleased at this encounter; but the honest troubled face of the old soldier touched him, and he listened patiently.
The turnpike-keeper had not much to say; it only amounted to an earnest representation of how well-conducted his son had always hitherto been; of how glad he had been to be a soldier; and he ended with a bitter lamentation that all this should have happened to such a good, brave lad; the boy must have gone clean out of his senses. The old man said it all with the most touching self-restraint. He took great pains to preserve a soldierly bearing, and omitted none of the customary tokens of respect, just as if he had been still clad in his old sergeant's uniform, and standing before an officer of the most severe type. Yet all the time the tears ran down his weather-beaten furrowed cheeks and his snow-white beard, and as he tried to draw up his bent shoulders the medals clinked together on his breast.
Wegstetten had but little comfort for the poor old man. He told him how favourably all the witnesses had spoken of his son, both officers and non-commissioned officers; how he as captain of the battery had always been glad to have such a capable man under him; and how the whole wretched business had come about through the mismanagement of an officer who had only lately returned to the regiment.
The face of the turnpike-keeper lighted up as he listened to the captain's words. He breathed again. Thank God! things could not go so badly with the boy. A few weeks under arrest--and the affair would be at an end.
But Wegstetten proceeded to tell him of the continued obstinacy of his son, and at last was forced to impart to the old man the severe sentence that had been passed.
Five months' imprisonment! It struck the old turnpike-keeper like a blow. He staggered, and the captain was obliged to support him. But the weakness soon passed, and Vogt begged the officer's pardon. He could not, however, listen to Wegstetten's explanation of the harsh verdict. This was a terrible, a crying piece of injustice; on the one side was an offence, a perfectly trivial offence, committed by a brave well-behaved soldier (as by common consent his boy had been pronounced), who had been driven into it moreover by the "mismanagement" of his superior; and on the other side was this heavy punishment of five months' imprisonment! The disproportion between crime and sentence was incomprehensible to his mind.