Sec.
Now I know why the bullet struck me. It is Clara.
Anthony.
Go and see. (Sits down.) I can’t. (Karl goes out.) And yet——(Stands up again.) If I understand you properly (to Secretary) it’s quite right.
Karl (comes back).
Clara’s dead. Her head’s all broken in by the edge of the well, when she—— Father, she didn’t fall in, she jumped in. A girl saw her.
Anthony.
Let her think well before she speaks. It is too dark for her to have seen that for certain.
Sec.
Do you doubt it? You’d like to, but you can’t. Just think of what you said to her. You sent her out on the road to death, and I, I’m to blame that she didn’t turn back. When you suspected her misfortune, you thought of the tongues that would hiss at it, but not of the worthlessness of the snakes that own them. You said things to her that drove her to despair. And I, instead of folding her in my arms, when she opened her heart to me in nameless terror, thought of the knave that might mock at me, and——I made myself dependent on a man who was worse than I, and I’m paying for it with my life. And you, too, though you stand there like a rock, you too will say some day, “Daughter, I wish you had not spared me the head-shakes and shoulder-shruggings of the Pharisees; it humiliates me more, that you are not here to sit by my deathbed and wipe the sweat of anguish from my brow.”