But Arthur was not in condition to give an intelligible answer. He stammered out something, and rushed toward me, apparently with the intention of striking me, but his father caught his arm and led him away, speaking very earnestly to him in a low tone, and as he went he threw a furious look at me.
My blood, already excited, was now boiling in my veins. The next thing I remember I was walking arm-in-arm with the commerzienrath--I have never been able to understand how I did it--and passionately complaining to him of the crying outrage I had received from my best friend, for whom I was at all times ready to sacrifice fortune and blood. The commerzienrath seemed as if he would die with laughing. "Fortune and blood!" he cried; "as for the fortune"--here he shrugged his shoulders and blew out his cheeks--"and as for the blood"--here he nudged me with his elbow in the side. "Full blood, capital blood, of course. I have had one of the breed myself; a Kippenreiter! Baroness Kippenreiter! My Hermann, at all events, is of the half blood. There she runs; is she not an angel? Pity she was not a boy: that's the reason I always call her Hermann. Hermann! Hermann!"
The little maid came running: she had on a red scarf, which her father, after kissing her, wrapped closer around her delicate shoulders.
"Is she not an angel--a pride?" he went on taking my arm again. "She shall have a count for a husband; not a poor, penniless sprig of nobility, like my brother-in-law, nor like his drunken brother at Zehrendorf, nor the other, that sneaking fellow, the penitentiary superintendent at What-d'ye-call-it. No, a real count, a fellow six feet high, just like you, my boy, just like you!"
The short commerzienrath tried to lay his two fat hands upon my shoulders, and tipsy emotion blinked in his eyes.
"You are a capital fellow, a splendid fellow. Pity you are such a poor devil; you should be my son-in-law. But I must call you thou: thou mayst say thou to me, too, brother!" and the worthy man sobbed upon my breast and called for champagne, apparently with a view of solemnly ratifying the bond, of brotherhood after the ancient fashion.
I have my doubts whether he carried this design into effect: at all events I remember nothing of the ceremony, which could scarcely have escaped my memory. But I remember that not long after I was in the engine-room with a bottle of wine, hobnobbing with my friend Klaus, and swearing that he was the best and truest fellow in the world, and that I would appoint him head-stoker in hell as soon as I got there, which would not be long coming as I must have a settlement with father this evening, and that I would let myself be torn in pieces for him at any time, and that I would be glad if it were done right at once, and that if the great black fellow there did not stop swinging his long iron arm up and down I would lay my head under it, and there would be an end of George Hartwig.
How the good Klaus brought me out of this suicidal frame of mind, and how he got me up the ladder again, I cannot say; it must have been managed somehow, for as we steamed into the harbor I was sitting on deck, watching the masts of the anchored ships glide past us, and the stars glittering through the spars and cordage. The crescent moon that was standing over the spire of the church of St Nicholas seemed suddenly to drop behind it, but it was I that dropped, as the Penguin struck the timbers of the wharf, on which there was again assembled a crowd of people, not hurrahing, however, as when we started, but, as it seemed to me, strangely silent; and, as I made my way through them, staring at me I thought in a singular manner, so that I felt as if something terrible must have happened, or was on the point of happening, and that I was in some mysterious way the cause of it.
I stood before my father's small house in the narrow Water street. A light was glimmering through the closed shutters of the room to the left of the front door, by which I knew that my father was at home--he usually took a solitary walk around the town-wall at this hour. Could it be so very late, then? I took out my watch and tried to make out the time by the moonlight--for the street-lamps were never lighted in Uselin on moonlight nights--but could not succeed. No matter, I said to myself, it is all one! and grasped resolutely the brass knob of the front door. To my feverish hand it felt cold as ice.