The doctor went to visit his patients; I started for the office, keeping close to the wall, and slipped into the house through the back-door, for fear of being noticed by some one of the guests. But no one saw me.
However, in the course of the day I caught sight of them from my window. First, the commerzienrath, taking his morning promenade through the garden, a long pipe in his mouth. He seemed to be pondering over important things. From time to time he stopped, and gazed long into vacancy. Doubtless, he was calculating. I observed how with his stumpy fingers he was multiplying, and then wrote the product in the air with the end of his pipe-stem. Once his face puckered into a grin of delight; what could he have reckoned out?
The next was the steuerrath. He went an hour later, with his brother, through the garden. The steuerrath was speaking very animatedly; he several times laid his right hand upon his breast, as if in asseveration. The superintendent's eyes were dropped; the subject of the conversation seemed to distress him. When they came near my window, he looked across with apparent uneasiness, and drew his brother behind a hedge. Apparently he did not wish me to witness his brother's gesticulations.
I had bent over my work again with the painful feeling that I was a superfluity and in the way, when suddenly the door leading from the office into the garden was opened, and the steuerrath hastily entered. I was startled, as even a man of courage is startled when unexpectedly a serpent glides across his path. The steuerrath smiled very benignantly, and held out to me his white well-kept hand, which he again withdrew with a graceful wave, as I showed no disposition to take it.
"My dear young friend," he said, "must we meet again thus?"
I made him no answer; what could I answer to a phrase in which every word and every tone was a lie?
"How would I deplore your fate," he proceeded, "had not fortune brought you here to my brother, who without doubt is one of the noblest and best of men alive, and who even now, while we were walking there, has said so many kind and affectionate things of you. I was impelled to offer you my hand, although I had a presentiment that you, like your father, would turn from one whom in truth fortune has bitterly enough persecuted."
And the victim of fortune threw himself into an arm-chair, and covered his eyes with his long white hand, the ring-finger of which was adorned with an enormous signet.
"I do not reproach him for it: Heaven forbid! I have known him for so many years. He is one of those strict men, whose horror of dereliction to duty is so great, and at the same time so blind, that in their eyes an accused person always appears a guilty one."
The last observation was too just for me not to admit it inwardly; and probably my look expressed as much, for the steuerrath said with a melancholy smile: