Since then I have discovered that this influence is not so extremely wide; that as water naturally seeks its level, so the moral world continually strives to keep truth erect, and to cancel the injurious effect of falsehood.
But on this morning this consolatory thought did not present itself to calm the agitation in my heart. "Liar, hateful, disgusting liar!" I murmured over and over to myself, "you deserve that I should have you placed in the pillory; that I should reveal the real contents of the last letter you wrote to your brother."
I think that if this state of things had continued, I should not have been able to resist the impulse to revenge Truth on her betrayer, however foreign to my nature was the part of informer. But I now heard the gentlemen coming down the stairs, and the next moment the superintendent entered the office. His cheeks were now as pale as they had before been flushed; his eyes were glassy, as those of one who has just undergone an agonizing operation; he tottered to a chair, and sank into it as I hastened to support him.
After a minute he pressed my hand, assumed an erect position, and said, smiling:
"Thank you; it is over now. Excuse this weakness, but it has affected me more powerfully than I had thought. Such a dispute about yours and mine is always the most disagreeable thing in the world, even when one looks upon it as a mere spectator; how much more then when the dust raised is thrown directly into one's face! Well, the matter is ended. I had proposed a compromise before, and they have agreed to sign it. My brother, for a very moderate indemnification, gives up all his claims, which your last words deprived, with me, of all remains of credit. He calls himself a beggar; but alas! he is not one of those beggars who might take their place by kings."
The pale man smiled bitterly, and continued in a low tone, as if talking to himself:
"Thus the last remnant of the inheritance of our ancestors passes out of our hands. The old time is past--it has lasted too long! I regret the forest; one does not like to see the trees fall through whose foliage the earliest morning-ray greeted our childish eyes, and under whose branches we played our childish sports. And now they will fall; to their new possessor they are but wood, which he will convert into money. Money! True, it rules the world, and he knows it; he knows that the turn has come for him and those like him, and they are now the knights of the hammer. It is the old game in a somewhat different form. How long will they play it? Not long, I trust. Then----"
He raised his eyes to me with a long loving look----"then will come our turn, ours, who have comprehended that there is such a thing as justice, that this justice cannot be trifled with, and that we must cleave to and desire with all our souls this justice, which is equity. Is it not so, George?"
CHAPTER XIII.
Doctor Willibrod and I had hoped that, now that their business was at an end, the burdensome guests who had so long made the superintendent's house their home, would take their leave; but our hope was to be only partially fulfilled.