The hour had now come.
I arose, hung my bundle once more over my stick, slowly descended the hill and took my way through the misty fields to the town. In an obscure spot in the suburbs I stopped again for awhile--it was not dark enough for me yet. I neither feared nor had reason to fear any one. Even before my great enemy, Justizrath Heckepfennig, or those redoubtable public servants Luz and Bolljahn, had I met them, I need not have cast down my eyes, or stepped aside; and yet it was not dark enough.
Now the night breeze rustled louder in the half-stripped boughs of the maple against which I was leaning, and looking up I saw a star twinkling through the sprays--now it would do.
How hollow sounded my footsteps in the empty streets, and how heavily beat my heart in my anxious breast! As I passed the Rathhaus, Father Rüterbusch, the night-watchman, was standing, bare-headed and without his weapons, at his post, and looking pensively at the empty table and barrel-chair of Mother Möller's cake stand, while above us the clock in the tower of St. Nicholas's church struck eight. Was Mother Möller dead, that Father Rüterbusch thus gazed at the empty barrel, and had not even a glance for his old acquaintance from the guard-house?
Dead? Why not? She was an old woman when I last saw her--just the age of my father, as she told me once when I was spending my pocket money at her stall. As old as my father! A chill wind blew through the hall; I shivered from head to foot, and with a rapid stride, almost a run, I hurried over the little market-place down the sloping streets leading to the harbor.
Here was the Harbor-street, and here was the house! Thank heaven! A light was glimmering through the shutters of both windows on the left. Thank heaven once more!
And now would I do and must do what on that other evening I wished to do and should have done, and yet did not: go in and say to him "forgive me!"
I grasped the brass knob of the door--again it felt cold as ice to my hot hand. The door-bell gave a sharp clang, and at its summons appeared at the door of the right-hand chamber--just as on that evening--the faithful Friederike. No, not just as on that evening; her little figure, bent with age, was dressed in black, and a black ribbon fastened the snow-white cap with its broad ruffle, which formed a ring of points around her wrinkled face. And out of the wrinkled face two eyes, red with weeping, stared at the strange visitor.
"Rike," I said--it was all that I could utter.
"George! good heaven!" the old women cried, tottering towards me with uplifted hands.