I was resolved not to be put off in this way, and I said:
"I will meet you half-way, Herr Justizrath. I have reasons for believing that the commerzienrath's affairs are far from being so prosperous as is commonly believed; and if you are so discreet as to withhold the grounds of advice which can only have one interpretation, the prince did not exercise the same reticence when he made me the offer you allude to."
The justizrath looked as if he was himself a sacrifice to his own inquisitorial genius, and saw no escape but in making a full and free confession.
"I will tell you but a single fact," he said. "Last Friday the commerzienrath went with me into the city to raise money on his paper to the extent of about a hundred thousand thalers, and I ran with these from post to pillar, until at last Moses in the Water street took them at a very short date for a very high discount. Sapienti sat, as we Latinists say!"
And the justizrath brushed his comb with both hands to its most imposing height, and moved toward the door, but stopped when he had reached it, came back a few steps, and said with the air of a man who can not tear himself from the grave where all his hopes lie buried:
"Do not think the worse of me that I have allowed myself to be seduced into a breach of confidence which is equally foreign to my position, my age, and I may add, my character. I have only told you what you will probably soon learn from other sources, and in any event must know before long; and George"--here the justizrath sighed, and then painfully smiled--"George, what you may not forgive to the hard-pressed man of business, you will perhaps forgive the father. I also have but one daughter, and am, heaven be thanked, a wealthy man."
The wealthy man who also had an only daughter, went out of the door at the moment that William entered it with a letter which the postman had just brought, the seal of which I broke with trembling hands.
"My dear George, my brother: Then it has at last come to pass what I have so long desired and hoped; and, since your happiness would hardly be perfect without it, let me add my wreath to the rest. I have entwined in it all the kind and loving wishes that one human soul can cherish for another, all the blessings that spring from the depths of my heart for you, for you, my friend, my brother, our brother, for the young ones too now come to their eldest and bow before him, now that he is crowned as he deserves. Wear it proudly, your beauteous crown, and may never a hand touch it less holy than that of her who now lays her hand on my shoulders and bends her face over the paper that her eyes can no longer see, and says softly to me--'He still remains to us what he always was.'"
This letter also bears traces of tears, but they were my eyes that wept them, and they were tears of joy. And when I raised my grateful looks towards heaven, the cloud had vanished, the one cloud that had darkened my sky, and all was as bright as the vernal heavens that stretched in splendor over land and sea.
Happy, radiant days were these, which now seem to me as if there had been no night at all and no darkness, but ever day and light and bliss. There were not too many of these days, and it was perhaps well that it was so. Which of us mortals, however great his powers, can long feast with impunity at the table of the gods?