"I can certainly make no objection," continued Brandow. "I only thought that this little consideration was due our friend Gotthold, who does not play, and of whom we have seen so little, or rather I should say, ourselves. He doesn't lose a great deal in dispensing with our society, but we do in losing his."
"Pray don't disturb yourselves on my account," said Gotthold.
"Well, then, in the devil's name, go on," cried Hans Redebas, seizing the cards. "I'll keep the bank for once, I can probably find a few little savings still."
And with his left hand he drew from the thick pocketbook lying before him a pile of bank-notes which he crushed together in a heap. "There now, play in regular order, Brandow and the rest of you, I beg."
"I am sorry, but what can I do? I hope you will excuse me," Brandow whispered to Gotthold, as he resumed his place at the table. Gotthold drew back, and could do nothing but accept the invitation of the Pastor, who was sitting in one corner of the great leather-covered sofa, and as Gotthold took his place beside him, leaned a little forward, not without difficulty, and began to talk with a faltering tongue.
"Yes, yes, my beloved friend, a sinful world, a wicked, sinful world, but we must not be too harsh, not too harsh, for Heaven's sake! You work all the week, or at least order your servants to work for you; but they must not do it on Sunday, on pain of a heavy punishment. Just before the beginning of this harvest, we sent out a paper written in the strongest terms. What were they doing with the long hours? Idleness is the beginning of all crimes: gambling, drinking--Rieke, a glass--two glasses--don't you drink? Do very wrong--brewed myself--from a receipt of my honored employer, Count Zernikow. I brewed more than three hundred bowls during my career as tutor--could do it at last with my eyes shut--with my eyes shut--eyes shut."
He had only stammered the last words, his heavy head fell forward, and the lower part of his face disappeared amid the folds of his crumpled white cravat. He sank helplessly back into his corner.
The vacant face filled Gotthold with angry contempt.
The man had realized the promise of the boy; intoxication had torn away the mask of hypocrisy, and there was the stupid, dissolute face of the Halle student, whom Gotthold so well remembered. It could not be otherwise. But that this pitiful creature should be his father's successor, this blinking owl sit in the eyrie of the eagle, whose fiery eyes had always sought the sun; this coarse buffoon be permitted to tinkle his bells in the very place where the preacher, with glowing eloquence, had summoned his hearers to repentance and atonement, seemed to him a personal insult. And yet this man was in his proper place; the flock was worthy of the shepherd; everything here was of a piece--like a picture drawn by some master hand, in the boldest outlines and most glaring colors: the drunken Pastor nodding in the sofa corner, the excited, wine-flushed faces of the gamblers, the voluptuous figure of the maid-servant passing to and fro and handing the fiery beverage to the revellers, exchanging a sly smile or hasty word with one, coquettishly pushing away the hand of another, who tried to pass his arm around her waist--the true goddess of this temple of sin!--and the whole enveloped in the circling wreaths of gray smoke which ascended from the constantly burning pipes, and floated in dusky red rings around the dim wicks of the candles; only that it was no picture, but the coarsest, rudest, most commonplace reality. And alas, the outrage that she should be compelled to live under this roof, that the wild riot should re-echo even in her quiet room--not for the first or last time!-that these were the men who frequented the house--these empty-headed, silly young noblemen, this rough upstart, with his coarse hands and coarser jests. And when this company of fauns and satyrs departed, to have for her only consoler solitude--solitude which stared at her with cold, hard, piercing serpent eyes. There they were, those very eyes; they had just glanced over the cards with a quick stealthy look! Those eyes, and hers--soft, gentle, tender!
Gotthold no longer saw the gamblers. He beheld her sitting in the lonely nursery beside her child's playthings; a touching figure, still so girlish in its soft, delicate outlines. He saw the sad face suffused with a roseate flush of joy, saw it disfigured with pain and terror-he lived over in imagination the whole scene, which already seemed like a dream; and dreamed on of a future which must surely come, a future full of sunlight, love, and poetry.