Magister Knips was silent.
"I have done with you," continued the Scholar. "I shall say nothing of the plan which this falsehood was to serve nor make any further reproaches concerning the injury that you have practiced towards a man who trusted in your honor."
He threw the parchment under the table. Knips seized his hat silently to leave the room.
"Stop!" exclaimed the Professor; "do not move from the spot. I must be silent as to what you have endeavored to do personally against me. It is not so much on account of this manuscript that I have sent for you. But the man whom I see before me, on whom I look with an abhorrence that I have never yet felt, is something more than an unscrupulous tool in the service of a stranger; he is an unfaithful philologist, a traitor to learning, a forger, and deceiver in that in which only honorable men have a right to live, a cursed man, for whom there is no repentance and no mercy."
The Magister's hat fell to the ground.
"You wrote the parchment strip of Struvelius; the trader has informed against you in your native city. Your writings are confiscated and are in the hands of the police."
The Magister still remained silent. He fumbled for his pocket-handkerchief and wiped the cold sweat from his brow.
"Now, at least, speak out," cried Werner. "Give me an explanation of the fearful riddle, how any one who belonged to us could willfully destroy all that made his life noble. How could a man of your attainments become untrue to science in so despicable a way?"
"I was poor and my life full of trouble," replied Knips, in a low voice.
"Yes, you were poor. From your earliest youth you have worked from morning to night; even as a child you have denied yourself much that others thoughtlessly enjoy. You have in this way the secret consciousness of having obtained for yourself inward freedom, and a humble friendship with the great spirit of our life. Yes, you have grown up to be a man amidst countless sacrifices and self-denials which others fear. You have thus learnt and taught what is the highest possession of man. In every proof-sheet that you have read for the assistance of others, in every index of words that you have drawn up for a classical work, in every word that you have corrected, in every number that you have written, you have been obliged to be truthful. Your daily work was an unceasing, assiduous struggle against what was false and wrong. Yet more, and worse than that, you have been no thoughtless day-laborer; you have fully and entirely belonged to us; you were, in fact, a scholar, from whose learning many with higher pretensions have frequently taken counsel. You not only treasured in your mind a mass of rare knowledge, but you well comprehend the thoughts to which such knowledge gives rise. You were all this--and yet a forger. With true devotion and self-denial, you united malicious willfulness; you were a confidential and assiduous assistant, and at the same time a deceiver, bold and mocking like a devil."