“What do you want? say, what do you want? We’ll do all you want!” cried Ulrich; and Fritz, who tried to hide behind his brother, seemed suddenly speechless.
“You shall keep your promise, as I will keep mine,” said Paul. “I wish you could find courage to defend yourselves, so that at last there might be a clear account between us.... But perhaps it is best as it is.... And now repeat after me what I say: ‘We swear before God and by the memory of our mother that we will redeem within three days our promise given to your sisters.’” Trembling and faltering, they repeated the words after him.
“And I swear to you before God and the remembrance of my mother,” he answered, “that I will shoot you down whenever I find you if you do not keep your oath. There! now you may drive on—I will harness the horse to the sledge myself. Stay where you are!” he repeated when, in spite of that, they wanted to lend him a helping hand.
They did not stir again, so obedient had they become. And when he had finished, they said, with great politeness,
“Good-evening,” and drove away.
“So that is how to do it,” he murmured, throwing the pistol down in the snow and looking after the sledge with folded hands. “If you rely upon what is right and honorable, and wish, in the goodness of your heart, to turn everything to good, you are called a coward and treated like a dog. But if you treat others like dogs from the first, without considering whether you are in the right or wrong, you are called brave, everything succeeds with you, and you are a hero. So that is how it is done.”
He shuddered. He was seized with such disgust towards himself and the whole world. In his own eyes he appeared so polluted that nothing on earth could ever cleanse him again.
The next forenoon he stood in the snow behind the shed and gazed towards Helenenthal, where a dark funeral procession was preparing for its sad journey. Twice he had gone to the stables to tell the servants to get the sledge ready, and each time the word had stuck in his throat.
Now he stood there with his hands folded, watching how the long, black, undulating line crept on over the dazzling-white snowy heath; it grew smaller and smaller, and disappeared at last behind the wood, for the cemetery of Helenenthal lay far off on the way to the town.