“They are talking to father.”
“Ah! that is a very different thing. Run to your room—I will come in a moment.”
“And what a price it cost,” he murmured, looking after them; then he gave a glance at Helenenthal, and went into the shed where “Black Susy” stood. “It is time that you should come back to life,” he said, stroking her black body; “we shall have to work bravely, you and I, if we want to procure the dowry for the girls.”
When he stepped into the house he heard the loud-sounding voice of his father coming out to him.
“I am curious all the same to see how they will behave,” he thought, and listened.
“Yes, he is a simpleton, and will remain a simpleton, gentlemen. What I have imagined on a big scale, he accomplishes on a small one in his petty, mercenary manner. It went to my heart when I saw him fidgeting about the machine, as if it were nothing more than a willow-pipe, and meanwhile the farm goes to ruin. Oh, gentlemen! you see me here a cripple, but if I still bore the sceptre, gentlemen, I would coin thousands of thalers out of the ground, no less than Vanderbilt, the American, whose life is written in this almanac in a very instructive manner.”
“Couldn’t you manage to direct the affairs from your chair?” inquired Ulrich’s voice.
“Oh, gentlemen, behold my tears! I shed them for the most ungrateful, the most degenerate child which this earth has ever seen. In this almanac there is the story of a son who, at the risk of his life, fetches draughts of water from the hands of robbers for his parents languishing in the desert. I am not able to offer you even a little liquor, a little ginger brandy with aniseed, which I am so fond of drinking myself.”
“In future we will bring some for you,” Fritz answered him.
“Oh, why has not God given me two such sons as you are? And fancy, he never consults me, he locks me out of the kitchen. I wonder that I have not been starved out. Well, you know him from a child; was he not always a rough, spiteful creature?”