“Oh, I suppose I shall have to beg of him—shall I?”
“Oh no; he will do it without that. Who is it?”
“Douglas, he is called. He comes from Insterburg. He seemed to swagger very much, this gentleman—very much. I should have liked to have driven him from the premises.”
“Is anything left us?” she asked, softly, looking hesitatingly down on the new-born child, for his young, tender life might be depending on the answer.
He broke out into a hard laugh. “Yes; a wretched pittance: full two thousand thalers.”
She sighed with relief, for she almost felt as if she had already heard that terrible “Nothing” hissed from his lips.
“What good are two thousand thalers to us?” he continued, “after we have thrown fifty thousand into the swamp? Perhaps I shall open a public-house in the town, or trade in buttons and ribbons. Perhaps you might help me, if you were to do the sewing in some aristocratic houses; and the children might sell matches in the streets. Ha, ha, ha!”
He thrust his hand through his gray and bushyhair, and inadvertently kicked the cradle with his foot, so that it swayed to and fro violently.
“Why has this brat been born?” he murmured, gloomily. He knelt down near the cradle and buried the tiny little fists in his big red hands, and talked to his child: “If you had known, my boy, how bad and vile this world is, how impudence triumphs, and honesty goes to ruin in it, you would really have stayed where you were. What fate will yours be? Your father is a sort of vagabond, a ruined man, who has to roam about the streets with his wife and his three children till he has found a place where he can completely ruin himself and his family.”
“Max, do not speak thus; you break my heart!” called out Frau Elsbeth, crying, and stretching out her hand to lay it round her husband’s neck; but her hand sank down without strength ere it had reached its destination.