XXXVII
Supper was going on when Leo reached Halewitz. He entered the house unobserved. The corridor was in darkness, but Christian, who had just gone to the kitchen with a pile of plates, had left the dining-room door ajar, and a thin stream of light that came through it penetrated the shadows. But no laughter, no cheerful talk fell on his ear. Meals at Halewitz were now sad affairs.
"Shall I go in and sit down with them?" he asked himself. Then he felt that he could not trust himself, that his farewell emotions might be too much for him. He would take a last peep at them, and then go quietly to his rooms.
On tiptoe he drew nearer. There the three sat at table under the golden radiance of the hanging lamp; grandmamma on the left. Ah! God, how she had aged, he thought, and his heart smote him. Beside her Elly was looking fresh and innocent, with the lamplight illumining her fair hair, and on the right sat Hertha. She was the same, but different. The dignified repose of her bearing, the troubled glance of her eye, the lines of pain on the brown oval cheeks, the firmly closed lips, were all new to him.
He felt that she had ripened and developed under the same sorrow which had rotted and withered him. How blind he had been to her fine qualities. Only the nearness of death opened his eyes to them, and to everything that surrounded him.
He saw every detail of the rooms that he had so long avoided, as if he had been given an extra sense with which to impress things on his mind before leaving life. His ear listened eagerly for each word that fell from the dear ones' lips. His hand caressed with unconscious affection the door-posts, with their time-worn oak carvings.
Christian's coming back ended his reverie, and before he had been seen he retired softly to his room.
He wanted to work, to go through the books, and put things straight so far as it was possible. He did not wish to sneak out of the world like a beggarly bankrupt. He lit his lamp and began to cast up figures.
The year had not been a bad one. Old arrears had been patched up; hopeful prospects peeped out everywhere between the columns. Amazing success had attended the beetroot culture, and in following years the ground would be even more richly productive in that line. He was on the point of drawing up a new scheme of planting when he remembered that the day after to-morrow he would not be alive.
He shut the book with a bang and jumped up. How farcical it all was; how insane both life and death, so far as he was concerned! He rang the bell violently, for he was hungry. Since the morning he had scarcely touched food.