The old man wrapped his dressing-gown over his poor aged ribs, which had been exposed in the excitement of the moment, and withdrew on tottering legs without saying a word.
Meanwhile the mother had begun to be ashamed of her outer woman, and after she had kindled a light in the garden-salon, she hurried away to put on a dress, still undecided between laughing and crying.
Leo was alone. The hanging lamp, which he had seen earlier casting a glory about the heads of the two young girls, seemed to greet him with its light. Half his life, his dreams, his happiness, and his sins--all were associated with this flame, which had shone upon his youth like some dear silent confidential friend.
He walked round the table with striding steps. In the middle of it was the old majolica vase with open dragons' jaws, where a bunch of gloire de Dijon roses languished exhausted from the heat of the day. Knitting and an album lay beside it, and on top the lady cook's account-book, which she was in the habit of leaving here open when she went to bed. So it had been thirty years ago; so it was to-day.
His eye wandered to the walls. There hung the same old pictures: Nelson at the battle of Trafalgar--brave Nelson with his compass and telescope in the midst of clouds of gunpowder and fiery zigzags. When he was six years old he had played at being Nelson, and constructed a deck and bridge of chairs, while Ulrich and Johanna cried "Hurrah!" and had to fire guns by striking matches.
This brought Johanna to his mind. What was she doing? Why didn't she come and throw herself into his arms?
"Ah, she is making herself smart," he thought, and chuckled.
The famous clock which his grandfather had brought from Paris, anno 14, still stood on the bureau with its bulky drawers and gilded feet. The dock represented a four-horsed victoria. The wheel of the gold triumphal chariot formed the dial, and every time it struck the hour the flaming sun which formed its axle revolved with a hum like a spinning-wheel.
Over the bureau was the portrait, framed in its own horns, of the stag with sixteen antlers which King Frederick William IV., in the year 1726, had shot (in his official capacity of Royal Ranger). The miller's daughter and the chimney-sweep, two coquettish old Dresden figures standing on either side on the rickety consols, still cast amorous glances at each other, unmindful of the fact that they became every year older, and so more valuable. All the dear old ornaments stood in their familiar places. The chalk bust of Frederick William IV. on the cigar cabinet, whose complexion long years of lamp-smoke and tobacco-fumes had turned a deep golden-brown, had been given no successor. At Halewitz the reigns of three German emperors seemed to have passed without making any impression.
Leo wandered from one article to another, examined and tested everything he took in his hand, never weary of celebrating anew this meeting again with old acquaintances.