Kurt acquiesced, and two hours after midnight he played the part of the good Samaritan by bringing home his father, whose drunken state, within a circuit of six miles, no creature would have taken pity on. He made up a bed for him on the sofa, so that his spouse should not be disturbed in her slumbers. After this no more was said about his going away.
The relations between father and son became day by day more intimate. Since his own offspring had beaten him at beer drinking, he had made no further attempt to assert his paternal authority, and allowed his son to come and go about the house at any hours he pleased. Only he could not give him money, for the noble youth's escapades had cleared him out of a year's income in advance. As he himself put it, there was scarcely a halfpenny left for the communion collection.
Through the winter Kurt Brenckenberg had lorded it, partly on the neighbouring estates, partly in his father's house, where he was dissatisfied with everything, and perpetually bullied and grumbled at his brothers and sisters. He drank, composed songs, made himself agreeable or arrogant according to the sex of his associates, borrowed where it was possible to borrow, and cut as elegant an appearance as was permitted by the increasing shabbiness of the last check suit supplied by Kessel and Munchmann of Unter-den-Linden, on credit to corps students. He got up private theatricals, contrived new figures for the cotillion, gave fencing lessons, and had understood on the whole how to make himself indispensable. Ladies gushed about him, but men rather avoided him, because if they so much as looked at him sideways, they were apt to be confronted with the disconcerting question, snapped out in tone of intimidation: "Will you give satisfaction?" Not that the sturdy young squires of the Hinterwald district were by any means cowards. On the contrary, they had proved often enough that they were ready where their honour was concerned to engage in any daring combat. It was only in the case of this little bristling fighting-cock, whom they regarded scarcely as their equal by half, that they felt stiff and embarrassed. Often as he boasted of his little adventures with pistols, he never gave a practical demonstration of anything of the sort. He it was who for the most part at the conclusion of the challenge formalities proved himself a model of wise moderation. But even this fact resulted in the increase of his reputation in the country-round, and made his pose as an irreconcilable combatant the more effective.
For his part he felt it incumbent on him to continue the rôle of the celebrated Dr. Oswald Stein, who two generations earlier had turned the heads of all the rustic young Pomeranian rustics, and he made no secret that the ideal on which he modelled himself was the hero of "Problematical Natures." Accordingly he had entered on a sentimental love episode with the pretty daughter of Halewitz, and by the spring hoped at last to have found his Melitta. For it was at about this time that Ulrich von Kletzingk summoned him to Uhlenfelde to act as private tutor to his little stepson. The boy was delicate, and not to be overworked. So he had all the more leisure at his disposal in which to pay court to the beautiful fair-haired mistress of the castle. It was patent that she was a flirt. How otherwise would she have kept dangling about her all the cavaliers, young and old, of the neighbourhood? She also had some sense. For she did what she pleased, quite unconcerned by the gossip of friendly neighbours. And the famous duel had proved that she was in possession of an interesting past.
Nevertheless she had turned a deaf ear to his addresses. He had hardly dared hope for anything but indifference. He languished at her feet, despairing, full of worship and a desire to die for her; as the pages of olden times had loved their queens, so he revelled in this hopeless passion.
It seemed sometimes almost as if his homage rather pleased her, as if she saw the necessity, as he did, for a little harmless romance with the tutor. No check was put on his poetical effusions; his sighs and half-intelligible speeches. He might, if he liked, break his neck in knightly service, or, above all, attempt great things in verse. He scattered his leaflets about the house and garden; sometimes he placed them under her knitting or in an uncut book. Yes, he had even had the temerity to put them under her pillow.
And in smiling silence she had ignored everything. Yet his unrequited passion had not in the least altered his manner of life. He ate enough for three, and drank enough for a dozen. He consorted with the bailiffs, in the hopes that they might lend him money, and, after dark, he flirted with the dairymaids and farm-wenches in the stables, or under the elder-bushes by the water.
But this brilliant career, so rich in every sort of experience and sentiment, was doomed and drawing to its close. His first hint that it was so had been three days ago, when Baron von Kletzingk had informed him, that for the present his services must be dispensed with, his wife having emphatically expressed a wish to teach the boy herself for the next few weeks. This decision alone might not have counted for much, for Frau Felicitas changed her mind as often as a new idea came into her curly head; but what upset him most was an unpleasant change in her manner towards him which he had remarked several days previously.
She had become cold, almost severe, and when he had resorted to the usual method of letting her know his feelings, she had, after morning coffee, put a question to him, with a languid smile and yawn.
"How did these atrocious verses get into my basket of keys, Herr Kandidat?"