"Can't you be quiet?" she stormed. "Father is busy with his sermon, and you are behaving like heathens."
"Heathens," replied Kurt, "are at least in the happy position of not requiring clean linen, as they prefer to go naked."
"Yes, you ungodly lout," cried his mother, whose admiration for him had long ago ebbed. "You are a precious, good-for-nothing----"
"You are a lout. A lout you are," he trolled forth, mimicking her. "A lout. Ha, ha!"
The harassed mother began to cry for vexation, and the little ones following her example, the Sunday morning concert of praise was in full swing.
Meanwhile, Pastor Brenckenberg, suffering from severe headache, sat brooding over a bulky book of sermons at the half-cleared breakfast-table in the parlour.
He was a corpulent man of over sixty, tall, with massive shoulders and a red, coarse neck. He wore his thin, much-greased hair parted in the middle and combed smoothly behind his ears, so that it framed his big, bloated face with locks like those with which Christ is depicted in sacred art. In spite of the hanging cheeks and moist, protruding, sensual lips, there was an expression of power and strength about his countenance which inspired a certain reverence and respect. Twenty-two years before, the old Squire Sellenthin had appointed him tutor and bear-leader to his wild, unmanageable son Leo, though he might be thought hardly suitable for the post, his drinking-bouts as a student having been the talk of the country-side. But the keen insight into character of the old man of the world had not been at fault in this instance. The new private tutor ruled with a rod of iron, and at the same time made himself invaluable as a perpetrator of dry jokes and an indefatigable boon companion.
And when Leo was ready for the gymnasium, a bright-eyed, plucky boy in his teens, thoroughly well trained and prepared, Herr von Sellenthin bestowed on the convivial clergyman the living of Wengern, of which he was the patron. On the strength of this the pastor at once made haste to renew an old attachment, the existence of which no one had had any suspicion, and with the love of his youth as his bride, and a bonus which his squire had given him, began to populate the empty old parsonage as speedily as possible.
Hypocrisy and unctuous piety were not in this man's line, and no one could deny that he was possessed of a certain vein of cynical good humour; but woe to the erring sheep who fell a victim to his righteous anger.
One of the stories told of him, as a warning to others, was that of the overgrown hobbledehoy, who had been in the act of taking himself off to America, and leaving the girl he had brought to shame behind him. When it had come to the pastor's ears, he had seized him by the throat and had so nearly throttled him, that the seducer, black in the face, had sunk on to his knees and implored him to let him go, promising to marry the girl on the spot, and to stay in the country and work honestly to support her and the child.