“No, I will not; I want to sleep.” These were the words that reached his ear from behind the bolted door.
He pressed three or four times on the latch, implored her three or four times to let him come in, but received no answer. He did not wish to make any more noise, looked straight ahead as if into a dark hole, and then turned and went back to his room in the attic.
XIII
Friedrich Benda was again in Europe. All the newspapers contained accounts of the discoveries made on the expedition. Last autumn Arab dealers in ivory had found him in the land of Niam-Niam, taken an interest in him, and finally brought him, then seemingly in the throes of imminent death, back to the Nile. In England he was celebrated as a hero and a bold pioneer; the Royal Geographical Society had made him an honorary member; and the incidents of his journey were the talk of the day.
Toward the close of April he came to Nuremberg to visit his mother. The blind old woman had been carefully and cautiously prepared for his coming. She nevertheless came very near dying with joy; her life was in grave danger for a while.
Benda had not wished to stay more than a week: his business and his work called him back to London; he had lectures to deliver, and he had to see a book through the press, a book in which he had given a description of the years spent in Africa.
At the urgent request of his mother he had decided to stay longer. Moreover, during the first days of his visit to Nuremberg, he suffered from a severe attack of a fever he had brought with him from the tropics, and this forced him to remain in bed. The news of his presence in the city finally became generally known, and he was annoyed by the curiosity of many people who had formerly never concerned themselves about him in the slightest.
He was eager to see Daniel; every hour of delay in meeting his old friend was an hour of reproach. But his mother insisted that he stay with her; he had to sit near her and tell of his experiences in Africa.
When he heard of the outer events in Daniel’s life he was filled with terror. The fact that made the profoundest impression on him was Daniel’s marriage to Dorothea Döderlein. People told him a great many things about their life and how they were getting along, and with each passing day he felt that it would be more difficult to go to Daniel. One evening he got his courage together and decided to go. He got as far as Ægydius Place, when he was seized with such a feeling of sadness and discomfort at the thought of all the changes that time and fate had made that he turned back. He felt as if he might be deceived by a picture which would perhaps still show the features of Daniel as he looked in former years, but that he would be so changed inwardly that words would be unable to bring the two together.