“No, not since that day.”
For a while they stood opposite each other in silence. Albrecht Wahnschaffe took Freia by her collar, and said with notable self-control: “Take counsel with yourself. There is time. I shall not urge you unduly, but rather wait. When you come to weigh the circumstances, and test your own mind, you will realize that I have your welfare at heart. Do not answer me now. When you have made a clear decision—let me know what it is.”
“Have I your permission to retire?” Christian asked. His father nodded, and he bowed and left the room.
Next morning he returned to Christian’s Rest.
XVIII
In a side street of the busiest quarter of Buenos Ayres, there stood a house that belonged to the Gunderam family. The parents of Gottlieb Gunderam had bought it when they came to the Argentine in the middle of the nineteenth century. In those days its value had been small, but the development of the city had made it a considerable property. Gottfried Gunderam received tempting offers for it, not only from private dealers, but from the municipality. The rickety house was to be torn down, and to be replaced by a modern apartment house.
But Gottfried Gunderam turned a deaf ear to all offers. “The house in which my mother died,” he declared, “shall not be sold to strangers so long as the breath is in my body.”
This determination did not arise so much from filial piety, as from a superstition that was powerful enough to silence even his greed. He feared that his mother would arise from her grave and avenge herself on him, if he permitted the family’s ancestral home to be sold and destroyed. Wealth, good harvests, a great age, and general well-being were, in his opinion, dependent on his action in this matter. He would not even allow strangers to enter the house.
His sons and kinsmen mockingly called it the Escurial. Gottfried Gunderam took no notice of their jeers, but he himself had, gradually and quite seriously, slipped into the habit of calling the house the Escurial.