CHAPTER XXV.
“Wenn Menschen aus einander gehen,
So sagen sie, Auf Wiedersehen!
Auf Wiedersehen!”
Eugen had said, “Very soon—it may be weeks, it may be days,” and had begged me not to inquire further into the matter. Seeing his anguish, I had refrained; but when two or three days had passed, and nothing was done or said, I began to hope that the parting might not be deferred even a few weeks; for I believe the father suffered, and with him the child, enough each day to wipe out years of transgression.
It was impossible to hide from Sigmund that some great grief threatened, or had already descended upon his father, and therefore upon him. The child’s sympathy with the man’s nature, with every mood and feeling—I had almost said his intuitive understanding of his father’s very thoughts, was too keen and intense to be hoodwinked or turned aside. He did not behave like other children, of course—versteht sich, as Eugen said to me with a dreary smile. He did not hang about his father’s neck, imploring to hear what was the matter; he did not weep or wail, or make complaints. After that first moment of uncontrollable pain and anxiety, when he had gone into the room whose door was closed upon him, and in which Eugen had not told him all that was coming, he displayed no violent emotion; but he did what was to Eugen and me much more heart-breaking—brooded silently; grew every day wanner and thinner, and spent long intervals in watching his father, with eyes which nothing could divert and nothing deceive. If Eugen tried to be cheerful, to put on a little gayety of demeanor which he did not feel in his heart, Sigmund made no answer to it, but continued to look with the same solemn, large and mournful gaze.
His father’s grief was eating into his own young heart. He asked not what it was; but both Eugen and I knew that in time, if it went on long enough, he would die of it. The picture, “Innocence Dying of Blood-stain,” which Hawthorne has suggested to us, may have its prototypes and counterparts in unsuspected places. Here was one. Nor did Sigmund, as some others, children both of larger and smaller growth, might have done, turn to me and ask me to tell him the meaning of the sad change which had crept silently and darkly into our lives. He outspartaned the Spartan in many ways. His father had not chosen to tell him; he would die rather than ask the meaning of the silence.
One night—when some three days had passed since the letter had come—as Eugen and I sat alone, it struck me that I heard a weary turning over in the little bed in the next room, and a stifled sob coming distinctly to my ears. I lifted my head. Eugen had heard too; he was looking, with an expression of pain and indecision, toward the door. With a vast effort—the greatest my regard for him had yet made—I took it upon myself, laid my hand on his arm, and coercing him again into the chair from which he had half risen, whispered:
“I will tell him. You can not. Nicht wahr?”
A look was the only, but a very sufficient answer.
I went into the inner room and closed the door. A dim whiteness of moonlight struggled through the shutters, and very, very faintly showed me the outline of the child who was dear to me. Stooping down beside him, I asked if he were awake.
“Ja, ich wache,” he replied, in a patient, resigned kind of small voice.