“Nein, nein, nein!” said he. “Who can make him do anything he does not wish? Who can take me away from him?”
“I do not know. I only know that it must be so. There is no escaping from it, and no getting out of it. It is horrible, but it is so. Sometimes, Sigmund, there are things in the world like this.”
“The world must be a very cruel place,” he said, as if first struck with that fact.
“Now dost thou understand, Sigmund, why he did not speak? Couldst thou have told him such a thing?”
“Where is he?”
“There, in the next room, and very sad for thee.”
Sigmund, before I knew what he was thinking of, was out of bed and had opened the door. I saw that Eugen looked up, saw the child standing in the door-way, sprung up, and Sigmund bounded to meet him. A cry as of a great terror came from the child. Self-restraint, so long maintained, broke down; he cried in a loud, frightened voice:
“Mein Vater, Friedel says I must leave thee!” and burst into a storm of sobs and crying such as I had never before known him yield to. Eugen folded him in his arms, laid his head upon his breast, and clasping him very closely to him, paced about the room with him in silence, until the first fit of grief was over. I, from the dark room, watched them in a kind of languor, for I was weary, as though I had gone through some physical struggle.
They passed to and fro like some moving dream. Bit by bit the child learned from his father’s lips the pitiless truth, down to the last bitter drop; that the parting was to be complete, and they were not to see each other.