He was silent for a moment; for the look exchanged between husband and wife told him that he had spoken more wisely than he knew. Then Dr. Richards said lightly,—
“Well, if ever I turn Christian, Mr. Clare, you shall have the glory of my conversion.”
CHAPTER VIII.
RITTER FRITZ.
One afternoon late in the summer, Mr. Clare and Dr. Richards, accompanied by a large party of boys and young men, including Freddy and the Ark of the Covenant, had climbed a rather steep road which led to one of their favorite resorts, a quaint and beautiful cemetery on a hill overlooking the river. The names, the German inscriptions, the artificial flowers, the child’s toys upon the smaller graves, the beautiful river flowing beneath—“It is all a mistake,” said Dr. Richards, smiling; “this is not practical, humdrum America; we are in Germany, the home of myth and song, and yonder flows the mysterious and beautiful Rhine. I am positive there is a ruined castle just at the turn of the hill yonder; and, if you listen, you will hear the song of the Lorelei.”
“I hope not,” replied Mr. Clare, so seriously that the others looked at him in surprise, perceiving which he went on more lightly, “There’s a song of the kind to be heard even in humdrum America, boys; and I confess to a terrible fear lest some of us should some day listen to it. A song that promises wealth and happiness to everybody at the cost of only a little bloodshed and violence. ‘All these things will I give thee,’ says Satan to us, as once to our Master, ‘if thou wilt fall down and worship me.’ And don’t you suppose it was a real temptation? to blot out the ‘two thousand years of wrong’ through which the world has waited, and to establish then and there the kingdom for which we still look?”
“That’s a new explanation of that temptation,” observed Dr. Richards, who never let fall a syllable that could lessen or hinder Mr. Clare’s influence over his “boys.”
“No, it’s in all the Commentaries,” said the clergyman, smiling; “except that we are now hoping that this kingdom may manifest itself to the world after a certain new yet old fashion. And that hope is the more sure,” he added, “because the temptation has grown so loud and insistent. ‘Fall down and worship me; manufacture a little dynamite; plot and conspire a little; murder a few tyrants; it’s all for the good of the race, the salvation of the oppressed, and the rescue of the poor and suffering!’ Do I blink the strength of the temptation, or blame unduly those who fall before it? The blessed Lord Himself can feel for them, and has given them the only effective weapon against it: ‘Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and Him only shalt thou serve.’”
“It’s pretty hard, sometimes, not to hate a rich man,” said Fritz Rolf gloomily. He laid down beside him on the grass an opera-glass which he had borrowed from Herr Martin, the jeweller, in order to examine some distant object in the landscape; but it had evidently been directed, as he held it to his eyes, towards the town they had left, where, perhaps, the color of a dress had caught his eye. It was on a secluded by-street, shut in by the high side walls of factories, empty and deserted on this summer Sunday evening, that the wearer of the dress stood, with her fair head drooping against the breast of a black coat, the sleeve of which gloomed about the blue waist.
Fritz was very pale, but he said nothing; as he himself would have expressed it, he “wouldn’t give it away to those fellows;” so he kept the glass strictly in his own possession, in spite of the objurgations levelled against him. He had borrowed it, he said, he was responsible for it, and he did not mean to have it broken. Only Mr. Clare, whose eyesight was as keen as the rest of his faculties, had caught a gleam of blue down the same treacherous vista of tall chimneys and low fences; and, though it was too far away for recognition of the wearer, fancied that he traced in the young man’s unusual sulky selfishness the features of chivalrous knighthood; upon which hint he spake.
“It must have been especially hard,” he said, “for those old fellows who used ‘to ride abroad redressing human wrong,’ putting down violence with the strong hand.”