Gretchen: A Novel

by Mary Jane Holmes

For a week or more it would remain there, and then he would put it carefully away, to be again brought out when the night was wild and stormy.

It was during Maude's absence that the two brothers became more intimate than they had been before since Arthur first came home, and it happened in this wise. Every day, for months after Maude and his wife went away, Frank spent hours alone in his private room, sometimes doing nothing, but oftener looking at the photograph of Gretchen and the Bible with the marked passages and the handwriting around it. Then he would take out the letter about which Jerrie had been so anxious, and examine it carefully, studying the address, which he knew by heart, and beginning at last to arrange the letters in alphabetical order as far as he could, and to try to imitate them. It was a difficult process, but little by little, with the assistance of a German text-book of Maude's which he found, he learned the alphabet, and began to form words, then to put them together, and then to read. Gradually, the work began to have a great fascination for him, and he went to Arthur one day and asked for some assistance.

"Never too old to learn," he said, "and as the house is like a tomb without Maude, I have actually taken up German, but find it up-hill business without a teacher. Will you help me?"

"To be sure, to be sure," Arthur cried, brightening up at once, and bringing out on the instant such a pile of books as appalled Frank and made him wish to withdraw his proposition.

But Arthur was eager, and persistent, and patient, and had never respected his brother one half as much as when he was stammering over the German pronunciation, which he could not well master. But he learned to read with a tolerable degree of fluency, and to speak a little, too, while he could understand nearly all Arthur said to him.

"Do you think I could get along in Germany?" he asked his brother one day.

"Certainly, you could," Arthur replied. "Are you going there? If you do, go to Weisbaden, and inquire for Gretchen—how she died, and where she is buried. I should have gone long ago, only I dreaded the ocean voyage so confoundedly, and then I forget so badly. When are you going?"

"Oh, I don't know as ever," Frank answered quickly, and yet in his heart there was the firm resolve to go to Weisbaden and hunt up Marguerite Heinrich's friends, if possible.

"And if I find them, and find my suspicions correct, what shall I do then?" he asked himself over and over again; and once made answer to his question: "I will either make restitution, or drown myself in the Rhine."

Jerrie was a constant source of misery to Frank, and yet when she was at home he was always managing to have her at the park house, where he could see her, and watch her, as she moved like a young queen through the handsome rooms, or frolicked with Maude upon the lawn.