"Who is that pretty boy?" Manasseh asked his wife.
She laughed merrily, and rebuked him for not knowing his own son. But he had not seen the child for six years.
His brother Aaron, too, he hardly recognised, so gray had his hair turned under the anxieties of the past few years. The speech of welcome which the elder brother was to have delivered proved a total failure, owing to the emotion aroused in the orator's breast at sight of the returned wanderer. But the most affecting part of it all to Manasseh was the appearance of his sister Anna. The poor girl, he could not fail to see, was sinking into an early grave.
CHAPTER XXVIII.
A DAY OF RECKONING.
Victory had neither glossed over nor defeat buried from sight those dishonest army contracts. Louder and louder grew the murmurs against the fraud that had contributed so disastrously to the unhappy issue of the war, until at last a high military officer opened his mouth and declared, emphatically, "The parties responsible for such an outrage deserve to be hanged!"
Soon after this bold utterance a decree went forth for an investigation of the scandal and the condign punishment of the guilty ones. Confusion and panic followed in more than one family of exalted station. A nobleman of proud lineage burnt all his papers and then opened the veins of his wrists with a penknife, and so escaped the ignominy of a trial in court. Another submitted to arrest, but no sooner saw his prison door closed upon him than he despatched himself by piercing his heart with a breast-pin. Two others vanished completely from sight and hearing the very day the edict was published, and never showed themselves afterward.
Benjamin Vajdar, black with guilt as he knew himself to be, chose the shrewder course of remaining in Vienna and calmly going about his business, with all the outward confidence of spotless innocence. Suspicion is much like a watch-dog; it leaps upon the man who quails. Prince Cagliari and the Marchioness Caldariva also remained quietly in the city, and even went so far as to forego their wonted sojourn at the seashore when summer came. They seemed to have acquired a sudden extraordinary fondness for the Austrian capital.