"'Tis well, my father. You've scared me enough now. A truce to jesting. I've neither murdered nor robbed. I am certainly anything but a parricide. If I did not honor my father, I should not be here now. Pray give me your blessing, therefore, and let me go to my wife. Michal followed me of her own free will, and she is waiting for me now."
"The virgin you have brought with you is not your wife, and she awaits you in vain. At dawn I will send her back to her father under a strong escort together with the news of your death."
At these words the son was seized with a paroxysm of rage. Trusting in the great strength by which he had so often distinguished himself among his fellow-scholars, he fell fiercely upon his father. He fancied he would be able to wrest the sword from him, break loose from this ambuscade, and venture another leap through the dormer window and over the palisades, as he had done ten years before. But he reckoned without his host. The old man had only to stretch out his left hand, seize him by the chest and hurl him like a young kitten to the other side of the room, where he bounded head foremost against the wall, and fell all of a heap.
"It only needed that," murmured the old man. "Now that you have raised your hand against your master and judge, against your own father, you've not another crime to commit. This is the first case among the thousands of which I have had experience in which the condemned has presumed to wrestle with the headsman. Curer of souls indeed! In what Bible did you learn that, I should like to know."
The humiliated wretch, after this overthrow, lost his strength of mind altogether. The hero who had thus found his master in a physical encounter no longer felt equal to an intellectual contest; he writhed to his father on his knees, and cried, sobbing loudly all the time:
"Mercy, my father! I am your only son!"
"A precious only son, truly, who has outraged his own father. You fled from me. You said to yourself: 'My father pursues a dishonorable trade. I will not share his fate!' Alas! that it should be so. I cleanse the human race of its filth. My hand cannot be as white as a lily. They send for me to wipe away all their dirt, all that is vile and disgusting. A terrible fate! But someone, if it be only one in a hundred thousand, must submit to it. Evil-doers thrive like a brood of serpents. You have seen them yourself. You have been surrounded by them. You have felt how powerful they are even where the sword has been whetted to destroy them. I have already peopled many a room in hell with these damned spirits, and yet they spring up again like so many poisonous funguses. But for the gallows the dominion of Satan in these parts would gain the upper hand. I too live in a state of horror night and day. When I am alone I loathe myself. When I lay me down to sleep, someone must stand by my bedside to wake me when I dream, for the dreams I dream are ghastly. Once I even resigned my office. The King's grace releases the headsman after a thirty years' service, and a Royal decree ennobles him after a thirty years' obloquy. But I had not laid the sword aside for more than six months when traveling in the district became impossible. In the town, women were robbed in the broad daylight, and malefactors danced in the churches, which they had broken open and plundered. I again began to work in blood. A ghastly work! Men hide themselves, dogs howl, grazing flocks disperse when they scent me from afar. There is no seat for me in the church, and every door in the town is closed against me. The good abhor me even more than the evil. But for all that I care nothing. What does grieve me is that my son should loathe me. The thousands of terrifying shapes which are waiting for me in the next world to stone me with their decapitated heads do not frighten me. My own son, who smites me in the face, he it is who really hurls me into hell."
"No, my father," interrupted Henry, "I adjure you by the living God not to say so. I do not abhor you. You, too, serve humanity. I condemn you not. But Heaven has not given me so strong a heart as yours. I have chosen the mission of reconciliation, of amelioration. I, too, would destroy the evil which you destroy, if not with the sword at least by the Word of God."
"Then you think it belongs to the eternal fitness of things that your father should be a headsman, while you are a curer of souls; that when you are dispensing the Lord's Supper, all the people should look with fear and loathing at your hand to see whether you have not inherited some blood-mark from your father; that the children in your parish should come into the world with red blotches instead of moles; that the rabble, when we sit side by side in the felons' car, should cry out: 'There go the headsman and his son, the parson; the old 'un flays the sinners, and the youngster patches 'em up again!' Perhaps, however, you think nothing of the sort. Perhaps you will prefer to go on denying your father. Perhaps you will prefer to live a lie six days in the week, and then ascend the pulpit to preach eternal truth on the seventh day. But then would not the words 'Our Father' stick in your throat? Would you not hear the devil whispering in your ear every time you repeated the fifth commandment? But enough of this. Keep steady! Stretch out your head, and let us make an end of it!"
The young man was almost in a state of collapse. He tried to raise himself from the floor with one hand, and, as if even the cold stones had pity upon him, there suddenly resounded from the room below a soft chant, a lowly prayer sung by a woman's gentle voice: