Then they resumed their walk. Without saying a word Fritz stroked his little son's cheek;--it was wet with tears. The poor little fellow was crying silently, for fear of grieving his father!
Fritz felt a strange, choking sensation. He took the boy to a confectioner's, but the child could eat nothing.
That night Siegi was taken ill. The physician pronounced it inflammation of the lungs. Lying in his father's arms for three days and nights, the boy suffered fearfully, and then the crisis was over. At the end of three weeks the little fellow could leave his bed, but he was paler and weaker than ever.
During Siegi's illness Fritz borrowed a hundred gulden from a former friend. Shortly afterwards he saw this friend in the street and was advancing to meet him when he saw him cross over the way with the evident intention of avoiding him. Fritz's blood was stirred at this, and blind, reckless rage seized him. The paltry hundred should be repaid at any cost. He sold his winter overcoat, and the golden chronometer which his father had given to him on his sixteenth birthday, and which was to have been an heirloom for Siegi.
He paid the hundred gulden--but ah, how often he repented it!
CHAPTER IX.
Among the lodgers at the widow Schmitt's, as Charlotte's mother was called, was a sallow-faced old woman, whose room was a small, dark, comfortless hole, and who wore the same shabby, green gown, summer and winter, year in and year out. She was known as Frau Pick, and she was a professional beggar.
One day, on returning from some humiliating errand, Fritz heard one of his sisters-in-law call to his wife: "Pick is waiting."--"I am ready," was the reply, and Charlotte came out into the passage with a letter in her hand. Fritz sprang to meet her, snatched the letter from her, forced her back into the room and, entering, closed the door behind them.
The letter was addressed to the archbishop of Vienna.
"What does this letter contain?" he asked angrily, seizing her so rudely by the wrist, that she screamed and fell upon her knees before him; she did not answer his question, however.