The old man spoke these last words in such a mournful voice, and hung his head so low upon his breast, that Schnetz could not help feeling the warmest pity for him. At the same time he asked himself with amazement how it could have been possible for them all to have associated with this terribly-tried man for so many long years without having taken the trouble to find out anything about his history.
He now bluntly said as much, inveighing in his bitter way against the wretched state of society in which they lived.
"A fine Paradise!" he growled out, half to himself. "We have a great idea of how necessary we are to one another, and yet the few fellow-men who are worth troubling ourselves about stand in no nearer relation to us than the wild animals did to our first parents. Though, to be sure, in your case we ought not to bear the chief blame. Why did you yourself never feel a desire to break the ice between us? It would have been a healthier thing for you, if you had long ago formed an intimacy with one of us."
The old man raised his head again, but still kept his eyes shut tight, and groped blindly for Schnetz's hand, which he pressed warmly.
"Perhaps it is not yet too late," he stammered, in a trembling voice. "I hope it may still be in your power to assist me in finding a place in life again.
"One morning about a fortnight ago a little sealed packet was brought to me by a street messenger. It bore no address, but when I saw the seal I felt a terrible shock. I recognized it as one I had once given to my daughter--a cornelian, in which was cut an Egyptian scarabæus. I asked the man who had given it to him. A girl, he said, who had given him an exact description of my lodging and appearance; and she had also known my name--my present one--which I have no reason to suppose my lost daughter had ever even heard of. I was so beside myself with alarm, joy, and a thousand indescribable sensations that I did not break the seal at first; only one thing seemed clear to me in my confusion--before all else I must find the person who had sent the messenger. Did he know where she was to be found? I asked. But she had engaged him in the street, had paid in advance, and had then immediately disappeared round the next corner. And then he described her! It was my lost one, feature for feature, and yet it could not be she herself, for this one must have been about as old as my daughter was when I cast her off. So it must be the child of my lost darling! And to think that she, too, should flee from me like her poor mother!
"At last I tore the string off the packet, and there fell out a letter and two small pictures--daguerreotypes, such as they used in those days to take on silvered plates--one of them a picture of her mother, the only thing she had taken away with her from her home, the other a young man whose face I had great difficulty in recalling.
"The letter had been written several years before. Only in case of her death was it to come into my hands, she wrote in the very first lines. She had always been a proud child, and guilt and want and her sad life had not changed her. Yet there was a loving, tender tone in her words, a spirit of parting that softens even the hardest and most bitter natures; and as I read her simple confession, in which she accused herself of having robbed me of my happiness and ruined my life--of having offended me beyond forgiveness--it seemed as if my heart would burst. She could never prevail upon herself to return to me; at first from fear that I would renounce her a second time, and later, because she did not want to become a fresh burden to me. She knew that I had taken another name, and was living in the strictest seclusion. If she should suddenly appear with her child, it might not be convenient for me. But, when she should be no more--and this must be soon, for her lungs grew weaker every day--she begged me not to let the child suffer for the wrong her mother had done me. It was a good child, unspoiled as yet, but with little sense and very giddy. She needed a father's hand to guide her through her years of danger. She had appealed in vain to the child's father in the first years after his desertion of her. But, when no answer came, she had taken an oath that he should be dead to her forever. She had found no difficulty in keeping it, for she hated him now as much as she had once loved him.
"For the child's sake she would now speak his name for the first time in eighteen years, so that if he should still be alive her father might call him to account and force him to make provision for his orphaned daughter.
"And then followed a short word of farewell and the name of my child, and beside it in brackets that of her betrayer, which was also on the back of the daguerreotype, where, with his own hand, he had written some words of presentation to my daughter.