"Edwin."
When Mohr passed Christiane's door, he was on the point of ringing her bell, but it occurred to him that it was not yet six o'clock. But he came back again during the forenoon. He had scarcely been able to sleep an hour; a strange anxiety urged him to return to the house in Dorotheenstrasse, which contained all that was dear to him. As he vainly pulled Christiane's bell for the third time, the maid-servant came up the stair's bringing Edwin's dinner; (Reginchen would not appear.) The woman was evidently confused when Mohr hastily asked where the young lady had gone and when she would return. Fräulein Christiane had gone out early in the morning, she answered sulkily, she couldn't say where. She didn't trouble herself about the lodgers.
He was not particularly surprised; only it was disagreeable to be thus compelled to wait before he could see her again. But as he intended to stay in the tun for the day and night, he hoped at any rate to hear when she returned.
On going up stairs he found Marquard, who tried to put the best possible face on matters.
"There's no immediate danger," he said in a low tone, while Balder was sleeping, "if he will only keep quiet and not play any more tricks. What the devil induced him, instead of taking a little ride in the sunshine, to venture alone into the city and wander about the foggy streets till he was warm and tired."
That he had done this, Balder had written with a trembling hand on a scrap of paper, for which he asked Edwin as soon as he awoke, as if by his written testimony to remove all suspicion of any other cause. Franzelius, who came up a moment to inquire about his health, and scarcely dared to look the invalid in the face, had kept silence. And indeed he knew nothing definite; he left after insisting that he must be permitted to watch the following night. There was no longer any mention of his fixed idea that he was pursued.
Here was a fresh instance of the power a pure and noble soul can exert over coarser natures. There was not a loud word heard in the house; everybody moved about on tiptoe; a Sabbath-like stillness pervaded the workshop beneath, only interrupted by the smothered grumbling of the head journeyman, if the apprentice who was sent up stairs in his stocking feet every two hours to inquire about Balder, remained too long. Even the old gentleman in the second story had been to the tun in person to express his sympathy for Edwin, and Madame Feyertag, the only person who succeeded in seeing the patient, came down with tearful eyes and declared that he looked like a young Saviour, and it was heart rending to see such a picture of a man suffer so terribly.
Reginchen, as has already been mentioned, did not appear. The maid-servant said she was ill. Such a thing was hard to imagine, but no one had much thought for anything except whether Balder would ever rise from his bed again.
We must, however, except Heinrich Mohr, who in the deathlike stillness of the house listened for nothing more anxiously than the sound of Christiane's door. But there was no movement or sound beneath, though hour after hour elapsed and she had never before remained absent without informing the pupils who came to take lessons at the house, and who were dismissed to-day by the old servant, with a shrug of the shoulders. The uncertainty became harder and harder to bear. He had never passed hours so full of torture as these in the quiet sick room, beside the friend to whom he could not even speak of his fears, for Edwin's sole anxiety was for his brother.
Evening had already come, when Mohr with a beating heart suddenly heard a carriage drive up the street and directly after rapid steps cross the courtyard. Now the first flight of stairs creaked, a woman's light footsteps could be heard upon them; they paused at the first landing but Christiane's room was not the goal, for with light cautious steps the late visitor mounted higher, reached the door of the tun, and tapped lightly on it.