As he rushes out and slams the door, he calls back: “Fortune-hunter!”
Uncle Theodore makes a movement as if to go after him and chastise him, but Downie holds him back.
“Ah, Uncle Theodore, do let Maurits have the last word. Maurits is always right. Fortune-hunter,—that is just what I am, Uncle Theodore.”
She creeps again close to him without hesitation, without question. And Uncle Theodore is quite confused; just now she was weeping and now she is laughing; just now she was going to marry one man and now she is caressing another. Then she lifts up her head and smiles: “Now I am your little dog. You cannot be rid of me.”
“Downie,” says Uncle Theodore with his gruffest voice: “You have known it the whole time!”
She began to whisper: “Had my brother—”
“And yet you wished, Downie—Maurits is lucky to be rid of you. Such a foolish, deceitful, hypocritical Downie, such an unreliable little wisp, such a, such a—”
Ah, Downie, ah, silken flower! You were certainly not a fortune-hunter only; you were also a fortune-giver, otherwise there would be nothing left of your happy peace in the house where you lived. To this day the garden is shaded by big beeches and the birch tree trunks stand there white and spotless from the root upwards. To this day the snake suns himself in peace on the slope, and in the pond in the park swims a carp which is so old that no boy has the heart to catch it. And when I come there, I feel that there is festival in the air, and it seems as if the birds and flowers still sang their beautiful songs of you.