“You would have had no right to, for three of my children would have been on my side.”
“I think my opinion has enough weight to balance that of two women and a degenerate fool.”
“You speak of your brother and sisters as heartlessly as you do to me.”
“Clara was a pious, ignorant woman, Mother. And Tony is a child—and, anyhow, she knew nothing about the affair at all until now—or she might have talked at the wrong time, eh? And Christian? Oh, he got Christian’s consent, did Tibertius! Who would have thought it of him? Do you know now, or don’t you grasp it yet—what he is, this ingenious pastor? He is a rogue, and a fortune-hunter!”
“Sons-in-law are always rogues,” said Frau Permaneder, in a hollow voice.
“He is a fortune-hunter! What does he do? He travels to Hamburg, and sits down by Christian’s bed. He talks to him—‘Yes,’ says Christian, ‘yes, Tibertius, God bless you! Have you any idea of the pain I suffer in my left side?’—Oh, the idiots, the scoundrels! They joined hands against me!” And the Senator, perfectly beside himself, leaned against the wrought-iron fire-screen and pressed his clenched hands to his temples.
This paroxysm of anger was out of proportion to the circumstances. No, it was not the hundred and twenty-seven thousand marks that had brought him to this unprecedented state of rage. It was rather that his irritated senses connected this case with the series of rebuffs and misfortunes which had lately attended him in both public and private business. Nothing went well any more. Nothing turned out as he intended it should. And now, had it come to this, that in the house of his fathers they “went over his head” in matters of the highest importance? That a pastor from Riga could thus bamboozle him behind his back? He could have prevented it if he had only been told! But events had taken their course without him. It was this which he felt could not have happened earlier—would not have dared to happen earlier! Again his faith tottered—his faith in himself, his luck, his power, his future. And it was nothing but his own inward weakness and despair that broke out in this scene before mother and sister.
Frau Permaneder stood up and embraced her brother. “Tom,” she said, “do control yourself. Try to be calm. You will make yourself ill. Are things so very bad? Tibertius doesn’t need to live so very long, perhaps, and the money would come back after he dies. And if you want it to, it can be altered—can it not be altered, Mamma?”
The Frau Consul answered only with sobs.
“Oh, no, no,” said the Consul, pulling himself together, and making a weak gesture of dissent. “Let it be as it is. Do you think I would carry it into court and sue my own mother, and add a public scandal to the family one? It may go as it is,” he concluded, and walked lifelessly to the glass door, where he paused and stood.