Cain and Katharine looked at each other involuntarily; they had never seen him like that before. He sat bowed over on the table; from time to time his dark and horny hands opened and shut convulsively, as if he were squeezing something in his hand.
"Are you ill?" stammered Cain. Then the smith pulled himself together. "Nonsense!" he growled, and then: "You shall not go, until I have thought things over for you."
There was something in these words that did not permit Cain to oppose him. "Then I will wait," said he. In the passageway he turned to Katharine, who stepped out of the room with him. "What is it, what is the matter with my father?" he asked.
Poor old Katharine was silent and thoughtful. "He is not easy to make out, the master," said she.
But after this conversation, Stephen Fausch passed a long, anxious, sleepless night. His bedroom was above the blacksmith shop, and was as bare as all the old monastery had been; a hard bed, a chair and a table were the only furniture. Fausch sat on the bed, near the open window, from which he could see the lakes and the whole Alpine valley.
At the supper table, an idea had come to Fausch, when Cain had spoken again of going away. "If the boy wants to go out of your life, Stephen Fausch, cannot you just as well pass out of his?"
He realized that it was the story of himself and the boy together that gave the material for all the scandal. And he knew perfectly well that it was he, Stephen, whose appearance and manner were so conspicuous, and who had played the principal part during the course of the events, who chiefly reminded people of the story. Cain was young and fresh and very much like other people. He lived in the present time, and suited the present time, so that the world could take pleasure in him just as he was, and therefore might not ask very much about his past, if there was nobody there, who was associated with the past and so was more bound up with it than Cain himself. He, Stephen, was the chief obstacle that prevented Cain's story from sinking into oblivion. If he parted from the boy, people would judge him for what he was, instead of for what he had been!
Fausch had carried these thoughts upstairs with him, and they would not let go their hold on him. As he sat on his bed, he was struggling with these ideas.
Until now, Fausch had gone his own way without troubling himself about anyone. And if a wall stood in his way, he had pushed through it with his obstinate head, and if anything else was in his way, he had kicked it aside with his heavy boots. Now for once he must yield, he must admit that--that in his self-will he had been unjust. If for the boy's good he should go away, it would be like begging Cain's pardon for what he had done to him, he, Stephen Fausch, who had no need to ask anyone's pardon!
This idea was so distasteful to him, that he laughed aloud and was too angry to sit still. He snatched up the chair by its back and put it over by the window, and sat down there and gazed out into the night.