A Twofold Life

by Wilhelmine von Hillern

"Not here?" asked Henri, in amazement. "Where is she?"

"Forgive me, Herr Baron! I could do nothing else,--I took her home to her father."

"What! what!" cried Henri, fairly beside himself with rage. "Did you dare to oppose your master? Leave this house early to-morrow morning before I am up! I will never see you again!"

He threw a heavy purse at his feet. The old man burst into tears, and his knees trembled under him.

"Herr Baron," he said, in a choking voice, "may you never regret having driven such a faithful servant from you! Farewell! may God preserve you!"

With these words he tottered out of the room, while Ottmar threw himself upon his couch in a mood of sullen discontent; for the first time consciousness of his marred existence came over him with crushing distinctness.

The second step was taken; he had fallen one degree lower. The warning voice had not failed him, but Egotism must complete his work at the cost of everything else.

The first act Heinrich had committed against his conscience, under the influence of this terrible demon, was the game he had played for a year with the Jesuits, in order to obtain knowledge which would be useful in his career. When he afterwards came to the decision, where he had an equal amount to lose or gain, he chose the path of truth; but now he again encountered the necessity of sacrificing his ambition or his convictions, and principle was compelled to yield to egotism. He would henceforth choose the path of falsehood, of worldly advantage, instead of the only one which could lead him to higher things.

He had bound himself to appear in N---- as an enemy of progress,--to aid in oppressing an impoverished nation. He must persuade his conscience that all his ideas of right and freedom were dead, and not worth the sacrifice of a whole life of honor and influence,--that the philanthropy which, in the guise of an earnest sense of duty, had lived his cold intellect, was an eccentricity of his youth, and must yield to his own advantage; in truth, it could not be otherwise. Only the emotional nature makes all ideas so living that we weep, suffer, and bleed for them as if they were real sentient beings, and gives us, for men whom we cannot draw within the circle visible to our senses, that warm feeling of sympathy which we call philanthropy. But he had lost this power, and with it a true sense of honor, yet to-night he found no repose. He was formed by nature for noble ends, and although he no longer felt as he had done in former days, he knew what his emotions were once. He knew the difference between right and wrong, and that he was choosing the latter, and looked back with shame upon the preceding day.

Both Heinrich and Henri had fallen equally low. If Heinrich had crushed his sense of right and yielded to ambition, Henri had gone so far in his pursuit of pleasure that he had sought to destroy a young, trusting heart, and angrily driven away the old man who had opposed his design. Egotism had completed his victory over both natures. Haunted by these and similar thoughts, he at last fell asleep just before dawn.