Only a Girl: or, A Physician for the Soul.

by Wilhelmine von Hillern

"I take back what I said," Gretchen moaned. "How could I say I had no father? Now that I am going to lose you, I feel that I can never forsake you!"

Leuthold writhed in agony in her embrace, but he managed to speak once more. "My child," he gasped thickly, "if there is a God, may He bless you! and when you hear that your father took his own life, remember that estate, freedom, honour, were gone past recall, but that by his own act he at least avoided a public exposure."

Gretchen gazed at him speechless. She tried to reply, but her lips refused her utterance. She only knew that her father was taken from her, and that stranger hands loosened her frantic clutch of his garments. She heard footsteps retreating, a door closed, and there was silence. For a few moments she lost consciousness. But other noises roused her from the fainting-fit that had brought her repose from grief, and recalled her to herself. Were the footsteps approaching again? Yes, they came on to the door of her room. What a strange murmur mingled with them! She raised her weary head with a mixture of fear and hope.

The door was thrown open as wide as it could go. Four men entered, bearing a well-nigh senseless burden. Her father had returned to her,--but how? They laid him upon the bed. Gretchen would have thrown herself into his arms, but he thrust her from him convulsively, for her clasping arms, her loving kiss, were tortures too great to be borne. He tried to speak, but in vain. Amidst frightful spasms, alternating with utter exhaustion, he breathed his last sigh, and his spirit bore its burden of guilt to new, unknown spheres of existence.

He had avoided all "public exposure."

But the only judge that he had acknowledged upon earth,--his child,--lay crushed at his feet expiating the crimes of the condemned.

[CHAPTER VII.]

THE ORPHAN.

Day was again mirrored brightly in the waters of the Alster, and again the streets swarmed with life. The prattle and laughter of children on their way to school, the monotonous cries of the street-hawkers, the rattle of passing vehicles, were all borne aloft into the quiet room where Leuthold had died, and where Gretchen still knelt beside the bed, and, by her constantly recurring bursts of grief, showed that the long night had not sufficed to exhaust the fountains of her tears. Her head lay upon the edge of the bed, and her arms were stretched across the empty mattress,--for the host had insisted upon the immediate removal from his house of the body of the suicide. But Gretchen could not yet be induced to leave the desolate room, the vacant couch. Since she was not allowed to follow her father's corpse, she would at least pillow her head where he had lain. She repulsed all her mother's advances. When everything had been done that the law requires in such terrible cases, and the officials had vacated the apartment, she shot the bolt of the door behind them, and thanked God that she was alone with her misery, alone by her father's death-bed.

What human eye can pierce the depths of a young heart lacerated by such anguish? All that goes on in the soul at such moments, when the creature wrestles with its Creator, must remain a profound mystery,--a mystery known to almost every human being, but never to be revealed, no mortal language can declare God's revelations to us in our direst need. Experience alone can enlighten us, and those who have lived through such a time can only clasp the hand of a fellow-sufferer, and say, "I know what it is," and henceforth there is a bond between them that is none the less close because it can never be explained.