“Miserable man!” he muttered to himself.
“You have to thank this circumstance—I mean the intervention of my daughter—that he is still alive,” said Uncle Ernst.
“I can feel no gratitude for that,” replied the General in a hollow voice.
“And that the father has not the son’s death upon his head.”
“The father would have been able to endure that responsibility.”
“So I should suppose,” muttered Uncle Ernst.
He sat for a few moments silent, and his looks also were now gloomy and downcast; but this was neither the time nor the place to renew the ancient feud. In a composed tone he said:
“If General von Werben did not know where Herr von Werben was gone, and that he was with my daughter, may I ask what brought him here?”
“I had intended to call to account the man whom I must suppose has brought ruin upon my son, as he has already brought ruin and shame upon my family. I confess that I hardly see any sense in this project now, and that I—”
The General made a movement as if to rise.
“Do not go, General,” said Uncle Ernst. “If time had permitted, I would have gone to you and asked the favour of an interview; now that chance—if we may call it chance—has brought us together, let us make use of this half-hour; it may spare us perhaps years of vain remorse.”
The General shot from under his bushy brows a dark, uncertain glance at the speaker.
“Yes, General,” said Uncle Ernst, “I repeat it—remorse; though we have neither of us had much opportunity yet of making acquaintance with such a thing. I think we may both bear witness of ourselves, without boasting, that we have all our lives long desired to do right, according to the best of our knowledge and conscience; but, General, since that first and only interview which I had with you, the words have been constantly ringing in my ear, and I hear them at this moment more plainly than ever, that I have indeed forgotten nothing, but have also learned nothing. It was a hard saying to a man like myself, whose highest pride had been to have striven from his youth up after a better and purer experience, after truth and light; and I put it from me, therefore, as an absolute injustice. But it has returned upon me again and again, all through these dark and gloomy winter months, day after day, and night after night, and it has gnawed at my heart till I almost went mad over it, for I thought I could not believe those words without giving up myself, without denying the sun at midday, or at least admitting that that sun had dark, very dark spots, fearfully dark for one who would joyfully have laid his head upon the block for its spotless purity. And yet, General, it was so. However the tortured heart might cry out against it, the relentless words would not be silenced: ‘You, who glory in having forgotten nothing, have lost the better part, and you have learned nothing.’
“This hard battle, General, in which I have nearly perished, and which has certainly shortened my life by many years, has continued till this very day, till this very hour. Even the shameless and disgraceful act of my son, with whom for years past I have lived in unnatural enmity, could not break my pride. ‘What is it to me,’ I cried, ‘if he drew poison from the honey, if, when I had made respect for foolish prejudices ridiculous to the boy, he later on lost all reverence for the sacredness of law? If my teaching that it was every man’s duty to stand upon his own feet and trust in his own strength was perverted by him into the doctrine that he who had the might had the right also to take all that his hand could grasp, and to tread under foot whatever was weak enough to allow itself to be trampled upon? He has been corrupt from his childhood,’ I cried, ‘let Nature be answerable for all that she has created in her dark recesses! What matters it to us who, out of the chaos where right and wrong, reason and folly, are wavering and mingling confusedly together, are striving after the light of absolute self-dependence? What matters it above all to the plebeian, to whom the aristocrat’s pride in his forefathers seems ridiculous? Let the children go their way! Why should the question of whither we go seem to us more worthy of inquiry than of whence we come, concerning which on principle we ask nothing? Pale spectre of family honour, write thy Mene Tekel on the walls of the prince’s palace, on the walls of the noble’s house, but attempt not to awe the free man who has no honour and desires no honour, but that of remaining true to himself!’
“And then, General, as I thus strove with my God—I believe in a God, General von Werben, Radical and Republican as I am—there crossed my threshold an angel, if I may so call a being whose heavenly goodness and purity seem to have no trace of earth, my clerk’s daughter, a blind girl, whom you have perhaps heard mentioned in your family circle. She came to tell me that my daughter had fled—fled with your son, to save him whom she loved with every fibre of her warm, passionate heart, to shield him from the death to which his own father, for what reason I knew not, had condemned him. But I had thrust the spectre from my door, I would not listen now to the angel’s soft voice, although a strange awe, which I could not account for, thrilled through me. The meaning was not long unexplained. The pure, pitiful words had been the last which that noble being had
