Uncle Ernst pressed his hand to his eyes, and, suppressing his deep emotion by a powerful effort, continued:
“I cannot require of you, General, that you should share my feelings, and I will not waste the precious minutes in a detailed account of the steps which I have now taken, moved by a force which I have neither the power nor the wish further to withstand, in order to save what is perhaps not yet utterly lost. Suffice it to you to know that I have ascertained from the woman who has been your son’s confidante lately, and also, without knowing it, the tool of that dangerous man who is such an arch-enemy of your family—I have ascertained, I believe, nearly all that I need know of the sad history which has been played beneath our eyes, unobserved by us.
“Suffice it to you that I am convinced, not of your son’s innocence, it would be a lie were I to say that, and today more than ever we must have the courage to be sternly true to ourselves and to each other, but that he is not more guilty than a combination of unhappy circumstances may make a young man who, in spite of all his apparent knowledge of the world, is absolutely inexperienced, and whose heart, though no longer sinless, is not corrupt, but capable of noble impulses. And, General, if I have made to you, in whom I have always seen the impersonation of the principles most detested and abhorred by me, to you, above whom in my own self-righteousness I stood so high, a confession which has not been easy to my pride; if I have acknowledged that the principle of unbounded liberty and absolute self-dependence when carried to its extreme consequence may lead weaker spirits into error, must so lead them perhaps, as I see my two children erring now, one irrecoverably lost, the other only trembling on the edge of the abyss, into which some mere accident may precipitate her; have you, too, General von Werben, nothing to repent of, nothing to atone for? Have not the narrow fetters of aristocratic and military routine, in which you have tried to confine your son’s easily-led disposition, been equally fatal to him? To him who in a freer and lighter atmosphere might have happily and naturally unfolded the bright gifts of his clear understanding, the powers of enjoyment of his warm heart, and who now, compressed and confined by prejudices on all sides, entangled in hopeless contradictions, has gradually accustomed himself to look upon life so completely and entirely as a series of necessary and unavoidable contradictions, that his death at this moment would be only one more?
“A terrible and monstrous contradiction. For would it not be one? Death by his own hand, at the moment when that hand is seized by the woman whom this self-condemned suicide—from all that I now hear I am certain of this—loves with all the force of which his heart is capable, and certainly far more than his own life; and this woman, who is not unworthy indeed of such love, says to him in tones which can only come from a loving and despairing heart: ‘Live, live! Live for me, to whom you are all! I have left father, and house, and home, to live for you! With you, without hoping for better days! With you, in shame and misery, if need be—with you!’ ”
Uncle Ernst ceased, overpowered by the feelings of his noble, strong heart, choked by the thoughts which surged in his powerfully working mind. The General, who had been sitting in gloomy meditation, raised his sorrow-dimmed eyes.
“If need be?—it must be!”
“Must be?” cried Uncle Ernst; “why? Because to the poor weary wayworn wanderers it seems that the farther road for them can only be toiling through the desert, through thorns and over stony ground? For them! Good heavens! They who are young and strong, who will soon in the palmy Eden of their love recognise their youth and strength, and with renewed courage and refreshed hearts go out into life, which stretches boundless and beautiful before them! Life, in whose immeasurable space there is a thousandfold room for the man who has erred, if he has but courage and can rise firmly to his feet again to resume the battle, and to conquer in a new sphere of work, a home for himself, for the woman he loves—for his children! The children, General, with whom a new world is born which knows nothing of the old, which needs to know and should know nothing of the father’s sin; that sin which, if the father indeed has not atoned for by his sorrow, by his penance, by a single noble deed, they may redeem by the simple fact of living, of being new blossoms on the tree of humanity, at the foot of which we old people with our ancient griefs and troubles shall long have gone to rest.”
Uncle Ernst’s great eyes were glowing with noble enthusiasm; but the General’s troubled face gave not the faintest response to it. He slowly shook his grey head.
“I must ask you one question, which sounds very cruel, but is not meant to be so, only to bring us down from this region of bright and, to my thinking, fantastic dreams to this dark earth. Does the perspective which you open to my son, extend also to your son?”
Uncle Ernst started, the fire of his glance was dimmed, and some moments elapsed before his answer came.
“The cases are as far apart as heaven is from earth, as far as a thoughtless act intended to injure no one, which he who committed it hoped, I know, to make good, and to which he had been after all led away by fiendish suggestions, differs from a proceeding which was carried out
