“I wish the man lived in a plainer house,” murmured the General.
“Will you step this way, sir?” Grollmann had his hand on the door. “He has not slept all night,” he whispered, as if he must apologise for his master, who would probably not do so for himself.
“I have not slept either,” answered the General with a melancholy smile, as he walked with a firm, quiet step through the door, which the old man now opened and shut after him.
XII
The two men stood opposite one another, each measuring the other’s strength, like two athletes who are about to fight to the death, and yet cannot resist admiring each other’s noble appearance, and thinking that whichever falls will have succumbed to a worthy adversary. And yet the General had all the time the sensation that, strong and powerful as was the man who stood before him, he himself was in that moment the more composed, the calmer, and therefore the stronger. He saw it in the sullen fire that smouldered in the man’s eyes, in the trembling of the hand with which he pointed to a chair; he heard it in the deep voice which now said: “I did not expect your visit, General; but it does not surprise me.”
“I conjectured as much,” answered the General; “and it is for that reason that you see me here. I thought that every hour which passed unused by us, would diminish the probability of a friendly arrangement of the affair which brings me to you, as it would leave time for the miserable writer of this letter to spread his poison further and further. May I venture to give you the disagreeable task of reading this document?”
“Will you at the same time take the trouble of casting a glance at this production?”
The two men exchanged the letters which they had received. That which the General now read with calm attention, ran thus:
“This then is the man who dismisses his workpeople because they have not kept their word, as he says. Does he then keep his, he whose mouth is always full of the words liberty, equality, and fraternity; and boasts that he alone has held firmly by the old democratic flag of , and who now shuts his eyes while his son buys estates and builds palaces with the money he has stolen from honest people, and while his daughter runs after an officer of the Guards, who has a new mistress every six months, and leads the wildest of lives, but who will ultimately make Fräulein Schmidt into Frau von Werben? Or does Herr Schmidt know this? does he wish this? It is not unlike the great man of progress; for to think one thing and speak another, and to speak one thing and act another, has always been the practice of these gentlemen, which they carry on till at last someone finds them out and stops their dirty work, as in this case is resolved by one who is determined to stop at nothing.”
The General gave back the letter and received his own.
“The man does not seem to have thought it necessary to put on any mask with you,” said the General, “except in the handwriting.”
“Which, however, I recognised at the first glance,” answered Uncle Ernst; “it is that of a certain Roller, who was for several years overseer at my works, till I was obliged a few days ago to dismiss him for disobedience, under the circumstances to which he alludes at the commencement of his letter.”
“I had heard of it,” said the General, “and that explains sufficiently the man’s brutal vindictiveness; and as for the way in which he has discovered what has up to this moment been a secret to both of us, we should not wish to follow him there if we could. Let us therefore set that point aside. Another appears to me more important. This man has not attempted to conceal his handwriting in the letter which he has written to me; he evidently concluded, therefore, that we should not communicate with one another.”
The General, at these words, raised his eyes, as if accidentally; but his glance was sharp and piercing as that of the commander of a battery counting the seconds as he looks out for the spot to which the first shot shall be directed.
“That is the only point on which he and I agree,” said Uncle Ernst.
His voice, which had become calmer, trembled again, and he had cast down his eyes. The General saw that it would probably be easy for him to provoke an explanation which would relieve him from all further explanation on his part, but he had laid his plan, point by point, and he was accustomed to carry his plans out. He said therefore:
“Before I proceed further, will you kindly allow me to give you a slight description of my views, socially and morally, and of the situation in which I and my family are placed? Imagine, I beg of you, that this is necessary for some unimportant purpose, that I must speak and you must listen, although the one had rather be silent and the other had rather not hear.”
The General gave Herr Schmidt no time to deny him the desired permission, but continued, without pausing:
“I am descended from a very old family, and can trace my descent authentically through many generations, though we appear never to have been rich, and for the last two centuries must reckon ourselves as belonging to the poorer, not to say to the poor nobility. It is no doubt a consequence of this poverty that the male descendants of the family, which was never very widespread, and has often depended only on one life, have almost without exception passed their lives at Court, and in attendance on their princes, particularly the military ones, and even the women have often devoted themselves to the
