The Son of His Mother Part 20

Whilst those who were in the room lifted him into the bath, Paul Schlieben and the nurse, and his mother placed her feeble hands underneath him to support him, Cilia stood outside the door and called upon all her saints. She would have liked to have had her manual of devotion, her "Angels' Bread," but there was no time to fetch it. So she only stammered her "Help" and "Have mercy," her "Hail" and "Fight for him," with all the fervour of her faith.

And the boy's pallid cheeks began to redden. A sigh pa.s.sed his lips, which had not opened to utter a sound for so long. He was warm when they put him back into the bed. Very soon he was hot; the fever commenced again.

The nurse looked anxious: "Now ice. We shall have to try what ice-bags will do."

Ice! Ice!

"Is there any ice in the house?" Paul Schlieben hurried from the sick-room. He almost hit the girl's forehead with the door as she stood praying outside.

Ice! Ice! They both ran down together. But the cook was at her wits' end too; no, there was no ice, they had not thought any would be required.

"Go and get some, quick."

The man-servant rushed off, but oh! before he could reach the shop, awake somebody and return, the flame upstairs might have burnt so fiercely that there was nothing left of the poor little candle. The man looked round, almost out of his mind with anxiety, and he saw Cilia with a chopper and pail running to the back-door.

"I'm going to fetch some ice."

"But where?"

"Down there." She laughed and raised her arm so that the chopper glittered. "There's plenty of ice in the lake. I'm going to chop some."

She was already out of the kitchen; he ran after her without a hat, without a cap, with only the thin coat on he wore in the house.

The terrors of the night gave way before the faint hope, and he did not feel the cold at first. But when the villas were lost sight of behind the pines, when he stood quit alone on the banks of the frozen lake that shone like a hard s.h.i.+eld of metal, surrounded by silent black giants, he felt so cold that he thought he should freeze to death. And he was filled with a terror he had never felt the like to before a--deadly fear.

Was not that a voice he heard? Hallo! Did it not come from the wood that had the appearance of a thicket in the blue, confusing glitter of the moonlight? And it mocked and bantered, half laughed, half moaned.

Terrible. Who was shrieking so?

"The owl's screeching," said Cilia, and she raised the chopper over her shoulder with both hands and let it whiz down with all her might.

The ice at the edge splintered, It cracked and broke; the sound was heard far out on the lake, a growling, a grumbling, a voice out of the deep.

Would the boy die--would he live?

The man gazed around him with a distraught look. O G.o.d! Yes, that was also in vain--would also be in vain. Despite all his courage he felt weak as he stood there. Here was night and loneliness and the wood and the water--he had seen it all before, it was familiar to him--but it had never been like this, so quiet and still, so alive with terrors.

The trees had never been so high before, the lake never so large, the world in which they lived never so far away.

Something seemed to be lurking behind that large pine--was a gamekeeper not standing there aiming at him, ready to shoot an arrow through his heart? The silence terrified him. This deep silence was awful. True, the blows of the chopper resounded, he could hear the echo across the lake, and nothing deterred Cilia from doing her work--he admired the girl's calmness--but the menace that lay in the silence did not grow any less.

The distracted man shuddered again and again: no, he knew it now--oh, how distinctly he felt it--n.o.body could do anything against that invisible power. Everything was in vain.

He was filled with a great grief. He seized hold of the pieces of ice the girl had chopped off with both hands, and put them into the pail; he tore his clothes, he cut himself on the jagged edges that were as sharp as gla.s.s, but he did not feel any physical pain. The blood dripped down from his fingers.

And now something began to flow from his eyes, to drip down his cheeks, heavy and clammy--slow, almost reluctant tears. But still the hot tears of a father who is weeping for his child.

CHAPTER XI

"Dear me, how big you've grown!" said Frau Lamke. "I suppose we shall soon have to treat you as a grown-up gentleman and say 'sir' to you?"

"Never!" Wolfgang threw his arms round her neck.

The woman was quite taken aback: was that Wolfgang? He was hardly to be recognised after his illness so approachable. And although he had always been a good boy, he had never been so affectionate as he was now. And how merry he was, he laughed, his eyes positively sparkled as if they had been polished.

Wolfgang was full of animal spirits and a never-ending, indomitable joyousness. He did not know what to do with himself. He could not sit still for a moment, his arms twitched, his feet sc.r.a.ped the ground.

His master stood in terror of him. He alone, the one boy, made the whole of the fourth form that had always been so exemplary run wild.

And still one could not really be downright angry with him. When the tired man, who had had to give the same lessons year after year, sit at the same desk, give the same dictations, set the same tasks, hear the same pieces read, repeat the same things, had to reprove the boy, something like a gentle sadness was mingled with the reproof, which softened it: yes, that was delight in existence, health, liveliness, unconsumed force--that was youth.

Wolfgang did not mind the scoldings he got, he had no ambition to become head of his form. He laughed at the master, and could not even get himself to lower his head and look sad when his mother waved a bad report in his face in her nervous excitement: "So that's all one gets in return for all one's worry?"

How ambitious women are! Paul Schlieben smiled; he took it more calmly. Well, he had not had the hard work that Kate had had. As the boy had missed so many lessons owing to his illness, she had sat with him every day, and written and read and done sums and learnt words and rules and repeated them with him indefatigably, and set him exercises herself besides the schoolwork, and in this manner he had succeeded in getting his remove into the fourth form with the others at Easter, in spite of the weeks and weeks he had been away from school. She had drawn a deep breath of relief: ah, a mountain had been climbed. But still the road was not straight by any means. When the first blackbirds began to sing in the garden he became No. 15 in his form--that is to say, an average pupil--when the first nightingale trilled he was not even among the average, and when summer came he was among the last in his form.

It was too tempting to sow, plant, and water the garden, to lie on the gra.s.s in the warm suns.h.i.+ne and have a sun bath. And still better to rove about out of doors along the edges of the wood or bathe in the lake and swim far out, so far that the other boys would call out to him: "Come back, Schlieben, you'll be drowned."

"Be thankful that there is so much life in him," said Paul to his wife. "Who would have thought only six months ago that he would ever be like this? It is fortunate that he isn't fond of sitting indoors.

'Plenty of fresh air,' Hofmann said, 'plenty of movement. Such a severe illness always does some harm to the const.i.tution.' So let us choose the lesser of two evils. But still the rascal must remember that he has duties to perform as well."

It was difficult to combine the two. Kate felt she was becoming powerless. When the boy's eyes, which were as bright as sloes, implored her to let him go out, she dared not keep him back. She knew he had not finished his school-work, had perhaps not even commenced it; but had not Paul said: "One must choose the lesser of two evils," and the doctor: "Such a severe illness always leaves some weakness behind, therefore a good deal of liberty"?

She suddenly trembled for his life; the horror of his illness was still fresh in her mind. Oh, those nights! Those last terrible hours in which the fever had risen higher and higher after the hot bath, the pulse and the poor heart had rushed along at a mad pace, until the ice from the lake had at last, at last brought coolness, and he had fallen into a sound sleep, which, when the sky commenced to glow in the east and a new day had looked in through the window, had turned into a beneficial, miraculous perspiration.

So she had to let the boy run about.

But that he hung on Cilia's arm when she had to go an errand in the evening, that he hurried after her when she only took a letter to the box, or that he brought her a chair when she wanted to sit with her mending-basket under the elderberry bush near the kitchen door was not to be tolerated. When Kate heard that Cilia had not gone further than the nearest pines on the edge of the wood when it was her Sunday out, and had sat there for hours with the boy on the gra.s.s, there was a scene.

Cilia wept bitter tears. What had she done? She had only told Wolfchen about her home.

"What's your home to him? He is to mind his own business and you yours." Kate was about to say still more, to cry out: "Leave off telling him your private concerns, I won't have it," but she controlled herself, although with difficulty. She could have boxed this round-cheeked girl's ears, as she looked at her so boldly with her bright eyes. Even Frida Lamke was preferable to her.

But Frida did not show herself very often now. She already wore a dress that reached to her ankles, attended a sewing cla.s.s out of school-hours, and after her confirmation, which was to be a year next Easter she was to go "to business," as she said very importantly.

"I shall give her notice," said Kate one evening, when Cilia had cleared the table and she was sitting quite alone with her husband.

"Oh!" He had not really been listening. "Why?"

"Because of her behaviour." The woman's voice vibrated with suppressed indignation more than that, with pa.s.sionate excitement. Her eyes, which were generally golden brown and gentle, became dark and sombre.

"Why, you're actually trembling! What is the matter now?" He laid the paper he was about to read aside, quite depressed. There was some trouble with the boy again; nothing else excited her in that manner.

"I can't have it any longer." Her voice was hard, had lost its charm. "And I won't stand it. Just think, when I came home to-day I was away an hour towards evening, hardly an hour good gracious, you cannot always be spying, you demean yourself in your own eyes." Her hands closed over each other, gripped each other so tightly that the knuckles showed quite white. "I had left him at his desk, he had so much to do, and when I returned not a stroke had been done. But I heard--heard them downstairs, at the back of the house near the kitchen door."

"Heard whom?"

"Wolfgang and her, of course--Cilia. I had only been away quite a short time."

"Well--and then?"