Dame Care Part 40

With a trembling hand he felt for the lever.... A jerk ... a swing ...

and whirling, as if driven by supernatural force, the wheel went round.

"Victory! she lives, she lives!"

"Now they may hear, now they may come!" His hand pulled at the valve of the steam-whistle, and shrilly the night echoed her cry:

"I live! I live!"

Then he folded his hands and murmured, softly,

"O mother, you should have lived to see this!" And as he said so it suddenly occurred to him that this, too, was useless--that death was upon him also, crying into his ear,

"You will die! will die! before having lived."

"I have still work to do," he said, with moist eyes. "First, I will see my sisters happy, for if they remain poor they will be treated brutally; then I must see the farm right itself; then death may come."

And, like the black clouds around, years and years of struggling and years of care rose up before his eyes.

With sleepy faces the inmates appeared at the gate of the shed; the sisters came, too, and stood anxiously clinging to each other, in the smoke and the glow of the fire, looking in their white dressing-gowns like two pale roses on the same stalk.

"Here your future is being prepared, you poor things," he murmured, nodding to them.

When the foreman had come, Paul went into his father's bedroom, who stared at him confusedly.

"Father," he said, modestly, though his heart swelled with pride, "the locomobile is in working order; as soon as the ground has thawed the work on the moor can begin."

The old man said, "Leave me in peace," and turned his head to the wall.

Next morning, when the locomobile was pulled out, a strange rattling, scrunching sound was heard on the threshold of the shed.

"Something has got under the wheels," said the foreman.

Paul looked. There, in a heap of little fragments, broken in half, and pressed quite flat, lay--Elsbeth's flute.

A bitter smile came over his face, as if he meant to say, "Now I have sacrificed to you all that I have; now can you be satisfied, Dame Care?"

Since that day he felt as if the last link between himself and Elsbeth was severed--he had lost her, like his dreams, his hopes, his dignity, his own self.

With hurrahs, "Black Susy" wandered out onto the moor.

CHAPTER XIX.

Years went by. The sisters had already long been settled as happy wives, their dowry was paid, and the brothers-in-law had already begun to borrow from Paul.

How silent it was now in the quiet Haidehof. The father could hobble about the house and garden on a crutch, but he had grown much too lazy to wield the sceptre again. Paul did not know what else to do for him, except to have his favorite dishes cooked, not to measure his rations of ginger and aniseed too sparingly, and to present him each Christmas with a new almanac. The old man might have been well satisfied with this, for indeed he needed nothing more--he had even grown too heavy to drive to the town; but the better his body throve the more imbittered and exasperated grew his mind. He would sit and brood for hours, and it was dreadful to see how in doing so he gnashed his teeth and shook his fists. One of his fixed ideas was that his son kept him under on purpose that he might claim for himself the glory of the great ideas which his father had conceived, and the better the moor paid the more eagerly he calculated what his company would have brought in. He was not sparing with the millions; he had no need to be so.

But something sprang up from the darkest corner of his soul, and that was a plan of revenge against Douglas, which he privately nursed and cherished as his most important secret. Even his sons-in-law, to whom he liked to open his heart, knew nothing of this. Ulrich once said to Paul,

"Take care; the old man is brewing something against Douglas."

"What could it be?" he replied, apparently unconcerned, although he had often felt anxiety on this subject.

Dull, and without interest, Paul lived from one day to the next. His whole inner being was sacrificed to the commonplace cares about property and money, yet without his ever experiencing any joy at the success he attained. There was no longer anybody whom he could make happy, and he worked on without knowing why--as a cart-horse in the traces moves forward, ignorant of what the plough does, which it drags through the briers. Months sometimes pa.s.sed without his taking one retrospective glance at his soul. He did not whistle any more, either. He feared the torments which overwhelming sentiment called into life, but he looked back on the time when he could commune with himself in the language of music as on a lost paradise. Often when he compared the result of his work, his toiling, his wakeful nights, to that which he had sacrificed for it, he was overcome by intense bitterness. It seemed to him to have been something unspeakably n.o.ble, sweet and blissful, only he could not find the right name for it.

He could rid himself of these black thoughts most successfully by plunging deep into some new work, and then a long time would pa.s.s before the fit of melancholy attacked him again.

Meanwhile the Haidehof was thriving more splendidly from year to year; the debt to Douglas was paid off, the crops flourished, and in the meadows thorough-bred cattle were feeding. The whole place was to be rebuilt. The house, stables, and barn all were to be thoroughly renewed.

And one spring there came a crowd of workmen of all kinds into the yard.

The house was pulled down, and while Paul chose a wooden barrack for his dwelling, his father was easily induced to go over to stay with one of his sons-in-law.

"I shall never come back," he said, taking leave; "I cannot stand the sight of your mad proceedings any longer." But the first to come back in the autumn was the old man. He seated himself comfortably in his own arm-chair, and henceforth added his son-in-law to the list of those he abused. It was very possible they might not have treated him with too much consideration.

"Now I have no longer a place on earth where I can rest my gray hairs,"

he grumbled, stretching himself lazily on his cus.h.i.+ons.

Next spring it was the turn of the farm buildings; the barn, especially, was to be made an example of rural magnificence, as a monument of that terrible night which had given the death-blow to his mother.

The farmers who now drove across the heath often halted to look admiringly at the smart buildings which, with their red-tiled roofs, impressed them already in the distance, and many a one shook his head thoughtfully and murmured the old proverb:

"To build and to lend Bring cares without end."

"Black Susy" on the moor was sending forth her black clouds of smoke, the knives of the cutting-machine bored themselves deep into the clammy ground, and the press worked slowly and silently like a good-natured domestic animal. A newly-built shed with its white walls looked dazzling in the suns.h.i.+ne, and all round about the long black rows of compressed peat were to be seen. The blocks were hard and heavy, with little fibre and much coal. They easily beat all compet.i.tion and had a good reputation as far as Koenigsberg.

Paul, who on his business journeys mixed much with strange people, now also enjoyed the happiness of being greeted as a man of consequence, and of being treated by the worthy land-owners as their equal. But he had no longer any pleasure in it.

When they shook hands with him in a friendly manner, congratulated him upon his success, or requested a visit from him, he asked himself in silence, "Are they mocking me?" And though he saw well that the gentlemen were quite in earnest about it, he always felt as if freed from a nightmare when they let him go.

"Why did not these kind people come here before," he said to himself, "at that time when I needed them--when each kind word would have been of great advantage to me? Now I am as insensible as a stone--now it is too late."

But his ambition increased more and more. And as if Heaven itself wished to consecrate it all, it caused the fruit to thrive in such abundance that year (the seventh since his mother's death), sent rain and suns.h.i.+ne so lavishly, each at its proper time, that the people began to feel uncomfortable at all this profusion, and asked each other anxiously, "Can it be for any real good?"

"Something will still come and spoil all--a hailstorm or the like," said Paul, who was always prepared for the worst. But no; the harvest wagons came in one after the other heavily laden, swaying from side to side, and kept pouring the profusion of golden ears into the granary, scattering grains around until it was full up to the rafters.

But neither did this give pleasure to Paul. The more he saw his property acc.u.mulate, the more proudly the fruits of his handiwork greeted him, the heavier grew his care. Any one who had seen him slowly walking across the yard, with deep lines in his forehead and bowed head, might have taken him for a man enc.u.mbered with debts and very near to ruin.

About this time he read in the newspaper that Elsbeth was betrothed.

The name of Elsbeth Douglas and Leo h.e.l.ler stood side by side in letters full of beautiful flourishes.

He did not feel any sharp pain, he was not even startled; only a smile of melancholy satisfaction played round his mouth, as if he were murmuring to himself, "I always said so!"

And then he remembered the doc.u.ment which had once been circulated in church by the younger Erdmann to vex him, and which sounded just the same, only that his own name had stood there instead of the strange one.

And that certainly made a difference.

He had not seen her for years. Although their properties lay so close together there had been no meeting between them. The White House still gleamed just as brightly over the heath and overlooked his window as at the time when the longing to wander thither had arisen in his childish heart, but the magic glitter which surrounded it then, and for fifteen years after, had now vanished, extinguished by the deepening shadows of every-day life.

"May she be happy!" he said, and considered himself comforted by this wish.