Now the night breeze rustled louder in the half-stripped boughs of the maple against which I was leaning, and looking up I saw a star twinkling through the sprays--now it would do.

How hollow sounded my footsteps in the empty streets, and how heavily beat my heart in my anxious breast! As I pa.s.sed the _Rathhaus_, Father Ruterbusch, the night-watchman, was standing, bare-headed and without his weapons, at his post, and looking pensively at the empty table and barrel-chair of Mother Moller's cake stand, while above us the clock in the tower of St. Nicholas's church struck eight. Was Mother Moller dead, that Father Ruterbusch thus gazed at the empty barrel, and had not even a glance for his old acquaintance from the guard-house?

Dead? Why not? She was an old woman when I last saw her--just the age of my father, as she told me once when I was spending my pocket money at her stall. As old as my father! A chill wind blew through the hall; I shivered from head to foot, and with a rapid stride, almost a run, I hurried over the little market-place down the sloping streets leading to the harbor.

Here was the Harbor-street, and here was the house! Thank heaven! A light was glimmering through the shutters of both windows on the left.

Thank heaven once more!

And now would I do and must do what on that other evening I wished to do and should have done, and yet did not: go in and say to him "forgive me!"

I grasped the bra.s.s k.n.o.b of the door--again it felt cold as ice to my hot hand. The door-bell gave a sharp clang, and at its summons appeared at the door of the right-hand chamber--just as on that evening--the faithful Friederike. No, not just as on that evening; her little figure, bent with age, was dressed in black, and a black ribbon fastened the snow-white cap with its broad ruffle, which formed a ring of points around her wrinkled face. And out of the wrinkled face two eyes, red with weeping, stared at the strange visitor.

"Rike," I said--it was all that I could utter.

"George! good heaven!" the old women cried, tottering towards me with uplifted hands.

She grasped both my hands, and gazed at me, sobbing and speechless, with quivering lips, while the tears streamed down her furrowed cheeks.

She had no need to speak: I did not ask what had happened: I only asked "When?"

"A week ago to-day," sobbed the old woman. "He did not even live to see his birth-day."

"What did he die of?"

"I do not know. n.o.body knows. Doctor Balthasar says he cannot understand it. He has never been quite well since you have been away; and kept growing worse and worse, though he would never own it; and two weeks ago he took to his bed, and kept perfectly still, looking always just before him, only that sometimes he would write in his house-book, and that on the very evening before; and when I came in the morning he was dead, and the book was lying on the bed, and I took it myself and showed it to n.o.body when they came and sealed up everything. I thought I ought to keep it for you: he used so often to say your name to himself when he was writing. What he wrote I don't know; I cannot read; but I will get it for you."

She opened the door into my father's room. It was neat as ever--painfully neat, but even more uninhabitable. The white slips of parchment, fastened with seals over the keyholes of the secretary and the old brown press in the corner, had a spectral look to me.

"Why is the lamp burning on the table?" I asked.

"They are coming this evening."

"Who are coming?"

"Sarah and her husband, and the children, I believe. Did you not know?"

"I know of nothing--nothing whatever. And there still lies my letter--unbroken! He never read it!"

I sank into the chair that stood by the writing table. I had never sat in this chair, had scarcely dared to touch it. A king's throne had seemed less venerable to me. This thought at once struck me, and was followed by many, many other painful thoughts: my head sank into my hands: gladly would I have wept, but I could not weep.

The old woman returned with the book of which she had spoken. I knew it well; it was a thick quarto volume, bound in leather, with clasps, and I had often seen it in my father's hands of an evening when he had done his work; but never had I ventured to cast a look into it, even had I had the opportunity, which but rarely happened, as my father always kept it carefully locked up. Now it lay open before me: one after another I turned the thick leaves of the rough coa.r.s.e paper, their pages covered with the neat, pedantically straight hand-writing of my father, which I knew so well. The hand had not changed, although the entries extended over more than forty years, and the ink on the first pages was entirely faded. Only upon the last did this steady strength seen to fail. The traces of the pen grew ever more angular, feebler; they were but the ruin of what had formerly been; the last word was just legible and no more. It was my name.

And everywhere upon the first leaves, those of some twenty-seven years back, stood my name.

"To-day a son has been born to me--a st.u.r.dy little fellow. The nurse says she never saw in her life so stout a babe, and that he is like St.

George. So he shall be called George, and shall be the joy of my life and the staff of my old age. May G.o.d grant it!"

"George comes on finely," was on another page. "He is already larger than the Herr Steuerrath's Arthur, who is not small either. He seems to have a good head of his own. Though only three years old, it is wonderful what ideas he has. He must soon go to school."

And again on another:

"Clerk Volland is full of praise of my George. 'He might get on better with his learning,' the old man says; 'but his heart is in the right place; he will be a fine man some day. I shall not live to see it, but you will, and then do you remember that I said so.'"

And so it went on, page after page--"George that splendid fellow! My n.o.ble boy, George!"

Then came other times. George's name was not now in almost every line, and George was no longer the splendid fellow and n.o.ble boy. George would not do right, neither in school, nor at home, nor on the street, nor anywhere. George was a good-for-nothing! No, no; that was too much to say; only he could do better if he would, and he certainly would do better--he certainly would!

Then came many pages and George's name was not mentioned at all. Many a family event was noted; my mother's death; the terrible news of my brother's loss; that his daughter Sarah had again--for the third--for the fourth time--presented him with a grandson or a grand-daughter; that he had been promoted to an accountant's place; that his salary had been raised; but George's name appeared no more.

Not even upon the last leaves, which again had references to "him;"

that "he" was so well liked by all in the prison, and that the Herr Superintendent von Zehren had asked today again if "he" was not yet found worthy of his father's forgiveness.

"I have tried to-day to write to him what the feelings of my heart are; but I cannot bring myself to it. I will tell him all when he comes back, if he cares for the love of an old broken man; but write it I cannot."

And upon the last page were the words:

"It is not true! It certainly is not true. Six years and a half he has behaved well, yes, exemplarily, and in the second half of the seventh to become worthless at once! I hear little good of the new superintendent. The one that is gone was a n.o.ble-spirited man, and he was always full of praise of him--no, no, whatever they may say of him, my boy is not worthless, not worthless!"

And last of all:

"In a week he will be free; he will find me upon a sick bed if he finds me at all. For his sake I wish it; for it would be a great sorrow to him to see me no more. I have thought all these years that my boy did not love me, or he would never have given me so much pain; but I had just now a dream that he was here and I held him in my arms. I said to him, George----"

I stared with burning eyes at the blank which followed, as if there must appear upon it the words which my father had said to me in his dream; but gaze as I might, the words appeared not, and at last I saw nothing more for the flood of tears that burst from my eyes.

"You must not cry so, George," said the good old woman. "I know he always loved you more than the rest--very much more. And if he died of grief and heart-break on your account, why he was an old man, and now he is dead and with our Heavenly Father, and he is well there, much better than here, though the good Lord knows that I have had no other thought these twenty years than to make it all right with him."

"I know it, I know it, and I thank you a thousand times," I cried, seizing her brown withered bands. "And now tell me, what are you going to do, and what can I do for you?"

She looked at me and shook her head; it probably seemed strange to her that George, just out of the prison, should offer to do anything for her.

I repeated my question.

"Poor boy," she said, "you will have enough to do to provide for yourself, for what he has left does not amount to much; he was too good; he would help everywhere that he could, and he bought a place in the Beguines for me, for the year or two I may still be spared. This will come out of it, and Sarah made fuss enough when she heard it. They thought they would get it all'; but it is to be divided equally between you both. I have that from his own mouth, and I can swear it, and will swear it, if they raise any dispute, because he left no will."

At this moment there was a loud ring at the front door.

"Good heavens!" cried the old woman, clapping her hands together, "there they are already!"

She hurried out of the room, leaving the door open after her. I remembered that I had never loved my sister--that I had parted from her with unfriendly feelings long years before, and that in the interval I had by no means learned to love her--but what difference did that make now? Now, when she and I had lost our father, when we might lean and take each other's hand across his grave?

I went into the little hall, which was nearly filled by the newcomers--a tall, lean, pale woman in black; a short, fat, red-faced man, in the uniform of an officer of the customs; and so far as I could make out at a glance, a half-dozen children, from ten or twelve years old to an infant, which the tall, pale woman clutched more firmly as I appeared at the door, and looked at me with a hostile rather than a startled look in her large cold eyes. The short, fat man in uniform stepped between me and the group of mother and children with a confused expression in his face, and, rubbing his plump hands in an embarra.s.sed manner, said:

"We were not expecting you--ahem!--brother-in-law ahem! but we are very glad to meet you here--ahem! My dear wife will only put herself to rights a little--ahem! In the meantime, suppose we go into our late father's room, where we can talk over matters undisturbed. Don't you think so, my dear?"

The little man turned upon his heel to face his dear wife, who, instead of answering, pushed the children before her into old Friederike's little room. He turned back to me, rubbed his hands with still more embarra.s.sment than before, and said again "Ahem!"

We entered my father's room. I took my seat in his chair, but my brother-in-law was too disturbed in spirit to be able to sit down. He paced up and down the room with short quick steps, stopping for a moment every time he pa.s.sed the door, with his head thrust forward a little on one side, listening if his dear wife had called him, and every time, to fill up the pause with propriety, he said "Ahem?"

It was a long detail that the little man went into during his restless wandering from door to stove and from stove to door, and what he said was as clumsy and awkward as himself. It seemed that he and his dear wife had cherished a half hope that I would never be discharged from prison, especially since I had been detained half a year over my time for alleged breaches of discipline. He rejoiced exceedingly, he said, that his fears and those of his dear wife had not been justified; but that I must admit that it was a hard thing for a public officer to have a brother-in-law who had been in the House of Correction. Did I think, now, that an officer with such kindred was likely to gain promotion? It was frightful, unpardonable, so to speak, and if he could have foreseen it----