At this moment there was a ring at the door. The old man stepped to the window and looked out.

"I thought it was they. You see we all went out walking, because the day is so fine; but it is too soon yet for them to be back; it must be some one else; I will see;" and the old man put back the drawing-board on which Oscar had sketched his first head from the life, and left me alone in the studio.

I heard a voice in the pa.s.sage which I thought I recognized as Paula's, and then the door opened, and Paula entered.

At first she did not observe me, and I saw at a glance that the sergeant had said nothing of my arrival. Advancing quickly she looked eagerly at the covered picture on the easel. The fresh air of the winter day had reddened her cheeks, her lips were slightly parted. I had never seen her so fair, nor could I have believed it possible.

Suddenly she perceived me; she stopped, gazed at me with fixed eyes and a frightened look. "Paula," I said, hastily coming forward, "dear Paula, it is really I."

"Dear George!"

She stood before me, and I took both her hands, while she looked at me, smiling and blushing.

"Thank heaven, George, that you are here at last. I have had no quiet hour since I knew that you were free again, and on the way here: I could not imagine where you were staying; I even feared something had happened to you. What have you been doing, and what adventures have you had, you bad boy? I know of one already, and that from the fairest mouth in the world."

Paula had seated herself upon a low chair near the picture, and looked up to me with smiling eyes.

"You need not be so confused," she said, mischievously.

"With a sister, you know, it makes no matter. I am in the exclusive possession of all Benno's tender secrets, and lately Kurt has honored me with his confidence. He is smitten with the twelve-year-old daughter of the geheimrath who has recently moved into the rooms below, and vows that Raphael never painted such a head. Why should I not be your confidante also, especially since you are my eldest brother--or are you not?"

I was surprised to hear Paula, who usually weighed every word, chattering after this fashion. A great change must have taken place in her since we had parted. It was no longer the Paula who in the shade of the high prison walls had developed under my eyes from a child to a maiden, and whom I thought I knew as I knew myself. What had loosened her tongue in this way? And whence had she the free carriage which I so much admired in her, as she now sat in a graceful posture in the low chair, while a beam of sunlight touched her head which seemed surrounded with an aureola?

"But you don't answer me," she resumed; "and really you have no cause to be ashamed of what you have done. Hermine says that without you the boat would have been lost, and probably the ship also. You may judge how proud I was when I heard it. And what do you think was my first thought?--that my father could have heard it too."

Paula's large eyes filled with tears, but she quickly suppressed her emotion and said:

"Yes, I was proud of you, and happy in the thought that you should commence life with such a n.o.ble deed, a deed worthy of yourself. And now you must tell me what you have been doing all this time, and you must expect to pay the penalty if I am not entirely satisfied with you.

Sit here in this chair. We have a quarter of an hour yet before my mother and the boys come back. An idea about the picture there had come into my mind, but it is better so."

I gave the dear girl an exact account of all that had happened to me since my discharge. She listened with the closest attention, and only once smiled when I took pains to prove that I should have entered the machine-works in any event, and that the fact that the commerzienrath was my employer was far from agreeable to me.

"But neither the commerzienrath nor Hermine know anything about it."

"No," I answered; "and that is one comfort."

"Which will not last long, for they will soon learn it."

"From whom will they learn it?"

"From me, for one. Hermine has adjured me by sun, moon, and stars, to give her notice of the runaway as soon as he is found; and the tears were standing in her beautiful eyes, and Fraulein Duff laid her hand upon her shoulder and said, 'Seek faithfully, and thou wilt find!' I can a.s.sure you, George, it was a moving scene."

Paula smiled, but so kindly that her banter, if she was bantering me, did not wound me. On the contrary I was thankful to her, very thankful.

I had considered over and over how I should tell her of my strange meeting with Hermine without embarra.s.sment, and now under her kindly hands all was smooth and straight, which my clumsy fingers would have hopelessly entangled. I was grateful to her--very grateful.

And now Paula told me of Hermine, and how amiable and good she had been to her, and had spent the three days she had stayed in Berlin almost exclusively in her company, and had at once fallen in love with the picture at the exhibition--here Paula smiled again very slightly--and could not reconcile herself to leaving it, after she had bought it, for a whole month at the exhibition. She further related how the notice which _Richard the Lion-heart_ had excited had already brought her new commissions, and that her _Monk and Templar_ was already sold for a handsome sum to a Jewish banker; and how her studio had since been visited by very distinguished persons, indeed more frequently than was agreeable, and she had had to lock up her portfolios of sketches because they began unaccountably to disappear.

"You can judge," she went on, "how inexpressibly happy all this makes me. Not that I think myself ent.i.tled to be proud--I think that I well know my defects and how great they are--but it is a sweet consolation to me to be at ease about the future of my mother and brothers, and that the boys can now go boldly forward in the paths they have chosen, without being compelled anxiously to consider every step--all the boys, from the youngest to the oldest, is it not so, George?--from the youngest to the oldest."

She looked full into my eyes, and I very well understood what she meant.

"I do not anxiously consider every step, Paula," I said. "I know that I am in the right path; why should I then be anxious?"

"I have boundless confidence in you," replied Paula; "both in your clear-sightedness and your energy. I know that you will make your way; but one can make his way with greater or with less labor, and in longer or in shorter time; and your sister desires that her brother, who has been so cruelly cheated of so many years of his life, may lose no moment, and may encounter no obstacle which his sister can remove from his path."

"I thank you, Paula," I said; "from the whole depth of my soul I thank you; but you will not be angry with me for trusting that the hour may never come when you will have to work for me; for that I may ever be able to care for you and yours--this, my clearest hope and most cherished desire, I see that I must now renounce."

"How can you speak so?" said Paula, gently shaking her beautiful head.

"True, I deserve it for my own wilfulness. You must consider me a foolish girl who allows herself to be dazzled by the false glitter of success. But believe me, it is not so. I know very well that I may be let fall just as quickly as I have been lifted, far above my desert.

And then I may fall sick, or my invention may fail me: I cannot go on forever painting you and old Sussmilch; and a girl has so little opportunity to make well-grounded studies, and to extend the narrow circle of her experience. And then what would become of the boys, of me, of all of us, if we had not our eldest to look to?"

"You are jesting with me now, Paula."

"Indeed I am not," she said, earnestly. "I have only too often felt how my powers are no longer sufficient for my brothers, and that young men need to be guided by a man, and not by a woman, who does not know where the limit lies to which a youth may go, nay, must go, if he is to become anything. Good friend as the doctor is, I cannot rely on him in this point, for he is an eccentric, and an eccentric is no fitting model for a young man. For this reason I have been all the time wishing for you. You know the boys so well, and they are so fond of you. I know no one to whom I would so willingly intrust them."

"But, Paula, a workman in a machine-shop, a mere common journeyman blacksmith, is no pattern for students and young artists."

"You will not--yes, you will always be a workman, but not always a journeyman: you will become a master, a great master in your craft. And the day is no longer distant; at least it is much nearer than you think. You do not know your own worth."

Paula said this with a slightly elevated voice, and with flashing eyes.

I was so in the habit of giving full confidence to her words, and it had so prophetic a sound, that I did not venture to express the slight doubt that arose in my mind as to its fulfilment.

At this moment came a ring at the bell. "It is my mother and the boys,"

Paula said hurriedly and softly.

"They do not know that you have been two weeks at liberty; my mother could not comprehend how you could let so long a time elapse without coming to see us, after you had once reached the city. You must not let her know that it has been so long."

At this they came rushing in at the door: Oscar, my favorite, Kurt, my second favorite, and Benno, who had always been my third favorite, who came with his mother on his arm; and there was rejoicing, and shaking hands, and kisses, and exultations, and perhaps some tears, though I am not sure. Of course I must spend the day with them. And in the evening nothing could keep them from seeing me home, that they might bring their sister word where and how I was living: and then I went back with them a piece of the way until they were out of the workmen's quarter, and in a part of the town which they knew better; and when I returned it was very late, and I fell asleep at once and had a long dream about the picture which Paula had painted, and Hermine had bought, and the fair Bellini, who resembled Constance von Zehren, had so much admired.

CHAPTER IV.

To be sure, if I had any fancy at this time for indulging in dreaming, I had to do it at night, for by day I had no leisure for such vagaries.

By day I was taken possession of by work--hard jealous work, that kept me busy from the early morning to late at night--now thrusting the heavy hammer into my hand and giving me a ma.s.s of iron to conquer, and then placing in my fingers the pen with which I covered page after page with long rows of figures and complicated formulas. Altogether it was a pleasant time, and even now I think of it with pleasure tempered with sadness. In our memory the brightest light always lies upon those periods of our lives in which we have striven forward most eagerly, and I was now, in all senses, a striver, and there was no day in which I did not mount at least one round of the steep ladder. Now it was some bit of technical dexterity that I caught from my fellow-workmen; now a new formula which I had calculated myself; and at all times the delightful sensation of rising, of progressing, of increasing powers, the joyous consciousness that a far heavier burden might lie upon my shoulders without danger of my sinking under it. It was a happy, a delightful time; and whenever I think of it, it is as if the perfume of violets and roses were floating around me, and as if then the days must all have been days of spring.

And yet it was not spring, but a rough severe winter, in which the icy sky lay gray and heavy above the snow-piled roofs and the filthy factory-yards, while the sparrows fluttered about all day, seeking in vain for food, and at night the famishing crows expressed their sufferings in incessant cawing; and day by day we saw pale, hollowed-eyed, ragged figures, in ever-increasing numbers, wandering in the stormy streets, or crouching at night in the dim light of the lamps upon the steps of the houses, or where any projecting masonry offered them a little shelter.

I now walked the streets more frequently, for, notwithstanding the distance at which my friends lived, no week pa.s.sed in which I did not spend at least one evening with them. Then Benno, who was now studying chemistry and physics, and had occasion to repair some deficiencies in his mathematics, came twice a week to my room to work with me, and I then accompanied him back half the way, and sometimes the whole distance. It had been discussed whether I had not better take another lodging, nearer to them; but Paula decided that it was best for me to live where my work was; and one Sunday forenoon she came with her brothers to pay me a visit, and convince me that I by no means lived entirely out of her reach, as I had maintained. She p.r.o.nounced my inhabiting the lonely ruinous court of the machine-works, which her hope looked to in the future, perfectly absurd; and the fitting-up of my room with the old worm-eaten rococo furniture of the previous century a crackbrained fancy; but she observed it all with the warmest interest, and did not conceal that she was touched by the sight of the terra-cotta vases on the mantel-piece, and the copy of the Sistine Madonna on the walk.

"Stay here," she finally said; "not because this lodging is convenient for you, and is really original enough; nor because the fitting-up does honor to your taste, wanting only a set of curtains, which I will make for you, and a piece of carpet by your writing-table, which I undertake to provide; for these are trifles. What determines my opinion is the feeling that you belong here; that this place belongs to you already, as if like a conqueror you had taken possession of this desolate province, and planted your standard first of all. The rest will surely follow. I fancy that I see these heaps of stone already growing up into stately buildings, the fire leaping from the tall chimneys, and these vacant courts alive with busy workmen; this house changed to a handsome villa, and you ruling and directing the whole as master and owner. Stay here, George; the place will bring you good fortune."

Words like these, from Paula's lips, had for me the force of irresistible conviction, as the words of a consecrated priestess might have for her trusting worshippers. Not that I always cheerfully and willingly acquiesced in her views; it would have been, for example, far more pleasant to me if Paula had said: "Your lodging is very well situated for your purposes, it is true; but I would rather have you nearer to me; I see you now once a week, and I could then see you twice, or perhaps every day." And then I upbraided myself that I did not value Paula's desire to advise me always for the best, higher than all else; but still I could not help wishing that this advice, however good, had not seemed quite so easy for her to give.

When I was thus brought to reflect upon my relations with Paula it could not escape even my inexperience that these relations were different from what they used to be. One circ.u.mstance especially proved this fact. The boys and I had from the first used to each other the familiar "thou;" but between Paula and myself the formal "you" had never been laid aside, not even in those trying days after the death of her father, when we had hand-in-hand to face the storm which had burst over us all. Even then, when our hearts were moved to their lowest depths, and our tears were mingled, the brotherly "thou" had never risen to our lips. And now she used it to me from the very moment of our meeting. The evening before I would have deemed it impossible; now, that it was really so, I could scarcely believe it. Did I feel that the very thing which made our intercourse easy and unrestrained was at the same time a strong fetter with which Paula bound my hands? Was it with that intention or, not? I did not know nor hope ever to know.

Of course I did not go about tormenting myself with this enigma.