x.x.xVII

Supper was going on when Leo reached Halewitz. He entered the house un.o.bserved. The corridor was in darkness, but Christian, who had just gone to the kitchen with a pile of plates, had left the dining-room door ajar, and a thin stream of light that came through it penetrated the shadows. But no laughter, no cheerful talk fell on his ear. Meals at Halewitz were now sad affairs.

"Shall I go in and sit down with them?" he asked himself. Then he felt that he could not trust himself, that his farewell emotions might be too much for him. He would take a last peep at them, and then go quietly to his rooms.

On tiptoe he drew nearer. There the three sat at table under the golden radiance of the hanging lamp; grandmamma on the left. Ah! G.o.d, how she had aged, he thought, and his heart smote him. Beside her Elly was looking fresh and innocent, with the lamplight illumining her fair hair, and on the right sat Hertha. She was the same, but different. The dignified repose of her bearing, the troubled glance of her eye, the lines of pain on the brown oval cheeks, the firmly closed lips, were all new to him.

He felt that she had ripened and developed under the same sorrow which had rotted and withered him. How blind he had been to her fine qualities. Only the nearness of death opened his eyes to them, and to everything that surrounded him.

He saw every detail of the rooms that he had so long avoided, as if he had been given an extra sense with which to impress things on his mind before leaving life. His ear listened eagerly for each word that fell from the dear ones' lips. His hand caressed with unconscious affection the door-posts, with their time-worn oak carvings.

Christian's coming back ended his reverie, and before he had been seen he retired softly to his room.

He wanted to work, to go through the books, and put things straight so far as it was possible. He did not wish to sneak out of the world like a beggarly bankrupt. He lit his lamp and began to cast up figures.

The year had not been a bad one. Old arrears had been patched up; hopeful prospects peeped out everywhere between the columns. Amazing success had attended the beetroot culture, and in following years the ground would be even more richly productive in that line. He was on the point of drawing up a new scheme of planting when he remembered that the day after to-morrow he would not be alive.

He shut the book with a bang and jumped up. How farcical it all was; how insane both life and death, so far as he was concerned! He rang the bell violently, for he was hungry. Since the morning he had scarcely touched food.

Christian appeared on the threshold, and reeled back in delighted astonishment at beholding his master in the house at this unaccustomed hour.

"Now then, old friend," said Leo, filled with a strange tenderness; "won't those old pins of yours carry you any longer?"

And as Christian in his confusion stammer forth inarticulate sentences, Leo put a ten-mark piece into his hand.

"You have had to keep bad hours lately on my account. But in future, old man, you shall have your proper rest."

Christian wept tears of joy over his master's unlooked-for consideration, and shuffled away to superintend his supper.

The news he took to the kitchen soon ascended to the parlour, and the stir it caused in the house smacked somewhat of the prodigal's return.

Doors were cautiously opened and shut, whispered conversations were held in the corridors, and now and then hesitating, hushed footsteps halted outside his room.

All this he heard and ground his teeth.

"Die, die, old boy!" cried a voice in his ears. "Die--die!"

Christian brought a tray groaning with good things, in the selection of which he could see that his mother had had a hand. He fell to, greedily. There was the favourite dish of his schoolboy days, of fried potatoes with jugged hare and baked slices of ham.

"Dear old girl," he thought; "this is her way of saying 'Stay with us.'" He laughed, but tears came into his eyes.

Christian wanted to know what he would have to drink.

"Don't ask me, old chap," he said, "but bring the very best that my deceased father left behind. Bring three bottles."

Astonished, Christian begged for the key of the cellar, for its treasures were now kept zealously locked up. The wine came, the wine that had been his father's pride and joy. Why should he leave the glorious stuff to be drunk by strangers? And in long draughts he emptied the first bottle.

But for him the wine had no flavour. He felt his cheeks grow hot, and his mood become more sombre. He would have liked to make his exit from the world with gay nonchalance, but instead the old agony began to gnaw at his vitals again, like an ulcer that was incurable. He started pacing wildly up and down the room, and wrenched open the windows one after the other.

He longed for a companion. He was in sore need of the sound of a human voice, the touch of a human hand. And this desire, which he supposed would be his last on earth, was strangely enough fulfilled.

It was nearly ten o'clock when the front door bell clanged violently through the house. Leo's hand went out involuntarily towards the wall where his weapons hung. "They have come to fetch me," he thought, with a sudden, horrid fear of arrest. He drew himself to his full height and awaited his visitor.

Christian announced that Pastor Brenckenberg had called and urgently requested an interview.

"Hurrah!" cried Leo; "the very person I want. Let him come in."

All the grim resentment he had so long cherished in the bottom of his heart for this old man rose to the surface. He felt that he had been delivered into his hand at an auspicious moment. In this hour he would make him rue it. In his company he would celebrate his farewell to life. In a voice of thunder he welcomed the belated guest, who, kicking the snow off his boots with his heels, entered the room in breathless haste. He was attired in a shabby fur coat like an Esquimaux's, and had twisted a thick brown woollen scarf two or three times round his throat. His fleshy face was purple either from the winter winds or from excitement. Sweat ran down his hanging cheeks, and in his fierce bulldog eyes, which in vain endeavoured to look round him with serenity, there was an expression of eager impatience.

"Well, old fellow!" Leo exclaimed. "The Almighty has done well to lead you here to-night. See, this is something extra special. A farewell drink." And turning to Christian, he gave him orders to bring in another armful of bottles and ice with them.

The pastor had remained standing at the door, tugging violently at the woollen scarf which in the heat of the room nearly suffocated him.

"Take it off, take it off, old man," said Leo.

He did as he was commanded, stroked back the oiled strands of hair on his neck, and, with his mouth open, breathed heavily like an animal wanting to sneeze.

"I am glad to see you so well satisfied with yourself, my son," he said at last. "Just as if you had performed some heroic action."

"Of course," Leo answered; "to me heroic actions come naturally." And he poured him out a gla.s.s.

"Your health, old man."

The pastor stole a timid glance at the sparkling wine. "Do you know why I have come here at this hour, when most people are in their beds?" he asked sourly, leaning against the door.

"To your health! Didn't you hear me?" cried Leo.

Whereat the pastor staggered towards the table, and raised the gla.s.s with two trembling hands. But he put it down again.

"I can't," he groaned, and protruded his lower jaw, half sobbing with disgust.

"What?" shouted Leo. "You despise my best wine? What fad is this?"

"Nothing, nothing," muttered the old clergyman, and pushed the gla.s.s nervously away from him to the other side of the table. "In my present condition, I should outrage my body and outrage the wine if I drank it."

"Condition!" jeered Leo. "And what sort of condition do you suppose that I am in? Have you ever seen a wild boar run to earth in a swamp, quenching its thirst with foul water, when the hounds have almost begun to tear it to pieces? Well, that is the condition in which I am drinking here. But I am going to drink another for all that. To your health, old man!"

The pastor regarded him with a disconcerted expression, then silently raised the gla.s.s, emptied it, and gave himself a shake.

"Isn't it nice?" laughed Leo. "You and I sitting and drinking here amiably together, cheek by jowl. We ought to be happy and sing that good old song, 'Sublime and sacred, brothers, is the hour which unites us here again,'" and he sang the couplet. "Or perhaps you would prefer some more obscene chorus? I am ready for any dare-devilry."

He tossed down two more gla.s.ses of the iced wine, feeling as he did so how his imagination began to go mad. All sorts of pictures shot up before his eyes, and disappeared again directly he tried to retain them.

The old man, who had been brooding gloomily with his chin on his breast and a fixed glare in his eyes, raised himself slowly with his hands grasping the edge of the table, and struggled with the unp.r.o.nounced words which half strangled him.

"Do you know why I have come?" he asked a second time.

"I think that I may safely hazard a guess," laughed Leo. "It was my unpleasant duty, this evening, to give your young hopeful a drubbing which he won't forget in a hurry. Come, here's to his health. Long may your son and heir flourish!"