"You have been away a long time," she said, and sat down.
"Yes; that is true."
"And you have kept your splendid health and spirits."
"Yes; I have kept in capital health, thank you."
There was a pause. He regarded her more and more as a stranger. A grim, inscrutable stoniness seemed to have frozen her nature. She had evidently nursed and cultivated an old grief with an egoism that had become fanatical. And then, as he recalled all the vanished splendour of her beauty, and looked at the emaciated throat and angular shoulders which made the flatness of her bust the more apparent, pity and his old love for her gained the upper hand. What must she have suffered to have so changed in appearance?
"We can"t go on like this, Hannah," he said. "If I have done anything to displease you, speak out and let us make it up."
For a moment a kindlier glance shot from her eyes. But he fancied it meant that she pitied him, and so he was not rea.s.sured.
However, he did not wish to rely on conjecture. He would try and put things on the old hearty footing between them.
"Look here!" he said, "it is plain that your soul is cherishing some old grudge. You and I always held to one another. Can"t you feel the old confidence in me again? Tell me what your trouble is, and see if I can"t heal the wound."
"It seems to me that you stand in greater need of healing than I do,"
she answered, without taking her sphinx-like eyes off him.
"How so?" he asked, and plunged his hands into his trouser-pockets, stretching his legs wide apart as he planted himself in front of her.
"I have often asked myself, Leo, what sort of man you would come back.
I hoped you might appear before us serious and subdued, a little burdened by the consciousness of what you had brought upon yourself and us. Often enough I have prayed G.o.d that it might be so. But instead you are--are---- Aye, what you are any one can see with half an eye."
"Well, what am I?" he asked, hardening into an att.i.tude of scoffing amus.e.m.e.nt.
"I can only hope, for your own sake," she went on, "that your conduct is not real, but a mask, that behind there is something more than one would suppose from your plump, happy face. But if you are not acting and deceiving us, if in reality you are so thoroughly satisfied with yourself, then, dear Leo, it would have been better if our mother had never borne you."
"But, Johanna!" their mother exclaimed, running between them in horror.
"Leave her alone, mummy," he said. "You see she is over-strung. You prepared me for it yourself."
"Have patience with her," the mother entreated softly.
"I have, haven"t I?" he laughed. "If I hadn"t learnt by this time to put up with a few feminine vagaries, I should indeed be incorrigible. I am not so thin-skinned, and when you choose, my dear sister, to adopt a more reasonable tone towards me we shall be friends again. Does that suit you, eh?"
She looked at him and did not speak.
He flung out of the room and the door banged behind him. He stood for a moment in the outer hall and drew a deep breath. His sister"s immovable, sphinx-like glance had oppressed him like a nightmare. A vague suspicion began to dawn within him, but he struggled against it.
"Now for work!" he exclaimed, and he shook his fists in the air.
VII
The worst of it all was, that the crops were ripe for harvest, but could not be cut, because there were not enough hands for the labour.
Uncle Kutowski, whom Leo wanted to call to account for this, was nowhere to be found. He had not been seen since early morning, when he had driven off in his one-horse chaise. Leo learnt how matters stood from Schumann, who was officiously obliging in giving information.
The old man, it would seem, was in the habit of levying fines, which added not a little to his salary, so that the foreign reapers who let themselves out on hire in gangs, long before the beginning of the harvest, had been so exasperated by deductions made on their wages, that last pay-day they had packed their bundles and decamped in the night.
The home farm-labourers who were available were not capable of the work, and so it had been at a standstill for eight days. Half the crops were likely to be ruined in consequence, but the old steward felt no qualms on that score, and did not let the prospect of a spoilt harvest weigh on his mind.
This alone was enough to give Leo an insight into what sort of hands the management of his property had fallen for the last four years. He would have liked to horse-whip his uncle and send him packing without further parley, but, unfortunately, those who have been accomplices in our past sins, have to be gently dealt with, lest they betray secrets.
He recognized the fact, in wrath and shame, that he had put himself, to a great extent, at the mercy of the old reprobate. Nevertheless, bold and resolute action might yet set him free.
He gave orders at the gatehouse that Herr Kutowski was to be sent to him so soon as he should show his face in the yard again. Then he shut himself up in his study.
Here, everything was the same as of old. In the embrasure of the window, there stood an ancestral bequest, in the shape of a huge escritoire, finely carved, with inlaid mother-of-pearl drawers, where many secrets lay hid. The walls were decorated with groups of pistols, sporting weapons and coats-of-arms, surrounded artistically with antlers, tusks, and bullet-ridden discs--trophies of boyish sportsmanship which once he had regarded with reverence, but which now hardly won a smile from him. Many an idle hour had he lounged away at one time of his life, on the old couch by the door, with its slippery, shabby leather covering, and dreamed of forbidden things. Over there were photographs of his nearest and dearest ones. Mamma, with a lace tippet over her long-waisted bodice, papa with epaulets and a general"s whiskers. Pastor Brenckenberg, before he had grown puffy and bloated, when he had lived in the house as tutor, and ruled him with the cane.
Then there was Johanna before she did up her hair, with white worsted stockings gleaming beneath her short skirts; Ulrich, as an upper third-form boy, round-backed as a fiddle-bow, with long hair and pigeon-breast. By him--strange coincidence--Felicitas, in budding maidenhood, with ma.s.ses of curly hair and a languishing smile.
The picture dated from the days when, as distant cousin, she had come to stay at Halewitz, and when he had fallen head over ears in love with her. Ulrich had followed his example, and Johanna had been annoyed. He grasped his brow. Was it all a dream? A shudder ran through him. He who had once believed himself to be master of his fate, saw himself tossed like a cork on the waves, and now in sport cast up on the sh.o.r.e.
Breathing hard, he set to work on the accounts. Hours went by. He sat bowed over the ledgers adding up, and for the first time in his life he added up right. It was worse than he feared. Shock followed shock, but none was pleasant.
And in the midst of his reckoning a sudden burning blush of shame flooded his face. He read, "Sent to Monte Carlo 10,000 marks." And a few lines further on: "To Monte Carlo 141,500 marks."
How could he reproach others when he himself had been a mere common gambler? Was it not natural, that every man should try to grab his share out of the universal bankruptcy? But he felt that in this memorandum it was not so much his wretched property, as his friend"s honour and peace of mind that was most at stake. It was for this he was determined to fight the old scoundrel. For a moment he let his eye linger on the opposite wall where the arms hung, and then he started on the figures again. The affair seemed to grow ever more and more complicated. It was almost inconceivable that, with expenditure always on the increase, and ever shrinking profits, a balance could be maintained. "The sequestrator must have been at home here for a long time," he muttered.
Altogether the actual accounts were in apple-pie order. Who could wonder? Everywhere amongst the uncle"s hen-scratchings, Ulrich"s beautiful clear signature proved how religiously his friend had performed his weekly duties as auditor. Only on the left-hand margin was entered here and there a certain mysterious sum of money, unendorsed, and specified among the receipts as "Interest called in by Herr Baron von Kletzingk." It ran each time to several thousand marks, and the total would have been a fortune.
"When did I ever lend money on interest?" cried Leo, striking his forehead on which started great beads of anxious sweat.
And the further he proceeded the oftener, with uncanny regularity, did the sum stare him in the face. It invariably occurred at a convenient juncture to cover some heavy outlay, or to help meet a long-standing bill. It presided over the columns as a _deux ex machina_, a blessing and friend in need.
The one person who could have thrown light on the bewildering problem was Uncle Kutowski, who still made himself scarce.
"If he owns up," Leo concluded, "I will let him off lightly. If not, it will be life or death."
Towards five o"clock, the old gentleman"s one-horse trap drew up at the bailiff"s house. He was lying back in a corner, tight as a drum, sucking the end of his burnt-out cigar.
Old Christian, who on Leo"s behalf had been on the look-out for him, helped him to alight, and informed him that the master wished to speak to him at once.
Herr Kutowski poured out a volley of abuse which echoed over the courtyard.
"What has the youngster taken into his head? Am I his shoe-black, that he should order me about like this? He had better be careful. I"ll teach him who I am, and what I know."
Christian, greatly scandalized to avert a further outbreak, hurried off to tell his master of the steward"s arrival. Fortunately no one had been near to overhear his disrespectful words.
Uncle Kutowski swaggered with jingling spurs into his apartments, to indulge in a well-earned siesta. He surveyed himself in the cracked shaving mirror, which satisfied the small demands of his vanity, and had a long conversation with himself, from which it might have been gathered that he wished to be regarded as the lawful possessor of Halewitz.
Then he cleared off the remains of a ham-bone, which lay on the table with some blacking, a dirty pack of French cards, a cocoa-tin filled with tobacco, and a pig"s bladder; he kicked a couple of empty beer-bottles off the sofa, which creaked at every touch like a hungry crow, and was just going to fling himself full-length on the horsehair cushions when the door opened and Leo walked into the room.
"It"s the custom for people to knock before they come in here, my boy,"