“Why have you come? I asked you never to come here.”
She saw now that he was glancing behind her with quick darting looks. To refuse him admission would be to confirm whatever suspicions he had. She stepped aside, and abruptly gestured to him to enter. She pressed herself back against the wall, not wishing to have him touch her. She led him into the parlor, and lit a lamp. She did not sit down, and neither did he. They confronted each other in the warm lamplight in the deserted room.
She spoke again: “When I wrote you that your father had died, I asked you to refrain from ever coming to this house. I told you I never wished to see you again. You respected my wishes then. Why have you violated them now?”
He studied her. She was livid under her brownness. But she stood before him rigidly and inflexibly, her hands clenched at her sides.
“You are making much out of nothing,” he said. His blue eyes taunted her. Then, deliberately, he sat down. “It was a hot evening, and I came out into the country for a long drive. I remembered, then, that you lived near here. Surely you can forget any past quarrels. After all, I am your son.”
“You are not my son!” she cried. “I have no son!”
But as she looked at him, so elegant, so burnished, so prosperous and well-fed, her treacherous heart cried out to him: Tell me that you are happy! Tell me that you have no regrets! She could hardly endure the sudden surging of all her flesh to him, and in the effort to control herself, she turned even paler. This smooth man was not Franz, surely! This man already fattening, with a silken yellow mustache hiding his long cruel upper lip, and with a gold watch-chain swinging across the black silk of his waistcoat! This easy smiling man who had done so much that was evil and despicable! She could read nothing from his smile, from his calmness, from his well-kept hands.
“You are going too far,” he said, smoothly. “I thought you had forgotten that hysteria. I had forgotten it, myself. Tonight, I remembered only that my father was dead. I had long forgiven you for not telling me before he was buried. I thought you might be lonely and sorrowful, remembering how you had loved him.”
But she was thinking of something else, with renewed terror. How much did he know? Oh, those foolish letters to Baldur Schmidt! Had Franz seen any of them? She replied mechanically, over the pounding of her heart:
“I have not been lonely, nor very sorrowful. I have worked hard. I have been at peace. There was no need for this visit.”
She saw that Franz, still smiling, was regarding her with merciless and narrowed eyes.
“I am glad to hear that you have needed nothing, and that you are well,” he said. He paused. To her heightened imagination, she thought he was listening. “Are you able to take care of this farm, with this woman, and the young farmer, alone?”
“The neighbors help me, when necessary. They are kind and good.” She strained her ears for a revealing moan from upstairs, and pressed her hand violently against her breast.
She saw that he was still watching her with an almost reptilian fixity, and that he was enjoying her agitation. But his voice was very sympathetic:
“It was wrong of Irmgard to leave you alone, and not to have remained with you to help you. She is still in Berlin with that English family?”
His tone was casual, but she saw the tightening of his big body, and a sudden gleam on his face.
“Yes,” she answered, steadfastly. “She is still there. When she wrote me last she said that the family might take her to England soon, for the summer. I have not heard from her since.”
“Ah,” he murmured. He folded his hands over the shining ebony stick he carried. He studied her with brutal calm. In all his life, he remembered, his mother had never lied at any time. He was convinced that she was not lying now. If she were, she would not be so cold, so steadfast.
“I asked her to remain with me,” said Emmi, and wondered vaguely at the facility with which lies came to her lips. She even managed to inject a faint note of indignation into her words. “But she said she wished to return to Germany. She had not liked America, after all. Then she was discovered by this Englander, this Herr Wordsworth.”
“And she is content? With these strangers?”
“She is content.”
They looked at each other in an electric silence. Then Franz, slowly and deliberately, drew a silver case from the tail of his long broadcloth coat. From it he removed a long cigar. He lit it from a little silver box of matches. Emmi, still not sitting, clenched her hands again until the nails wounded her calloused palms. Cold drops appeared on her brow. With all her will, all her might, she willed him to leave at once. But he sat easily on the chair, and looked about him with pleasant interest.
“A good room,” he remarked, generously, with a nod at the books. “This is much better than I expected.”
“I am happy here,” she replied, somewhat hoarsely. Was that a moan, a faint cry, from Irmgard’s room? Had he heard it?”
But it appeared that he had not even heard her reply. He was regarding her with amused affection.
“I came, thinking I might offer you some help, if you need it.”
She cried out, with sudden desperation: “I need nothing! I have everything. But there is no need for you to remain here! I asked you not to come. You will do me the kindness of leaving, and of forgetting that I am here!”
He assumed an expression of slight injury. “How inflexible and narrow you are, Mother. You have asked me nothing, though I wrote you that I have married Miss Ernestine Schmidt. But surely you will be interested to know that you are soon to become a grandmother?”
Emmi’s long thin lips jerked. They were pale and dry. But she said nothing. However, her agitation was apparent, to his satisfaction. “I, too, am content,” he said, “though the information cannot possibly interest you.”
“You are content?” she asked, in spite of herself. “You are happy with that young woman? You have nothing to regret?”
“No,” he said, frankly. “I regret nothing.”
It was this, then, which renewed her hatred for him. She could have struck him.
She cried out, savagely: “I had hoped you were miserable! I had hoped that you were suffering, as you have made others suffer! I had wished that you might never forget that you killed your friend, and robbed another friend! I had hoped you might never sleep, remembering!”
He stood up. His smile was gone. Now his face was harsh and brutal, and revealed.
“You are still a fool, I can see. You are right. I should never have come.”
He saw that she was almost hysterical, and that her small blue eyes were thick with tears. His old dislike of her returned, and he enjoyed her misery. She walked to the door and flung it open, with a violent gesture, wordless but expressive.
“I ask only one more thing of you,” he said, in a loud contemptuous voice. “Tell me where Irmgard lives, that I might write her.”
“That I shall never do!” she exclaimed. “You betrayed her, as you betrayed others. She does not wish to hear of you, to know of you.”
He shrugged. He picked up his hat and cane. “Very well, then. It is not necessary. I shall be able to trace her in Germany, myself.”
She watched him go. He stood outside and put on his hat. He went down the walk to his waiting carriage. Something soft and treacherous, moaning and deprived, ran out from her, followed him. She gripped the open door in both sweating hands, and her lips fell open, slackly. Even when he drove away, she stood there, her heart seeming to drip in her breast in slow torturous drops of blood. She listened to the last sound of the wheels and the rattle of the harness. Long after they were lost in the silence of the night, she strained her ears for them.
She knew why he had come. He had believed to the last that she was hiding Irmgard. Now he was convinced she had told the truth. He had waited, all these months, wishing to let Irmgard suffer for her “desertion” of him, and was now magnanimously prepared to let her return. Emmi did not underestimate him. But for a while, at lea
st, she had respite. In the meantime, surely Irmgard would recover from her infatuation and care for nothing but her child. Then she would be safe.
CHAPTER 3
When Irmgard woke, it was only an hour before midnight. She did not awaken in her earlier condition of weakness and desperation. Now life and death had her, and in her stern and sweating preoccupation with them there was no room for less elemental forces. Emmi rejoiced to see this profound struggle of the strong young body against pain and danger.
Then, at midnight, came another lull, and the exhaustion came again. She lay on her pillows, white and lax, with closed eyes. The doctor had not yet come.
Emmi never knew, in her great fear, whether it was inspiration or not which made her say loudly and triumphantly to Irmgard, through the haze of suffering and apathy that had taken her:
“That fine gnädige Frau of his! She shall not bear such a child as yours, my little one! This child shall be strong and beautiful, but hers shall be weak and worthless. This shall be your revenge!”
At first she did not know if Irmgard had heard her or not. But slowly the sunken eyes opened, brightened like far specks seen at the end of a dark tunnel, and then quickened into life. That was all, but Emmi knew that she had conquered the monstrous unseen enemy in this room.
Irmgard did not speak. Only rarely did she groan. Her expression became severe and abstracted, as though all her energies of mind and body were absorbed in giving birth. Florence Tandy, fluttering and gesticulating, came and went, sighing. Emmi sat calmly by the bed, trimmed the lamp, wiped the girl’s moist face, fanned her. And hour by hour her sense of triumph increased, and her exultation.
“This is our child, Egon,” she said internally. “This is the son we should have had for our old age.”
Still the doctor did not come. And so it was that it was Emmi, herself, with the blushing and horrified assistance of the old maiden, Miss Tandy, delivered the son of Irmgard and Franz. Her heart bounded almost unbearably when she had ascertained the sex of the child. She wrapped the child quickly in a blanket warmed and prepared for him, and held him in her arms. He was strong and large, with wisps of shining golden hair on his big round skull and blue eyes that opened almost at once, simply and clearly. His body was pink and firm and vigorous, and his cries loud and sharp. Then reluctantly, lingeringly, she gave him into Florence’s arms, and returned to minister to Irmgard, who had fallen into a sudden prostrated sleep.
At dawn, Irmgard awoke, pale and battered on her pillows. She said at once: “My child. Where is he?”
Emmi brought him to her and laid him on her arm. For one instant only she shrank away. But the next moment she caught him fiercely to her breast and held him clenched there, tears running over her white veined cheeks.
Emmi was satisfied. The little one would not go unloved or unwanted, then, as she had secretly feared. She heard the protesting clamors of the baby; and she saw his beating hands. He was Siegfried.
“It is Siegfried,” she said aloud. “He will fight a great number of dragons.”
She was somewhat mystified and mortified, coloring somewhat, when Irmgard suddenly laughed, not weakly, but with strength, amusement, and enjoyment.
CHAPTER 4
Invariably, when Franz Stoessel came into his office, which adjoined that of his father-in-law, Hans Schmidt, he glanced quickly at his desk for a certain envelope for which he waited eagerly from week to week. The envelope now lay there, waiting for him, and he pounced on it, without removing his pearl-gray bowler and his black coat. He tossed his cane onto a chair, and standing, read the letter rapidly. It was thick and voluminous, and was from the Burnley Detective Agency’s New York office.
“Carrying our inquiries further into England, with regard to the Wordsworth family, we encountered some delicate difficulties. As you mentioned that the family was undoubtedly of some influence and importance in England, otherwise they would not employ foreign nursemaids, we had discreet inquiries of the most prominent of this name. The one family we have in mind is addicted to foreign travel, but they were very reserved and haughty, according to our investigator. It seems that an exceedingly famous member of this family was once entangled with a Frenchwoman, with sad results, and the surviving members did not care to discuss any other entanglements. But our investigator was indefatigable, and he is now assured that no member of this family employs any woman of German birth. We therefore went down the list of Wordsworths, with the same discouraging report.
“We have reinvestigated the ship lists for the past two years very thoroughly, and find no young lady of the name given on those lists, bound for Germany. Nor does our American investigator discover that Mrs. S. receives any letters from that country, or from England. Investigation of Mrs. S., as we have written you before, shows only that she employs two women on the farm, a Miss Florence Tandy, and a German widow with one child, a boy, who is about two years old. The widow’s name is Mrs. Darmstadter, whose husband is alleged to have been a German soldier.
“We regret that our investigations have so far proved unfortunate in results. However, we shall continue them. We enclose our latest bill, and await your instructions before proceeding further. We are certain it will be only a matter of time before we discover the object of our search.”
Franz, with a gloomy expression, lit a match and carefully burned the letter, holding it over the empty fireplace. He sat down, and stared before him. The fools! In this time they ought to have discovered something. There were only two solutions to this: either Irmgard was still in America, or she had sailed for Germany under an assumed name. Something to nag and knock in his brain, something elusive and persistent. But he could not identify it. He wrote out a check and enclosed it in an envelope for mailing to the Burnley Agency. The nagging and knocking began again, and he frowned, playing with his watch-chain. But still it eluded him.
He ran his hand over his hair, which was no longer rough and unkempt, but smooth, burnished and longish, and even dandified. He smoothed his thick yellow mustache abstractedly. He then observed that he had a noticeable paunch, and resolved vaguely and irritably that he must do something about this at once. His beer-drinking bouts with old Hans must be curtailed. There was a long mirror over his washstand and he went to it, observing himself critically, and with returning satisfaction. When he stood thus, straight, with broad shoulders thrown back, the paunch disappeared, and there remained only the figure of a fine gentleman with ruddy cheeks and hard blue eyes. He resembled, perhaps, an army officer, perhaps just a little softened from a sojourn on his estate. But certainly not a fleshy bourgeois!
He returned to his desk, his complacency restored. He moved with vigor and alertness. After all, he was only twenty-eight, he reminded himself. He noticed another letter from another office of the Burnley Agency, and opened it quickly with one thrust of a silver paper-knife. Ah, this was better news! The letter appeared to sing with triumph.
“Our investigations of Senator A. now produce the fact that in his youth he became amorously entangled with a young octoroon girl on his father’s plantation. Reports indicate that the girl bore a child, which was sold into slavery, with the probable knowledge of Senator A. The child, a boy, died at the age of ten from ill-treatment administered by his new master. Nothing indicates any interest on the part of Senator A. You may take this report as authentic.”
“Ah, that is better!” exclaimed Franz, aloud, smiling. He folded the letter and put it into his pocket. He smiled about his office, exultantly.
His office, which had once been a storeroom for miscellaneous files and books, had been converted by himself into an elegant room, with heavy mahogany furniture, rich rugs, fine paintings, draperies at the windows, and a white marble fireplace. In one corner was a bust of Goethe, in pink marble. The windows looked out, it is true, on the yard of the mills, but it was not an unwelcome view.
Because of the warmness of the late spring day no fire burned in the hearth. But a fan of gilded and painted paper filled the b
lack opening. And on his desk was a vase filled with fresh spring flowers from the Schmidt conservatory. Franz sniffed them with pleasure. He called for his clerk, and began to dictate a letter, leaning far back in his high, red-plush chair, and smiling.
“My dear Senator Trusley: I am sending you enclosed a report on Senator A. which will interest you excessively.
“This scoundrel, so exposed in this report, is the high-minded Alabama patriot who is attempting to ruin the coal operators of the North by opening what he calls the ‘rich coal-fields of my native State, which will induce some measure of prosperity to my desperate and impoverished people.’ It is apparent that he has in mind, not honorable competition to which we would not overly object, but mines run by negroes who still exist, in the South, in a condition of semi-slavery and oppression. Needless to say, we operators and miners and industrialists of the North would not find it possible to operate with any reasonable profit, considering the fact that our labor is white, free and well-paid. There are, of course, unscrupulous industrialists in the North, without proper regard for human rights, who would welcome this opportunity to buy coal at ridiculous rates—The mines of Alabama must be abandoned—You, as a native Pennsylvanian, could not endure to see your people impoverished, and your holdings in various industrial enterprises jeopardized.”
He dictated for a short time more, then folded the newly written letter and put it with the other in his pocket. He then went into Hans’s office, after a light gay tap on the door.
Hans was in consultation with Dietrich, and looked up as his son-in-law entered, scowling from the ambush of his thick white brows. But in spite of the scowl, the tiny eyes softened and gleamed.
“What do you want, charging in here like a bull?” he asked, rudely.
Franz smiled, and seated himself, ignoring Dietrich, who shot him a glance of covert hatred. He tossed the Burnley letter and the letter to Senator Trusley onto Hans’s desk. “We have him!” he exclaimed.
The Strong City Page 49