The Benefactress Part 50

"My dear patron, Herr von Lohm, who by some incomprehensible and appalling mistake----"

"You must go to the judge who conducted the preliminary inquiries."

"But who is he, and where is he to be found?"

The official looked at his watch. "If you hurry you may still find him at the Law Courts. In the next street. Examining Judge Schultz."

And the door was shut.

So they went to the Law Courts, and hurried up and down staircases and along endless corridors, vainly looking for someone to direct them to Examining Judge Schultz. The building was empty; they did not meet a soul, and they went down one pa.s.sage after the other, anguish in Anna's heart, and misery hardly less acute in Manske's. At last they heard distant voices echoing through the emptiness. They followed the sound, and found two women cleaning.

"Can you direct me to the room of the Examining Judge Schultz?" asked Manske, bowing politely.

"The gentlemen have all gone home. Business hours are over," was the answer. Could they perhaps give his private address? No, they could not; perhaps the porter knew. Where was the porter? Somewhere about.

They hurried downstairs again in search of the porter. Another ten minutes was wasted looking for him. They saw him at last through the gla.s.s of the entrance door, airing himself on the steps.

The porter gave them the address, and they lost some more minutes trying to find their _Droschke_, for they had come out at a different entrance to the one they had gone in by. By this time Manske was speechless, and Anna was half dead.

They climbed three flights of stairs to the Examining Judge's flat, and after being kept waiting a long while--"_Der Herr Untersuchungsrichter ist bei Tisch_," the slovenly girl had announced--were told by him very curtly that they must go to the Public Prosecutor for the order. Anna went out without a word. Manske bowed and apologised profusely for having disturbed the _Herr Untersuchungsrichter_ at his repast; he felt the necessity of grovelling before these persons whose power was so almighty. The Examining Judge made no reply whatever to these piteous amiabilities, but turned on his heel, leaving them to find the door as best they could.

The Public Prosecutor lived at the other end of the town. They neither of them spoke a word on the way there. In answer to their anxious inquiry whether they could speak to him, the woman who opened the door said that her master was asleep; it was his hour for repose, having just supped, and he could not possibly be disturbed.

Anna began to cry. Manske gripped hold of her hand and held it fast, patting it while he continued to question the servant. "He will see no one so late," she said. "He will sleep now till nine, and then go out.

You must come to-morrow."

"At what time?"

"At ten he goes to the Law Courts. You must come before then."

"Thank you," said Manske, and drew Anna away. "Do not cry, _liebes Kind_," he implored, his own eyes br.i.m.m.i.n.g with miserable tears. "Do not let the coachman see you like this. We must go home now. There is nothing to be done. We will come early to-morrow, and have more success."

They stopped a moment in the dark entrance below, trying to compose their faces before going out. They did not dare look at each other. Then they went out and drove away.

The stars were shining as they pa.s.sed along the quiet country road, and all the way was drenched with the fragrance of clover and freshly-cut hay. The sky above the rye fields on the left was still rosy. Not a leaf stirred. Once, when the coachman stopped to take a stone out of a horse's shoe, they could hear the crickets, and the cheerful humming of a column of gnats high above their heads.

CHAPTER x.x.xI

Gustav von Lohm found Manske's telegram on his table when he came in with his wife from his afternoon ride in the Thiergarten.

"What is it?" she inquired, seeing him turn pale; and she took it out of his hand and read it. "Disgraceful," she murmured.

"I must go at once," he said, looking round helplessly.

"Go?"

When a wife says "Go?" in that voice, if she is a person of determination and her husband is a person of peace, he does not go; he stays. Gustav stayed. It is true that at first he decided to leave Berlin by the early train next morning; but his wife employed the hours of darkness addressing him, as he lay sleepless, in the language of wisdom; and the wisdom being of that robust type known as worldly, it inevitably produced its effect on a mind naturally receptive.

"Relations," she said, "are at all times bad enough. They do less for you and expect more from you than anyone else. They are the last to congratulate if you succeed, and the first to abandon if you fail. They are at one and the same time abnormally truthful, and abnormally sensitive. They regard it as infinitely more blessed to administer home-truths than to receive them back again. But, so long as they do not actually break the laws, prejudice demands that they shall be borne with. In my family, no one ever broke the laws. It has been reserved for my married life, this connection with criminals."

She was a woman of ready and frequent speech, and she continued in this strain for some time. Towards morning, nature refusing to endure more, Gustav fell asleep; and when he woke the early train was gone.

In the same manner did his wife prevent his writing to his unhappy brother. "It is sad that such things should be," she said, "sad that a man of birth should commit so vulgar a crime; but he has done it, he has disgraced us, he has struck a blow at our social position which may easily, if we are not careful, prove fatal. Take my advice--have nothing to do with him. Leave him to be dealt with as the law shall demand. We who abide by the laws are surely justified in shunning, in abhorring, those who deliberately break them. Leave him alone."

And Gustav left him alone.

Trudi was at a picnic when the telegram reached her flat. With several of her female friends and a great many lieutenants she was playing at being frisky among the hayc.o.c.ks beyond the town. Her two little boys, Billy and Tommy, who would really have enjoyed hayc.o.c.ks, were left sternly at home. She invited the whole party to supper at her flat, and drove home in the dog-cart of the richest of the young men, making immense efforts to please him, and feeling that she must be looking very picturesque and sweet in her flower-trimmed straw hat and muslin dress, silhouetted against the pale gold of the evening sky.

Her eye fell on the telegram as the picnic party came crowding in.

"Bill coming home?" inquired somebody.

"I'm afraid he is," she said, opening it.

She read it, and could not prevent a change of expression. There was a burst of laughter. The young men declared they would never marry. The young women, p.r.o.ne at all times to pity other women's husbands, criticised Trudi's pale face, and secretly pitied Bill. She lit a cigarette, flung herself into a chair, and became very cheerful. She had never been so amusing. She kept them in a state of uproarious mirth till the small hours. The richest lieutenant, who had found her distinctly a bore during the drive home, went away feeling quite affectionate. When they had all gone, she dropped on to her bed, and cried, and cried.

It was in the papers next morning, and at breakfast Trudi and her family were in every mouth. Bibi came running round, genuinely distressed. She had not been invited to the picnic, but she forgot that in her sympathy.

"I wanted to catch you before you start," she said, vigorously embracing her poor friend.

"Where should I start for?" asked Trudi, offering a cold cheek to Bibi's kisses.

"Are you not going to Herr von Lohm?" exclaimed Bibi, open-mouthed.

"What, when he tries to cheat insurance companies?"

"But he never, never set fire to those buildings himself."

"Didn't he, though?" Trudi turned her head, and looked straight into Bibi's eyes. "I know him better than you do," she said slowly.

She had decided that that was the only way--to cast him off altogether; and it must be done at once and thoroughly. Indeed, how was it possible not to hate him? It was the most dreadful thing to happen to her. She would suffer by it in every way. If he were guilty or not guilty, he was anyhow a fool to let himself get into such a position, and how she hated such fools! She registered a solemn vow that she had done with Axel for ever.

At Kleinwalde the effect of the news was to make Frau Dellwig slay a pig and send out invitations for an unusually large Sunday party. She and her husband could hardly veil their beaming satisfaction with a decent appearance of dismay. "What would his poor father, our gracious master's oldest friend, have said!" e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed Dellwig at dinner, when the servant was in the room.

"It is truly merciful that he did not live to see it," said his wife, with pious head-shakings.

What Anna was doing at Stralsund, no one knew. She said she was having some bother with her bank. Miss Leech related how they had been to the bank on the Monday. "I must go again," Anna said on the evening of the fruitless Tuesday, when she had been the whole day again with Manske, vainly trying to obtain permission to visit Axel; and she added, her head drooping, her voice faint, that it was a great bore. Certainly she looked profoundly unhappy.

"One cannot be too careful in money matters," remarked Frau von Treumann, alarmed by Anna's white looks, and afraid lest by some foolish neglect on her part supplies should cease. She enthusiastically encouraged these visits to the bank. "Take care of your bank," she said, "and your bank will take care of you. That is what we say in Germany."

But Anna did not hear. There was but one thought in her mind, one cry in her heart--how could she reach, how could she help, Axel?

He was in a cell about five yards long by three wide. There was just room to pa.s.s between the camp bedstead and the small deal table standing against the opposite wall. Besides this furniture, there was one chair, an empty wooden box turned up on end, with a tin basin on it--that was his washstand--a little shelf fixed on the wall, and on the little shelf a tin mug, a tin plate, a pot of salt, a small loaf of black bread, and a Bible. The walls were painted brown, and the window, fitted with ground gla.s.s, was high up near the ceiling; it was barred on the outside, and could only be opened a few inches at the top. On the door a neat printed card was fastened, giving, besides information for the guidance of the habitually dirty as to the cleansing properties of water, the quant.i.ty of oak.u.m the occupant of the cell would be expected to pick every day. The cell was used sometimes for condemned criminals, hence the mention of the oak.u.m; but the card caught Axel's eye whenever he reached that end of the room in his pacings up and down, and without knowing it he learnt its rules by heart.

At first he had been completely dazed, absolutely unable to understand the meaning and extent of the misfortune that had overtaken him; but there was a grim, uncompromising reality about the prison, about the heavy doors he pa.s.sed through, each one barred and locked behind him, each one cutting him off more utterly from the common free life outside, about the look of the miserable beings he met being taken to or from their work by armed warders, about the warders themselves with their great keys, polished by frequent use--there was about these things an inexorable reality that shook him out of the blind apathy into which he had fallen after his arrest. Some extraordinary mistake had been made; and, knowing that he had done nothing, when first he began to think connectedly he was certain that it could only be a matter of hours before he was released. But the horror of his position was there.

Released or not released, who would make good to him what he was suffering and what he would have lost? He had been searched on his arrival--his money, watch, and a ring he wore of his mother's taken from him. The young official who arrested him--he was the Junior Public Prosecutor--presided at these operations with immense zeal. Being young and obscure, he thirsted to make a name for himself, and opportunities were few in that little town. To be put in charge, therefore, of this sensational case, was to behold opening out before him the rosiest prospects for the future. His name, which was Meyer, would flare up in flames of glory from the ashes of Axel's honour. Stralsund, ringing with the ancient name of Lohm, would be forced to ring simultaneously with the less ancient and not in itself interesting name of Meyer. He had arrested Lohm, he had special charge of the case, he could not but be talked about at last. His zeal and satisfaction accordingly were great, carrying him far beyond the limits usual on such occasions. Axel stood amazed at the trick of fortune that had so suddenly flung him into the power of a young man called Meyer.