The Undying Past Part 8

"Leo!" he called a second time.

And then an ear-splitting, marrow-freezing din arose. The animals seemed suddenly to have gone mad. With their howls was mingled the clang of shaken chains, and the gnashing of their teeth as they bit on the iron links. Joyous delight, faithful yearning, all the emotions which can sway the breast of a living creature, found moving expression in the wild ecstasy of these chain-laden animals.

Leo felt his eyes grow moist "It is time I came, indeed," thought he.

He made the knocker of the outer portal resound threateningly through the house. The echo came back on his ear in reverberating waves. Then the window of the room where the light was was pushed open, and a white figure leaned out.

"Who is there?" called a woman's voice, which he knew at once.

"Johanna, is it you?"

There was a cry, but it seemed to Leo that it was not by any means a cry of pleasure. His sister's figure disappeared. Two long anxious moments he waited at the door.

The dogs went on howling; people began to stir in the stables and call each other; lanterns flashed hither and thither. At last hurrying footsteps were heard within, crossing the hall, amidst sounds half of laughing, half of weeping. The key turned, the bolts ground back.

And there she was, dear, fat, bright old lady; her nightcap awry on her curly grey hair, her white dressing-gown b.u.t.toned up long, odd slippers on her feet. There she stood, holding the candle high in her trembling hand, while glistening tear after tear rolled down her cheeks.

"Leo, my dear boy--my dear, dear boy!"

The caressing, confused murmur was half shy, as if she hardly dared all at once to take the son, as son, to her bosom. Then she gave herself a little shake and clung round his neck, while the candle she still held trickled grease down his back. The silence of this embrace was broken by the heartrending howling and whining of the dogs, who yearned for their master with all their lungs. His mother noticed the noise.

"Do they know already?" she asked, as she straightened herself, and, reaching up, took his head between her hands.

He nodded, and kissed the fingers that glided over his cheeks with an anxious touch.

Then a new wave of joy overpowered her. She put the candle on the stairs, and, cowering beside it, she covered her face with her hands wept bitterly. He was seized with a sense of shame; all this love and longing had been waiting for him, and he, with a brutal thirst for seeing life, had simply turned his back on it and gone his way. He bent over her and half consciously and half absently stroked the crochet edging of her nightcap, from which the grey hair escaped in scanty little curls.

Another light cast its radiance from the back of the hall, and an infirm old figure came forward trembling and hesitating. His mother dropped her hands, and, laughing through her tears, called out--

"Come, Christian, come. Don't be frightened, you stupid fellow. It really is he. Look at him, and see for yourself that it is."

The old butler, arrayed in Leo's old dressing-gown and Leo's old slippers, in his joy and astonishment let candle and matches fall with a crash on the floor. Tender and servile, half slave and half father, he bent over the master's hand, wiping away nervously his fast-falling tears.

A fresh feeling of shame took possession of Leo. "What a wonderful thing was the faithful soul of such old servants!" he thought. "No matter how you might have bullied and abused them all your life, they still clung to you and worshipped you as a G.o.d." And then aloud he said, "That's enough now. Christian; we shall have other opportunities of rejoicing together. Go and let the dogs loose, or the brutes will go mad."

The old man wrapped his dressing-gown over his poor aged ribs, which had been exposed in the excitement of the moment, and withdrew on tottering legs without saying a word.

Meanwhile the mother had begun to be ashamed of her outer woman, and after she had kindled a light in the garden-salon, she hurried away to put on a dress, still undecided between laughing and crying.

Leo was alone. The hanging lamp, which he had seen earlier casting a glory about the heads of the two young girls, seemed to greet him with its light. Half his life, his dreams, his happiness, and his sins--all were a.s.sociated with this flame, which had shone upon his youth like some dear silent confidential friend.

He walked round the table with striding steps. In the middle of it was the old majolica vase with open dragons' jaws, where a bunch of _gloire de Dijon_ roses languished exhausted from the heat of the day. Knitting and an alb.u.m lay beside it, and on top the lady cook's account-book, which she was in the habit of leaving here open when she went to bed.

So it had been thirty years ago; so it was to-day.

His eye wandered to the walls. There hung the same old pictures: Nelson at the battle of Trafalgar--brave Nelson with his compa.s.s and telescope in the midst of clouds of gunpowder and fiery zigzags. When he was six years old he had played at being Nelson, and constructed a deck and bridge of chairs, while Ulrich and Johanna cried "Hurrah!" and had to fire guns by striking matches.

This brought Johanna to his mind. What was she doing? Why didn't she come and throw herself into his arms?

"Ah, she is making herself smart," he thought, and chuckled.

The famous clock which his grandfather had brought from Paris, anno 14, still stood on the bureau with its bulky drawers and gilded feet. The dock represented a four-horsed victoria. The wheel of the gold triumphal chariot formed the dial, and every time it struck the hour the flaming sun which formed its axle revolved with a hum like a spinning-wheel.

Over the bureau was the portrait, framed in its own horns, of the stag with sixteen antlers which King Frederick William IV., in the year 1726, had shot (in his official capacity of Royal Ranger). The miller's daughter and the chimney-sweep, two coquettish old Dresden figures standing on either side on the rickety consols, still cast amorous glances at each other, unmindful of the fact that they became every year older, and so more valuable. All the dear old ornaments stood in their familiar places. The chalk bust of Frederick William IV. on the cigar cabinet, whose complexion long years of lamp-smoke and tobacco-fumes had turned a deep golden-brown, had been given no successor. At Halewitz the reigns of three German emperors seemed to have pa.s.sed without making any impression.

Leo wandered from one article to another, examined and tested everything he took in his hand, never weary of celebrating anew this meeting again with old acquaintances.

Suddenly there arose in the hall a noise like the rush of a whirlwind, a concert of yapping, barking, and growling. The door flew open, and the whole pack, rushed in, quite off their heads for joy and affection, with tongues lolling out and foam-covered jaws, biting and knocking each other over. They jumped up on him as if they would smother him with their embraces.

Leo took the lead, his yellow-maned, lion-like namesake; then came two fine bulldogs who kept guard in the stable; the Scotch greyhounds whose ancestors his father had got for coursing; the chow, who in furious jealousy bit the others' legs. Even the old fat pug belonging to his mother, that he had never given anything but kicks, would not be left behind in choking and snorting forth a joyous welcome.

But, as is always the case, the least worthy claim the largest share of love, and the wildest demonstrations were made by a young hound, which of course he had never seen before. He managed to leap clean over the s.h.a.ggy back of the Leonberger on to his master's knee, and began licking his ears with zeal.

Leo shook himself free, laughing, and turned his canine lovers with an upset chair out of the room. Only his namesake was allowed to stay. He stretched himself at his feet with dignified composure, and drank in draughts of the long-lost master's scent, as one who enjoys an unsurpa.s.sed delicacy.

Then his mother reappeared. She had taken off her nightcap and put on a morning gown. The grey hair had been hurriedly smoothed, and there was even a brooch showing under her chin. Like all mothers when their sons come back to them from distant countries, she asked him if he was hungry.

No, he said; he was only tired. A pleasant sensation of slackness had taken possession of his limbs. Three hours' sleep, and then the work of managing the neglected estate should begin.

But where was Johanna all this time--she who had first caught sight of him? Surely she could not have gone to bed without giving him a welcome?

The question seemed to embarra.s.s his mother. "She asked you to excuse her," she answered, "because she didn't feel quite prepared to meet you ... at least----"

"Now, upon my word, little mother! How long is it since preparations have been necessary between Johanna and me?"

For answer, his mother made a wry face, and, taking his hand in hers, stroked it gently.

"There is something wrong here too," he thought, and resolved to investigate the matter thoroughly, early the next morning.

But the mother, whose memory was short, began laughing again. "What a big beard you've grown!" she said admiringly; "and how close-cropped your hair is! And you are brown, oh, so brown; you look exactly as if you had come from the man[oe]uvres."

And while she fondled him, her gaze rested on him in a shy scrutiny.

There was an undertone of anxiety in her manner despite her proud tenderness. He had come home as a kind of prodigal son. His soul had fed on husks, and yet he had thrived on them withal. Between mother and son there was much that was difficult to speak of, and what was most difficult of all would have to remain unspoken.

"I will go and see if your bed is ready," she said, rising, and combing the ends of his beard with her hand in pa.s.sing.

As she opened the door into the next room, which was in darkness, she started back with a cry, answered by a simultaneous, only more alarmed exclamation from the other side. At the same instant Leo saw a glimmer of something white, and then another, disappear into the darkness.

Mamma turned to him, and said, with a t.i.tter, "It was the girls."

The lovely double picture that he had seen on the terrace rose before his eyes.

"Come in," he called out, and stood up as if he were going to the door.

But his mother stopped him, laughing. "For goodness' sake, let them run away to bed," she said. "They were in their nightgowns."

V