“You don’t even ask me? You go right over my head?”
“I have done as I had to do.”
“You have acted like a distracted person, in a perfectly unreasonable way.”
“Reason is not the highest thing on earth.”
“Please don’t make phrases. The question is one of the most ordinary justice, which you have most astonishingly ignored.”
“Let me suggest to you, my son, that you yourself are ignoring the duty and respect which you owe to your mother.”
“And I answer you, my dear Mother, by telling you that I have never for a moment forgotten the respect I owe you; but that my attributes as a son became void when I took my father’s place as head of the family and of the firm.”
“I desire you to be silent, Thomas!”
“No, I will not be silent, so long as you fail to realize the extent of your own weakness and folly.”
“I have a right to dispose of my own property as I choose!”
“Within the limits of justice and reason.”
“I could never have believed you would have the heart to wound me like this!”
“And I could never have believed that my own Mother would slap me in the face!”
“Tom! Why, Tom!” Frau Permaneder’s anguished voice got itself a hearing at last. She sat at the window of the landscape-room, wringing her hands, while her brother paced up and down in a state of high excitement, and the Frau Consul, beside herself with angry grief, sat on the sofa, leaning with one hand on its upholstered arm, while the other struck the table to emphasize her words. All three wore mourning for Clara, who was now no longer of this earth; and all three were pale and excited.
What was going on? Something amazing, something dreadful, something at which the very actors in the scene themselves stood aghast and incredulous. A quarrel, an embittered disagreement between mother and son!
It was a sultry August afternoon. Only ten days after the Senator had gently prepared his mother and given her the letters from Clara and Tiburtius, the blow fell, and he had the harder task of breaking to the old lady the news of death itself. He travelled to Riga for the funeral, and returned with his brother-in-law, who spent a few days with the family of his deceased wife, and also visited Christian in the hospital at Hamburg. And now, two days after the Pastor had departed for home, the Frau Consul, with obvious hesitation, made a certain revelation to her son.
“One hundred and twenty-seven thousand, five hundred marks current,” cried he, and shook his clasped hands in front of him. “If it were the dowry, even! If he wanted to keep the eighty thousand marks! Though, considering there’s no heir, even that—! But to promise him Clara’s whole inheritance, right over my head! Without saying aye, yes, or no!”
“Thomas, for our blessed Lord’s sake, do me some sort of justice, at least. Could I act otherwise? Tell me, could I? She who has been taken from us, and is now with God, she wrote me from her death-bed, with faltering hand, a pencilled letter. ‘Mother,’ she wrote, ‘we shall see each other no more on this earth, and these are, I know, my dying words to you. With my last conscious thoughts, I appeal to you for my husband. God gave us no children; but when you follow me, let what would have been mine if I had lived go to him to enjoy during his lifetime. Mother, it is my last request—my dying prayer. You will not refuse it.’—No, Thomas, I did not refuse it—I could not. I sent a despatch to her, and she died in peace.” The Frau Consul wept violently.
“And you never told me a syllable. Everybody conceals things from me, and acts without my authority,” repeated the Senator.
“Yes, Thomas, I have kept silent. For I felt I must fulfil the last wish of my dying child, and I knew you would have tried to prevent me!”
“Yes! By God, I would have!”
“You would have had no right to, for three of my children would have been on my side.”
“I think my opinion has enough weight to balance that of two women and a degenerate fool.”
“You speak of your brother and sisters as heartlessly as you do to me.”
“Clara was a pious, ignorant woman, Mother. And Tony is a child—and, anyhow, she knew nothing about the affair at all until now—or she might have talked at the wrong time, eh? And Christian? Oh, he got Christian’s consent, did Tiburtius! Who would have thought it of him? Do you know now, or don’t you grasp it yet—what he is, this ingenious pastor? He is a rogue, and a fortune-hunter!”
“Sons-in-law are always rogues,” said Frau Permaneder, in a hollow voice.
“He is a fortune-hunter! What does he do? He travels to Hamburg, and sits down by Christian’s bed. He talks to him—‘Yes,’ says Christian, ‘yes, Tiburtius, God bless you! Have you any idea of the pain I suffer in my left side?’—Oh, the idiots, the scoundrels! They joined hands against me!” And the Senator, perfectly beside himself, leaned against the wrought-iron fire-screen and pressed his clenched hands to his temples.
This paroxysm of anger was out of proportion to the circumstances. No, it was not the hundred and twenty-seven thousand marks that had brought him to this unprecedented state of rage. It was rather that his irritated senses connected this case with the series of rebuffs and misfortunes which had lately attended him in both public and private business. Nothing went well any more. Nothing turned out as he intended it should. And now, had it come to this, that in the house of his fathers they “went over his head” in matters of the highest importance? That a pastor from Riga could thus bamboozle him behind his back? He could have prevented it if he had only been told! But events had taken their course without him. It was this which he felt could not have happened earlier—would not have dared to happen earlier! Again his faith tottered—his faith in himself, his luck, his power, his future. And it was nothing but his own inward weakness and despair that broke out in this scene before mother and sister.
Frau Permaneder stood up and embraced her brother. “Tom,” she said, “do control yourself. Try to be calm. You will make yourself ill. Are things so very bad? Tiburtius doesn’t need to live so very long, perhaps, and the money would come back after he dies. And if you want it to, it can be altered—can it not be altered, Mamma?”
The Frau Consul answered only with sobs.
“Oh, no, no,” said the Consul, pulling himself together, and making a weak gesture of dissent. “Let it be as it is. Do you think I would carry it into court and sue my own mother, and add a public scandal to the family one? It may go as it is,” he concluded, and walked lifelessly to the glass door, where he paused and stood.
“But you need not imagine,” he said in a suppressed voice, “that things are going so brilliantly with us. Tony lost eighty thousand marks, and Christian, beside the setting up of fifty thousand that he has run through with, has already had thirty thousand in advance, and will need more, as he is not earning anything, and will have to take a cure at Öynhausen. And now Clara’s dowry is permanently lost, and her whole inheritance besides for an indefinite period. And business is poor; it seems to have gone to the devil precisely since the time when I spent more than a hundred thousand marks on my house. No, things are not going well in a family where there are such scenes as this to-day. Let me tell you one thing; if Father were alive, if he were here in this room, he would fold his hands and commend us to the mercy of God.”