A Hero of the Pen. E. Werner
it is fortunate if the merchant and the lover do not come in conflict, and here each is quite sufficient to itself. Once more I congratulate you!"
After leaving these two, Jane had hastily passed through several rooms, and now entered a half-darkened, but richly and tastefully furnished sleeping-chamber. Gliding softly over the carpet, she approached the bed, and flung back its heavy curtains.
Now it was evident whence the young girl derived that strange expression of face which made her so unlike other girls of her own age, intense seriousness, cool determination, energetic pride; all these, unobliterated, unsoftened by the traces of illness, were repeated in the face of the man who lay here upon the pillow. He slowly turned his head towards the daughter who bent over him, saying:--
"They have just told me of the physician's visit. He was alone with you, and I wished to be present. Was this your command, my father?"
"Yes, my child! I wanted to hear an opinion from him which it would have been difficult to give freely in your presence. I now know that I have but a few days to live."
Jane had sunk on her knees at the bedside, and pressed her head into the pillows. She did not answer, but her whole form shook with the tearless sobs she energetically suppressed. The sick man gazed down upon her.
"Be calm, Jane, this opinion can surprise you as little as it does me, although we have both, perhaps, expected a longer respite. It must be, and you will not make the necessity of the separation more bitter through your tears."
"No!" She suddenly drew herself up, and gazed down upon her father; her sorrow was suppressed by the most absolute self-mastery; her lips scarce quivered. The sick man smiled, but there lay a sort of bitterness in that smile; perhaps he would rather have seen her not obey him so readily.
"I have to speak with you, my child, and I do not know how many quiet, painless hours may be granted me. Come nearer to me, and listen."
Jane took her place by her father's bedside, and waited silently.
"I can calmly leave you, for I know that despite your youth, you need no stay and no guardian. In outward emergencies, you have Atkins at your side; his sarcastic, eternally mocking nature has never been agreeable to me; but in an association of almost twenty years, I have proved his integrity and devotion. You know that he long since amassed a fortune of his own, but he preferred to let it remain in our house. He will be at your side, until you confide yourself to the protection of a husband, which will perhaps happen soon."
"Father," interrupted Jane, "I have something to tell you. You know that Mr. Alison has been here; he has asked for my hand."
The sick man drew himself up with an expression of lively interest.
"And you?"
"I have given him my promise."
"Ah?" Forest sank back upon his pillow, and was silent.
Jane bent over him in astonishment. "And are you not willing? I felt certain of your consent in advance."
"You know Jane, that I will neither restrict nor control you in your choice of a husband. It is your own future for which you have to decide, and I am convinced that you have not decided without serious deliberation."
"No; the proposal did not come unexpectedly to me. I have implicit confidence in Mr. Alison's character, and in his future; his family is one of the first in our city, his position is brilliant, and I am certain that his mercantile genius will in after years secure him an important place in the business world. Does this not appear sufficient to you, my father?"
"To me? certainly, if it is enough for you!"
With an expression of surprise, Jane fixed her dark eyes upon her father. "What more could be demanded from a marriage?" Forest again smiled with the same bitterness as before.
"You are right, Jane, quite right! I was only thinking of my own wooing, and of your mother's promise. But it is just as well. Mr. Alison indeed possesses all the advantages you have named, and in these respect you are more than his equal; you will be very content with each other."
"I hope so!" said Jane, and now began to tell her father the conditions she had imposed upon her betrothed, and the delay upon which she had insisted. Forest listened with eager attention.
"I like that! Without knowing it you met my wishes in this decision, for I, too, have a condition to impose upon you. What would you say if I demanded that you should pass this year of freedom in Germany with our relatives?"
With a movement of the most painful surprise, the young girl rose from her chair.--"In Germany? I?"
"Yes, do you not love Germany?"
"No," replied Jane coldly, "as little as you, my father. I do not love the country that blighted your youth, embittered your life, and at last thrust you out like a malefactor. I could not forgive my mother, that with a consciousness of all you had suffered there, she always clung to the fatherland, and made you and herself inexpressibly unhappy with that incurable homesickness."
"Be silent, Jane!" interrupted Forest passionately. "There are things which you do not understand, will never learn to understand! I met no consideration in your mother, that I confess; she indeed made me unhappy; and still, she gave me hours of happiness, such as you will never give your husband--never, Jane! But then Mr. Alison will have no need of them."
Jane was silent. She had become accustomed to find her father very irritable in his sickness, sometimes quite incomprehensible. With the consideration one gives the sick, she now bore this passionate outbreak, and quietly resumed her place at his bedside.
A few minutes after, Forest again turned to her. "Forgive me, child!" he said mildly, "I was unjust. You have become what I educated you to be, what I would have you be, and I do not now regret having given you this direction. You will better endure the life-conflict than your weak, sensitive mother. Let this rest; it was something different you were to hear from me. Do you know that you have a brother?"
Jane started up in terror, and in questioning expectation, fixed her eyes upon her father.
"As a child I sometimes heard a hint of this; but lately no one has ever spoken of him to me. Is he dead?"
A deep sigh rent Forest's breast. "Perhaps he is dead, perhaps not. We have never been able to learn with certainty. I at last forbade all mention of his name, because his remembrance threatened to kill your mother; but the silence was of little avail; she never forgot him for a single hour."
With eager intentness Jane bent down yet closer to her father. He took her hand and held it fast in his.
"You are not unacquainted with the recent history of your native country, my daughter; you are aware of the glowing enthusiasm which in the thirtieth year of the present century took possession of all Germany, and especially of its high schools. I was a student at that time, and, a youth of eighteen years, I was animated like so many of my comrades with visions of the freedom and greatness that might come to my fatherland under a new and more liberal order of things. We sought to carry out these revolutionary ideas, and for that crime the government repaid us with imprisonment, in many cases with sentence of death. I was doomed to die, but by especial favor, my sentence was commuted to thirty years' imprisonment. Seven of these years I endured; but as you have often enough heard the story, I will not repeat it now. Even these bitter years resulted in good to me; they ended for all time my youthful ideals and youthful illusions. When the amnesty at last came, under the iron pressure of the prison, in endless humiliations, in glowing hatred, had been ripened a man, who better than the twenty years' old dreamer knew how to bravely assume and patiently endure the struggle with life and misery."
Forest was silent for a moment, but the hard, savage bitterness which now lay in his features, and which was even more grimly reflected in Jane's face, showed that these remembrances were not foreign to her, and that the daughter had always been her father's confidant.
After a short pause the father continued: "Scarce was I free, when I committed the folly of marrying. It was madness in my