Part 5 (2/2)

Finally she produced her trump-card. She knew that the rural quiet of the little station had wound itself round her husband's heart during the week of trial he had already pa.s.sed there. So she confessed her own secret journey.

And she conquered.

Each could describe as well as the other the charms of the una.s.suming little retreat. What one omitted the other supplied. Thus the picture in the sergeant-major's mind was revived afresh, and in such vivid colours that it regained its old power over him, dissipating the cloud of self-reproachful doubt. He saw before him a calm bright future in the narrow valley between wooded heights, and it came over him suddenly that there in the stillness, where one could live in touch with nature, he would for the first time begin really to live.

CHAPTER III

”I vow to thee my duty, My heart and my hand, O land of love and beauty, My German fatherland!”

(_Ma.s.smann._)

Lieutenant Reimers had reported himself to the colonel of the regiment and to the major.

These officers had given him a hearty welcome, each after his own fas.h.i.+on.

Major Schrader, who never let pa.s.s an opportunity of making a joke, received his report at first in a very stiff official manner, a.s.suring him with a frown that he was very loth to have in his division officers who had been in disgrace; then almost fell on his neck, and asked him if it were true that the Kaffir girls had such an abominable smell.

Colonel Falkenhein gave him only a prolonged handshake; but Reimers could read the great gladness in his eyes.

The colonel had treated the young man almost as a son; and a year before, when the doctors had sent Reimers to Egypt as a consumptive patient with a very doubtful prospect of recovery, had seen him depart with a heavy heart. Now, looking upon him once more, he was doubly glad. Reimers had not developed into a broad-chested, red-cheeked, powerful man, but every trace of illness had vanished from the bronzed face; the thin features and the rather spare rigid figure gave an impression of tough endurance, a characteristic of greater value in resisting disease than mere well-nourished sleekness.

”You are well out of that, thank G.o.d! Reimers,” he said, once more shaking the lieutenant's hand; ”and it looks as if the improvement would be permanent, considering the test to which your health has been put.”

”It was rather _va banque_, sir,” replied the lieutenant. ”Either all or nothing.”

”I decidedly prefer the all,” said Falkenhein, in such a hearty, affectionate tone that a rush of devotion carried the lieutenant past the barriers of formality. He bent quickly over the colonel's hand and kissed it. Tears stood in his eyes--tears of grateful pleasure. Now he indeed felt himself back in his native country.

How he had longed for it, day after day, during this year of furlough!

At first when, in Cairo, he was again laid low by the fatigues of the journey, he had thought of his country with pensive melancholy. Later, as his strength returned, homesickness a.s.serted itself increasingly; he suffered from it more than from his gradually-subsiding bodily malady, and the aimless life of a health-resort only increased his sufferings.

He could never have resigned himself to pa.s.s long months of such inaction in a strange land; and when he joined the Boer forces, it was to no small extent in order to counteract the torturing longing for Germany.

He loved his country with a pa.s.sionate ardour. The ideas of greatness, power and sovereignty were inseparably connected in his mind with the name of the German Empire. But his chief enthusiasm was reserved for the diligent, unostentatious work, quietly accomplished and conscious of its aim, which, begun by Stein, Scharnhorst and Boyen, had led through long struggles to such a glorious result. He reviewed the whole story with the eye of a soldier from the collapse at Jena onward to the last great war he seemed to trace an uninterruptedly ascending line, not diverted even by Prussia's temporary political defeats. In the unparalleled siege of Sedan a height of military efficiency had been reached from which no further ascent was possible. He could not imagine anything in the whole world more honourable than to belong to that splendid army of Sedan; and he wore his officer's sword-knot with a pride far removed from any kind of conceit: in fact, nearly akin to religious veneration.

As a boy, it had been his bitterest grief that his mother's wishes and the doctor's opinion were against his becoming a soldier,--an officer like his dead father, who had fought in the great campaign. His mother and the doctor had feared that he was too weakly for the military profession. In order to remove this objection, the boy voluntarily subjected himself to heroic discipline, and by strictly following a graduated system of physical exercises inured his body to hards.h.i.+ps, until he was actually found fit for service. Conquered by such persistent devotion, his mother at last yielded to his wishes; but she saw him wear his father's familiar old uniform only a few times, for she died shortly after, barely forty years old.

Bernhard Reimers thus became doubly an orphan. But he had far more than the death of a mother to deplore. With his mother he also lost the only person who had loved him, and the only one whom he in return had loved.

So closely was the boy encircled by his mother's love, that the need which led his schoolfellows at the gymnasium to form friends.h.i.+ps was never felt by him. Whenever he wanted to learn something, to solve a doubt or to confide a secret, he could count on his mother's tenderness; she would explain, soothe, or sympathise, as the joys and sorrows of the growing youth became ever more serious. From this relation he retained a touch of womanliness in his character, even after he had left home to enter the regiment: a shrinking from everything coa.r.s.e, a reserve before all that was unlovely. This instinctive feeling did not, indeed, altogether protect him from temptation, but it withheld him from yielding to excess. He joined in the little drink and love follies of the other young subalterns from a sense of comrades.h.i.+p; alone they would never have appealed to him.

As at school, so in the regiment, he had many comrades, but no friend.

He did not trouble himself about this, and until his mother's death he felt no want. Then he recognised sadly that he was quite alone; but he was incapable of setting to work to seek a friend, so he just waited for some happy chance to bring the right person across his path.

When, at last, he found the friends.h.i.+p he sought, it did not come in the way he had dreamed, suddenly, like a gift from heaven thrown into his lap; but was a gradual strong growth, a slow mutual recognition.

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