And did you not tell me you loved Helen?"
"More than my life!"
"And you refused all that splendor to remain faithful to your old flag?"
Oswald shook his head.
"No, Berger!" he said; "I am not good and great enough for that, as you think in your goodness and greatness. She could never be mine. Too many things had happened that could never be forgiven and forgotten. I had preferred others to her, and she had preferred another man to me. That Prince Waldenberg was her betrothed."
"Why do you say _was_?"
"Because I found them leaving town. She had recollected at the last moment that she had a heart in her bosom whose longing not all the riches of the world could satisfy."
"Strange! strange!" murmured Berger. "You, both of you: the baron's son who makes common cause with the people, and the low-born man's son who sits among princes, are rivals for the favor of the same lady! And she rejects you because she has no suspicion of your noble birth, and she accepts the prince because she thinks that the same blood flows in his veins, of which he is so proud! What a pity the world does not know this and must not know it! They might possibly find out then what the difference is between noble blood and common blood!"
"You, at all events, do not seem to value the difference quite as much as formerly. I can remember the time when you thought it morally impossible to be the friend of a nobleman."
"You allude to my friendship with Oldenburg," said Berger, calmly. "I tell you, Oswald, if there ever was a man who deserved to be loved and honored, Oldenburg is that man. If any man could ever have reconciled me with the world, Oldenburg would have been that man. If I ever could humble myself before any man and acknowledge him to be my lord and master, that man is Oldenburg. I know you hate him because the woman whom you have forsaken thinks more of him than of the whole world. That is not fair, Oswald. Oldenburg has also spoken of you like a friend. I should be very happy, Oswald, if you could be reconciled with each other before I leave you forever."
"My turn comes first!" said Oswald. "Do you know what you once told me in Grunwald? 'You will die before me,' you said, 'for the Big Serpent is tough of life, and you are too soft, far too gentle for this hard world.'"
"That was long ago. This last year has made the Big Serpent dull and feeble. But what is that?"
A noise, coming from a low restaurant with steps leading up from the basement, made both men jump up from their seats. They seized their arms and hurried, followed by other men of the same barricade, to the place, where now several shots were fired. These were the same shots which Oldenburg had heard when he was roused from his effort to seek rest on his barricade in Broad street.
CHAPTER XVII.
Albert Timm had stopped, after his violent altercation with Oswald, looking after his faithless friend and laughing so loud and so bitterly that the passers-by had looked at him in surprise. Then he had hurried away in another direction, murmuring violent words, gnashing his teeth, and shaking his hands at imaginary enemies. Albert Timm was savage, and from his point of view he had reason to be furious. He was in a desperate position. The debts he had left behind him in Grunwald and elsewhere were not particularly pressing--he was great in bearing such burdens!--but the small sum he had brought with him to town was at an end; and even if that could be borne, all his bright prospects for a brilliant future had been suddenly blown to the winds and burst like a many-colored soap bubble.
Cursing the world and himself, he had thus walked through several streets before he reached that part of town where the rising was general. He delighted in it not because he had any sympathy with the cause of the people or liberty, but because he felt instinctively that in such times, where all is turned upside down, he--the man without a home, the adventurer--could lose nothing, and possibly gain much. This thought restored to him his full elasticity. He hurrahed merrily with the crowd, he chimed in with the cry: To arms! to arms! and had real pleasure in finding the excitement growing apace as he came nearer the place of his destination, the Dismal Hole. Thus he reached Broad street just at the moment when Oswald and Berger approached it from the other side. He noticed both, also Mr. Schmenckel, who had come by appointment to have an interview with Berger. By no means desirous to be seen by his enemies he slipped aside, and was about to creep into Gertrude street when some one seized hold of his coat. When he looked around he found himself face to face with his friend and patron, Jeremy Goodheart.
"Well, how did matters go?" asked the detective, who had in the meantime become Timm's friend, and was fully initiated in his intrigues.
"All up!" sighed Timm, angrily. "Lost my labor and my trouble! All up!
I could roast the two rascals!" He pointed at Oswald and Schmenckel.
"Hem, hem!" said the policeman. "You must tell me that at leisure. Come to Rose; but let us first hear what the mad professor has to say."
"Do you know him?" asked Timm.
"Hush! We know him. Deceived people!--all right! To arms!--excellent!
Just wait!--we'll catch you! And there comes the tall baron, who makes such revolutionary speeches at the election meetings! Why, there is the whole nest of them!--build barricades!--hurrah! Bravo!--hurrah! All men to the barricades! Hurrah!" cried the detective, and waved his hat with admirably feigned enthusiasm. Then he seized Timm by the arm and said: "Now we must get away quickly or the fellows will shut us up here with their barricade."
The two companions crept down Gertrude street and disappeared in the Dismal Hole.
Mrs. Rose Pape received them with unusual cordiality.
"Well, darlings, do you come with full purses? Have you got it, eh?
"Hush!" said the detective, "and bring us beer; we can't stop."
"Without telling me how the----?" said the worthy matron indignantly, and made with her thumb and her forefinger the motion of counting money.
Mr. Timm shrugged his shoulders in reply, and pulled out the empty pockets of his trousers.
Mrs. Pape was of choleric nature, and the failure of such magnificent expectations filled her with just indignation, to which she gave vent in a flood of oaths and vile invectives, some of which were aimed at the detective. "But I will pay Schmenckel, with his big paunch," she said. "Let him come here again and have no money to pay for his beer; I'll show him home, the old rascal!"
At that moment the firing was heard as the troops charged the barricade in Broad street; and almost immediately afterwards a great noise was heard at the windows. They began building the barricade which was to close up Gertrude street. The detective and Timm, who looked stealthily out at the window, saw Oswald, Berger, Schmenckel, and other men, hard at work. They withdrew, following their landlady to the remoter depths of the basement.
"That is a charming trap," said the detective. "We are hemmed in on all sides, and if they find us here the rascals will kill us."
"It is not quite so bad as that," said the woman. "I can get you out safely. Come along."
She led the two men through the last room and a hidden door down a few steps into a deep cellar, which was used as a store-room. On the wall a thin little gas-flame was burning. The woman screwed it up.
"Now," she said, "you go through that door!"--she pointed out an iron door on the opposite side; "then you get into a narrow court-yard; keep to the left, and thus you can get through my brewer's house into Brother street. Good-by!"
"Is it always open? asked Timm, when he found the iron door was not locked.
"Only to-day," replied Rose; "we expect more beer that way. The fellows are like sponges to-day."
When the two gentlemen had safely passed through the door, the little court-yard, and the brewery, into the space above the barricade in Brother street, they stopped and looked at each other. The same thought was uppermost in the mind of both.
"What a mousetrap this would be!" said Timm.
"If you will lend a hand," said the detective, "you can make sure of the president. We want people like you. I have already spoken about you to the old man."
"And that would avenge us, too, on the rascals."
"The thing is not free from danger, though," said the policeman.
"Faint heart never won fair lady," said Timm. "I confess I like the idea of catching my good friends in this funny way. If you do not choose to undertake it I'll do it alone."
"Well, then, come!" said the detective. "We'll see if the military are disposed to look at it as we do."
And the two men advanced boldly upon the colonel, who was waiting on horseback at some little distance surrounded by his officers, and furious at the obstinate resistance of the two barricades in Broad street and Gertrude street, which he had been ordered to take by storm.
When Mrs. Rose had helped her friends out and returned to the public rooms she found there Mr. Schmenckel, with ten or twelve other men from the barricades, who wished to refresh themselves after their fatigue.
They were mostly old customers of the locality, the same men with long beards and dishevelled locks who had been in the habit of meeting here to condemn the "rotten condition of the state," the "hateful police,"
and the "brutalized soldiery." Mr. Schmenckel had always been highly respected by these people, and now, when they had seen that he could not only speak boldly but also act courageously, he became the hero of the day.
Under these circumstances Mrs. Rose deemed it more prudent not to carry out her resolution, and to leave the waiting upon the barricade men to pretty Lisbeth while she herself took her accustomed seat at the bar.