The Breaking of the Storm by Friedrich Spielhagen

Author:Friedrich Spielhagen [Spielhagen, Friedrich]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Tags: Fiction
Publisher: Standard Ebooks
Published: 2026-01-20T04:40:48+00:00

VI

Autumn had come, and was boisterously asserting his authority; the weather was dark and gloomy, even in Reinhold’s eyes. “The gloomiest and darkest I ever experienced,” he said each morning to himself as the same spectacle always presented itself when he opened his window: dark, lowering clouds, trees swaying to and fro, from whose branches blustering winds were stripping the brown leaves and whirling them through the moist, foggy atmosphere across the roofs of the workshops, which looked so drenched and miserable that one would only have expected tombstones to be made there.

“And yet I have got through darker and gloomier days without losing heart,” philosophised Reinhold further; “it is not the weather out of doors, it is that whichever way I turn I see people in need and trouble, as if I were on board a ship that must sink shortly and could do nothing to save it, but must sit with my hands before me, and look on idly at the catastrophe.”

Reinhold could do nothing; of that he had only too soon convinced himself ever since that terrible morning when the General had come to his room, and in the deepest agitation, which even his iron strength could hardly master, had informed him of the conversation he had just had with Herr Schmidt, and its miserable results.

“I made every advance to your uncle,” said the General, “which was possible to a man of honour. I offered to him and to your family the reparation which, at least in the eyes of the world, would put everything straight, and would secure to the young people the possibility of that happiness which they have so recklessly pursued. If they will find it in this way, God only knows, but that is their affair, and must be theirs. What I feel about it, what hopes I bury here, what a sacrifice I make of my personal convictions, is a matter that lies between my God and me. May God guide your uncle’s heart, that he may put his trust in Him, as I do, in the inward conviction that our own wisdom will not help us here. I have come to you, my dear Schmidt, to say all this to you, not that I wish that you should try to influence your uncle; according to my judgment of him, that would be labour lost; but because I cannot endure the thought of being wrongly judged by a man whom we all think so highly of, and who, besides, is connected with me as a brother soldier, even if only for a short time.”

Reinhold had, notwithstanding, followed the impulse of his heart, and attempted the impossible. He had been, for the first time since they had been together, harshly repulsed by his uncle, and had been forced to own to himself that neither he nor any other man could persuade the fiery-tempered old man to retract a decision once made “because he must.” But when Aunt Rikchen, unable to rest from fear

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