How silent it was now in the quiet Haidehof. The father could hobble about the house and garden on a crutch, but he had grown much too lazy to wield the sceptre again. Paul did not know what else to do for him, except to have his favorite dishes cooked, not to measure his rations of ginger and aniseed too sparingly, and to present him each Christmas with a new almanac. The old man might have been well satisfied with this, for indeed he needed nothing more--he had even grown too heavy to drive to the town; but the better his body throve the more imbittered and exasperated grew his mind. He would sit and brood for hours, and it was dreadful to see how in doing so he gnashed his teeth and shook his fists. One of his fixed ideas was that his son kept him under on purpose that he might claim for himself the glory of the great ideas which his father had conceived, and the better the moor paid the more eagerly he calculated what his company would have brought in. He was not sparing with the millions; he had no need to be so. But something sprang up from the darkest corner of his soul, and that was a plan of revenge against Douglas, which he privately nursed and cherished as his most important secret. Even his sons-in-law, to whom he liked to open his heart, knew nothing of this. Ulrich once said to Paul, “Take care; the old man is brewing something against Douglas.” “What could it be?” he replied, apparently unconcerned, although he had often felt anxiety on this subject. Dull, and without interest, Paul lived from one day to the next. His whole inner being was sacrificed to the commonplace cares about property and money, yet without his ever experiencing any joy at the success he attained. There was no longer anybody whom he could make happy, and he worked on without knowing why--as a cart-horse in the traces moves forward, ignorant of what the plough does, which it drags through the briers. Months sometimes passed without his taking one retrospective glance at his soul. He did not whistle any more, either. He feared the torments which overwhelming sentiment called into life, but he looked back on the time when he could commune with himself in the language of music as on a lost paradise. Often when he compared the result of his work, his toiling, his wakeful nights, to that which he had sacrificed for it, he was overcome by intense bitterness. It seemed to him to have been something unspeakably noble, sweet and blissful, only he could not find the right name for it. He could rid himself of these black thoughts most successfully by plunging deep into some new work, and then a long time would pass before the fit of melancholy attacked him again.