Regina, or the Sins of the FathersSudermann, Hermann
General
Regina, or the Sins of the Fathers
Sudermann, Hermann
Fiction
She turned on him a pair of lustrous, large dark eyes. "What do you
want here?" she asked, grasping the spade tighter, as if intending to
use it as a weapon of defence. Then lifting her other arm she calmly
raised the chemise over her shapely bosom.
"What do you want?" she repeated.
Still he did not answer. "So this is she," he was thinking, "the
traitress, the courtesan, who---- Should he point his pistol at her,
and drive her instantly from the island, so that the ground he trod on
might at least be clean?"
Meanwhile his bearing seemed to have convinced her of the peacefulness
of his intentions.
"This is no place for strangers," she went on. "Go away again at once.
You are lucky not to have been caught in a wolf's trap."
She stood, drawn to her full height, and waved him off. Then gradually
she became confused under his searching glance, and regarded him
nervously out of the corners of her eyes. Tossing back the black tangle
of hair from her sunburnt cheeks, she began to fidget with her
inadequate garment, seeming conscious for the first time of her
half-nude condition.
"Show me his corpse!" he asked imperatively.
She started and stared at him for a moment with astonished, questioning
eyes, then threw herself weeping at his feet.
"_Gnädiger Herr_!" she murmured, in a voice stifled with emotion.
He felt her fingers seeking his hand, and pushed her violently from
him.
"Show me his corpse!" he commanded again, "and then you may go."
She rose slowly, kicked the spade away with her foot, and led the way
down to the park. As they neared some bushes she turned round and said
timidly, "There's a trap here." He stepped quickly to one side,
otherwise he would have walked straight into the snare. She held
back the brambles of the thicket through which they were making their
way, to prevent the thorns scratching his face. They came to a clearing
in the wood where stood a small one-storied cottage with a tall
chimney, surrounded by broken hot-house frames and lime heaps. It was
the gardener's house, in which as a boy he had often played with
flower-pots, seeds, and bulbs; the one solitary building the ravages of
the fire had left untouched, because the incendiary had been unable to
find his way to it.
Again his guide warned him. "Take care! That is dangerous," she said,
pointing to a heap of earth like a mole-hill. "Whoever steps on it is a
dead man," she added half to herself. He knelt down, and with his hands
dug out the bomb that lay concealed in the soft earth, and hurled it
with all his might far away, so that it exploded with a loud report
against the trunk of a tree. She cast a shy, half-scandalised glance at
him over her shoulder, for to her what he had done was an act of
desecration.
Then she opened the door, and he found himself in a dark passage. The
cottage had only two rooms. The one on the left of the front-door had
been the gardener's dwelling-room, the other his workshop.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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