Composers -- Fiction; German fiction -- Translations into English; Germany -- Fiction
She made a study of the house; she knew the rooms by heart. She
preferred to come along toward sunset or a little later. One day she
told Eleanore she had seen a mysterious-looking person out on the hall
steps. Eleanore took a candle and went out, but she could not see any
one. Philippina insisted nevertheless that she had seen a man in a green
doublet, and that he had made a face at her.
She was particularly attracted by the rooms in the attic. She told the
neighbours that there was an owl up there. As a result of this the
children of that section began to fear the entire house, while the
chancellor’s wife, who lived on the ground floor, became so nervous that
she gave up her apartment.
There was no outside door or entrance hall of any kind to Jordan’s new
quarters. You went direct from the stairway into the room where Eleanore
worked and slept. Adjoining this was her father’s room. People still
called him the Inspector, although he no longer had such a position.
He sat in his narrow, cramped room the whole day. One wall was out of
plumb. The windows he kept closed. When Eleanore brought him his
breakfast or called him to luncheon, which she had cooked in the tiny
box of a kitchen and then served in her own little room, he was
invariably sitting at the table before a stack of papers, mostly old
bills and letters. The arrangement of these he never changed.
Once she entered his room without knocking. He sprang up, closed a
drawer as quickly as he could, locked it, put the key in his pocket,
and tried to smile in an innocent way. Eleanore’s heart almost stopped
beating.
He never went out until it was dark, and on his return he could be seen
carrying a package under his arm. This he took with him to his room.
At first Eleanore was always uneasy when she had to leave. She requested
Philippina to be very careful and see to it that no stranger entered the
house. Philippina had a box full of ribbons in Eleanore’s cabinet. She
set a chair against the door leading into Jordan’s room; and when her
hands were tired from rummaging around in the ribbons and her eyes weary
from looking at all the flashy colours, she pressed her ear to the door
to see if she could find out what the old man was doing.
At times she heard him talking. It seemed as if he were talking with
some one. His voice had an exhortatory but tender tone in it. Philippina
trembled with fear. Once she even pressed the latch; she wanted to open
the door as quietly as possible, so that she might peep in and see what
was really going on. But to her vexation, the door was bolted on the
other side.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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