Gerhardt was an honest man, and he liked to think that others appreciated his integrity. “William,” his employer used to say to him, “I want you because I can trust you,” and this, to him, was more than silver and gold.
This honesty, like his religious convictions, was wholly due to inheritance. He had never reasoned about it. Father and grandfather before him were sturdy German artisans, who had never cheated anybody out of a dollar, and this honesty of intention came into his veins undiminished.
His Lutheran proclivities had been strengthened by years of church-going and the religious observances of home life, In his father’s cottage the influence of the Lutheran minister had been all-powerful; he had inherited the feeling that the Lutheran Church was a perfect institution, and that its teachings were of all-importance when it came to the issue of the future life. His wife, nominally of the Mennonite faith, was quite willing to accept her husband’s creed. And so his household became a God-fearing one; wherever they went their first public step was to ally themselves with the local Lutheran church, and the minister was always a welcome guest in the Gerhardt home.
Pastor Wundt, the shepherd of the Columbus church, was a sincere and ardent Christian, but his bigotry and hard-and-fast orthodoxy made him intolerant. He considered that the members of his flock were jeopardizing their eternal salvation if they danced, played cards, or went to theaters, and he did not hesitate to declare vociferously that hell was yawning for those who disobeyed his injunctions. Drinking, even temperately, was a sin. Smoking—well, he smoked himself. Right conduct in marriage, however, and innocence before that state were absolute essentials of Christian living. Let no one talk of salvation, he had said, for a daughter who had failed to keep her chastity unstained, or for the parents who, by negligence, had permitted her to fall. Hell was yawning for all such. You must walk the straight and narrow way if you would escape eternal punishment, and a just God was angry with sinners every day.
Gerhardt and his wife, and also Jennie, accepted the doctrines of their Church as expounded by Mr. Wundt without reserve. With Jennie, however, the assent was little more than nominal. Religion had as yet no striking hold upon her. It was a pleasant thing to know that there was a heaven, a fearsome one to realize that there was a hell. Young girls and boys ought to be good and obey their parents. Otherwise the whole religious problem was badly jumbled in her mind.
Gerhardt was convinced that everything spoken from the pulpit of his church was literally true. Death and the future life were realities to him.
Now that the years were slipping away and the problem of the world was becoming more and more inexplicable, he clung with pathetic anxiety to the doctrines which contained a solution. Oh, if he could only be so honest and upright that the Lord might have no excuse for ruling him out. He trembled not only for himself, but for his wife and children. Would he not some day be held responsible for them? Would not his own laxity and lack of system in inculcating the laws of eternal life to them end in his and their damnation? He pictured to himself the torments of hell, and wondered how it would be with him and his in the final hour.
Naturally, such a deep religious feeling made him stern with his children. He was prone to scan with a narrow eye the pleasures and foibles of youthful desire. Jennie was never to have a lover if her father had any voice in the matter. Any flirtation with the youths she might meet upon the streets of Columbus could have no continuation in her home. Gerhardt forgot that he was once young himself, and looked only to the welfare of her spirit. So the Senator was a novel factor in her life.
When he first began to be a part of their family affairs the conventional standards of Father Gerhardt proved untrustworthy. He had no means of judging such a character. This was no ordinary person coquetting with his pretty daughter. The manner in which the Senator entered the family life was so original and so plausible that he became an active part before any one thought anything about it. Gerhardt himself was deceived, and, expecting nothing but honor and profit to flow to the family from such a source, accepted the interest and the service, and plodded peacefully on. His wife did not tell him of the many presents which had come before and since the wonderful Christmas.
But one morning as Gerhardt was coming home from his night work a neighbor named Otto Weaver accosted him.
“Gerhardt,” he said, “I want to speak a word with you. As a friend of yours, I want to tell you what I hear. The neighbors, you know, they talk now about the man who comes to see your daughter.”
“My daughter?” said Gerhardt, more puzzled and pained by this abrupt attack than mere words could indicate. “Whom do you mean? I don’t know of any one who comes to see my daughter.”
“No?” inquired Weaver, nearly as much astonished as the recipient of his confidences. “The middle-aged man, with gray hair. He carries a cane sometimes. You don’t know him?”
Gerhardt racked his memory with a puzzled face.
“They say he was a senator once,” went on Weaver, doubtful of what he had got into; “I don’t know.”
“Ah,” returned Gerhardt, measurably relieved. “Senator Brander. Yes. He has come sometimes—so. Well, what of it?”
“It is nothing,” returned the neighbor, “only they talk. He is no longer a young man, you know. Your daughter, she goes out with him now a few times. These people, they see that, and now they talk about her. I thought you might want to know.”
Gerhardt was shocked to the depths of his being by these terrible words. People must have a reason for saying such things. Jennie and her mother were seriously at fault. Still he did not hesitate to defend his daughter.
“He is a friend of the family,” he said confusedly. “People should not talk until they know. My daughter has done nothing.”
“That is so. It is nothing,” continued Weaver. “People talk before they have any grounds. You and I are old friends. I thought you might want to know.”
Gerhardt stood there motionless another minute or so t his jaw fallen and a strange helplessness upon him. The world was such a grim thing to have antagonistic to you. Its opinions and good favor were so essential. How hard he had tried to live up to its rules! Why should it not be satisfied and let him alone?
“I am glad you told me,” he murmured as he started homeward. “I will see about it. Good-by.”
Gerhardt took the first opportunity to question his wife.
“What is this about Senator Brander coming out to call on Jennie?” he asked in German. “The neighbors are talking about it.”
“Why, nothing,” answered Mrs. Gerhardt, in the same language. She was decidedly taken aback at his question. “He did call two or three times.”
“You didn’t tell me that,” he returned, a sense of her frailty in tolerating and shielding such weakness in one of their children irritating him.
“No,” she replied, absolutely nonplussed. “He has only been here two or three times.”
“Two or three times!” exclaimed Gerhardt, the German tendency to talk loud coming upon him. “Two or three times! The whole neighborhood talks about it. What is this, then?”
“He only called two or three times,” Mrs. Gerhardt repeated weakly.
“Weaver comes to me on the street,” continued Gerhardt, “and tells me that my neighbors are talking of the man my daughter is going with. I didn’t know anything about it. There I stood. I didn’t know what to say. What kind of a way is that? What must the man think of me?”
“There is nothing the matter,” declared the mother, using an effective German idiom. “Jennie has gone walking with him once or twice. He has called here at the house. What is there now in that for the people to talk about? Can’t the girl have any pleasure at all?”
“But he is an old man,” returned Gerhardt, voicing the words of Weaver. “He is a public citizen. What should he want to call on a girl like Jennie for?”
“I don’t know,” said Mrs. Gerhardt, defensively. “He comes here to the house. I don’t know anything but good about the man. Can I tell him not to come?”
Gerhardt paused at this. All that he knew of the Senator was excellent. What was there now that was so terrible about it?
“The neighbors are so ready to talk. They haven’t got anything else to talk about now, so they talk about Jennie. You know whether she is a good girl or not. Why should they say such things?” and tears came into the soft little mother’s eyes.