She is avenged!  The scoundrel is done for!  But I too am—­Oh, why did it have to be?—­God!  Now I cannot—­

ANTONY.

What’s the matter with you?  What ails you?

SECRETARY.

It is nearly up with me!  Give me your hand on it, that you will not cast off your daughter—­do you hear?—­will not cast her off, if she—­

ANTONY.

That is strange talk!  Why should I, pray—­Ha!  My eyes are opening!—­Was
I right after all in suspecting?—­

SECRETARY.

Give me your hand!

ANTONY.

No!

[He puts both hands into his pockets.]

But I will clear the way for her—­she knows that!  I have told her so.

SECRETARY (horrified).

You told her!—­unhappy girl!  Now for the first time I quite understand—­

CARL (rushes in).

Father!  Father!  There is somebody lying in the well!  If only it is not—­

ANTONY.

The long ladder!  Hooks!  Ropes!  Why do you delay?  Quick!  Even were it the bailiff!

CARL.

Everything is already there!  The neighbors arrived before me!  If only it is not Clara!—­

ANTONY.

Clara?

[He grasps the table.]

CARL.

She went to draw water, and they found her handkerchief!

SECRETARY.

Scoundrel, I know now why your bullet hit the mark!  It is she!

ANTONY.

Go and find out!

[He, sits down.]

I cannot!

[Exit CARL.]

And yet—­

[Rises again.]

If [to the SECRETARY] I understood you correctly, everything is all right!

CARL (reenters).

Clara!  Dead!  Her head terribly crushed on the edge of the well, as she—­Father, she did not fall in, she jumped in!  A maid saw her!

ANTONY.

Let her think before she speaks!  It is not light enough for her to have distinguished things with certainty!  SECRETARY.  Do you doubt it?  You would like to, but you cannot!  Think only of what you said to her!  You pointed out to her the road to death!  I, I alone am to blame that she did not turn back!  When you suspected her misery, you thought only of the tongues that would hiss at you, but not of the worthlessness of the snakes to which they belonged!  Then you uttered a word that drove her to despair!  And I, instead of catching her in my arms when her heart was bursting with nameless anguish before me, thought only of the scoundrel who could make light of it.  And now I pay with my life for having made myself so dependent upon a man who was worse than I!  And you too, who stand there so stolidly, you too will say one day:  Daughter, I would to God you had not spared me the head-shaking and shoulder-shrugging of the Pharisees about me!  It crushes me more deeply that you cannot sit by my death-bed and wipe the sweat of anguish from my brow!