One single letter, however, sent all the scenery of his theatre into confusion again. It came from Schulrath Stiefel:--
"HONOURED SIR,--You doubtless remember more than too well the testamentary instruction which our mutual friend, the late lamented Poor"s Advocate, Siebenkaes, left behind him, to the effect that Herr von Blaise should make payment of the trust-funds in his hands--and, indeed (as you are aware), to your respected self in order that you, might remit it to the widow--which failing, it was the testator"s avowed intention to appear as a ghost. Be this as it may, thus much is matter of notoriety in this town and neighbourhood, that, for some weeks past, a ghost, in the likeness of our lamented friend, has pursued the Herr Heimlicher everywhere, who has, in consequence, become so ill and bedridden, that he has taken the Holy Sacrament, and made up his mind to pay over the above-mentioned moneys in good earnest. I now beg to inquire of you whether you would wish to receive them in the first instance, or whether (as would be almost more natural) they shall be paid at once to the widow. I have yet to mention that--in accordance with the desire of the testator--I sometime since married the former Mrs. Siebenkaes, and that I expect very soon to be the happiest of fathers. She is a most admirable wife and housekeeper. She is by no means a Thalaea,[110] and would lay down her life for her husband as gladly as he would lay down his for her; and I often have nothing left to desire, but that my predecessor, her good, never-to-be-forgotten first husband Siebenkaes (who _had_ his little whims and eccentricities at times), could be a spectator of the happiness in which his beloved Lenette is now bathed. She weeps for him every Sunday as she goes through the churchyard, but at the same time she confesses that she is happier now than in former times. It grieves me much that it is only now that I have learnt, from my wife, in what miserable circ.u.mstances the dear departed found himself, as regarded his purse. How eagerly, had I been aware of this, I should have taken him and his wife by the arms, and a.s.sisted them as becomes a Christian! If the deceased, who _now_ possesses more than any, or all, of us, can, in his glory, look down upon us, I am sure he will forgive me. I would respectfully beg for an early reply to this letter. One cause of the rest.i.tution of the trust-funds may also be, that the Heimlicher (who is an honest enough man upon the whole) is now no longer influenced by Herr von Meyern.
They have completely fallen out, as all the town knows, and the latter has broken off engagements with five ladies in Bayreuth, and is about to enter into the state of holy matrimony with a native of Kuhschnappel.
"My wife is as bitter against him as Christian love permits, and says that when she meets him she feels like a hunter who encounters an old woman in his path of a morning; for he was the cause of much needless vexation between her and her husband, and she often tells me with pleasure how cleverly you, esteemed Mr. Inspector, often set this dangerous fellow down, and kept him in his place. However, he does not dare to set foot in _my_ house. I defer, for the present, a more detailed request--as to whether you would not feel inclined to fill our departed friend"s vacant place as Collaborateur in the "G.o.d"S Messenger of German Programmes," which (I may say without undue boasting) is taken in, and looked upon with approval in Gymnasia and Lycaea, from Swabia as far as Nurnberg, Bayreuth, and Hof. There is rather a superfluity than a lack of miserable Programme-scribblers; and (let me say it without flattery) _you_ are the very man to wield the satiric scourge over the heads of these frog-sp.a.w.n in the Castalian springs, as few others _could_. But of this more on another occasion. My wife desires to add _her_ most cordial remembrances to her departed husband"s highly-esteemed friend; and, hoping for a speedy answer,
"I remain, your most obedient humble servant,
"S. R. STIEFEL, Schulrath."
The human heart is shielded by _great_ sorrows from the impact of _small_ ones--by the waterfall from the rain.[111] Firmian forgot everything in remembering, suffering, and crying out to himself, "Thus I have lost thee for ever, wholly. Oh! _thou_ wert good always, it was _I_ who was not. Be happier than thy solitary friend whom thou mournest justly every Sunday." He now cast all the blame of his bygone matrimonial lawsuits upon his own satirical whimsies, and ascribed the failure of his crop of happiness to his own ungenial climate.
But in this he was doing himself greater injustice than he had formerly done Lenette. I mean to make the world a present of my thoughts on this subject, on the spot. Love is the Perihelion of the fair s.e.x; nay, it is the transit of every one of those Venuses over the sun of the ideal world. At the epoch of this "higher style" of their souls, they love _everything_ that _we_ love, even the sciences, and the whole _best_ world within the breast--and they despise what _we_ despise, even clothes and news. In this spring of theirs these nightingales go on singing until the summer solstice; the wedding-day is their longest day. Then the devil runs away with--not exactly everything, but something every day. The bast-band of wedlock binds the poetic wings, and the bridal-bed is (for the imagination, the phantasy), an Engelsburg, and prison-cell, with bread and water. During the honeymoon I have often followed these poor birds of paradise, or peac.o.c.ks of Psyche, and in this moulting-season of theirs picked up the glorious wing and tail-feathers which they have dropped; and then, when a husband has fancied he has married a naked crow, I have held out the bunch of feathers to him. Why is this? For this reason: marriage overlays the poetical world with the rind of the actual; as (according to Descartes) our earthly sphere is a sun covered over with a dirty crust, or bark. The hands of everyday labour are unwieldy, hard, and full of indurations, and find much difficulty in going on holding, or drawing the delicate threads of the woof of the ideal. Hence it is that among the upper cla.s.ses (where, instead of work-_rooms_ there are only little work-_baskets_, and where the little spinning-wheels are turned on the lap with the finger, and where love still endures after marriage--often even for the husband) the wedding-ring is not so often, as among the lower orders, a Gyges-ring, which renders books and the arts of music, poetry, painting, and dancing--invisible. Upon high places plants of all sorts, and particularly female plants, have more vigour and aroma. A woman has not, as a man has, the power of protecting the outer side of her inner air-and-magic-castles against rough weather. What then is she to hold to? Her husband. He ought always to stand beside the liquid silver of the female spirit with a spoon, and keep skimming off the sc.u.m which gathers on it, that the silver-glittering sheen of the ideal may always keep bright and shining. But then there are two sorts of husbands--Arcadians, or lyric-poets of life, who love for ever, like Rousseau, when their hair is grey--and these are not to be controlled or comforted when they can no longer see any gold on the feminine anthology (bound with gilt edges) because they have turned the leaves of the little book over one by one, (as is the case with all gilt-edged books). Secondly, there are shepherd-hinds and sheep-smearers, I mean master-singers by profession, men-of-business, who thank G.o.d when the _enchantress_ turns, at last, like other witches, into a grumbling _house_-cat, keeping down the vermin.
n.o.body has to suffer more anxiety and alarm, combined with tedium and ennui (and therefore I intend some day to awaken the pity of my readers for this very condition, in a comic biography) than a portly, energetic, pushing, pompous, ponderous _Ba.s.so_ of a "business-man," who finds himself (like the elephants in Rome of old) constrained to dance on the slack-rope of love; and whose deportment and play of feature, in the circ.u.mstances, _I_ think more like those of a marmot than anything else, when the warmth of a room has awakened him from his winter"s sleep, and he finds he can"t get properly into the knack of moving. It is only with widows (who wish less to be loved than to be married) that a weighty office-holder of this sort can begin his romance at the place where all the novel-writers leave theirs off--namely, at the altar-steps. A man, built after this simplest of styles, would find a great weight lifted from his heart if anybody would only love his shepherdess _for_ him till such time as he should have nothing to do but go and be married; and no one would have greater pleasure in taking up this burden, or cross, from them than myself. I have often thought of announcing in the public newspapers (except that I was afraid it would be looked upon as a joke) that I was prepared to swear Platonic, eternal love to any number of endurable girls (whom men of business might not even have _time_ to love), and make them all the necessary love-declarations as plenipotentiary of the bridegroom-elect--in a word, to lead them on my arm, as _subst.i.tutus sine spe succedendi_, or _cavalier de societe_, athwart the whole of the unlevel land of love, till, on the frontier, I should hand over my charge, duly prepared, to the bridegroom; which would be lovemaking, rather than marrying, by amba.s.sador. If, according to this _systema a.s.sistantiae_, there should be any one who would care to employ the writer even during the honeymoon (when a certain amount of love may still be expected to crop up), he must take care to establish all the necessary conditions in good time, beforehand.
In Siebenkaes"s Lenette (from no fault of his) the ideal isle of the blest had sunk away, miles deep, in an instant, at the very marriage altar. The husband could in nowise either help or hinder this. On the whole, dear Mr. Education-Counsellor Campe, you really should not strike so hard upon your writing-desk with your school birch-rod whenever a solitary she-frog croaks out something or other out of the nearest marsh, which is capable of being sent to an almanack. Ah me!
don"t tear away from the good creatures (who _do_ put the loveliest dreams, all full of fantasy-flowers, into this empty life of ours) the terribly short dream of a delicate, sentimental love. They will be awakened to reality only too soon without that, and neither you nor I will be able to put them to sleep again, let us write as much as we choose.
Siebenkaes wrote off that day a brief and hurried reply to the Schulrath, saying "he was extremely glad that he had stood to the will, and the laws, and enclosed him a power of attorney to enable him to draw the money. Only he entreated him, as a great scholar and man of letters (one of a cla.s.s who of ten, perhaps, suppose they understand matters of business better than they really do), to put the whole affair into a lawyer"s hands to be transacted, inasmuch as _Jus_ is of little use without jurists--nay, often not Of very much even _with_ them. To _review_ "Programmes" he had no time, let alone to _read_ them; and he sent his kind regards to his wife."
It is not displeasing to me that (as I perceive) my readers have all discovered of themselves that the ghost, or supernatural bow-wow, and mumbo-jumbo,[112] who had got the trust money out of the Heimlicher"s clutches more effectually than the whole _posse-comitatus_ of the Court of Exchequer, was none other than Heinrich Leibgeber, who had availed himself of his resemblance to the departed Siebenkaes to play the part of _Revenant_. I need not, therefore, tell the reader what he knows already.
When one has at last managed to creep up a steep Alp with the hands of a tree-frog, one very often finds that, what one looks down at from the summit is a fresh yawning abyss. Firmian saw a new one under his feet; he had to abandon the resolution he had taken. I mean, he did not now dare to say a word to Nathalie about his resurrection from the charnel-house--his immortality after death. Alas! the happiness of his Lenette, who (in the utmost innocence) had two husbands, would then be hanging on the tip of a tongue. The blame would be his, the misery Lenette"s. No, no (he said); Time will, by slow degrees, lay dust upon my pale image in Nathalie"s kind heart, and draw the colours out of it.
In brief, he kept silence. The proud Nathalie kept silence also.
In this terrible position of matters, face to face with the hard, eternal _knot_ of the drama, he pa.s.sed his anxious hours upon the stage. The raven-flight of cares and sorrows cast their flitting shadows over every charm and beauty of the spring, and poisonous dreams fell upon his sleep like mildew. Every dream-night cut the falling planetary-knot, and his heart along with it. How would Fate rescue and recover him from this poison-vapour, this azote-gas, of anguish and anxiety? How would it cure the finger-worm in his ring finger? By taking his arm off. One evening, to wit, shortly before bedtime, the Count was as confidential with him as a man of the world can ever be.
He had something very pleasant to tell him, he said; only he must be allowed to say something beforehand, by way of a preface or introduction. It struck him--he went on to say, that, now that his Inspector had entered upon his duties, he was no longer quite so gay and full of humour as he had found him to be of old, but rather (if he might speak openly) downcast at times, and over-sentimental. Yet he had formerly said himself (but this was the _other_ Leibgeber) that he would rather hear a man swear at a mischance than lament over it; and that one might have his feet sticking in the winter, and his nose in the spring, and smell a flower, though in the midst of snow. "I forgive it, at once, for perhaps I guess the reason of it," he added. But his forgiveness was really not quite genuine. For, like all the great, to him strength of feeling, even of a loving sort--but still more, of a sorrowful--was an annoyance; and a strong handclasp of friendship was almost as bad as a crunch on the toes. He demanded of pain that it should pa.s.s before him with a smile--of wickedness and evil, that they should pa.s.s him by laughing, or, at all events, laughed _at_--as, indeed, the coldest men of the world are like the physical man, whose highest temperature is about the region of the diaphragm.[113]
Consequently, the previous Leibgeber--that storm-windy, but, at the same time, serene blue sky--naturally suited the Count better than this so-called Leibgeber. But how differently from us who _read_ this little reproach quietly, did Siebenkaes listen to it! These _solar eclipses_ of his Leibgeber (which really were not even so much as _sun spots_ belonging to _him_, but merely _apparent_ shadows cast on him by Siebenkaes, by reason of the position he chanced to occupy) the latter reproached himself with as so many deadly sins against his friend, which he felt it absolutely necessary to confess and do penance for.
As the Count now went on to say, "This melancholy of yours can scarcely be caused altogether by grief at the loss of your friend Siebenkaes, because since his death you have never spoken to me of him with such warmth as when he was alive. Pardon me this frankness,"--a fresh pang at this shadowing of Leibgeber cut across his brow, and it was with difficulty that he could allow his patron to finish his explanation.
"But this is not a shortcoming in _my_ eyes, dear Leibgeber: on the contrary, it is an excellence. We ought not to go on eternally mourning for the dead; if we grieve at all, it should be for the living. And even the latter species of grief may come to an end with you next week, for then I expect my daughter, and" (he spoke here very deliberately) "her friend Nathalie with her. They have met _en route_." Siebenkaes sprang hastily up, stood speechless and motionless, held his hand before his eyes, not to hide them, but to keep the light out of them, so that he might look through, and follow the course of, the cloud-ma.s.ses of thought which were piled one over another and rolling in all directions, ere he should give his answer.
But the Count--misconstruing him (as Leibgeber) in all points, and ascribing his sentimental metamorphosis to Nathalie"s account, and the fact of his being deprived of her--begged him merely to hear him out before speaking, and to accept his a.s.surance that he would be delighted to do everything in his power to retain his daughter"s lovely friend always in the neighbourhood. Heavens! what thousandfold entanglement the Count made of a matter so wholly simple!
Here Siebenkaes, stormed at from fresh points of the compa.s.s, had to beg for a moment to think--for there were now _three_ souls at stake--but he had scarcely taken one or two hasty steps across the room, when he stood firm again, and said to the Count, and to himself, "Yes, I shall do what is right." Then he begged the Count to give his word of honour that he would keep inviolate a secret which he would confide to him, and which neither related to, nor would injure, himself or his daughter in the slightest degree. "In that case why should I not?" answered the Count, to whom the discovery of a secret was as the clearing away of a thick woodland before a fine view.
Then Firmian opened his heart, his life, and everything, like a stream let loose and dashing into a new channel, not yet to be measured with a glance. The Count several times detained him by fresh misunderstandings, because he had only prea.s.sumed, out of his own imagination, a love on Nathalie"s part for the real Leibgeber, and had never heard from any one of her real love for Siebenkaes.
And now the astonished Count, in his turn, astonished the Advocate; and, of all the many faces which in such a case he might have put on--faces offended, angry, startled, embarra.s.sed, delighted, cold--he only showed the Inspector an exceedingly contented one. It only particularly pleased him, he said, that he _had_ observed so many little matters which rather vexed him, and that in certain points he had _not_ thought over-highly of Leibgeber; but what delighted him most was his good fortune at possessing, in this manner, a _double_ Leibgeber, and the knowledge that the absent one was not sorrowing for a dead friend.
Let no one be surprised at the Count"s maintaining his good-humour and serenity who has seen a bright order-star sparkle on an aged, and extinguished, breast. When our old man of the world beheld the little shuttle of this chain of friends flying to and fro between love and sacrifice on either side; when he held in his hand the bright Raphael-tapestry of friendship which it wove, and looked at it closely, there came to him the enjoyment of _something new_, for the first time for many years. So that, up to this point, he had been sitting in his front box before a living comic-historical drama, of which he himself unravelled the plot, and which could be performed all over again in his head at any given moment. Moreover, his Inspector had become a new being for him, full of fresh entertainment, inasmuch as he had gone off the stage, changed his dress and re-entered as the pseudo-deceased Siebenkaes; and could, in the future, tell him as much as he pleased of the narrator. In this way both the friends had become flatteringly-precious to him, by reason of the dependent interest in him with which they had interwoven the bond which bound their souls.
He who has tasted the bliss of sticking to the truth can understand the new delight with which Siebenkaes could now pour himself out unrestrained concerning everything--himself and Henry and Nathalie--inasmuch as it was not till now that he felt the full weight of the burden he had got relieved of--that of working the light, jest-falsehood of a moment into a yearly comedy, in 365 acts. With what ease he explained to the Count that, before Nathalie"s arrival (whom he could neither undeceive, nor go on deceiving), he must fly, and that straight to Kuhschnappel. As the Count listened, he told him all the reasons urging him to go; longing to see his tombstone, and unhallowed grave, so as to do penitence and expiation; longing to see Lenette, unseen, from afar, perhaps her child near; longing to hear from eye-witnesses a minute account of her happy married life with Stiefel (for Stiefel"s letter had wafted the flower ashes of bygone days into his eyes, and opened the leaves of the sleeping-flower of his conjugal love); longing to wander, romantically (erect now, and with his burden off), about the scenes of his old oppressed life; longing to hear, in the market-town, something of his Leibgeber, who had been there so recently; longing to celebrate August, the month of his death, in solitude--the month when it had been with him as with the vine, whose leaves are taken off in August, that the sun may shine more warmly on the grapes.
In three words, for why give many reasons--since when once there is a _will_, there can never be any lack of _reasons_--he set off.
CHAPTER XXV., AND LAST.
THE JOURNEY--THE CHURCHYARD--THE SPECTRE--THE END OF THE TROUBLE, AND OF THE BOOK.
I see more clearly every day that I and the other 999,999,999 human beings,[114] are nothing but so much skin-and-bone stuffed (like cooked chickens), full of a ma.s.s of incongruities, contradictions, inconsistencies, irremediable insufficiencies, and resolves, of which every one has its antagonist muscle (_musc. antagonista_). We do not contradict other people half as often as ourselves. This last Chapter is a fresh proof of it. Up to this point, the reader and I have been labouring together with the sole object of finishing this Book, and now that we see the sh.o.r.e, and have all but reached it, we are both sorry for it. I shall, at all events, be doing something--the most that I can--if I conceal, and hide away (so to speak) the end of it, as we do the end of a garden, and say several things which will help to lengthen out the work a little.
The Inspector sprang out into the open country, among the corn-ears, fortified with a muscular, full breast--the Alp of silence and deception no longer weighed upon him as it had done. The avalanche which had overwhelmed his life had melted to a third of its original size Tinder the sun of his present fair fortune. His electric Leyden-jar coating with a better income, and even the fact of his having a great deal more to do, had charged him with fire and courage.
His appointment was a mountain permeated by so many veins of silver and gold, that even in this first year of it he had found he was enabled to send sundry anonymous contributions to the Prussian Widows" Fund, so as to make amends for a good half of his fraud upon it, and see his way to finally clearing it off altogether. I should not lay this act of duty before the public gaze were it not that Kritter, in Gottingen--who reckons that this fund will be exhausted in the year 1804--or even calculators more moderate in their results, who think its extreme unction will be received in 1825, might take occasion, from these Flower-pieces of mine, to lay its death wholly at the Inspector"s door.
If this should prove to be the case, I should very deeply regret having alluded to the subject, in the remotest manner, in my Flower-pieces.
He did not take his way by Hof or Bayreuth, or any of the old romantic journey-roads. He dreaded lest the hand of Fate (which sows behind the clouds) might bring his phantom-body before Nathalie"s eyes. And yet he hoped a little that this said hand might bring him just the least bit in contact with his Leibgeber, since _he_ had been so recently cruising in these waters. As a matter of course, he had embodied himself, _en route_, in the said Leibgeber"s shirt, jacket, and complete exterior--the same which he had swopped with him in the inn at Gefrees and this costume was a mirror which continually showed him the absent one"s image. A "Saufinder," like Leibgeber"s, who lifted his head up to him in a forest-cottage, sent a throb of joy through his heart; but the dog"s nose knew him as little as did the dog"s master.
And yet, the nearer he drew to the hills and woods, behind whose Chinese churchyard-wall stood his two empty houses--his grave and his old lodging--the tighter slid Anxiety draw her drag-net about his heart. It was not the fear of being recognised; this, by reason of his resemblance to Leibgeber (particularly in his present dress), was an impossibility. Nay, people would sooner have taken him for his own wraith and Prophet Samuel than for Siebenkaes still in the body. But, besides love and antic.i.p.ation, there was a something which made him anxious--a something which once hemmed in and oppressed myself when I came back among the Herculanean antiquities of my own childhood. There clasped themselves once more around my breast the iron bands and rings which had crushed it in my childhood--a time when the little human creature is still tremblingly helpless and comfortless in presence of the sorrows and sufferings of life and death--when we stand between the footstool we have cast away, the handcuffs and ankle-chains which we have burst asunder, and the great sighing and singing tree of philosophy which is to guide us to the free, open battle-arena and coronation city of this earth. In every thicket round which Firmian had wandered in his poverty-stricken, miserable winter-autumn, he saw the cast-off skins of the snakes sticking, which in former days had twined themselves about his feet. Remembrance (that after-winter of his hard, cruel days) fell into this lovelier time of his life, and the combination of these dissimilar feelings--the clasp of the old fetters, and the breeze of freedom of the present--generated a third sensation, which was bitter-sweet, as well as anxious and uneasy.
When it was twilight, he walked slowly and observantly through the streets, which were strewn with scattered ears of corn. Every child he met going home with the supper-beer, every familiar dog, and every well-remembered cling of a bell, was full of fossil-impressions of joy-roses and pa.s.sion-flowers, the originals of which were all fallen to dust. As he pa.s.sed the house where he used to live, he heard two stocking-looms clattering and rattling there.
He took up his quarters in the Lizard Inn, which cannot have been the grandest hotel in the town, inasmuch as the Advocate ate his beef on a pewter-platter, which (to judge by the marks and _stigmata_ of a facsimile of his own knife which it bore), seemed to have once been enrolled as a soldier of his own p.a.w.ned-plate-militia regiment.
However, the inn had this advantage--that Firmian could occupy the little room, number seven, on the third story, and there establish a star-observatory, or mast-head crow"s-nest, which commanded Stiefel"s study just opposite, at a somewhat lower elevation. But his Lenette never came to the window. Ah! if he had seen her, he would have knelt on the floor for sheer sorrow. Not till it was quite dark did he see his old friend Stiefel, who came and held a printed sheet--probably a proof of the "German Programme Advertiser"--against the red western sky, it being too dark to see it inside. He was surprised to see the Schulrath look so worn and bowed--and he had a c.r.a.pe on his arm too.
"Can my Lenette"s poor baby be dead?" he thought.
When it was quite late he crept, all trembling, to that garden, whence we do not all return, and which is bounded by the hanging Eden-Garden of the second life. In the churchyard he was safe from the approach of spectators, thanks to the ghost-stories by means of which Leibgeber had forced his inheritance out of his guardian"s clutches. On his way to his own vacant, subterranean bed, he pa.s.sed by the grave on which (while it was black, it was gra.s.s-grown now) he had placed the flower-garland which he had _meant_ to give Lenette a pleasant surprise with, though it _did_ only cause her an unexpected sorrow. At last he came to the bed-curtains of that grave-siesta, his own tombstone, and he read the inscription with a cold shudder. "Suppose this stone trap-door were lying upon your face," he said to himself, "building you in from the wide heavens!"--and he thought what clouds, what coldness, and night, reign around the two poles of life, as about the poles of our earth--about the beginning and the end of man. He considered it a very wicked thing to have aped the last hour--the c.r.a.pe-streamer of a long, dark cloud was over the moon, his heart was tender and anxious; when suddenly a something with colour in it, near his grave, seized his attention, and caused a revulsion in his soul.
For there, close beside it, was a fresh grave, quite recently covered in, surrounded by a painted wooden-frame, not unlike a bedstead. And upon these painted boards Firmian (as long as his streaming eyes allowed him) read what follows:--
"Here reposes in G.o.d, Wendeline Lenette Stiefel, born Engelkraut of Augspurg. Her first husband was the lamented Poor"s Advocate, F. St.
Siebenkaes. On the 20th of October, 1786, she entered, for the second time, into holy matrimony with the Schulrath Stiefel, of this place, and after three-quarters of a year of a peaceful union with him, she fell asleep in childbed, on the 22nd of July, 1787, and lies here, with her little still-born daughter, awaiting a joyful resurrection."
"Oh! poor creature, poor creature!" More he could not _think_. Now--now that her day of life was better and warmer, the earth must swallow her, and she take nothing with her but a hand roughened by labour, a face furrowed with the death-bed sickness, and a contented, but empty heart, which, hemmed down among the hollow-ways and mine-shafts of this world, had seen scarcely any stars or flowery meadows. Her troubles had gradually clouded over her life so thickly and darkly, that no picturing fancy could brighten and purify them by the colour-play of poesy, just as no rainbow is possible when the whole sky is black with rain. "Why did I vex you so often, and pain you, even by my death, and be so unforgiving to all your little innocent crotchets?" he said, weeping bitterly. An earth-worm came twining out of the grave, and he threw it forcibly away, as though it had come straight from the beloved cold heart; although that which satiates this creature is what satiates _us_ also at last--EARTH. He thought of the child (mouldering to dust) which laid its thin, withered arms about his soul, as if it had been his own, and to which Death had given as much as a G.o.d gave to Endymion--sleep, eternal youth, and immortality. At length he tottered away from this place of mourning with his heart wearied, not lightened, by his tears.
When he went back to the inn, a woman with a harp was singing in the public room (a boy accompanying her on a flute) a song, of which the _ritournelle_ was, "dead is dead, and gone is gone." It was the same woman who had been playing and singing on the New Year"s eve when his Lenette, now departed and at peace, had buried her face in the handkerchief, weeping and desolate. Oh! the burning arrows of these music-tones went hissing through his heart--the poor soul had no shield. "I tortured her terribly in these days" (he went on constantly saying). "_How_ she sighed! _How_ she kept silence! Ah! if you could but see me now from on high, now that you are happier! If you could but behold this bleeding soul of mine--not that you should forgive me, no, only that I might have the consolation of suffering something for your sake! Oh! how different would I be to you _now_!"
And this is what we all say when we bury some one whom we have tortured; but on that very same evening of mourning we go and dart the javelin deep into some other breast which is still warm. Oh! weaklings that we are, strong only in resolves! If that form, now resolved into its elements, whose mouldering wounds (which we ourselves inflicted) we expiate with tears of penitence and warm resolves to do better, were to come back to us to-day, new-created, and in the brightest bloom of youth, it would be but for the first week that we should clasp the newfound soul, more fondly loved than ever, to our hearts; and then we should apply the old martyrdom instruments to it again, just as of old.
That we should do this, even to our beloved dead, I deduce from the fact (to say nothing of our rude unkindness to the living) that, in our dreams, when those whom we have lost revisit us again, we act over again everything which we now repent. I do not say this to deprive any mourner of the consolation of repentance, or of the thought, that his love for the lost one is purer and fonder than before, but to lessen the pride which may be grounded upon the repentance and the data of feelings.
Later in the night, when Firmian saw the face (gnawed and sunken with sorrow) of his old friend (who had now so little left to him), looking up to heaven, as if seeking there among the stars his friend of whom he was bereaved, sorrow pressed the last tear from his anguished heart, and in the madness of grief he cast the blame upon himself of his friend"s sorrow; jut as if the latter had not a great deal to thank him for in the first instance, before setting about pardoning him.
He awoke in all the exhaustion of sorrow, i.e. in that _bled-away_ condition of the feelings which at last resolves itself into a sweet melting-away and longing for death. For he had lost everything--even what was _not_ buried. He dared not go to the Schulrath for fear of being recognised, or, at the very lowest, staking upon a most dangerous chance the peace of mind of that most innocent creature, who would never be able to reconcile it to either his conscience or his sense of honour, that he had married a woman whose husband was still alive.
But he could go and see Meerbitzer, the hairdresser, with, less danger of discovering himself, and could carry away from him a great dowry of news. Moreover, the sickle of Death had cut through all his _other_ chains and knots, together with his bonds of love. He would be doing no injury to any one but himself if he took off his mask of death, and showed himself unmouldered to other people, nay, even to the sorrowing Nathalie; particularly as on very beautiful evenings, and whenever he did any good action, his conscience claimed the arrear-interest of the unpaid debt of truth, refusing to grant any further letters of respite.
Also his soul swore, as a G.o.d swears to his own self, that he would only stay there this one day, and then never come back.
The Friseur knew in a moment, from the lameness, that he could be n.o.body but the Vaduz Inspector, Leibgeber. Like posterity, he decked his own lodger, Siebenkaes, with the richest of rosemary-garlands, and declared that these ragam.u.f.fins of stocking-weavers whom he had got upstairs now were not to be spoken of in the same day with poor lamented Mr. Siebenkaes. The whole house creaked when they rattled and stamped in their upstairs-room. He then called attention to the circ.u.mstance that the departed had taken his wife away to him within the s.p.a.ce of a year and day; and dwelt on the fact that she had never forgotten the Meerbitzer"s house, but had often looked in of an evening in her widow"s weeds (which she had been buried in according to her desire), and spoken with them about all her various vicissitudes, and about her new life. "They lived together just like two children," the hairdresser said, "Stiefel and she." This conversation, the house, and his old rooms, so noisy now, were all so many waste places of his ruined Jerusalem. A stocking-loom now stood where his writing-table used to be, and so on. All his questions about the past were so many conflagration-relics, collected for the fresh building of his burnt-down pleasure-chateaux from out their Ph[oe]nix ashes. Hope is the morning Aurora of joy, and memory its red evening sky; but the latter is terribly apt to drop down in grey dew or rain, with no colour left in it. The blue day, which the red sky gives promise of, _does_, indeed, break in brightness; but it is in another world, where there is another sun. Meerbitzer unknowingly cleft, deep and wide, the split into which he grafted the sundered flower-twigs of the bygone days on to Firmian"s heart; and when, finally, his wife related how, when Lenette had taken the Communion of the Sick, she said to the evening preacher, "I _shall_ go to my Firmian when I am dead, shall I not?"
Firmian averted his breast from this blind dagger-thrust, and hurried out into the open air, that he might not encounter any one to whom he should be constrained to lie.
Yet he could not but long for some human creature, even were one to be found nowhere else but beneath his lowliest roof of all--in the churchyard. The electrically-charged atmosphere of the evening brooded and hatched melancholy longings of every kind; the sky was overspread with scattered unripe fragments of a thunder-cloud, and in the west horizon a muttering storm had begun, scattering its lighted pitch-rings and full-charged clouds down upon unknown lands. He went home; but as he pa.s.sed by the tall railings of Blaise"s garden, he fancied he saw a figure like Nathalie, dressed in black, glide into the arbour. And then, for the first time, he turned his mind to something which Meerbitzer had said about a lady in mourning, who had come a few days before, and wished to be shown all over the house, lingering particularly in Siebenkaes"s old rooms, and making a great many inquiries. That she should have come out of her road on her way to Vaduz was by no means unlikely; indeed, it was very consistent with her romantic turn of mind, particularly as she had never seen Siebenkaes"s former home, and the Inspector had not answered her letter--as Rosa was married, and Blaise reconciled to her (since he had seen the ghost)--and the month of Firmian"s death would naturally suggest to her a visit to his last resting-place.