CHAPTER IV.
BELLA'S LEGACY.
When the Doctor came with the Professorin, he was highly rejoiced that Adams had left the house, and still more that the Major was able to sit up in bed, and smoke his long pipe. After enjoining upon him great quiet, he went with the two women into the sitting-room, and there informed them that he had reason to be proud; for Bella had written to him from Antwerp, and to no one else. He read the letter to them which was as follows,—
"You alone are no puppet; you never made a pretence of friendship for me, and therefore you shall have a keepsake. I give you my parrot. The parrot is the masterpiece of creation: he says nothing but what he is taught. Adieu!
"BELLA."
The ladies exchanged glances of surprise; and Fräulein Milch rejoiced the Doctor by saying, for once in her life, an unkind word; for she could not help expressing pleasure that Frau Bella had come to such an end. The Doctor, on the other hand, said, in a tone of complaint,—
"I feel a want now that she is gone. I miss in her a sort of barometer of thought and an interesting object of study. Strange! now that this woman is gone we see, for the first time, how widely her influence was extended,—more widely perhaps than was her due. But still the story pleases me, as a proof that there still exist persons of courage and strong will."
"You like eccentricity," suggested the Professorin.
"Oh, no! What seems eccentric to others appears to me the only natural and consistent course, Bella could not have acted otherwise than she has: this very step was a part of her heroism. Your son can tell you that I suspected something of this sort before it happened. There is much in common between Bella and Sonnenkamp. Both are quick and clear in judgment where others are concerned; but, when self is touched, they are tyrannical, malicious, and self-asserting. And, now that she is fairly gone, I may say that she has fled a murderess: to be sure, she did not kill Clodwig with poison or dagger, but she smote him to the heart with killing words and thoughts. He confessed to me that it was so, and now I may repeat it."
"I am confounded," said the Professorin. "With all her culture, how were such things possible?"
"That was just it," broke in the Doctor delighted. "All this intellectual life was nothing to Frau Bella: she found herself in it, she knew not how. She had to destroy something, or what would she have done with all this culture? Formerly there was hypocrisy only in religion; now there is hypocrisy in education. But, no: Frau Bella was no hypocrite, neither was she really ill-natured; she was simply crude."
"Crude?"
"Yes. Thought of others educates at once the heart and the mind; Frau Bella thought only and always of herself; of what she had to say and to feel."
"Do you think," asked the Professorin with some hesitation, "that these two persons can be happy together for a single hour?"
"Certainly not, according to our ideas of happiness. They have no real affection for each other: pride and disappointment, and a desire to shock the world, have induced them to make their escape together. There is one other motive which persons like us cannot enter into. I tried for a long time to discover it, and believe at last that I have succeeded: it is the consciousness of beauty. I am a beauty: that is a principle on which a whole system is founded. Other people are only made for the purpose of seeing and admiring the beauty. Bella committed an act of treason against herself when she married Clodwig: she could not have done it except in a moment of forgetfulness of this great principle. But how can we judge such people aright? The longer I live, the more clearly I see that human beings are not alike: they are of different species."
"You want to provoke us by heresies."
"By no means: that is the reason why this anti-slavery fever is distasteful to me. This claiming equality for all men is a wrong."
"A wrong?"
"Yes. Men are not all the same kind of beings; one is a nightingale that sings on a tree; another is a frog that croaks in the marsh. Now, to require of the frog that he should sing up in a tree is a wrong, a perversion of Nature. Let the frog alone in his marsh, he is very well off there, and to him and his wife his song sounds as sweet as that of the bird to his mate. Men are of different kinds."
The Major called from his room to know what the Doctor was talking so loudly and excitedly about. Fräulein Milch soothed him by telling him it was nothing for a sick man to hear, though she confessed that they had been talking of Bella. As she re-entered the sitting-room, a messenger arrived from Villa Eden with intelligence which summoned the Doctor and the Professorin thither instantly: Frau Ceres was dangerously ill.
The Doctor and the Professorin made all haste back to the Villa.