CHAPTER XVIII.
Who knows how long we can! Perhaps not long; perhaps but a short, far too short a time. It is a melancholy word, but unhappily the right word to open the record of this part of my life which I begin with a hesitating hand. It was not my intention, when I determined to write this narrative, to cast any further gloom upon the spirits of my readers, who have in all likelihood themselves borne their own share of life's sorrows. It was not my aim to dampen their courage in life's battles, when I related how the youth had erred by his folly, and how he suffered the penalty; I rather hoped to infuse into them the spirit of delight in active life, the faculty of enduring and forbearing; and thus we may together live over in memory the hard fortune which was yet to be the lot of the man. The reader, who has by this time perhaps grown to be my friend, may follow me without fear on my path of life.
And first into the room of the commerzienrath, which I entered the following morning at ten o'clock with a heart possibly not perfectly at ease, but not at all fearful. But I would not have advised any timid person to cross this man's path this morning, as he ran up and down his room like a madman, then stopped before me and surveyed me with infuriated looks, again raged about the room, and then stopped and cried:
"So! You want to marry my daughter, do you?"
"It is a wish which had nothing alarming about it ten years ago, Herr Commerzienrath. Do you not remember, on the deck of the Penguin, the day we went out to the oyster-beds?"
"Do not try any impertinence with me! I ask you once more; you--you have the audacity to aim at being my son-in-law?"
"Excuse me, Herr Commerzienrath; your first question was whether I wanted to marry your daughter."
"That is the same thing."
"You are quite right; and therefore you would perhaps do better Herr Commerzienrath, to consider me now your son-in-law--or we will say, son-in-law that is to be--and treat me accordingly."
I said this in a very grave firm tone, which I knew from experience seldom failed of its effect upon the really pusillanimous nature of the man. Instinctively he stepped back a couple of paces out of my reach, seated himself in his chair, adopted a sneering tone instead of his air of contemptuous indignation, and said in his driest business voice:
"I understand then, Herr George Hartwig, that you do me the honor to ask the hand of my daughter Hermine. The first points then to be considered, are the nature of your pretensions, the position you occupy in the world, and, in a word, your personal relations generally. You are, as far as I know, the son of a subaltern official, a young man who in his youth did no good, and for a horrible crime was punished with eight years----"
"Seven years, Herr Commerzienrath----"
"Counting the preliminary detention, and disciplinary punishment, eight years in the penitentiary----"
"Imprisonment, Herr Commerzienrath----"
"Who, thanks to the remissness or connivance of the authorities----"
My papers are all in order, Herr Commerzienrath----
"Learned the rudiments of blacksmithing for a few months in my factory, and now with the respectable capital of----"
"Fifty thalers cash, and a hundred and sixty thalers outstanding debts which I shall never collect----"
"And, I may add with future prospects corresponding; for as to what you told me day before yesterday of his highness's proposition to you, I do not attach any weight to them at all--you then, such a man as this, with such a past, such a position, such means, and such prospects, desire to marry the daughter of Commerzienrath Streber."
"To have your permission to address her, Herr Commerzienrath."
"My future father-in-law shot from under his bushy brows a searching look at my face, which probably assured him that his attempt to humiliate me availed as little as his former attempt to intimidate. He had to open another register. He rested his bald forehead in his hand, enveloped himself in a thick black cloud of silence, from which he suddenly snapped at me with the sharply spoken question:
"But if I were really not the millionaire, not the wealthy man you and every one have hitherto considered me--how then, sir; how then?"
The commerzienrath had sprung to his feet, and was standing before me, as I had taken my seat fronting him, with his hands on his back, bending forward, and his keen eyes piercing into mine.
"The circumstances would then be, as far as I am concerned, precisely what they were before; especially as your vaunted wealth has long been a matter of serious doubt with me, Herr Commerzienrath."
His piercing glances plunged into watery and uncertain mist, as he threw himself back in his chair, smote the arms of it with his hands, broke out into a crowing laugh ending in a coughing-fit, and between laughing and coughing cried:
"That is too good!--this young fellow--matter of serious doubt with him--long been so--it is too good! really too good!"
The coughing fit became so alarming that I sprang up and began to pat the old man's back. Suddenly he seized my hands and said in a lamentable lachrymose tone:
"George, my dear boy, it is my only, child! You do not know what that is; the comfort, the joy of a feeble old man who may die to-morrow! And you will not even wait those few hours? Oh, it is cruel, cruel! Have I lived to see this!"
Cassandra hit the mark indeed when she said that "it was hard to fathom the wiles of this labyrinthine old man." He had kept his grand stroke for the last. If I could not be intimidated or humiliated, I might perhaps be melted; and I was really touched, and said, while I pressed the stumpy withered hands I was holding in my own--"I will not rob you of your child."
"You really will not? God bless you!" cried the commerzienrath, springing from his chair as if touched by a galvanic battery. "You are a man of your word: I have always known you such. I hold you to your word."
"When you have heard the whole of it, Herr Commerzienrath. I say, I will not rob you of your child, because Hermine, though my wife, will not cease to love and to honor her father as she now does, and because you will gain a good son in me, whom you will have great need of if you are no longer wealthy, and in the other case perhaps still more. I think that I have already proven to you that I know other things besides the rudiments of blacksmithing, and perhaps enough to make up for my deficiency of fortune."
The "labyrinthine old man" gave me a look in which I plainly read that he had reached the end of his windings. It is very likely that at no time had he a serious intention flatly to reject my proposal, for I think I can safely say that as he had always lacked courage to offer any determined resistance to his proud wilful daughter assuredly he would not have had it now, when she confronted him with the triumphant knowledge that she was beloved with a love equal to her own. But it was not in the nature of the man to grant anything, be it what it might, as a man of an honorable spirit would do, frankly and squarely, without chaffering and higgling. So he had chaffered and higgled, and continued doing so, and hiding his real thoughts and wishes from me, until, when I parted from him after an hour's conversation, I was more in the dark as to all that I wished to know, and as to the state of his affairs, than I had been before. But one point I had attained and made clear beyond any possibility of a doubt, that Hermine was to be my wife; and as this, as every one will admit, was the main point, I thought I was not acting very inconsiderately if I took all the other contingencies very lightly indeed.
It had never been difficult for me to do this, even in the gloomiest passages of my life, and how could it be so now when I was so happy? How could the envious, hypocritically-friendly glances of others embitter my happiness when I saw the light of love and joy in Hermine's wonderful blue eyes? And yet such glances were not wanting, nor the phrases with which they are usually accompanied.
"I always knew it, and have often enough said to your late excellent father, my dear friend and colleague, that you would win distinction some day. Yes, yes, dear George--I may still call you by that old familiar name, may I not?--my prophecy has come to pass, though otherwise than I had expected. Well, well, so it had to be; and probably, all things considered, it is well that it is as it is. You have always been a good man whose hand was ever open to the distressed. You will not withdraw this generous hand from an old man who looks to you as his last hope?" And the steuerrath applied the finger on which glittered the immense signet to the inner corner of his left eye, and passed his cambric handkerchief over his pale aristocratic face.
"I have always held you up as a pattern to my Arthur," said the Born: "Do you not remember the times when you both went to school together and the teachers were always full of your praises? Ah! I can see you now, two wild high-spirited boys, always clinging faithfully together, and each ready to go through anything for the other. 'That it might always be so!' I often sighed from the depths of a mother's heart, for I felt how greatly my good easy-natured Arthur would need his strong thoughtful friend. My presentiment has become a reality. May heaven have heard my prayer; may you, dear George, never forget what he has once been to you; may you never forget the companion of your happy youth!"
And the Born pressed convulsively both my hands, and raised her face as near as possible to mine, as if she wished to afford me an opportunity once for all to gain a thorough knowledge of her whole apparatus of false hair, teeth, colors, expression and looks.
"I heard yesterday what a lucky fellow you are, as you have always been," said Arthur. "Lucky in everything, but luckiest of all with women. You could always turn them round your finger, you scamp. Don't you remember the dancing-lessons, and Annie Lachmund, Elise Kohl, and Emilie? Ha! ha! ha! Emilie! Don't you remember the quarrel we had about her on the Penguin? Poor girl! There she goes, arm in arm with Elise, bewailing the shipwreck of her hopes. I shall have to take up with the poor thing myself: an ex-lieutenant, ex-secretary of legation, who is also ex in pretty much everything else, must naturally be content with anything."
And Arthur laughed bitterly, smote his brow with his fist, and added that though he might not be worth much, he supposed he was worth as much powder as would end his miseries.
Emilie Heckepfennig had been for departing the next morning and fleeing the sight of the traitor, but remained notwithstanding, either because the scene of her ill-fortune had more attractions for her than she was disposed to admit, or else because the justizrath, who had not yet returned from Uselin, had written to her that she must on no account leave until he returned. So in the meantime the lorn maiden went about as if she was to serve the most sentimental of artists as a model for a resignation, leaning perpetually upon the arm of her friend, so that one could not enough admire the physical strength of the latter lady, who, as well known, had been pining into the grave for twenty years. At times she looked at me with the eyes of a dying gazelle, and at others cast me a look in which was plainly written "You will repent it some day."
That I did not misinterpret the meaning of this glance, I was convinced by a conversation to which the justizrath in a mysteriously confidential way invited me a few days after his return. The worthy man shook my hand again and again, assured me that my great coup, as he phrased it, would make no alteration in his friendship, then rubbed up the crest of hair which stood erect upon his head like a cock's-comb, assumed an important air--I knew this air well from the time of my old examination--and said:
"Young man! Excuse me--I mean, my dear young friend! Young as you are, life has already taught you that everything has two sides; and that all is by no means gold that glitters. If you will allow an old and true friend of your family to give you a counsel which it is my most sincere belief you will do well to follow, and which in any event is honestly meant, accept the proposal that his highness has made you, under any condition! under any condition!"
He wished to leave me after saying this, but I held him back and said: "You must feel, Herr Justizrath, that I am compelled to ask you for a more definite explanation of advice which strikes me as rather singular, coming from you."
"Ask me nothing more," said the justizrath, with a deprecatory gesture.
"You have asked me in your time so many things, and so much more than was agreeable to me, that a little retaliation may be allowed me, I think," I answered smiling.
"Would you ask an old lawyer to reveal business secrets intrusted to him professionally?" said the justizrath, and the cock's-comb trembled with the conflict of his feelings.
I was resolved not to be put off in this way, and I said:
"I will meet you half-way, Herr Justizrath. I have reasons for believing that the commerzienrath's affairs are far from being so prosperous as is commonly believed; and if you are so discreet as to withhold the grounds of advice which can only have one interpretation, the prince did not exercise the same reticence when he made me the offer you allude to."
The justizrath looked as if he was himself a sacrifice to his own inquisitorial genius, and saw no escape but in making a full and free confession.
"I will tell you but a single fact," he said. "Last Friday the commerzienrath went with me into the city to raise money on his paper to the extent of about a hundred thousand thalers, and I ran with these from post to pillar, until at last Moses in the Water street took them at a very short date for a very high discount. Sapienti sat, as we Latinists say!"
And the justizrath brushed his comb with both hands to its most imposing height, and moved toward the door, but stopped when he had reached it, came back a few steps, and said with the air of a man who can not tear himself from the grave where all his hopes lie buried:
"Do not think the worse of me that I have allowed myself to be seduced into a breach of confidence which is equally foreign to my position, my age, and I may add, my character. I have only told you what you will probably soon learn from other sources, and in any event must know before long; and George"--here the justizrath sighed, and then painfully smiled--"George, what you may not forgive to the hard-pressed man of business, you will perhaps forgive the father. I also have but one daughter, and am, heaven be thanked, a wealthy man."
The wealthy man who also had an only daughter, went out of the door at the moment that William entered it with a letter which the postman had just brought, the seal of which I broke with trembling hands.
"My dear George, my brother: Then it has at last come to pass what I have so long desired and hoped; and, since your happiness would hardly be perfect without it, let me add my wreath to the rest. I have entwined in it all the kind and loving wishes that one human soul can cherish for another, all the blessings that spring from the depths of my heart for you, for you, my friend, my brother, our brother, for the young ones too now come to their eldest and bow before him, now that he is crowned as he deserves. Wear it proudly, your beauteous crown, and may never a hand touch it less holy than that of her who now lays her hand on my shoulders and bends her face over the paper that her eyes can no longer see, and says softly to me--'He still remains to us what he always was.'"
This letter also bears traces of tears, but they were my eyes that wept them, and they were tears of joy. And when I raised my grateful looks towards heaven, the cloud had vanished, the one cloud that had darkened my sky, and all was as bright as the vernal heavens that stretched in splendor over land and sea.
Happy, radiant days were these, which now seem to me as if there had been no night at all and no darkness, but ever day and light and bliss. There were not too many of these days, and it was perhaps well that it was so. Which of us mortals, however great his powers, can long feast with impunity at the table of the gods?
But many or few, ye shall be held sacred in memory, ye happy hours, and sacred shall be held whatever was associated with you and enhanced your sweetness. The bright sun, the rustling woods through which I walked at the side of the beloved one, the twilight fields through which we strolled, the sky larks that singing soared into the blue ether until they were lost to sight, and the sweet nightingales that tried to persuade me that they were happier than we.
Yes, all shall be sacred and precious in memory, for the memory is all that is left to me of those happy days.