“MY NEW YEAR’S GREETING TO MYSELF.
“The New Year’s gates are open, and Fate, standing between the sun and the burning morning clouds upon the mound of ashes of the year which has fallen to dust, deals out the days according to their lot. What dost thou pray for, Nathalie?
“Not for joy. Alas! all the joys which have been in my heart have left but black thorns there; their rose-juice soon, was gone. The heavy thunder-cloud grows as the sun-gleam brightens—and what shines upon us is the ray reflected from the sword which the coming day will hold to our happy hearts. No, no; I pray not for joys; they make the thirsting heart so void. It is but sorrow that can fill it full.
“Fate deals the days according to their lot. What dost thou long for, Nathalie?
“Not love. Oh! those who press the thorny white rose of love to their hearts draw blood from out them; the warm tears of bliss which fall into the blossom soon grow chill, and are dried up amain. Love, all gleam and bloom, hangs on the morning sky of life, like some great rose-red Aurora in the heavens. Ah! do not enter that bright glittering cloud—it is but mist and tears. No, no; long not for love; die of a lovelier sorrow. Sink into the chill of death under a nobler poison-tree than is the lovely myrtle.
“Thou art kneeling at the feet of Destiny, Nathalie; tell him thy desire!
“Neither do I desire more friends. No; we stand all, side by side, on undermined graves—and when we have so long held each other so fondly by the hand, and so long suffered together, our friend’s empty mound breaks in, and he turns pale, and sinks—and I am left alone, my life all frozen, beside the filled-up grave. No, no: but when at last there comes the hour when the heart will die no more, but has put on immortal being—and when friends stand side by side in the eternal world—then let the firmer breast beat warm and high, then let the eye, which is to beam for ever, weep blissful tears, then let the lips, which never more grow pale, murmur in rapture, ‘Now come to me, beloved soul, we will love now, for we shall never have to part, again.’
“Oh! thou bereaved and widowed Nathalie! what would’st thou have on earth?
“A grave, and patience; nothing else beside. But these deny me not, thou silence-keeping Fate! Dry thou mine eyes, then close them! Still my heart, then break it!—Yes, one day, when the free spirit spreads her wings in a fairer heaven, and when the New Year breaks upon a purer world—when we all meet, and love, again—then shall I lay my longings, prayers, and wishes at thy feet. But none for me; for I shall be too blest.”
In what words could I depict the inward speechlessness and motionlessness of her friend, when he had read the paper, and still held and gazed at it, although he could no longer either see or think. Oh! the ice-floes of the glacier of death spread wider and wider, and filled up one warm Tempè valley after another. The only bond by which our solitary Firmian now held to humanity was the cord of his death-bell and coffin—his bed was but a broader bier—and every joy seemed a theft from the withered, leaf-stripped heart of another. And thus the stem of his life, like that of many flowers,[[108]] went deeper and deeper down, its top becoming its hidden root.
The abyss of a difficulty yawned on every side, and to do anything was just as perilous as to do nothing. I shall lay the difficulties, or resolutions, in their order as they struck his mind, before the reader. In man, the devil flies up always sooner than the angel,—the evil intention comes before the good one.[[109] ]His first was non-moral, namely, that he should answer Nathalie, and tell her what she wished to hear—that is, should lie to her. We find the black mourning coat as becoming, when others wear it for us, as warm when we wear it for others. “But I shall melt her heart” (said his) “into fresh anguish with a continuation of wound and lie; ah! not even my actual death would be worth such pain and sorrow. Therefore I shall keep utter silence.” But then, she must think Henry annoyed, and that she has lost this friend too; nay, she might, in this case, travel to Kuhschnappel, and go to his grave, and bear it as an additional burden upon her oppressed and trembling soul. In both these cases there was the risk of the third danger—that she should come to Vaduz, and that he should then have to convert the written lies, which he had spared her, into spoken ones. There was but one way of escape that he could see—the most virtuous, but the steepest—he could tell her the truth. But with what danger to every relation of his life this confession was fraught, even if Nathalie kept counsel—also, a yellow, cross light would fall upon Henry in Nathalie’s eyes, especially as she had no means of knowing anything as to the nobleness and generosity of his aims and deceptions. On the whole, there was least for his heart to suffer on the precarious path of truth, and ultimately he resolved to go by it.
CHAPTER XXIV.
NEWS FROM KUHSCHNAPPEL—WOMAN’S ANTICLIMAX—OPENING OF THE SEVENTH SEAL.
It is a matter which often quite puts me beyond myself that, although we do, in the end, duly accept and honour the bills which Virtue draws upon us, we only pay them after such a vast number of days of grace and double-usances—although neither the devil nor Constantinople will hear of either the one or the other. Firmian urged no further pleas of objection, except for delay. He merely postponed his confession, thinking that as Apollo is the best consoler (Paraclete) of man, and as Nathalie had shown the basilisk of sorrow its own image in the mirror of poetry, the sight of itself would be sufficient to kill it, Thus it is that all virtuous motions in us are weakened by the friction of time and of our inclinations.
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, Siebenkæs, 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. Siebenkæs, 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 Thalæa,[[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 Siebenkæs (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 circumstances 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 assisted 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 restitution 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 ‘GOD’S Messenger of German Programmes,’ which (I may say without undue boasting) is taken in, and looked upon with approval in Gymnasia and Lycæa, from Swabia as far as Nürnberg, 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-spawn 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 sex; 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 peacocks 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 classes (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 scum 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 God when the enchantress turns, at last, like other witches, into a grumbling house-cat, keeping down the vermin.
Nobody 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 Basso 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 circumstances, 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 substitutus sine spe succedendi, or cavalier de société, 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 ambassador. If, according to this systema assistantiæ, 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 Siebenkæs’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.
Siebenkæs 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 class 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 Siebenkæs 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 passed 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 pass before him with a smile—of wickedness and evil, that they should pass 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 Siebenkæs 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 Siebenkæs, 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 Siebenkæs, 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.” Siebenkæs 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-masses 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 assurance 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 Siebenkæs, stormed at from fresh points of the compass, 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 preassumed, 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 Siebenkæs.
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, embarrassed, 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 Siebenkæs; 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 Siebenkæs 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 mass 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 shore, 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 Göttingen—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 did 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 Siebenkæs still in the body. But, besides love and anticipation, 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 passion-flowers, the originals of which were all fallen to dust. As he passed 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 pawned-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 crape 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 passed by the grave on which (while it was black, it was grass-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 crape-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 God, Wendeline Lenette Stiefel, born Engelkraut of Augspurg. Her first husband was the lamented Poor’s Advocate, F. St. Siebenkæs. 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 God 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 God 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 nobody but the Vaduz Inspector, Leibgeber. Like posterity, he decked his own lodger, Siebenkæs, with the richest of rosemary-garlands, and declared that these ragamuffins of stocking-weavers whom he had got upstairs now were not to be spoken of in the same day with poor lamented Mr. Siebenkæs. The whole house creaked when they rattled and stamped in their upstairs-room. He then called attention to the circumstance that the departed had taken his wife away to him within the space 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 Phœnix 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 passed 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 Siebenkæs’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 Siebenkæs’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.
So that her friend could not but dwell all this evening with feelings of painful fondness upon her memory—the one unclouded star which beamed on him from the overcast heaven of his bygone days. It was deep in the gloaming now, a cooler air was stirring. A storm had spent its force in other regions, and there remained only some broken, lurid clouds, piled in the sky like glowing, half-burned firebrands. He betook himself, for a last time, to the place where death had planted the red carnation, with its little buds snapped so untimely from its stem. But within his soul, as without him, the air breathed less sultrily now, and fresher; tears had blunted the sharp edge of the first bitterness of his sorrow. He felt, with far more of gentleness, that the earth is only our CARPENTER’S YARD, not our BUILDING-GROUND. In the East, where the stars were rising, a long blue streak shone above the sunken thunder-clouds. The moon (light-magnet of the sky) was lying, like a fount of light, upon the foil of a cleft cloud, and the wide vaporous veil was melting motionlessly away.
When Firmian, approaching the beloved grave, raised up his downcast head, he saw a dark form resting there. He stopped short, and gazed more piercingly. The form was a woman’s. Her face, frozen into the ice of death, was fixed on him. As he drew nearer, he saw his dearest Nathalie leaning overpowered against the painted railing of the grave. The autumnal breath of death had tinted her lips and cheeks with white; her wide eyes were sightless, and nothing but the tear-drops which hung on her lashes gave proof that she was in life, and had taken him for the apparition of which she had heard so much. In the excess of her romantic sorrow at his grave she had longed, in the strength and loneliness of her heart, that his spirit might appear to her; and when she saw him approaching, she thought Heaven had granted her prayer. And then the iron hand of chill terror turned this red rose to a white one. But ah, her friend was the more wretched of the two. His tender, unshielded heart was crushed motionless between the impact of two worlds which rushed crashing together. In tones of utter distress he cried out, “Nathalie! Nathalie!” Her lips quivered spasmodically, and a breath of life gave back a shade of brightness to her glance; but the spirit was still there before her, and she closed her eyes again, and said, with a shudder, “Oh God!” It was in vain that his voice called her back to life; when she looked up at the apparition her heart failed her again, and she could only cry “Oh God!” Firmian seizing her hand, cried, “Angel of heaven, I am not dead! only look at me! Nathalie, don’t you know me? Oh! merciful God, don’t punish me so terribly, don’t let me be the cause of her death!” At length she slowly lifted her heavy eyelids, and saw her old friend trembling beside her, with tears of anxiety and terror. His tears were happier, but more abundant, and he smiled sorrowfully upon her as she still kept her eyes open, and said, “Nathalie, I am still upon this earth, in very truth, and suffer as you do yourself; don’t you see how I tremble on your account? Take my warm, living hand. Are you still afraid?” “No,” she answered faintly; but she still looked at him in an awe-stricken fashion, as at a super-earthly being, and had not courage to ask for an explanation of the riddle. He helped her to rise (gently weeping), and said, “But, dear innocent one, come away from this place of sorrow, where so many tears have been shed already. For your heart mine has no secrets now. Ah! I can tell you everything, and I will tell you everything.” He led her out, above the quiet dead, through the back gate of the churchyard. She leaned on his arm heavily and languidly, shuddering again often as they climbed the little height, and only the tears which joy, relief from terror, grief, and exhaustion combined, had brought to her eyes, fell like warm balsam upon her chilled and wounded heart.
When they reached the top of the height she sat down to rest, and the black night-woods, railed round by white harvests, and cut across by the moon’s silent sea of light, lay before them. Nature had drawn out the “pianissimo lute” organ-stop of midnight, and by Nathalie’s side stood one of her beloved dead, new-risen from the grave. He told her now all about Leibgeber’s entreaties; the short story of his mock-death; his residence with the Count; all the longings and tears of his long solitude; his firm determination rather to fly from her than to deceive or wound her beloved heart, either by speech or in writing; and the disclosures he had made to her friend’s father. She sobbed at the account of his last moments and parting from Lenette, as if it had all been real. She thought on many things as she merely said, “Ah! it was only for other people’s happiness that you sacrificed yourself. But you will be able to have done with all this deception now, and to make amends for it, will you not?” “I shall,” he said, “to the very utmost of my power; and my heart and my conscience shall be free and clear once more. Have I not even kept the vow I made to you—that I should not see you again till after my death?” She smiled gently.
They both sunk into a dreamy and blissful silence. At last, seeing her lay a mourning-cloak butterfly[[115]] (disabled by the night-dew) down upon her lap, the fact that she was in mourning herself struck him for the first time, and he hastily asked, “You are not in mourning for any one, are you?” Alas! she had put it on for him. “Not now,” Nathalie answered, and, looking at the butterfly, she said pityingly, “a few drops and a little chilliness have benumbed the poor thing.” Her friend reflected how easily Fate might have punished his temerity by benumbing the even more beautiful, black-attired creature by his side, who had, moreover, had her full share already of shivering in the night-frosts of life and the night-dew of tears. But he could not answer her for love and pain.
They kept silence now, reading each other’s thoughts, lost, half in their hearts, half in the grandeur of night. The wide æther had absorbed all the clouds (only those of the sky, alas!); Luna bent down, with her saintly halo, like a glorified Madonna, from the tranquil blue, to greet her pale sister of the earth. The voice of the stream was heard, as it flowed on its course unseen, hidden by a light mist—like the stream of time, hidden from sight by the haze of countries and nations. Behind them the night-breeze had laid itself to rest upon a swelling, rushing bed of corn, bestreaked with blue corn-flowers; and before them lay the reaped harvest of the world to come—precious stones (as it were) in their coffin-settings, cold and heavy in death.[[116]] The pious and humble ones (forming an antithesis to the sunflower and the mote in the sunbeam) turned as moon-flowers to the moon, and played as moonbeam-motes in her cool rays, feeling that there is nothing under the starry sky so great as hope.
Nathalie leant on Firmian’s hand, that he might help her to rise, and said, “I feel quite able to go home now.” He kept hold of her hand, but did not rise nor speak. He was gazing at the dry, prickly stalk of the old rose-twig which she had given him. Unwittingly, and without feeling what he was doing, he pressed the thorns into his fingers. His laden bosom heaved with deeper, warmer sighs; burning tears stood in his eyes, and the moon’s light trembled before them like a shower of falling light. A whole universe lay upon his soul and upon his tongue, and kept both motionless.
“Firmian,” said Nathalie, “what would you have?” He bent his fixed eyes widely opened upon her gentle form, and pointed down to his grave in the valley. “My house down there,” he answered, “which has been empty so long. For the bed on which we dream this dream of life is terribly hard.”
He lost command of himself, for she wept so terribly—and her face, all heavenly kindness, was so near—and he burst forth, with the bitterest and strongest emotion, “Are not all my loved ones gone, and are not you going too? Ah! why has torturing destiny laid the waxen image of an angel upon all our breasts,[[117]] and lowered us into the chill life? Oh! the soft image melts away, and there is no angel. Yes, you HAVE appeared to me, it is true, but you disappear, and time will crush to atoms your image on my heart, ay, and my heart with it. For when I have lost you, I shall be alone in earnest. But, fare you well! I shall actually die one day, and then I shall appear to you; but not as I have done to-night. Ah! nowhere but in eternity, and then I shall say to you, ‘Oh! Nathalie, I loved you there below with infinite, unending grief and sorrow; make amends to me here!’” She strove to answer, but her voice broke and failed her. She raised her great eyes to the starry sky, but they were full of tears. She tried to rise, but her friend held her, with his hand all thorns and blood, and said, “Can you leave me, Nathalie?”
She arose here, sublime and grand, bent her head back, looking upward to the sky, rapidly swept away the tears from her eyes; her soaring soul found words, and, clasping her hands in prayer, she said, “Oh! THOU who art all love, and lovest ALL, he has been lost to me, I have found him again; eternity is here on earth; make THOU him happy through me!” And her head sank down on his, tenderly and languidly, and she said,
“We are going to be always TOGETHER.”
“Oh God!” stammered Firmian; “Oh angel! you are going to be always with me—in this world and the next!”
“For ever, Firmian!” said Nathalie, softly. And our friend’s troubles were over and past.