"Remain with us, Master Laurenzano," said Belier, "and watch over your brother. You can have a room near the beloved patient, and there work at the plans of my new house. That is a quiet, serious occupation which cannot disturb the sick man, and on the other hand the stillness of the sick-room will be agreeable to your Muse. Design there the façade, and therein strive to emulate that of the building of the deceased Count Palatine, that is naturally, in so far as the house of a private citizen can vie with that of a prince."
"Take now the hand of reconciliation," said Frau Belier. "There shall no longer be any blood between us, I forgive you the death of the poor parrot."
The architect seized the hand with a look of comical contrition. "I cannot order masses to be read for the rest of the soul of one nipped in the flower of his youth," he said, "but I will immortalise him on the façade, and erect a monument to him in spite of many Counts."
While they were all thus joking together and forming plans for the future, Klytia slipped quietly away. This merriment after the dreadful visitations of the previous days grieved the kind-hearted child, and she went upstairs to sit with the nurse, so as to be able to listen to Paul's heavy breathing and feverish fantasies, in the room next to his. His eyes gleamed like those of a prophet, his cheeks were tinged with a feverish glow and an unearthly beauty had come over his idealised features. His lips moved unceasingly, and it seemed as if the fever had caused the long suppressed desire for companionship of this reserved man to burst all sluices. Earliest impressions of youth were by this revolution of his mental and physical life once more called to life. He spoke oftenest with his mother calling her by pet names. "I shall certainly never lie again," he said in the convinced tone of a small child, calling tears to Lydia's eyes. Klytia herself was ever prominent in his fantasies as a sister. "I really did not intend to do Lydia any harm, Mother," he said. "I only wished to kiss her. Is that wrong?" and so saying he tossed about. "If I were only not obliged to return to that horrid school. But I will pretend to be as stupid as Bernardo the hunch-back, then they will certainly expel me and say they do not require me any longer." After a while he would cry out: "But mother says I ought never to pretend." The terrors of the last days curiously enough seemed to have made hardly any impression on his mind. He only once said: "It is very well, that they beat me in this manner, now it is all over and no one can again reproach me for anything." In general all his worst impressions were connected with the school at Venice. Pigavetta was a wicked teacher, Ulrich the executioner was the "brother corrector," the Church counsellors represented the collegium of professors, the remembrance of the present seemed on the other hand to be entirely wiped away from his memory. But once only, as Felix sat at his bed-side, did it seem to recur to him. With an expression of the most intense moral fear he called out: "Save the parsons." Felix then stooped over him and whispered in his ear: "I have freed Neuser, and the others have been pardoned." "Oh!" sighed the sick man as if relieved of a heavy burden and casting a piteously grateful look at his brother. From that time his restlessness seemed to lessen gradually. His strained expression disappeared. It was replaced by excessive weakness. So soon as he awoke his nurse brought him some nourishment, his wounds were dressed afresh, after which he immediately sank into his somnolent state.
Felix had arranged his atelier near to Paul's bedroom and worked quietly and diligently at his plans for Belier's new house. Klytia took her place as nurse in the room between them so often as her duties towards her father allowed her, and Frau Belier repeatedly put the searching question to her towards which of the two rooms did her heart most incline. Paul's presence had in fact the same influence on Klytia's tender heart as formerly, without however detracting from her feelings of gratitude and tender friendship towards Felix. In nursing Paul she often met Felix and they neither seemed ever to consider the question as to what should take place after Paul's recovery. Felix however felt more and more distinctly that he loved the maiden in reality only from an artistic point of view. His fiery nature required a counterfoil, which would oppose a greater vivacity and capacity of contradiction than was to be met with in Erastus' tender hearted daughter. The daily scrimmages which he had with Frau Belier, in which like two children with locked hands they endeavored each to bring the other to its knees, developed his own inward strength rather than any quiet thoughtful conversation with the German maiden. He was wont to watch with artistic delight Lydia as sitting at her work she pondered over her past or her future. It was impossible to have gazed on a more lovely picture of a maiden mind buried in the sweet dream of the love of a young life. The brow wrapt in thought, the mouth puckered up as if seeking a kiss, the blooming cheeks, the full development of bust, on which nature had lavished its riches with a bounteous hand, formed a finished picture of beauty irresistible to the artist nature in Felix. He quietly brought out one day a lump of modelling clay, and whilst Lydia was sitting without any misgivings at her work near the window, and dreamily listening to the breathing of the patient, the young artist kneaded the plastic material and soon completed an exact portrait of the thoughtful maiden. He formed the base as the calix of a flower as he had seen in the antique busts in Rome and Florence. The scented calix out of which Klytia arose was intended as a symbol of the dreamy flower-life of young love, of the tender perfume full of misgivings of a pure woman's mind, whose life is in part the existence of a plant. Lydia became aware at last of what he was doing, as the young Maestro looked intently at her, and then stepping to one side appeared to be busy on some unusual piece of work. She arose and a look of maidenlike severity came over her face on beholding a too faithful representation of her charms. "Fie, how wrong," she blushingly exclaimed. But the artist begged her so touchingly to resume her seat and let him continue that she finally resigned herself. "What can I otherwise grant him," she thought sadly, "when the heart belongs to the other." The artist carefully examined each particular feature. "God never created anything more beautiful than thou art," he said. When he had finished he clapped his hands together, and repeated "splendid, splendid" half aloud. She now stepped up quietly to him. "What mean those leaves?"
"I have moulded thee as Goddess of flowers," he answered.
"As Wegewarte?" She looked up towards him with a sad smile. He however lightly kissed her pure forehead: "As Klytia turning towards her Sun-God." She held out her hand to him, and looked up gratefully into his eyes. He pressed it as if bidding her farewell. Without that a single word passed between them, they understood one another. Klytia was free, he himself had released her from her promise.
She now went oftener than ever to the couch of the sick brother, cooled his brow with damp cloths and bound up his wounds with the delicate, apt hands of a woman.
Thus passed away peacefully the last sunny days of autumn, leaving to all the inhabitants of the gable-house the precious impression, that there was even something beautiful in the stillness of a sick-room, in which no sounds were heard but the regular breathings of the patient, the ticking of the large Nuremberg clock in the ante-chamber, and the buzzing of the gnats on the diamond panes reflecting the sun. However little the relations of the various persons seemed to have changed outwardly, Erastus nevertheless felt the magnetic deviation which had taken place in Lydia. Wearied from many visits, he sat down one afternoon with his daughter near the chapel on the other side of the bridge to enjoy the last sunny hours of the fleeting year. The Heidelberg woods lay before them tinged with yellow, and their serrated lines blue and indistinct melted away as some old poetic saw in the autumn mist causing the mountains to appear higher than usual. Near to the bench on which they sat, the blue flower bloomed by the wayside and ever turned its calix to the sun. Lydia plucked one and pondered over the world of experiences she had lived through in the short time since Felix had related to her the fable out of Ovid. Her father looked steadily at her and said: "Hast thou broken thy bonds towards Felix?"
"Felix remains a Papist," she answered evasively. "He cannot fulfil the conditions which thou hast laid upon him."