MEMORIES OF CHILDHOOD OF A DYING SEER.
Clodwig slept several hours, while Eric sat with the Banker, and drew refreshment from his self-forgetting sympathy. The Banker failed in many of the ordinary forms of society; but he possessed a nature full of tact, and, in the midst of his deep emotion, Eric thought that only unselfishness has genuine tact. Want of tact is at bottom selfishness; for the man who is without it thinks and acts only for himself.
Eric now saw the Banker in a new light. In Carlsbad he had made rather an effort to display his intelligence; but now his gentle and sensible character showed itself naturally. Eric remembered the Banker's once having said to him at Carlsbad, "The Jews are the children of compassion: they understand how to bear and to relieve sorrow much better than to create joy; the remembrance of past oppression gives them sympathy with all suffering."
The Banker was ready to lend help at any moment, but allowed himself to be put in the background again immediately.
Bella treated him with manifest neglect, but he took it good-humoredly, showing without words that he was not offended. She acted like her mother's own child; and moreover, he thought, she was not his friend. Clodwig was his friend, and he regarded it as a duty to bear something for his sake. He sat in the library, ready to answer any call, and retiring again as soon as he believed himself in the way. Towards midnight, Eric was suddenly summoned; Clodwig had waked, and asked for him.
"Ah! I have slept so well," said Clodwig; "and it's strange, I constantly dream now of my cousin Hatty, whom I am to marry. I like her, and she likes me; but she has learned, and will learn nothing at all, and she has such a shrill laugh, and says, 'Come, Clodwig, you're so sad, come, marry me, we'll be merry.' And then I say, 'Child, I'm so old already! see, I've no teeth left, and what will Bella say to it?' 'Ah, what' she says, 'nonsensical things! Come, we'll dance.' And then we dance down to the chapel; and there stands the priest beckoning to us, and we dance on, past the priest; and she's a splendid child with beautiful eyes, and loves me dearly; and so we dance on and on, and I can keep it up very well till I wake, without being tired."
"Is your cousin Hatty still living?"
"Oh, no! she died long ago. A few weeks since a grandson of hers was here with me. But isn't it strange that my first youthful love—I was hardly ten years old—should have awakened in me? And she had an apple in her hand, and bit into it, and then said, 'Take a bite too;' but, when I wanted to take the apple, she wouldn't let me, and said, 'Don't bite too much.' And, when I awoke, the taste of the apple seemed still in my mouth. Now it just comes back to me that we were once painted together. The painter declared that it would please us very much some time or other. He did it secretly, and, of course, the picture was bought of him; I believe it is still in existence; but I don't know where. Don't you like her name of Hatty? She is a half-grown girl in a pink calico dress and white apron, and that's the way she was always dressed, and she had a broad Florence straw hat, whose brim drooped down upon her shoulders." So Clodwig went on, and said with a repressed sigh, "Bella has never cared to hear about my youth;" but then, as if not wishing to speak of her, he quickly added in a trembling voice, stretching out both hands, "Now attend, and I can tell you my story. I have had a very different life from that Herr Sonnenkamp. My father was Prime-Minister, and I was born in the ministerial residence, the son of a late marriage, an only son, like Herr Sonnenkamp; but my life was different. My father became representative of the Confederacy to the German Diet, and then I often lived here in summer on our estate. The society of the representatives of the Confederacy,—who knows whether it is not passing away without any one's having pictured it truly,—I might have done it; even when I was still a student, it was plain to me that it was a society which exists only to stand in the way of every improvement. Come a little nearer and I will tell you what the German Diet is,—it is the evil conscience of the Princes. I thought so very early, and I was soon sure of it, and yet I stayed in the midst of it; and the farther I advanced, the more plainly I saw that it was true. All progress has built itself up apart from the Diet; and there is something like it in the Church. Progress is made without her, aside from her; she has not done away with capital punishment, nor torture, nor the confinement of prisoners in irons: none of these has she abolished. And now are coming the two great works of emancipation,—the emancipation of the slaves and of the serfs, and what is bringing them about? Humanity alone in its freedom of action. You see, this Herr Sonnenkamp lived in quite another world than mine, and yet my life,—Ah, wait a minute, wait, I cannot say more now."
After a while, Clodwig began again,—
"This Sonnenkamp is another proof to me, our civilization has the same defects as religion; it also gives no definite moral laws; it is not a complete, not the true civilization."