“Ah! you know not—no one knows—what it is that depresses and weighs me down,” answered Ludwig. “Poverty is such a heavy burden. It rests like a load upon the pinions of the soul. Oh, it is awful to feel here, here in one’s inmost soul, that one could accomplish the great and the beautiful, and yet not be able to do it because he lacks a few miserable gulden and kreuzers. It is hard, Wegeler.”
Tears stood in young Beethoven’s eyes, and his lips quivered in the effort to repress his emotions. Wegeler’s eyes rested with an expression of deep sympathy upon the dejected figure which he had seen only a short time before exulting in the joyousness of hope.
“Ludwig,” he said,—and his voice had an unusually tender tone,—“I pray you, open your heart to me, and do not conceal what troubles and oppresses you. I feel for you as for a true and sincere friend. Take me for your friend and then speak, for you know between true heart-friends there should be no restraint, no secrets.”
“Friend!” said Ludwig. “Would you actually be my true friend?”
“To the last hour of my life. I swear it,” said Wegeler, in such an honest manner that his sincerity could not be doubted.
Ludwig understood him and was comforted. With an exclamation of joy he embraced Wegeler and kissed him. “So we are friends, always friends,” he cried. “Oh, how I have longed for a soul that could and would understand me, and lo, at last I have found one. Now you shall learn, dear, good Wegeler, what has disturbed my soul and checked its flights. I am not happy, and the cause of my unhappiness, alas, is my father’s conduct. I have kept this melancholy secret deeply hidden in my breast, but here, where no one but the dear God and the little birds can hear, I will disclose it.”
With an exclamation of joy he embraced Wegeler
He told in passionate words how his father’s temper had made him suffer from the days of his childhood, of that father’s insatiable craving for drink, and how, on that account, the family often had to go without the necessaries of life.
“Though my father naturally is good-natured,” he went on, “this craving makes him exceedingly irritable and sometimes violent. His habits drive him to extremes. At one moment he is a tender father, at the next a cruel tyrant. The despair of it all is that when necessity and trouble press hardest he has no patience to bear, but seeks consolation and forgetfulness in wine. This is my heaviest burden, for, so long as he cannot resist drinking, there is no hope of better conditions for our family. My mother, my good, true, tender mother, secretly weeps, and bears her hard lot with Christian calmness. But I and my two younger brothers[14] suffer unspeakably, and many a time I have been tempted to throw myself into the Rhine and end all my miseries.”