I looked around the cell, and now first remarked what pains they had taken to make me forget where I was. There was the picture of the Sistine Madonna with the child, which I had grown to love so during my illness, and which was hung opposite my bed, just as it had hung in Paula's room. There stood upon the bureau the same two terra-cotta vases, and in each a couple of fresh roses. There was the easy-chair in which Dr. Snellius had falsely predicted that I had sat for the last time, and over the back hung a cover of crotchet-work on which I had seen Paula engaged the previous evening. There hung the same étagère with the same neatly-bound books; Goethe's Faust, Schiller's and Lessing's works, which Paula had so often urgently recommended me to read, and into which I had as yet hardly looked. They had done all they could to make my prison as endurable, as pleasant as possible; but did not the very pains they took show that it was a prison, and that the episode of my apparent freedom was at an end. Yes, they had been kind, inexpressibly kind to me, under the friendly smiling mask of Samaritan compassion to one sick unto death--a mask that must be laid aside, as soon as a Pharisee passed that way and looked askance upon the moving sight. No, no; I was and remained a prisoner, whether my chains were decked with roses or not.
Why had I not been able to break these chains? True, as I had begun, it was impossible; but why did I begin so clumsily? Why did I not keep to myself, calmly trusting in my own strength and my own craft, and in some lucky chance that must have offered sooner or later? Now, as things had happened, after I had incurred such a debt of gratitude to these people, after I had grown so attached to them, I was twice and thrice a prisoner. For the tempting pottage of friendship and love, I had bartered the first inalienable birthright of man, which is the very breath of his soul--the right of liberty. Seven years! Seven long, long years!
I strode up and down my cell. For the first time since my sickness I felt something of my former strength; it was but a remnant, but enough to bring back a part of my old roving humor, of my old restlessness. How would it be then when I felt myself all that I had ever been? Would it not, combined with the knowledge that nothing held me but my own will, drive me to frenzy? Would it not have been better if they had left me in my old slavery, with the dream that some day I should be able to break their bonds, even if this dream was never verified?
"Here is a young man who wants to speak with us," announced the sergeant. Since my sickness when "we" had come through so much together, he frequently used in speaking to me the same plural which he employed with all who, in his opinion, had acquired an entire claim on his honest heart; for example, the superintendent and all his family, including the doctor, and now myself.
"What sort of a man!" I asked, while a joyous shiver ran through me. As long as I had been in confinement this was the first time that any one had come to see me; and somehow I connected the extraordinary event of a visitor with the thoughts that had been passing through my mind.
"Looks like a sailor," answered the sergeant. "Says he has news of our dead brother."
This sounded extremely improbable. My brother Fritz had been dead for five years; he had fallen from the foreyard overboard one stormy night, and was drowned. The ship had returned in safety; there was no mystery of any sort connected with his death; and if any one now brought me intelligence of his end, there must be some other purpose involved with it.
"Can I speak with him, Süssmilch?" I asked, in the most indifferent tone I could assume, while my heart seemed to rise in my throat.
"We can speak to whom we like."
"Then let him in; and, Süssmilch, if he is a sailor he would like a glass of something; perhaps you could get me something of the kind?"