They went together through the new house, and the little Frau Pastorin thanked him, and kissed him, for his friendship, that he had arranged everything just as it was in Gurlitz, and she looked out of the window, and said, "Everything, everything, but no grave!"
They stood for a long time at the window, then Habermann pressed her hand, and said, "Frau Pastorin, I have a favor to ask, I have given notice to Herr von Rambow, and shall leave next Christmas; can you spare me the little gable room, and will you take me at your table?"
At a less agitated moment, she would have had much to ask, and much to say; but now she said merely.
"Where Louise and I live, you are always the nearest."
Yes, so it is in the world, what is one's joy is another's sorrow, and weddings and graves lie close together, and yet the distance between them is wider than between summer heat and winter cold; but there is a wonderful kind of people in the world,--if one seeks one can find them,--who can throw a kind of wonderful, heaven-climbing bridges, from one heart to another, over the gulfs which the world has torn open, and such a bridge was built between the little, round Pastors' wives, Lining of Rexow, and Frau Pastorin of Rahnstadt; and when the key stone was dropped into place, exactly over the parsonage at Gurlitz, they fell into each other's arms, and held so fast together that to their life's end they were never parted.
And our old Gottlieb! He did his share, he brought stones and mortar,--he had but a brief experience in the pastoral office; but I must say that, when he preached his entrance sermon, he thought less of himself than of his faithful predecessor, the old Pastor Behrens.
"He sticks to common sense," said Bräsig, as he came out of the church, and he patted Lining's cheek, and gave Mining a kiss. "The pietists often become very reasonable people; but they think too much of the devil. I have a very good pietist acquaintance, that is the Pastor Mehlsack, a really clever man, but he is so taken up with the devil that he says scarcely anything about the Lord; and there is the pastor in the beautiful Krakow region, who has paddagraphically discovered that there are three hundred, three and thirty thousand different devils running about the world, not counting the regular devil and his grandmother. And you see, Lining, what an inconvenience it is for us: you sit down in Rahnstadt with your good friends around a punch bowl, and you drink to this one, and to that one, and then to another, and at your side sits a gentleman in a brown dress-coat,--for the devil always wears a brown dress-coat, he must, that is his uniform,--and he talks, the whole evening, very friendly things to you, and when you wake up next morning there he stands before you, and says, 'Good morning! you signed yourself to me last evening,' and then he shows you his cloven foot, and if he is polite he takes out his tail, and slaps you over the ears with it, and there you are, his rightful property. So it is with the honest Pietists, the others are a great deal worse."
And so Gottlieb and Lining were settled in the pastor's house, and Mining was naturally much with them, and it often happened that good old Gottlieb embraced Mining, in the twilight, and gave her a kiss, instead of Lining; but it was all in friendship, he had no other design.
But Pomuchelskopp had a design, when he came with his wife and Malchen and Salchen to make their first call on the young Herr Pastor. And this design was the pastor's acre, and the blue dress-coat with the gilt buttons said to the black coat he would take the field, and offered him just half the sum which the Herr von Rambow had given, and our old Häuning stood up and said, that was all it was worth, and it could not be otherwise disposed of, for Jochen Nüssler had declined it, and old Gottlieb stood there bowing to the blue dress-coat, and was going to say "yes," when Lining sprang up like a ball, out of the sofa-corner, and said, "Hold! In this business, I have a word to say. We must consult other people," and she called, from the door, "uncle Bräsig, will you come in, a moment?"
And he came, placing himself audaciously in a linen frock, before the blue dress-coat, and asked, "How so?"