Her smile made the same appeal to Eberhard that Eleanore’s had. And yet, when he was in Sylvia’s company, he seemed to recognise more distinctly than ever what had drawn him with such irresistible power to Eleanore, possibly because Sylvia was of a less ardent and forceful nature. He could not exactly express it in words; he merely felt that it was the unknown realm of tones, the unknown melting of melodies, the ringing order of the music transformed into soul.
At the beginning of June, Sylvia went back to Nuremberg with Eberhard and her parents. A few days later the betrothal took place in the baronial residence.
VII
Herr Carovius had been paid. The consortium of silent backers had been dissolved.
Never in the history of finance had there been a satisfied creditor who was so unhappy as Herr Carovius. He was without a goal, and the sign posts had been destroyed. He had received his money; so far so good. His share of the profit was something over sixty thousand marks. But what was this in comparison with the great noise? What comparison was there between living in ease and the gorgeous sight of falling stars? What attraction could the world offer him after this hopeful affair, which had begun as a tragedy, and had increased in interest and suspense until one was justified in believing that all the contradictory forces in human nature were going to collide with one mighty bang, when, in reality, the whole incident flattened out into an ordinary drama of emotion, with the curtain going down on reconciliation all around?
But this was not the sole reason why Herr Carovius, up until this time a most elastic figure, one of those imperturbable bachelors for whom no hurdle was too high, suddenly felt that he was growing old. His soul was filled with unrest; he was seeing bad omens; he feared there was going to be a change in the weather.
He felt an inner hunger, and yet he somehow lacked appetite for his kind of things. “Down and out, lost and no good,” he sighed within. But those who had got rich at his expense could not possibly succeed. This much he knew.
He began to lose his hair; he became rheumatic. As soon as the thermometer began to fall he shivered; if it rained he stayed at home. He began to study medicine, all by himself. He took up the various remedies of our remote ancestors. He read the works of Paracelsus, and declared that all those who had written on medicine since Paracelsus were quacks and poison-mixers.
His ideas with regard to music became also more and more strange and bizarre. He had discovered an old Nuremberg composer by the name of Staden. His opera entitled “Seelewig”—the first of all German operas, by the way—he insisted was the very zenith of musical art, eminently superior to Mozart and Bach. He played arias and melodies from “Seelewig” to Dorothea.
“Now, when you can get that,” he exclaimed, “when you come to the point where I can see from your playing what is in it and at the bottom of it, Heaven and Hell in one stroke of the bow, then, you little jackanapes, I’m going to make you my heiress.”