The heart of our sorrowful Firmian grew sadder yet as he stood upon this cold, burnt-out hearth-place of nature. The daily-recurring pausings of his heart and pulse were (he thought) the sudden silences of the storm-bell in his breast, presaging a speedy end of the thunder, and dissolution of the storm-cloud, of life. He thought the faltering of his mechanism was caused by some loose pin having fallen in among the wheels somewhere; he ascribed it to polypus of the heart, and his giddiness he felt sure gave warning of an attack of apoplexy. To-day was the three hundred and sixty-fifth Act of the year, and the curtain was slowly dropping upon it already: what could this suggest to him save gloomy similes of his own epilogue—of the winter solstice of his shortened, over-shadowed life? The weeping image of his Lenette came now before his forgiving, departing soul, and he thought, “She is really not in the right; but I will yield to her, as we have not very long to be together now. I am glad for her sake, poor soul, that my arms are mouldering away from about her, and that her friend is taking her to his.”
He went up on to the scaffold of blood and sorrow where his friend, Heinrich, had taken his farewell. From that eminence, as often as his heart was heavy, his glance would follow Leibgeber’s path as far as the hills; but to-day his eyes were moister than before, for he had no hope that he would see the spring again. This spot was to him the hill which the Emperor Adrian permitted the Jews to go up twice in the year, that they might look towards the ruins of the holy city and weep for the place wherein their steps might tread no more. The sun was now assembling the shadows which were to close in upon the old year, and as the stars appeared—the stars which rose at evening now being those which in spring adorn the morning—fate snapped away the loveliest and richest in flowers of the liana-branches from his soul, and from the wound flowed clear water. “I shall see nothing of the coming spring,” he thought, “except her blue, which, as in enamel-painting, is the first laid on of all her colours.” His heart—one educated to be loving—could always fly for rest from his satires and from dry details of business-duty, sometimes, too, from Lenette’s indifference and lack of sympathy, to the warm breast of the eternal goddess Nature, ever ready to take us to her heart. Into the free, unveiled, and blooming out-door world, beneath the grand wide sky, he loved to repair with all his sighs and sorrows, and in this great garden he made all his graves (as the Jews made them in smaller ones). And when our fellows forsake and wound us, the sky and the earth, and the little blooming tree, open their arms and take us into them; the flowers press themselves to our wounded hearts, the streams mingle in our tears, and the breezes breathe coolness into our sighs. A mighty angel troubles and inspires the great ocean-pool of Bethesda; into its warm waves we plunge, with all our thousand aches and pains, and ascend from the water of life with our spasms all relaxed and our health and vigour renewed once more.
Firmian walked slowly home with a heart all conciliation, and eyes which, now that it was dark, he did not take the pains to dry. He went over in his mind everything which could possibly be adduced in his Lenette’s excuse. He strove to win himself over to her side of the question by reflecting that she could not (like him) arm herself against the shocks, the stumbling-stones, of life by putting on the Minerva’s helm, the armour of meditation, philosophy, authorship. He thoroughly determined (he had determined the same thing thirty times before) to be as scrupulously careful to observe in all things the outside politesses of life with her as with the most absolute stranger;[[55]] nay, he already enveloped himself in the fly-net or mail-shirt of patience, in case he should really find the checked calico untranslated at home. This is how we men continually behave—stopping our ears tight with both hands, trying our hardest to fall into the siesta, the mid-day sleep, of a little peace of mind (if we can only anyhow manage it); thus do our souls, swayed by our passions, reflect the sunlight of truth as one dazzling spot (like mirrors or calm water), while all the surrounding surface lies but in deeper shade.
How differently all fell out! He was received by Peltzstiefel, who advanced to meet him, all solemnity of deportment, and with a church-visitation countenance full of inspection-sermons. Lenette scarcely turned her swollen eyes towards the windward side of her husband as he came in at the door. Stiefel kept the strings tight which held the muscles of his knit face, lest it might unbend before Firmian’s, which was all beaming soft with kindliness, and thus commenced: “Mr. Siebenkæs, I came to this house to hand you the money for your review of Professor Lang; but friendship demands of me a duty of a far more serious and important kind, that I should exhort you and constrain you to conduct yourself towards this poor unfortunate wife of yours here like a true Christian man to a true Christian woman.” “Or even better, if you like,” he said. “What is it all about, wife?” She preserved an embarrassed silence. She had asked Stiefel’s advice and assistance, less for the sake of obtaining them than to have an opportunity of telling her story. The truth was, that when the Schulrath came unexpectedly in, while her burst of crying was at its bitterest, she had really just that very moment sent her checked, spiny, outer caterpillar-skin (the calico-dress, to wit) away to the pawnshop; for her husband having pledged his honour, she felt sure that, beyond a doubt, he would stick those preposterous horns on his head and really go and hawk them, all over the town, for she well knew how sacredly he kept his word, and also how utterly he disregarded “appearances,”—and that both of these peculiarities of his were always at their fellest pitch at a time of domestic difficulty like the present. Perhaps she would have told her ghostly counsellor and adviser nothing about the matter, but contented herself with having a good cry when he came, if she had had her way (and her dress); but, having sacrificed both, she needed compensation and revenge. At first she had merely reckoned up difficulties in indeterminate quantities to him; but when he pressed her more closely, her bursting heart overflowed and all her woes streamed forth. Stiefel, contrarily to the laws of equity (and of several universities), always held the complainant in any case to be in the right, simply because he spoke first: most men think impartiality of heart is impartiality of head. Stiefel swore that he would tell her husband what he ought to be told, and that the calico should be back in the house that very afternoon.
So this father-confessor began to jingle his bunch of binding-and-loosing keys in the advocate’s face, and reported to him his wife’s general confession and the pawning of the dress. When there are two diverse actions of a person to be given account of—a vexatious and an agreeable one—the effect depends on which is spoken of the first; it is the first narrated one which gives the ground-tint to the listener’s mind, and the one subsequently portrayed only takes rank as a subdued accessory figure. Firmian should have heard that Lenette pawned the dress first, while he was still out of doors, and of her tale-bearing not till afterwards. But you see how the devil brought it about, as it really did all happen. “What!” (Siebenkæs felt, if not exactly thought) “What! She makes my rival her confidant and my judge! I bring her home a heart all kindness and reconciliation, and she makes a fresh cut in it at once, distressing and annoying me in this way, on the very last day of the year, with her confounded chattering and tale-telling.” By this last expression he meant something which the reader does not yet quite understand; for I have not yet told him that Lenette had the bad habit of being—rather ill-bred; wherefore she made common people of her own sex, such as the bookbinder’s wife, the recipients of her secret thoughts—the electric discharging-rods of her little atmospheric disturbances; while, at the same time, she took it ill of her husband that, though he did not, indeed, admit serving-men and maids and “the vulgar” into his own mysteries, he yet accompanied them into theirs.
Stiefel (like all people who have little knowledge of the world, and are not gifted with much tact,—who never assume anything as granted in the first place, but always go through every subject ab initio)—now delivered a long, theological, matrimonial-service sort of exhortation concerning love as between Christian husband and wife, and ended by insisting on the recall of the calico (his Necker, so to say). This address irritated Firmian, and that chiefly because (irrespectively of it) his wife thought he had not any religion, or, at all events, not so much as Stiefel. “I remember” (he said) “seeing in the history of France that Gaston, the first prince of the blood, having caused his brother some little difficulties or other of the warlike sort on one occasion, in the subsequent treaty of peace bound himself, in a special article, to love Cardinal Richelieu. Now I think there’s no question but that an article to the effect that man and wife shall love one another ought to be inserted as a distinct, separate, secret clause, in all contracts of marriage; for though love, like man himself, is by origin eternal and immortal, yet, thanks to the wiles of the serpent, it certainly becomes mortal enough within a short time. But, as far as the calico’s concerned, let’s all thank God that that apple of discord has been pitched out of the house.” Stiefel, by way of offering up a sacrifice, and burning a little incense before the shrine of his beloved Lenette, insisted on the return of the calico, and did so very firmly; for Siebenkæs’s gentle, complaisant readiness to yield to him, up to this point, in little matters of sacrifice and service, had led him to entertain the deluded idea that he possessed an irresistible authority over him. The husband, a good deal agitated now, said, “We’ll drop the subject, if you please.” “Indeed, we’ll do nothing of the kind,” said Stiefel; “I must really insist upon it that your wife has her dress back.” “It can’t be done, Herr Schulrath.” “I’ll advance you whatever money you require,” cried Stiefel, in a fever of indignation at this striking and unwonted piece of disobedience. It was now, of course, more impossible than ever for the advocate to retire from his position; he shook his head eighty times. “Either you are out of your mind,” said Stiefel, “or I am; just let me go through my reasons to you once more.” “Advocates,” said Siebenkæs, “were fortunate enough, in former times, to have private chaplains of their own; but it was found that there was no converting any of them, and therefore they are now exempt from being preached at.”
Lenette wept more bitterly—Stiefel shouted the louder on that account; in his annoyance at his ill success, he thought it well to repeat his commands in a ruder and blunter form; of course Siebenkæs resisted more firmly. Stiefel was a pedant, a class of men which surpasses all others in a bare-faced, blind, self-conceit, just like an unceasing wind blowing from all the points of the compass at once (for a pedant even makes an ostentatious display of his own personal idiosyncrasies). Stiefel, like a careful and conscientious player, felt it a duty to thoroughly throw himself into the part he was representing, and carry it out in all its details, and say, “Either” “Or” Mr. Siebenkæs; “either the mourning gown comes, or I go, aut-aut. My visits cannot be of much consequence, it’s true, still they have I consider, a certain value, if it were but on Mrs. Siebenkæs’s account.” Firmian, doubly irritated, firstly at the imperious rudeness and conceit of an alternative of the sort, and secondly at the lowness of the market price for which the Rath abandoned their society, could but say, “Nobody can influence your decision on that point now but yourself. I most certainly cannot. It will be an easy matter for you, Herr Schulrath, to give up our acquaintance—though there is no real reason why you should—but it will not be easy for me to give up yours, although I shall have no choice.” Stiefel, from whose brow the sprouting laurels were thus so unexpectedly shorn—and that, too, in the presence of the woman he loved—had nothing to do but take his leave; but he did it with three thoughts gnawing at his heart—his vanity was hurt, his dear Lenette was crying, and her husband was rebellious and insubordinate, and resisting his authority.
And as the Schulrath said farewell for ever, a bitter, bitter sorrow stood fixed in the eyes of his beloved Lenette—a sorrow which, though the hand of time has long since covered it over, I still see there in its fixity; and she could not go down stairs, as at other times, with her sorrowing friend, but went back into the dark, unlighted room, alone with her overflowing breaking heart.
Firmian’s heart laid aside its hardness, though not its coldness, at the sight of his persecuted wife in her dry, stony grief at this falling to ruin of every one of her little plans and joys; and he did not add to her sorrow by a single word of reproach. “You see,” was all he said, “that it is no fault of mine that the Schulrath gives up our acquaintance; he ought never to have been told anything about the matter,—however, it’s all over now.” She made no reply. The hornet’s sting (which makes a triple stab), the dagger, thrown as by some revengeful Italian, was left sticking firm in her wound, which therefore could not bleed. Ah! poor soul; thou hast deprived thyself of so much! Firmian, however, could not see that he had anything to accuse himself of; he being the gentlest, the most yielding of men under the sun, always ruffled all the feathers on his body up with a rustle in an instant at the slightest touch of compulsion, most especially if it concerned his honour. He would accept a present, it is true, but only from Leibgeber, or (on rare occasions) from others in the warmest hours of soul communion; and his friend and he both held the opinion that, in friendship, not only was a farthing of quite as much value as a sovereign, but that a sovereign was worth just as little as a farthing, and that one is bound to accept the most splendid presents just as readily as the most trifling; and hence he counted it among the unrecognised blessings of childhood that children can receive gifts without any feeling of shame.
In a mental torpor he now sat down in the arm-chair, and covered his eyes with his hand; and then the mists which hid the future all rolled away, and showed in it a wide dreary tract of country, full of the black ashy ruins of burnt homesteads, and of dead bushes of underwood, and the skeletons of beasts lying in the sand. He saw that the chasm, or landslip, which had torn his heart and Lenette’s asunder, would go on gaping wider and wider; he saw, oh! so clearly and cheerlessly, that his old beautiful love would never come back, that Lenette would never lay aside her self-willed pertinacity, her whims, the habits of her daily life; that the narrow limits of her heart and head would remain fixed firmly for ever; that she would as little learn to understand him, as get to love him; while, again, her repugnance to him would get the greater the longer her friend’s banishment endured, and that her fondness for the latter would increase in proportion. Stiefel’s money, and his seriousness, and religion, and attachment to herself combined to tear in two the galling bond of wedlock by the pressure of a more complex and gentle tie. Sorrowfully did Siebenkæs gaze into a long prospect of dreary days, all constrained silence, and dumb hostility and complaint.