Thus may we human creatures serve as flower clocks to higher intelligences when our petals close upon our last bed, or as sand-glasses when our sands of life are run so far out that they are turned over into the other world. On such occasions, when seventy of man’s years have ended and passed away, these higher intelligences may say, “Another hour already! Good God! how time flies!”
And this digression reminds me that it really does fly! Firmian and Heinrich lived on in great cheerfulness of spirit towards the jocund morning which was so close at hand, though the former could by no means take root upon any chair or room-floor all the forenoon; for, in his mind’s eye, the curtain kept always rising upon the opera buffa e seria of his mock death, and displaying its burlesque situations. And at present (as was always the case, indeed) the presence and example of Leibgeber heightened his sense of humour and power of expressing the same. Leibgeber, who had gone through all the stage-business and scene-shifting of the sham death in an exhaustive manner weeks ago (in fancy), was thinking little about it now. The problem occupying him at present was how to extract the wick (that is to say, the bride) out of Rosa’s wedding-torch, all painted and moulded as it was. Heinrich was at all times forcible, free, and bold, furious and implacable as regards anything unjust; and his righteous indignation often had much the appearance of vengeance, as here in Rosa’s case, and in that of Blaise. Firmian was more kindly; he spared and pardoned, often, indeed, at the (apparent) expense of honour. He could never have plucked Nathalie’s epistolary lover out of her bleeding heart with Leibgeber’s forceps and knife. His friend, at leaving for Fantaisie that day, had to promise the gentlest of behaviour, and, for a time, silence on the subject of the Royal Prussian Widows’ Fund. It would, of course, have made a terrific, bleeding wound in Nathalie’s feeling of rectitude had the most distant hint been uttered of such a matter as metallic compensation for a spiritual loss such as that involved in her separation on moral grounds from the immoral Venner. She deserved to conquer (and was well able to do so), with the prospect of her victory reducing her to poverty.
Heinrich did not come back till it was somewhat late, and his face was a little troubled, though it was a happy face too. Rosa was discarded, and Nathalie pained. The English lady was at Anspach with Lady Craven, eating her butter—(for she made butter as well as books). When he had read out to Nathalie all that was written on Rosa’s black board and sin-register (which he did gravely, but perhaps louder than was necessary, and with scrupulous truth), she rose up with that grand grace which is a characteristic of enthusiasm of self-sacrifice: “If you are yourself deceived in this as little as you are capable of deceiving, and if I may believe your friend as I do you, I give you my sacred word that I will not allow myself to be persuaded, or constrained, to anything. But the subject of this conversation will be here himself in a few days, and I owe it to him as well as to my own honour, to hear him, as I have given my letters into his hands. Oh! it is hard to have to speak so coldly!” As the moments passed, the rose red of her cheek paled to rose-white. She leant it on her hand, and as her eyes grew fuller, and tears dropped at last, she said, strongly and firmly, “Be in no anxiety, I shall keep my word; and then, cost what it may, I will tear myself from my friend, and go back to my poor people in Schraplau. I have lived quite long enough in the great world, though not too long.”
Heinrich’s unusual seriousness had overpowered her. Her confidence in his truth was immovable, and that (strange reason!) just because he had never seemed to fall in love with her, or to pass beyond the condition of friendship, and so did not measure her affection by his own. Perhaps she would have been angry with her bridegroom’s married attorney (i. e. Firmian), had he not had three or four of the best possible excuses; to wit, his general mental resemblance to Leibgeber, and his physiognomical resemblance to him (which his paleness purified and refined at this juncture).
Her yesterday’s request to Leibgeber to bring Siebenkæs with him in the evening was now repeated (to the former’s joy), though her heart was aching in every corner. But let none take umbrage at her half-mourning for the Venner (now setting and near the horizon), or her erroneous estimate of him; for we all know that women (Heaven bless them!) often think sentiment and integrity, letters and actions, tears and honest warm blood, to be equivalent one to another.
In the afternoon Leibgeber took Siebenkæs to her as a sort of syllogistic figure in support of his argument, or set of rationes decidendi (for the Venner was a collection of rationes dubitandi). Aquiliana received Siebenkæs with a blush, which came and went in an instant; and then with the least dash of hauteur (result of modesty!), yet with all the kindness and good-will which she owed to his interest in her future. She lived in the English lady’s rooms. The flowery valley lay without, like a world before its sun. One advantage connected with a rich pleasure-garden of this sort is that a stranger advocate finds that he can attach the floating spider-threads of his talk to the branches of it, until they have been woven into the finished art-work of a glittering web, which can float in the free air. Firmian could never emulate these clever men of the world, who only need a listener to be able to begin spinning a conversation; who, like the tree-frogs, can cling firmly to anything they chance to hop on to, however smooth, and polished it may be; yea, who can even keep afloat in a space devoid of air, and all objects whatever (which a tree-frog cannot). A man of Siebenkæs’ free and independent soul cannot, however, long remain embarrassed by his unfamiliarity with his surroundings; he must speedily recover his freedom by virtue of his innate superiority to chance, external circumstances; and his unassumed and unassuming simpleness soon amply compensates for his lack of the great world’s artificial and assuming simplicity.
Yesterday he had seen this Nathalie in the happy exercise and enjoyment of all her powers, and of nature and friendship, smiling and enchanting, and crowning the delightful evening with an act of brave self-devotion. Alas! how little remained to-day of all these joys, so tender and so bright. In no hour is a lovely face lovelier than at that immediately succeeding the bitter one, when tears for the loss of a heart have passed over it; for the sight of the loveliness in its sorrow, during that hour itself, would be too sad to bear. For this beautiful creature, who hid the sacrificial knife deep in her heart, where it had been plunged, and gladly let it smart there, that but the wound’s bleeding might be delayed, Siebenkæs would gladly have died—in a way more serious than had been intended—could it have been of any service to her. Is it a thing so strange that the bond between them grew closer and stronger as the sand run down in the hourglass, when we consider that, swayed by an unwonted three-sided seriousness (for even Leibgeber was overtaken by this feeling), their hearts, at sight of the gala-beauty of the spring, were filled with tender, longing wishes?—that Siebenkæs, with his pale face, worn, and stamped with all the traces and marks and signs of recent, bygone, trouble and pain, shone, this day, with a soft and pleasing sheen, as of evening sunlight, on her sight, all weakened by her tears?—that she thought with pleasure on his (rather singular) merit of having, at all events, embittered some of her faithless suitor’s infidelities—and that every note he touched was in the minor mode of his tender nature, because he was seeking to atone for, and cast into shade, the circumstance that it had fallen to his lot to lay waste at one fell stroke so many of this innocent, unknown creature’s hopes and joys—that even his greater share of modest, respectful reserve, became him, and set him off by contrast with his counterpart, the bolder and more outspoken Heinrich? With all these charms of accidental circumstance (which win the female world far sooner than charms of a bodily kind), Firmian was endowed in Nathalie’s eyes. In his eyes she had attractions greater still, and altogether new to him: her cultivation and acquirements; her manly enthusiasm, her delicate refinement; her (most flattering) way of treating him—(none of her sex had ever before glorified him with anything like it, and this particular species of charm plunges many a man who is unused to female companionship, not only into rapture, but into matrimony),—and (two crowning delights) the facts that the whole affair was fortuitous and out of the common, and that Lenette was the exact antipodes of her in each and every respect.
Alas! poor starved, hungering Firmian. There are always a gallows, and a notice-board marked “No thoroughfare,” on the banks of the streamlet of your life, even now that it has become a pearl-bearing brook. Your marriage ring must have pinched you a good deal, and felt very tight in a warm, temperature like this, as, indeed all rings feel tight in a warm bath, and loose in a cold one.
But either some naiad of a diabolical turn of mind, or some ocean god who loved a jest, took always the greatest delight in perturbing and disturbing the sea of Firmian’s life, and stirring up the sand at the bottom of it just when its waters were sparkling and glowing enchantingly with phosphorescent sea creatures, or some electric matter or other, and his ship leaving a long shining wake behind her in it. For just as the glory and the beauty of the garden outside were growing moment by moment, and embarrassment vanishing away with equal rapidity, the painful memory of the late bereavement fading out of remembrance; just when the pianoforte (or, say, the pianissimo fortissimo), and the songs, duets, and trios were being opened and got ready; in fine, just as the honey-cells of their orangery of happiness, their permitted flesh-pots of Egypt, and deep communion cup of love were all ready to their lips, who came with a pop into the room but a certain bluebottle fly on two legs, who had often flown into Firmian’s cup of joy before now.
The Venner, Rosa von Meyern, made his appearance on the scene, lovelily attired in saffron silk, to pay his bride his privileged ambassadorial visit.