Nathalie, who had heard what the child said, came down, and said, with a blush, “Is it I, darling? Give me your flowers, then.” The child, recognising her, kissed her hand, the hem of her dress, and, lastly, her lips, and would have recommenced this round of kisses, when Nathalie, in turning the flowers over, came upon three silken counterfeits amidst its living forget-me-nots and red and white roses. To Nathalie’s questions as to whence these costly flowers came, the child answered, “Give me a kreuzer or two, and I’ll tell you.” This was done, and she added, “I got them from my godpapa, and he is a very, very grand gentleman;” then ran away among the bushes.
This bouquet was a veritable Turkish Selam-and-Flower riddle to them all. Leibgeber accounted with ease for the child’s sudden marriage of Nathalie and Siebenkæs, by the circumstance that the advocate had been standing beside her at the water-side, and people, who had seen no one so constantly with her as himself, had been misled by the bodily likeness between them.
Siebenkæs’s mind, however, ran more on the machine-master, Rosa (so fond of setting his patchwork life-scenes for every woman to play her part before), and the resemblance these silk flowers bare to those which the Venner had once redeemed from pawn for Lenette in Kuhschnappel struck him at once; yet how could he sadden this gladsome time, and spoil the pleasure of receiving these votive flowers, by giving words to his suspicions? Nathalie insisted upon a distribution of this floral inheritance, inasmuch as each of the three had taken part in the rescue, and Siebenkæs and Leibgeber had, at all events, rescued the rescuer. She kept the white silk roses for herself, allotted the red ones to Leibgeber (who would not have them, but asked for a proper, real, living rose instead, which he immediately put in his mouth); to Siebenkæs she gave the silken forget-me-nots, and one or two living, perfume-breathing ones as well (souls, as it were, of the artificial ones). He took them with rapture, and said the tender real ones should never wither for him. Nathalie here took a brief temporary leave of the pair, but Firmian could not find words to express all his gratitude to his friend for the means he had adopted to prolong this little day of grace which orbed his whole life round with a new heaven and a new earth.
No King of Spain ever took as little out of some six, or so (at the outside), of the hundred dishes which, by the laws of the realm, are daily served at his table, than Siebenkæs did that day out of one. Historians, worthy of credence, inform us, however, that he managed to drink a very little—a little wine it was—and that in a considerable hurry for he could not be happy enough that day to satisfy Leibgeber. The latter, not apt to be easily swayed by heart and feeling, was all the more delighted that his beloved Firmian should at last have a pole star of happiness shining in the zenith point of the heavens above his head, beaming down genial warmth upon the blossoming time of his few scattered flowers.
The rapid rate at which his duplex enjoyment kept on moving enabled him to steal a march upon the sun, and he arrived once more at the villa, whose walls were now tinted red by his beams, while the glory of evening was gilding its windows into fire. Nathalie, on the balcony, was like some sunlit soul, just ready to take wing after the departing sun, hanging with her great eyes upon the shining, quivering world rotunda all full of church-music—and on the sun flying downward from this temple, like some angel—and at the holy, luminous tomb of night into which earth was sinking.
When they came under the balcony (Nathalie beckoning them to come up to her) Heinrich handed him his stick, saying, “Keep that for me. I have enough to carry without it—if you want me, blow the whistle.” As regarded his morale and physique, our good Henry had the kindest and softest of human hearts within his shaggy, Bruin breast.
Ah! happy Firmian, happy in spite of all your troubles. When now you pass through the door of glass and on to the floor of iron, the sun confronts you, and sets for a second time. Earth closes her great eye, like some dying goddess! Then the hills smoke like altars—choruses call from the woods—shadows, the veils of day, float about the enkindled, translucent tree-tops and rest upon their many-tinted breast-pins (of flowers), and the gold-leaf of the evening sky throws a dead-gilt gleam towards the east, and touches with a rosy ray the vibrating breast of the hovering lark, far up evening bell of Nature. Ah! happy Firmian, should some glorious spirit from realms afar wing its flight athwart earth and her spring tide, and, as he passes, a thousand lovely evenings be concentrated into one burning one—it would not be more Elysian than this, whereof the glow is now dying out around you as the moments fly.
When the flames of the windows paled, and the moon was rising heavily behind the earth, they both went back into the twilight room, silent, and with full hearts. Firmian opened the pianoforte and, in music, went through his evening once more. The trembling strings were as tongues of fire to his full heart; the flower-ashes of his youth were blown away, and two or three youthful minutes bloomed back into life.
But as the music poured its warm life-balsam upon Nathalie’s swollen heart in all its constraint (for its wounds were only closed, not healed), it melted and gave way, the heavy tears which had been burning within it flowed forth, and it grew weak and tender, but light. Firmian, who saw she was passing once more through the gate of sacrifice towards the sacrificial knife, stopped the sacrificial music, and tried to lead her away from the altar. Just then the first beam of the moon alighted, like a swan’s wing, upon the waxen grapes. He asked her to come out into the silent, misty, after-summer of the day, the moonlit evening. She placed her arm in his without saying yes.
What a sparkling, gleaming world! Through the branches, through the fountains, over the hills and over the woodlands, the flashing molten silver was flowing, which the moon was fining from out the dross of night. Swiftly shot her glance of silver athwart the rippling wavelet, and the glossy, shining, gently-trembling apple-leaves, pausing to rest upon the marble pillars and birch-tree stems. Nathalie and Firmian paused upon the threshold of the magic valley (it gleamed like some enchanted cavern, where night and light were playing, and all the founts of being—which by day cast up sweet odour, melody of songs and voices, feathery wings, translucent pinions—seemed sunk in voiceless slumber deep into some silent chasm). They looked up to the mountain, the Sophienberg, with its summit flattened as by the weight of years; a great mist Colossus was veiling all its Alp-like peak; next at the pale-green world, lying asleep beneath the shimmering radiance of the far-off silent suns, gleaming depths of silver star-dust, flowing faint and far before the ever-brightening rising moon; and then at one another, with hearts full to the brim of holy friendship, such a gaze as only two blest angels, new created, free and gladsome, bend in rapture on each other. “Are you as happy as I?” he asked. “No,” she answered, involuntarily pressing his arm, “that I am not; for, on a night like this should follow, not a day, but something far lovelier and richer—something that should satisfy the heart’s thirst, and staunch its bleeding for ever.” “And what should that be?” he asked. “Death,” was her answer. She lifted her streaming eyes to his and said, “You think so, too, do you not? Death for me.” “No, no,” he added quickly, “for me, if you will, not for you.” To break the course of this overpowering moment, she added hurriedly, “Shall we go down to the place where we first met, and where, two days too soon, I became your friend;[[68]] and yet it was not too soon. Shall we?”