Solitude lay around our friend like some beautiful country—all the echoes, driven away from him, and wandering, lost and astray, could find their way back to him now athwart it. And on the crape-veil, woven of the twelve past hours, which had laid itself over his life’s loveliest historical picture, he could tremblingly trace that picture’s lines with crayon-pencil, and trace, and trace them over again, a thousand and a thousand times! But a visit to the beautiful Fantasie—blooming richer and fairer as the hours went by—this he must deny himself; for he must not be a living hedge, to fence and bar Nathalie from that Valley of Blossom. He must pay for bliss with privation. The charms of the town and neighbourhood had still their bright, many-tinted skins—but their sweet kernels were gone. Everything was to him as some dessert dish which had, in the older time, had coloured sugar sprinkled over it, which was now, somehow, turned to coloured sand. All his hopes—all the flowers and fruit of his life (as is the case with our higher ones)—now grew and matured beneath the ground, like those of the subterranean vetch;[[78]] I mean, in the sham grave into which he was going. How little he had—and yet, how much! His feet were upon prickly rose branches, and all round the Elysian fields of his future he saw thorny bushes, bristly undergrowth, and a wall built, beginning at his grave. His Leipzig rose valley was dwindled into the one green rosebud-twig, which had been transplanted, unblown, from Nathalie’s heart to his. And yet, how much he had. A forget-me-not, from Nathalie, for all his life to come (the silken ones she gave him were but the hulls of that whose blossom was immortal and eternal); a springtime in his soul at last, at last after all these many springs—to be so beloved, for the first time by a woman as an hundred dreams and poets had pictured to him that men might be beloved. To pass, in an instant, at a single step, from his dingy lumber room of old law papers and books into the fresh, green, flowery, golden age of love,—for the first time, not only to gain a rare and priceless love like this, but to take away with him such a parting kiss, like a sun into all his coming life, to light and warm it through and through for ever! This was bliss for one who had had his cross to bear in former days. But, more than this, he was free to let himself be borne along upon the beauteous waves of this river of Eden without care or constraint, inasmuch as Nathalie never could be his, nor should he ever see her more. In Lenette he had loved no Nathalie as in the latter no Lenette. His wedded love was a prosaic summer day of sultry hay-making, but this was a poetic spring night of starlight and flowers, and his new world was like the name of the spot where it was created—Fantaisie. He did not deceive himself as to the fact that, as he was going to die before Nathalie, he was loving, in her, merely a departed spirit, and that as a departed spirit—nay, while yet in this life, of a truth, for him, a pure and glorified risen soul; and he freely put the question to himself whether there were any reason why he should not love this Nathalie (thus departed into the past, for him) as truly and fondly as any other, departed long since into a yet remoter past—the Heloise of an Abelard or St. Preux, or a poet’s Laura, or a Werther’s Lotte for whom his dying was not even to be as real as Werther’s.
With all his efforts, he could not manage to say more to Leibgeber than, “She must have been very, very fond of you, this rare, exceptional soul—for it is only to my resemblance to you that I can ascribe her heavenly kindness to me—who am so little like other men—and have never been cared for by women.” Leibgeber—and he himself as soon as he said it—laughed at this almost idiotic statement; but what is any and every lover, during his May month, but a dear, genuine, simple sheep?
Leibgeber soon came back to the hotel with the news that he had seen the English lady on her way to Fantaisie. Firmian was very glad of it. She rendered his resolve to shut himself out of the entire circle of delight easier to execute. For she was the Count von Vaduz’s daughter, and consequently must not see him (Siebenkæs) at present, having to believe him hereafter to be Leibgeber. Heinrich botanised, however, the whole day on the flowery slope of Fantaisie, with the view of discovering and observing the flower goddess, rather than the flowers, with his botanical glasses (to wit, his eyes). But no goddess appeared. Alas! our poor wounded Nathalie had so many reasons for keeping aloof from the ruins of her loveliest hours—for fleeing the scene of conflagration (now overgrown with flowers) where she might encounter him whom she meant to meet no more.
A few days after this, the Venner Rosa von Meyern honoured the company at the table d’hôte in the ‘Sun’ with his.... If the author’s calculations as to dates do not wholly mislead him, he was at dinner there on that occasion himself. But I have only an indistinct recollection of the two advocates, and none at all of the Venner—because coxcombs of his description are an uninteresting species of animals, and there are whole game-preserves and zoological gardens full of them to be met with at all times. I have more than once met with characters, in the body, whom I have subsequently taken careful wax casts of from the crowns of their heads to the soles of their boots, and then exhibited them about the country in my collection of wax-work figures. But I wish I always knew beforehand exactly which of the people whom I happen to be dining or travelling with chances to be the one who is going to have his portrait painted in this way. I should note down, and store up a thousand trifling, minute peculiarities, and lay them down in my epistolary cellars. As it is, I sometimes find myself obliged (and I confess it freely) to set to work and coolly lie a number of matters of minor importance—for instance, that a thing takes place about six o’clock, or about seven—if I happen to be wholly without documentary evidence on the point. Wherefore it is a moral certainty that if three other authors had sat down, on the same morning with me, to give the world an account of Siebenkæs’s wedded life derived from the same historical sources as mine, that we four, however great our devotion to truth, would have produced family histories containing much the same amount and description of inaccuracy as we find in those which the four Evangelists have given us; so that our tetrachord would have stood in need of a good tuning with a tuning-pipe in the shape of a “Harmony” of our Gospels.
Meyern dined at the ‘Sun,’ as we have said. He told Siebenkæs with a triumph, which was not without a dash of menace, that he was going back to Kuhschnappel next day. He was vainer than ever—probably he had offered his hand to some fifty of the fair sex of Bayreuth, as though he had been the giant Briareus, with fifty wedding-rings on his hundred hands. He was as greedy of the fair sex as cats are of marum verum; which is why both are surrounded with metallic guards by their possessors. When the clergy rivet poachers of this description, alive, to one particular animal of their chase by means of a strong wedding-ring, and the animal of the chase in question drags them through every thicket till they are scratched and bled to death, philanthropic weekly-papers would say that it is too severe a punishment; and it is so, no doubt, for the poor animal of the chase.
On the following day Rosa really did send to ask whether Siebenkæs had any message to send to his wife, as he was going back to see her.
Nathalie was invisible still. All that Firmian saw of her was a letter for her which he saw shaken out of the post-bag when he went (as he did every day) to see if there was one from his wife. Lenette did not require more hours to write a letter than Isocrates did years for a panegyric on the Athenians—no more, but just the same number, namely about ten. Judging by the handwriting and the seal, the letter for Nathalie was from the (step) father of his country, Herr von Blaise. “Thou darling girl,” thought Firmian, “with what deliberation he will pass the burning focus of his burning-glass (formed of the ice of his heart) over every wound of thy soul! How many secret tears wilt thou weep—and no one to count them; and thou hast no hand now to dry them and hide them, except thine own!”
One exquisite, blue afternoon he went alone to the only pleasure garden which was not barred against him—the Hermitage. Memories met him every where—all painfully sweet memories. At every spot he had lost, or renounced, something of life or heart—had become a hermit, in accordance with the place’s name. Could he forget the great, dim glade where, beside his kneeling friend, and before the setting sun, he had sworn to die, and part from his wife and from all the world he knew?
He left the joy-place, turned his face to the setting sun (which almost hid, in its brightness, the prospect from his sight), and strolled in circles round the town. With a deeply moved heart he gazed after the gently radiant luminary as it sank, amid the glowing cloud-embers, towards that distant spot where his widowed Lenette would be standing in her silent room, with her face lighted up by the evening red. “Ah! dear, good Lenette,” the voice within him cried, “why can I not press thee to this full, tender heart, here in this paradise, in bliss? I should love thee better here, and forgive thee easier.”
Yes, of a truth, it is thou, kind Nature—never ending Love, who changest, in us, distance of body into nearness of soul. It is thou who, when we are utterly happy in some distant spot, bringest to us from afar, in fancy, the beloved forms of those whom we have had to leave—they come like beautiful music, or like happy years—and we stretch out our arms to the clouds that go soaring over the hills beyond which lie the dwellings of those whom we love the best. Our severed hearts open to those distant ones as the flowers which open to the sun unfold their petals even on days when there are clouds between them.