CHAPTER XX.
APOPLEXY—THE PRESIDENT OF THE BOARD OF HEALTH—THE NOTARY-PUBLIC—THE LAST WILL AND TESTAMENT—THE KNIGHT’S MOVE—REVEL, THE MORNING PREACHER—THE SECOND APOPLECTIC ATTACK.
In the evening Henry drew up the curtain upon this tragedy (full of comic gravedigger business), and discovered Firmian lying on his bed speechless, with apoplectic head, and all his right side paralysed. The only mode in which the patient could bring himself to endure the torture of the deception, and of the pain he was causing Lenette, was by making a mental vow to send her the half of his yearly income as inspector at Vaduz, anonymously, and by remembering that by his death she would obtain happiness, freedom, and her lover. The occupants of the house formed a circle about the apoplectic patient, but Leibgeber drove them out of the room, saying, “the sufferer must have quietness and rest.” It delighted him beyond expression to be able to go on uttering humourous lies without cessation. He assumed the office of Imperial Hereditary Doorkeeper, and shut the door in the doctor’s face (whom people insisted upon prescribing). “I am going to prescribe a little prescription for the patient myself,” he said, “but, little as it is, it will restore his speech for a time. These cursed death-rivers, doctors’ potions, Mr. Schulrath,” (for that gentleman had been fetched immediately) “are like those rivers which demand a dead body every year.” So he wrote a recipe for a simple sedative powder, as follows, reading aloud as he wrote;—
Rx Conch: Citratæ Sirup: j.
Nitri Crystallisatæ gr. x.
D.S. “The Sedative Powder.”
“But above all things,” he added, in the most imperative tones, “we must place the patient’s feet in warm water.”
However, everybody in the house knew well enough that nothing would be of the slightest avail, as his death had been but too unmistakably foretold by the floury face; and Fecht felt a kind of sympathising satisfaction that he had hit the mark.
Scarcely had the sick man swallowed the powder, than, to the astonishment of the Death-Assurance Association in his bedroom, he found himself able to speak, intelligibly, if not very loud. The domestic Vehmgericht was not, perhaps, altogether pleased with this. But our good Henry had a pretext now for resuming his cheerful mien. He comforted Lenette by reminding her that “here below pain was but an initiation ceremony to something higher—the box-on-the-ear, or sword-accolade whereby a man is dubbed a knight.”
The patient had a very fair night after his sedative powder, and began to have some slight hopes of himself. Henry would not allow Lenette (whose eyes were heavy with tears and sleep) to sit up by his bed during the night. He said he would prefer to be at hand himself, in case there should be any danger; of which, however, there was no great risk, as they made their agreement together (doing so in Latin, like princes) that Death, the fifth act of this tragic interlude, (only one of the scenes of the tragedy of Life,) should take place on the evening of the following day. “Even till to-morrow,” said Firmian, “is too long to wait. I am so unspeakably grieved for my poor Lenette’s sorrow. Like David, alas! I have to make a melancholy choice between famine, war, and pestilence, and have no way out of it but his. You, dear brother, are my Cain, and send me on my journey, and believe in the world to which you despatch me not a bit more than he did.[[86]] Before you prescribed the sedative power which obliged me to talk, I was really wishing, in my silent gloom, that the jest might become earnest. For I must one day pass through that underground portal which opens into the fortress of futurity, in which we shall be safe. Ah! it is not the dying that is painful, it is the parting—I mean from those we love.” Henry said, in reply, “Nature holds a broad Achilles-shield before us to protect us from that final bayonet-thrust of life. On our death-beds we grow cold morally before we do so physically, a strange courtier-like indifference towards all we are leaving creeps frostily through the dying nerves. Sapient spectators say, ‘See, nobody but a Christian can die with such resignation and trust.’ Never mind, dear Firmian; the two or three painful burning minutes which you have to bear till to-morrow arrives are a capital warm bath of Aix water for the sick spirit. It has an infernal smell of rotten eggs now, no doubt, but that will go away completely as the bath grows cool.”
Next day Henry eulogised him as follows. “As Cato the younger slept quietly the night before his death, (history heard him snore,) so you appear to have afforded these debilitated, unnerved, and degenerate days a fresh example of a similar magnanimity. If I were your Plutarch I should record the circumstance.”
“In sober seriousness, though,” answered Firmian, “I should be rather pleased if, several years hence, when Death has presented his second of exchange, some literary West, the historical painter, should honour this odd first death of mine by describing it for the press.” This, we see a biographical West has now actually done, but I beg to be permitted to confess, without hesitation, that it has afforded me sincere gratification to find among the documents this death-bed speech and wish, which I am so completely carrying out. Leibgeber answered, “The Jesuits in Löwen once published a little book in which the terrible end of Luther was minutely described in Latin. Old Luther got hold of the book and translated it, as he did the Bible, merely adding at the end, ‘I, Dr. M. Luther, have read and translated this narrative myself.’ If I were you, when I translated my death into English, I should write that at the end of it too.” Do please write it, dear Siebenkæs, as you are still in life—but translate me, at all events.