Yes, my Christian, we have something better left still—a warmer, truer, lovelier, love for every soul which we have not yet lost.
CHAPTER XXIII.
DAYS IN VADUZ—NATHALIE’S LETTER—A NEW YEAR’S WISH—WILDERNESS OF DESTINY AND THE HEART.
We next meet our Firmian (promoted to higher rank on his retirement from the world, as officers are on theirs from the service, to that of Inspector, namely) in the Inspector’s quarters at Vaduz. He found he had to twist his way through so many thickets of prickly-pear and impenetrable thorn-hedges, that, amid his labours, he almost forgot that he was alone—so utterly alone—in the world. No one could endure and overcome solitude, if it were not for the hope of companionship in the future, or for the belief in invisible companionship in the present.
With the Count he had only to seem to be what he really was, and then he was most like the unconventional Leibgeber. He found the Count to be an old man of the world, living alone, with neither wife, sons, nor female servants—a man who filled up and adorned his grey years with the arts and sciences, the last, and most lasting, enjoyments of a life enjoyed to the end—and who cared for nothing on earth (saving always the amusement of jesting upon it) except his daughter, who (as we are aware) had been Nathalie’s greatest friend in the starry and flowery days of youth.
As he had devoted all his powers of body and soul, in early life, to climbing to the tops of all the slipperiest mats de cocagne of pleasure, and carrying off the prizes from them, he had come down to earth with both sides of his being a little wearied. His mental life was now a kind of nursing, and lying in a tepid bath, which it required a shower of cold water to make him raise himself from, and into which fresh warm water had to be constantly being poured. The point of honour of keeping his word, and the greatest possible happiness for his daughter, were the only unbroken reins by which moral laws had ever restrained him; for he looked upon all their other covenants more in the light of flower-chains, or strings of pearls—matters which a man of the world breaks and mends often enough in his career.
As it is easier to imitate lameness than straight walking, it was not difficult for Siebenkæs to enact the part of his beloved Diable Boiteux. The Count was somewhat struck with his white-painted face (which was natural to him), and with his melancholy, and a heap of nameless divergences (variations and aberrations) from Leibgeber. But the Inspector accounted for these to his patron by saying that he was so changed that he scarce recognised himself—that he seemed to have become the changeling of his former self since his illness, and since he had seen his college friend Siebenkæs depart this life in Kuhschnappel. In brief, the Count could not but believe what he was told; who would think of such an absurd story as the one I am telling here? And if the reader had been present in the room himself, I am sure he would have believed the Inspector in preference to me, if it were for no other reason than that he remembered more of his old conversations with the Count than the latter did himself. (’Tis true he got this knowledge out of Leibgeber’s diary.)
At the same time, as he had to speak, and act, in the capacity of chargé-d’affaires, or resident consul, and proxy of his beloved Leibgeber, there were two things which he was, in a high degree, constrained to be—cheerful and kindly. Leibgeber’s humour had a greater power of colour, a greater freedom of drawing, and a more poetic and citizen-of-the-world-ish, and ideal compass and range, than Firmian’s own[[104]] and this assumed brightness of temper by and by became genuine. Moreover, his delicacy of feeling, and his friendship, kept constantly before his mental vision, as on a Moses-cloudy-pillar on his path of life, a shining, magnified image of Henry with a glory, and a crown of laurel on his brow and every thought within him cried, “Be glorious, be godlike, be a Socrates, to do honour to the spirit whose ambassador you are.” And which of us could assume the name of a beloved person, and go and act unworthily?
Nothing on earth is so often deceived—not even women or princes—as the conscience. Our Inspector tried to make his believe that his name had really been Leibgeber in early days—just as he signed it now—and that he really was helping the Count in his work. Moreover, who could be more ready than he to make a perfectly clean breast of the whole story to the Count as soon as ever the proper time came? It was easy to see that a humourous, juristic forgery, and pictorial illusion of this sort would please him better than any amount of truths founded upon reason, or responsa prudentum—to say nothing of his gratification at finding he could have his friend, humorist, and jurist, with two heads, two hearts, four legs and arms—in duplicate, in short. Besides, the fact must not be lost sight of that the lies he told were more unavoidable lies than lies for the amusement of the thing—inasmuch as he touched as seldom as he could upon Leibgeber’s previous conversations and relations, and as much as possible on his own, which involved no breaches of truth.