“Neither do I desire more friends. No; we stand all, side by side, on undermined graves—and when we have so long held each other so fondly by the hand, and so long suffered together, our friend’s empty mound breaks in, and he turns pale, and sinks—and I am left alone, my life all frozen, beside the filled-up grave. No, no: but when at last there comes the hour when the heart will die no more, but has put on immortal being—and when friends stand side by side in the eternal world—then let the firmer breast beat warm and high, then let the eye, which is to beam for ever, weep blissful tears, then let the lips, which never more grow pale, murmur in rapture, ‘Now come to me, beloved soul, we will love now, for we shall never have to part, again.’
“Oh! thou bereaved and widowed Nathalie! what would’st thou have on earth?
“A grave, and patience; nothing else beside. But these deny me not, thou silence-keeping Fate! Dry thou mine eyes, then close them! Still my heart, then break it!—Yes, one day, when the free spirit spreads her wings in a fairer heaven, and when the New Year breaks upon a purer world—when we all meet, and love, again—then shall I lay my longings, prayers, and wishes at thy feet. But none for me; for I shall be too blest.”
In what words could I depict the inward speechlessness and motionlessness of her friend, when he had read the paper, and still held and gazed at it, although he could no longer either see or think. Oh! the ice-floes of the glacier of death spread wider and wider, and filled up one warm Tempè valley after another. The only bond by which our solitary Firmian now held to humanity was the cord of his death-bell and coffin—his bed was but a broader bier—and every joy seemed a theft from the withered, leaf-stripped heart of another. And thus the stem of his life, like that of many flowers,[[108]] went deeper and deeper down, its top becoming its hidden root.
The abyss of a difficulty yawned on every side, and to do anything was just as perilous as to do nothing. I shall lay the difficulties, or resolutions, in their order as they struck his mind, before the reader. In man, the devil flies up always sooner than the angel,—the evil intention comes before the good one.[[109] ]His first was non-moral, namely, that he should answer Nathalie, and tell her what she wished to hear—that is, should lie to her. We find the black mourning coat as becoming, when others wear it for us, as warm when we wear it for others. “But I shall melt her heart” (said his) “into fresh anguish with a continuation of wound and lie; ah! not even my actual death would be worth such pain and sorrow. Therefore I shall keep utter silence.” But then, she must think Henry annoyed, and that she has lost this friend too; nay, she might, in this case, travel to Kuhschnappel, and go to his grave, and bear it as an additional burden upon her oppressed and trembling soul. In both these cases there was the risk of the third danger—that she should come to Vaduz, and that he should then have to convert the written lies, which he had spared her, into spoken ones. There was but one way of escape that he could see—the most virtuous, but the steepest—he could tell her the truth. But with what danger to every relation of his life this confession was fraught, even if Nathalie kept counsel—also, a yellow, cross light would fall upon Henry in Nathalie’s eyes, especially as she had no means of knowing anything as to the nobleness and generosity of his aims and deceptions. On the whole, there was least for his heart to suffer on the precarious path of truth, and ultimately he resolved to go by it.
CHAPTER XXIV.
NEWS FROM KUHSCHNAPPEL—WOMAN’S ANTICLIMAX—OPENING OF THE SEVENTH SEAL.
It is a matter which often quite puts me beyond myself that, although we do, in the end, duly accept and honour the bills which Virtue draws upon us, we only pay them after such a vast number of days of grace and double-usances—although neither the devil nor Constantinople will hear of either the one or the other. Firmian urged no further pleas of objection, except for delay. He merely postponed his confession, thinking that as Apollo is the best consoler (Paraclete) of man, and as Nathalie had shown the basilisk of sorrow its own image in the mirror of poetry, the sight of itself would be sufficient to kill it, Thus it is that all virtuous motions in us are weakened by the friction of time and of our inclinations.