Siebenkæs wrote off that day a brief and hurried reply to the Schulrath, saying “he was extremely glad that he had stood to the will, and the laws, and enclosed him a power of attorney to enable him to draw the money. Only he entreated him, as a great scholar and man of letters (one of a class who of ten, perhaps, suppose they understand matters of business better than they really do), to put the whole affair into a lawyer’s hands to be transacted, inasmuch as Jus is of little use without jurists—nay, often not of very much even with them. To review ‘Programmes’ he had no time, let alone to read them; and he sent his kind regards to his wife.”
It is not displeasing to me that (as I perceive) my readers have all discovered of themselves that the ghost, or supernatural bow-wow, and mumbo-jumbo,[[112]] who had got the trust money out of the Heimlicher’s clutches more effectually than the whole posse-comitatus of the Court of Exchequer, was none other than Heinrich Leibgeber, who had availed himself of his resemblance to the departed Siebenkæs to play the part of Revenant. I need not, therefore, tell the reader what he knows already.
When one has at last managed to creep up a steep Alp with the hands of a tree-frog, one very often finds that, what one looks down at from the summit is a fresh yawning abyss. Firmian saw a new one under his feet; he had to abandon the resolution he had taken. I mean, he did not now dare to say a word to Nathalie about his resurrection from the charnel-house—his immortality after death. Alas! the happiness of his Lenette, who (in the utmost innocence) had two husbands, would then be hanging on the tip of a tongue. The blame would be his, the misery Lenette’s. No, no (he said); Time will, by slow degrees, lay dust upon my pale image in Nathalie’s kind heart, and draw the colours out of it.
In brief, he kept silence. The proud Nathalie kept silence also. In this terrible position of matters, face to face with the hard, eternal knot of the drama, he passed his anxious hours upon the stage. The raven-flight of cares and sorrows cast their flitting shadows over every charm and beauty of the spring, and poisonous dreams fell upon his sleep like mildew. Every dream-night cut the falling planetary-knot, and his heart along with it. How would Fate rescue and recover him from this poison-vapour, this azote-gas, of anguish and anxiety? How would it cure the finger-worm in his ring finger? By taking his arm off. One evening, to wit, shortly before bedtime, the Count was as confidential with him as a man of the world can ever be. He had something very pleasant to tell him, he said; only he must be allowed to say something beforehand, by way of a preface or introduction. It struck him—he went on to say, that, now that his Inspector had entered upon his duties, he was no longer quite so gay and full of humour as he had found him to be of old, but rather (if he might speak openly) downcast at times, and over-sentimental. Yet he had formerly said himself (but this was the other Leibgeber) that he would rather hear a man swear at a mischance than lament over it; and that one might have his feet sticking in the winter, and his nose in the spring, and smell a flower, though in the midst of snow. “I forgive it, at once, for perhaps I guess the reason of it,” he added. But his forgiveness was really not quite genuine. For, like all the great, to him strength of feeling, even of a loving sort—but still more, of a sorrowful—was an annoyance; and a strong handclasp of friendship was almost as bad as a crunch on the toes. He demanded of pain that it should pass before him with a smile—of wickedness and evil, that they should pass him by laughing, or, at all events, laughed at—as, indeed, the coldest men of the world are like the physical man, whose highest temperature is about the region of the diaphragm.[[113]] Consequently, the previous Leibgeber—that storm-windy, but, at the same time, serene blue sky—naturally suited the Count better than this so-called Leibgeber. But how differently from us who read this little reproach quietly, did Siebenkæs listen to it! These solar eclipses of his Leibgeber (which really were not even so much as sun spots belonging to him, but merely apparent shadows cast on him by Siebenkæs, by reason of the position he chanced to occupy) the latter reproached himself with as so many deadly sins against his friend, which he felt it absolutely necessary to confess and do penance for.
As the Count now went on to say, “This melancholy of yours can scarcely be caused altogether by grief at the loss of your friend Siebenkæs, because since his death you have never spoken to me of him with such warmth as when he was alive. Pardon me this frankness,”—a fresh pang at this shadowing of Leibgeber cut across his brow, and it was with difficulty that he could allow his patron to finish his explanation. “But this is not a shortcoming in my eyes, dear Leibgeber: on the contrary, it is an excellence. We ought not to go on eternally mourning for the dead; if we grieve at all, it should be for the living. And even the latter species of grief may come to an end with you next week, for then I expect my daughter, and” (he spoke here very deliberately) “her friend Nathalie with her. They have met en route.” Siebenkæs sprang hastily up, stood speechless and motionless, held his hand before his eyes, not to hide them, but to keep the light out of them, so that he might look through, and follow the course of, the cloud-masses of thought which were piled one over another and rolling in all directions, ere he should give his answer.
But the Count—misconstruing him (as Leibgeber) in all points, and ascribing his sentimental metamorphosis to Nathalie’s account, and the fact of his being deprived of her—begged him merely to hear him out before speaking, and to accept his assurance that he would be delighted to do everything in his power to retain his daughter’s lovely friend always in the neighbourhood. Heavens! what thousandfold entanglement the Count made of a matter so wholly simple!
Here Siebenkæs, stormed at from fresh points of the compass, had to beg for a moment to think—for there were now three souls at stake—but he had scarcely taken one or two hasty steps across the room, when he stood firm again, and said to the Count, and to himself, “Yes, I shall do what is right.” Then he begged the Count to give his word of honour that he would keep inviolate a secret which he would confide to him, and which neither related to, nor would injure, himself or his daughter in the slightest degree. “In that case why should I not?” answered the Count, to whom the discovery of a secret was as the clearing away of a thick woodland before a fine view.
Then Firmian opened his heart, his life, and everything, like a stream let loose and dashing into a new channel, not yet to be measured with a glance. The Count several times detained him by fresh misunderstandings, because he had only preassumed, out of his own imagination, a love on Nathalie’s part for the real Leibgeber, and had never heard from any one of her real love for Siebenkæs.
And now the astonished Count, in his turn, astonished the Advocate; and, of all the many faces which in such a case he might have put on—faces offended, angry, startled, embarrassed, delighted, cold—he only showed the Inspector an exceedingly contented one. It only particularly pleased him, he said, that he had observed so many little matters which rather vexed him, and that in certain points he had not thought over-highly of Leibgeber; but what delighted him most was his good fortune at possessing, in this manner, a double Leibgeber, and the knowledge that the absent one was not sorrowing for a dead friend.
Let no one be surprised at the Count’s maintaining his good-humour and serenity who has seen a bright order-star sparkle on an aged, and extinguished, breast. When our old man of the world beheld the little shuttle of this chain of friends flying to and fro between love and sacrifice on either side; when he held in his hand the bright Raphael-tapestry of friendship which it wove, and looked at it closely, there came to him the enjoyment of something new, for the first time for many years. So that, up to this point, he had been sitting in his front box before a living comic-historical drama, of which he himself unravelled the plot, and which could be performed all over again in his head at any given moment. Moreover, his Inspector had become a new being for him, full of fresh entertainment, inasmuch as he had gone off the stage, changed his dress and re-entered as the pseudo-deceased Siebenkæs; and could, in the future, tell him as much as he pleased of the narrator. In this way both the friends had become flatteringly-precious to him, by reason of the dependent interest in him with which they had interwoven the bond which bound their souls.