He took up his quarters in the Lizard Inn, which cannot have been the grandest hotel in the town, inasmuch as the Advocate ate his beef on a pewter-platter, which (to judge by the marks and stigmata of a facsimile of his own knife which it bore), seemed to have once been enrolled as a soldier of his own pawned-plate-militia regiment. However, the inn had this advantage—that Firmian could occupy the little room, number seven, on the third story, and there establish a star-observatory, or mast-head crow’s-nest, which commanded Stiefel’s study just opposite, at a somewhat lower elevation. But his Lenette never came to the window. Ah! if he had seen her, he would have knelt on the floor for sheer sorrow. Not till it was quite dark did he see his old friend Stiefel, who came and held a printed sheet—probably a proof of the ‘German Programme Advertiser’—against the red western sky, it being too dark to see it inside. He was surprised to see the Schulrath look so worn and bowed—and he had a crape on his arm too. “Can my Lenette’s poor baby be dead?” he thought.
When it was quite late he crept, all trembling, to that garden, whence we do not all return, and which is bounded by the hanging Eden-Garden of the second life. In the churchyard he was safe from the approach of spectators, thanks to the ghost-stories by means of which Leibgeber had forced his inheritance out of his guardian’s clutches. On his way to his own vacant, subterranean bed, he passed by the grave on which (while it was black, it was grass-grown now) he had placed the flower-garland which he had meant to give Lenette a pleasant surprise with, though it did only cause her an unexpected sorrow. At last he came to the bed-curtains of that grave-siesta, his own tombstone, and he read the inscription with a cold shudder. “Suppose this stone trap-door were lying upon your face,” he said to himself, “building you in from the wide heavens!”—and he thought what clouds, what coldness, and night, reign around the two poles of life, as about the poles of our earth—about the beginning and the end of man. He considered it a very wicked thing to have aped the last hour—the crape-streamer of a long, dark cloud was over the moon, his heart was tender and anxious; when suddenly a something with colour in it, near his grave, seized his attention, and caused a revulsion in his soul.
For there, close beside it, was a fresh grave, quite recently covered in, surrounded by a painted wooden-frame, not unlike a bedstead. And upon these painted boards Firmian (as long as his streaming eyes allowed him) read what follows:—
“Here reposes in God, Wendeline Lenette Stiefel, born Engelkraut of Augspurg. Her first husband was the lamented Poor’s Advocate, F. St. Siebenkæs. On the 20th of October, 1786, she entered, for the second time, into holy matrimony with the Schulrath Stiefel, of this place, and after three-quarters of a year of a peaceful union with him, she fell asleep in childbed, on the 22nd of July, 1787, and lies here, with her little still-born daughter, awaiting a joyful resurrection.”
“Oh! poor creature, poor creature!” More he could not think. Now—now that her day of life was better and warmer, the earth must swallow her, and she take nothing with her but a hand roughened by labour, a face furrowed with the death-bed sickness, and a contented, but empty heart, which, hemmed down among the hollow-ways and mine-shafts of this world, had seen scarcely any stars or flowery meadows. Her troubles had gradually clouded over her life so thickly and darkly, that no picturing fancy could brighten and purify them by the colour-play of poesy, just as no rainbow is possible when the whole sky is black with rain. “Why did I vex you so often, and pain you, even by my death, and be so unforgiving to all your little innocent crotchets?” he said, weeping bitterly. An earth-worm came twining out of the grave, and he threw it forcibly away, as though it had come straight from the beloved cold heart; although that which satiates this creature is what satiates us also at last—EARTH. He thought of the child (mouldering to dust) which laid its thin, withered arms about his soul, as if it had been his own, and to which Death had given as much as a God gave to Endymion—sleep, eternal youth, and immortality. At length he tottered away from this place of mourning with his heart wearied, not lightened, by his tears.
When he went back to the inn, a woman with a harp was singing in the public room (a boy accompanying her on a flute) a song, of which the ritournelle was, “dead is dead, and gone is gone.” It was the same woman who had been playing and singing on the New Year’s eve when his Lenette, now departed and at peace, had buried her face in the handkerchief, weeping and desolate. Oh! the burning arrows of these music-tones went hissing through his heart—the poor soul had no shield. “I tortured her terribly in these days” (he went on constantly saying). “How she sighed! How she kept silence! Ah! if you could but see me now from on high, now that you are happier! If you could but behold this bleeding soul of mine—not that you should forgive me, no, only that I might have the consolation of suffering something for your sake! Oh! how different would I be to you now!”
And this is what we all say when we bury some one whom we have tortured; but on that very same evening of mourning we go and dart the javelin deep into some other breast which is still warm. Oh! weaklings that we are, strong only in resolves! If that form, now resolved into its elements, whose mouldering wounds (which we ourselves inflicted) we expiate with tears of penitence and warm resolves to do better, were to come back to us to-day, new-created, and in the brightest bloom of youth, it would be but for the first week that we should clasp the newfound soul, more fondly loved than ever, to our hearts; and then we should apply the old martyrdom instruments to it again, just as of old. That we should do this, even to our beloved dead, I deduce from the fact (to say nothing of our rude unkindness to the living) that, in our dreams, when those whom we have lost revisit us again, we act over again everything which we now repent. I do not say this to deprive any mourner of the consolation of repentance, or of the thought, that his love for the lost one is purer and fonder than before, but to lessen the pride which may be grounded upon the repentance and the data of feelings.
Later in the night, when Firmian saw the face (gnawed and sunken with sorrow) of his old friend (who had now so little left to him), looking up to heaven, as if seeking there among the stars his friend of whom he was bereaved, sorrow pressed the last tear from his anguished heart, and in the madness of grief he cast the blame upon himself of his friend’s sorrow; jut as if the latter had not a great deal to thank him for in the first instance, before setting about pardoning him.
He awoke in all the exhaustion of sorrow, i.e. in that bled-away condition of the feelings which at last resolves itself into a sweet melting-away and longing for death. For he had lost everything—even what was not buried. He dared not go to the Schulrath for fear of being recognised, or, at the very lowest, staking upon a most dangerous chance the peace of mind of that most innocent creature, who would never be able to reconcile it to either his conscience or his sense of honour, that he had married a woman whose husband was still alive.
But he could go and see Meerbitzer, the hairdresser, with, less danger of discovering himself, and could carry away from him a great dowry of news. Moreover, the sickle of Death had cut through all his other chains and knots, together with his bonds of love. He would be doing no injury to any one but himself if he took off his mask of death, and showed himself unmouldered to other people, nay, even to the sorrowing Nathalie; particularly as on very beautiful evenings, and whenever he did any good action, his conscience claimed the arrear-interest of the unpaid debt of truth, refusing to grant any further letters of respite. Also his soul swore, as a God swears to his own self, that he would only stay there this one day, and then never come back.