The Friseur knew in a moment, from the lameness, that he could be nobody but the Vaduz Inspector, Leibgeber. Like posterity, he decked his own lodger, Siebenkæs, with the richest of rosemary-garlands, and declared that these ragamuffins of stocking-weavers whom he had got upstairs now were not to be spoken of in the same day with poor lamented Mr. Siebenkæs. The whole house creaked when they rattled and stamped in their upstairs-room. He then called attention to the circumstance that the departed had taken his wife away to him within the space of a year and day; and dwelt on the fact that she had never forgotten the Meerbitzer’s house, but had often looked in of an evening in her widow’s weeds (which she had been buried in according to her desire), and spoken with them about all her various vicissitudes, and about her new life. “They lived together just like two children,” the hairdresser said, “Stiefel and she.” This conversation, the house, and his old rooms, so noisy now, were all so many waste places of his ruined Jerusalem. A stocking-loom now stood where his writing-table used to be, and so on. All his questions about the past were so many conflagration-relics, collected for the fresh building of his burnt-down pleasure-chateaux from out their Phœnix ashes. Hope is the morning Aurora of joy, and memory its red evening sky; but the latter is terribly apt to drop down in grey dew or rain, with no colour left in it. The blue day, which the red sky gives promise of, does, indeed, break in brightness; but it is in another world, where there is another sun. Meerbitzer unknowingly cleft, deep and wide, the split into which he grafted the sundered flower-twigs of the bygone days on to Firmian’s heart; and when, finally, his wife related how, when Lenette had taken the Communion of the Sick, she said to the evening preacher, “I shall go to my Firmian when I am dead, shall I not?” Firmian averted his breast from this blind dagger-thrust, and hurried out into the open air, that he might not encounter any one to whom he should be constrained to lie.
Yet he could not but long for some human creature, even were one to be found nowhere else but beneath his lowliest roof of all—in the churchyard. The electrically-charged atmosphere of the evening brooded and hatched melancholy longings of every kind; the sky was overspread with scattered unripe fragments of a thunder-cloud, and in the west horizon a muttering storm had begun, scattering its lighted pitch-rings and full-charged clouds down upon unknown lands. He went home; but as he passed by the tall railings of Blaise’s garden, he fancied he saw a figure like Nathalie, dressed in black, glide into the arbour. And then, for the first time, he turned his mind to something which Meerbitzer had said about a lady in mourning, who had come a few days before, and wished to be shown all over the house, lingering particularly in Siebenkæs’s old rooms, and making a great many inquiries. That she should have come out of her road on her way to Vaduz was by no means unlikely; indeed, it was very consistent with her romantic turn of mind, particularly as she had never seen Siebenkæs’s former home, and the Inspector had not answered her letter—as Rosa was married, and Blaise reconciled to her (since he had seen the ghost)—and the month of Firmian’s death would naturally suggest to her a visit to his last resting-place.
So that her friend could not but dwell all this evening with feelings of painful fondness upon her memory—the one unclouded star which beamed on him from the overcast heaven of his bygone days. It was deep in the gloaming now, a cooler air was stirring. A storm had spent its force in other regions, and there remained only some broken, lurid clouds, piled in the sky like glowing, half-burned firebrands. He betook himself, for a last time, to the place where death had planted the red carnation, with its little buds snapped so untimely from its stem. But within his soul, as without him, the air breathed less sultrily now, and fresher; tears had blunted the sharp edge of the first bitterness of his sorrow. He felt, with far more of gentleness, that the earth is only our CARPENTER’S YARD, not our BUILDING-GROUND. In the East, where the stars were rising, a long blue streak shone above the sunken thunder-clouds. The moon (light-magnet of the sky) was lying, like a fount of light, upon the foil of a cleft cloud, and the wide vaporous veil was melting motionlessly away.
When Firmian, approaching the beloved grave, raised up his downcast head, he saw a dark form resting there. He stopped short, and gazed more piercingly. The form was a woman’s. Her face, frozen into the ice of death, was fixed on him. As he drew nearer, he saw his dearest Nathalie leaning overpowered against the painted railing of the grave. The autumnal breath of death had tinted her lips and cheeks with white; her wide eyes were sightless, and nothing but the tear-drops which hung on her lashes gave proof that she was in life, and had taken him for the apparition of which she had heard so much. In the excess of her romantic sorrow at his grave she had longed, in the strength and loneliness of her heart, that his spirit might appear to her; and when she saw him approaching, she thought Heaven had granted her prayer. And then the iron hand of chill terror turned this red rose to a white one. But ah, her friend was the more wretched of the two. His tender, unshielded heart was crushed motionless between the impact of two worlds which rushed crashing together. In tones of utter distress he cried out, “Nathalie! Nathalie!” Her lips quivered spasmodically, and a breath of life gave back a shade of brightness to her glance; but the spirit was still there before her, and she closed her eyes again, and said, with a shudder, “Oh God!” It was in vain that his voice called her back to life; when she looked up at the apparition her heart failed her again, and she could only cry “Oh God!” Firmian seizing her hand, cried, “Angel of heaven, I am not dead! only look at me! Nathalie, don’t you know me? Oh! merciful God, don’t punish me so terribly, don’t let me be the cause of her death!” At length she slowly lifted her heavy eyelids, and saw her old friend trembling beside her, with tears of anxiety and terror. His tears were happier, but more abundant, and he smiled sorrowfully upon her as she still kept her eyes open, and said, “Nathalie, I am still upon this earth, in very truth, and suffer as you do yourself; don’t you see how I tremble on your account? Take my warm, living hand. Are you still afraid?” “No,” she answered faintly; but she still looked at him in an awe-stricken fashion, as at a super-earthly being, and had not courage to ask for an explanation of the riddle. He helped her to rise (gently weeping), and said, “But, dear innocent one, come away from this place of sorrow, where so many tears have been shed already. For your heart mine has no secrets now. Ah! I can tell you everything, and I will tell you everything.” He led her out, above the quiet dead, through the back gate of the churchyard. She leaned on his arm heavily and languidly, shuddering again often as they climbed the little height, and only the tears which joy, relief from terror, grief, and exhaustion combined, had brought to her eyes, fell like warm balsam upon her chilled and wounded heart.
When they reached the top of the height she sat down to rest, and the black night-woods, railed round by white harvests, and cut across by the moon’s silent sea of light, lay before them. Nature had drawn out the “pianissimo lute” organ-stop of midnight, and by Nathalie’s side stood one of her beloved dead, new-risen from the grave. He told her now all about Leibgeber’s entreaties; the short story of his mock-death; his residence with the Count; all the longings and tears of his long solitude; his firm determination rather to fly from her than to deceive or wound her beloved heart, either by speech or in writing; and the disclosures he had made to her friend’s father. She sobbed at the account of his last moments and parting from Lenette, as if it had all been real. She thought on many things as she merely said, “Ah! it was only for other people’s happiness that you sacrificed yourself. But you will be able to have done with all this deception now, and to make amends for it, will you not?” “I shall,” he said, “to the very utmost of my power; and my heart and my conscience shall be free and clear once more. Have I not even kept the vow I made to you—that I should not see you again till after my death?” She smiled gently.
They both sunk into a dreamy and blissful silence. At last, seeing her lay a mourning-cloak butterfly[[115]] (disabled by the night-dew) down upon her lap, the fact that she was in mourning herself struck him for the first time, and he hastily asked, “You are not in mourning for any one, are you?” Alas! she had put it on for him. “Not now,” Nathalie answered, and, looking at the butterfly, she said pityingly, “a few drops and a little chilliness have benumbed the poor thing.” Her friend reflected how easily Fate might have punished his temerity by benumbing the even more beautiful, black-attired creature by his side, who had, moreover, had her full share already of shivering in the night-frosts of life and the night-dew of tears. But he could not answer her for love and pain.
They kept silence now, reading each other’s thoughts, lost, half in their hearts, half in the grandeur of night. The wide æther had absorbed all the clouds (only those of the sky, alas!); Luna bent down, with her saintly halo, like a glorified Madonna, from the tranquil blue, to greet her pale sister of the earth. The voice of the stream was heard, as it flowed on its course unseen, hidden by a light mist—like the stream of time, hidden from sight by the haze of countries and nations. Behind them the night-breeze had laid itself to rest upon a swelling, rushing bed of corn, bestreaked with blue corn-flowers; and before them lay the reaped harvest of the world to come—precious stones (as it were) in their coffin-settings, cold and heavy in death.[[116]] The pious and humble ones (forming an antithesis to the sunflower and the mote in the sunbeam) turned as moon-flowers to the moon, and played as moonbeam-motes in her cool rays, feeling that there is nothing under the starry sky so great as hope.
Nathalie leant on Firmian’s hand, that he might help her to rise, and said, “I feel quite able to go home now.” He kept hold of her hand, but did not rise nor speak. He was gazing at the dry, prickly stalk of the old rose-twig which she had given him. Unwittingly, and without feeling what he was doing, he pressed the thorns into his fingers. His laden bosom heaved with deeper, warmer sighs; burning tears stood in his eyes, and the moon’s light trembled before them like a shower of falling light. A whole universe lay upon his soul and upon his tongue, and kept both motionless.
“Firmian,” said Nathalie, “what would you have?” He bent his fixed eyes widely opened upon her gentle form, and pointed down to his grave in the valley. “My house down there,” he answered, “which has been empty so long. For the bed on which we dream this dream of life is terribly hard.”
He lost command of himself, for she wept so terribly—and her face, all heavenly kindness, was so near—and he burst forth, with the bitterest and strongest emotion, “Are not all my loved ones gone, and are not you going too? Ah! why has torturing destiny laid the waxen image of an angel upon all our breasts,[[117]] and lowered us into the chill life? Oh! the soft image melts away, and there is no angel. Yes, you HAVE appeared to me, it is true, but you disappear, and time will crush to atoms your image on my heart, ay, and my heart with it. For when I have lost you, I shall be alone in earnest. But, fare you well! I shall actually die one day, and then I shall appear to you; but not as I have done to-night. Ah! nowhere but in eternity, and then I shall say to you, ‘Oh! Nathalie, I loved you there below with infinite, unending grief and sorrow; make amends to me here!’” She strove to answer, but her voice broke and failed her. She raised her great eyes to the starry sky, but they were full of tears. She tried to rise, but her friend held her, with his hand all thorns and blood, and said, “Can you leave me, Nathalie?”