This longest of summer days and Mondays was followed by the longest of winter nights (which is impossible only in an astronomical sense). Early next morning, the Schulrath Stiefel drove up, and lifted out of the carriage (fine manners have twice their charm when they adorn a scholar) a bonnet-block instead of the bride, and ordered the rest of her belongings, which consisted of a white tinned box, to be unloaded, while he, with her head under his arm, ran upstairs to the advocate.
“Your worthy intended,” he said, “is coming directly. She is getting ready at this moment, in a farm cottage, for the sacred rite, and begged me to come on before, lest you should be impatient. A true woman, in Solomon’s sense of the term, and I congratulate you most heartily.”
“The Heir Advocate Siebenkæs, my pretty lady?—I can conduct you to him myself. He lodges with me, and I will wait upon you this moment,” said the wig-maker, down at the door, and offered his hand to lead her up: but, as she caught sight of her second bonnet-block, still sitting in the carriage, she took it on her left arm as if it had been a baby (the hairdresser in vain attempting to get hold of it), and followed him with a hesitating step into the advocate’s room. She held out her right hand only, with a deep curtsey and gentle greeting, to her bridegroom, and on her full round face (everything in it was round, brow, eyes, mouth, and chin) the roses far out-bloomed the lilies, and were all the prettier to look upon as seen below the large black silk bonnet; while the snow-white muslin dress, the many-tinted nosegay of artificial flowers, and the white points of her shoes, added charm upon charm to her timid figure. She at once untied her bonnet—there being barely time to get one’s hair done and be married—and laid her garland, which she had hidden at the farm that the people might not see it, down upon the table, that her head might be properly put to rights, and powdered for the ceremony (as a person’s of quality ought to be) by the landlord, thus conveniently at hand.
Thou dear Lenette! A bride is, it is true, during many days, for everyone whom she’s not going to many, a poor meagre piece of shewbread—and especially is she so to me. But I except one hour, namely, that on the morning of the wedding-day, when the girl, whose life has been all freedom hitherto, trembling in her wedding dress, overgrown (like an ivied tree) with flowers and feathers, which, with others like them, fate is soon to pluck away—and with anxious pious eyes overflowing on her mother’s heart for the last and loveliest time; this hour, I say, moves me, in which, standing all adorned on the scaffold of joy, she celebrates so many partings, and one single meeting: when the mother turns away from her and goes back to her other children, leaving her, all fainthearted, to a stranger. “Thou heart, beating high with happiness,” I think then, “not always wilt thou throb thus throughout the sultry years of wedded life; often wilt thou pour out thine own blood, the better to pass along the path to age, as the chamois hunter keeps his foot from sliding by the blood from his own heel.” And then I would fain go out to the gazing, envious virgins by the wayside leading to the church, and say to them, “Do not so begrudge the poor girl the happiness of a, perhaps fleeting, illusion. Ah, what you and she are looking at to-day is the strife- and beauty-apple of marriage hanging only on the sunny side of love, all red and soft; no one sees the green sour side of the apple hidden in the shade. And if ye have ever been grieved to the soul for some luckless wife who has chanced, ten years after her wedding, to come upon her old bridal dress, in a drawer, while tears for all the sweet illusions she has lost in these ten years rise in a moment to her eyes, are you so sure it will be otherwise with this envied one who passes before you all joy and brightness now?”
I should not, however, have performed this unexpected modulation into the “remote key” of tenderheartedness, had it not been that I managed to form to myself a picture so irresistibly vivid of Lenette’s myrtle wreath, beneath her hat (I really had not the slightest intention to touch on the subject of my own personal feelings), and her being all alone without a mother, and her powdery white-flower face, and (more vivid still) of the ready willingness with which she put her young delicate arms (she was scarcely past nineteen) into the polished handcuffs and chain-rings of matrimony, without so much as looking round her to see which way she was going to be led by them——
I could here hold up my hand and take oath that the bridegroom was quite as much moved as myself, if not more so; at all events, when he gently wiped the Auricula dust from the blossom-face, so that the flowers there were seen to bloom unobscured. But he had to be careful how he carried about that heart of his—so full to the brim of the potion of love, and tears of gladness—lest it should run over in the presence of the jovial hairdresser and the serious Schulrath, to his shame. Effusion was a thing he never permitted himself. All strong feeling, even of the purest, he hid away, and hardened over: he always thought of poets and actors, who let on the waterworks of their emotions to play for show; and there was no one, on the whole, at whom he bantered so much as at himself. For these reasons, his face to-day was drawn and crinkled by a queer, laughing, embarrassment, and only his eyes, where the moisture gleamed, told of the better side of this condition. As he noticed presently that he wasn’t masking himself sufficiently by merely playing the part of barber’s mate, and commissary of provisions (of the breakfast), he adopted stronger measures, and began to exhibit himself and his movable property in as favourable a light as possible to Lenette, inquiring of her whether she didn’t think her room “nicely situated,” and saying, “I can see into the senate house window, on to the great table, and all the ink bottles. Several of these chairs I got last spring at a third of their value, and very handsome they are, don’t you think so? My good old grandfather’s chair here, though” (he had sat down in it, and laid his lean arms on the chair’s stuffed ones), “does, I think, take the precedence in the grandfather dance:[[11]] ‘how they so softly rest,’ arm upon arm! The flowers upon my table-cloth are rather cleverly done, but the coffee-tray is considered the better work of the two, I am given to understand, on account of its flora being japanned; however, they both do their best in the flower line. My Leyser with his pigskin ‘Meditations’ is a great ornament to the room: the kitchen, though, is the place—better still than this room; there are pots, all ranged side by side—and all sorts of things—the hare-skinner and the hare-spit—my father used to shoot the hares for these.”
The bride smiled on him so contentedly that I must almost believe she had heard the greater part of the story of the 100l. (with interest) in her Fuggery through twenty united ear- and speaking-trumpets. I shall be the more inclined to believe this if the public should happen to be looking forward eagerly to the hour when he is to hand it over to her.
It may not be otherwise than agreeable to my fair readers to be informed that the bridegroom now put on a liver-coloured dress coat, and that he walked to the church with his dress-maker without any dress cravat, and with no queue in his hair, picturing as he went, to his own satirical delight, the slanderous glances with which the fair Kuhschnappelers were following the good stranger girl across the market to the sacrificial altar of her maiden name. He had said on a previous occasion, “We ought rather to facilitate than obstruct backbiting, to a moderate extent, in a married woman, as some slight compensation for lost flatteries.”
The Schulrath Stiefel remained in the bridal chamber, where he sketched the outlines of a critique on a school-programme at the writing-table.
I see before me, as I write, the lovers kneeling at the altar steps; and I should like to cast wishes at them (as flowers are thrown), especially a wish that they may be like the married in Heaven, who, according to Swedenborg’s vision, always merge into one angel—although on earth, too, they are often fused, by warmth, into one angel, and that a fallen one—the husband (who is the head of the wife) representing the butting head of this evil one; this wish, I say, I would fain cast at them; but my attention, in common with that of all the wedding company is riveted by an extraordinary circumstance and puzzling apparition behind the music desks of the choir.