So he came back to the oratory again, finding Saufinder keeping up his appointed official contemplation, and his friend maintaining his observation of the dog. They then all took a most polite leave, and even begged the Heimlicher not to come into the street with them, as it mightn’t be so easy to keep Mordax from a bite or so there.
When they got to the street Leibgeber said to his friend, “Don’t pull such a long face about it—I shall keep flying backwards and forwards to you, of course. Come through the gate with me—I must get across the frontier of this country; let’s run, and get on to royal territory before six minutes are over our heads.”
When they had passed the gate, that is to say, the un-Palmyra-like ruins of it, the crystal reflecting grotto of the August night stood open and shining above the dark-green earth, and the ocean-calm of nature stayed the wild storm of the human heart. Night was drawing and closing her curtain (a sky full of silent suns, not a breath of breeze moving in it), up above the world and down beneath it; the reaped corn stood in the sheaves without a rustle. The cricket with his one constant song, and a poor old man gathering snails for the snail-pits, seemed to be the only things that dwelt in the far reaching darkness. The fires of anger had suddenly gone out in the two friends’ hearts. Leibgeber said, in a voice pitched two octaves lower, “God be thanked! this writes a verse of peace round the storm bell within! the night seems to me to have muffled my alarum drum with her black robe, and softened it down to a funeral march. I am delighted to find myself growing a little sad after all that anger and shouting.”
“If it only hadn’t all been on my account, old Henry,” said Siebenkæs, “your humorous fury at that barefaced old sinner.”
“Though you are not so apt to shy your satire into people’s faces as I am,” said Leibgeber, “you would have been in a greater rage if you had been in my place. One can bear injustice to one’s self—particularly when one has as good a temper as I have—but not to a friend. And unluckily you are the martyr to my name to-day, and eyewitness and blood-witness into the bargain. Besides, I should tell you that, as a general rule, when once I am ridden by the devil of anger—or rather when I have got on to his back—I always spur the brute nearly to death, till he falls down, so that I mayn’t have to mount him again for the next three months. However, I have poured you out a nice basin of black broth, and left you sitting with the spoon in your hand.” Siebenkæs had been dreading for some time that he would say something about the 1200 gulden, those baptismal dues of his re-baptism, the discount of his name. He therefore said, as cheerfully and pleasantly as his heart, torn by this sudden, nocturnal parting, would let him, “My wife and I have plenty of supplies in our little bit of a fortress of Konigstein, and we can sow and reap there too. Heaven only grant that we may have many a hard nut to crack; they give a delicious flavour to the table-wine of our stale, flat, everyday life. I shall bring my action to-morrow.”
They both concealed their emotion at the approach of the moment of parting under the cloak of comic speeches. These two counterparts came to a column which had been erected by the Princess of —— on the spot where, on her return from England, she had met her sister coming from the Alps; and as this joyful souvenir of a meeting had a quite opposite significance to-night, Leibgeber said, “Now, right about face—march! Your wife is getting anxious—it’s past eleven o’clock. There, you see, we have reached your boundary mark, your frontier fortress, the gallows. I am off at once into Bayreuth and Saxony to cut my crop—other people’s faces, to wit, and sometimes my own fool’s face into the bargain. I shall most likely come and see you again, just for the fun of the thing, in a year and a day, when the verbal libels are pretty well out of date. By the by.” he added, hastily, “promise me on your word of honour to do me one little favour.”
Siebenkæs instantly did so. “Don’t send my deposit after me[[19]]—a plaintiff has payments to make. So fare you well, dearest old man,” he blurted huskily out, and after a hurried kiss, ran quickly down the little hill with an air of assumed unconcern. His friend, bewildered and forsaken, looked after the runner, without uttering a syllable. When he got to the bottom of the hillock, the runner stopped, bent his head low towards the ground, and—loosened his garters.
“Couldn’t you have done that up here?” cried Siebenkæs, and went down to him, and said, “We’ll go as far as the gallows hill together.” The sand-bath and reverberating furnace of a noble anger made all their emotions warmer to-day, just as a hot climate gives strength to poisons and spices. As the first parting had caused their eyes to overflow, they had nothing more to keep in control but voice and language.
“Are you sure you feel quite well after being so much vexed?” said Siebenkæs. “If the death of domestic animals portends the death of the master of the house, as the superstition runs,” said Leibgeber, “I shall live to all eternity, for my menagerie[[20]] of beasts is all alive and kicking.” At last they stopped at the market house, beside the place of execution. “Just up to the top,” said Siebenkæs, “no further.”
When they came to the top of this boundary-hill of so many an unhappy life—and when Siebenkæs looked down upon the green spotted stone altar where so many an innocent sacrifice had been offered up, and thought, in that dark minute, of the heavy blood drops of agony, the burning tears which women who had killed their children[[21]] (and were themselves put to death by the state and their lovers) had let fall upon this their last and briefest rack of torture here in this field of blood—and as he gazed from this cloudbank of life out over the broad earth with the mists of night steaming up round its horizons and over all its streams—he took his friend’s hand, and, looking to the free starry heaven, said, “The mists of our life on earth must be resolved into stars, up there at last, as the mists of the milky way part into suns. Henry, don’t you yet believe in the soul’s immortality?”—“It will not do yet, I can not,” Leibgeber replied. “Blasius, now, hardly deserves to live once, let alone twice or several times. I sometimes can’t help feeling as if a little piece of the other world had been painted on to this, just to finish it off and make it complete, as I’ve sometimes seen subsidiary subjects introduced in fainter colours towards the edge of a picture, to make the principal subject stand out from the frame, and to give it unity of effect. But at this moment, human beings strike me as being like those crabs which priests used to fasten tapers to and set them crawling about churchyards, telling the people they were the souls of the departed. Just so do we, in a masquerade impersonation of immortal beings, crawl about over graves with our tapers of souls. Ten to one they go out at last.”