The Venner threw the ballad into the fire, and himself into Lenette’s arms, and cried—
“Oh! you sympathising, noble, holy creature!”
I cannot paint the amazement with which, completely unprepared for and incomprehensive of this transition from crying to kissing, she shoved him away. This made little impression on him; he was on his high horse and said he must have some souvenir of this “sacred entrancing moment”—only a little lock of her hair. Her humble station, his high-flown language, and the fact that she was perfectly unable to form the slightest idea what use her hair would be to him, even supposing she gave enough to stuff a pillow—all this put into her head the foolish idea that he wanted it to perform some magical rite with, such as putting her under a love spell, or something of the sort.
He might have stabbed himself there and then before her, hewn himself in pieces, impaled himself alive, she wouldn’t have interfered; she might indeed have shed her blood to save him, but not a single hair of her head.
He had still one resource in petto—he had really never met with such a case as this before; he lifted up his hand and vowed that he would get Herr von Blaise to recognise her husband as his nephew, and pay over his inheritance—and that with the greatest ease, because he would threaten to jilt his niece unless he did it—if she would just take the scissors and cut off a little hair memorial, no bigger even than the fourth part of a moustache.
She knew nothing about the business of the inheritance, and he was consequently obliged, to the great detriment of his enthusiastic state, to give a prosaic, detailed account of the species facti of the whole of that law suit. By great good fortune he had still in his pocket the number of the ‘Gazette’ in which the inheritance chamber’s inquiry as to the advocate’s existence appeared in print, and he was able to put it into her hands. And now this plundered wife began to cry bitterly, not for the loss of the money, but because her husband had told her nothing about it all this time, and still more because she couldn’t quite make out what her own name really was, or whether she was married to a Siebenkæs or to a Leibgeber. Her tears flowed faster and faster, and in her passion of grief she would have let the deceiver before her have all the pretty hair on her head, had not an accidental circumstance burst the whole chain of events, just as he was kneeling and imploring her for one little lock.
But we must first look after her husband a little, and see how he is getting on, and whither he bends his steps. At first among the market stalls; for the many-throated roaring, and the Olla Podrida of cheap pleasures, and the displayed pattern cards of all the rags out of, and upon, which we human clothes moths construct our covering cases and our abodes—all these caused his mind to sink deep into a sea of humoristic-melancholy reflections concerning this mosaic picture of a life of ours, made up as it is of so many little bits, many-tinted moments, motes, atoms, drops, dust, vapours. He laughed, and listened, with an emotion incomprehensible by many of my readers, to a ballad singer, bawling, with his rhapsodist’s staff in his right hand pointed at a big, staring picture of a horrible murder, and his left full of smaller, printed pictures, for sale, in which the misdeed and the perpetrator of it were displayed to the German public in no brighter colours than those of poetry. Siebenkæs bought two copies, and put them in his pocket, to read in the evening.
This tragic murder picture evoked in the background of his fancy that of the poor girl he had defended, and the gallows, on to which fell those burning tears which had flowed from his wounded heart—that heart which nobody on earth, save one, understood—when last it had been lacerated. He left the noisy market-place, and sought all-peaceful nature, and that isolatorium, destined alike for friendship and for guilt, the gallows. When we pass from the stormy uproar of a fair into the still expanse of wide creation, entering into the dim aisles of nature’s hushed cathedral, the strange sudden calm, is to the soul as the caressing touch of some beloved hand.
With a sad heart he climbed up to the well-known spot, whose ugly name I shall omit, and from these ruins he gazed around upon creation, as if he were the last of living beings. Neither in the blue sky, nor upon the wide earth, was there voice or sound; nothing but one forlorn cricket, chirping in monosyllables, among the bare furrows, where the harvest had been cleared away. The troops of birds flocking together with discordant cries flew to the green nets spread upon the ground—and not to meet the green spring far away. Above the meadows, where all the flowers were withered and dead, above the fields, where the corn ears waved no more, floated dim phantom forms, all pale and wan, faint pictures of the past. Over the grand eternal woods and hills a biting mist was draped in clinging folds, as if all nature, trembling into dust, must vanish in its wreaths. But one bright thought pierced these dark fogs of nature and the soul, turning them to a white gleaming mist, a dew all glittering with rainbow colours, and gently lighting upon flowers. He turned his face to the north-east, to the hills which lay between him and his other heart, and up from behind them rose, like an early moon in harvest, a pale image of his friend. The spring, when he should go to him and see him once more, was at work already preparing for him a fair broad pathway thither, all rich with grass and flowers. Ah! how we play with the world about us, so quickly dressing it all with the webs which our own spirits spin.
The cloudless sky seemed sinking closer to the dusky earth, bright with a softer blue. And though a whole long winter lay between, the music of the coming spring already came, faint and distant, to his ear; it was there in the evening chime of the cattle bells down in the meadows, in the birds’ wild wood notes in the groves, and in the free streams flowing fast away amid the flowery tapestries that were yet to be.