When the Schulrath was gone, the poor’s advocate took his sulky house-goddess into his arms, and plied her with every conceivable method of proof; with proofs derived from immemorial hearsay, partial proofs, evidential proof, proof on oath, and by logical deduction—every kind of proof wherewith one can harden one’s own heart, or soften another’s.
But the whole of the evidence he adduced was useless. He might just as well have been embracing the cold hard angel at the baptismal font in the principal church, his own angel remained quite as cold and silent. Furboots had been the tourniquet which stopped the hemorrhage of Lenette’s open, streaming artery; but his departure had taken the German tinder stopping from her eyes and now they streamed unstanched.
Siebenkæs went often to the window, and up and down in the room, that she might not see that he was following her example, and that her sorrow, little reasonable as it was, infected him by sympathy. We can more easily bear, and forgive pain of our own causing than of another’s. All the following day there was an unendurable silence in the house. This was the very first of the beds of the matrimonial nursery-garden in which a seed of the apple of discord had been planted, and as yet not the faintest rustle of its sap was audible. It is not in the first domestic squabble, not till the fourth, tenth, ten-thousandth, that a woman can keep perfect silence with her tongue, yet make a tremendous noise with her body, and turn every chair which she shoves about, and every reel of cotton which she lets fall, into a language-machine and fountain of speech, and play her instrumental music all the louder, because her vocal parts are counting their rests. Lenette Wendeline moved everything and said everything, as softly as if her liege lord had the gout and was lying with cramped foot pressed in agony against the trembling bottom board of his bed.
When the third day of this came on, he was vexed and annoyed—and he had reason. I beg to say that, for my own part, I should be quite prepared to quarrel with my own wife, if I had one—ay, and to do it with a will—and that to some purpose, and to bandy words with her, as well as letters (though I should prefer the former). But there’s one thing which would kill me outright, and that would be her keeping up a long, dreary, tearful sulking, a thing which, like the sirocco wind, ends by blowing out all a man’s lights, thoughts, and joys, and at length his life itself. Just as we all of us, rather like a violent thunderstorm in summer, and think it refreshing rather than otherwise in itself—and yet consider it a cursed nuisance on the whole, because it’s sure to be followed by some days of dreary wet weather. Siebenkæs was all the more vexed on this occasion, because he was a man who scarcely ever was vexed. As other jurists have reckoned themselves among men exempt from torture, so Siebenkæs had long ago fortified himself against grief and care, those torture racks of the soul (by the help of Epictetus), as effectually as he had the infanticide against bodily torture.
The Jews hold that when Messiah comes, hell will be joined on to paradise, so as to make a bigger dancing saloon. And all the year long, Siebenkæs occupied himself in building and adding on his torture chambers and schools of suffering to the entertainment halls of his bagatelle, so as to have more room to perform his ballets.
He often said a medal should be struck for any citizen who should be three hundred and sixty-five days, five hours, forty-eight minutes and fifty-five seconds, without either growling or snarling.
He wouldn’t have got that medal himself in the year 1785. On the third day, the Saturday, he was so wild at his wife’s speechlessness, that he was wilder still with that kill-joy of an Everard. For, of course, that minnesinger, might come in again at any moment, bringing in his company the goddess of discord (who, as directrix and ambassadress, performs such important poetical functions in Voltaire’s Henriade), and introducing her into the homely “Volkslied” of an advocate, by way of a dea ex machina to unloose the matrimonial knot, and tie a fresh one with the Venner. Siebenkæs accordingly wrote him the following academic-controversial document.
“May it please your Lordship,
“I take the liberty to lay before your Lordship in this little memorial my humble petition,
“That you will be pleased to stay at home, and spare me the honour of your visits.