Here he tore open joyfully all his wounds, and let them bleed out freely in tears; they overspread with mournful streams the face which once had often smiled, but always good-naturedly, and which from other eyes had never wrung any, but only wiped them away; every flood was a load taken off, but the heart grew heavy again upon it, and poured out a fresh one.—At last he could hear the tones again; most of them sank and were lost before they were wafted to the tower; little ones arrived dying, and expired in his darkling heart; every tone was a falling tear, and made him lighter, and expressed his anguish. The garden seemed to consist of softly resounding, dark-green waves of shadow, veiled under a broken twilight. Stung by memory, he tore his eye away from it: "What does it concern me any longer?" he thought. But at last from this shadowy Eden and from the viole d'amour came up the song, "Forget me not," to his weary heart, and gave him back the softer pang and the past love. "No," said he, "I never will forget thee, though thou hast not loved me! thy form will assuredly forever move me, and remind me of my dreams! ah, thou heavenly one, it is, indeed, now, the only thing that does not pain me, to think I forget thee not!"
All was silent and extinguished; he was alone in the presence of night. At length, after remaining a long time in silence, he went down and back to Flachsenfingen, exhausted with weeping, and a poor man. And as, on the way, he cast a hurried glance up at the dark-blue heaven, in which floating clouds lay flung around the moon like scoriæ, and a hurried glance again over the half-annihilated shadowy landscape, over the shadow-hills and shadow-villages, all appeared to him dead, empty, and vain, and it seemed to him as if, in some brighter world, there were a magic-lantern, and through the lantern glasses moved on which earth and springs and human groups were painted, and we called the descending, dancing images of these glasses us and an earth and a life; and after all that was bright and many-colored, a great shadow followed on.—
Ah, I stir up, perhaps, once more, in many a breast, long-forgotten troubles! But it is good for us—since sorrows occupy so large a place in our memory—that this bitter winter-fruit should grow mild by lying, and that there is but a small difference between a past sorrow and a present bliss.
Poor Victor arrived after midnight, with a pale face and burning eyes, at the house of the Apothecary. He asked for nothing, that he might not betray his broken voice. When he saw his every-day overcoat hanging in the moonbeams, and when he imagined himself a strange person to whom the coat belonged, and who took it off so joyfully in the morning and now would put it on again so sorrowfully, then did a certain compassion which he had for himself seize again with too strong an impression his exhausted heart. Marie came, and he turned not away from her even the signs of this compassion. She stood surprised; he said to her with the softest voice, woven of sighs, that he wanted nothing; and the good soul went slowly out without courage to console or to weep, but all night long she shed invisible tears for those of another, and for a woe which had not been whispered in her ear.
Why did Fate to-day, of all days, open all the veins of his heart? Why must the Senior Pastor's silver wedding and the first marriage of his daughter to the preacher of the Orphan-House fall just on this day? Why, if indeed the two nuptial feasts had to coincide on this day, must they last till after midnight, when they gave poor Victor occasion to gaze into all the mouldering scenes of his burnt-up hopes, when he could see from his dark chamber, in a brilliantly lighted room, the love which linked hand in hand, pressed lips to lips, and mingled eyes and souls? At another time he would have smiled at the Orphan-House preacher and at two catechists of the poor; but tonight he could only sigh over them,—and it is a soft line of beauty on his inner man, that he did not grudge, but felicitated, the poor people's possession of what he was deprived of himself. "Ah, you are happy!" said he. "O, love each other truly, press your throbbing, transitory hearts ardently to each other, ere the wing of Time shatters them, and glow on each other's bosoms during the short minute of life, and exchange your tears and kisses ere eyes and lips freeze in the grave! Ye are happier than I,—I, who can give my heart full of love to no one but the worms of the grave, and on whose coffin a joiner shall paint the inscription, which like myself shall be buried in the earth: 'Ye good children of men, you loved me not, and yet I loved you so well!'"
Every happy smile, every fleeting touch of the violin, every thought, became now, to his soft tear-bathed heart, a hard, sharp corner,—just as a hand which dips itself under the water feels everything hard to the touch.
His unbounded sincerity, his unbounded tenderness, he could now satisfy in no other way than by a letter to Emanuel, into which he let his whole soul overflow.
"O Dearly Loved Friend!
"Ought I to hide it from thee, when griefs or follies unman me? Ought I to show thee the faults I have repented of, and never my present ones? No, come hither, dear one, to my wounded breast! I will lay open to thee the heart therein, let it bleed and beat under the exposure as it will. Thou wilt, perhaps, still cover it up again with thy fatherly love, and say, 'I love thee still.'
"Thou, my Emanuel, reposest in thy lofty solitude, on the Ararat of the saved soul, on the Tabor of the shining One: there thou gazest, softly dazzled, into the sun of Deity, and seest calmly the cloud of death swim in over the sun; it veils the orb: thou growest blind under the cloud; it melts away, and again thou standest before God. Thou lovest men as children who cannot offend,—thou lovest earthly enjoyments as fruits, which one plucks for refreshment, but without hungering for them; the storms and earthquakes of life pass by thee unheard, because thou liest in a life-dream full of tones, full of songs, full of meadows,—and when death awakes thee, thou art still smiling over the bright dream.