His first thunder-stroke gave his hereditary foes the repose which it snatched from his blood relations.... But as I have now put everybody into a condition to imagine the Chaplain in his shirt and with the cymbal of the soldiery, let us rather go to the bed of his son Flamin, and see what he is doing therein. Nothing,—but out of it he is at this moment taking a ride at this late hour, and that, too, without saddle or waistcoat. He, whose bosom was a cave of Æolus, full of pent-up storms—(any discreet prothonotary in Wetzlar would have scraped his fish-head or partridge's-wing cleaner or brushed his velvet-knee cleaner than he)—could not possibly lie longer on his pillow,—he to whom a drum came so near to-night, and to-morrow a friend. Anybody else, of course (at least the reader and myself), in the midst of the transparent night wherewith April was closing, the wide stillness on which the drum-sticks fell, the longing for a loved one with whom to-morrow would again make whole a desolate heart and a dismembered life, would have been filled by all this with tender emotions and dreams;—its only effect on the Chaplain's son was to fling him on his nag and out into the night: his inward earthquakes could only be allayed by a bodily gallop. He flew up and down the hill, on which he would to-morrow reunite himself to his Horion, ten times. He cursed and thundered at all his passions—to be sure with passion—which had hitherto laid the bone-saw to their hands linked in friendship. "Oh! when I once have thee again, Sebastian," he said, and twitched his nag round, "I will be so gentle, as gentle as thou, and never misconstrue thee; if I do, may the thunder—" Ashamed at his self-contradictory impetuosity, he rode merely at an ambling-pace home.
His longing for his returning friend he expressed in the stable by plucking out some hairs from the top of the horse's head, drawing the cue-hair like the fourth string of a fiddle, and twisting off the bit of the key to the fodder-chest. Only a man who languishes for a friend exactly as for a loved woman deserves either. But there are men who go out of the world without ever having been troubled or concerned at the fact that no one in it had loved them. He who knows nothing higher than the commercial treaty of self-interest, the social contract of civility, or even than the boundary and barter agreement of love, such a one,—but I wish he had never ordered me from the publisher!—whose withered heart knows nothing of the Unitas Fratrum of men joined in friendship, of the intertwining of their nobler vascular system, and of their sworn confederacy in strife and sorrow—But I see not why I should talk so long of this ninny, as he knows not how to enter into the least feeling of Flamin's yearning, who desired a loving, appreciative eye, because his faults and his virtues stood out in equal relief; for with other men, either at least the spots balance the rays, or the rays the spots.
Only in princely stables is there an earlier and louder din than there was in the parsonage on the blessed 1st of May. I ask any female reader at random, whether there can ever be more to polish and to boil than on a morning when a lord with a cataract is expected, and his son, too, and an eye-doctor? Men's resting-days always fall upon women's rasping-days; father and son went composedly to meet the doctor and the coucher.
The 1st of May began, like man and human history, with a mist. Spring, the Raphael of the northern earth, stood already out of doors and covered all apartments of our Vatican with his pictures. I love a mist whenever it glides off like a veil from the face of a fair day, and whenever it is created, not by the "four faculties," but by greater ones. When (as this one did on the 1st of May) it webs-over summits and streams like a drag-net,—when the clouds, pressed down by their weight, crawl along on our lawns and through wet bushes,—when in one quarter it soils the heavens with a pitchy vapor and lines the wood with a heavy, unclean fog-bank, while in the other, wiped off from the moist sapphire of the sky, it gilds with minute drops the flowers, and when this blue splendor and that dirty night pass over close by each other and exchange places,—who does not feel, then, as if he saw lands and nations lying before him, on which poisonous and mephitic mists move round in groups, now coming and now going? And when, further, this white night encompasses my melancholy eye with flying streams of vapor, with floating, fluttering particles of perfume-dust, then do I sadly see in the vapor human life pictured, with its two great clouds on our rising and setting, with its seemingly light space around us, and its blue opening over our heads....
The Doctor may have thought so too, but not father and son, who are going to meet him. Flamin is more powerfully affected by distant than by near nature, by the gross than by the detail, just as he has more feeling for the state than for the family room, and his inner man loves best to twine upward on pyramids, tempests, Alps. The Chaplain enjoys nothing about the whole thing except—May-butter, and from his mouth, amidst all this moral apparatus, issues nothing but—spittle, and both, because he is afraid of the damp's preying upon him and gnawing at his throat and stomach.
As they strode down from the hill which was the scene of the nocturnal gallop into a valley confused with patches of mist; there marched out from it to meet them three garrison regiments on the double-quick. Each regiment was four men strong and as many deep, without powder or shoes, but provided with fine openwork high-ruffles,—that is to say, with porous pantaloons, and with superfluous officers, because there were no privates for them at all. When I now go on in my description to add, that both staffs, as well the regimental as the general staff, had over six hundred cannon in their pockets, and in fact a whole siege-train of artillery, and that the first platoon had wholly new yellow balls,[[14]] unusual in war, which germinated sooner than the gunpowder sowed by the savages, and which they thrust with the tongue into the muskets,—I should (I fear) make my readers, especially my lady readers, a little too distressed (and the more as I have not yet hinted whether these were soldier-parents or soldier-children) if I were to dip my pen again, and actually append the annoying circumstance that the troops began to fire at the befogged Court-Chaplain,—unless I leaped forward instanter with the information beforehand that a man's voice from behind the army cried, "Halt!"
Forth came out of the rear ranks the general field-marshal, who was just as tall again as his lieutenant of artillery;—with a round hat, with flying arms and hair, he rushed impetuously upon Flamin, and attacked him with intent to destroy,—less from hatred than from love. It was the Doctor! The two friends hung trembling in each other's arms, face buried in face, breast pushed back from breast, with souls that had no words, but only tears of joy: the first embrace ended in a second,—the first utterances were their two names.
The Chaplain had volunteered as a private along with the army, and stood with tried feelings on his insulating-stool, with a bare neck, around which nothing clung. "Just hug each other a moment longer," said he, and turned half-way round: "I must station myself only just a minute or two at the hazel-bush yonder, but I will be back again directly, and then I, in my turn, will embrace Mr. Doctor with a thousand pleasures." But Horion understood the natural recoil of love; he flew from the son's arms into those of the father, and lingered long therein, and made all good again.
With appeased love, with dancing hearts, with overflowing eyes, under the full bloom of heaven and over the garniture of earth,—for Spring had opened her casket of brilliants, and flung blooming jewels into all the vales, and over all the hills, and even far up the mountains,—the two friends sauntered blissfully along, the British hand clasping the German. Sebastian Horion could not say anything to Flamin, but he talked with the father, and every indifferent sound made his bosom, laden with blood and love, breathe more freely.
The three regiments had gone out of every one's head; but they had themselves marched obediently after the general field-marshal. Sebastian, too humane to forget any one, turned round toward the escort of little Sansculottes, who came, however, not from Paris, but from Flachsenfingen, and had attended him as begging soldier-children. "My children," said he, and looked at nothing but his standing army, "to-day is for your generalissimo and you, the memorable day on which he does three things. In the first place, I discharge you; but my retrenchment shall not hinder you any more than a prince's would from begging; secondly, I pay each of you arrearage for three years; namely, to each officer an allowance of three seventeen-kreutzer-pieces, because we have in these days raised the wages; thirdly, run back again to-morrow, and I will have all the regiments measured for breeches."