A most gracious autograph is the Tetragrammaton[[78]] and means of grace, which works supernatural effects and state-miracles; and the illustrious writing-thumb is the magic thief's-thumb,[[79]] as it were, by which the different wheels of the state-repeating-watch—the lever-wheel, the face-wheel, often merely the hand—is shoved forward or backward, according as it desires an hour earlier or later. Hence ministers often climb up and cut off for themselves such a thief's-thumb to carry in their pockets.
Sebastian is seized by joy, as by Habakkuk's angel, by the hair of the head, and carried through the garden, and driven with his news to the first he might meet, and that proved to be the Chaplain, who, with a comic face, swore it was all a fib of Victor's; but his restrained jubilation almost burst his compressed veins. Victor had no time for refutation, but hurried off with such a message to the heart to which it rightly belonged,—the mother's. The mother could not shape her mouth to anything but a blessed smile, into which the drops of joy overflowed from her eyes. No joy in nature is so sublimely affecting as the joy of a mother at the good fortune of a child. But the son, in whose soul, such as it was to-day, this sunbeam of fate was really needed, could not, in the surprise, be immediately found.
His Lordship, meanwhile, talked with Clotilda as with a daughter, and gave her a letter from her mother and the intelligence of his approaching departure. His manly kindness, guided by respect and graced by refinement, ennobled her attentiveness to his looks; and as she came forth from the affectionate and low-toned conversation with sparkling eyes, her tall form, which usually stooped a little, was raised by a certain inspiration to a noble stature, and she stood in the temple of Nature, as a priestess of the temple, infinitely beautiful. His Lordship separated from her. She found Flamin near the tulip-formed letter C, and the Goddess of Fortune appeared to him in the sweetest human incarnation, to deliver to him her gift. We need not say that the news and the news-bearer threw him into equal ecstasy.
Joy had shaken up the whole bee-garden in a swarming-bag and turned it into chaos. The foaming wine-fermentation could not work itself off till it ended in clear, tranquil rapture. His Lordship took himself out of the way of a gratitude swelled by so many ripieno[[80]] voices and off to his carriage, when the mother with her dumb heart-fulness overtook him; but nothing could she get from her blissfully burdened heart to her lips, save the modest words, that "to-day was his birthday, and his son did not know it, and ought also to have been surprised with a rapture." He tried to escape from her with a grateful smile, and said that he must hasten back to the Prince, who perhaps had taken as kind an interest in this very day as she; but Sebastian, with his friend whom he had found, overtook him at the garden-gate, and the hurrying lord was delayed a little longer by a swift embrace of his son. Not until he was off did the mother, who longed to unburden her love, clasp tenderly Victor's hand, and, forgetting the agreement, asked: "O dearest, why, then, did you not congratulate him on his birthday? For, indeed, I could not." Now for the first time he understood and felt the sudden embrace of his father, and stretched out his arms after him and would fain reciprocate it.
Here the old Parson, also coming out of the garden, struck in and said, as if talking nonsense, "I wish he were Administrative Councillor"; but his wife, without making any reply to that, said to him with overflowing voice and love, "Such a cradle-festival thou hast never yet lived to see as to-day's, Peter!" Agatha looked at her inquiringly and admonishingly. "Just out with it," said she, and enfolded the children and drew them both into the paternal embrace, "and wish your good father length of days and three more blessed children."
The father could not say anything, but stretched his hand toward the mother, to round the group of the loving Eden. Victor's sympathetic blood swelled up in his heart, to dissolve it in love, and he thought the silent prayer: "Never may any misfortune, All-gracious One, tear these entwined arms asunder!" But Flamin soon drew himself out of the concatenation, and said to Victor with a most grateful pressure of the hand, "Thou knowest not how I am always wronging thee." The Chaplain thought he should hide his emotion from all by saying: "I wish I had not deceived you. I have let myself be bled, but it was a stupid thing; if I had only known! only known! It is true; there, see for yourselves!" And finding that this mask was not adequate to cover the whole emotion of his soul, he called, in an overloud tone, to the poor forgotten Apollonia, who was rocking at the house door the awakened Bastian, to "come here!" But the poor girl, whose merely distant participation in the general mingling of hearts touched our Victor's tenderest feelings, shyly hesitated, till the mother came and indemnified her against any loss by all that for which mothers are never repaid. But not until the Parson's wife held her child in her arms and on her lips, did she feel that the imprisoned flames of her affections found vent, and her heart its alleviation.
Ah, that man should receive the fairest love precisely at the time when he does not yet understand it!—alas that not until late in life's year, as he contemplates with a sigh the love of other parents and children, he should say hopefully to himself, "Ah, thus did mine certainly love me too!"—alas that then the bosom to which thou wouldst hasten with thy thanks for half of a life, for a thousand unappreciated anxieties, for an inexpressible, never returning love, is already lying crushed under an old grave, and has lost the warm heart which so long loved thee!...
In domestic happiness the calm, cosey pleasures driven in between four narrow walls are only the most accidental constituent; its nervous and vital fluid is the blazing fire-fountains of love which spring out of kindred hearts into each other. The involuntary surprise had disconcerted the intentional ones. But the flood of joy had swept all parties together; and they still remained in the same confidential closeness to each other, when it had abated again. They sat down to the entertainment in the summer-house. Seldom are banquets spiced as this one was, by two extraordinary advantages,—want of food and want of room. Nothing whets the appetite so much as the fear of its not finding enough to satisfy it. It had been contrived by Sebastian, that for each guest only his favorite dish should be provided; for the Parson, stuffed crabs and potato cheese; for Flamin, ham; for the Hero, good Harry's beans. But in this case every one wanted another's favorite dish, and set his own up at auction.[[81]] Even the ladies, who generally eat and do not eat, like fishes, nibbled a little. The second intoxicating ingredient which they had, thrown into their cup of joy, was the table, together with the garden-house, of which the former would not hold the food nor the latter the feeders. Sebastian had betaken himself, with Agatha, to an affiliated table which had been adjoined outside to the window of the banquet-hall, merely for the purpose of screaming in from out there and whining, more than eating. This caprice was, at bottom, a covered modesty which feared being honored inside at the expense of the other guests, on his Lordship's account. His own solitude—perhaps in a painful sense—pictured to him the shy Appel, who, as vestal of the hearth, ate only the drawback toll of returning dishes, merely to try how they had tasted to others. He could not longer endure the thought of this separation, but took wine and the best of the dessert, and carried it in to her in her kitchen winter quarters. As, in doing so, he displayed upon his face, instead of his gayety towards girls, of which she might have made a too humble interpretation, the greatest seriousness of courtesy; he was so happy as to have given to a soul pinched up by nature itself—with no other flower-pot here to send its roots round in than a cooking-pot, and only the kitchen for its concert-hall and the spit for its music of the spheres—a golden evening and a long memory of pleasure. Let no one maliciously thrust his fist in the way of such a good snail-soul, and laugh to see how she wriggles over it; and let him who stands upright willingly stoop and gently lift her along over her little stone.
As to Clotilda, before dinner things went very well, but after dinner very ill. I speak of Sebastian, who, after the handing in of the petition to his Lordship, was happier and more light-hearted, and actually talked as frankly with Clotilda as if she were—a bride. For he had already said in Hanover, that "there was not a more tedious and holy thing than a bride, particularly if it were a friend's; sooner would he fritter away his time about the musty Pandects in Florence, or a holy body in a glass shrine at Vienna, than about her." In fact, it was hard to fall in love with Clotilda; I know the reader would not have done it, but would have gone coldly away again. "Her Grecian nose under the almost manly breadth of forehead," he would have said, "this sister-nose to all Madonnas and this frontier wild-game[[82]] so rare on German faces, her still but bright eyes, which seek nothing beyond themselves, this British gravity, this harmonious thoughtful soul, raise her above the rights of love. And even if this majestic form should incline to love, who could ever be so selfish as to pocket the present of a whole heaven, or so proud as to shoot his heart into hers like a smoke-ball, and becloud thereby this still, pensive serenity?" The reader will be glad to read his own words.
But after dinner things went differently. Under Victor's cerebral membrane, some hobgoblin had so thrown into pi all the letters of his ideas in the inner letter-case, that he was up to this time gay, but unsatisfied. He had tried to tie and untie Agatha's hair, to separate her double-bows into unequal, and for that very reason into equal halves again; but the operation had not pleased him as usual,—to-day's interludes of domestic love had put his mirthful spirit wholly out of joint,—and it seemed to him as if, withdrawn from the present joy, he should be happier, at least for a few minutes, in some quiet corner, and he particularly longed to see the sun set.