Clotilda withdrew now from the merry male company into the adjoining room, where her Agatha and all were,—it was not done from disapproval of decorous, manly festivity,—still less from embarrassment, as it is, in fact, easier, and made easier for her sex, to behave itself naturally under forty eyes than under four,—still less from inability to disguise her sisterly love towards Flamin; for her flying soul had long since learned to fold together its wings and hide its tears and wishes, brought up as she had been among strangers, trained in thorny relations and between discordant parents. She did it merely, like the Parson's wife, because it is a British custom, that the ladies shall take themselves away from the men and their incense-kettle of punch.
When she was out of Victor's sight,—and when, from her present look of increased paleness, he drew the conclusion that the vale of Emanuel would hardly restore her spring-colors, since the prospect of the journey had brought no healing influence,—and when this short absence held before him as it were in a pocket-mirror the death-apparition of an eternal one,—and when, at last, to be sure, the swelling heart carried away the dam of dissimulation,—then he rushed out into the winter,—bared his inflamed breast to the cooling flakes, and tore wider the clefts into which fate grafted its sorrows,—and ran up through the white night to the observatory;—and here, covered with the snow-avalanche silently descending from heaven, he looked out into the gray, whirling, trembling, flickering landscape, and in the broad snow-pierced night,—and all the tears of his heart fell, and all the thoughts of his soul cried: "So looks the future! So glistening fall the joys of men from heaven, and dissolve even while they fall! So does everything melt away! Ah, what air-castles I saw shine around me on this eminence, and how they gleamed in the evening red! Alas! all are buried under the snow and under the darkness of night!" He looked down into Clotilda's garden, in whose dark bowers, now whitened with snow, he had found and lost again the Eden of his heart. "The tones which flowed over this garden are dried up, but not the tears which streamed after them," thought he. He looked down into her brother's garden, where the tulip-C had dropped its leaves, and the blooming names had passed away into obscurity.
With such a soul, which had looked into this landscape as into the charnel-house of mouldered days, he returned to the joyous club. The alternation of cold and warmth had kept up his similarity to the punch-union, which meanwhile had gone on drinking. He and all had touched the limits of drinking, where one laughs and weeps in the same breath; but I am glad that man can after all extract true nourishment of mind and heart (though not from a cloister-kitchen or cloister-library, yet) from a cloister-cellar; that he drinks the health of his wit; that every cup (not merely on the altar) spiritually strengthens him, and that, if serpents take off their crowns upon drinking,[[41]] he puts his on during the process; and that the vine sheds tears not merely of itself, or from the eyes of a Catholic image of the Virgin, but also from those of a man, who has drunk of it. The club hit upon the fancy of making parliamentary speeches. The Chaplain proposed occasional discourses. Victor jumped up in a chair and said: "I am going to deliver a funeral-sermon on myself,—I preached here long ago in my childhood."
All drank once more, even the corpse, and the latter began the following harangue:—
"Most beloved and distressed hearers and brethren!"
A mortal, deeply-afflicted hearers, may sink into the next world, without having a mourning-steed prance after him, just as he makes his entrance into this, without having a festive-nag trot before him. We, for our part, have jointly taken the funeral-cup beforehand, in order to be able to go through it all; for man expands by moistening, and shrinks up when he is dry, I mean, when he takes only solid food, like the bloodsucker, which, when out of water, loses four inches in length. And I hope I and the deeply afflicted funeral-procession have toasted the deceased sufficiently.
"And so then I see before me" ... —Here he beckoned to the Parson to toss out his nightcap, that something death-like might lie there on which his emotion could "vent itself—
"I see lying before me him, the never-to-be-forgotten Mr. Court-Physician, Sebastian Victor von Horion, and dead he is and is about to go down under the covering of earth, into the place full of long repose. What do we see still lying at rest before us but the diving-bell, wherein the covered soul descended into this vapory life,—what but the dry shell of a kernel which is sown for the first time in a second planet,—what but his hull,—what but (so to speak) the cast-off nightcap of his awakened spirit?
"Behold, weeping hearers, this emblematic pale cap! Here it lies, the head is out of it, which once mused therein. Our Victor is gone and is hushed, who talked so often of mathematics, clinical medicine, heraldry, precautionary jurisprudence, medicina forensis, Sphragistics and their auxiliary sciences. We have lost much in him—who shall console you for this loss, excellent Herr von Schleunes, and the other gentlemen likewise? One has not however, absolutely, in this absurd life, which may well be a sort of ante-death, time enough to administer proper consolation. Not merely church-pews are often built on tombstones, but also princely chairs—they particularly—and even pulpits.
"Can it be supposed that thy soul, deceased Sebastian, in its intermediate state after death, should know anything of its body, from which it is unpacked, as out of its hat-box, and of the last honors which we here pay to its case? If it still has consciousness and an eye for this room, wherein it has been so often, then will it be glad that the three holy kings, of whom the Moor is Cato the Elder, are standing round its worm-bag, hardly willing to let the bag go; it must be pleased, that we are unitedly lamenting: where is his equal in common chemistry, in physiognomies and physiognomy,—in the modern languages,—in the doctrine of ribbons, from which he imbibed a love for all kinds of ribbons? Who sought less than he that strict concatenation of ideas, which misleads the Germans to cement good ones with bad ones, and to use more mortar than stones? Not even the Court—hence he never liked to go thither, when fun was going forward—could break him off from a certain serious sedate way, which he ran even into a ridiculous one, which last was always his aim.—By heaven! through the hour-glass of death, through which he peeped, as through a pocket spyglass, everything came out so small to him, that he knew not why he should be serious—I hope I may not be standing here alive and well, if in the aforesaid glass all the steps of the throne did not appear to him as diminutive as the thumb-long wood-stair of the tree-frog in his preserving jar.