Brotherly Love.—Friendly Love.—Maternal Love.—Love.
The Dog is here, but not his Lordship,—the noise is small, but not the joy,—all is prepared for, and yet unexpected,—vice maintains the battle-field, but virtue the Elysian fields.—In short, it is very foolish, but very fine.
I think this is the last chapter of the book. I look upon the Post-Dog—my Pomeranian messenger,[[190]] whose tail is his official pike—with real emotion, and it vexes me to think that he, too, has fallen in Adam, and has eaten a bone under the forbidden tree; for in Paradise the first canine parents shone like diamonds, and one could see through them, as Böhme asserts.—For this very reason, as the Mining Superintendent will soon have written himself out, let it be forgiven him that, in this chapter of love, he is more ardent and agreeable than ever, and in fact writes now as if he were possessed.
In the beginning, the heavenly chariot is still drawn by mourning steeds.... It was very early, on the 21st of October, 1793, when the court-page ran into Flamin's block-house out of his own, and announced to that brother, doing penance there, the whole budget,—his release,—his relation to Clotilda as brother and sister,—his affiliation into the princely house,—his ascending career, and at the same time the amnesty of the murderer and messenger, namely, his own. O how did joy kindle his stagnant veins at Matthieu's acquittal and intercession, and at his elevation of rank! For Flamin mounted the higher station as an eminence whence he might send out farther his benefits and plans; Victor, on the contrary, had rejoiced at his bankruptcy of rank, because he craved stillness, as Flamin did tumult. The former was more desirous to amend himself; the latter, to improve others. Flamin thrust the live crew overboard, and nailed the Bucentaur of state full of galley-slaves, in order to propel it more swiftly against the winds. But Victor allowed himself to make only one corpse by way of lightening the privateer,—namely, his own. He said to himself, "If I can only always sacredly maintain the courage to sacrifice myself, then I need no greater; for a greater sacrifices after all stolen goods.—Fate can sacrifice centuries and islands to benefit millennia and continents;[[191]] but man, nothing but himself."
Exultingly Flamin hastened with his savior to St. Luna, to embrace gratefully and apologetically the true sister in the untrue mistress.—Ah! as the high observatory rose upon his sight, with pain and bleeding did the covering fall from them like scales, which had hitherto obscured the innocence of his best friend, Victor! "Ah, how will he hate me! O that I had trusted him more!" he sighed, and nothing any longer gladdened him; for the grief of a good man who has been unjust, even under the notion of the fullest justice, nothing can console, nothing but many, many sacrifices. He stole, sighing, not to his new mother, but sank softly on the unoffended heart of the three true twins. The honest souls all welcomed the Evangelist as a friend in need; and this gayly-colored spider crawled round with his unclean spider-warts over all these noble growths of an open love. The spider heard everything, even the agreement that the Englishmen should take the injunction to go off to their island literally, and seclude themselves in the English island of his Lordship, until such time as Flamin and her Ladyship were ready to embark with them all for their greater island,—the workshop of freedom, the classic soil of erect men.
The same morning the Chaplain betook himself to his quarry, and lay at anchor there, because he knew as yet nothing of the latest news. There in the open air, all day long, he sat away his agony, and at night he came home again. He conversed there with no one but his own body,—as many commune with their souls, so do others with their bodies,—and looked from time to time, not at Nature, but at his water, in order—as its want of color, according to physiology, betokens sorrow—to ascertain from it whether he was pining away very much or not with grief; although his protomedicus will answer for him, that he shall not have mistaken urinam chyli or sanguinis for urinam potûs. As the physicians assert that sighs are beneficial, to quicken the pulse and lighten the lungs,—accordingly a prince can benefit whole countries at once, by compelling them to sigh,—Eymann, therefore, prescribed to himself a definite number of sighs, which he had daily to draw for the benefit of his lungs.
The same morning went my Lady to the wife of the Parson to tell her that Flamin was an innocent man, but not her son; and Clotilda went with her to take the hands of the two daughters and say to them, "You have another brother"; for Victor had still concealed his extraction. "O God!" said the Parson's wife, now becoming impoverished, and clasped Flamin's mother and sister to her pining maternal bosom, which, with hot sighs, yearned for a son,—"where, then, is my child?—Bring me my true son!—Ah, I had a presentiment that the duel would certainly cost me a child! He regains all, but I lose all.—O you are a mother, and I am a mother, help me!" Clotilda looked upon her, weeping with a desire to give consolation; but the Lady said, "Your son lives, and is happy too; but more I cannot say!"
And the same morning, this son, our Victor, was not happy. It seemed to him, at the report of Flamin's discharge and of Matthieu's officiousness, as if he heard the hissing and the bullet-like whistle of the swooping hawk, that hitherto in motionless poise, as if with nailed pinion, had hung high in the blue above his prey.—Think not too hardly of the Doctor, that he mourned the lost opportunity of freeing his friend out of the narrow prison, and himself out of the wide one of life. For he has lost too much and is too lonely; men appear to him as people in the Polish rock-salt mines, who grope round with a light bound to their heads, which they call "I," encircled with the unenjoyable glitter of the salt, clad in white and with red fillets,[[192]] as if they were bandages.—The speech of his acquaintances, like that of the Chinese, is monosyllabic.—He must live to see the mortifying day when January and the city will set down against him the lowliness of his rank as a fraud.—Before every eye he stands in a different light, or shade rather. Matthieu regards him as coarse; January, as intriguing; the women, as trifling,—just as Emanuel regarded him as pious, and Clotilda as too ardent; for every one hears in a full-toned, harmonious man only his own echo. What heart could henceforth induce him—his own could not—to hold an oar any longer in the slave-ship of life? O, one could do it, a warm and mighty one,—his mother's! "Only once plunge out of this world," said his conscience, "then will thy mother, in the fulness of love, die after thee, and appear before thee in the next world with so many tears, with all her hot wounds, and say, 'Son, this sorrow is thy work!'"—He obeyed, and perceived that, if it is noble to die for a mistress, it is still nobler to live for a mother.
He therefore determined this very evening—in the evening, so that night might place its screen before certain weather-wasting ruins of better times, before certain gliding night-corpses of memory—to go to St. Luna, to call to his mother, and to refresh her sick and weary heart with at least one flower of joy, and say to her,—as no oath any longer bound him,—"Now for the second time thou givest me life!" How sweet was the thought to him!—A single good purpose makes up and airs the sharp sick-bed of a shattered life.
But at evening, you good, oppressed souls, in the evening—not of life, but—of the 21st of October, all will be lighter and fresher to you, and the ball of your fortune will revolve from the stormy to the sunny side.