I think I have by my digressions adequately accounted for the circumstance in my story, that Gustavus at last, because he had to succumb to such quick-witted dames, and from his modest deference to other people's talents, and perhaps because the Resident Lady was withheld from him by her company, and Beata by her respected father--absolutely took himself away. But out of doors the drooping flower cannot revive itself under the cooling night-dew; in the Still Land he passed along before the four-cornered reflections which the chandeliers threw upon the grass without yearning, and turned round and round to take in at a full glance all the walls of the broad darkly-painted ball-room, where fate propels the sun-ball into great, and the ball of earth into little circles. When he there felt the great profile of day, the night, like that of a departed female friend, cool and comforting, on his bosom, then he thought, but without pride: "O to thee, great Nature, will I always come, when I am saddened in the midst of men; thou art my oldest friend and my truest, and thou shalt console me till I fall from thy arms at thy feet and need no solace more." ...
"Can you not inform me where young Herr von Falkenberg lodges hereabouts," a night-messenger accosted him. He handed him a letter, which he hurriedly ran through in the fixed-star-light of the far off chandeliers. But they seemed to-night to have to illumine only sad scenes. Amandus had therein written to him on the coverlet of his sick bed as follows:
THIRTY-FIRST, OR XXV TRINITATIS, SECTION.
The Sick Bed.--Eclipse of the Moon.--The Pyramid.
"If thou hast become my friend again, then hasten to thy friend who is soon to die. Make thy peace with me, ere I go to the eternally Silent Land, as we did the last time, before we went out into the earthly one. Ah, thou inexpressibly beloved one! I have indeed often offended, but always loved thee! O come, let not the short breath of my breaking heart, which has consisted on this earth of nothing but unsatisfied sighs, vanish with a last vain sigh for thee. Thou saw'st me for the first time when my eyes were blind; see me for the last time, when they are becoming so once more!"
This leaf, coming at an hour when the love of a human being was such a blessed thing for him, hurried him away from the palace, but the parts of his heart in which it touched him, were bleeding. Such a journey through the night bows down the soul, and on this short passage he saw his friend die more than ten times over. Every bird he chased out of its bed made him think, how will they in the darkness find their little bough again? Every dissolving light that trailed about at a distance through the gloom, made him think for what sighs, for what painful steps, will it just now illumine the weary ascent; and it seemed to him as if he saw the human life going. It did not make him more cheerful when he saw several chariots set round with a halo of torches, filled with the idle guests of the souper, which they, like himself, were leaving, roll along as hurriedly as if they were hasting to visit a dying friend. At last the slumbering city unswathed itself out of the shadows; the Pharos-lamp of the warder and a few widely scattered lights, which probably were measuring off with their sad and untrimmed beams the night of some invalid, fell on the mourning-ground of his soul.
Softly he knocked at the door of the sick house, softly it was opened, softly he went up the stairs; nothing broke the silence but the sound of the clock, pealing like a funeral knell into the dumb house of sorrow, with its twelve strokes, a voice which he had so often heard there. Ah! there lay suffering in bed a form, which one will forgive all, and which one hastens to love and to cheer a little longer, ere it shall stir no more. Not the unclean, shriveled sick face, not the hue of life corroded by fever, not the wrinkles of the lip--not all of these was it in Amandus (nor is it in other invalids) which rent utterly Gustavus's heart and hopes, but the heavily rolling, spasmodically flashing, wild and yet burnt-out glassy sick eye, upon which all sufferings of past nights and the nearness of the last were so legibly written.
Amandus stretched his dead hand far out to meet him, as if it were possible that any one else than he still remembered the black dyer's hand of another, which he had lately reached out to him. For him the reunion was sweeter than to Gustavus, who saw waiting behind it the long separation.
The morning and the joy arrested a little the curtain of his life as it fell. Gustavus took the place of the nurse; first, because she knew how to do everything so well and with so many circumstances and marginal notes, that she poured gall into his very last minutes; secondly, because, surely, in the hour when all nature in the company of death tears off from men with stern hand all finery and all articles of raiment which she had lent him, the only remaining solace for the impotent friends who cannot hold back this inexorable hand, is, during the unclothing, freezing and sinking to sleep of the friend, by unconditional compliance to all his whims, by indulgence of his capriciousness, to be still. Upon such services of heart and love toward poor dying men one looks back after many years with more satisfaction than upon those rendered to all well persons together--and yet the two classes are separated from each other by only a few hours; for thou dost not climb in and out of thy bed many times before thou ceasest to rise from it....
Dear Death! I think now of myself. If thou enterest one day into my lodging-room, pray do me the favor to shoot me down at my secretaire or writing-table dead on the spot; lay me not, dear Death, behind the curtains of the sick-bed, nor hunt slowly with thy ripping knife after every vein to amputate it from life, so that I shall be compelled to gaze whole nights' long into the dissecting face, or that during thy long unraveling of my souls raiment all shall be stepping up and looking on in good health: the Captain, the Pestilentiary and my good sister. But if the Evil One possesses thee, so that thou canst not listen to reason, then, dear Death, as no hell lasts forever, I will not, after a thousand vexations, vex myself about the last.