The old man's face suddenly darkened and put on an expression which might be called terrific. He started up hastily, walkt several times up and down the room, then sat down again sighing, and began in a bitter tone: "So! this is it! You are in love! Is it not so? I am doomed again to hear this ill-omened, this calamitous word! I am doomed to witness this frenzy, this dark, heart-rending, heart-sickening absurdity, even in you, in a man of your sense! And all, all that one might otherwise esteem, and look upon as reasonable, is swallowed up in this whirlpool, in which horrour, madness, wild passions, carnal lust, and capricious folly are frothing and boiling all at once. This marriage however, Edward, can never, never be."
"I have said too much," answered Edward calmly, "to be satisfied with a bare refusal. Tell me what are your plans for the dear girl, and I shall learn to bear them with resignation."
"And she, the little fool!" interposed the old man hastily, "has she too tumbled in love with you? Has the luckless word already past to and fro betwixt you?"
"No," replied Edward; "her pure youth is still hovering in that happy state of simplicity, which only desires that tomorrow may be just like today and yesterday. She has no wishes but the simple ones of a child."
"So much the better," said Balthasar; "she will be ready to act rationally then, and will not throw any hinderance in the way of my plan. Surely you, who are tolerably well acquainted with me, ought to have perceived long ago that I had designed the child for Eleazar. I mean her to marry, to live in sober wedlock, not to dream away and dote in what you call love."
"And will she," askt Edward, "be happy with him for her husband?"
"Happy!" cried the old man, bursting into a kind of loud laugh; "happy! What is a man to think of when he hears that word? There is no happiness; there is no unhappiness; only pain, which we are to welcome to our arms, only self-contempt, beneath which we must bow our necks, only hopelessness, which we must make the partner of our table and of our bed. Everything else is a lie and a trick. Life is a spectre, before which, whenever I pause to look upon it, I stand shuddering: and nothing but toil and activity, and straining all my faculties, can enable me to endure and to despise it. I could envy the loom and the spinning-jenny, if such a feeling, such a wish had any sense in it: for what is our consciousness but a consciousness of misery? what is our existence but an unveiling of the madness, the frenzy of all life? to which we either abandon ourselves in chill patience, or weep and struggle against it convulsively, or play through a caricature of happiness and joy, while in our dreary heart we are fully aware that it is all a wanton lie."
"Neither then must I ask you," continued Edward quietly and sorrowfully, "whether you love Eleazar as a friend, whether he is truly worthy of friendship and esteem; for all freedom of will, every movement of feeling is crusht by these dark thoughts."
"As if I had not felt," said Balthasar, "and wept and laught, like other men. The difference is only, that I soon stript truth naked, and that I acknowledged and felt my own baseness, and that of all mankind, of the world, and everything in it. Eleazar! he and you! If we are to make use of such words, my friend, I love you; all the fibres of my heart twine fast around you; awake and in my dreams you stand before me: your being miserable might reduce me to despair. And this raw-boned, loathsome Eleazar! If I am to give a name to this folly of my nature, I hate him; he is quite nauseous to me, whenever he stands before my eye or before my imagination: the bile which has tainted his eyes and face, his squinting glances, the twitches of his nose when he is speaking, while his long teeth stare out as if he were grinning, his shrugging up his shoulders at every word, whereby his odious snuff-coloured coat is every moment dragged upward and lays bare the skinny bones of his wrists, all this, his way of drawing in his breath, his hissing voice, is so revolting to my bodily senses, and always excites my wrath so strongly, so painfully, that no other created being ever gave me the same torment; and for this very reason, because there is so much I have to make amends to him for, because heaven and nature have so utterly neglected him, must he become my chief heir, my son. Besides he has long known of it, and is pleased with the prospect of this union."
"I only half understand you," answered Edward: "you are fighting against your own feelings, you are wilfully putting yourself on the rack. I am not arguing now against your promise, since you have already given it to that man: but why do you cling to this image of life, that harasses and tortures you? Why not open your mind to those joyous feelings, to those sunny thoughts, which lie just as near, nay nearer?"