"To be rich does not matter, it is to live that matters," interrupted Doctor Ehbehard, with a cutting glance.
"Yes, that was too true," groaned the two brothers, Max with his soft, sweet voice and perfect distinction, Ludwig fretting, fuming, always seeming to suffocate. After all living mattered, but that life apart from every festivity, from every distraction, like two paupers separated from the world and its pleasures, condemned to measure even what they ate, to analyse what they drank, destined to live in the great centres of joy and luxury, like two wandering shadows, avoiding rooms too warm, verandahs too cold, and smoking-rooms—what a life of renunciation!
"One must make renunciations to live," declared Doctor Karl, slightly pale, with lowered eyes.
"Yes, renunciations," they said, Max Freytag in an almost weeping voice, and Ludwig with one of grotesque anger; but what a destiny for both to be struck down by this cruel disease, which no one in their family had ever had—both sons of the head of the House of Freytag, the only sons of the House of Freytag—as if stricken to death by a curse, although they could live perhaps and drag out their life, yet they must implacably die of it.
Suddenly both became silent, in consternation, Max pale and as if convulsed, Ludwig heated and asthmatical. They became silent, gazing with eyes full of tears at Doctor Ehbehard, with an expression of great sorrow and supplication. He from his seat looked at the two ailing brothers, vowed to infirmity and death; he looked at them and his eyes lost all indifference and harshness. Perhaps beneath his thick, sprinkled moustache his lips trembled; for he was slow to answer them. Before and around the two men the great Alpine landscape, even more lifeless, beneath the weight of its motionless clouds, spread itself. And not a noise nor a breath of wind came to give them the living sense of life.
Slowly, meaning every word, with a sagacity which did not only come from science, Doctor Ehbehard began to discuss, one by one, all the complaints of the brothers, and if there was no promise in his just words, if there was no false hope in his phrases, at any rate they inspired patience, and calm hope; they restored equilibrium, tranquillity, and peace to those agitated spirits. Like two children, fixing and holding his eyes with their imploring eyes, noting every word and impressing them on their memory, making no gesture so as to lose nothing of what he was saying, so as not to lose a fleeting expression, like children who wished for succour, protection, and strength, Max and Ludwig Freytag regained courage and moral vigour in the presence of Karl Ehbehard. He did not speak entirely to Max, who was the less ill of the two and who might be cured, but he told them both that their life was still tenacious, and that their youth could not be conquered either easily or soon. He did not promise them perfect health, but he promised them the superior energy that supports disease and ends by obeying it. Karl Ehbehard did not pity their cruel destiny, which in them was destroying their fortune and their house, but he invited them to pity so many other invalids, thousands and hundreds of thousands who were languishing and perishing for want of care and medicine, sick and languishing of gloomy misery, who had no more means of supporting their families, and dying, would leave them in extreme poverty. And all the human sorrow of disease that finds no obstacles or contrasts, of the disease that ruins, that tortures, that whips, that slays, since its companion is misery, all the human sorrow of hundreds of thousands of sufferers who were perishing without succour, medicine and food, in narrow death-dealing houses, on hard beds of cold and want—all this inconsolable, disconsolate human suffering was reviewed in the calm, firm words of Karl Ehbehard, shone from his glance, and flowed from his voice. The two brothers felt calmed and soothed, as if their little insignificant sorrow were dissolved in their mind.
When they had left, Doctor Ehbehard remained for some time quite alone on his terrace, where he was wont to pass the afternoon, and where, to the surprise of all his new clients, he preferred to receive the visits of the sick instead of in his large consulting-room, furnished like the other rooms, and which looked out on the principal façade at the back. Again his reading absorbed him, but it was more a concentration of spirit, a recollection of his thoughts, since he seldom turned over the pages. Twice while he was thus taken and conquered by his interior life, his faithful servant appeared at the doorway to tell his master something, but knowing him quite well and seeing him thus immersed in silence, and motionless, he had not dared to call him. At last, at the third time, he ventured to disturb a chair to attract Doctor Karl's attention, who, raising his head, as if aroused from a lethargy, looked at him as in a dream. He read the visiting-card that the servant offered him twice.
"La Vicomtesse de Bagdad," he read in French, and then added to the servant in German:
"New?"
"New."