"There you are right. You are too spirited and much too talented for that. You will deliver your maiden speech amid universal applause, and become famous at once. You will be hated by the opposite parties, hated and feared, and that will only stimulate your courage. You will be a great man, and a blessing to your country. You can engage a trustworthy man to manage your estate, and do well under such an arrangement; and you will give your talent and your faculties to your country and your party. It is your duty, and you are not the man to shrink from an acknowledged duty. Besides, out of friendship for me, you cannot refuse. I have positively staked my word on your acceptance; and then there is a request from the party, with a hundred and twenty signatures. Look here!"
He showed me a sheet of writing, with a long list of badly-scrawled names underneath a few lines of writing. I still hesitated, when Siegfried smiled, and, taking from his pocket a little bit of a letter, perfumed with heliotrope, handed it to me.
"My aunt sends you this."
I broke the rose-coloured wax, and drew out a tiny piece of bristol-board with the signature of Countess Diodora Vernöczy. Its contents were as follows:—
"Pray accept the nomination."
That was all. But what all the persuasions, all the allusions to country, race, patriotism, and religion had not effected, these few Hungarian words, written in a fine, aristocratic hand, did at once. They persuaded me, and I accepted. Yet I had never seen the lady who had written these words, and did not even know whether she was young or old, beautiful or ugly! She was a woman, and that sufficed. No! the Devil is not dead; here is his hoof.
How I triumphed and how I fell I have told you already. If I had the gift of Virgilius Maro, and could speak or write in hexameters, in such verses I would compose the "Æneid" of my career as a belligerent. As it is, you can read it all, described in somewhat unflattering language, in the Hungarian newspapers of the period. There is a whole history of bribery, corruption, intimidation, and similar crimes committed in my name, related in those papers, and you may read of the horrible fraud that was practised in offering the vote of a dead man. The epithets "cheat," "deceiver," "liar," and so forth were freely and frequently attached to my name; and then followed the shameful annulment of the election, and I was sent home—a broken, disgraced, snuffed-out wretch—a dead man, indeed!
There is something fearful, something terribly cruel and unjust, in such a moral cudgelling to death, for those who cast the stones are not a whit better than their victim. A common criminal, murderer, counterfeiter, or forger may procure a pardon, and rehabilitate himself in time; but a man that has furnished society with amusement and been laughed to death is never again allowed to hold up his head and show his face. I was nearly mad with shame and disgrace. What should I do with myself now—now that I was nothing but a broken tool—I, who might have been a scientific celebrity, a light in the profession? I could not go back to Vienna for very shame. A flouted, ridiculed man cannot be a doctor. A doctor must be respected, trusted, even revered, like a priest. For me there was nothing but to hide myself in my own house, shut the doors against everybody, and live the life of a hermit—the life of my Uncle Diogenes.
I need not have shut my doors; not a soul demanded admittance. I really think my dear friends made a circuit around my château when they had to pass through my village.
The first day I remained shut up in my room; the second I paced the garden walks in a furious rage; the third I noticed that I had shamefully neglected my uncle's dearly-cherished garden since I had abandoned myself to the mania of politics. The carefully tended Isabella grapes wound their tender twigs up and around an apple tree; the roses were full of water shoots; the American lilies choked up with dead nettles. Wasps' nests were hanging from the branches of the trees, and giant ants had built their pyramids on the foot-path; and the hedgehogs boldly invaded the lawn as I passed. As I strolled, my eye fell upon a little flower which I recognised as a favourite from my dear mother's garden; I observed a glowing alkermes, an Oriental corn-rose, then again an artichoke, overgrown with vile weeds. All at once I found myself working away with garden-knife, shovel, and spade, pruning, weeding, and tying up the twigs and branches, just as Uncle Diogenes had done.