"Good-evening, my angel," he stammered, and was going up to her to embrace her. She silently rose and looked at him with a sorrowful gaze, which suddenly seemed to sober him. "Well, well," he said, "it's hardly one o'clock--we don't act to-morrow--I've done a good business, too, haven't I, cousin? He'll stay with us, sweetheart; I've engaged him as dramatist and conductor, at a monthly salary of twelve thalers for the present--that will please you, I think. But now good-night, cousin! I'm perfectly sober, only I couldn't tell the town how one becomes President. So I'm going to take a long sleep, for the torture of the day was great."
Amid all the confusion of his brain, he still retained sufficient chivalrous courtesy to take his wife's hand and kiss it. Then he staggered through the side door into the sleeping-room, and we could hear him fall on the bed without undressing.
I cast a hasty glance at his wife, who stood gazing into vacancy.
"Good-night, Frau Luise," I said. "You will see me again to-morrow."
"To-morrow?"
"Certainly. To-morrow, and every day until you yourself send me away. Perhaps I may yet make myself useful here--though not as conductor."
After that night I no longer led my own life.
My existence seemed only valuable when I made myself a slave, soul and body, in Frau Luise's service, coming to her aid wherever her own grand and lofty strength failed.
In reality I was making no sacrifice by this self-abnegation. For, as I have already confessed, my own aims and purposes had vanished, as a light on which a nocturnal traveler depends suddenly proves a will-o'-the-wisp, and flickers into a marsh mist. I felt averse rather than inclined to enter a pulpit, and I had not sufficient love or talent for any art or science to induce me to devote my life to it. Clearly, as though written on the wall by some spectral hand, the sentence stood before me: "You are a mediocre man from whom the world has nothing to hope in the way of happiness or enlightenment. Rejoice if some good human being can warm his hands by your little flame."