The grand wedding dinner passed off very cheerfully. Giulia possessed the lightheadedness of an actress; in glad emotions she forgot everything which at other times might depress her, she imbibed forgetfulness and courage with the sparkling froth of the champagne. Then, when her countenance brightened, a slight colour suffused it as she smiled and joked, and gave herself up to a genial actress' mood, which owes its birth to a rich treasury of recollections; then only her beauty, which until now had but inspired cold admiration, warmed all hearts, and Blanden was deemed fortunate to have won so beautiful a wife.
There was no lack of toasts and verses. Schöner made use of a few ideas which he had once mustered in Neukuhren at Eva's betrothal. A true poet always goes economically to work, because when once he has stamped an idea with the immortal impress of his genius, it must not be lost again, and it would be most blameworthy even to make a feeble copy. Salomon retired to the domain of satire, he compared the new Knights of St. John with those of the old Order, and ridiculed the celibacy of the latter in verses imitative of Heine.
Dr. Kuhl, it is true, proposed no toasts, but he was in a wild mood, which inspired his betrothed with some slight alarm, he spoke of his gallows-wit, and said he had courage to mention the rope, even in the house of a man who had been hanged; he was enjoying himself immensely at the wedding, but this fact did not upset his theories that marriage festivities were a public nuisance; however, as he had at last lost all his characteristics and fallen a victim to his own good nature, and another person's amiability, well, he could not help it; he, too, must let himself be married, but he should only permit two witnesses, selected from the midst of the sovereign people, to be present, who afterwards would disappear in the night of that plebeian universality where all cows are black; his marriage dinner he and Cäcilie should eat alone, or at the utmost invite his Caro who, on that day, should receive a specially good dish of meat and bones. Well, he had somehow got into the good-for-nothing frock-coat, and he only wished that all the seams would burst. The whole life of perishing humanity consisted in most abject concessions; he, too, now moved on that degrading course, and had already fallen far from that height upon which he had formerly stood in proud self-glorification, and he looked upon himself as an apostate, and with his better self, which still occasionally rose from out the slough, he looked upon his present self, planted up to its neck in a bog of social prejudices, with an indescribable feeling of pity and contempt.
"Thank God," said Wegen to Olga, "that you have not fallen into the hands of this wicked hector, who seems to look upon his engagement as an act of suicide. How differently I appreciate you."
Smiling meaningly, Olga pressed her lover's hand, but Kuhl had overheard the last words.
"Dear friend and brother-in-law," said he, "I herewith pronounce you to be the greatest hypocrite at this round table. The theory of common love, for which the century is not yet ripe, permits many variations--and one of these variations you have performed, and all the world performs them with us. Enter upon an engagement to-day, give it up soon, and a week or so later fall in love and engage yourself again, and you are one of the most moral citizens in the world, and no one will assail your good name. But, if only you feel that affection a week sooner, before the old one is given up, then you are a Don Juan. Everything then depends upon time, just as in hiring anything, a week constitutes the whole difference between virtue and vice. Well, if we have not sinned, dear brother-in-law in spe, at least we have nothing with which to reproach ourselves! I have loved two sisters, but so have you also--your good health, my friend!"
Wegen coloured at this address, which, to him, appeared intensely heartless. Olga laughed, but Cäcilie had long since compressed her lips and prepared herself for an armed reprimand.
The clergyman opposite, an enlightened man, had listened to Kuhl's defiant speech with a smiling countenance. He quietly took part in the conversation.
"The affections of the human heart are very peculiar, and who, indeed, excepting the Lord, who searches heart and mind, can say that he has fathomed that organ? Such affection may be transient or deep, yet it seems to me that it, too, is subject to mutability and change. But this free-booter's love must cease at that point where human society rises unanimously, striving to attain its grandest ends. We will grant dual love to Herr Dr. Kuhl. Let every one manage it as best he can. I know, indeed, that the heart, like the ocean, can have but one ebb and flow, and that this tide is only produced by the mysterious attraction of one orb, not merely in regular course--as is the case with the ocean tide--but also in wild passionate upheavings, as in that of the glowing liquid emotion of the earth, the earthquake, which clever men also ascribe to the influence of the moon's powers of attraction; but although dual love may be a whim of the heart, bigamy is very different."
Although Blanden was talking to her at the moment, Giulia became attentive, and listened eagerly to the words of her other neighbour.