Just at present, however, he had earthly things to think of, and a trial to endure particularly disagreeable to one of his temperament. He had to be a second time the lion of the hour, to be stared at, followed, observed in all he did, listened to in all he said—in short, to be the temporary victim of public curiosity.
Conquering his disgust and annoyance, he chose the best method of making this trial a short one, by showing himself quite freely. He took rooms at a quiet hotel frequented by business men, and very seldom visited by ladies. If the mood should take him to pace his room at night, he did not choose that any sympathizing heart should be counting his footsteps. He called on his former pupils, and [pg 502] made appointments with them, and listened with patience to their earnest, and often tearful, protestations of regret and indignation in his regard. He gathered up into his hands, one by one, the threads of ordinary life, and tried to interest himself in them again, and to renew some of his old pleasures; but he could not unite them and weave his heart in with them as before. A gulf, of which he only now became aware, lay between him and the past. It was not the sense of wrong and loss, it was not even that he had a greater distrust of mankind; it was at once higher and deeper than anything merely personal: it was a disgust and fear of life itself, as he had seen and felt it, a sense of instability and of hollowness everywhere. His desires for wealth and power and fame dropped into an abyss, and left no sound to tell that they were substances or had encountered any substance in their descent. Like one who, walking over a bridge, suddenly perceives that, instead of solid arches of stone beneath, there is only a thin and trembling framework between him and the torrent, he felt that he might at any moment fall through into the unknown world, or into nothingness.
This man had called himself a Jew, partly from an inherited allegiance, which ran in his blood, though it was no longer niched in his brain, partly, also, from a generous unwillingness to desert the unfortunate. He cherished the fragments of his ancient traditions as the poet and the antiquary cherish the ruins of an antique temple, in which the vulgar see only broken rocks and rubbish, but from which their imaginations can rebuild portico and sculptured frieze and painted ceiling. Their eyes can discern the acanthus leaf where it lies half choked in dust, and the dying glimmer of what once was gold, and, faintly burning through its encrusting soil, the imperishable color of that rare stone, blue as the vault of a midnight sky. In the ruin of his people Mr. Schöninger still beheld and gloried in that sublime race which, in the early world, had borne the day-star on their foreheads.
But it was only a memory to him, and the present was all vanity.
While in prison, he had thought that liberty was, of all things, the most precious. In his emptied heart it had been the one object of longing; and in the first moments of freedom he had found it intoxicating. But the joy it gave effervesced and died away like foam, and the emptiness remained. Looking back on that prison life, he almost wondered at the agony it had caused him, or even that the shameful death which had threatened him should have had power to move him so, or that the opinions and the enmities of men should have struck such bitterness from his soul. What was it all but motes in the beam? “Vanity of vanities, and all is vanity.”
But life must be lived, and work must be done; and he took up the duties that came to hand, and performed them almost as if he loved them.
One small pleasure, indeed, he gave himself. Escaping from the city, with as much care as if he had been flying from justice, he took a long, solitary walk in the pine-woods where, nearly a year before, he had gone with a May party, and, searching there, he brought back handfuls of pale, nodding snow-drops, and sent them by a trusty messenger to Honora Pembroke.
“They are for her or for Mrs. [pg 503] Gerald, as she may choose,” he said.
She made no answer, but the messenger saw her lay the delicate blossoms in the white hand of the dead, while her tears fell on them, drop by drop.
Mr. Schöninger's generosity of feeling would have prompted him to attend the funeral, but his good taste prevented. He would have been too much observed there. He watched the procession as it passed by his window—an old-fashioned, solemn, genuine New-England funeral; no mourning carriages with laughing people inside, no hired bearers but a long line of friends and neighbors, who knew and lamented the dead, walking after her with downcast faces, to stand by her grave till the earth should have covered her in.