"Yes, my angel, you are right. Never was it so clear to me as to-day that I bore my worst enemy in myself, and in the last few hours I have buried him forever. One complete in himself, Cornelia, receives you in his arms; it shall be his one task to live for you and your happiness; he no longer seeks or hopes for anything but you and a quiet family happiness, unnoticed, but rich in blessing."
Cornelia looked at him in astonishment. "Would you renounce politics and every manly profession?"
"How can I help it? What can I begin after this failure? My political credit is ruined here as well as elsewhere. What can it avail to convince myself more and more that I cannot make amends for my errors in this province? But here,"--he laid his band an Cornelia's shoulder,--"here, thank God, I can atone for the wrongs I have committed; here I can and will prove that I have become a different man!"
"No, Heinrich," cried Cornelia, deeply touched. "I thank you for these words, and for the cheerfulness with which you hope to find in me a compensation for all; but I think too highly of you to be able to share this hope. No wife, not even the most beloved, can make that superfluous for which her husband was born: to work in a lofty vocation. What you now feel, in the first ebullition of joy, you cannot always experience. The storm that now fills your heart now will subside in time, and the calm which will then follow would at last make you find a void in yourself. You are no 'shepherd,' Heinrich. An idyllic, private life would not long satisfy you; a quiet withdrawal into your own family circle, a limiting of yourself to that which is personally dear to you, would be again an egotistical, and therefore only a partial, happiness. You possess the power of solving comprehensive problems. Every power imperiously demands its right to assert itself; if the opportunity is denied, it turns destructively against the barriers imposed upon it, and that which is also within them. Thus it would be with you and our peace. Woe betide the wife who believes that she can and must be the whole world to her husband! She does not understand his larger nature, and will only make herself or him unhappy. I do not belong to that class. I pride myself in taking into account all the just demands of your character, thus only can I make you happy. I will not regret you in the hours your profession claims, for I shall take possession of you doubly in spirit, when I know you to be toiling for that for which I myself would fain strive with all my powers, and must not because I am a woman. I will not bewail the time you take from me to give to mankind, for I love all men far too much to grudge them what you can do for their welfare. And then, Heinrich,"--she laid her head on his breast, and gazed into his face with a bride's ardent love,--"then when you return home to your wife weary but joyous in the consciousness of duty then you shall rest in my arms, in my faithful love, and let me have the proud belief that my heart is the soil from which the roots of your life draw nourishment for the glorious fruits that you permit the world to reap!"
"Cornelia, glorious creature! What a picture you conjure up before the soul! These are divine revelations, and I will follow them unquestioningly. Yes, I will begin anew; guide me with your inspired, prophetic glance, lead me to the path upon which my first step faltered; you alone know what is for my welfare." He gazed long and earnestly into her eyes. "Oh, do not reproach me as unmanly because I give myself up entirely to you, since through you I first became what I am, through you alone I first learned to perceive in laboring for others a duty, an object, in life! The representatives of these noble ideas are principally women; for to labor and care for others is woman's mission, to sacrifice herself for others' interests her greatest power. The man who allows himself to be guided by a woman need not become womanish, nor the woman masculine. If, like you, Cornelia, she rises above her narrow subjective world to ideas which comprehend all humanity, she confers the qualities inherent in her upon them, and then doubtless becomes capable of guiding the more egotistical man to honest efforts for the race, self-sacrifice, and true philanthropy! Thus the strength of your love and virtue, in one word, your lofty womanhood, draws me upward." He threw his arms around her and pressed her ardently to his heart. "Cornelia, my betrothed bride, oh, tell me again and again that I can never lose you, that you are mine!"
She clasped her hands. "Forever! forever! and may God's blessing be with us!"
"Amen!" said Heinrich.
Thus the power of a genuine love had healed the secret conflict in Ottmar. Intellect and sensuous feelings, both equally attracted, equally satisfied, united in the same object, and in the soft atmosphere of a true happiness his shattered nature healed into a symmetrical whole.
The ghostly apparitions of his dual existence disappeared before the reality of an all-reconciling feeling which seized upon the inmost kernel of life, and from this brought forth the source of never-failing joy.
When the whole man was in harmony with himself, his long-scattered and dispersed powers concentrated in the depths of his soul, and now for the first time showed unity of purpose and noble, honest action: for the first time he became a man. And when he thus once more appeared before the world with head erect, he conquered; for real ability and honest convictions always find allies in the natural instincts of the people, and against these even the hostility of the Jesuits was powerless. The web they had entwined around him was only that of his own cowardice and duplicity. His manly conduct at last tore it asunder. He was now free, and his purified character afforded no opening for a new snare. After a few years he saw the noblest ambition gratified,--that of being useful and accomplishing some good result. He was the main support of the Party in favor of the constitution, averted a threatening reaction by his ready dialectics, felt the mighty breath of an applauding nation hovering like a vivifying spring-storm about his head, and everywhere, far and wide, saw the seeds springing up which his reawakened philanthropy had sown.