CHAPTER XIII.A CLOCK OF HUMAN BEINGS—A COLD SHOULDER—THE VENNER.When, in my last chapter, I spoke of ladies who were given to brevity of sleep, and awoke six hours before their sisters at the Antipodes, I think I did well not to cram into my twelfth chapter (among the numerous events so tightly packed there) a model of a certain clock, composed of men and women, which I invented a considerable time ago, but to reserve it for this thirteenth chapter, where I shall now introduce it, and set it up. I believe this humanity clock of mine was suggested to me by Linnæus’ flower clock at Upsal, whose wheels were the earth and the sun, and the figures on its dial were flowers, whereof one always awoke and opened later than another. I was living at the time in Scheerau, in the middle of the market-place, and had two rooms. From thefrontroom I was able to see all the market-place and the palace buildings, while my back room looked into the Botanical Gardens. Whoever may be living in these rooms now is in possession of a delightful, ready-tuned harmony between the flower clock in the garden and the mankind clock in the market-place.At 3 A.M. the yellow meadow goatsbeard awakes—also brides—and then, too, the stable-boy begins rattling and feeding the horses under the lodger. At 4 (on Sundays) awake the little hawksweed, and ladies who are going to the Holy Communion (chimingclocks these may be called) and the bakers. At 5, kitchen-maids and dairy-maids awake, and buttercups; at 6, sowthistles and cooks. By 7, a good many of the wardrobe women of the palace, and the salad in the Botanical Gardens, are awake, as well as several tradeswomen. At 8, all their daughters and the little yellow mouse-ear—all the colleges and the leaves of flowers, piecrust, and law-papers, are open. At 9, the female aristocracy begin to stir, and the marygolds, to say nothing of a number of young ladies from the country, in town on a visit, glance out of their windows. At 10 and 11, the Court ladies, the whole staff of lords of the bedchamber, the green colewort and pippau of the Alps, and the Princesses’ reader, arouse themselves from their morning slumber; and (so brightly is the morning sun breaking in through the many-tinted silken curtains) the whole Court curtails a morsel or so of its sleep. At 12, the Prince; at 1, his consort, and the carnation in her flower-vase—have their eyes open. What gets up at later hours in the afternoon—about 4 o’clock, say—is nothing but the red hawksweed and the night, watchman (a cuckoo clock), and these two are but evening dials, or moon clocks. From the hot eyes of the poor devil who opens them only at 5 (with the jalap), we turn our own away in sorrow; he is a sick man, who hastakensome of it (the jalap), and only passes from fever-fancies of being griped with hot pincers to genuine, waking spasms.I could never tell when it was 2 o’clock, because I, and a thousand other stout gentlemen and the yellow mouse-ear, were always asleep at that hour; though I awoke, with the regularity of an accurate repeater, at 3 in the afternoon and at 3 in the morning.Thus may we human creatures serve as flower clocks to higher intelligences when our petals close upon our last bed, or as sand-glasses when our sands of life are run so far out that they are turned over into the other world. On such occasions, when seventy of man’s years have ended and passed away, these higher intelligences may say, “Another hour already! Good God! how time flies!”And this digression reminds me that it reallydoesfly! Firmian and Heinrich lived on in great cheerfulness of spirit towards the jocund morning which was so close at hand, though the former could by no means take root upon any chair or room-floor all the forenoon; for, in his mind’s eye, the curtain kept always rising upon theopera buffa e seriaof his mock death, and displaying its burlesque situations. And at present (as was always the case, indeed) the presence and example of Leibgeber heightened his sense of humour and power of expressing the same. Leibgeber, who had gone through all the stage-business and scene-shifting of the sham death in an exhaustive manner weeks ago (in fancy), was thinking little about it now. The problem occupying him at present was how to extract the wick (that is to say, the bride) out of Rosa’s wedding-torch, all painted and moulded as it was. Heinrich was at all times forcible, free, and bold, furious and implacable as regards anything unjust; and his righteous indignation often had much the appearance of vengeance, as here in Rosa’s case, and in that of Blaise. Firmian was more kindly; he spared and pardoned, often, indeed, at the (apparent) expense of honour.Hecould never have plucked Nathalie’s epistolary lover out of her bleeding heart with Leibgeber’s forceps and knife. His friend, at leaving for Fantaisie that day, had to promise the gentlest of behaviour, and, for a time, silence on the subject of the Royal Prussian Widows’ Fund. It would, of course, have made a terrific, bleeding wound in Nathalie’s feeling of rectitude had the most distant hint been uttered of such a matter as metallic compensation for a spiritual loss such as that involved in her separation on moral grounds from the immoral Venner. She deserved to conquer (and was well able to do so), with the prospect of her victory reducing her to poverty.Heinrich did not come back till it was somewhat late, and his face was a little troubled, though it was a happy face too. Rosa was discarded, and Nathalie pained. The English lady was at Anspach with Lady Craven, eating her butter—(for she made butter as well as books). When he had read out to Nathalie all that was written on Rosa’s black board and sin-register (which he did gravely, but perhaps louder than was necessary, and with scrupulous truth), she rose up with that grand grace which is a characteristic of enthusiasm of self-sacrifice: “If you are yourself deceived in this as little as you are capable of deceiving, and if I may believe your friend as I do you, I give you my sacred word that I will not allow myself to be persuaded, or constrained, to anything. But the subject of this conversation will be here himself in a few days, and I owe it to him as well as to my own honour, to hear him, as I have given my letters into his hands. Oh! it is hard to have to speak so coldly!” As the moments passed, the rose red of her cheek paled to rose-white. She leant it on her hand, and as her eyes grew fuller, and tears dropped at last, she said, strongly and firmly, “Be in no anxiety, I shall keep my word; and then, cost what it may, I will tear myself from my friend, and go back to my poor people in Schraplau. I have lived quite long enough in the great world, though nottoolong.”Heinrich’s unusual seriousness had overpowered her. Her confidence in his truth was immovable, and that (strange reason!) just because he had never seemed to fall in love with her, or to pass beyond the condition of friendship, and so did not measure her affection by his own. Perhaps she would have been angry with her bridegroom’s married attorney (i. e. Firmian), had he not had three or four of the best possible excuses; to wit, his general mental resemblance to Leibgeber, and his physiognomical resemblance to him (which his paleness purified and refined at this juncture).Her yesterday’s request to Leibgeber to bring Siebenkæs with him in the evening was now repeated (to the former’s joy), though her heart was aching in every corner. But let none take umbrage at her half-mourning for the Venner (now setting and near the horizon), or her erroneous estimate of him; for we all know that women (Heaven bless them!) often think sentiment and integrity, letters and actions, tears and honest warm blood, to be equivalent one to another.In the afternoon Leibgeber took Siebenkæs to her as a sort of syllogistic figure in support of his argument, or set ofrationes decidendi(for the Venner was a collection ofrationes dubitandi). Aquiliana received Siebenkæs with a blush, which came and went in an instant; and then with the least dash ofhauteur(result of modesty!), yet with all the kindness and good-will which she owed to his interest in her future. She lived in the English lady’s rooms. The flowery valley lay without, like a world before its sun. One advantage connected with a rich pleasure-garden of this sort is that a stranger advocate finds that he can attach the floating spider-threads of his talk to the branches of it, until they have been woven into the finished art-work of a glittering web, which can float in the free air. Firmian could never emulate these clever men of the world, who only need a listener to be able to begin spinning a conversation; who, like the tree-frogs, can cling firmly to anything they chance to hop on to, however smooth, and polished it may be; yea, who can even keep afloat in a space devoid of air, and all objects whatever (which a tree-frog cannot). A man of Siebenkæs’ free and independent soul cannot, however, long remain embarrassed by his unfamiliarity with his surroundings; he must speedily recover his freedom by virtue of his innate superiority to chance, external circumstances; and his unassumed and unassuming simpleness soon amply compensates for his lack of the great world’s artificial and assuming simplicity.Yesterday he had seen this Nathalie in the happy exercise and enjoyment of all her powers, and of nature and friendship, smiling and enchanting, and crowning the delightful evening with an act of brave self-devotion. Alas! how little remained to-day of all these joys, so tender and so bright. In no hour is a lovely face lovelier than at that immediately succeeding the bitter one, when tears for the loss of a heart have passed over it; for the sight of the loveliness in its sorrow, during that hour itself, would be too sad to bear. For this beautiful creature, who hid the sacrificial knife deep in her heart, where it had been plunged, and gladly let it smart there, that but the wound’s bleeding might be delayed, Siebenkæs would gladly have died—in a way more serious than had been intended—could it have been of any service to her. Is it a thing so strange that the bond between them grew closer and stronger as the sand run down in the hourglass, when we consider that, swayed by an unwonted three-sided seriousness (for even Leibgeber was overtaken by this feeling), their hearts, at sight of the gala-beauty of the spring, were filled with tender, longing wishes?—that Siebenkæs, with his pale face, worn, and stamped with all the traces and marks and signs of recent, bygone, trouble and pain, shone, this day, with a soft and pleasing sheen, as of evening sunlight, on her sight, all weakened by her tears?—that she thought with pleasure on his (rather singular) merit of having, at all events, embittered some of her faithless suitor’s infidelities—and that every note he touched was in the minor mode of his tender nature, because he was seeking to atone for, and cast into shade, the circumstance that it had fallen to his lot to lay waste at one fell stroke so many of this innocent, unknown creature’s hopes and joys—that even his greater share of modest, respectful reserve, became him, and set him off by contrast with his counterpart, the bolder and more outspoken Heinrich? With all these charms of accidental circumstance (which win the female world far sooner than charms of a bodily kind), Firmian was endowed in Nathalie’s eyes. Inhiseyes she had attractions greater still, and altogether new to him: her cultivation and acquirements; her manly enthusiasm, her delicate refinement; her (most flattering) way of treatinghim—(none of her sex had ever before glorified him with anything like it, and this particular species of charm plunges many a man who is unused to female companionship, not only into rapture, but into matrimony),—and (two crowning delights) the facts that the whole affair was fortuitous and out of the common, and that Lenette was the exact antipodes of her in each and every respect.Alas! poor starved, hungering Firmian. There are always a gallows, and a notice-board marked “No thoroughfare,” on the banks of the streamlet ofyourlife, even now that it has become a pearl-bearing brook. Your marriage ring must have pinched you a good deal, and felt very tight in a warm, temperature like this, as, indeedallrings feel tight in a warm bath, and loose in a cold one.But either some naiad of a diabolical turn of mind, or some ocean god who loved a jest, took always the greatest delight in perturbing and disturbing the sea of Firmian’s life, and stirring up the sand at the bottom of it just when its waters were sparkling and glowing enchantingly with phosphorescent sea creatures, or some electric matter or other, and his ship leaving a long shining wake behind her in it. For just as the glory and the beauty of the garden outside were growing moment by moment, and embarrassment vanishing away with equal rapidity, the painful memory of the late bereavement fading out of remembrance; just when the pianoforte (or, say, the pianissimo fortissimo), and the songs, duets, and trios were being opened and got ready; in fine, just as the honey-cells of their orangery of happiness, their permitted flesh-pots of Egypt, and deep communion cup of love were all ready to their lips, who came with a pop into the room but a certain bluebottle fly on two legs, who had often flown into Firmian’s cup of joy before now.The Venner, Rosa von Meyern, made his appearance on the scene, lovelily attired in saffron silk, to pay his bride his privileged ambassadorial visit.Never in all his career did this young gentleman arrive otherwise than too soon or too late; just as he was never serious, but either lachrymose or jocular. The three faces were now each a long duodecimo edition of themselves; Leibgeber’s was the only one which was not stretched on the wire-drawing press, but it was dyed a fine red by his inborn detestation of fops and maiden-hawks of every kind. Everard had come primed with one idea (taken from Stolberg’s ‘Homer’), which was, to ask Nathalie, on his entrance, whether she were a goddess or a mortal (in the manner of Homer’s heroes), sincehecould only pretend to contend with the latter race. But at sight of the masculine pair whom the Devil levelled at his head like a double-barrelled gun, everything inside it turned to cheese and curd, immobile;twentykisses wouldn’t have enabled him to get his great idea a-flow again. It was five days before he got what little there was inside the bones of his head into such a fair way of recovery as to make shift to deliver himself of this idea to a distant relation of my own (how else should I have known anything about it?) in a tolerable degree of preservation. At all times nothing so paralysed him in female society as the presence of a man; he would have stormed an entire convent of women sooner than have laid siege to a single couple of novices (to say nothing of a canoness), had but a single wretched man been alongside them.A standing troupe of players, such as I now see before my pencil, never performed in Fantaisie. Nathalie was lost in amazement (little polite), and in a quiet comparison of this original edition with her epistolary ideal. The Venner, who took for granted that the result of her observations was just the opposite of what it really was, would have been delighted had he had it in his power to be a manifest contradiction, an antipodes to himself. I mean, he would fain have shown himself both cold and angry at finding her in the society of this couple, and also confidential and tender, so that this beggarly pair might be filled with envy and vexation at the sight of his harvest and vintage. And inasmuch as he was quite as greatly (only much more agreeably) struck with, and surprised at her appearance, as she with his, and as he had time enough before him for revenge and punishment, he chose rather to adopt the line of bragging and vaunting with the view of seasoning and blessing the visit of these two lawyer fellows with a good spice of envy. Moreover, he had the advantage of them in possessing a light horse-artillery body, and he couldmobilisehis army of physical charms quicker than they could. Siebenkæs was thinking of nothing nearer at hand than—his wife. Before Rosa’s arrival he had been browsing on the idea of her as on a meadow of bitter herbs, for the rough, chapped bark of the conjugal hand was by no means capable of touching his self-love with the delicate, etherial, gentle,snail-antennætouch of this unmated beauty’s eiderdown fingers. But now the idea of Lenette became a pasture of sweet and succulent verdure; for his jealousy of Rosa (domiciled in two different quarters) was less awakened by Lenette’s behaviour to him than by Nathalie’s relations with him. The grimness of Heinrich’s glances increased amain; they wandered up and down over Rosa’s summer hare-skin of yellow silk with a jaundiced glare. In an irritable impulse to be doing something or other, he fumbled in his waistcoat pocket, and got hold of the profile of Herr von Blaise which he had clipped out (as we may remember) on the occasion when he stamped the glass wig to pieces (and with respect to which profile the only thing which had been distressing him for a twelvemonth past was that it was in his pocket, and not affixed to the gallows, where he could have stuck it with a hairpin the evening he went away). He pulled it out, and tousling it between his fingers, he glided nimbly backwards and forwards between Nathalie and Rosa, murmuring to Siebenkæs (with his eyes fixed on the Venner), “À la silhouette.”[64]Everard’s self-love divined these flattering (and involuntary) sacrifices of the self-love of the other two, and he went on firing off at the embarrassed girl (with ever-growing superciliousness, directed to Siebenkæs’s address) fragments from the story of his travels, messages from his friends, and questions concerning the arrival of his letters. The brethren, Siebenkæs and Leibgeber, sounded a retreat, but did so like true males; for they were the least bit annoyed with poor, innocent Nathalie, just as though she could have marched up to this sponsus and letter bridegroom of hers the moment he came into the room, with a salutation such as, “Sir, you can never be lord of mine, even were you nothing worse than a scoundrel, idiot, fright, prig, man-milliner,” &c. But must we not, all of us (for I don’t consider myself an exception), smite upon our bony, sinful breasts, and confess that we spit fire the moment modest girls refrain from spitting it instantly at those whom we may have nigrified or excommunicated in their presence; that further we insist upon their discarding wicked squires instantaneously, although they may not be in such a hurry to receive them that they should care as little what forced marches and honourable retreats their cottiers and dependents may have to make, as we fief-holders do ourselves; and that we are offended with them when they have an innocent opportunity of being false; even when they do not avail themselves of it? May Heaven improve the class of persons of whom I have just been treating.Firmian and Heinrich roamed for an hour or two about the enchanted valley; it was full of magic flutes, magic zithers, and magic mirrors. But they had neither ears nor eyes. What they found to say concerning events heated their heads to the temperature of balloon furnaces, and Leibgeber blew a fanfare of mere satiric insults out of the reverse end of Fame’s trumpet at every female Bayreuthian he met taking her evening walk. He announced it as his opinion that women were the unsafest ships in winch a man could embark on the great open ocean of life—slaveships in fact, or bucentaurs (or shuttles[65]which the Devil weaves his nets and gins with)—and the more so that, like other ships of war, they are so often and so scrupulously washed, sheathed on the outside with poisonous copper, and have about the same amount of bunting and tarry tackle (ribbons) flying about them. Heinrich had gone to Nathalie’s, indulging the (highly improbable) anticipation that she would at once unhesitatingly accept and act upon his friend’s deposition of evidence in his capacity of an eye- and ear-witness concerning Rosa’s canonicalimpedimenta(or ecclesiastical marriage disabilities), and it was his disappointment on this score which was so gnawing upon his mind.But just as Firmian was discussing and expatiating upon the Venner’s lisping and indistinct mode of speaking (his words seemed to curl about the top of his tongue with no power of expression in them), Heinrich cried out, “Hallo! there the dirt-fly goes!” It was the Venner, floundering as a pike does in the net he has been brought to market in. As the woodpecker (naturalists call most gaudy-plumaged birds woodpeckers) winged his flight closer by them, they saw, as he passed them, that his face was a-glow with anger. Doubtless the cement which had attached him to Nathalie was broken and dissolved.The two friends waited a little while longer in the shady walk, hoping that they might meet her; but at length they made their way back to town, meeting, as they went, a maid of hers, who was taking the following letter to Leibgeber:—“You and your friend were, alas! quite right, and all is now at an end. Please to let me rest, and reflect for a time in solitude over the ruins of my little future. When people’s lips are wounded and stitched, they are not allowed to talk, although it is not my lips but my heart that bleeds, and that for your sex. Ah! I blush when I think of all the letters I have written, which it has been such happiness to me to write—and, alas! under such a delusion!—yet I have no real reason to do so after all. You have yourself said that innocent pleasures should give us as little cause to be ashamed as blackberries, although, when the enjoyment is past, there may be a black stain on the lips. But, at all events, I thank you from my heart. As I must have been disenchanted one day, it was kind that it was not done by the wicked sorcerer himself, but by you and your most honest and truthful friend, to whom please to offer my very kind regards and remembrances.“Yours,“A. Nathalie.”Heinrich had expected the letter to be one of invitation, “for” (said he) “her empty heart must feel a cold void, like a finger with its nail cut too short.” Firmian, whom matrimony had taught, and furnished with barometer scales and meteorological tables for observance of women, knew enough to be of opinion that a woman must, in the very hour when she had dismissed one lover (on purely moral grounds) be a little over-cool towards the person who has persuaded her thereto, even were he hersecondlover. And (I take leave here to add, myself) for the very same reasons she will exceed in warmth towards this second immediately afterwards.“Ah! poor Nathalie!” Firmian wished unceasingly “May the flowers and blossoms be court-plaister for the wounds of your heart; may the soft æther of spring be a milk-cure for your oppressed panting bosom.” It seemed unspeakably sad to him that an innocent creature like this should be thus tried and punished, as though she were guilty, and be compelled to draw the purifying air of her life from poison plants, and not from wholesome ones.The next day all Siebenkæs did was to write a letter (in which he signed himself Leibgeber), informing the Count von Vaduz that he was unwell and as grey and yellow as a Swiss cheese. Heinrich had left him no peace until he did this. “The count,” said he, “is accustomed, in my person, to a fine, blooming, sturdy Inspector; but, if he is properly prepared for the thing by a letter, he will really believe you to be me. Luckily we are neither of us men who would be asked to unbutton in any custom-house; nobody would fancy there was anything insideourwaistcoats but skin and bone.”[66]On the Thursday Siebenkæs, standing at the hotel-door, saw the Venner, in an Electoral habit, with a full-dress parade head, and a whole Barth’s vineyard in his face, driving to the Hermitage between two young ladies. When he carried this news upstairs, Leibgeber swore—(and also cursed)—to the effect that the scoundrel wasn’t worthy of the society of any young lady, unless her head was a Golgotha and her heart agorge(orcul)de Paris. He was quite bent on going to see Nathalie then and there, and telling her the news, but Firmian prevented him by main force.On the Friday she herself wrote to Heinrich as follows:—“I have mustered up courage to revoke my prohibition, and beg that you and your friend will come to-morrow to beautiful Fantaisie, when (it being Saturday) it will lie depopulated. I keep my arms about Nature and Friendship; there is no room in them for anything besides. Do you know, I dreamt last night that I saw you both in one coffin there was a white butterfly fluttering above you, and it grew larger and larger till its wings were like great white shrouds; and then it covered you both over and hid you with them, and there was no motion beneath. My dear, dear friend arrives the day after to-morrow—and to-morrow,you. And then, I must bid you all adieu.“N. A.”The Saturday in question occupies the whole of the next chapter, and I can form some sort of idea of the reader’s eagerness to be at it frommy own; and all the better, seeing thatIhave read (to say nothing about writing) the said chapter already, which he has not.
A CLOCK OF HUMAN BEINGS—A COLD SHOULDER—THE VENNER.
When, in my last chapter, I spoke of ladies who were given to brevity of sleep, and awoke six hours before their sisters at the Antipodes, I think I did well not to cram into my twelfth chapter (among the numerous events so tightly packed there) a model of a certain clock, composed of men and women, which I invented a considerable time ago, but to reserve it for this thirteenth chapter, where I shall now introduce it, and set it up. I believe this humanity clock of mine was suggested to me by Linnæus’ flower clock at Upsal, whose wheels were the earth and the sun, and the figures on its dial were flowers, whereof one always awoke and opened later than another. I was living at the time in Scheerau, in the middle of the market-place, and had two rooms. From thefrontroom I was able to see all the market-place and the palace buildings, while my back room looked into the Botanical Gardens. Whoever may be living in these rooms now is in possession of a delightful, ready-tuned harmony between the flower clock in the garden and the mankind clock in the market-place.
At 3 A.M. the yellow meadow goatsbeard awakes—also brides—and then, too, the stable-boy begins rattling and feeding the horses under the lodger. At 4 (on Sundays) awake the little hawksweed, and ladies who are going to the Holy Communion (chimingclocks these may be called) and the bakers. At 5, kitchen-maids and dairy-maids awake, and buttercups; at 6, sowthistles and cooks. By 7, a good many of the wardrobe women of the palace, and the salad in the Botanical Gardens, are awake, as well as several tradeswomen. At 8, all their daughters and the little yellow mouse-ear—all the colleges and the leaves of flowers, piecrust, and law-papers, are open. At 9, the female aristocracy begin to stir, and the marygolds, to say nothing of a number of young ladies from the country, in town on a visit, glance out of their windows. At 10 and 11, the Court ladies, the whole staff of lords of the bedchamber, the green colewort and pippau of the Alps, and the Princesses’ reader, arouse themselves from their morning slumber; and (so brightly is the morning sun breaking in through the many-tinted silken curtains) the whole Court curtails a morsel or so of its sleep. At 12, the Prince; at 1, his consort, and the carnation in her flower-vase—have their eyes open. What gets up at later hours in the afternoon—about 4 o’clock, say—is nothing but the red hawksweed and the night, watchman (a cuckoo clock), and these two are but evening dials, or moon clocks. From the hot eyes of the poor devil who opens them only at 5 (with the jalap), we turn our own away in sorrow; he is a sick man, who hastakensome of it (the jalap), and only passes from fever-fancies of being griped with hot pincers to genuine, waking spasms.
I could never tell when it was 2 o’clock, because I, and a thousand other stout gentlemen and the yellow mouse-ear, were always asleep at that hour; though I awoke, with the regularity of an accurate repeater, at 3 in the afternoon and at 3 in the morning.
Thus may we human creatures serve as flower clocks to higher intelligences when our petals close upon our last bed, or as sand-glasses when our sands of life are run so far out that they are turned over into the other world. On such occasions, when seventy of man’s years have ended and passed away, these higher intelligences may say, “Another hour already! Good God! how time flies!”
And this digression reminds me that it reallydoesfly! Firmian and Heinrich lived on in great cheerfulness of spirit towards the jocund morning which was so close at hand, though the former could by no means take root upon any chair or room-floor all the forenoon; for, in his mind’s eye, the curtain kept always rising upon theopera buffa e seriaof his mock death, and displaying its burlesque situations. And at present (as was always the case, indeed) the presence and example of Leibgeber heightened his sense of humour and power of expressing the same. Leibgeber, who had gone through all the stage-business and scene-shifting of the sham death in an exhaustive manner weeks ago (in fancy), was thinking little about it now. The problem occupying him at present was how to extract the wick (that is to say, the bride) out of Rosa’s wedding-torch, all painted and moulded as it was. Heinrich was at all times forcible, free, and bold, furious and implacable as regards anything unjust; and his righteous indignation often had much the appearance of vengeance, as here in Rosa’s case, and in that of Blaise. Firmian was more kindly; he spared and pardoned, often, indeed, at the (apparent) expense of honour.Hecould never have plucked Nathalie’s epistolary lover out of her bleeding heart with Leibgeber’s forceps and knife. His friend, at leaving for Fantaisie that day, had to promise the gentlest of behaviour, and, for a time, silence on the subject of the Royal Prussian Widows’ Fund. It would, of course, have made a terrific, bleeding wound in Nathalie’s feeling of rectitude had the most distant hint been uttered of such a matter as metallic compensation for a spiritual loss such as that involved in her separation on moral grounds from the immoral Venner. She deserved to conquer (and was well able to do so), with the prospect of her victory reducing her to poverty.
Heinrich did not come back till it was somewhat late, and his face was a little troubled, though it was a happy face too. Rosa was discarded, and Nathalie pained. The English lady was at Anspach with Lady Craven, eating her butter—(for she made butter as well as books). When he had read out to Nathalie all that was written on Rosa’s black board and sin-register (which he did gravely, but perhaps louder than was necessary, and with scrupulous truth), she rose up with that grand grace which is a characteristic of enthusiasm of self-sacrifice: “If you are yourself deceived in this as little as you are capable of deceiving, and if I may believe your friend as I do you, I give you my sacred word that I will not allow myself to be persuaded, or constrained, to anything. But the subject of this conversation will be here himself in a few days, and I owe it to him as well as to my own honour, to hear him, as I have given my letters into his hands. Oh! it is hard to have to speak so coldly!” As the moments passed, the rose red of her cheek paled to rose-white. She leant it on her hand, and as her eyes grew fuller, and tears dropped at last, she said, strongly and firmly, “Be in no anxiety, I shall keep my word; and then, cost what it may, I will tear myself from my friend, and go back to my poor people in Schraplau. I have lived quite long enough in the great world, though nottoolong.”
Heinrich’s unusual seriousness had overpowered her. Her confidence in his truth was immovable, and that (strange reason!) just because he had never seemed to fall in love with her, or to pass beyond the condition of friendship, and so did not measure her affection by his own. Perhaps she would have been angry with her bridegroom’s married attorney (i. e. Firmian), had he not had three or four of the best possible excuses; to wit, his general mental resemblance to Leibgeber, and his physiognomical resemblance to him (which his paleness purified and refined at this juncture).
Her yesterday’s request to Leibgeber to bring Siebenkæs with him in the evening was now repeated (to the former’s joy), though her heart was aching in every corner. But let none take umbrage at her half-mourning for the Venner (now setting and near the horizon), or her erroneous estimate of him; for we all know that women (Heaven bless them!) often think sentiment and integrity, letters and actions, tears and honest warm blood, to be equivalent one to another.
In the afternoon Leibgeber took Siebenkæs to her as a sort of syllogistic figure in support of his argument, or set ofrationes decidendi(for the Venner was a collection ofrationes dubitandi). Aquiliana received Siebenkæs with a blush, which came and went in an instant; and then with the least dash ofhauteur(result of modesty!), yet with all the kindness and good-will which she owed to his interest in her future. She lived in the English lady’s rooms. The flowery valley lay without, like a world before its sun. One advantage connected with a rich pleasure-garden of this sort is that a stranger advocate finds that he can attach the floating spider-threads of his talk to the branches of it, until they have been woven into the finished art-work of a glittering web, which can float in the free air. Firmian could never emulate these clever men of the world, who only need a listener to be able to begin spinning a conversation; who, like the tree-frogs, can cling firmly to anything they chance to hop on to, however smooth, and polished it may be; yea, who can even keep afloat in a space devoid of air, and all objects whatever (which a tree-frog cannot). A man of Siebenkæs’ free and independent soul cannot, however, long remain embarrassed by his unfamiliarity with his surroundings; he must speedily recover his freedom by virtue of his innate superiority to chance, external circumstances; and his unassumed and unassuming simpleness soon amply compensates for his lack of the great world’s artificial and assuming simplicity.
Yesterday he had seen this Nathalie in the happy exercise and enjoyment of all her powers, and of nature and friendship, smiling and enchanting, and crowning the delightful evening with an act of brave self-devotion. Alas! how little remained to-day of all these joys, so tender and so bright. In no hour is a lovely face lovelier than at that immediately succeeding the bitter one, when tears for the loss of a heart have passed over it; for the sight of the loveliness in its sorrow, during that hour itself, would be too sad to bear. For this beautiful creature, who hid the sacrificial knife deep in her heart, where it had been plunged, and gladly let it smart there, that but the wound’s bleeding might be delayed, Siebenkæs would gladly have died—in a way more serious than had been intended—could it have been of any service to her. Is it a thing so strange that the bond between them grew closer and stronger as the sand run down in the hourglass, when we consider that, swayed by an unwonted three-sided seriousness (for even Leibgeber was overtaken by this feeling), their hearts, at sight of the gala-beauty of the spring, were filled with tender, longing wishes?—that Siebenkæs, with his pale face, worn, and stamped with all the traces and marks and signs of recent, bygone, trouble and pain, shone, this day, with a soft and pleasing sheen, as of evening sunlight, on her sight, all weakened by her tears?—that she thought with pleasure on his (rather singular) merit of having, at all events, embittered some of her faithless suitor’s infidelities—and that every note he touched was in the minor mode of his tender nature, because he was seeking to atone for, and cast into shade, the circumstance that it had fallen to his lot to lay waste at one fell stroke so many of this innocent, unknown creature’s hopes and joys—that even his greater share of modest, respectful reserve, became him, and set him off by contrast with his counterpart, the bolder and more outspoken Heinrich? With all these charms of accidental circumstance (which win the female world far sooner than charms of a bodily kind), Firmian was endowed in Nathalie’s eyes. Inhiseyes she had attractions greater still, and altogether new to him: her cultivation and acquirements; her manly enthusiasm, her delicate refinement; her (most flattering) way of treatinghim—(none of her sex had ever before glorified him with anything like it, and this particular species of charm plunges many a man who is unused to female companionship, not only into rapture, but into matrimony),—and (two crowning delights) the facts that the whole affair was fortuitous and out of the common, and that Lenette was the exact antipodes of her in each and every respect.
Alas! poor starved, hungering Firmian. There are always a gallows, and a notice-board marked “No thoroughfare,” on the banks of the streamlet ofyourlife, even now that it has become a pearl-bearing brook. Your marriage ring must have pinched you a good deal, and felt very tight in a warm, temperature like this, as, indeedallrings feel tight in a warm bath, and loose in a cold one.
But either some naiad of a diabolical turn of mind, or some ocean god who loved a jest, took always the greatest delight in perturbing and disturbing the sea of Firmian’s life, and stirring up the sand at the bottom of it just when its waters were sparkling and glowing enchantingly with phosphorescent sea creatures, or some electric matter or other, and his ship leaving a long shining wake behind her in it. For just as the glory and the beauty of the garden outside were growing moment by moment, and embarrassment vanishing away with equal rapidity, the painful memory of the late bereavement fading out of remembrance; just when the pianoforte (or, say, the pianissimo fortissimo), and the songs, duets, and trios were being opened and got ready; in fine, just as the honey-cells of their orangery of happiness, their permitted flesh-pots of Egypt, and deep communion cup of love were all ready to their lips, who came with a pop into the room but a certain bluebottle fly on two legs, who had often flown into Firmian’s cup of joy before now.
The Venner, Rosa von Meyern, made his appearance on the scene, lovelily attired in saffron silk, to pay his bride his privileged ambassadorial visit.
Never in all his career did this young gentleman arrive otherwise than too soon or too late; just as he was never serious, but either lachrymose or jocular. The three faces were now each a long duodecimo edition of themselves; Leibgeber’s was the only one which was not stretched on the wire-drawing press, but it was dyed a fine red by his inborn detestation of fops and maiden-hawks of every kind. Everard had come primed with one idea (taken from Stolberg’s ‘Homer’), which was, to ask Nathalie, on his entrance, whether she were a goddess or a mortal (in the manner of Homer’s heroes), sincehecould only pretend to contend with the latter race. But at sight of the masculine pair whom the Devil levelled at his head like a double-barrelled gun, everything inside it turned to cheese and curd, immobile;twentykisses wouldn’t have enabled him to get his great idea a-flow again. It was five days before he got what little there was inside the bones of his head into such a fair way of recovery as to make shift to deliver himself of this idea to a distant relation of my own (how else should I have known anything about it?) in a tolerable degree of preservation. At all times nothing so paralysed him in female society as the presence of a man; he would have stormed an entire convent of women sooner than have laid siege to a single couple of novices (to say nothing of a canoness), had but a single wretched man been alongside them.
A standing troupe of players, such as I now see before my pencil, never performed in Fantaisie. Nathalie was lost in amazement (little polite), and in a quiet comparison of this original edition with her epistolary ideal. The Venner, who took for granted that the result of her observations was just the opposite of what it really was, would have been delighted had he had it in his power to be a manifest contradiction, an antipodes to himself. I mean, he would fain have shown himself both cold and angry at finding her in the society of this couple, and also confidential and tender, so that this beggarly pair might be filled with envy and vexation at the sight of his harvest and vintage. And inasmuch as he was quite as greatly (only much more agreeably) struck with, and surprised at her appearance, as she with his, and as he had time enough before him for revenge and punishment, he chose rather to adopt the line of bragging and vaunting with the view of seasoning and blessing the visit of these two lawyer fellows with a good spice of envy. Moreover, he had the advantage of them in possessing a light horse-artillery body, and he couldmobilisehis army of physical charms quicker than they could. Siebenkæs was thinking of nothing nearer at hand than—his wife. Before Rosa’s arrival he had been browsing on the idea of her as on a meadow of bitter herbs, for the rough, chapped bark of the conjugal hand was by no means capable of touching his self-love with the delicate, etherial, gentle,snail-antennætouch of this unmated beauty’s eiderdown fingers. But now the idea of Lenette became a pasture of sweet and succulent verdure; for his jealousy of Rosa (domiciled in two different quarters) was less awakened by Lenette’s behaviour to him than by Nathalie’s relations with him. The grimness of Heinrich’s glances increased amain; they wandered up and down over Rosa’s summer hare-skin of yellow silk with a jaundiced glare. In an irritable impulse to be doing something or other, he fumbled in his waistcoat pocket, and got hold of the profile of Herr von Blaise which he had clipped out (as we may remember) on the occasion when he stamped the glass wig to pieces (and with respect to which profile the only thing which had been distressing him for a twelvemonth past was that it was in his pocket, and not affixed to the gallows, where he could have stuck it with a hairpin the evening he went away). He pulled it out, and tousling it between his fingers, he glided nimbly backwards and forwards between Nathalie and Rosa, murmuring to Siebenkæs (with his eyes fixed on the Venner), “À la silhouette.”[64]
Everard’s self-love divined these flattering (and involuntary) sacrifices of the self-love of the other two, and he went on firing off at the embarrassed girl (with ever-growing superciliousness, directed to Siebenkæs’s address) fragments from the story of his travels, messages from his friends, and questions concerning the arrival of his letters. The brethren, Siebenkæs and Leibgeber, sounded a retreat, but did so like true males; for they were the least bit annoyed with poor, innocent Nathalie, just as though she could have marched up to this sponsus and letter bridegroom of hers the moment he came into the room, with a salutation such as, “Sir, you can never be lord of mine, even were you nothing worse than a scoundrel, idiot, fright, prig, man-milliner,” &c. But must we not, all of us (for I don’t consider myself an exception), smite upon our bony, sinful breasts, and confess that we spit fire the moment modest girls refrain from spitting it instantly at those whom we may have nigrified or excommunicated in their presence; that further we insist upon their discarding wicked squires instantaneously, although they may not be in such a hurry to receive them that they should care as little what forced marches and honourable retreats their cottiers and dependents may have to make, as we fief-holders do ourselves; and that we are offended with them when they have an innocent opportunity of being false; even when they do not avail themselves of it? May Heaven improve the class of persons of whom I have just been treating.
Firmian and Heinrich roamed for an hour or two about the enchanted valley; it was full of magic flutes, magic zithers, and magic mirrors. But they had neither ears nor eyes. What they found to say concerning events heated their heads to the temperature of balloon furnaces, and Leibgeber blew a fanfare of mere satiric insults out of the reverse end of Fame’s trumpet at every female Bayreuthian he met taking her evening walk. He announced it as his opinion that women were the unsafest ships in winch a man could embark on the great open ocean of life—slaveships in fact, or bucentaurs (or shuttles[65]which the Devil weaves his nets and gins with)—and the more so that, like other ships of war, they are so often and so scrupulously washed, sheathed on the outside with poisonous copper, and have about the same amount of bunting and tarry tackle (ribbons) flying about them. Heinrich had gone to Nathalie’s, indulging the (highly improbable) anticipation that she would at once unhesitatingly accept and act upon his friend’s deposition of evidence in his capacity of an eye- and ear-witness concerning Rosa’s canonicalimpedimenta(or ecclesiastical marriage disabilities), and it was his disappointment on this score which was so gnawing upon his mind.
But just as Firmian was discussing and expatiating upon the Venner’s lisping and indistinct mode of speaking (his words seemed to curl about the top of his tongue with no power of expression in them), Heinrich cried out, “Hallo! there the dirt-fly goes!” It was the Venner, floundering as a pike does in the net he has been brought to market in. As the woodpecker (naturalists call most gaudy-plumaged birds woodpeckers) winged his flight closer by them, they saw, as he passed them, that his face was a-glow with anger. Doubtless the cement which had attached him to Nathalie was broken and dissolved.
The two friends waited a little while longer in the shady walk, hoping that they might meet her; but at length they made their way back to town, meeting, as they went, a maid of hers, who was taking the following letter to Leibgeber:—
“You and your friend were, alas! quite right, and all is now at an end. Please to let me rest, and reflect for a time in solitude over the ruins of my little future. When people’s lips are wounded and stitched, they are not allowed to talk, although it is not my lips but my heart that bleeds, and that for your sex. Ah! I blush when I think of all the letters I have written, which it has been such happiness to me to write—and, alas! under such a delusion!—yet I have no real reason to do so after all. You have yourself said that innocent pleasures should give us as little cause to be ashamed as blackberries, although, when the enjoyment is past, there may be a black stain on the lips. But, at all events, I thank you from my heart. As I must have been disenchanted one day, it was kind that it was not done by the wicked sorcerer himself, but by you and your most honest and truthful friend, to whom please to offer my very kind regards and remembrances.
“Yours,
“A. Nathalie.”
Heinrich had expected the letter to be one of invitation, “for” (said he) “her empty heart must feel a cold void, like a finger with its nail cut too short.” Firmian, whom matrimony had taught, and furnished with barometer scales and meteorological tables for observance of women, knew enough to be of opinion that a woman must, in the very hour when she had dismissed one lover (on purely moral grounds) be a little over-cool towards the person who has persuaded her thereto, even were he hersecondlover. And (I take leave here to add, myself) for the very same reasons she will exceed in warmth towards this second immediately afterwards.
“Ah! poor Nathalie!” Firmian wished unceasingly “May the flowers and blossoms be court-plaister for the wounds of your heart; may the soft æther of spring be a milk-cure for your oppressed panting bosom.” It seemed unspeakably sad to him that an innocent creature like this should be thus tried and punished, as though she were guilty, and be compelled to draw the purifying air of her life from poison plants, and not from wholesome ones.
The next day all Siebenkæs did was to write a letter (in which he signed himself Leibgeber), informing the Count von Vaduz that he was unwell and as grey and yellow as a Swiss cheese. Heinrich had left him no peace until he did this. “The count,” said he, “is accustomed, in my person, to a fine, blooming, sturdy Inspector; but, if he is properly prepared for the thing by a letter, he will really believe you to be me. Luckily we are neither of us men who would be asked to unbutton in any custom-house; nobody would fancy there was anything insideourwaistcoats but skin and bone.”[66]
On the Thursday Siebenkæs, standing at the hotel-door, saw the Venner, in an Electoral habit, with a full-dress parade head, and a whole Barth’s vineyard in his face, driving to the Hermitage between two young ladies. When he carried this news upstairs, Leibgeber swore—(and also cursed)—to the effect that the scoundrel wasn’t worthy of the society of any young lady, unless her head was a Golgotha and her heart agorge(orcul)de Paris. He was quite bent on going to see Nathalie then and there, and telling her the news, but Firmian prevented him by main force.
On the Friday she herself wrote to Heinrich as follows:—
“I have mustered up courage to revoke my prohibition, and beg that you and your friend will come to-morrow to beautiful Fantaisie, when (it being Saturday) it will lie depopulated. I keep my arms about Nature and Friendship; there is no room in them for anything besides. Do you know, I dreamt last night that I saw you both in one coffin there was a white butterfly fluttering above you, and it grew larger and larger till its wings were like great white shrouds; and then it covered you both over and hid you with them, and there was no motion beneath. My dear, dear friend arrives the day after to-morrow—and to-morrow,you. And then, I must bid you all adieu.
“N. A.”
The Saturday in question occupies the whole of the next chapter, and I can form some sort of idea of the reader’s eagerness to be at it frommy own; and all the better, seeing thatIhave read (to say nothing about writing) the said chapter already, which he has not.