CHAPTER XVIII.AFTER SUMMER OF MARRIAGE—PREPARATIONS FOR DEATH.Although Sunday was come, and the Vicar’s eyes were no more open than his congregation’s (because, like many of the clergy, he kept his physical eyes shut while preaching), my hero went to him to get his certificate of birth, because this was wanted for the Brandenburg Widows’ Fund.Leibgeber had charged himself with the rest. Enough of the subject—for I don’t care to say more about it than I can help; because some years ago—long after all Siebenkæs’s pecuniary affairs had been settled up to the last farthing, and his debt to the Fund duly paid—the ‘Imperial Gazette’ publicly accused me of bringing discredit upon Integrity and Widows’ Funds by the last book of this story of mine, and considered it to be its (the ‘Gazette’s’) duty to take me pretty severely to task on the subject, according to its measure of ability. But are the advocate and I the same person? Does not everybody know that my proceedings as regards my married life in general, and the Prussian Widows’ Fund in particular, have been quite unlike those of Siebenkæs in every respect, and that to this very hour I have never departed this life, either in jest or in earnest, in all these years during which I have regularly paid a considerable annual contribution to the institution in question? Nay, do I not mean—(and I need have no hesitation in saying so)—to go on paying my yearlyquotumfor as many more years as I can—so that, when I die, the fund may have got more out of me than out of any other contributor?These are my views on the subject; but I must do Siebenkæs the simple justice to state (to his credit) that the views by which he was actuated differed very, very little from my own. The only thing was, that, in Bayreuth, he had immolated his own truthful heart to the stormy urgency of his friend, Leibgeber, which had imbued and intoxicated him, in a moment of enthusiasm, with that cosmopolitan spirit of his which, in the boundless soul-transmigrations which, in the course of his never ending journeyings he passed through, had come to look upon life too much as a mere game at cards, and stage-play—as a Chicken-hazard, and Opera Buffa and Seria combined. And as, besides, he knew Leibgeber’s pecuniary circumstances, and his contempt for money (and his own into the bargain), he had undertaken arôlewhich was anything but well suited to him, and as to which he had as little foreseen the torture of difficulty which it would cost him to act it, as the penitential sermon which was to be preached from Gotha concerning it.At the same time it was a great piece of good luck that it wasonlyBecker’s ‘Gazette’ that found out about Nathalie’s straw-widowhood, and not Lenette! Heavens, if thelatter, with her silk “Forget-me” (for the “not” had altogether disappeared from it), in her hand, had got wind of Firmian’s adoptive marriage! I neither desire to judge the fair sex, nor to be judged by them. But at this point I would fain put to all my lady readers (and most particularly tooneof them), two rather weighty and important questions.“Wouldyounot bend down from your judge’s seat, and hand my hero, if not aflower-wreath, anoak-wreath, at all events, for his good and kind behaviour to this feminine couple? Or (inasmuch as there are four female hands playing a duet sonata on his heart), a bouquet for his button-hole at the very least?” Dearest lady readers, you could not possibly have given a better verdict—although my surprise at it is not so great as my gratification. My second question nobody shall put to you but yourselves. Let each of you ask herself, “Supposeyouhad this fourth book of my story put into your hands, andwereLenette her very self, and consequently knew to a hair all about the whole business from beginning to end; what would youthinkof your husband Siebenkæs’ proceedings? What would youdo?”I will answer the question for you: “Weep, storm,[80]chide, be very angry, not speak a word, break things, &c.” So terribly does selfishness falsify, corrupt and degrade the most delicate moral feelings, coercing them into the giving of two totally diverse verdicts upon one and the same case. Whenever I am wavering, or in any hesitation, concerning the worth of a character, or conclusion, I always find it helps me to come to a decision in a moment if I represent it to my mind’s-eye as coming wet from the press in a novel or biography. If it seems rightthen, it is certain toberight.It was far better, and more becoming, for Graces to dwell hidden in the Satyrs of old, and in Socrates, than to reverse the process, so that Satyrs should dwell hidden within Graces. The Satyr whopossessedLenette butted about him in all directions with horns of very considerable sharpness. Her unreciprocated anger began to take the shape of sneering banter, for her husband’s present meekness and gentleness were so strikingly in contrast with his former Job’s-disputations, that she came to the conclusion that his heart was frozen altogether. In old times he had wanted to be served by mutes (like a Sultan), until his satirical fœtus, his book, should be brought to the light of day by help of the Roonhuysian lever and Cæsarian operation of the penknife; even as Zacharias was dumb until the child ceased to be so, and was born, and cried simultaneously with him. Formerly, their married life had been like most other people’s; for the majority of wedded pairs are like those twin-daughters,[81]grown together as to their backs, but continually quarrelling (though they could never look each other in the face), and always trying to go towards opposite quarters of the globe, till the one succeeded in forcing the other in the direction in which she wanted to go. Now, on the contrary, Firmian allowed all Lenette’s discords to jar on as long as they pleased, without the slightest trace of irritation. A soft, peaceful light now fell upon all her angles, upon her works of supererogation in washing, on the water-sproutlings of her tongue; and the tint of the shadow which her heart (made of dark earth, like everybody else’s) cast, as a matter of course, was very much lost in the blue of heaven, as shadows cast in starlight are (according to Mariette) as blue as the sky overhead. And was there not always a grand, blue, starry sky spread out above his soul, in the shape of death? Every morning, every evening, he said to himself, “Why should I not go on always forgiving everything! We have such a very little while to be together now.” Every opportunity of forgiving did something to sweeten the bitterness of his voluntary farewell; and, as those who are going away, or going to die, are eager to pardon,—the deep, warm spring and fount of love in his heart was never chilled from morning till night. He was fain to pass along the brief, dark, alley of weeping willows, which led from his home to his empty grave (afullone, alas! as regarded his love), leaning only on beloved arms; and to rest on the mossy banks by its side, between his friend and his wife, with a beloved hand in each of his own. Thus it is that death not only beautifies our bodies when the soul has fled (as Lavater points out), but even in life the thought of death gives new beauty to our lineaments, and new strength to the heart, as rosemary both winds as a garland about the dead, and revives the fainting by its cordial essence.“There is nothing surprising to me in this,” quoth the reader. “Everybody in Firmian’s position would have felt just as he did; at all events,Ishould.” But, dear reader,arewe notallin Firmian’s position? Does the nearness or the remoteness of our everlasting good-bye make any difference? Ah! inasmuch as, here below, we are nothing but images, delusively firm, and red of colour, standing on the edges of our holes, into which (like the ancient princes) we totter, crumbling to dust, when the unknown hand gives the mouldering images a shake—why do we not say (like Firmian), “Why should I not forgive? We have so short a time to be together.” We should have four better fast-days, and prayer- and penitence-days, than we usually have if we had but four days of bitter, hopeless sickness to go through, one after the other, every year; because we should look down from our sick bed (that ice-region of life beside the crater) with loftier and sublimer glance upon the pleasure-gardens and pleasure-forests of life as they shrunk and shrivelled away; becausethereour wretched racecourses would seem shorter, and only thepeoplelarger, and we shouldtherelove nothing buthearts, magnify and detect no other faults but our own, and because we leave our sick beds with better resolutions than we take to them with. For the first day of convalescence of the body, after its winter of sickness, is the blossoming time of a lovelier soul, which issues forth as if transfigured from the earth’s cold crust into a mild warm Eden; longing to press all things to her breast (feeble yet, and short of breath)—mankind, and flowers, and spring breezes, and every other bosom which has sighed for her upon her bed of pain. Like all the newly risen from death, she longs to loveall thingsthroughout an eternity; and the whole heart is a warm and dewy spring-time, rich in buds, beneath a youthful sun.HowFirmian would have loved his Lenette, had she not constrained him to be always pardoning, instead of petting and caressing her! Ah! she would have rendered his approaching death a terribly difficult task for him if she had been like what she was in their honeymoon days!But their byegone Paradise was now yielding a harvest of ripeGrainsof Paradise (the old name for peppercorns). Lenette piled fuel on the fire of her hell’s ante-chamber of jealousy, brewing there, for him, the draught of the coming heaven of Vaduz. A jealous woman can be cured by no kind of speech or treatment; she is like the kettledrums, which are the most difficult of all instruments to tune, and the quickest to get out of tune when tuned. A loving, tender look was, to Lenette, a blister; for he had looked at Nathalie with one like it. If he seemed happy and glad, it was evident he was thinking of the past. If he lookedunhappy and sad, he was thinking of the past too, but with longing. He had to consider his face in the light of an open warrant of caption, or billposter and placard, of the thoughts which were behind it. In short, her husband merely served her as fiddle rosin to roughen her horse-hair with, in order to bow herviole d’amourwith it from morning till night. He dare not allow himself more than an occasional word about Bayreuth, scarce so much as the name of it; for if he did, she knew whom he was thinking of. Nay, he could not say anything at all strong in disparagement of Kuhschnappel without raising a suspicion that he was comparing it with Bayreuth, and thinking the latter much the better place (for reasons well known toher). Wherefore (and whether in earnest, or from consideration for her, I really do not know) he restricted his laudations of Bayreuth merely to thebuildingsthere, not venturing to extend them to their inhabitants.There was only one object of praise concerning the praising, whereof he ignored every idea of difficulty and miscomprehension, and this was Leibgeber, his friend. But—thanks to Rosa’s calumnies, and the fact of his having aided and abetted in affairs at Fantaisie—it so chanced that Leibgeber had come to be more unendurable by her now than he had been in the old days, by reason of his indecorous conduct, and his great dog. She knew, moreover, that Stiefel had several times expressed grave disapproval of him and his doings.“My dear Henry will be here very soon now, Lenette,” said Firmian.“And that horrible brute with him, I suppose, of course?” she asked.“I do think,” he answered, “you might like my friend a little better than you do; if not because he is so very like myself, at any rate, on account of the faithfulness of his friendship. If you did, you wouldn’t be so terribly set against his dog; you used not to mind mine when I had one. Hemusthavesomefaithful creature to follow him about on his everlasting journeys; through thick and thin, through good times and bad, as Saufinder does. And he looks uponmeas just such another faithful creature, and is every bit as fond of me. But for that matter, the whole faithful trio of us are not likely to trouble Kuhschnappel very long.”Meanwhile, no amount of love enabled him to gain hissuitfor love. It here strikes me that this was only a most natural matter, and that the recent warm proximity of the Schulrath had raised Lenette’s temperature (of love) to such a point thather husband’sfelt like a blast of cold wind by comparison. The jealousy of hatred proceeds just like the jealousy of love. There is but one sign for the cypher of nothing and the circle of infinity.The time had arrived when Siebenkæs had to pave the way, and give a colour to, his sham death, by a feigned sickness of some sort; but this voluntary bending over the grave, and drooping towards it, gave his conscience a pretext for trying to win back Lenette’s embittered heart. Thus it is that deceived, and deceiving, man always magnifies and elevates his false shows, his cheateries, and deceptions either intolessones than they really are, or into beneficently intended ones.The Greek and Roman lawgivers invented dreams and prophecies, which contained the ground-plans and elevations of their projects, as well as the building-conditions, and building-materials of them. For instance, Alcibiades lied forth a prophecy of the conquest of Sicily. Firmian imitated this process, with alterations suitable to the circumstances of his case. He often said, in Stiefel’s presence (for Stiefel took a deep and tender interest in everything, and, consequently, so didshe), that he should soon be going away for ever—that he should soon be playing in a game at hide-and-seek, and hide himself so effectually that no friendly eye should be able to find him again—that he would soon slip behind the bed-curtain of the coffin-pall, and vanish. He told them a dream (which, perhaps, was no invention). He said, “The Schulrath and Lenette were looking at a room in which a scythe was moving of its own accord;[82]then, in a while, Firmian’sclotheswere walking about in the room, empty, without anybodyin them. ‘He must haveotherclothes on,’ they both said. Then all at once the churchyard passed along the street, with a fresh grave in it, no grass on it as yet. But a voice cried, ‘Seek him not there; it is over and past now.’ And a second (softer) voice cried, Rest—rest—thou art worn and weary. And a third said, ‘Weep not, if ye love him.’ But a fourth cried out, in terrible tones, ‘Jest—jest—all human life and death.’” Firmian was the first to shed tears; his friend was the next, and his angry spouse wept,with the latter.But now he looked with eager longing for the coming of Leibgeber, whose hand would lead him quicker and more pleasantly through the dark foreground, and the hot, reeking, sultry, breathless, forehellof his artificial death. For he himself was now too feeble and too tender to pass through them alone.And upon one particular, unusually lovely, August evening he was so, more than ever before. There played and rested on his face that glorified and celestial bliss of self-devotion—that tearless depth of emotion and smiling gentleness, which sometimes come to us when pain and sorrow are—wearyfor the time, rather than over and past—something like the blue sky when the brightness of the rainbow falls in light athwart its radiant beauty. He resolved to bid good-bye, in solitude, that day to all the beautiful country which lay around the town.The face of Nature was veiled (but not for his eyes, for his soul only), in a thin, soft mist, which went hovering before the breeze in ever-changing wreaths, like the tender vapouriness—not amounting to a shrouding—which Berghem’s and Wouvermanns’ pencils have cast upon their landscapes. As though to say farewell, he went and touched, and gazed upon, every leafy tree beneath whose branches he had been wont to read—each little darkling brooklet, purling on its way beneath its thickets of forest-roots, laved bare of earth by its ripples—each rocky crag, all green and sweet of scent with moss and flowers—each stair-way of rising hillocks which, in the days gone by, he had climbed to see the sun set (or gone down to watch his risings) many times instead of once—and every spot where wide creation had brought tears of rapture from his happy heart. But everywhere—amid the long harvest corn-ears, amid Creation’s oft-repeated tale in Nature’s brooding-oven with all its swarming life, in the seed-nursery of the ripe and endless garden—a hollow, broken voice cried out, in long-drawn tones which mingled with, and sounded clear above, the bright, rejoicing, trumpet-clang of Nature’s ‘Alexander’s Feast,’ “What are these dead men’s bones that move about amid this life of mine, defiling all my blossoms?” And to him it seemed as if, from out the glory of the red West sky, a something sang to him, “Wandering skeleton! with strings of nerves clasped in thy bony hand, thou playest not on thyself. The breath of endless life is breathing on the Æolian harp, which answers back in music, and thou art playedupon.” But soon this mournful error fell away from him, and he thought thus: “I am both playing and answering back in music. I boththinkandam thought. It is not the green bark that holdsmyDryad, myspiritus rector(the soul). The latter holds the former. The life of the body depends as intimately on the life of the soul, as that of the latter on that of the former. Life and force are at work, with power, everywhere. The grave hillock and the mouldering body are each aworldof powers at work. Wechangeour stage, but do notretirefrom it.”When he got home, he found the following letter from Leibgeber for him:—“I am onmyway; set out onyours.—L.”
AFTER SUMMER OF MARRIAGE—PREPARATIONS FOR DEATH.
Although Sunday was come, and the Vicar’s eyes were no more open than his congregation’s (because, like many of the clergy, he kept his physical eyes shut while preaching), my hero went to him to get his certificate of birth, because this was wanted for the Brandenburg Widows’ Fund.
Leibgeber had charged himself with the rest. Enough of the subject—for I don’t care to say more about it than I can help; because some years ago—long after all Siebenkæs’s pecuniary affairs had been settled up to the last farthing, and his debt to the Fund duly paid—the ‘Imperial Gazette’ publicly accused me of bringing discredit upon Integrity and Widows’ Funds by the last book of this story of mine, and considered it to be its (the ‘Gazette’s’) duty to take me pretty severely to task on the subject, according to its measure of ability. But are the advocate and I the same person? Does not everybody know that my proceedings as regards my married life in general, and the Prussian Widows’ Fund in particular, have been quite unlike those of Siebenkæs in every respect, and that to this very hour I have never departed this life, either in jest or in earnest, in all these years during which I have regularly paid a considerable annual contribution to the institution in question? Nay, do I not mean—(and I need have no hesitation in saying so)—to go on paying my yearlyquotumfor as many more years as I can—so that, when I die, the fund may have got more out of me than out of any other contributor?
These are my views on the subject; but I must do Siebenkæs the simple justice to state (to his credit) that the views by which he was actuated differed very, very little from my own. The only thing was, that, in Bayreuth, he had immolated his own truthful heart to the stormy urgency of his friend, Leibgeber, which had imbued and intoxicated him, in a moment of enthusiasm, with that cosmopolitan spirit of his which, in the boundless soul-transmigrations which, in the course of his never ending journeyings he passed through, had come to look upon life too much as a mere game at cards, and stage-play—as a Chicken-hazard, and Opera Buffa and Seria combined. And as, besides, he knew Leibgeber’s pecuniary circumstances, and his contempt for money (and his own into the bargain), he had undertaken arôlewhich was anything but well suited to him, and as to which he had as little foreseen the torture of difficulty which it would cost him to act it, as the penitential sermon which was to be preached from Gotha concerning it.
At the same time it was a great piece of good luck that it wasonlyBecker’s ‘Gazette’ that found out about Nathalie’s straw-widowhood, and not Lenette! Heavens, if thelatter, with her silk “Forget-me” (for the “not” had altogether disappeared from it), in her hand, had got wind of Firmian’s adoptive marriage! I neither desire to judge the fair sex, nor to be judged by them. But at this point I would fain put to all my lady readers (and most particularly tooneof them), two rather weighty and important questions.
“Wouldyounot bend down from your judge’s seat, and hand my hero, if not aflower-wreath, anoak-wreath, at all events, for his good and kind behaviour to this feminine couple? Or (inasmuch as there are four female hands playing a duet sonata on his heart), a bouquet for his button-hole at the very least?” Dearest lady readers, you could not possibly have given a better verdict—although my surprise at it is not so great as my gratification. My second question nobody shall put to you but yourselves. Let each of you ask herself, “Supposeyouhad this fourth book of my story put into your hands, andwereLenette her very self, and consequently knew to a hair all about the whole business from beginning to end; what would youthinkof your husband Siebenkæs’ proceedings? What would youdo?”
I will answer the question for you: “Weep, storm,[80]chide, be very angry, not speak a word, break things, &c.” So terribly does selfishness falsify, corrupt and degrade the most delicate moral feelings, coercing them into the giving of two totally diverse verdicts upon one and the same case. Whenever I am wavering, or in any hesitation, concerning the worth of a character, or conclusion, I always find it helps me to come to a decision in a moment if I represent it to my mind’s-eye as coming wet from the press in a novel or biography. If it seems rightthen, it is certain toberight.
It was far better, and more becoming, for Graces to dwell hidden in the Satyrs of old, and in Socrates, than to reverse the process, so that Satyrs should dwell hidden within Graces. The Satyr whopossessedLenette butted about him in all directions with horns of very considerable sharpness. Her unreciprocated anger began to take the shape of sneering banter, for her husband’s present meekness and gentleness were so strikingly in contrast with his former Job’s-disputations, that she came to the conclusion that his heart was frozen altogether. In old times he had wanted to be served by mutes (like a Sultan), until his satirical fœtus, his book, should be brought to the light of day by help of the Roonhuysian lever and Cæsarian operation of the penknife; even as Zacharias was dumb until the child ceased to be so, and was born, and cried simultaneously with him. Formerly, their married life had been like most other people’s; for the majority of wedded pairs are like those twin-daughters,[81]grown together as to their backs, but continually quarrelling (though they could never look each other in the face), and always trying to go towards opposite quarters of the globe, till the one succeeded in forcing the other in the direction in which she wanted to go. Now, on the contrary, Firmian allowed all Lenette’s discords to jar on as long as they pleased, without the slightest trace of irritation. A soft, peaceful light now fell upon all her angles, upon her works of supererogation in washing, on the water-sproutlings of her tongue; and the tint of the shadow which her heart (made of dark earth, like everybody else’s) cast, as a matter of course, was very much lost in the blue of heaven, as shadows cast in starlight are (according to Mariette) as blue as the sky overhead. And was there not always a grand, blue, starry sky spread out above his soul, in the shape of death? Every morning, every evening, he said to himself, “Why should I not go on always forgiving everything! We have such a very little while to be together now.” Every opportunity of forgiving did something to sweeten the bitterness of his voluntary farewell; and, as those who are going away, or going to die, are eager to pardon,—the deep, warm spring and fount of love in his heart was never chilled from morning till night. He was fain to pass along the brief, dark, alley of weeping willows, which led from his home to his empty grave (afullone, alas! as regarded his love), leaning only on beloved arms; and to rest on the mossy banks by its side, between his friend and his wife, with a beloved hand in each of his own. Thus it is that death not only beautifies our bodies when the soul has fled (as Lavater points out), but even in life the thought of death gives new beauty to our lineaments, and new strength to the heart, as rosemary both winds as a garland about the dead, and revives the fainting by its cordial essence.
“There is nothing surprising to me in this,” quoth the reader. “Everybody in Firmian’s position would have felt just as he did; at all events,Ishould.” But, dear reader,arewe notallin Firmian’s position? Does the nearness or the remoteness of our everlasting good-bye make any difference? Ah! inasmuch as, here below, we are nothing but images, delusively firm, and red of colour, standing on the edges of our holes, into which (like the ancient princes) we totter, crumbling to dust, when the unknown hand gives the mouldering images a shake—why do we not say (like Firmian), “Why should I not forgive? We have so short a time to be together.” We should have four better fast-days, and prayer- and penitence-days, than we usually have if we had but four days of bitter, hopeless sickness to go through, one after the other, every year; because we should look down from our sick bed (that ice-region of life beside the crater) with loftier and sublimer glance upon the pleasure-gardens and pleasure-forests of life as they shrunk and shrivelled away; becausethereour wretched racecourses would seem shorter, and only thepeoplelarger, and we shouldtherelove nothing buthearts, magnify and detect no other faults but our own, and because we leave our sick beds with better resolutions than we take to them with. For the first day of convalescence of the body, after its winter of sickness, is the blossoming time of a lovelier soul, which issues forth as if transfigured from the earth’s cold crust into a mild warm Eden; longing to press all things to her breast (feeble yet, and short of breath)—mankind, and flowers, and spring breezes, and every other bosom which has sighed for her upon her bed of pain. Like all the newly risen from death, she longs to loveall thingsthroughout an eternity; and the whole heart is a warm and dewy spring-time, rich in buds, beneath a youthful sun.
HowFirmian would have loved his Lenette, had she not constrained him to be always pardoning, instead of petting and caressing her! Ah! she would have rendered his approaching death a terribly difficult task for him if she had been like what she was in their honeymoon days!
But their byegone Paradise was now yielding a harvest of ripeGrainsof Paradise (the old name for peppercorns). Lenette piled fuel on the fire of her hell’s ante-chamber of jealousy, brewing there, for him, the draught of the coming heaven of Vaduz. A jealous woman can be cured by no kind of speech or treatment; she is like the kettledrums, which are the most difficult of all instruments to tune, and the quickest to get out of tune when tuned. A loving, tender look was, to Lenette, a blister; for he had looked at Nathalie with one like it. If he seemed happy and glad, it was evident he was thinking of the past. If he lookedunhappy and sad, he was thinking of the past too, but with longing. He had to consider his face in the light of an open warrant of caption, or billposter and placard, of the thoughts which were behind it. In short, her husband merely served her as fiddle rosin to roughen her horse-hair with, in order to bow herviole d’amourwith it from morning till night. He dare not allow himself more than an occasional word about Bayreuth, scarce so much as the name of it; for if he did, she knew whom he was thinking of. Nay, he could not say anything at all strong in disparagement of Kuhschnappel without raising a suspicion that he was comparing it with Bayreuth, and thinking the latter much the better place (for reasons well known toher). Wherefore (and whether in earnest, or from consideration for her, I really do not know) he restricted his laudations of Bayreuth merely to thebuildingsthere, not venturing to extend them to their inhabitants.
There was only one object of praise concerning the praising, whereof he ignored every idea of difficulty and miscomprehension, and this was Leibgeber, his friend. But—thanks to Rosa’s calumnies, and the fact of his having aided and abetted in affairs at Fantaisie—it so chanced that Leibgeber had come to be more unendurable by her now than he had been in the old days, by reason of his indecorous conduct, and his great dog. She knew, moreover, that Stiefel had several times expressed grave disapproval of him and his doings.
“My dear Henry will be here very soon now, Lenette,” said Firmian.
“And that horrible brute with him, I suppose, of course?” she asked.
“I do think,” he answered, “you might like my friend a little better than you do; if not because he is so very like myself, at any rate, on account of the faithfulness of his friendship. If you did, you wouldn’t be so terribly set against his dog; you used not to mind mine when I had one. Hemusthavesomefaithful creature to follow him about on his everlasting journeys; through thick and thin, through good times and bad, as Saufinder does. And he looks uponmeas just such another faithful creature, and is every bit as fond of me. But for that matter, the whole faithful trio of us are not likely to trouble Kuhschnappel very long.”
Meanwhile, no amount of love enabled him to gain hissuitfor love. It here strikes me that this was only a most natural matter, and that the recent warm proximity of the Schulrath had raised Lenette’s temperature (of love) to such a point thather husband’sfelt like a blast of cold wind by comparison. The jealousy of hatred proceeds just like the jealousy of love. There is but one sign for the cypher of nothing and the circle of infinity.
The time had arrived when Siebenkæs had to pave the way, and give a colour to, his sham death, by a feigned sickness of some sort; but this voluntary bending over the grave, and drooping towards it, gave his conscience a pretext for trying to win back Lenette’s embittered heart. Thus it is that deceived, and deceiving, man always magnifies and elevates his false shows, his cheateries, and deceptions either intolessones than they really are, or into beneficently intended ones.
The Greek and Roman lawgivers invented dreams and prophecies, which contained the ground-plans and elevations of their projects, as well as the building-conditions, and building-materials of them. For instance, Alcibiades lied forth a prophecy of the conquest of Sicily. Firmian imitated this process, with alterations suitable to the circumstances of his case. He often said, in Stiefel’s presence (for Stiefel took a deep and tender interest in everything, and, consequently, so didshe), that he should soon be going away for ever—that he should soon be playing in a game at hide-and-seek, and hide himself so effectually that no friendly eye should be able to find him again—that he would soon slip behind the bed-curtain of the coffin-pall, and vanish. He told them a dream (which, perhaps, was no invention). He said, “The Schulrath and Lenette were looking at a room in which a scythe was moving of its own accord;[82]then, in a while, Firmian’sclotheswere walking about in the room, empty, without anybodyin them. ‘He must haveotherclothes on,’ they both said. Then all at once the churchyard passed along the street, with a fresh grave in it, no grass on it as yet. But a voice cried, ‘Seek him not there; it is over and past now.’ And a second (softer) voice cried, Rest—rest—thou art worn and weary. And a third said, ‘Weep not, if ye love him.’ But a fourth cried out, in terrible tones, ‘Jest—jest—all human life and death.’” Firmian was the first to shed tears; his friend was the next, and his angry spouse wept,with the latter.
But now he looked with eager longing for the coming of Leibgeber, whose hand would lead him quicker and more pleasantly through the dark foreground, and the hot, reeking, sultry, breathless, forehellof his artificial death. For he himself was now too feeble and too tender to pass through them alone.
And upon one particular, unusually lovely, August evening he was so, more than ever before. There played and rested on his face that glorified and celestial bliss of self-devotion—that tearless depth of emotion and smiling gentleness, which sometimes come to us when pain and sorrow are—wearyfor the time, rather than over and past—something like the blue sky when the brightness of the rainbow falls in light athwart its radiant beauty. He resolved to bid good-bye, in solitude, that day to all the beautiful country which lay around the town.
The face of Nature was veiled (but not for his eyes, for his soul only), in a thin, soft mist, which went hovering before the breeze in ever-changing wreaths, like the tender vapouriness—not amounting to a shrouding—which Berghem’s and Wouvermanns’ pencils have cast upon their landscapes. As though to say farewell, he went and touched, and gazed upon, every leafy tree beneath whose branches he had been wont to read—each little darkling brooklet, purling on its way beneath its thickets of forest-roots, laved bare of earth by its ripples—each rocky crag, all green and sweet of scent with moss and flowers—each stair-way of rising hillocks which, in the days gone by, he had climbed to see the sun set (or gone down to watch his risings) many times instead of once—and every spot where wide creation had brought tears of rapture from his happy heart. But everywhere—amid the long harvest corn-ears, amid Creation’s oft-repeated tale in Nature’s brooding-oven with all its swarming life, in the seed-nursery of the ripe and endless garden—a hollow, broken voice cried out, in long-drawn tones which mingled with, and sounded clear above, the bright, rejoicing, trumpet-clang of Nature’s ‘Alexander’s Feast,’ “What are these dead men’s bones that move about amid this life of mine, defiling all my blossoms?” And to him it seemed as if, from out the glory of the red West sky, a something sang to him, “Wandering skeleton! with strings of nerves clasped in thy bony hand, thou playest not on thyself. The breath of endless life is breathing on the Æolian harp, which answers back in music, and thou art playedupon.” But soon this mournful error fell away from him, and he thought thus: “I am both playing and answering back in music. I boththinkandam thought. It is not the green bark that holdsmyDryad, myspiritus rector(the soul). The latter holds the former. The life of the body depends as intimately on the life of the soul, as that of the latter on that of the former. Life and force are at work, with power, everywhere. The grave hillock and the mouldering body are each aworldof powers at work. Wechangeour stage, but do notretirefrom it.”
When he got home, he found the following letter from Leibgeber for him:—
“I am onmyway; set out onyours.—L.”