Part 26

I confess, in the very first chapter it struck me singularly that Victor should be a physician; now it is explained; for the medical doctor's hat was the best Montgolfier[159] and Fortunatus's wishing-cap for a citizen-legate of his Lordship, in order thereby the more easily to hover round the throne and work upon the frail January; then, too, Victor, after his future devalvation,[160] and after the loss of the feather-hat, could best gather into the medical one his daily bread as a citizen,--his Lordship saw. This was _one_ reason why the latter gave him out as his son. Another is, Victor was best fitted to play the part with the prince by his humor, cleverness, good nature, &c., to which was added as a further recommendation the resemblance he bore in everything, except age, to the fifth and up to this time still lost son, whom January so loved. As, now, a physician in ordinary was to be the favorite, his Lordship could not take any one of the princely sons for his purpose, because they must be jurists, in order to fit into their future offices.--His own son Julius he could not use, because he was blind,--by the way! his Lordship was also blind once, and thus adds his example to the cases of blindness inherited from father to son, but even independently of the blindness he could not possibly, by reason of his disinterested delicacy, let his son reap the advantages of princely favor while he withheld from them January's own sons themselves.

Thou good man without hope! when I compare now thy poetic education of the blind youth with thy cold principles,--when I consider how thou--dead to lyric joys, hardened to the tears of enthusiasm--nevertheless causest the dark soul of thy Julius curtained with eyelids to be filled by his teacher with poetic flower-pieces, with dew-clouds of sensibility, and with the nebulous star of the second life,--then does it enhance quite as much my sorrow as my esteem, that thou findest nothing on the earth which thou canst press to thy starved-out heart, and that thou raisest thine eye withered on empty tear-ducts coldly to heaven, and even there findest nothing but a void waste of blue!--

This painful observation Victor made still sooner than myself.--But to the story! The past portion of it sent a thousand thorns through his heart. We no longer recognize now our once joyous Sebastian,--he has lost four beings, as if to pay off therewith the four days of Whitsuntide: Emanuel has vanished, Flamin has become an enemy, his Lordship a stranger, and Clotilda--a stranger. For he said to himself: "Now, when she is removed so far above me, I will not cost the sufferer, from whom I have already taken so much, absolutely everything, absolutely her father's love and her position,--I will not insist upon the love which, in her ignorance of my connections, she has bestowed upon me.--No, I will cheerfully tear away my soul from the most precious one amidst a thousand wounds of my breast, and then lay myself down and bleed to death." _Now_ this determination was easy for him; for after the death of a friend we love to take a new load of misery on our breast; _that_ shall crush it, for we _will_ die.

Yet destiny had still left two loved ones in his arms; his Julius and his mother. In the former he loves so many sweet associations; even this was one, namely, that one always loves him with whom one has been confounded; and he would fain fulfil the place of father with him as his Lordship had done with _him_, in order not so much to requite as to emulate that noble man. And still more ardently did his soul embrace the excellent wife of the Pastor, to whom his heart had already hitherto beat responsive with the soft warmth of a son. Ah, how would it have comforted in its longing his childlike breast, from which one hitherto his father was thrust away, to be clasped to a maternal heart, and to hear from a mother the words, "Good son, why comest thou to me so unhappy and so late?" But he dared not, because in that case he would have broken the oath to leave Flamin's extraction under the cover of mystery.

He shut himself up four days with the blind one in the house of death;--he saw no one,--did not visit the mourning convent, where from all fair eyes flowed similar tears,--renounced the fragrant park and the blue sky,--and let the flowerage of the departed one fade after him.--He consoled the forsaken blind one, and all day long they rested in each other's embrace, and pictured to each other weeping their teacher and his teachings and the radiant hours of their childhood. At last, on the fourth day, he conducted the blind one forever out of the beautiful Maienthal,--the evening-bell sent after them from afar the knell of a whole coffined life,--Julius wept aloud,--but Victor had only a moist eye, and consoled not himself, but the blind one; for his soul was now otherwise than one would guess; his soul was exalted above this eventide-life: his departed one, like a genius, held it high up above the clouds and above the plays of our little time. Victor stood on the high mountain, where one stands on the burial-day of a friend; at the foot of the mountain stretched far away the dead sea of the abyss,[161] and drained an expanded, trembling cloud which reared itself on the sea,--and on the cloud were painted gay cities, and swaying landscapes hung therein, and the little tribes of people with red cheeks ran over the landscapes of vapor,--and all, people and cities, dropped down like tears into the absorbing sea,--only down below along the horizon in the dusky cloud was a lighted rim like morning glow; for a sun rises behind the twilight, and then the cloud has passed away, and a new green continent lies stretching into the immensity.----

He would have gone on the whole night, but something frightful in the next village, which is called Upper-Maienthal, arrested him. He recognized in the coachhouse of the inn, by its coat of arms, the carriage of the Chamberlain. He set the blind one down on a stone bench at the door, where he could listen to the rustle of unloading hay. Victor, in answer to his question in the house, got the intelligence: "There were two ladies overhead, one of them they did not know (he immediately discovered, however, by the first sketch of her attire, the wife of the Parson),--the other had often passed that way; it was the daughter of the Chief Chamberlain, and had on full mourning, because her father some days before had been shot dead in a duel with the Regency-Councillor Flamin, and the two were travelling, as these people said, to England."

He screamed in vain, half choking in blood and agony, "It is impossible,--with the page Von Schleunes, you mean." But nevertheless it was so,--Flamin was in prison,--Matthieu out of the country,--Le Baut already under the ground.... But demand not now the history of this murder!--Victor slowly drew out the watch of the happy Bee-father, and stared rigidly at the index of joyous hours, which, for want of winding up, had stopped some days since; something within him counselled the wild and desperate thought to hurl it against the stone floor and smash it to pieces. But three lute-breaths of the flute, with which the blind youth conjured before his benumbed soul a fairer, warmer past, dissolved his congealing heart into a wet eye, and he lifted it up overflowing, and only said, "Forgive me for it, All-gracious One,--ah, I will gladly do nothing but weep."--When the pangs of grief are too heart-rending within us, then something in us gnashes against fate, and the heart infuriate clenches itself like a fist, as it were, for resistance,--but this strength is blasphemy. O, it is more comely towards thee, All-gracious One, to let the crushed and broken heart melt away and become a tear, and to love and be silent until one dies!

The familiar tones of the flute penetrated into Clotilda's thick rain-cloud of grief,--she staggered to the window,--she saw the blind one,--but she went slowly back and wrapped her heart deeper in the cold cloud,--for now she knew all; the blind one was the messenger of death, come to tell that her great friend had left the earth and the disconsolate ones behind him. "My teacher, too, is dead," she said to her companion; and when Victor sent up a request for an interview, she could only nod her head speechlessly.--Then she begged the Parson's wife to step into another chamber, because the sight of Victor, for many reasons, must be oppressive to her. Victor ascended the staircase as if to a scaffold on which fate was to pluck out his heart, namely, the good Clotilda, from whom, as well by her journey as by his purpose of resigning her, he was to-day being separated. When he opened the door and beheld the afflicted maiden leaning pale and weary against the wall; and as both with hands hanging down looked into each other's eyes red with weeping, and trembled in the sombre interval between the sight of each other and the first word, as in the fearful pause between the fire of a great gun and the arrival of the ball, and when at last Clotilda asked in a low voice, "It is all true?" and he said, "All!"-- then she slowly laid her beautiful head round to the wall again, and repeated, in one continuous utterance, but in a low, wailing tone, with the soft, muffled funeral tones of exhausted anguish, the words, "Ah! my good teacher; my never to be forgotten friend!--Ah, thou great spirit! thou fair, heavenly soul, why hast thou gone so soon after my Giulia!----O, dearest friend, be not angry, I could wish now only to be, where my father is, in the still grave."----Victor began eagerly the question, "Has Flamin--" but he could not add, "killed him"; for she lifted up her head and looked upon him with a swelling, a laboring, unspeakable sorrow, and that sorrow was her _yes_.----

Exhausted with the bleeding of tears and convulsed amidst remembrances, which, like brain-borers, touched the soul, she was on the point, at last, of sinking down by the wall; but Victor sustained her with inexpressible compassion, and held her upright on his breast and said, "Come, innocent angel, come to my heart, and weep thyself dry thereon,--we are unhappy, but innocent.--O, take thy rest, thou tormented head, rest softly under my tears."----But always in the height of woe a mountain-air began to flutter around him; it seemed to him as if an iron lever lifted up the broken-in skull, as if vital air streamed in through the pierced, inwardly mouldering breast; the reason why he felt so was that the life of men became little to him, death great, and earth dust. "Sleep, harassed one,"--he said to Clotilda, who leaned languidly upon him,--"sleep away the woe,--life is a sleep, an oppressed, sultry sleep; vampyres sit upon it, rain and wind fall upon us sleepers, and we vainly clutch at waking.----O, life is a long, long sigh before the going out of the breath.--But alas that the wretched meteor should be permitted so to torment just this good soul, just thyself!"--"Ah," said Clotilda, "if only the so sad flute would cease! My heart is ready to fly to pieces for agony!" But her friend cruelly tore open again all the springs of her tears and poured his into hers, and depicted to her the past: "Four weeks ago it was otherwise; then the flute-tones passed over a fairer region; through the happy plaints of the nightingale they found their way into our hearts, which were then so joyous.--On the first Whitsuntide-day I found thee, when the nightingale throbbed,--on the second, I sank down before thee for rapture and reverence, when the rain glistened round about us,--on the third, at the evening fountain a broad heaven rose, and I saw a single angel stand sparkling and smiling therein.----Our three days were dreams of fair flowers, for dreams of flowers signify sorrow."--He had hitherto hardened his soft soul against this cruel picture, but when he had actually, with oppressed voice, added, "At that time our Emanuel was still living, and visited at evening his open grave..." then must his heart needs burst, and all his tears gushed out over the deeply buried sword-blade like bloody drops, and he said, straining her more passionately to himself "O, come, we will weep without measure: we will not console ourselves. We shall not be much longer together: O, I could now tear myself to pieces with sorrow.--Exalted Dahore! look upon this dying one and her tears over thee, and requite her mourning, and give the weary soul at length repose, and thy peace, and all that is wanting to man."

The two souls sank, entwined together, into a single tear, and the stillness of mourning hallowed the moment,--and let me not with my oppressed breath say any more of this.

--As if awaking, she drew her head from his heart and with an enervated smile took his hand; for notwithstanding all unhappy events she loved him inexpressibly, and was even now on the way to Maienthal for the very purpose of seeing him once more,--and she said, "I am going to England to my mother, to find his Lordship, and to beg him to come sooner and act as intercessor, and end the sorrows of others and my own."--Her pause, which her look filled out, disclosed to him as much as it concealed from the unhappy wife of the Parson, who could hear a good deal in the adjoining chamber;--what she suppressed was, that she would urge upon his Lordship the expediting of the disclosure that Flamin was the son of the Prince. Besides, this journey withdrew her eyes from so many images of grief, as well as her ears from so many a discordant tone of mockery. To be sure, the design of taking motion on the coach-cushion and on shipboard as a tincture of iron, had only been her pretext at court, where polite untruths are not merely forgiven, but even required.

Victor promised her, under a dark presentiment of his strength and disinterestedness,--for the unhappy makes sacrifices more freely and easily than the happy,--that "he would care for him like a _sister_."--Their eyes exchanged confessions of their secrets, and, for that _very_ reason, of their love, and Clotilda overflowed with tearful love, first on account of the journey (because to her sex a journey by reason of its rarity is something of consequence); secondly, on account of sorrow, for love makes a woman's heart in full mourning warmer than one in half-mourning, as burning lenses heat black-colored things more powerfully than white.

And this very day, when she looked into his eyes with so much renewed love, he was to be torn from her! He spared her, it is true, the revelation of his birth and his eternal separation, in order not to lay upon her lacerated heart new loads of sorrow; but he would fain wholly gather, in this last minute of his fair love, this gleaning and this after-bloom of his life. Ah, he would fain look upon her as never before,--he would press her hand intensely as he had never before done,--he would say a farewell to her like a dying man.----For it is all--his innermost being cried unceasingly--for the last, last time!--Only he would not kiss her: a shrinking reverence, the thought of having played out the part of the lover, forbade him to make a selfish use of her ignorance. But when he was about to direct towards her the last look of love,--then did fate thrust all the sharpened weapons, which had hitherto been driven into his nerves, once more into the bleeding openings, just as they replace in the wounds of murdered men the old instruments, to see whether they are the same,----ah, they _were_ the same,--the chamber was darkened as if by an extinguisher,----the tones of the flute were stifled in the internal din,--he must needs look upon her and yet could not for the water in his eyes,--he must look upon her with a long, retentive look, because he wanted to impress her beautiful face as a shadow-image of the shadowy Eden forever upon his soul.--At last he succeeded; amidst a thousand woes he seized with an intense look her tear-bedewed face, through which virtue pulsed like a heart, and shadowed it out in his desolate soul even to every line, to every drop.--So much of her he took away with him,--no more; he left her everything, his heart and his joy.--Ah, tender Clotilda! if thou hadst guessed it!--The sobbing of _his_ mother hurried him to the adjoining chamber; he flung open the door, cried in a crushed voice to his mother, whose face was averted: "Dearest! by the Almighty, your _son_ is no murderer and no reprobate,"--and compressed the hand she gave him behind her back with a wild intensity of grasp.

Look not now, my friends, at the dismal moment when for the last time he takes Clotilda's hand, and severs his heart from hers, and yet only says, "A happy journey, Clotilda, a peaceful life, Clotilda, joy be with thee, Clotilda!"

--And at a distance from the village he fell on his knees beside the blind one, with a mute prayer for the mourning heart which he had now lost for the last time.--

Not until four o'clock in the morning did he arrive with the blind-one, without weariness, without tears, and without thoughts, at Flachsenfingen.

40. DOG-POST-DAY.

The Murderous Duel.--Apology for the Duel.--Prisons regarded as Temples.--Job's-Wails of the Parson.--Legends of my Biographical Past.--Potato-Planting.

As I am on the point of entering upon the fortieth day with the observation, "The history of the duel is still full of regular ciphers, and is a true unfigured thorough-bass,"-a piece of the forty-third comes to hand and figures the bass and puts the vowel-points to the Hebrew consonants. To this young forerunning[162] of the forty-third chapter one is indebted for the fact that I can relate the shooting-history with better spirits.

It will not be guessed who boiled up the most furiously at Clotilda's engagement,--namely, the Evangelist. He was vexed with the bold faithlessness of the Chamberlain, whose courtliness he had hitherto managed by coarseness, and so much the more because a human mixture of imbecility and flattery like Le Baut exasperates us unspeakably, when it passes over from flatteries to insults. Still more was he who set on Flamin himself set on by the widow of the Chamberlain, who stirred into his elementary fire soft oil and some matches; she hated Clotilda because she was loved, and our hero because he did not, like the Evangelist, set the step-mother above the step-daughter. A woman who has gone to the death for a man, i. e. into a short sleep (which is death to the good), namely, into a swoon,--as this very widow did in the Eighth Post-Day,--must be expected of course to hate this man, if he will not let himself be loved. The Evangelist, who had hitherto taken the love of Victor and Clotilda only for the accidental gallantry of a moment, and who had also looked upon the flying attachment to his sister Joachime as nothing more serious, was devilishly mad at the mis-shot in the first case, and at the royal shot in the second; and he determined to avenge himself and his sister, whom he loved more than his father, on both.

Joachime was additionally and bitterly enraged with Victor, because she believed herself and her love to have been hitherto abused as a mere cloak for his love to Clotilda. I have stated above that Matthieu, after the Eymann visit, made his to Flamin. When the Councillor had disclosed to him the interview with the Parson and his decisory oath, Mat formed his resolution and threw much upon the Chamberlain: "This fellow was a small sharper and a great courtier,--he had perhaps had more to do than the lover had with Clotilda's excursion to the baths of Maienthal,--he, and not so much Victor, sought to make out of his daughter a lark's net for the Prince's heart and a _gradus ad Parnassum_ of the Court." Flamin was right down glad that his vengeance had got another object besides him with whom he had sworn to his father not to quarrel. Meanwhile he did not conceal from the Councillor (to be impartial) that the Apothecary proclaimed everywhere, from exasperation against Sebastian, that the latter had gotten the plan of this marriage as a stepping-stone to promotion entirely from him, from Zeusel. Flamin, in such bone-fractures of the breast, always resorted at once to the chalybeate (steel-cure) of the sword, the lead-water of bullets; and the cautery of the sabre; and as the duel with Victor, one of noble extraction, had spoiled him, he would also in the first heat have proposed it to the three-buttoned[163] fellow, when Mat ridiculed the incompetent plebeian. Flamin cursed in vain fury his defect of ancestry, which hindered him from letting himself be shot by one ancestrally endowed; nay, he would have been capable--as he kindled quickly and yet cooled slowly--for a mere verbal insult from a nobleman (as one actually did on a certain occasion)--of becoming a soldier, then an officer and a nobleman, merely for the sake of afterward summoning the canonical and challengeable defamer before the muzzle of his pistol.

But the faithful Matthieu,--whose spotted soul turned a different side to every one, like the sun, which, according to Ferguson, on account of its spots, revolves on its axis, so as to give all the planets equal light,--he understood the business; he said, he would in his own name challenge the Chamberlain, and in fact to a masked duel, and then Flamin in the disguise could take his part, while he himself stood by under the name of the third Englishman, and the two others as seconds.

Flamin was overmastered by rapidity; but now again there was a want of something, which is still more indispensable than nobility to a game of fighting,--namely, of a good, legitimate offence. Matthieu, to be sure, was ready with pleasure to offer one to the man which should adequately justify a duel; but the man with the Chamberlain's master-key was one who, there was every reason to fear, would forgive it,--and there would be nobody to shoot.--Most fortunately the Evangelist remembered, that he himself had already received one from him, which he knew how profitably and honestly to bring to bear upon the case: "Le Baut had, indeed, _three_ years before, as good as promised him his daughter; and however indifferent this perjury was in itself, still, as a pretext for the chastisement of a greater fault, it retained its full value." ... Thus on a smutty tongue does truth take the form of a lie, provided the lie cannot dress itself in that of truth. And Flamin did not dream that his alleged groomsman was no other than the veritable Sabine robber of his bride.