Part 16

I confess, therefore, when according to ancestral usage (on birthdays at court I never tasted the like) a tart or turnover was brought on, on which the Vivat and the name Roeper could be read and eaten set in types of almonds--when, furthermore, the proprietor of the name said indeed: "this now is one of thy stupid tricks," but immediately had his eye fill with moisture and added: "cut out a piece for our people also outside," I confess, I say, I could at that moment have wished my memory rid of many a saying I had heard of him which did not well comport with the lapidary almond style, and I would especially have given something, the crabs most readily, if he had not been so troubled about the bits of gravel in their heads, and scolded so at his Louisa, who in her joy had scattered in sundry contributions to his crab _dactyliotheca_ or collection of pebbles. I will just be candid, the deuce might have taken me, if I could have borne to remain hard as a crab-eye, when thou, my music-pupil, beloved Beata, who from the court-air[59] as other flowers do from the mephitic, hadst imbibed nothing but tenderer charms and a higher enamel--when thou, fair pupil, with a feminine sense of paternal respectability, didst go up to thy father and with thy lips on his hand, offer him the most sincere wishes, and when only on the neck of thy mother, who showered upon you both looks of love, thou didst let thy heart overflow into a more congenial one....

I come now to the promised _main thing_--namely, my Gustavus. I wish he had stayed away. He rode in advance of two Hussars, who were escorting a grain-wagon. The wagon was going to discharge its load beyond the limits--(the principality of Scheerau, like the human understanding, everywhere runs against limits)--the two Hussars were ready to be bribed, so far all was agreeable; but Gustavus was not; the conductor, the farmer, had given out that the smuggled goods were Roeper's property--and from Roeper the whole of Gustavus recoiled from his very fathers loins. Secondly, he was living now in bridal relations with virtue, and in the honeymoon, when one regards good works and moral _hors d'[oe]uvre_ [works of supererogation] as one and the same thing, and when style and virtue alike have too much fire. In short, farmer and wagon must go back; and the Cadet had burst into the birthday chamber to make the announcement with over-boiling indignation against Roeperish treacheries. But was he in a fit frame to do this when he saw me again after many weeks and my fair scholar for the first time, and when he found himself among the faces glowing with friendship, from which he would at once banish blood and joy? The most he could do was to draw me aside and disclose to me all; but the overhearing neighborhood and the impetuous _corpus delicti_ discovered the same to the Commercial Agent. Without ceremony he broke out into a furious tirade against the Cadet, who, as he said, had nothing to do with the matter, and continued rising to a climax in his fury, till a remedy occurred to him for the whole disaster. I had to go out with him before the street door and there he told me I could, as his magistrate, easily see that one must needs give out the grain as the property of the farmers, because the Prince would have no mercy on an official. This last assertion I, as his new magistrate, could well understand, that the covetous, arsenical king, who could tolerate office-trading, judicial misdemeanors, and the like, would nevertheless come down like a poisonous wind upon all disobedience to himself; but this I could not see through, that a second treason must needs be the abattis and advocate of the first. In the midst of our fight came running up at length the object of it, the farmer himself, who broke in with distorted visage and with the stammering entreaty that "His Grace would not ungraciously remark the fact that he in his bewilderment had given out _his_ grain as _His Grace's own_." Now the knot was untied; my principal had until now merely confounded his own smuggled goods which had been successfully brought over the frontier with arrested goods of another party. To the farmer he forthwith, as a sound moralist, represented the wickedness of deceiving at once himself, the country, and the Prince, "and he wished he would break open now the writing of the Government, he would deliver him up on the spot." He hastened in to my Gustavus and hurled at him, with the heat of misunderstood innocence, as many coarsenesses as one might expect from an offended demi-millionaire, since gold possessors, like gold strings, sound the harshest. I pitied my dear Gustavus with his plethora of virtue; he pitied the ill-luck of the poor farmer, and Beata pitied our confusion all round. With boiling emotions Gustavus fled out of a dumb apartment, where he had broken off from the tenderest heart that ever trembled under a fair form, that of Beata, the flowers of childish joy, and dashed them to the ground.

In fact, now at length the old Harry was loose--namely, the howling of Roeper's rage against the house of Falkenberg and its abominable extravagance, and against the Cadet. Beata was silent; but not I. I should have been a scoundrel (a greater one, I mean) if I had allowed extravagance, in the sense in which the adversary meant it, to be imputed to the Captain. I should, moreover, have been stupid (or stupider) if I had not in my first official act endeavored to accustom him to opposition, instead of waiting till the tenth or twentieth.... But the oil which I poured round for the purpose of smoothing his waves, dropped into fire instead of water. Little did it help either of us, that my pupil played upon us with the richest passages out of Benda's Romeo, the old hilarity was not to be brought back again; we twitched and twisted our faces to no purpose. Roeper looked like an Indian cock and I like a European. I had intended, toward evening, after moon-rise, to be somewhat sentimental in the presence of Beata, seeing, besides, that the Count tore her away from me. I am certain I should have had sensibility and sentiment adequate to the occasion. I should, under the shade of a tree, have taken out my heart and said, _prenez_. Nay, I seemed even to-day to draw Beata much nearer to me than usual, a thing in which one prospers with all maidens with whose parents one has business associations. But all that was now gone to the old Harry. I was compelled to make my exit cold and hard as a page of the exchequer, and felt miserably. If the new magistrate was provoked, who had thus been ushered into his new office in a cloud of vexation, his principal was still more so, who had been escorted by a jar and jangle into his new year. So I limped off and said to myself all the way, "thus, then, and with such face and aspect art thou hieing home, happy Paul, from thy Maussenbach judgeship, of which thou hast boasted so much in thy former sections. Thou need'st not rise on my account, O moon; I need not to-night thy powdered face. That single, confounded grain-wagon! and the Prince! and the skin-flint, too! and even youthful virtue! Would that ye all.... But had I only been as sensible and felt as much in the very forenoon, and had I only, before dinner, shown forth something of my heart, an auricle, a fibre.

"Heigh! Mr. Magistrate," cried my Wutz, coming to meet me; "here again! Hast had fine cases of adultery, harlotry, riots, defamations?"

"Merely a few defamations," I replied.

TWENTY-THIRD, OR XVIII TRINITY, SECTION.

Other Quarreling.--The Still Land.--Beata's Letter.--The Reconciliation.--The Portrait of Guido.

Up to this present Sunday I have not succeeded in finding out why Gustavus arrived at Scheerau five days later than he might have done; he evaded even my inquiries more distressfully than adroitly. Oefel had all reported to him, and made out of it one or two sections of his romance, which I and the reader, it is to be hoped, may yet see. I could wish his might see the light sooner than mine, then I might refer the reader to it or perhaps extract from it some anecdotes. Gustavus seemed to have a mental wound-fever. He carried his heart chilled with recent bleeding to Amandus, to warm it and let it brood again upon his friend's hot bosom, and to recover the self-respect which he could not get at first hand, from a second, and there he always got it--for a peculiar reason. In his character there was a trait, which, if he had been a member of a Moravian church, would long ago have enrolled him a missionary therefrom to America for the conversion of the savages: he was fond of preaching. I can say it in other words: his gushing soul must either stream or stagnate, but trickle or drop it could not--and then, when once a friendly ear opened to it, it rained down in inspiration upon Virtue, Nature and Futurity.--Then did a fresh, bracing air flow through the world of his ideas--the down-pouring torrents disclosed the fair, bright, deep-blue heaven of his inner-being and Amandus stood under the open heaven enraptured. This youth, to whom the exuberance of his heartily beloved friend was a pedestal, something that did not oppress but uplifted him, enjoyed in another's worth his own; nay, in his less enlightened head there arose a still greater warmth than was in the speaker, somewhat as _dark_ water grows more intensely warm in the sun than that which is _bright_. Gustavus related to him what had happened, and talked with him so long upon his rights and wrongs in the case, that at last all his grief about it had been talked away: such is the way in which friendship _talks out_ the internal fire of anger. It was merely a sign of love and a little weakness, that Amandus wiped away with greater sympathy a tear of sorrow than a tear of joy from the loved eye of another; he, therefore, by way of prolonging his interest in another's affliction, came back again to the old subject, and dropped the casual question where my hero had been the last five days. Gustavus with a troubled and reddening face would have given the question the go-by--his friend pressed it the more eagerly--the other embraced him still more passionately and said: "Ask me not, thou only tormentest thyself for nothing." Amandus, whose hysterical sensibility was less fine than spasmodic, now began to be really fired up--Gustavus's heart was intensely agitated and out of it came the words:--"O my dear friend, thou can'st never learn it, never from me!"--Amandus, like all weaklings, was easily inclined to jealousy in friendship and love, and in an offended mood placed himself at the window. Gustavus, made more indulgent and warmer to-day by the consciousness of his latest mistake in the accusation touching the grain-case, went over to him and said with moist eyes: "If I only had not given my oath to say nothing about it." But in the soul of Amandus not all parts were invested with that nice sense of honor in which is found the _lapis infernalis_ that consumes every breach of word and oath. Moreover in him, as in all weaklings, the emotions of the soul, even when the occasion for them was removed, like the waves of the sea when a long-continued wind is followed by one blowing from the opposite quarter, still retain the old direction. He continued, therefore, looking out of the window, and _meant_ to forgive, but was obliged to let the mechanically heaving waves gradually subside again. If Gustavus had less earnestly begged his forgiveness, he would have obtained it the sooner; both were silent and remained as they were. "Amandus!" he cried at length in the tenderest tone. No answer and no change of position. All at once the lonely and agonized Gustavus, overcome with grief, drew forth the portrait of the lost Guido who so closely resembled himself, which in the fair days of childhood had been hung upon his breast and which he had intended to-day to show him, and said with melting heart: "O thou pictured friend, thou beloved colored nothing, thou bearest under thy painted breast no heart, thou dost not know me, thou requitest me in nothing--and yet I love thee so dearly. And could I be otherwise than true to my Amandus?" Suddenly he saw in the glass of this portrait his own face reflected with its mournful features: "O look here" (he said in an altered tone); "I am said to look so like this painted stranger, his face wears one constant smile, but look into mine!"--and he raised it up, and showed his eyes wide open, but swimming in tears and his lips quivering. The flood of love snatched both away and bore them up in a close embrace--and when, not till after that, Amandus in reply to his half jealous question: "he had supposed the portrait was that of Gustavus," received an answering No, followed by the whole history: then no harm was done; for the emotions of his heart settled down again and flowed on in the bond of friendship.

After such expansions of the soul a sitting-room offers no proportionate objects; they sought them therefore under _that_ ceiling from which not a painted, but a living heaven-canopy, not grains of color, but burning and carbonized worlds depend, and went out into the _Still Land_, which lies less than half a league from Scheerau. Ah, they should not have done it, if they had wished to remain reconciled.

Wilt thou have me describe thee here, thou Still Land! over which my fancy flies so high above the ground and with such yearning--or thou, still soul! thou that watchest it still in thine, and hast cast only an earthly image thereof upon the earth?--Neither of the two am I equal to; but I will point out the way which our friends took through it; and first I must communicate something further, which gave rise to the extraordinary issue of their walk.

Besides I could not rightly decide where to put the letter which Beata immediately after my and her return from Maussenbach wrote to my sister. She had in the few days which she had spent with my Philippina at the Resident Lady's become her friend. The friendship of maidens consists often in their holding each other by the hand or wearing clothes of the same color; but these two preferred to have like friendly sentiments. It was fortunate for my sister that Beata had no opportunity to come in contact with the tinge of coquetry which touched the surface of her character; for maidens divine nothing more easily than coquetry and vanity, especially in their own sex.

"Dear Philippina:--I have delayed all this time in order to write you a real lively letter. But, Philippina, this is not one. My heart lies in my breast as in an ice-house and trembles all day long; and yet you were so happy here, and never sad except at our leave taking, which lasted almost as long as our stay together: am I, perhaps, to blame for this? I think so very often when I see the laughing faces around the Resident Lady, or when she herself speaks, and I imagine myself in her place, and fancy how I must appear to her with my silence and my speeches. I dare not think any more on the hopes of my solitude, so sorely am I shamed by the superior advantages of other people's society. And when a part which is too great for me to play of course oppresses me, I know no way of raising myself up again, except by creeping away into the Still Land. Then and there I have sweeter moments, and often my eyes suddenly run over, because there everything seems to love me, and because there the tender flower and the innocent bird do not humiliate me, but respect my love. There I see the spirit of the mourning Princess make its lonely pilgrimage through her works, and I walk with her and feel what she feels, and I weep even sooner than she. When I stand beneath the brightest and bluest day, then I gaze yearningly up at the sun, and after that round about the horizon and think: 'Ah! when thou hast gone down thy arch, thou hast shone on no spot of earth on which I could be wholly happy until thy evening glow; and when thou art down and the moon comes up, she too finds that it is not much thou hast given me.' Dearest friend, do not take it ill of me that I use this tonic; ascribe it to a malady, which always comes to me preceded by this _avant courier_. O, could I chain thee to me with my arm, then perhaps I should not be so. Happy Philippina! from whose mouth wit already flutters forth again smiling, even when the eye above it is still full of water; as the solitary balsam poplar in our park breathes out spicy perfumes, while warm rain drops still fall from it. All forsake me, even images; a dumb, dead picture behind a glass door was the only brother whom I had to love. You cannot feel what you have or I miss--this time even his reflection departs from me, and I have nothing left of my beloved brother, no hope, not a letter, not a likeness. I have missed this portrait, indeed, only since my return from Maussenbach; but perhaps it has been gone still longer, for I had hitherto merely to arrange my things; perhaps I myself packed it up among the books which I gave you. You will let me know, I am well aware. In our house there was a second, somewhat less faithful, likeness of my brother, but that has been missing for a long time," etc.

* * * * *

Very naturally! for old Roeper had sold it at public auction, because it was that of Gustavus. But we will follow our two friends again into the _Still Land_.

They had to go by the old palace, which, like an Adam's-rib, had hatched out the new one; which, in its turn, had sent forth new watershoots--a Chinese cottage, a bathing-house, a garden-saloon, a billiard-room, etc. In the new palace dwelt the Resident Lady von Bouse, who did not admire this architectural feature twice in the whole year. Behind the second rear extension of the palace the English garden began with a French, which the Princess had let stand, by way of utilizing the contrast, or of avoiding that which an angular gala-palace assumes by the side of patriarchal Nature in her pastoral attire. Any one who cared not to go by the two palaces could reach the park through a pine grove, coming first into a cloister, of which the old Prince and his favorite chamberlain had been the fathers. Neither of them had been alone half a day in all their lives, except when they were lost on a hunt or _otherwise_; hence they wanted for once to be alone, and therefore--(what cared they if they did perpetrate a plagiarism and a copy of the former Baireuth Eremitage?)--they placed nine small houses first on paper, then on a table, and finally on the earth, or rather nine moss-grown cords of wood. In these puzzle-houses of hollow logs there was lodged Chinese furniture, gold and a live courtier, somewhat as in living trunks of trees one is astonished to come suddenly upon a live toad, because one does not see where the creature's hole is. The logs enclosed a cloister which--as not a soul in the whole court had any disposition to be a living hermit--was committed to a wooden one, who silently and sensibly sat therein and meditated and reflected as much as is possible for such a man to do. They had provided the Anchorite with some ascetic works from the Scheerau school-library, which suited him well enough and exhorted him to a mortification of the flesh which he already had. The great, or the greatest, either are represented or themselves represent something; but they seldom are anything; others must eat, write, enjoy, love, conquer, for them, and they themselves, again, do so for others; hence it is fortunate that, as they have no soul of their own to enjoy a monastic life and find no other that can, they can at least hunt up among the carvers wooden business-agents who can enjoy the recluse life for them; but I only wish that the great ones, who never suffer more _ennui_ than in their pastimes, would have made and placed before their parks, before their orchestras, their libraries, and their nurseries, such solid and inanimate agents and canopy-bearers or _curatores absentis_ of pleasure and _fair_-weather, lightning-conductors, either hewn out in stone or merely embossed in wax.

Upon the ceiling of the hermitage (as in that of the grotto in the cloister of Santa Felicita) was to have been represented an adequate amount of ruin, six cracks and two or three lizards falling through them. The painter, too, was already on his travels, but stayed so long upon them, that at last the thing painted itself, and like openhearted people, was nothing else than what it appeared. Only, when the artificial hermitage had ennobled itself into a natural one, it had long since been forgotten by everybody. I hold it, therefore, rather as persiflage than as pure truth, that the Chamberlain--as so many Upper-Scheerauers said--had hunted up wood-ticks and had them grafted into the hermit's chair, so that the creatures might work there instead of hair-saws and ripping-knives, and make the seat the sooner antique--in fact the vermin are now gnawing both chair and monk. Still more ridiculous is the idea of making a reasonable man believe, that the architectural chamberlain had covered and papered an artificially running wheelwork with a mouse-skin, in order that the artificial lizard above might have a mouse-correspondent below, and thus provision be made for symmetry at either end; and that afterward the proprietor had approached Nature and drawn over a live, running mouse a second artificial mouse-skin as frock and overcoat, that Nature and art might have a mutual indwelling;--ridiculous? It is true, mice are always capering round the hermit, but certainly only in one skin under-jacket....

Our two friends are far from us, and are already in the so-called long evening-vale of the park, through which a wavy stream of gold flowed from the setting sun. At the western and gently raised end of the vale, the scattered trees seemed to grow on the dissolving sun itself; at the eastern end one could look across over the continuation of the park to the glowing palace, on whose window-panes the sun and the evening fire-works redoubled their splendor. Here the old Princess always saw the first setting of the sun; then a path that wound gently upward led her to the high brow of this park, where day was still dying, and once more paternally beheld with his expiring sun-eye his great circle of children, till night closed his eye and took the orphaned earth into her motherly lap.