Flower, Fruit, and Thorn Pieces Part 6

She knew nothing about the business of the inheritance, and he was consequently obliged, to the great detriment of his enthusiastic state, to give a prosaic, detailed account of the _species facti_ of the whole of that law suit. By great good fortune he had still in his pocket the number of the 'Gazette' in which the inheritance chamber's inquiry as to the advocate's existence appeared in print, and he was able to put it into her hands. And now this plundered wife began to cry bitterly, not for the loss of the money, but because her husband had told her nothing about it all this time, and still more because she couldn't quite make out what her own name really was, or whether she was married to a Siebenkaes or to a Leibgeber. Her tears flowed faster and faster, and in her pa.s.sion of grief she would have let the deceiver before her have all the pretty hair on her head, had not an accidental circ.u.mstance burst the whole chain of events, just as he was kneeling and imploring her for one little lock.

But we must first look after her husband a little, and see how he is getting on, and whither he bends his steps. At first among the market stalls; for the many-throated roaring, and the Olla Podrida of cheap pleasures, and the displayed pattern cards of all the rags out of, and upon, which we human clothes moths construct our covering cases and our abodes--all these caused his mind to sink deep into a sea of humoristic-melancholy reflections concerning this mosaic picture of a life of ours, made up as it is of so many little bits, many-tinted moments, motes, atoms, drops, dust, vapours. He laughed, and listened, with an emotion incomprehensible by many of my readers, to a ballad singer, bawling, with his rhapsodist's staff in his right hand pointed at a big, staring picture of a horrible murder, and his left full of smaller, printed pictures, for sale, in which the misdeed and the perpetrator of it were displayed to the German public in no brighter colours than those of poetry. Siebenkaes bought two copies, and put them in his pocket, to read in the evening.

This tragic murder picture evoked in the background of his fancy that of the poor girl he had defended, and the gallows, on to which fell those burning tears which had flowed from his wounded heart--that heart which n.o.body on earth, save one, understood--when last it had been lacerated. He left the noisy market-place, and sought all-peaceful nature, and that isolatorium, destined alike for friends.h.i.+p and for guilt, the gallows. When we pa.s.s from the stormy uproar of a fair into the still expanse of wide creation, entering into the dim aisles of nature's hushed cathedral, the strange sudden calm, is to the soul as the caressing touch of some beloved hand.

With a sad heart he climbed up to the well-known spot, whose ugly name I shall omit, and from these ruins he gazed around upon creation, as if he were the last of living beings. Neither in the blue sky, nor upon the wide earth, was there voice or sound; nothing but one forlorn cricket, chirping in monosyllables, among the bare furrows, where the harvest had been cleared away. The troops of birds flocking together with discordant cries flew to the green nets spread upon the ground--and not to meet the green spring far away. Above the meadows, where all the flowers were withered and dead, above the fields, where the corn ears waved no more, floated dim phantom forms, all pale and wan, faint pictures of the past. Over the grand eternal woods and hills a biting mist was draped in clinging folds, as if all nature, trembling into dust, must vanish in its wreaths. But one bright thought pierced these dark fogs of nature and the soul, turning them to a white gleaming mist, a dew all glittering with rainbow colours, and gently lighting upon flowers. He turned his face to the north-east, to the hills which lay between him and his other heart, and up from behind them rose, like an early moon in harvest, a pale image of his friend.

The spring, when he should go to him and see him once more, was at work already preparing for him a fair broad pathway thither, all rich with gra.s.s and flowers. Ah! how we play with the world about us, so quickly dressing it all with the webs which our own spirits spin.

The cloudless sky seemed sinking closer to the dusky earth, bright with a softer blue. And though a whole long winter lay between, the music of the coming spring already came, faint and distant, to his ear; it was there in the evening chime of the cattle bells down in the meadows, in the birds' wild wood notes in the groves, and in the free streams flowing fast away amid the flowery tapestries that were yet to be.

A palpitating chrysalis was hanging near him still in her half-shrivelled caterpillar's case, sleeping away the time till the flower cups all should open; phantasy, that eye of the soul, saw beyond and over the sheaves of autumn the glories of a night in June; every autumn-tinted tree seemed blooming once again; their bright coloured crests, like magnified tulips, painted the autumn mist with rainbow dyes; light breezes of early May seemed chasing each other through the fresh, fluttering leaves; they breathed upon our friend, and buoyed him up, and rose with him on high, and held him up above the harvest and above the hills, till he could see beyond these hills and lands--and lo! the springs of all his life to come, lying as yet enfolded in the bud, lay spread before his sight like gardens side by side--and there, in every spring time, stood his friend.

He left the place, but wandered a long while about the meadows, where at this time of year there was no need to hunt carefully for footpaths--chiefly that his eyes might not betray where his thoughts had been to all the market people who were to be met. It was of little use--for in certain moods the torn and wounded heart, like injured trees, bleeds on and on, and at the slightest touch.

He shunned eye-witnesses, such as Rosa above all, for this reason, that he was (I am sorry to have to say it) in just one of those moods when, whether from modesty or from vividness of feeling, he was most disposed to mask his emotion under the semblance of temper. At last a weapon of victory came to his hand, the thought that he had to apologize and make amends to his guest for so long and so uncourteous an absence.

When he got home what a strange state of matters! The old guest gone--another there in his place--and near the latter his wife in tears. When he came into the room, Lenette went to one of the windows, and a fresh torrent of tears fell down. "Madame Siebenkaes," said the Schulrath, continuing his address to her, and keeping hold of her hand, "submit yourself to the will of G.o.d, I beseech you; nothing has happened but what can be put to rights without difficulty. I am willing to concede you a sorrow of the heart--but it must be a restrained and a subdued one."

Lenette looked out of the window, not at her husband.

The Schulrath related, in the first place, all that I have already given my account of (Firmian, listening to him and looking at him, took the glowing hand of Lenette, whose face was still averted), and then continued--

"When I came in, merciful Heavens, there was his lords.h.i.+p on his knees before Madame Siebenkaes, with carnal tears, and--I am constrained to have the gravest suspicions--a design upon her precious honour!

However, I raised him up, without the least ceremony, and I said to him, with the boldness of St. Paul himself--for which I am ready to answer before G.o.d and man--'Your Lords.h.i.+p, are these the doctrines which I inculcated into your Lords.h.i.+p when I was your private tutor; is it Christian conduct to go down upon your knees in such a manner? Fie, for shame, Herr von Meyern. Fie, for shame, Herr von Meyern!'"

Here the Schulrath got into a terrible heat again, and strode up and down the room with his hands in the pockets of his plush coat.

Firmian said, "It's a simple matter to set up a scarecrow and plant a hedge to keep off a hare like _him_; but what ails _you_, love," he said, "and what are you crying so bitterly about?"

She cried more bitterly than ever; when the Schulrath planted his hands on his sides, and said to her in much wrath, "Very well, Madame Siebenkaes, this is the way of it, is it? This is all the impression my good counsel and comforting words have made upon your mind, is it? I never should have believed it of you!

"It was all for nothing then (as I am constrained to conclude) that, when I had the honour of bringing you here from Augspurg in my carriage, I described to you with all the eloquence at my command, the blessedness of the married state, before you had had an opportunity of learning it by experience; it seems I might just as well have spoken to the winds of heaven. Can it really be the case that all that I said to you in the carriage simply went in at one ear and out at the other?

when I told you how happy a wife was in and through her husband, how she often could hardly help crying for joy at possessing him--how these two had but one heart and one flesh, and shared everything between them, joy and sorrow, every morsel of food, every wish and desire, ay and the very smallest secrets. Well, well, Madame Siebenkaes, I see the Schulrath may keep his breath to cool his porridge."

Upon this she twice wiped and dried her eyes hurriedly, constrained herself to look at him very kindly indeed, and with a forced appearance of being quite pleased again, and said with a deep sigh, but softly and not in a tone of pain, "Oh dear me!"

The Schulrath touched her hand as it hung down with his finger tips in a priestly manner, and said--

"But may the Lord be your physician and helper in all your necessities"

(he could hardly say more, for his tears were coming), "Amen,--which is, being interpreted, 'Yea, verily, so mote it be.'" Here he embraced and kissed the husband, and this with much warmth, saying, "Send for me, if your wife can obtain no consolation--and may G.o.d give you both strength. O, by the by--the very thing I came here about--the review of the Easter programme must be ready by Wednesday--and I am in your debt for the eight lines or more you did about that piece of rubbish the other day, which you gave such a capital dressing to."

When he had gone, however, Lenette didn't seem so thoroughly consoled as might have been expected: she leant at the window sunk in deep, hopeless, amazement and reflection. It was in vain that Firmian pointed out that of course he wasn't going to change his and her present name any more, and that her honour, marriage, and love didn't depend upon a wretched name or so up or down, but upon himself and his heart. She restrained her tears, but she continued to be troubled and silent the whole of the evening.

Now let no one call our good Firmian over jealous or suspicious when, having just got well rid of one wretched sacrilegious robber of marriage honour, the Venner, the idea of a volcanic eruption which might throw stones and ashes all over a great tract of his life suddenly occurs to him; what if his friend Stiefel should be really (as it almost seems) falling in love with his wife, in all innocence, himself. His whole behaviour from the very beginning--his attentions on the wedding-day, his constant visits, and even his exasperation with the Venner that very day, and his warm feeling and sympathy on the occasion altogether, all these were the separate parts of a pretty coherent whole, and seemed to indicate a deep and growing affection, thoroughly honourable, no doubt, and unperceived by himself. Whether or not a spark of it had jumped off into Lenette's heart, and was smouldering there, it was impossible as yet to determine; but true and good as he knew his wife and his friend to be, his hopes and his fears could not but be pretty equally balanced.

Dear hero! Do continue to be one! Destiny, as I see more and more clearly as time goes on, seems to have made up her mind gradually to join the separate pieces of a drill machine together with which to pierce through the diamond of thy stoicism; or else by slow degrees to build and fas.h.i.+on English sc.r.a.ping and singeing machines (made out of poverty, household worries, law suits, and jealousy) to sc.r.a.pe and singe away from thee every rough and ill-placed fibre, as if you were a web of finest English cloth. If this should be so, do but come out of the mill as splendid a piece of English stuff as was ever brought to the Leipzig cloth and book fair, and you will be glorious indeed.

CHAPTER IV.

A MATRIMONIAL PARTIE a LA GUERRE--LETTER TO THAT HAIR COLLECTOR, THE VENNER--SELF-DECEPTIONS--ADAM'S MARRIAGE SERMON--SHADOWING AND OVER-SHADOWING.

There is nothing which I observe and note down with more scrupulous and copious accuracy than two equinoctial periods, the matrimonial equinox when, after the honeymoon, the sun enters the constellation Libra (or the balance), and the meteorologic vernal equinox; because, by observing the weather which prevails at these two periods, I am enabled to prognosticate with surprising accuracy the nature of that which will characterise the succeeding season. I consider the first storm of the spring to be always the most important, and similarly, the first matrimonial storm; the others all come from the same quarter.

When the Schulrath was gone, the poor's advocate took his sulky house-G.o.ddess into his arms, and plied her with every conceivable method of proof; with proofs derived from immemorial hearsay, partial proofs, evidential proof, proof on oath, and by logical deduction--every kind of proof wherewith one can harden one's own heart, or soften another's.

But the whole of the evidence he adduced was useless. He might just as well have been embracing the cold hard angel at the baptismal font in the princ.i.p.al church, his own angel remained quite as cold and silent.

Furboots had been the tourniquet which stopped the hemorrhage of Lenette's open, streaming artery; but his departure had taken the German tinder stopping from her eyes and now they streamed unstanched.

Siebenkaes went often to the window, and up and down in the room, that she might not see that he was following her example, and that her sorrow, little reasonable as it was, infected him by sympathy. We can more easily bear, and forgive pain of our own causing than of another's. All the following day there was an unendurable silence in the house. This was the very first of the beds of the matrimonial nursery-garden in which a seed of the apple of discord had been planted, and as yet not the faintest rustle of its sap was audible. It is not in the first domestic squabble, not till the fourth, tenth, ten-thousandth, that a woman can keep perfect silence with her tongue, yet make a tremendous noise with her body, and turn every chair which she shoves about, and every reel of cotton which she lets fall, into a language-machine and fountain of speech, and play her _instrumental_ music all the louder, because her _vocal_ parts are counting their rests. LENETTE WENDELINE moved everything and said everything, as softly as if her liege lord had the gout and was lying with cramped foot pressed in agony against the trembling bottom board of his bed.

When the third day of this came on, he was vexed and annoyed--and he had reason. I beg to say that, for my own part, I should be quite prepared to quarrel with my own wife, if I had one--ay, and to do it with a will--and that to some purpose, and to bandy words with her, as well as letters (though I should prefer the former). But there's one thing which would kill me outright, and that would be her keeping up a long, dreary, tearful sulking, a thing which, like the sirocco wind, ends by blowing out all a man's lights, thoughts, and joys, and at length his life itself. Just as we all of us, rather _like_ a violent thunderstorm in summer, and think it refres.h.i.+ng rather than otherwise in itself--and yet consider it a cursed nuisance on the whole, because it's sure to be followed by some days of dreary wet weather. Siebenkaes was all the more vexed on this occasion, because he was a man who scarcely ever was vexed. As other jurists have reckoned themselves among men exempt from torture, so Siebenkaes had long ago fortified _himself_ against grief and care, those torture racks of the soul (by the help of Epictetus), as effectually as he had the infanticide against bodily torture.

The Jews hold that when Messiah comes, h.e.l.l will be joined on to paradise, so as to make a bigger dancing saloon. And all the year long, Siebenkaes occupied himself in building and adding on his torture chambers and schools of suffering to the entertainment halls of his bagatelle, so as to have more room to perform his ballets.

He often said a medal should be struck for any citizen who should be three hundred and sixty-five days, five hours, forty-eight minutes and fifty-five seconds, without either growling or snarling.

He wouldn't have got that medal himself in the year 1785. On the third day, the Sat.u.r.day, he was so wild at his wife's speechlessness, that he was wilder still with that kill-joy of an Everard. For, of course, that minnesinger, might come in again at any moment, bringing in his company the G.o.ddess of discord (who, as directrix and amba.s.sadress, performs such important poetical functions in Voltaire's Henriade), and introducing her into the homely "Volkslied" of an advocate, by way of a _dea ex machina_ to unloose the matrimonial knot, and tie a fresh one with the Venner. Siebenkaes accordingly wrote him the following academic-controversial doc.u.ment.

"May it please your Lords.h.i.+p,

"I take the liberty to lay before your Lords.h.i.+p in this little memorial my humble pet.i.tion,

"That you will be pleased to stay at home, and spare me the honour of your visits.

"Should your Lords.h.i.+p find it necessary to become possessed of a certain quant.i.ty of my wife's hair--the undersigned hereby undertakes to cut and deliver the same himself. In the event of your Lords.h.i.+p's being minded to exercise a _jus compascui_, or right of free common and pasturage in my premises, and appearing therein in person, I shall embrace with much pleasure the opportunity then afforded me of plucking as many of your Lords.h.i.+p's own hairs as may be requisite to const.i.tute a souvenir out of your Lords.h.i.+p's head, by the roots, like monthly radishes, with my own hands. While I was in Nurnberg, I used often to go and dine in the neighbouring villages (against the will of the authorities) with a fine old PRUGEL KNECHT,[27] _i. e_. with a private tutor, who had towzed out and excerpted from the heads of three little slips of n.o.bility, while he was giving them their lessons, enough silky hair to make him a handsome mouse-coloured bag-wig, which the man most probably wears to this day. His motive in thus applying himself to the production of silk, or rather, his reason for divesting these little heads of their exterior foliage, was, that his own beams might the more effectually ripen the fruit within, as, for similar reasons, it is usual to remove leaves from the vines in August.

"I have the honour to remain, &c."

I shall be very sorry if I cannot manage to get the reader to understand that the advocate wrote this biting letter without the slightest bitterness of feeling. He had read the brilliant satirical writings of the three merry wise men of London, Butler, Swift, and Sterne--those three bodies of the satirical giant, Geryon, or three furies (Parcae) of the foolish--to such an extent that, as their disciple and follower, he never thought whether it was a biting letter or not. In his admiration of the artistic beauties of his composition, he lost sight of its meaning; and indeed, if a stinging speech were made to himself, he would think nothing of the length of its p.r.i.c.kles in comparison with its form and shape. I need merely instance his 'Selection from the Devil's Papers;' the satirical poison bubbles and venomous p.r.i.c.kles so frequent in that work came from his pen and ink--_i. e_. his head only, not from his heart.

I take the opportunity of begging the reader always to infuse the very soul of gentleness and kindness into every word and tone he utters (because it is our words more than our deeds which make people angry), and, more particularly still, into every page he writes. For, truly, even if your correspondents have forgiven you an epistolary _pereat_ long ago, yet the old leaven of ill-will ferments anew, if the sorrel-leaf of a letter containing it chances to come to hand again. We may, of course, on the other hand, reckon upon a similar immortality for a piece of epistolary kindness. Truly, though a long, cutting December wind had made my heart stiff and immoveable to everything in the shape of kindly feeling for one who, once on a time, used to write me absolute Epistles of St. John, tender pastorals of letters, what would it matter, if I should but chance to turn up these old letters in my letter-treasury of bundles and packets of letters?

The sight of the beloved handwriting, the welcome seal, the kind, endearing words, and the pieces of paper where so many a pleasure found s.p.a.ce to sport and play, would cast the suns.h.i.+ne of the old affection upon the frozen heart once more; it would reopen at the memory of the dear old time, as some flower that has closed reopens when a sunbeam lights upon it, and its only thought--ay, were it but the day before yesterday that it had conceived itself mortally offended--would be, "Ah! I was too hard upon him (or her) after all." Many of the saints in the first century used to drive devils out of the possessed, in a somewhat similar way, merely by means of letters.

Furboots came, as if he had been sent for, on the Sat.u.r.day evening, like a Jewish Sabbath. I have often seen a guest serve as cement or hefting powder to two better halves in a state of fracture, because shame and necessity compelled them to speak and behave kindly to each other, at all events while the guest was there.

Every husband should be provided with two or three visitors of this sort, to come in when he's suffering from an attack of wife-possessed-too-long-with-the-devil-of-dumbness; as long as the people are there, at all events, she must speak, and take the iron thief-apple of silence--which grows on the same stalk as the apple of discord--out of her mouth.

The Schulrath stood up before Lenette Wendeline as if she were one of his school girls, and asked her if she had borne this first cross of her married life patiently, and like a worthy sister in suffering of the patriarch Job. She drooped her big eyes, wound a thread the length of a finger into a white s...o...b..ll, and breathed deeper. Her husband answered for her: "I was her brother in affliction, and bore the cross-bar of the burden--I without a murmur, she without a murmur. In the twelfth century, the heap of ashes on which Job endured his sufferings used still to be shown. Our two chairs are our heaps of ashes; there they are still to be seen!"

"Good woman!" said Stiefel, in the softest pianissimo of his pedal reed-stop of a masculine voice, and laid his snow-white hand on the soft, raven hair upon her forehead. Siebenkaes heard a multiplying sympathetic echo of these words in his heart, and laid his arm on Lenette's shoulders, who was blus.h.i.+ng with pleasure at the honour conferred upon her by this kindness of the man in office. Her husband softly pressed her left side to his right, and said:--

"She is good, indeed; she is gentle, and quiet, and patient, and only too industrious. If the whole tag, rag and bobtail of h.e.l.l's army, in the shape of the Venner, had only not advanced upon our little summer-house of happiness, to knock its roof off, we should have lived happy in it for many a day, Mr. Stiefel, far into the winter of our lives. For my Lenette is good, and _too_ good for me and for many another man." Here Stiefel, in his emotion, surrounded that hand of hers which had the skein of thread in it, at the seat of the pulse with his fine fingers--the empty hand being in her husband's possession--and the Wound Water of our pain, the great drops of which trickled from her drooped eyes down her cheeks, where her imprisoned hands could not wipe them away, made the two male hearts very tender. And besides, her husband could never praise any one long without his eyes overflowing.

He went on, faster, "Yes, she might have been very comfortable and well-off with me, but that my mother's money is kept back from me in this terrible way. But, even for all that, I should have made her happy without the money, and she me--we never had a word, never a single unhappy moment--now had we, Lenette? nothing but peace and love, till the Venner came. He has taken a good deal from _us_!"