Chapter XXV., and Last

THE JOURNEY—THE CHURCHYARD—THE SPECTRE—THE END OF THE TROUBLE, AND OF THE BOOK.

I see more clearly every day that I and the other 999,999,999 human beings, are nothing but so much skin-and-bone stuffed (like cooked chickens), full of a mass of incongruities, contradictions, inconsistencies, irremediable insufficiencies, and resolves, of which every one has its antagonist muscle (musc. antagonista). We do not contradict other people half as often as ourselves. This last Chapter is a fresh proof of it. Up to this point, the reader and I have been labouring together with the sole object of finishing this Book, and now that we see the shore, and have all but reached it, we are both sorry for it. I shall, at all events, be doing something—the most that I can—if I conceal, and hide away (so to speak) the end of it, as we do the end of a garden, and say several things which will help to lengthen out the work a little.

The Inspector sprang out into the open country, among the corn-ears, fortified with a muscular, full breast—the Alp of silence and deception no longer weighed upon him as it had done. The avalanche which had overwhelmed his life had melted to a third of its original size Tinder the sun of his present fair fortune. His electric Leyden-jar coating with a better income, and even the fact of his having a great deal more to do, had charged him with fire and courage. His appointment was a mountain permeated by so many veins of silver and gold, that even in this first year of it he had found he was enabled to send sundry anonymous contributions to the Prussian Widows’ Fund, so as to make amends for a good half of his fraud upon it, and see his way to finally clearing it off altogether. I should not lay this act of duty before the public gaze were it not that Kritter, in Göttingen—who reckons that this fund will be exhausted in the year 1804—or even calculators more moderate in their results, who think its extreme unction will be received in 1825, might take occasion, from these Flower-pieces of mine, to lay its death wholly at the Inspector’s door. If this should prove to be the case, I should very deeply regret having alluded to the subject, in the remotest manner, in my Flower-pieces.

He did not take his way by Hof or Bayreuth, or any of the old romantic journey-roads. He dreaded lest the hand of Fate (which sows behind the clouds) might bring his phantom-body before Nathalie’s eyes. And yet he hoped a little that this said hand might bring him just the least bit in contact with his Leibgeber, since he had been so recently cruising in these waters. As a matter of course, he had embodied himself, en route, in the said Leibgeber’s shirt, jacket, and complete exterior—the same which he had swopped with him in the inn at Gefrees and this costume was a mirror which continually showed him the absent one’s image. A “Saufinder,” like Leibgeber’s, who lifted his head up to him in a forest-cottage, sent a throb of joy through his heart; but the dog’s nose knew him as little as did the dog’s master.

And yet, the nearer he drew to the hills and woods, behind whose Chinese churchyard-wall stood his two empty houses—his grave and his old lodging—the tighter did Anxiety draw her drag-net about his heart. It was not the fear of being recognised; this, by reason of his resemblance to Leibgeber (particularly in his present dress), was an impossibility. Nay, people would sooner have taken him for his own wraith and Prophet Samuel than for Siebenkæs still in the body. But, besides love and anticipation, there was a something which made him anxious—a something which once hemmed in and oppressed myself when I came back among the Herculanean antiquities of my own childhood. There clasped themselves once more around my breast the iron bands and rings which had crushed it in my childhood—a time when the little human creature is still tremblingly helpless and comfortless in presence of the sorrows and sufferings of life and death—when we stand between the footstool we have cast away, the handcuffs and ankle-chains which we have burst asunder, and the great sighing and singing tree of philosophy which is to guide us to the free, open battle-arena and coronation city of this earth. In every thicket round which Firmian had wandered in his poverty-stricken, miserable winter-autumn, he saw the cast-off skins of the snakes sticking, which in former days had twined themselves about his feet. Remembrance (that after-winter of his hard, cruel days) fell into this lovelier time of his life, and the combination of these dissimilar feelings—the clasp of the old fetters, and the breeze of freedom of the present—generated a third sensation, which was bitter-sweet, as well as anxious and uneasy.

When it was twilight, he walked slowly and observantly through the streets, which were strewn with scattered ears of corn. Every child he met going home with the supper-beer, every familiar dog, and every well-remembered cling of a bell, was full of fossil-impressions of joy-roses and passion-flowers, the originals of which were all fallen to dust. As he passed the house where he used to live, he heard two stocking-looms clattering and rattling there.

He took up his quarters in the Lizard Inn, which cannot have been the grandest hotel in the town, inasmuch as the Advocate ate his beef on a pewter-platter, which (to judge by the marks and stigmata of a facsimile of his own knife which it bore), seemed to have once been enrolled as a soldier of his own pawned-plate-militia regiment. However, the inn had this advantage—that Firmian could occupy the little room, number seven, on the third story, and there establish a star-observatory, or mast-head crow’s-nest, which commanded Stiefel’s study just opposite, at a somewhat lower elevation. But his Lenette never came to the window. Ah! if he had seen her, he would have knelt on the floor for sheer sorrow. Not till it was quite dark did he see his old friend Stiefel, who came and held a printed sheet—probably a proof of the ‘German Programme Advertiser’—against the red western sky, it being too dark to see it inside. He was surprised to see the Schulrath look so worn and bowed—and he had a crape on his arm too. “Can my Lenette’s poor baby be dead?” he thought.

When it was quite late he crept, all trembling, to that garden, whence we do not all return, and which is bounded by the hanging Eden-Garden of the second life. In the churchyard he was safe from the approach of spectators, thanks to the ghost-stories by means of which Leibgeber had forced his inheritance out of his guardian’s clutches. On his way to his own vacant, subterranean bed, he passed by the grave on which (while it was black, it was grass-grown now) he had placed the flower-garland which he had meant to give Lenette a pleasant surprise with, though it did only cause her an unexpected sorrow. At last he came to the bed-curtains of that grave-siesta, his own tombstone, and he read the inscription with a cold shudder. “Suppose this stone trap-door were lying upon your face,” he said to himself, “building you in from the wide heavens!”—and he thought what clouds, what coldness, and night, reign around the two poles of life, as about the poles of our earth—about the beginning and the end of man. He considered it a very wicked thing to have aped the last hour—the crape-streamer of a long, dark cloud was over the moon, his heart was tender and anxious; when suddenly a something with colour in it, near his grave, seized his attention, and caused a revulsion in his soul.

For there, close beside it, was a fresh grave, quite recently covered in, surrounded by a painted wooden-frame, not unlike a bedstead. And upon these painted boards Firmian (as long as his streaming eyes allowed him) read what follows:—

“Here reposes in God, Wendeline Lenette Stiefel, born Engelkraut of Augspurg. Her first husband was the lamented Poor’s Advocate, F. St. Siebenkæs. On the 20th of October, 1786, she entered, for the second time, into holy matrimony with the Schulrath Stiefel, of this place, and after three-quarters of a year of a peaceful union with him, she fell asleep in childbed, on the 22nd of July, 1787, and lies here, with her little still-born daughter, awaiting a joyful resurrection.”

“Oh! poor creature, poor creature!” More he could not think. Now—now that her day of life was better and warmer, the earth must swallow her, and she take nothing with her but a hand roughened by labour, a face furrowed with the death-bed sickness, and a contented, but empty heart, which, hemmed down among the hollow-ways and mine-shafts of this world, had seen scarcely any stars or flowery meadows. Her troubles had gradually clouded over her life so thickly and darkly, that no picturing fancy could brighten and purify them by the colour-play of poesy, just as no rainbow is possible when the whole sky is black with rain. “Why did I vex you so often, and pain you, even by my death, and be so unforgiving to all your little innocent crotchets?” he said, weeping bitterly. An earth-worm came twining out of the grave, and he threw it forcibly away, as though it had come straight from the beloved cold heart; although that which satiates this creature is what satiates us also at last—EARTH. He thought of the child (mouldering to dust) which laid its thin, withered arms about his soul, as if it had been his own, and to which Death had given as much as a God gave to Endymion—sleep, eternal youth, and immortality. At length he tottered away from this place of mourning with his heart wearied, not lightened, by his tears.

When he went back to the inn, a woman with a harp was singing in the public room (a boy accompanying her on a flute) a song, of which the ritournelle was, “dead is dead, and gone is gone.” It was the same woman who had been playing and singing on the New Year’s eve when his Lenette, now departed and at peace, had buried her face in the handkerchief, weeping and desolate. Oh! the burning arrows of these music-tones went hissing through his heart—the poor soul had no shield. “I tortured her terribly in these days” (he went on constantly saying). “How she sighed! How she kept silence! Ah! if you could but see me now from on high, now that you are happier! If you could but behold this bleeding soul of mine—not that you should forgive me, no, only that I might have the consolation of suffering something for your sake! Oh! how different would I be to you now!”

And this is what we all say when we bury some one whom we have tortured; but on that very same evening of mourning we go and dart the javelin deep into some other breast which is still warm. Oh! weaklings that we are, strong only in resolves! If that form, now resolved into its elements, whose mouldering wounds (which we ourselves inflicted) we expiate with tears of penitence and warm resolves to do better, were to come back to us to-day, new-created, and in the brightest bloom of youth, it would be but for the first week that we should clasp the newfound soul, more fondly loved than ever, to our hearts; and then we should apply the old martyrdom instruments to it again, just as of old. That we should do this, even to our beloved dead, I deduce from the fact (to say nothing of our rude unkindness to the living) that, in our dreams, when those whom we have lost revisit us again, we act over again everything which we now repent. I do not say this to deprive any mourner of the consolation of repentance, or of the thought, that his love for the lost one is purer and fonder than before, but to lessen the pride which may be grounded upon the repentance and the data of feelings.

Later in the night, when Firmian saw the face (gnawed and sunken with sorrow) of his old friend (who had now so little left to him), looking up to heaven, as if seeking there among the stars his friend of whom he was bereaved, sorrow pressed the last tear from his anguished heart, and in the madness of grief he cast the blame upon himself of his friend’s sorrow; jut as if the latter had not a great deal to thank him for in the first instance, before setting about pardoning him.

He awoke in all the exhaustion of sorrow, i.e. in that bled-away condition of the feelings which at last resolves itself into a sweet melting-away and longing for death. For he had lost everything—even what was not buried. He dared not go to the Schulrath for fear of being recognised, or, at the very lowest, staking upon a most dangerous chance the peace of mind of that most innocent creature, who would never be able to reconcile it to either his conscience or his sense of honour, that he had married a woman whose husband was still alive.

But he could go and see Meerbitzer, the hairdresser, with, less danger of discovering himself, and could carry away from him a great dowry of news. Moreover, the sickle of Death had cut through all his other chains and knots, together with his bonds of love. He would be doing no injury to any one but himself if he took off his mask of death, and showed himself unmouldered to other people, nay, even to the sorrowing Nathalie; particularly as on very beautiful evenings, and whenever he did any good action, his conscience claimed the arrear-interest of the unpaid debt of truth, refusing to grant any further letters of respite. Also his soul swore, as a God swears to his own self, that he would only stay there this one day, and then never come back.

The Friseur knew in a moment, from the lameness, that he could be nobody but the Vaduz Inspector, Leibgeber. Like posterity, he decked his own lodger, Siebenkæs, with the richest of rosemary-garlands, and declared that these ragamuffins of stocking-weavers whom he had got upstairs now were not to be spoken of in the same day with poor lamented Mr. Siebenkæs. The whole house creaked when they rattled and stamped in their upstairs-room. He then called attention to the circumstance that the departed had taken his wife away to him within the space of a year and day; and dwelt on the fact that she had never forgotten the Meerbitzer’s house, but had often looked in of an evening in her widow’s weeds (which she had been buried in according to her desire), and spoken with them about all her various vicissitudes, and about her new life. “They lived together just like two children,” the hairdresser said, “Stiefel and she.” This conversation, the house, and his old rooms, so noisy now, were all so many waste places of his ruined Jerusalem. A stocking-loom now stood where his writing-table used to be, and so on. All his questions about the past were so many conflagration-relics, collected for the fresh building of his burnt-down pleasure-chateaux from out their Phœnix ashes. Hope is the morning Aurora of joy, and memory its red evening sky; but the latter is terribly apt to drop down in grey dew or rain, with no colour left in it. The blue day, which the red sky gives promise of, does, indeed, break in brightness; but it is in another world, where there is another sun. Meerbitzer unknowingly cleft, deep and wide, the split into which he grafted the sundered flower-twigs of the bygone days on to Firmian’s heart; and when, finally, his wife related how, when Lenette had taken the Communion of the Sick, she said to the evening preacher, “I shall go to my Firmian when I am dead, shall I not?” Firmian averted his breast from this blind dagger-thrust, and hurried out into the open air, that he might not encounter any one to whom he should be constrained to lie.

Yet he could not but long for some human creature, even were one to be found nowhere else but beneath his lowliest roof of all—in the churchyard. The electrically-charged atmosphere of the evening brooded and hatched melancholy longings of every kind; the sky was overspread with scattered unripe fragments of a thunder-cloud, and in the west horizon a muttering storm had begun, scattering its lighted pitch-rings and full-charged clouds down upon unknown lands. He went home; but as he passed by the tall railings of Blaise’s garden, he fancied he saw a figure like Nathalie, dressed in black, glide into the arbour. And then, for the first time, he turned his mind to something which Meerbitzer had said about a lady in mourning, who had come a few days before, and wished to be shown all over the house, lingering particularly in Siebenkæs’s old rooms, and making a great many inquiries. That she should have come out of her road on her way to Vaduz was by no means unlikely; indeed, it was very consistent with her romantic turn of mind, particularly as she had never seen Siebenkæs’s former home, and the Inspector had not answered her letter—as Rosa was married, and Blaise reconciled to her (since he had seen the ghost)—and the month of Firmian’s death would naturally suggest to her a visit to his last resting-place.

So that her friend could not but dwell all this evening with feelings of painful fondness upon her memory—the one unclouded star which beamed on him from the overcast heaven of his bygone days. It was deep in the gloaming now, a cooler air was stirring. A storm had spent its force in other regions, and there remained only some broken, lurid clouds, piled in the sky like glowing, half-burned firebrands. He betook himself, for a last time, to the place where death had planted the red carnation, with its little buds snapped so untimely from its stem. But within his soul, as without him, the air breathed less sultrily now, and fresher; tears had blunted the sharp edge of the first bitterness of his sorrow. He felt, with far more of gentleness, that the earth is only our CARPENTER’S YARD, not our BUILDING-GROUND. In the East, where the stars were rising, a long blue streak shone above the sunken thunder-clouds. The moon (light-magnet of the sky) was lying, like a fount of light, upon the foil of a cleft cloud, and the wide vaporous veil was melting motionlessly away.

When Firmian, approaching the beloved grave, raised up his downcast head, he saw a dark form resting there. He stopped short, and gazed more piercingly. The form was a woman’s. Her face, frozen into the ice of death, was fixed on him. As he drew nearer, he saw his dearest Nathalie leaning overpowered against the painted railing of the grave. The autumnal breath of death had tinted her lips and cheeks with white; her wide eyes were sightless, and nothing but the tear-drops which hung on her lashes gave proof that she was in life, and had taken him for the apparition of which she had heard so much. In the excess of her romantic sorrow at his grave she had longed, in the strength and loneliness of her heart, that his spirit might appear to her; and when she saw him approaching, she thought Heaven had granted her prayer. And then the iron hand of chill terror turned this red rose to a white one. But ah, her friend was the more wretched of the two. His tender, unshielded heart was crushed motionless between the impact of two worlds which rushed crashing together. In tones of utter distress he cried out, “Nathalie! Nathalie!” Her lips quivered spasmodically, and a breath of life gave back a shade of brightness to her glance; but the spirit was still there before her, and she closed her eyes again, and said, with a shudder, “Oh God!” It was in vain that his voice called her back to life; when she looked up at the apparition her heart failed her again, and she could only cry “Oh God!” Firmian seizing her hand, cried, “Angel of heaven, I am not dead! only look at me! Nathalie, don’t you know me? Oh! merciful God, don’t punish me so terribly, don’t let me be the cause of her death!” At length she slowly lifted her heavy eyelids, and saw her old friend trembling beside her, with tears of anxiety and terror. His tears were happier, but more abundant, and he smiled sorrowfully upon her as she still kept her eyes open, and said, “Nathalie, I am still upon this earth, in very truth, and suffer as you do yourself; don’t you see how I tremble on your account? Take my warm, living hand. Are you still afraid?” “No,” she answered faintly; but she still looked at him in an awe-stricken fashion, as at a super-earthly being, and had not courage to ask for an explanation of the riddle. He helped her to rise (gently weeping), and said, “But, dear innocent one, come away from this place of sorrow, where so many tears have been shed already. For your heart mine has no secrets now. Ah! I can tell you everything, and I will tell you everything.” He led her out, above the quiet dead, through the back gate of the churchyard. She leaned on his arm heavily and languidly, shuddering again often as they climbed the little height, and only the tears which joy, relief from terror, grief, and exhaustion combined, had brought to her eyes, fell like warm balsam upon her chilled and wounded heart.

When they reached the top of the height she sat down to rest, and the black night-woods, railed round by white harvests, and cut across by the moon’s silent sea of light, lay before them. Nature had drawn out the “pianissimo lute” organ-stop of midnight, and by Nathalie’s side stood one of her beloved dead, new-risen from the grave. He told her now all about Leibgeber’s entreaties; the short story of his mock-death; his residence with the Count; all the longings and tears of his long solitude; his firm determination rather to fly from her than to deceive or wound her beloved heart, either by speech or in writing; and the disclosures he had made to her friend’s father. She sobbed at the account of his last moments and parting from Lenette, as if it had all been real. She thought on many things as she merely said, “Ah! it was only for other people’s happiness that you sacrificed yourself. But you will be able to have done with all this deception now, and to make amends for it, will you not?” “I shall,” he said, “to the very utmost of my power; and my heart and my conscience shall be free and clear once more. Have I not even kept the vow I made to you—that I should not see you again till after my death?” She smiled gently.

They both sunk into a dreamy and blissful silence. At last, seeing her lay a mourning-cloak butterfly (disabled by the night-dew) down upon her lap, the fact that she was in mourning herself struck him for the first time, and he hastily asked, “You are not in mourning for any one, are you?” Alas! she had put it on for him. “Not now,” Nathalie answered, and, looking at the butterfly, she said pityingly, “a few drops and a little chilliness have benumbed the poor thing.” Her friend reflected how easily Fate might have punished his temerity by benumbing the even more beautiful, black-attired creature by his side, who had, moreover, had her full share already of shivering in the night-frosts of life and the night-dew of tears. But he could not answer her for love and pain.

They kept silence now, reading each other’s thoughts, lost, half in their hearts, half in the grandeur of night. The wide æther had absorbed all the clouds (only those of the sky, alas!); Luna bent down, with her saintly halo, like a glorified Madonna, from the tranquil blue, to greet her pale sister of the earth. The voice of the stream was heard, as it flowed on its course unseen, hidden by a light mist—like the stream of time, hidden from sight by the haze of countries and nations. Behind them the night-breeze had laid itself to rest upon a swelling, rushing bed of corn, bestreaked with blue corn-flowers; and before them lay the reaped harvest of the world to come—precious stones (as it were) in their coffin-settings, cold and heavy in death. The pious and humble ones (forming an antithesis to the sunflower and the mote in the sunbeam) turned as moon-flowers to the moon, and played as moonbeam-motes in her cool rays, feeling that there is nothing under the starry sky so great as hope.

Nathalie leant on Firmian’s hand, that he might help her to rise, and said, “I feel quite able to go home now.” He kept hold of her hand, but did not rise nor speak. He was gazing at the dry, prickly stalk of the old rose-twig which she had given him. Unwittingly, and without feeling what he was doing, he pressed the thorns into his fingers. His laden bosom heaved with deeper, warmer sighs; burning tears stood in his eyes, and the moon’s light trembled before them like a shower of falling light. A whole universe lay upon his soul and upon his tongue, and kept both motionless.

“Firmian,” said Nathalie, “what would you have?” He bent his fixed eyes widely opened upon her gentle form, and pointed down to his grave in the valley. “My house down there,” he answered, “which has been empty so long. For the bed on which we dream this dream of life is terribly hard.”

He lost command of himself, for she wept so terribly—and her face, all heavenly kindness, was so near—and he burst forth, with the bitterest and strongest emotion, “Are not all my loved ones gone, and are not you going too? Ah! why has torturing destiny laid the waxen image of an angel upon all our breasts, and lowered us into the chill life? Oh! the soft image melts away, and there is no angel. Yes, you HAVE appeared to me, it is true, but you disappear, and time will crush to atoms your image on my heart, ay, and my heart with it. For when I have lost you, I shall be alone in earnest. But, fare you well! I shall actually die one day, and then I shall appear to you; but not as I have done to-night. Ah! nowhere but in eternity, and then I shall say to you, ‘Oh! Nathalie, I loved you there below with infinite, unending grief and sorrow; make amends to me here!’” She strove to answer, but her voice broke and failed her. She raised her great eyes to the starry sky, but they were full of tears. She tried to rise, but her friend held her, with his hand all thorns and blood, and said, “Can you leave me, Nathalie?”

She arose here, sublime and grand, bent her head back, looking upward to the sky, rapidly swept away the tears from her eyes; her soaring soul found words, and, clasping her hands in prayer, she said, “Oh! THOU who art all love, and lovest ALL, he has been lost to me, I have found him again; eternity is here on earth; make THOU him happy through me!” And her head sank down on his, tenderly and languidly, and she said,

“We are going to be always TOGETHER.”

“Oh God!” stammered Firmian; “Oh angel! you are going to be always with me—in this world and the next!”

“For ever, Firmian!” said Nathalie, softly. And our friend’s troubles were over and past.