Through Night to Light Part 19

The worthy pair shook hands, and Albert went away rapidly. His face was darker than when he came. Either the second part of the conversation had not been to his taste, or he thought it good policy to a.s.sume an air of being offended. Felix, who knew him pretty well from former days, was disposed to take the latter view.

CHAPTER XIV.

About the same time, and while these transactions were going on in the Grenwitz mansion, a young man was impatiently walking up and down in front of a large house in one of the suburbs of Grunwald. His impatience looked very much like that of an honest lover who is waiting on a cool autumn evening in a dense fog for the lady of his heart, whom he has orders to call for "punctually at seven, but be sure to be punctual," to see her home from a little party, and whom he sees at half-past seven sitting near the brightly-lighted-up window, engaged in most lively conversation. It may be he sees really her whom he loves; it maybe the shadow belongs to a very different person.

The young man is Doctor Braun; the house before which he patrols, Leporello-fas.h.i.+on, is the famous boarding-school of Miss Bear; and the young lady for whom he is waiting is his betrothed Sophie, the only child of the privy councillor and professor, Doctor Roban, a physician of great renown in Grunwald, and a distinguished member of the university.

"What a vague idea of time even the cleverest of women have!" murmured Franz, pulling out his watch and looking at it by the faint light of a badly-burning cigar; "it is a psychological fact which I must treat of one of these days in a monograph."

He throws away the short end of his cigar, which threatened to singe his moustache, and looks up once more at the lighted window.

"Heaven be thanked, they are getting ready! Dark shadows are flitting to and fro near the curtains! Now for the cloak, and the bonnet--a kiss to say good-by then a little bit of a chat of ten minutes about the next place of meeting--then another farewell kiss. The window is looking darker; there is a light in the hall; now a final discussion on the steps--_enfin_!"

"Do you come at last, _ma mignonne_? said Doctor Braun, greeting the slight maidenly form which had come out of the house, and now hastened with light steps across the little garden which divided the house from the street, to the iron gate.

"Poor Franz! You have not been waiting for me," answers the girl, affectionately leaning on the arm of her betrothed.

"Oh, not at all! Nothing to speak of! Half an hour or so!"

"I really did not know it was so late. The time pa.s.sed so quickly, although the whole party consisted only of two persons. Can you guess who they were?"

"Yourself, probably, for one."

"Very well--and the other?"

"Helen Grenwitz."

"Exactly! She sends you her best regards. Only think, she will probably stay with the Great Bear, although her friends are coming to town for the winter, If they have not already come to-day. That will be a fine subject for gossip. Poor Helen! I pity her with all my heart!"

"Why?"

"How can you ask? Is it not bad enough that the whole town will ask why a girl of sixteen--no, sixteen and a half--should be sent back to school when she has hardly been four weeks at home? And as long as the Grenwitz family was not living in town, there might have been some explanation; but now--oh, I think it is abominable. People must think of her--I don't know what; and it is not so much to be wondered at if they connect Helen in some way or other with the duel fought by her cousin and your amiable friend, Stein."

"And what says Miss Helen?"

"Nothing! You know how she is. She never speaks of family matters; at most she occasionally mentions her father, whom she seems to love most tenderly. She is quiet and serious; but not exactly sad."

"I believe she is much too proud ever to be really sad."

"How so?"

"Sadness is a pa.s.sive disposition; the disposition of one who sees that he cannot struggle with fate, and therefore submits to endure it as well as he can. But there are characters which resist as long as it is possible, and when nothing more can be done, instead of laying down their arms, break them to pieces and throw them fiercely at the victor's feet."

Sophie came up closer to her betrothed and said, after a pause:

"I am not one of those characters, Franz. I am not too proud to be sad; I have been very often sad these last days. I was sad when you left us with Doctor Stein, although at that time I had no particular reason for being so. But since then, when papa was taken sick and I sat by his bedside, and my greatest anxiety--next to that about papa's life--was whether you had received my letter ... You might have travelled on and on, and my heart was all the time breaking with longing for you! You went to see him, I am sure, before you came to call for me at Miss Bear's."

"Of course! He is better. I begged him to lie down, but he insisted upon sitting up till we should come back."

"And I have wasted so much time! Let us go faster!"

"A few minutes, more or less, do not matter; and besides, I should like to speak with you definitely about our future. We must at last make an end to this provisional state, which is pleasant to no one--not to G.o.d--I mean Nature--nor to man--and is daily becoming more oppressive.

An unmarried man is a fish; but an engaged man is neither fish nor flesh. When two people are in their own heart and conscience man and wife through their mutual love, they ought to be man and wife also in the world, before men, provided circ.u.mstances admit of their marrying.

Now, that is the case with us. We have enough for our support, and for the present we need no more; whatever else may be necessary will come.

In short, shall we have our wedding day four weeks from to-day?"

"But, Franz, I have not finished half of my trousseau!"

"Then we'll marry with half a trousseau."

"And what will papa say? You know how very hard it is for him to let me go from him; and shall I just now ask such a sacrifice from him, when he needs me more than ever? I have not the courage to propose it to him."

"But I have it; your father knows that I am not less anxious for your happiness than he is, and he is far too sensible not to see that my plan is the best. Come, my darling, don't hang your head. To-day four weeks we are man and wife."

"Ah, Franz! I wish it could be so. But I fear, I fear, Heaven does not mean it so well with us!"

"Why not? Heaven means it well with all who have the courage to determine upon their own happiness. For, how says the poet: 'In our bosom are the stars of our fate.'"

The haste with which Franz pressed her had a very good motive in the illness of her father. Franz, as a physician, knew best that the life of the excellent man was hanging on a very slender thread. He had rallied quickly enough from a stroke of apoplexy, which had attacked him a fortnight ago, but several bad symptoms announced that another attack was not improbable, and with his nervous, very delicately-organized system, this was likely to be fatal. But if the father died before his daughter had been married, the poor girl would have been placed in a very painful position, as her mother had been dead for many years, and she had neither brothers and sisters nor any near relations. The world with its prejudices would have hardly been willing to admit that under such circ.u.mstances her only home should be in the house of the man whom she loved, but would have been inconceivably shocked if the daughter had married "before the shoes were worn out in which she had followed her father's funeral." The whole city would have broken out in one cry of indignation against such a fearful crime against decency and propriety.

Sophie loved her father with a love which bordered upon enthusiasm, little as enthusiasm generally formed a part of her clear and sensible character, which shrank instinctively from all exaggeration. And the father was well worthy of such love.

The privy councillor, Roban, was a man of rare distinction in many respects. As a man of science he stood very high; he was considered the very first pathologist in Germany. But a remarkable versatility of mind enabled him to gather, outside of the studies which his profession required, information upon the most varied fields of knowledge, and to attain to a high degree of perfection in more than one of the arts. In the morning he would take his pupils, hour after hour, from bed to bed in the hospital, and open to them views into the innermost workings of nature. Then again he would wander for long hours from house to house, soothing here a sufferer's pains, comforting others, and exhorting them to patient endurance. And yet in the evening, when a circle of intimate friends were gathered under his hospitable roof, he would be ready to take an active part in an animated conversation about art, literature, or politics, or perhaps take his favorite instrument, the violoncello, between his knees, and delight even the best cultivated ears by his correct and yet deeply-felt playing in a quickly-improvised quartette.

Where there are lights there must be shadows, and where there are shadows there is never a lack of people who take pleasure in painting everything in the darkest and blackest of colors. Thus it was with the little foibles of the excellent man, which his rivals and enemies subjected to pitiless criticism. Some declared he was a charlatan, who understood his business tolerably well, but the necessary bragging and boasting about it still better; others declared his bon-mots were better than his prescriptions, and a good story more welcome to him than the most famous case in his practice. Still others said that the essence of his nature was a restless vanity, which induced him to try all the arts and to play the Maecenas for all travelling artists and spoilt men of genius. Still others--so-called practical men, who laid no claim to any opinion in matters of art and science, but who demanded in return that everybody should comply with their standard of morality--shook their heads when people spoke of the councillor's hospitality, and said: "If everybody would sweep the dust before his own door, many things would be seen that are hidden now; and if certain folks would remember the old saying: 'Save in time and you'll have in need,' they would be better off than they were."

Of all these reproaches none really affected the distinguished professor, except the last. Money was to him what it is to Saladin in Lessing's great drama, Nathan: "the most trifling of trifles;" he looked upon it, as Saladin did, as "perfectly superfluous when he had it," much as he appreciated the necessity of being provided with it whenever he was reminded of it by his liberality, his generosity, and his intense antipathy against all bargaining and all haggling. If he had lived economically he might have become a very rich man, for his income was considerable; but Mammon would not stay in his hands, which were ever open to all who were poor and suffering. He never could force himself to accept money from the hard hand of a mechanic, even if the sum had been ever so small. "It is bad enough," he used to say, "that Nature has not wisdom enough to allow only such people to be sick as have leisure and money enough for it; but for the poor, sickness itself is a punishment severe enough, not to sentence them moreover into the payment of costs." Thus it happened to him very often that he poured the golden reward he had earned by his attention and his skill in the palace of rich Sinbad a few minutes later into the open hand of poor Hinbad, and reached home with a lighter purse than he had carried out.

His house also was an expensive one, although the whole family consisted but of himself and his daughter. A nature as richly endowed and as productive as his own was not made to be content with meagre fare and thin beer; he was fond of rich, savory dishes and fiery old wines; above all he loved to share the pleasures of his table with others who were as willing to be pleased as he himself with the good things of this world, and especially with one of the best among the good--a pleasant table-talk.

All this might have been accomplished without causing a deficit in the budget of the privy councillor, if a careful, sensible housewife had managed the whole, and spent what was coming in properly and economically. His wife, however, an exceedingly amiable, intelligent woman, died the second year after their marriage; and her husband, who had loved her above all things, could not summon resolution to fill the place in his heart which death, inexorable death, had made vacant, and to give a stepmother to his daughter, in whom he soon concentrated all his affections. He remembered too well the old saying, _apud novercam queri_! He had seen the fairy tale of Cinderella repeat itself in too many families. Thus he left his child in the hands of nurses and governesses whom he paid magnificently, and sent her, when she was old enough, to Miss Bear's boarding-school, in case anything should have been forgotten in her outward polish or her inner culture. In the meantime he kept a kind of bachelor's hall, which soon became a very costly life, owing to the thievishness of his servants and the incapacity of a housekeeper in whom he placed implicit confidence. He comforted himself, however, whenever Mrs. Bartsch had forced him into a very uncomfortable discussion about credit and debt, with the prospect of the time when his daughter could relieve him of all this _misere_, and of the answer to the question: what shall we have for dinner, etc., which ought not to be allowed to trouble a good Christian's peace of mind.

The time came at last, but Miss Sophie's return to the paternal home did not exactly mend matters. Sophie was too young and too inexperienced to see the cause of the evil and to reform the abuses, which were deeply rooted after so many years' toleration. Mrs. Bartsch, who could not adapt herself at all to the new regime, was dismissed, it is true; but--as the doctor said, "the bad one is gone, the bad ones have stayed"--the servants stole just as before, and the privy councillor did not know yet "what in all the world could have become of the miserable money?" As it could not well be otherwise under such circ.u.mstances, the accounts agreed less and less every year, and instead of saying, "I must learn to be more economical hereafter," he only said, "I must work harder." He felt himself yet in the full vigor of his strength. He saw before him yet long years of energetic activity, during which he might make up what had been so long neglected.

But it was not to be so, and the beautiful fruit-bearing tree, in whose broad, hospitable shade so many who suffered from the burning heat of life sought shelter and refreshment, and found it too, was to be irreparably injured by a flash of lightning which fell from a clear sky. Like wildfire the news flew one morning all over town that Privy Councillor Roban had had a stroke of paralysis over night, and was now laid up without hope. People told it one to another with grave faces, and said it would be an irreparable loss to science, especially as far as the university was concerned, which had had in Roban its only really great man since Berger had become insane. But of all who suffered by the loss, the poor were most seriously threatened, since they lost in the privy councillor their generous friend and protector. For many and many a day one might have seen old women dragging themselves painfully along on crutches, men so old and feeble that they had to be led by a boy, young pale mothers with a baby in their bosom--all sitting on the steps of the house, bathed in tears, and asking every one who came out whether things were not going a little better with the privy councillor, or whether there was really no hope at all that the good old gentleman would recover?

In the meantime the patient was lying in that terrible state which is neither night nor day, but a painful twilight, when the sun is about to set, and the darkness is rising full of threatenings on all sides. For a long time it remained uncertain whether life or death would be the end, and when at last the cruel conflict was decided in favor of life, death only yielded after having marked his victim unmistakably forever.

One might even have said, that he had taken all the reality away with it, and left only the shadow of existence.

To-day was the first time that the privy councillor had risen for a few hours; they had rolled him in his large easy-chair from his bed-chamber, before the fire-place in the sitting-room. He had insisted upon it that his daughter, who since the beginning of his sickness had scarcely left his bed, should go out to her little party; and he had dismissed his son-in-law, who had taken his practice provisionally in hand and came to see him every evening--for he wished to be alone. He felt the necessity of availing himself of the first hour in which the pressure on his brain was less overwhelming, for the purpose of thinking over his situation. As a physician, he would probably have warned his patient against such an injurious excitement; but now he was physician and patient at once, and made the experience in himself that the physician may very often demand certain things which the patient is unable to do with the best will in the world.

Poor, unfortunate man; doubly and trebly poor, because you have been doubly and trebly rich and happy before, in the fulness of your mental and physical strength, in the elasticity of your sanguine temper, nay even in the easy humor which bore you like a bird high over the greatest difficulties! Where is now your restless activity, which formerly made it impossible for you to sit still in one and the same place for any length of time, which induced you even at table frequently to change your place among your guests? Where is your sharp, penetrating mind, which used to solve the hardest problems as in play?

Where your brilliant fancy, which threw even upon every-day occurrences a bewitching light? Where, above all, your Olympian cheerfulness, which made it so easy for you not to be angry or excited, but allowed you to fight at most with a humorous smile and satirical wit against the misery and wretchedness of life, against the stupidity and vulgarity of men? Where are the thousand arguments with which you often nearly overwhelmed the pessimist views of your friend Berger, when you tried to persuade him that this earth was by no means a vale of tears from the rising to the setting of the sun, but a wide, fair landscape, in which hill and dale, waste deserts and Elysian fields alternated very wisely, and that in most cases man was not only at liberty but even commanded to avoid the one and to enjoy the other? Have you all at once changed your views? Has a brutal blow of fate suddenly reduced you in the discussion to an _absurdum_? Has the pressure which weighs on your brain and paralyzes the elasticity of your mind transformed you all of a sudden from an optimist into a pessimist, so that you see the world and your own situation in dark colors, as you are counting the beats of your pulse mechanically, and sit there, rolled in a ball in your easy-chair, glaring in dull thoughts at the dying embers of the fire-place?