Chapter 58
Valerie had sunk back, with closed eyes, utterly exhausted in her chair, believing that he had left the room. At the first sound of his voice she started.
"Which you have won!"
"For you!"
He bent down to her as he had done before and raised her hand to his lips.
"My lady's hand is cold, however warm I know her heart to be. The noise of the battle is not fit for her sensitive nerves. We must take care that she retires betimes to a quieter spot, where she may await the end in peace."
"What do you mean?" asked Valerie with a smile, though a shudder ran through her.
"It is a plan which has just taken shape in my mind, and which--but no, not now, when you need repose! not now; to-morrow, perhaps, when these eyes may s.h.i.+ne more boldly, when the blood will run more warmly in this dear hand--the day after to-morrow--there is no hurry; you know that Gregorio Giraldi does not make his plans for a day."
"I know it," answered Valerie.
He now really left the room; Valerie listened, she heard his door shut, she was alone. She rose trembling limbs and tottered to the chair in which Elsa had sat, and there fell upon her knees, pressing her forehead against the back.
"And Thou knowest it, Almighty G.o.d! Thou hast sent me Thy angel, in token of Thy grace and mercy. I will trust in Thee faithfully. Thou wilt not suffer that this tyrant shall destroy Thy beautiful world."
CHAPTER VI.
Autumn had come, and was boisterously a.s.serting his authority; the weather was dark and gloomy, even in Reinhold's eyes. "The gloomiest and darkest I ever experienced," he said each morning to himself as the same spectacle always presented itself when he opened his window: dark, lowering clouds, trees swaying to and fro, from whose branches bl.u.s.tering winds were stripping the brown leaves and whirling them through the moist, foggy atmosphere across the roofs of the workshops, which looked so drenched and miserable that one would only have expected tombstones to be made there.
"And yet I have got through darker and gloomier days without losing heart," philosophised Reinhold further; "it is not the weather out of doors, it is that whichever way I turn I see people in need and trouble, as if I were on board a s.h.i.+p that must sink shortly and could do nothing to save it, but must sit with my hands before me, and look on idly at the catastrophe."
Reinhold could do nothing; of that he had only too soon convinced himself ever since that terrible morning when the General had come to his room, and in the deepest agitation, which even his iron strength could hardly master, had informed him of the conversation he had just had with Herr Schmidt, and its miserable results.
"T made every advance to your uncle," said the General, "which was possible to a man of honour. I offered to him and to your family the reparation which, at least in the eyes of the world, would put everything straight, and would secure to the young people the possibility of that happiness which they have so recklessly pursued. If they will find it in this way, G.o.d only knows, but that is their affair, and must be theirs. What I feel about it, what hopes I bury here, what a sacrifice I make of my personal convictions, is a matter that lies between my G.o.d and me. May G.o.d guide your uncle's heart, that he may put his trust in Him, as I do, in the inward conviction that our own wisdom will not help us here. I have come to you, my dear Schmidt, to say all this to you, not that I wish that you should try to influence your uncle; according to my judgment of him, that would be labour lost; but because I cannot endure the thought of being wrongly judged by a man whom we all think so highly of, and who, besides, is connected with me as a brother soldier, even if only for a short time."
Reinhold had, notwithstanding, followed the impulse of his heart, and attempted the impossible. He had been, for the first time since they had been together, harshly repulsed by his uncle, and had been forced to own to himself that neither he nor any other man could persuade the fiery-tempered old man to retract a decision once made "because he must." But when Aunt Rikchen, unable to rest from fear of the terrible _something_ in the air which yet she could not comprehend, found Ferdinanda an hour later lying senseless on the floor of her studio; when the unfortunate girl was raving in high fever, and the family doctor came and went with anxious looks, and soon returned in company with a colleague, and in the evening the two were joined by a third physician, who seemed no less helpless before this strange seizure--then, when Reinhold's first words, "It will kill her!" seemed likely to be so terribly soon fulfilled, he bethought himself of the General's fervent prayer that G.o.d might guide his uncle's heart, and sought his uncle, who had not left his room again since the morning, and asked him whether he would really allow his child to die when it was in his power to save her.
"I am convinced that you can save her," he cried; "that a word from you would pierce to her troubled mind through all the horrors of a fevered fancy, and that she would awake to a new life."
"And what would that word be?" asked Uncle Ernst.
"If your heart does not tell you, you would not understand it if I spoke it."
"My heart only tells me that it would be a lie," replied Uncle Ernst; "and as I understand life, no lie will restore it. What life would it be to which she would awake! Life at the side of a man whose courage holds out just so long as the darkness in which he has followed his course of intrigue; who only steps forth from that darkness when a villain tears off his mask, and he cannot endure his father's eye upon his miserable face; who would do what he must to-day, driven on by the reproaches of his conscience and fear of the world's opinion, only to repent it tomorrow from the same fear, and to hint it to her at first in a thousand different ways, and say it at last to her face. Is that a lot for a father to prepare for his child? No, never! Better a thousand times death, if she must needs die. Every man has his own way of looking at life, and this is mine; and no general officer, with I know not what confused ideas
"But you ought not to have urged Ferdinanda to a decision which cannot possibly have come from her heart."
"Are not you attempting something of the same kind at this moment?"
"I have no authority over you, and your mind is not torn by conflicting feelings as Ferdinanda's must have been in that unhappy hour."
"So much the better, that one of us at least should know what he wishes and wills."
That had been Uncle Ernst's last word, and he had said it with a calmness that to Reinhold was more terrible than the wildest outburst of pa.s.sion would have been.
And yet not so terrible as the smile with which the stubborn old man a few days later received the news that Ferdinanda was, in the doctor's opinion, out of danger.
Reinhold could not forget that smile; it haunted him even in his dreams. He had never seen the like on any human face; he could not even describe it to Justus, to whom he had repeatedly mentioned it, till one day he stopped with a sudden exclamation at a face that stared at him from the wall in a remote corner of the studio.
"Good heavens, Anders, what is this!"
"The mask of the Rhondonini Medusa," said Justus, looking up from his work.
"That was my uncle's smile."
"I dare say it was something like it," said Justus, coming up with his modelling-tool in his hand, "although I cannot quite reconcile Uncle Ernst's beard with the Medusa; but one sees sometimes such diabolical resemblances."
Justus's friends.h.i.+p was invaluable to Reinhold in these dark days; when he was almost giving way, the artist's perpetually cheerful temper would keep him up. "I cannot understand you," said Justus; "I certainly have every possible respect for Uncle Ernst's splendid qualities, and I take really a sincere interest in Ferdinanda, to say nothing of Aunt Rikchen, poor soul, who will soon have cried her eyes out; but sympathy and pity and all that sort of thing, like everything else in the world, must have its limits, and if anything of the kind affects my own life and incapacitates me from working--why, then, you see, Reinhold, I say with Count Egmont: 'This is a foreign drop within my veins!' and--out with it! Have you written to the President?"
"Three days ago."
"That's right. Heaven knows how sorry I shall be to lose you; but you have been here too long already. You ought to have a s.h.i.+p's planks under your feet again, and a northeaster whistling in your ears; that would soon blow your melancholy and hypochondria and all that well out of you, and clear your brain and your heart--you may take my word for it!"
"If only it comes to anything," said Reinhold; "I almost fear, as the answer is so long in coming, that my report may have roused bad feelings in the other department as well, as the General prophesied it would."
"Then we must think of something else," answered Justus; "so smart a vessel must not be left to rot in the stagnant waters of a port. For the present you can sit to me occasionally as a model for my bas-relief; not that I want you yet, but one must gather the roses ere they fade. I will take your head now at once, life-size, to be sure of you in any case." Justus set aside all other work, and busied himself over the designs for his bas-reliefs from morning till night, which came only too early for the busy worker. Two of them, the "March out"
and the "Battle," were already finished, and the "Ambulance preparations" had made great progress; but what was to be done about the "Return"? Heaven only knew! "And the idea was such a splendid one,"
cried Justus. "You had been promoted to be an officer meanwhile, and were to be standing at attention in the right corner, your eyes left towards the charming burgomaster's daughter, who, with the wreath in her hand, also turned her eyes right towards the smart lieutenant, while the two elders exchanged the most beautiful sentiments about union, peace, fraternity, and the like. Heaven help us! beautiful sentiments they have exchanged certainly! Those confounded politics!
for after all they are at the bottom of all this trouble. Why must that old Berserker go running about upon the barricades in '48! And he calls himself a Liberal now, and bottles up his anger for four and twenty years, and so spoils my splendid idea, for the idea was fairly embodied in those two. Who the devil is to make bas-reliefs from disembodied ideas! I, for one, can't do it; I gladly renounce the doubtful glory of being an inventor; my motto is: 'Seek, and you shall find!' I have held by it, and it has held by me. I have always found just what I wanted for the moment; it has fairly fallen in my way, I must have been blind not to see it; and this time it was just as if Abdallah's wonderful cave had opened before me: 'Diamonds, emeralds, rubies, only the way between them is narrow... the camels laden almost beyond their strength;' and now--just turn a little more to the right, my good fellow!--'one only, the last, remained to the dervish.' Admirable, my dear Reinhold, but, excepting you, every one of my splendid models has left me in the lurch; Uncle Ernst, the General, Ferdinanda--absolutely impossible! Aunt Rikchen declares that in such a time of trouble she cannot have anything to do with such nonsense--it would be quite wicked!--is not that good? Old Grollmann's face, I positively cannot see through his melancholy wrinkles; our worthy Kreisel, since he has given up Socialism and taken to speculation, has shrivelled up into a mere gra.s.shopper; dear Cilli even has only occasionally the sweet smile with which, gift in hand, she was to grope for the superintendent's table; and among the new workmen I cannot find a single decent model. A parcel of stupid, coa.r.s.e, sullen faces; and all comes from politics--those confounded politics!"
Thus Justus lamented, and between whiles laughed, over his own "splendid" idea, while he kneaded and moulded the wet clay incessantly in his busy hands, whose dexterity seemed miraculous to Reinhold, and then stepped back a few paces, nodding his half-bald head backwards and forwards, and shaking it gravely if he did not think he had succeeded, or whistling softly and contentedly if he was satisfied--which he generally had reason to be--in any case taking up again outwardly the work which he had not for a moment ceased mentally to carry on.
"I never know which to be most amazed at," said Reinhold; "your skill or your industry."
"It is all one," answered Justus; "a lazy artist is a contradiction in terms, at the best he is only a clever amateur. For what is the difference between artists and amateurs? That the amateur has the will and not the power--the will to do what he cannot accomplish; and the artist can accomplish what he will, and wills nothing but what he can accomplish. But to this point--to comparatively perfect mastery over the technicalities of his art and knowledge of its limits--he attains only through unremitting industry, which is no special virtue in him, but rather his very self, his very art. Or, to put it differently, his art is not merely his greatest delight, it is everything to him; he rises with his work as he went to bed with it, and if possible dreams of it too in the night. The world vanishes for him in his work, and it is just, therefore, that he creates a new world in his work. Of course this makes him one-sided, narrows him in a hundred other directions--you must have discovered long ago that I am insufferably stupid and ignorant; but ask the ants, who pursue their way, because it is the shortest, right across the beaten tracks, or the bee who commits murder so jovially in the autumn, and roves about in such idyllic fas.h.i.+on in the spring, or any of the other artistic creatures--the whole tribe of them is stupid, and narrow-minded, and barbarous, but they accomplish something. Look at my Antonio; he will never accomplish anything but hewing a figure out of the marble after a finished model, and working it up till it is ready to receive the last touches at the artist's hands, that is to say, being a first-cla.s.s workman. Why?
Because he has a thousand follies in his head, and in the front rank his own precious, conceited self. And then a feeling heart! Goethe, who was a real, true artist, though he did draw and paint some bad things, had his thoughts about that. The fellow--I don't mean Goethe, but Antonio--was good for nothing during the first days of Ferdinanda's illness, so that I had to send him away from his work altogether. What is Ferdinanda to him? Or, at any rate, what is she to him more than to me? and I have been able to work splendidly all these last days. And Ferdinanda herself! such a pity! She was absolutely standing on the threshold of the sanctuary, and yet she will never enter because she cannot grasp the stern saying over the door: 'Thou shalt have none other G.o.ds but me.' She has begun to work again, indeed, since yesterday; but defiance, and despair, and resignation, and all that--it may be all very fine; but it is not the muse. And neither is love the muse of art--let people say what they will. All this yearning of heart to heart, it is all very well, but just let a man try to work with a yearning heart, and see how soon his art gives way to the yearning! The artist must be cool to the centre of his heart. I have kept it so till now, and intend so to continue, and if ever you see the name of Justus Anders in a register of marriages, you need no longer look for it in the golden book of art; you would see a line drawn through the s.p.a.ce where it may once have stood in alphabetical order."
Reinhold would not allow this, any more than he would accept Justus's theory of the necessary one-sidedness of artists. He saw in the artist rather the complete, perfect man, to whom nothing in humanity was strange; the more than complete man even, who poured out his exuberant wealth, which otherwise must have overwhelmed him, in his works, and thus, beside the real world in which ordinary men dwelt, created for himself a second ideal world. And if Justus maintained that he had never loved, it might be true, although for his part he ventured slightly to doubt the strict truth of his a.s.sertion; but even if it were so, this great finder had merely not yet found the right object, and as he boasted of always finding the right object at the right moment, here, too, at the right moment the right object would certainly present itself.
"That is a most unartistic view of the matter, my dear Reinhold!" cried Justus. "We, who according to your ideas are something of demi-G.o.ds, know better with what groans and creaks these beautiful creations are brought into life, and that at the best of times, when things go as smoothly as possible, you cannot boil anything without water. And as for love, you certainly have more experience in that, and experience, said Goethe's grey friend at Leipzig, is everything; but very often it is better to be without that experience."
And Justus hummed the tune of "No fire, no coals, no ashes," as, with his modelling-tool grasped in both hands, he worked at the forehead of his clay figure.
"Do not give expression to such profane notions this evening at the Kreisels'," said Reinhold.
"Why not? It is the simple truth."
"May be so; but it hurts good little Cilli to hear such things, especially from your mouth."
"Why especially from my mouth?"