Oh, so it is ever! So does Fate set fire to the theatre of our little
plays, and our bright-painted curtain of Futurity! So does the
Serpent of Eternity wind round us and our joys, and crush, like the
royal-snake, what it does not poison! Thou good Fixlein!--Ah! last
night, I little thought that thou, mild soul, while I was writing
beside thee, wert already journeying into the poisonous Earth-shadow of
Death.
Last night, late as it was, he opened the lead box found in the old
steeple-ball; a catalogue of those who had subscribed to the last
repairing of the church was there; and he began to read it now; my
presence and his occupations having prevented him before. O, how shall
I tell that the record of his birth-year, which I had hidden in the new
Ball, was waiting for him in the old one; that in the register of
contributions he found his father's name, with the appendage, "given
for his new-born son Egidius?"--
This stroke sunk deep into his bosom, even to the rending of it
asunder; in this warm hour, full of paternal joy, after such fair days,
after such fair employments, after dread of death so often survived,
here, in the bright, smooth sea, which is rocking and bearing him
along, starts snorting, from the bottomless abyss, the sea-monster
Death; and the monster's throat yawns wide, and the silent sea rushes
into it in whirlpools, and hurries him along with it.
But the patient man, quietly and slowly, and with a heart silent,
though deadly cold, laid the leaves together; looked softly and firmly
over the churchyard, where, in the moonshine, the grave of his father
was to be distinguished; gazed timidly up to the sky, full of stars,
which a white overarching laurel-tree screened from his sight;--and
though he longed to be in bed, to settle there and sleep it off, yet he
paused at the window to pray for his wife and child, in case this night
were his last.
At this moment the steeple-clock struck twelve; but, from the breaking
of a pin, the weights kept rolling down, and the clock-hammer struck
without stopping,--and he heard with horror the chains and wheels
rattling along; and he felt as if Death were hurling forth in a heap
all the longer hours which he might yet have had to live,--and now, to
his eyes, the churchyard began to quiver and heave, the moonlight
flickered on the church-windows, and in the church there were lights
flitting to and fro, and in the charnel-house was a motion and a
tumult.
His heart fainted within him, and he threw himself into bed, and closed
his eyes that he might not see;--but Imagination in the gloom now blew
aloft the dust of the dead, and whirled it into giant shapes, and
chased these hollow, fever-born masks alternately into lightning and
shadow. Then at last from transparent thoughts grew colored visions,
and he dreamed this dream. He was standing at the window looking out
into the churchyard; and Death, in size as a scorpion, was creeping
over it, and seeking for his bones. Death found some arm-bones and
thigh-bones on the graves, and said, "They are my bones"; and he took a
spine and the bone-legs, and stood with them, and the two arm-bones and
clutched with them, and found on the grave of Fixlein's father a skull,
and put it on. Then he lifted a scythe beside the little flower-garden,
and cried: "Fixlein, where art thou? My finger is an icicle and no
finger, and I will tap on thy heart with it." The Skeleton, thus piled
together, now looked for him who was standing at the window, and
powerless to stir from it; and carried in the one hand, instead of a
sand-glass, the ever-striking steeple-clock, and held out the finger of
ice, like a dagger, far into the air....
Then he saw his victim above at the window, and raised himself
as high as the laurel-tree to stab straight into his bosom with the
finger,--and stalked towards him. But as he came nearer, his pale bones
grew redder, and vapors floated woolly round his haggard form. Flowers
started up from the ground; and he stood transfigured and without the
clamm of the grave, hovering above them, and the balm-breath from the
flower-cups wafted him gently on;--and as he came nearer, the scythe
and clock were gone, and in his bony breast he had a heart, and on his
bony head red lips;--and nearer still, there gathered on him soft,
transparent, rosebalm-dipped flesh, like the splendor of an Angel
flying hither from the starry blue;--and close at hand, he was an Angel
with shut snow-white eyelids....
The heart of my friend, quivering like a Harmonica-bell, now melted in
bliss in his clear bosom;--and when the Angel opened its eyes, his were
pressed together by the weight of celestial rapture, and his dream fled
away.----
But not his life; he opened his hot eyes, and--his good wife had hold
of his feverish hand, and was standing in room of the Angel.
The fever abated towards morning; but the certainty of dying still
throbbed in every artery of the hapless man. He called for his fair
little infant into his sick-bed, and pressed it silently, though it
began to cry, too hard against his paternal, heavy-laden breast. Then
towards noon his soul became cool, and the sultry thunder-clouds within
it drew back. And here he described to us the previous (as it were,
arsenical) fantasies of his usually quiet head. But it is even those
tense nerves, which have not quivered at the touch of a poetic hand
striking them to melody of sorrow, that start and fly asunder more
easily under the fierce hand of Fate, when with sweeping stroke it
smites into discord the firm-set strings.
But towards night his ideas again began rushing in a torch-dance, like
fire-pillars round his soul; every artery became a burning-rod, and the
heart drove flaming naphtha-brooks into the brain. All within his soul
grew bloody; the blood of his drowned brother united itself with the
blood which had once flowed from Thiennette's arm, into a bloody
rain;--he still thought he was in the garden in the night of
betrothment, he still kept calling for bandages to stanch blood, and
was for hiding his head in the ball of the steeple. Nothing afflicts
one more than to see a reasonable, moderate man, who has been so even
in his passions, raving in the poetic madness of fever. And yet if
nothing save this mouldering corruption can soothe the hot brain; and
if, while the reek and thick vapor of a boiling nervous-spirit and the
hissing water-spouts of the veins are encircling and eclipsing the
stifled soul, a higher Finger presses through the cloud, and suddenly
lifts the poor bewildered spirit from amid the smoke to a sun,--is it
more just to complain, than to reflect that Fate is like the oculist,
who, when about to open to a blind eye the world of light, first
bandages and darkens the other eye that sees?
But the sorrow does affect me, which I read on Thiennette's pale lips,
though do not hear. It is not the distortion of an excruciating agony,
nor the burning of a dried-up eye, nor the loud lamenting or violent
movement of a tortured frame, that I see in her; but what I am forced
to see in her, and what too keenly cuts the sympathizing heart, is a
pale, still, unmoved, undistorted face, a pale, bloodless head, which
Sorrow is as it were holding up after the stroke, like a head just
severed by the axe of the headsman; for oh! on this form the wounds,
from which the three-edged dagger had been drawn, are all fallen firmly
together, and the blood is flowing from them in secret into the choking
heart. O Thiennette, go away from the sick-bed, and hide that face
which is saying to us: "Now do I know that I shall not have any
happiness on Earth; now do I give over hoping,--would this life were
but soon done!"
You will not comprehend my sympathy, if you know not what, some hours
ago, the too loud lamenting mother told me. Thiennette, who of old had
always trembled for his thirty-second year, had encountered this
superstition with a nobler one; she had purposely stood farther back at
the marriage-altar, and in the bridal-night fallen sooner asleep than
he; thereby--as is the popular belief--so to order it that she might
also die sooner. Nay, she has determined, if he die, to lay with his
corpse a piece of her apparel, that so she may descend the sooner to
keep him company in his narrow house. Thou good, thou faithful wife,
but thou unhappy one!--