Paul Laurenzano was brought to the house on the marketplace in order to
recover under the tender care of Erastus and Frau Belier from his
severe wounds. "The burns," said the physician to Herr Belier, after
that the patient had been put to bed in a room high above all noise
from the street, "are bad but not mortal. When two thirds of the skin
as in this case are uninjured the patient usually recovers. The joints
are wrenched but not torn. He is young and will survive, still he must
be a burden on you for some time, if he is not to suffer from the
consequences for the rest of his life."
"No Huguenot ever considers one unjustly persecuted as a burden," said
the Frenchman. "We know from experience what our duty requires."
Frau Belier cast the first kindly look at Felix since the melancholy
death of her parrot and said: "We shall soon have the poor young man up
on his legs again."
"I shall have time to aid you, noble lady," replied the young Maestro,
"I have been turned away from my work in the Castle."
"What! How ungrateful," cried Frau Belier and the others in one breath.
"The Kurfuerst must have been told to whom the reverend Parson Neuser
owed through a lucky _qui pro quo_ his escape. He paid me off and
ordered me at the same time to give up the plans of the Castle, I also
received a hint that in consequence of suspicious proceedings in
connection with Neuser's flight all foreigners had to leave the
castle."
"I cannot blame the noble gentleman," said Erastus. "He is naturally of
a mild disposition; spring cannot be milder. He would only have
punished Vehe and Suter by banishment, and he would have even forgiven
Neuser; it is quite proper that he should not permit any interference
in his affairs. It may be presumed that our friend would have had to
pay dearer for his gymnastics, were it not that the kind-hearted man is
weary of punishing, so that the daring brother escapes through Paul's
sufferings."
"It is the same with him as with me," replied Felix with a smiling side
glance at the plump hostess. "Had I not slaked my Neapolitan thirst for
blood on the parrot, neither this Hartmanni, nor Master Ulrich, nor
Pigavetta would have lived longer."
"Private justice is not necessary in this country, my dear friend,"
said Erastus. "Pigavetta will be prosecuted by law. The Magistrate is
_ab officio_ suspended, and punishment will be meted out to the other
wretches for their misdeeds."
"Would that Paul could only get the use of his limbs again by this
means," said Felix sighing.
"Remain with us, Master Laurenzano," said Belier, "and watch over your
brother. You can have a room near the beloved patient, and there work
at the plans of my new house. That is a quiet, serious occupation which
cannot disturb the sick man, and on the other hand the stillness of the
sick-room will be agreeable to your Muse. Design there the facade, and
therein strive to emulate that of the building of the deceased Count
Palatine, that is naturally, in so far as the house of a private
citizen can vie with that of a prince."
"Take now the hand of reconciliation," said Frau Belier. "There shall
no longer be any blood between us, I forgive you the death of the poor
parrot."
The architect seized the hand with a look of comical contrition. "I
cannot order masses to be read for the rest of the soul of one nipped
in the flower of his youth," he said, "but I will immortalise him on
the facade, and erect a monument to him in spite of many Counts."
While they were all thus joking together and forming plans for the
future, Klytia slipped quietly away. This merriment after the dreadful
visitations of the previous days grieved the kind-hearted child, and
she went upstairs to sit with the nurse, so as to be able to listen to
Paul's heavy breathing and feverish fantasies, in the room next to his.
His eyes gleamed like those of a prophet, his cheeks were tinged with a
feverish glow and an unearthly beauty had come over his idealised
features. His lips moved unceasingly, and it seemed as if the fever had
caused the long suppressed desire for companionship of this reserved
man to burst all sluices. Earliest impressions of youth were by this
revolution of his mental and physical life once more called to life. He
spoke oftenest with his mother calling her by pet names. "I shall
certainly never lie again," he said in the convinced tone of a small
child, calling tears to Lydia's eyes. Klytia herself was ever prominent
in his fantasies as a sister. "I really did not intend to do Lydia any
harm, Mother," he said. "I only wished to kiss her. Is that wrong?" and
so saying he tossed about. "If I were only not obliged to return to
that horrid school. But I will pretend to be as stupid as Bernardo the
hunch-back, then they will certainly expel me and say they do not
require me any longer." After a while he would cry out: "But mother
says I ought never to pretend." The terrors of the last days curiously
enough seemed to have made hardly any impression on his mind. He only
once said: "It is very well, that they beat me in this manner, now it
is all over and no one can again reproach me for anything." In general
all his worst impressions were connected with the school at Venice.
Pigavetta was a wicked teacher, Ulrich the executioner was the "brother
corrector," the Church counsellors represented the collegium of
professors, the remembrance of the present seemed on the other hand to
be entirely wiped away from his memory. But once only, as Felix sat at
his bed-side, did it seem to recur to him. With an expression of the
most intense moral fear he called out: "Save the parsons." Felix then
stooped over him and whispered in his ear: "I have freed Neuser, and
the others have been pardoned." "Oh!" sighed the sick man as if
relieved of a heavy burden and casting a piteously grateful look at his
brother. From that time his restlessness seemed to lessen gradually.
His strained expression disappeared. It was replaced by excessive
weakness. So soon as he awoke his nurse brought him some nourishment,
his wounds were dressed afresh, after which he immediately sank into
his somnolent state.
Felix had arranged his atelier near to Paul's bedroom and worked
quietly and diligently at his plans for Belier's new house. Klytia took
her place as nurse in the room between them so often as her duties
towards her father allowed her, and Frau Belier repeatedly put the
searching question to her towards which of the two rooms did her heart
most incline. Paul's presence had in fact the same influence on
Klytia's tender heart as formerly, without however detracting from her
feelings of gratitude and tender friendship towards Felix. In nursing
Paul she often met Felix and they neither seemed ever to consider the
question as to what should take place after Paul's recovery. Felix
however felt more and more distinctly that he loved the maiden in
reality only from an artistic point of view. His fiery nature required
a counterfoil, which would oppose a greater vivacity and capacity of
contradiction than was to be met with in Erastus' tender hearted
daughter. The daily scrimmages which he had with Frau Belier, in which
like two children with locked hands they endeavored each to bring the
other to its knees, developed his own inward strength rather than any
quiet thoughtful conversation with the German maiden. He was wont to
watch with artistic delight Lydia as sitting at her work she pondered
over her past or her future. It was impossible to have gazed on a more
lovely picture of a maiden mind buried in the sweet dream of the love
of a young life. The brow wrapt in thought, the mouth puckered up as if
seeking a kiss, the blooming cheeks, the full development of bust, on
which nature had lavished its riches with a bounteous hand, formed a
finished picture of beauty irresistible to the artist nature in Felix.
He quietly brought out one day a lump of modelling clay, and whilst
Lydia was sitting without any misgivings at her work near the window,
and dreamily listening to the breathing of the patient, the young
artist kneaded the plastic material and soon completed an exact
portrait of the thoughtful maiden. He formed the base as the calix of a
flower as he had seen in the antique busts in Rome and Florence. The
scented calix out of which Klytia arose was intended as a symbol of the
dreamy flower-life of young love, of the tender perfume full of
misgivings of a pure woman's mind, whose life is in part the existence
of a plant. Lydia became aware at last of what he was doing, as the
young Maestro looked intently at her, and then stepping to one side
appeared to be busy on some unusual piece of work. She arose and a look
of maidenlike severity came over her face on beholding a too faithful
representation of her charms. "Fie, how wrong," she blushingly
exclaimed. But the artist begged her so touchingly to resume her seat
and let him continue that she finally resigned herself. "What can I
otherwise grant him," she thought sadly, "when the heart belongs to the
other." The artist carefully examined each particular feature. "God
never created anything more beautiful than thou art," he said. When he
had finished he clapped his hands together, and repeated "splendid,
splendid" half aloud. She now stepped up quietly to him. "What mean
those leaves?"
"I have moulded thee as Goddess of flowers," he answered.
"As _Wegewarte_?" She looked up towards him with a sad smile. He
however lightly kissed her pure forehead: "As Klytia turning towards
her Sun-God." She held out her hand to him, and looked up gratefully
into his eyes. He pressed it as if bidding her farewell. Without that a
single word passed between them, they understood one another. Klytia
was free, he himself had released her from her promise.
She now went oftener than ever to the couch of the sick brother, cooled
his brow with damp cloths and bound up his wounds with the delicate,
apt hands of a woman.
Thus passed away peacefully the last sunny days of autumn, leaving to
all the inhabitants of the gable-house the precious impression, that
there was even something beautiful in the stillness of a sick-room, in
which no sounds were heard but the regular breathings of the patient,
the ticking of the large Nuremberg clock in the ante-chamber, and the
buzzing of the gnats on the diamond panes reflecting the sun. However
little the relations of the various persons seemed to have changed
outwardly, Erastus nevertheless felt the magnetic deviation which had
taken place in Lydia. Wearied from many visits, he sat down one
afternoon with his daughter near the chapel on the other side of the
bridge to enjoy the last sunny hours of the fleeting year. The
Heidelberg woods lay before them tinged with yellow, and their serrated
lines blue and indistinct melted away as some old poetic saw in the
autumn mist causing the mountains to appear higher than usual. Near to
the bench on which they sat, the blue flower bloomed by the wayside and
ever turned its calix to the sun. Lydia plucked one and pondered over
the world of experiences she had lived through in the short time since
Felix had related to her the fable out of Ovid. Her father looked
steadily at her and said: "Hast thou broken thy bonds towards Felix?"
"Felix remains a Papist," she answered evasively. "He cannot fulfil the
conditions which thou hast laid upon him."
"I release him from them," said Erastus. "Are we not all Papists since
we have Olevianus as our Pope, execute heretics, and that Theologians
assume to themselves not only the authority of Princes, but also that
of heads of houses, and fathers of families? Hardly any trace is left
of the freedom which Luther and Zwingli sought to introduce."
"Dost thou permit me then to marry a Catholic?"
"What right would I have to forbid? So often as I pass the square on
which was spilt the blood of my friend, the very stones cry out to me,
'thou hypocrite, in what art thou better than the Caraffas?' The
officium of the Calvinists has rendered me lenient towards index and
inquisition."
"And wilt thou be equally lenient," asked Lydia timidly, "if I marry
Paul?"
Erastus looked at her in amazement: "How? After that he plunged us all
in this misery, can'st thou not sever thy heart from him?"
"Ask this flower why it follows the course of the sun," said Lydia, "it
cannot do otherwise."
"But how can'st thou prefer the horrible Priest, this pale man broken
down in health to the straightforward, happy young Maestro?"
"I know not," said the maiden thoughtfully. "This love has deeper roots
than those of reason. In what does it consist? Merely in my love for
him, in that I cannot tear myself away from him. Not because he is
handsomer or wiser than others am I his, but only because I cannot live
away from him, because he is my Sun, without whom I should wither away
as does this flower in winter;" and she silently dried the tears which
rose to her eyes.
"He has suffered too severely for our sakes," answered Erastus after a
few moments of thought, "for me to say nay. It is God's decree, His
will be done."