Part 7 (1/2)

He took the young man's hand. ”Bring me the mayor this evening, and the priest and bailiff as witnesses. You are now my son, and this is the spirit I shall now make my will in. I feel it is high time; for it would be horrible if Helbach were to fling all my fortune to the dogs.

O if I could but totally forget this shot and Eleazar! if such wild thoughts did not keep rus.h.i.+ng about in my brain! Now you and Rose will stay with me.”

Edward withdrew. He went to look for Rose in her room. She burst out a-crying, jumpt up from her chair, and threw herself into the young man's arms with an expression of the fondest affection. ”Alas Edward!”

she cried sobbing, and hid her face on his breast: ”only look now at what I have to go through in my youth. This was never sung over me in my cradle, that I should lose my husband in so shocking a manner, and even before our wedding. And the last thing I should have thought of was that you were to shoot him dead, you, the dearest and kindest of all men.--Alas! poor, poor Eleazar! when he came from nature's hands, such an odious misshapen abortion of a man! And now into the bargain to steal, to lie, and to cheat! to rob my good father, who meant to give him everything! What will become of his poor soul now? Oh yes, he has perisht still more cruelly, he is much more unhappy than my cat with her kittens, that he shot so barbarously on the orange tree. Alas Edward! are you then in real truth such a good creature, as I have always believed you? or are you perchance very wicked too? You did not mean it, did you? that Eleazar should die so?”

Edward took pains to explain the nature of the whole affair to her.

”Be composed,” he continued; ”the course of our lives here has suddenly undergone a violent change; we must all overcome this shock, to get back again into the path of our ordinary duty. A few days since you were sorry that I was going away; if it can give you any comfort, let me a.s.sure you that for the present at least I shall and must stay here. Do you still wish that I should?”

She gazed at him affectionately and seemed comforted. ”So then that is settled now!” she exclaimed: ”ah yes, I always thought you would stay; for I can't live without you; and my father can't live without you; and all our poor workmen and spinners, our good miners, for whom you are always saying and doing something, and who, when they come for their wages or for relief, look with their whole souls into your kind eyes, these above all can never live without you.”

”This calamity,” said Edward, ”may hereafter make you, your father, me, and all of us happy. The discovery was inevitable; and perhaps, if it had not taken place now, it would have come at a time when it would have plunged us all in misery.”

”If my father now,” said Rose, ”were to have no objection, I might perhaps in time accustom myself to look upon you as my future husband.

If I could but feel a little more respect and awe for you! If you would behave very roughly to me now and then, not always so kindly, but angrily and savagely at times, I might by and by grow reconciled to it.”

Edward went to his business. The uprore had ceast, and the whole house was now quiet and silent: it seemed as if people were afraid of even breathing: all walkt about softly and on tiptoe. News came that Eleazar was dead.

Toward evening Edward went with the mayor and witnesses into old Balthasar's room. He was surprised to find him in bed. On being spoken to by his visitors he lifted himself up, stared fixedly at them, and seemed to know no one. ”Aha! reverend Sir,” he cried out after a while, ”you are come to fetch away a second poor sinner today. It is a busy time in your vocation. Is master Eleazar come with you?”

He beckoned to Edward. ”Thou yellow blockhead!” he whispered to him; ”what am I to do with thy gold bars that thou hast left me? don't thrust thy stupid cheat into men's eyes so ... it is far too glaring.

But beware of Edward, he is wise and good. If he should ever suspect thee, thou art lost.”

He talkt to the others, but still quite at random, and was taken up with the phantoms of his own brain. The mayor and witnesses retired, and Edward went after the physician. The business of drawing up the will was put off, until the sick man should have recovered and be restored to his perfect consciousness.

The physician found the patient's state very alarming. Edward was called up in the night; but when he entered the room Herr Balthasar had already breathed his last.

The dismay, the sorrow was universal. The mayor sent to have everything sealed up. In the midst of this confusion, it seemed a matter of very little moment that the Hungarian had found means to escape from his prison.

In the town where the extravagant counsellor Helbach lived, there was a great feast at which all the epicures famous for their love of good eating and their knowledge of good dishes were a.s.sembled. The counsellor himself was the soul of such parties: his word was law in them; and he it was that had managed the present banquet.

The dinner was nearly over; some of the guests, who had business to call them away, were gone: the company had grown quieter; and it was only at the upper end of the table, where the counsellor and some of the scientific eaters were sitting, that the conversation was carried on with any spirit.

”Believe me, my friends,” said the counsellor with great earnestness, ”the art of eating, the skill men may attain in it, has its epochs, its cla.s.sical ages, and its decline, corruption, and dark ages, just as much as every other art; and it seems to me that we are now again verging to a kind of barbarism in it. Luxury, profusion, rarities, new dishes, overpeppering, overspicing, all these, my good sirs, are the artifices now commonly made use of to obtain admiration for a dinner; and yet these are the very things from which a thinking eater will turn away with contemptuous slight. In the whole of this department indeed much still remains to be done; and the stories we read of the old gormandizer, Heliogabalus, and others who lived during the decrepitude of the Roman empire, stories at which many men stare with stupid astonishment, ought only to excite our pity.”

”It must always be difficult no doubt,” said one of the guests, ”to frame any distinct conception of the dishes and the delicacies of a former age. If we dress them by such receits as remain, the result will always have something absurd in it, like the dinner which Smollett describes so humourously in his _Peregrine Pickle_.”

”That tact on which after all everything depends,” answered the counsellor, ”is sure to be wanting, that nice knowledge of the exact limit between too much and too little which nothing but instinct can bestow; and even this instinct must be cultivated by studying the properties of fire, the culinary powers of which can never be described, and which a cook can only make himself master of by long experience, judgement, and observation, nor even then unless he was born a cook. The main point however is, that our tongue and palate have been trained and fas.h.i.+oned from our childhood to particular tastes, likings, and antipathies; so that often the very best, most judicious, and admirable thing, if it come across us on a sudden as a novelty, as something we have never set tooth on, and thus give a shock to all our prepossessions, will be disregarded and abused; until at length in course of time on our becoming familiar with the stranger's merits, he is naturalized: and then the new knowledge we have acquired will often exercise the most salutary influence and throw much light on other dishes, both old and lately invented ones, so that our palate is as it were strung with a new chord, which sends forth a variety of delicious notes. Moreover the ages that are gone and the ideas that prevailed among our forefathers are still acting upon this _tastature_ of mankind, as a race made to relish, to discern, and to enjoy; and as in philosophy and science, in politics and government, so here too there is an unbroken chain; the acc.u.mulated experience of centuries moulded us to be just such as we are; and this state of our taste can and must only be modified by degrees; nor could anything be more ruinous than a sudden revolution which should throw everything topsy turvy. In every field of human action history is man's best master.”

”You yourself,” said the guest, ”should write a history of the articles of food, the art of eating, and the progress of the human mind in it.”

”When one is oneself a practical artist,” answered the counsellor, ”and so devoted a one as I am, so diligent in working at my art, and so ready to try every new experiment in it, one must leave such matters to people of an idler and more contemplative turn. If you aim at doing everything, you will never do anything well and thoroughly.”

”Why,” resumed the other, ”do we hear this perpetual abuse of sensuality? why will men so seldom confess, and even then but reluctantly, the pleasure they take in eating and drinking?”

”Because,” said counsellor Helbach, ”they never know what they are really at. It has always struck me as very remarkable and singular that, in the little round box in which all our finer senses are ranged and stored up, and in the top of which moreover our thinking powers, and all the n.o.blest intellectual products of our soul are deposited, we should find that red-lined drawer close beneath, with the delicate little bosses set like jewels over the tremulous vocal tongue and palate, garnisht in front with teeth that toil and cut, and closed by the graceful mouth. Eating is only another mode of thinking. Thus this box is a coppel in which the essences of all created things, the finest and the grossest, vapours and juices, the soft soothing oils, the bitternesses and tartnesses which at first seem grating, the flavour which evaporates in a momentary enjoyment, are put to the test. First the teeth begin chopping and grinding; the tongue, at other times so talkative, silently and busily rolls about and makes much of the morsels it receives, presses them affectionately and benevolently against the palate, to double its pleasure by sharing it; and when this tender dalliance has been sufficiently indulged in, at length pushes them back almost unwillingly to its friend that swallows them down, and that indeed has the real enjoyment of them, the highest of all, though but for a moment, and then with heroic self-sacrifice makes them over to another power. Straightway the same game is repeated a second, a third, a thousandth time. I never yet heard it said that any self-tormenting anch.o.r.et had courage enough altogether to forgo the pleasure of eating, even though he stinted himself to bread. Indeed kind Nature has taken such good care of her children, that it is next to impossible.”