Elective Affinities (35 page)

During this time Mittler had been calling more frequently and staying longer than had been his custom. The obstinate gentleman knew only too well that you must wait till the iron is hot before striking. He interpreted Ottilie’s silence and abstinence in a sense favourable to his own notions. Up to now no steps had been taken towards a divorce, and he hoped to be able to steer Ottilie’s fate in some other propitious direction. He listened, he yielded, he demurred, and, in his own fashion, behaved as prudently as might be desired.

Only, when opportunity arose for arguing about matters which he regarded as being of great weight, then he was always carried away. He was much given to introspection, and when he associated with others it was usually in the sense of actively assisting them. But if he once started talking among his friends, his loquacity would, as we have seen, go rolling heedlessly on, wounding or healing, harming or helping, just as it might turn out.

On the evening before Eduard’s birthday Charlotte and the Major were sitting together waiting for Eduard, who had gone out riding; Mittler was pacing up and down the room; Ottilie had stayed in her own room laying out her finery for the morrow and giving various silent instructions to Nanni, which the girl understood quite well and carried out very ably.

Mittler had just got on to one of his favourite topics. He was fond of asserting that nothing was more inept or barbaric, in the education of children or the government of peoples, than prohibitions, than prohibitive laws and regulations. ‘Man is by nature active,’ he said, ‘and if you know how to command him he will get on with whatever you will tell him to do. Speaking for myself, I prefer to tolerate crimes and errors in my own circle until such time as I am able to suggest a better alternative, rather than abolish the error without
having anything to put in its place. Man likes to do what is good and purposeful if only he can discover what it is; he does it so as to have something to do, and thinks no more about it than he does about the follies he commits through idleness and boredom.

‘How often it puts me out of humour to hear the way the Ten Commandments are repeated in Sunday school. The fifth is quite a nice, reasonable, positive commandment: Honour thy father and thy mother. If children inscribe that on their minds they can practise it the whole day long. But what is one to say of the sixth? Thou shalt not kill. As if anyone had the remotest desire to kill anyone else! You may hate someone, you may grow angry, you may act rashly, and as a consequence of this and of much else it may occasionally happen that you kill someone. But is it not a barbaric custom to forbid children to kill and murder? If it said: Care for thy neighbour’s life, remove what may be harmful to him, save him even at risk to thyself, if thou harmest him think thou harmest thyself – these are commandments that have a place among cultivated, rational peoples, yet when they are dragged into the catechism, it is only as a wretched footnote.

‘And as for the seventh, that one I find quite repulsive! What! Are we to stimulate children’s curiosity about dangerous mysteries of which they already have an inkling and excite their imaginations to strange ideas and images which are likely violently to precipitate precisely that which we want to keep from them? It would be far better for such things to be arbitrarily punished by a secret tribunal than for them to be blabbed about before church and congregation.’

At that moment Ottilie came in. – ‘Thou shalt not commit adultery,’ Mittler went on: ‘How coarse, how improper! Would it not sound far different if it said: Thou shalt reverence the marriage bond; where thou seest a loving husband and wife thou shalt rejoice thereat and be glad as at the happiness of a bright day. Should anything trouble their
relationship, thou shalt seek to rectify it: thou shalt seek to bring them to peace with one another, to make clear to them their mutual advantages, and with fine selflessness further their well-being by letting them feel what happiness lies in every duty and especially in that duty which binds man and wife indissolubly together.’

Charlotte was in an agony of apprehension. The situation was all the more dreadful for her in that she was convinced Mittler had no idea what he was saying or where he was saying it, and before she could interrupt him she saw Ottilie leave the room, her face and aspect transformed.

‘Perhaps you will spare us the eighth commandment,’ she said with a forced smile. ‘All the others,’ Mittler replied, ‘provided I can save that upon which they all rest.’

Rushing in with a shriek of horror, Nanni cried: ‘She’s dying! The lady’s dying! Come quick!’

When Ottilie had returned fainting to her room all the finery for the following day lay spread out over the chairs, and Nanni, who had been running about gazing upon it with wonder and admiration, cried out triumphantly: ‘Just look at it, miss! Clothes for a bride really worthy of you!’

Ottilie heard these words and sank down on the sofa. Nanni sees her mistress turn pale and motionless: she runs to Charlotte and they come along to the room. Their friendly physician comes hurrying up; it seems to him only a case of exhaustion. He has some strong broth prepared; Ottilie refuses it with a gesture of revulsion, indeed she is almost convulsed when they take the spoon to her mouth. He asks earnestly and urgently what Ottilie has had to eat that day. The girl falters; he repeats the question, and the girl confesses that Ottilie has had nothing to eat.

Nanni seems to him more frightened than she ought to be. He pulls her into a neighbouring room, Charlotte follows, the girl falls to her knees and confesses that for a long time now Ottilie has had as good as nothing to eat. At Ottilie’s
insistence she has eaten the food instead; she has kept silent about it because of her mistress’s silent entreaties and threats, and also, she added innocently, because it tasted so good.

Mittler and the Major came in and found Charlotte and the doctor busy with Ottilie. The beautiful child sat, pale and apparently conscious, in the corner of the sofa. They beg her to lie down; she refuses, but gestures to them to bring over the little chest. She places her feet upon it and finds this semi-recumbent position comfortable. She seems to be wanting to take her leave, her gestures seem to be expressing the tenderest attachment to those standing about her – love, gratitude, appeal for pardon, and the most heartfelt farewell.

Eduard returns and learns what has happened, he rushes into the room, he throws himself down beside her, clasps her hand and bathes it with silent tears. For long he remains thus, without moving. At last he cries: ‘Shall I never hear your voice again? Will you never return to this life with a word for me? Very well! I shall follow you across: there we shall speak together in another tongue!’

She grips his hand tightly, she gazes upon him with eyes full of life and love, and after drawing a deep breath, after an ethereal silent movement of the lips, ‘Promise me you will live!’ she cries with gentle exertion, and at once sinks back. ‘I promise!’ he cried to her – yet he only cried it after her, for she had already departed.

After a night of tears it fell to Charlotte to care for the interment of the dear remains. Mittler and the Major stood by her. Eduard’s condition was pitiable. As soon as he was able to emerge from his despair and come at all to his senses, he insisted that Ottilie should not be removed from the mansion but waited on and attended, and treated as a living person, for she was not dead, she could not be dead. They did as he wished, in as much as they did not do what he had forbidden. He did not ask to see her.

Yet another dreadful event now came to plague our friends. Nanni, whom the doctor had sternly reprimanded, forced to a confession by threats, and after the confession heaped with reproaches, had run away. After a long search she was found again; she seemed distracted. Her parents took her back into their care. No treatment, however kind, seemed to have any effect upon her and, since she threatened to run away again, she had to be locked in the house.

Gradually they succeeded in banishing the black despair into which Eduard was sunk, but it was only to transport him to a worse condition; for he now perceived, he was now convinced, that his life’s happiness was gone from him for ever. They ventured to suggest to him that if Ottilie were laid in the chapel she would still be among the living and would not lack a quiet friendly dwelling-place. It was hard to obtain his consent, and only on condition that she was carried there in an open coffin and the coffin was laid in the vault covered only by a glass lid and that an ever-burning lamp was set before it did he finally agree and seem to resign himself to everything.

They dressed the gentle body in the finery she herself had prepared; they set on her head a wreath of asters, which glittered strangely like melancholy stars. To decorate the bier, the church, the chapel, all the gardens were plundered. They lay deserted as if winter had already come and blotted out all their joy. In the early morning she was borne out of the mansion in an open coffin and the rising sun again brought a glow of red to her ethereal features. The mourners crowded about the pall-bearers: no one wanted to go on ahead or follow behind, they all wanted to press close to her and again, and for the last time still be with her. The boys, the men, the women: none was left unmoved. The girls, who felt their loss most immediately, were inconsolable.

Nanni was not there. They had kept her away, or rather concealed from her the day and hour of the funeral. She was
being kept at home with her parents in a room looking on to the garden. But when she heard the bells she soon realized what was going on, and when the woman who had been left to look after her slipped away to watch the
cortége
she climbed out of the window into a passageway and, since she found all the doors locked, up into the garret.

The
cortège
was just winding its way along the road through the village, which had been swept clean and then strewn with leaves. Nanni saw clearly her mistress below her, more clearly, more completely, more beautifully than any who were following. In an unearthly way, as if borne on clouds or the waves of the sea, she seemed to beckon to her servant, and Nanni, confused, trembling and giddy, fell down to the ground.

With a cry of horror the crowd scattered in all directions. The confusion and pressure compelled the bearers to set down the bier. The child lay quite close to it: she seemed to be shattered in every limb. They lifted her up and, either by chance or a dispensation of providence, they rested her over the corpse, indeed she herself seemed to be trying with her last remaining spark of life to reach her beloved mistress. But hardly had her lifeless limbs touched Ottilie’s dress, her powerless fingers touched Ottilie’s folded hands, than the girl sprang up, first raised her eyes and hands to heaven, then fell on her knees before the coffin and gazed up at her mistress in an ecstasy of amazement and devotion.

At length she sprang up as if inspired and exclaimed in tones of solemn joy: ‘Yes, she has forgiven me! What no man could forgive, what I could not forgive myself, God has forgiven through her glance, through her gestures, through her mouth. Now again she reposes so still and gentle: but you saw how she raised herself and blessed me with her hands, how she gazed on me with such friendly eyes! You all heard, you are witnesses, how she said to me: Thou art forgiven! – Now I am no longer a murderess among you; she
has pardoned me, God has pardoned me, and now no one can hold anything against me.’

The crowd stood pressing round her; lost in astonishment, they listened and gazed about them and hardly knew what to do next. ‘Now carry her to rest!’ said the girl: ‘she has done what it was hers to do and suffered what it was hers to suffer, and she can no longer dwell among us.’ The bier moved on, Nanni followed it at the head of the crowd, and they came to the church and the chapel.

And thus Ottilie’s coffin now stood enclosed in an oaken shrine, the dead child’s coffin at its head and her little casket at its foot. They had engaged a woman to keep watch over the body lying so fair under its glass cover, but Nanni insisted on performing this office herself: she wanted to stay there alone, without any companion, and tend the lamp now lit for the first time. So passionately and persistently did she demand it, they let her have her way for fear her mind might grow more unhinged if they refused.

But she was not alone for long: for as night was falling and the flickering light, now coming into its own, began to spread around a brighter glow, the door opened and the architect came into the chapel; and the chapel, with its piously decorated walls bathed in so gentle a light, seemed to him more ancient and mysterious than he had ever believed possible.

Nanni sat at one side of the coffin. She recognized him at once, but in silence she indicated her dead mistress. And so he stood on the other side, in the strength and charm of his youth, sunk in his own thoughts, motionless with drooping arms and piteously wringing his hands, his head bowed towards the inanimate form.

Once before he had stood thus, in the tableau of Belisarius. Now he involuntarily adopted the same posture, and as the posture had then been a natural one, so it was now. Here too something immeasurably fine had fallen from its heights;
and if, in the case of Belisarius, bravery, prudence, power, rank and wealth combined in one man was mourned as irretrievably lost, if qualities indispensable to the nation and its prince in times of crisis had, instead of being valued, been thrown aside and banished, so in the case of Ottilie many other quiet virtues not long since called forth by nature out of its capacious depths had quickly been obliterated again by its own indifferent hand: rare, beautiful virtues, whose peaceful influence the needy world in every age embraces with joy and satisfaction and longingly mourns for when it is gone.

The young man stood in silence, and the girl too stayed silent for a time; but when she saw tears flowing copiously from his eyes, when he seemed to be dissolving utterly in grief, she addressed him with such truth and force, with such kindness and certainty, that, astonished at her flow of speech, he was able to pull himself together, and in imagination he saw his fair friend alive and active in a higher region. His tears were dried, his grief was assuaged; on his knees he took his farewell of Ottilie, he pressed Nanni’s hand warmly in farewell, and that same night he rode away without having seen anyone else.