Page:Tales by Musæus, Tieck, Richter, Volume 2.djvu/121

Rh company, like me, with high people, with a Fräulein Thiennette, he soon knows whom he is speaking to, and what polished manners and Saver di veaver (Savoir vivre) require.”

He arrived with the Quintaner, and green fingers (dyed with the leaves he had plucked on the path), and with a half-nibbled rose between his teeth, in presence of the sleek lackeys of Schadeck.—If women are flowers,—though as often silk and Italian and gum-flowers as botanical ones,—then was Frau von Aufhammer a ripe flower, with (adipose) neck-bulb, and tuberosity (of lard). Already, in the half of her body, cut away from life by the apoplexy, she lay upon her lard-pillow but as on a softer grave: nevertheless, the portion of her that remained was at once lively, pious and proud. Her heart was a flowing cornucopia to all men, yet this not from philanthropy, but from rigid devotion: the lower classes she assisted, cherished and despised, regarding nothing in them, except it were their piety. She received the bowing Quintus with the back-bowing air of a patroness; yet she brightened into a look of kindliness at his disloading of the compliments from Thiennette.

She began the conversation, and long continued it alone, and said,—yet without losing the inflation of pride from her countenance: “She should soon die; but the god-children of her husband she would remember in her will.” Farther, she told him directly in the face, which stood there all over-written with the Fourth Commandment before her, that “he must not build upon a settlement in Hukelum; but to the Flachsenfingen Conrectorate (to which the Bürgermeister and Council had the right of nomination), she hoped to promote him, as it was from the then Bürgermeister that she bought her coffee, and from the Town-Syndic (he drove a considerable wholesale and retail trade in Hamburg candles) that she bought both her wax and tallow lights.”

And now by degrees he arrived at his humble petition, when she asked him sick-news of Senior Astmann, who guided himself more by Luther’s Catechism than by the Catechism of Health. She was Astmann’s patroness in a stricter than ecclesiastical sense; and she even confessed that she would soon follow this true shepherd of souls, when she heard, here at Schadeck, the sound of his funeral-bell. Such strange chemical af- Rh