Doctor Fenk had not in his face the apprehension of a coming loss, but grief for a present one; he regarded his son as a shattered porcelain vase, whose shards one sets up again in its old combination on the toilet-table and which at the least agitation thereof will fall asunder. He therefore no longer forbade him anything. He even received some male patients, "because he had one in his house and would fain _cure away_ the thought of him." The patient himself already heard the murmur of the evening-wind of his life. A few weeks before he had indeed still believed that in the spring he might drink the Scheerau mineral waters in Lilienbad, and then it would be quite different with him. (Poor, sick man! it has become different with thee sooner than that!) Only a certain fever-vision, which he did not reveal, pronounced sentence upon his sick life; and his superstitious reliance upon this dream was so firm that since that he had no longer watered his flower-bushes, had given away his birds, and extinguished all wishes excepting the wish for Gustavus.
The very next day happened to be market day. This tumult had too much life in it for years consecrated to the stillness of death, and Gustavus had to sit by his bed that during the talking and listening he might not be able to lend an ear to the din below. Gustavus was startled when at length he asked him suddenly and eagerly, did he still love Beata? He evaded the "Yes," but Amandus summoned up the little life that still glowed in his nerves, and said, though with long pauses after every sentence: "Ah, take not thy heart from her--O, if thou knowest her as I do--I was often with her father--I saw with what mute patience she bore his heat--how she took upon herself the faults of her mother--full of goodness, full of gentleness, full of tenderness, full of lowliness, full of intelligence--such she is--all, but for her image there had been little joy in my life--give me thy hand and say that thou lovest her more than me." He himself took it; but the taking pained his friend.
Suddenly there darted into the veins of his sunken cheeks perhaps the last flush of shame, which often, like a flush of morning redness, comes as the swift forerunner of a good deed; he asked for his father to be brought to him. To him he, with so much fire, with so much longing in eyes and lips, made the request--to fetch Beata, who surely could not refuse the last prayer of a dying man, that the father himself could not refuse it; but promised (despite the sense of impropriety) to drive over to her mother, and through her to persuade the daughter, and to bring them both. Fenk knew that in his whole sickness no refusal had done any good--that, if he should see his son lying there dead from the frustration of his last wish, he should not be able to bear the thought of having embittered for that dead one the dying moments which he still drained from the cup of life, and that mother and daughter were too good not to act toward his son like himself. In short, he started.