Softly he knocked at the door of the sick house, softly it was opened, softly he went up the stairs; nothing broke the silence but the sound of the clock, pealing like a funeral knell into the dumb house of sorrow, with its twelve strokes, a voice which he had so often heard there. Ah! there lay suffering in bed a form, which one will forgive all, and which one hastens to love and to cheer a little longer, ere it shall stir no more. Not the unclean, shriveled sick face, not the hue of life corroded by fever, not the wrinkles of the lip--not all of these was it in Amandus (nor is it in other invalids) which rent utterly Gustavus's heart and hopes, but the heavily rolling, spasmodically flashing, wild and yet burnt-out glassy sick eye, upon which all sufferings of past nights and the nearness of the last were so legibly written.
Amandus stretched _his_ dead hand far out to meet him, as if it were possible that any one else than he still remembered the black dyer's hand of _another_, which he had lately reached out to him. For him the reunion was sweeter than to Gustavus, who saw waiting behind it the long separation.
The morning and the joy arrested a little the curtain of his life as it fell. Gustavus took the place of the nurse; first, because she knew how to do everything so well and with so many circumstances and marginal notes, that she poured gall into his very last minutes; secondly, because, surely, in the hour when all nature in the company of death tears off from men with stern hand all finery and all articles of raiment which she had lent him, the only remaining solace for the impotent friends who cannot hold back this inexorable hand, is, during the unclothing, freezing and sinking to sleep of the friend, by unconditional compliance to all his whims, by indulgence of his capriciousness, to be still. Upon such services of heart and love toward poor dying men one looks back after many years with more satisfaction than upon those rendered to all well persons together--and yet the two classes are separated from each other by only a few hours; for thou dost not climb in and out of thy bed many times before thou ceasest to rise from it....
Dear Death! I think now of myself. If thou enterest one day into my lodging-room, pray do me the favor to shoot me down at my _secretaire_ or writing-table dead on the spot; lay me not, dear Death, behind the curtains of the sick-bed, nor hunt slowly with thy ripping knife after every vein to amputate it from life, so that I shall be compelled to gaze whole nights' long into the dissecting face, or that during thy long unraveling of my souls raiment all shall be stepping up and looking on in good health: the Captain, the Pestilentiary and my good sister. But if the Evil One possesses thee, so that thou canst not listen to reason, then, dear Death, as no hell lasts forever, I will not, after a thousand vexations, vex myself about the last.