Toward the end of October, and before the negotiations in regard to the army appointment were concluded, the young man was released from the hospital, and placed under the control of the master, with the injunction that he be removed from Vienna at once.  At this juncture brother Johann placed his country house at Gneixendorf at the disposal of the master and nephew, and thither the two repaired, the elder, stricken, bowed with grief; the youth, sullen and indifferent.  The master had never entered Johann’s house since the summer of 1812, when he had tried so ineffectually, as noted in a previous chapter, to break up the relations existing between the pair while the lady was as yet only the housekeeper.  It must have been with great reluctance that he considered visiting him at all.  The sacrifice, if such there was, was made in the interest of Karl; where this young scapegrace was concerned, the master was generally willing to sink his own preferences.  The situation must have been embarrassing for all concerned, less so in reality for the master than for the others.  Absorbed in the composition of the new finale, and also in the finishing up of the great C sharp minor Quartet, he was for the most part oblivious to anything unusual in his surroundings.  Johann’s wife, with the policy of her class, bore no resentment, or at least showed none outwardly.  A pleasant room on the ground floor was fitted up for him, but the welcome must have been a cold one at best.

No doubt the Gutsbesitzer took much pleasure in showing off his possessions to the brother whom he knew had little esteem for him at heart.  He paraded his own importance in the neighborhood, taking the composer on business visits to prominent people.  On these occasions he would not usually introduce his brother, treating him as a kind of appendage.  The master, deep in the thought of creative work, was, no doubt, to a great extent unconscious of this sordidness.  At all events he gave no sign.  But he contributed very little to the social well-being of the family.  Two aims only seem to have occupied his mind at this time:  the welfare of his nephew, and the carrying to completion of a few great works already sketched or begun.  These included a Tenth Symphony, (for the Philharmonic Society of London), the Oratorio, The Victory of the Cross, for the Vienna Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde, music to Goethe’s Faust, which latter he must have been in good mood for,—­as well as an overture on Bach.  “I hope yet,” he writes from Johann’s home, “to bring some great works into the world, and then like an old child, to close my earthly career somewhere among good people.”  He worked with feverish haste in the latter years of his life, whenever his health permitted, even abandoning his books in favor of his work.  Failing health prevented him from forcing it ahead as in former years, but he worked up to the limit of his powers.