"Why not now and for ever?" said she in a murmur.
"Here nothing is permanent!" said he in a tone of scorn. "The transient joys of earthly love are false lights which reveal to some souls the dawn of more durable bliss, just as the discovery of a law of nature enables certain privileged minds to deduct a whole system. Is not our perishable happiness here below an earnest of some other more perfect happiness, as the earth, a mere fragment of the universe, testifies to the universe? We cannot measure the orbit of the Divine mind, of which we are but atoms as minute as God is great; but we may have our intuitions of its vastness, we may kneel, adore, and wait. Men are constantly mistaken in their science, not seeing that everything on their globe is relative and subordinate to a general cycle, an incessant productiveness which inevitably involves progress, and an aim. Man himself is not the final creation; if he were, God would not exist."
"How have you had time to learn so many things?" said the girl.
"They are memories," replied he.
"To me you are more beautiful than anything I see."
"We are one of the greatest works of God. Has He not bestowed on us the faculty of reflecting nature, concentrating it in ourselves by thought, and making it a stepping-stone from which to fly to Him? We love each other in proportion to what is heavenly in our souls.—But do not be unjust, Minna; look at the scene displayed at our feet; is it not grand? The ocean lies spread like a floor, the mountains are like the walls of an amphitheatre, the ether above is like the suspended velarium of the theatre, and we can inhale the mind of God as a perfume.
"Look! the storms that wreck vessels filled with men from hence appear like mere froth; if you look above you all is serene; we see a diadem of stars. The shades of earthly expression are here lost. Thus supported by nature so attenuated by space, do you not feel your mind to be deep rather than keen? Are you not conscious of more loftiness than enthusiasm, of more energy than will? Have you not feelings to which nothing within us can give utterance? Do you not feel your wings?—Let us pray!"
Seraphitus knelt, crossing his hands over his bosom, and Minna fell on her knees weeping. Thus they remained for some minutes, and for some minutes the blue halo that quivered in the sky above them spread, and rays of light fell round the unconscious pair.
"Why do you not weep when I cannot help it?" said Minna in a broken voice.
"Those who are pure in spirit shed no tears," replied Seraphitus, rising. "Why should I weep? I no longer see human misery. Here all is good and shines in majesty. Below I hear the supplications and the lament of the harp of suffering, sounding under the hands of the spirit held captive. Here I listen to the concert of harmonious harps. Below, you have hope, the beautiful rudiment of faith; but here faith reigns, the realization of hope!"
"You can never love me, I am too imperfect; you disdain me," said the girl.
"Minna, the violet hidden at the foot of the oak says to itself, 'The sun does not love me, he never comes.'—The sun says, 'If I fell on her, that poor little flower would perish!' Because he is the flower's friend he lets his beams steal through the oak-leaves, subduing them to tint the petals of the blossom he loves.—I feel I am not sufficiently shrouded, and fear lest you should see me too clearly; you would quail if you knew me too well. Listen; I have no taste for the fruits of the earth; I have understood your joys too well; like the debauched Emperors of Pagan Rome, I am disgusted with all things, for I have the gift of vision.—Leave me for ever," added Seraphitus sorrowfully.
He went away to sit down on a projecting rock, his head drooping on his breast.
"Why thus drive me to despair?" said Minna.
"Go from me!" cried Seraphitus; "I can give nothing that you want. Your love is too gross for me. Why do you not love Wilfrid? Wilfrid is a man, a man tested by passion, who will clasp you in his sinewy arms, and make you feel his broad, strong hand. He has fine black hair, eyes full of human feeling, a heart that fires the words of his lips with a lava torrent. He will crush you with caresses. He will be your lover, your husband. Go to Wilfrid!"
Minna was crying bitterly.
"Dare you tell me that you do not love him?" he added in a voice that pierced her like a dagger.
"Mercy! Mercy! My Seraphitus!"
"Love him, poor child of earth, to which fate irrevocably rivets you," said the terrible Seraphitus, seizing the girl with such force as dragged her to the brink of the sœter, whence the prospect was so extensive that a young creature full of enthusiasm might easily fancy that she was above the world. "I wanted a companion to go with me to the realm of light; I thought to show her this ball of clay, and I find you still cling to it. Adieu! Remain as you are, enjoy through your senses, obey your nature; turn pale with pale men, blush with women, play with children, pray with sinners, look up to heaven when you are stricken; tremble, hope, yearn; you will have a comrade, you still may laugh and weep, give and receive.—For me—I am an exile far from heaven; like a monster, far from earth! My heart beats for none; I live in myself, for myself alone. I feel through my spirit, I breathe by my brain, I see by my mind, I am dying of impatience and longing. No one here below can satisfy my wishes or soothe my eagerness; and I have forgotten how to weep. I am alone.—I am resigned, and can wait."
Seraphitus looked at the flowery knoll on which he had placed Minna, and then turned towards the frowning summits, round whose peaks heavy clouds had gathered, into which he seemed to fling his next thoughts.
"Do you hear that delightful music, Minna?" said he, in his dove-like tones, for the eagle had ended his cry. "Might one not fancy that it was the harmony of those Eolian harps which poets imagine in the midst of forests and mountains? Do you see the shadowy forms moving among those clouds? Do you discern the winged feet of those who deck the sky with such hangings? Those sounds refresh the soul; Heaven will ere long shed the blossoms of spring, a flash blazes up from the Pole. Let us fly—it is time!"
In an instant they had replaced their snow-shoes and were descending the Falberg by the steep slopes down to the valley of the Sieg. Some miraculous intelligence guided their steps—or rather their flight. When a crevasse covered with snow lay before them, Seraphitus seized Minna, and with a swift rush dashed, scarce the weight of a bird, across the frail bridge that covered a chasm. Many a time, by just pushing his companion, he deviated slightly to avoid a cliff or tree, a block of stone which he seemed to see through the snow, as certain mariners, accustomed to the sea, discern a shoal by the color, the eddy, and the recoil of the water.
When they had reached the roads of the Siegdahl, and they could proceed without hesitation in a straight line down to the ice on the fiord, Seraphitus spoke.
"You have nothing more to say to me?" he asked Minna.
"I fancied," replied the girl respectfully, "that you wished to think in silence."
"Make haste, pretty one, the night is falling," said he.
Minna was startled at hearing the new voice, so to speak, in which her guide spoke. A voice as clear as a girl's, dissipating the fantastic flashes of the dream in which she had been walking. Seraphitus was abdicating his manly strength, and his looks were losing their too keen insight. Presently the fair couple were gliding across the fiord; they reached the snowy level that lay between the margin of the bay and the first houses of Jarvis; then, urged by the waning light, they hurried up to the parsonage as if climbing the steps of an enormous stairway.
"My father will be uneasy," said Minna.
"No," said Seraphitus.
At this moment they stopped at the porch of the humble dwelling where Pastor Becker, the minister of Jarvis, sat reading while awaiting his daughter's return to supper.
"Dear Pastor Becker," said Seraphitus, "I have brought your daughter back safe and sound."
"Thank you, mademoiselle," said the old man, laying his spectacles on the book. "You must be tired."
"Not in the least," said Minna, on whose brow her companion had just breathed.
"Dear child, will you come to tea with me the evening after to-morrow?"
"Pastor Becker, will you bring her?"
"Yes, mademoiselle."
Seraphitus nodded prettily, bowed to the old man, and left, and in a few minutes was in the courtyard of the Swedish Castle. An old servant of eighty came out under the wide veranda carrying a lantern. Seraphitus slipped off the snow-shoes with the grace of a woman, ran into the sitting-room, dropped on to a large divan covered with skins, and lay down.
"What will you take?" said the old man, lighting the enormously long tapers that are used in Norway.
"Nothing, David; I am too tired."
Seraphitus threw off the sable-lined pelisse, wrapped it about him, and was asleep. The old servant lingered a few minutes in loving contemplation of the strange being resting under his gaze, and whose sex the most learned man would have been puzzled to pronounce on. Seeing him as he lay, wrapped in his usual garment, which was as much like a woman's dressing-gown as a man's overcoat, it was impossible to believe that the slender feet that hung down, as if to display the delicacy with which nature had moulded them, were not those of a young girl; but the brow, the profile, seemed the embodiment of human strength carried to its highest pitch.
"She is suffering, and will not tell me," thought the old man. "She is dying like a flower scorched by too fierce a sunbeam."
And the old man wept.
II.
SERAPHITA.
In the course of the evening David came into the drawing-room.
"I know who is coming," said Seraphita in a sleepy voice. "Wilfrid may come in."
On hearing these words, a man at once appeared, and came to sit down by her.
"My dear Seraphita, are you ill? You look paler than usual."
She turned languidly towards him, after tossing back her hair like a pretty woman overpowered by sick headache and too feeble to complain.
"I was foolish enough," said she, "to cross the fiord with Minna; we have been up the Falberg."
"Did you want to kill yourself?" cried he, with a lover's alarm.
"Do not be uneasy, my good Wilfrid, I took great care of your Minna."
Wilfrid struck the table violently with his hand, took a few steps towards the door with an exclamation of pain; then he came back and began to reproach her.
"Why so much noise if you suppose me to be suffering?" said Seraphita.
"I beg your pardon, forgive me," said he, kneeling down. "Speak harshly to me, require anything of me that your cruel woman's caprice may suggest to you as hardest to be endured, but, my beloved, do not doubt my love! You use Minna like a hatchet to hit me with again and again. Have some mercy!"
"Why speak thus, my friend, when you know that such words are useless?" she replied, looking at him with a gaze that became at last so soft that what Wilfrid saw was not Seraphita's eyes, but a fluid light shimmering like the last vibrations of a song full of Italian languor.
"Ah! anguish cannot kill!" cried he.
"Are you in pain?" said she, in a voice which produced on him the same effect as her look. "What can I do for you?"
"Love me, as I love you!"
"Poor Minna!" said she.
"I never bring any weapons!" cried Wilfrid.
"You are in a detestable temper," said Seraphita, smiling. "Have I not spoken nicely, like the Parisian ladies of whom you tell me love stories?"
Wilfrid sat down, folded his arms, and looked gloomily at Seraphita.
"I forgive you," said he, "for you know not what you do."
"Oh!" retorted she, "every woman from Eve downwards knows when she is doing good or evil."
"I believe it," said he.
"I am sure of it, Wilfrid. Our intuition is just what makes us so perfect. What you men have to learn, we feel."
"Why, then, do you not feel how much I love you?"
"Because you do not love me."
"Great God!"
"Why then do you complain of anguish?"
"You are terrible this evening, Seraphita. You are a perfect demon!"
"No; but I have the gift of understanding, and that is terrifying. Suffering, Wilfrid, is a light thrown on life."
"Why did you go up the Falberg?"
"Minna will tell you; I am too tired to speak. You must talk, you who know everything, who have learned everything and forgotten nothing, and have gone through so many social experiences. Amuse me; I am listening."
"What can I tell you that you do not know! Indeed, your request is a mockery. You recognize nothing that is worldly, you analyze its terminology, you demolish its laws, its manners, feelings, sciences, by reducing them to the proportions they assume when we take our stand outside the globe."
"You see, my friend, I am not a woman. You are wrong to love me. What! I quit the ethereal regions of strength you attribute to me; I make myself humble and insignificant to stoop after the manner of the poor female of every species—and you at once uplift me! Then, when I am crushed and broken, I crave your help; I want your arm, and you repulse me! We do not understand each other."
"You are more malignant this evening than I have ever known you."
"Malignant?" said she, with a flashing look that melted every sentiment into one heavenly emotion. "No; I am weary, that is all. Then, leave me, my friend. Will not that be a due exercise of your rights as a man? We are always to charm you, to recreate you, always to be cheerful, and have no whims but those that amuse you.—What shall I do, my friend? Shall I sing, or dance, when fatigue has deprived me of voice and of the use of my legs? Yes, gentlemen, at our last gasp we still must smile on you! That, I believe, you call your sovereignty!—Poor women! I pity them. You abandon them when they are old; tell me, have they then no longer heart or soul? Well, and I am more than a hundred, Wilfrid. Go—go to kneel at Minna's feet."
"Oh, my one, eternal love!"
"Do you know what eternity is? Be silent, Wilfrid.—You desire me, but you do not love me.—Tell me, now, do not I remind you of some coquette you have met?"
"I certainly do not see you now as the pure and heavenly maiden I saw for the first time in the church at Jarvis."
As he spoke Seraphita passed her hands over her brow, and when she uncovered her face Wilfrid was astonished at the religious and saintly expression it wore.
"You are right, my friend. I am always wrong to set foot on your earth."
"Yes, beloved Seraphita, be my star.—Never descend from the place whence you shed such glorious light on me."
He put out his hand to take the girl's, but she withdrew it, though without disdain or anger. Wilfrid hastily rose and went to stand by the window, turning towards it so that Seraphita should not see a few tears that filled his eyes.
"Why these tears?" she asked. "You are no longer a boy, Wilfrid. Come back to me, I insist.—You are vexed with me, when it is I who should be angry. You see I am not well, and you compel me by some foolish doubts to think and speak, or participate in whims and ideas that fatigue me. If you at all understood my nature, you would have given me some music; you would have soothed my weariness; but you love me for your own sake, not for myself."
The storm which raged in Wilfrid's soul was stilled by these words; he came back slowly to contemplate the bewitching creature who reclined under his eyes, softly pillowed, her head resting on her hand, and her elbow in an insinuating attitude.
"You fancy I do not like you," she went on. "You are mistaken. Listen, Wilfrid. You are beginning to know a great deal, and you have suffered much. Allow me to explain your thoughts. You wanted to take my hand."
She sat up, and her graceful movement seemed to shed gleams of light.
"Does not a girl who allows a man to take her hand make a promise, and ought she not to keep it? You know full well that I can never be yours. Two feelings rule the love that attracts the women of this earth: either they devote themselves to suffering creatures, degraded and guilty, whom they desire to comfort, to raise, to redeem; or they give themselves wholly to superior beings, sublime and strong, whom they are fain to worship and understand—by whom they are too often crushed. You have been degraded, but you have purified yourself in the fires of repentance, and you now are great; I feel myself too small to be your equal, and I am too religious to humble myself to any power but that of the Most High. Your life, my friend, may thus be stated; we are in the North, among the clouds, where abstractions are familiar to our minds."
"Seraphita, you kill me when you talk so," he replied. "It is always torture to me to see you thus apply the monstrous science which strips all human things of the properties they derive from time, space, form, when you regard them mathematically under some ultimate simplest expression, as geometry does with bodies, abstracting dimensions from substance."
"Well, Wilfrid, I submit.—Look at this bearskin rug which my poor David has spread. What do you think of it?"
"I like it very well."
"You did not know I had that Doucha Greka?"
It was a sort of pelisse made of cashmere lined with black fox-skin; the name means, "warm to the soul."
"Do you suppose," said she, "that any sovereign in any court possesses a fur wrap to match it?"
"It is worthy of her who wears it!"
"And whom you think very beautiful?"
"Human words are inapplicable to her; she must be addressed heart to heart."
"Wilfrid, it is kind of you to soothe my griefs with such sweet words—which you have spoken to others."
"Good-bye."
"Stay. I love you truly, and Minna too, believe me, but to me you two are one being. Thus combined you are as a brother, or, if you will, a sister to me. Marry each other, let me see you happy before quitting for ever this sphere of trial and sorrow. Dear me! the most ordinary women have made their lovers obey their will. They have said 'Be silent!' and their lovers were mute. They have said 'Die!' and men have died. They have said 'Love me from afar!' the lovers have remained at a distance like courtiers in the presence of a king. They have said 'Go, marry!' and the men have married. Now, I want you to be happy, and you refuse. Have I then no power?—Well, Wilfrid—come close to me—Yes, I should be sorry to see you married to Minna; but when you see me no more, then—promise me to make her your wife. Heaven intends you for each other."
"I have heard you with rapture, Seraphita. Incomprehensible as your words are, they are like a charm. But what, indeed, do you mean?"
"To be sure; I forget to be foolish, to be the poor creature in whose weakness you delight. I torture you, and you came to this wild country to find rest—you who are racked by the fierce throes of misunderstood genius, worn out by the patient labors of science, who have almost stained your hands by crime, and worn the chains of human justice."
Wilfrid had fallen half dead on the floor. Seraphita breathed on the young man's brow, and he fell calmly asleep, lying at her feet.
"Sleep, rest," said she, rising.
After laying her hands on Wilfrid's forehead, the following phrases fell from her lips, one by one, each in a different tone, but alike melodious and full of a kindly spirit that seemed to emanate from her countenance in misty undulations like the light shed by the heathen goddess on the beloved shepherd in his sleep.
"I may show myself to you, dear Wilfrid, as I am, to you who are strong.
"The hour is come, the hour when the shining lights of the future cast their reflections on the soul, the hour when the soul moves, feeling itself free.
"It is granted to me now to tell you how well I love you. Do you not see what my love is, a love devoid of self-interest, a feeling full of you alone, a love which follows you into the future, to light up your future, for such love is the true light. Do you now perceive how ardently I long to see you released from the life that is a burden to you, and nearer to the world where love rules for ever? Is not love for a lifetime only sheer suffering? Have you not felt a longing for eternal love? Do you not now understand to what ecstasy a being can rise when he is double through loving Him who never betrays his love, Him before whom all bow and worship!
"I would I had wings, Wilfrid, to cover you withal; I would I had strength to give you that you might know the foretaste of the world where the purest joys of the purest union known on earth would cast a shadow in the light that there perennially enlightens and rejoices all hearts!
"Forgive a friendly soul for having shown you in one word a vision of your faults with the charitable intention of lulling the acute torments of your remorse. Listen to the choir of forgiveness! Refresh your spirit by inhaling the dawn that shall rise for you beyond the gloom of death! Yes, for your life lies there.
"My words shall wear for you the glorious garb of dreams, and appear as forms of flame descending to visit you. Rise! Rise to the heights whence men see each other truly, though tiny and crowded as the sands of the seashore. Humanity is unrolled before you as a ribbon; look at the endless hues of that flower of the gardens of Heaven.—Do you see those who lack intelligence, those who are beginning to be tinged by it, those who have been tried, those who are in the circle of love, and those in wisdom, who aspire to celestial illumination?
"Do you understand, through these thoughts made visible, the destination of man—whence he comes, whither he is tending? Keep on your road. When you shall reach your journey's end, you will hear the trumpet call of omnipotence and loud shouts of victory, and harmonies, only one of which would shake the earth, but which are lost in a world where there is neither East nor West.
"Do you perceive, dear, much-tried one, that but for the torpor and the veil of sleep, such visions would rend and carry away your intellect, as the wind of a tempest rends and sweeps away a light sail, and would rob a man for ever of his reason? Do you perceive that the soul alone, raised to its highest power, and even in a dream, can scarce endure the consuming effluence of the Spirit?
"Fly, fly again through the realms of light and glory, admire, hurry on. As you fly you are resting, you go forward without fatigue. Like all men, you would fain dwell always thus bathed in these floods of fragrance and light, where you are wandering free of your unconscious body, speaking in thought only. Hurry, fly, rejoice for a moment in the wings you will have earned when love is so perfect in you that you shall cease to have any senses, that you shall be all intellect and all love! The higher you soar, the less can you conceive of the gulf beneath.—Now, gaze at me for a moment, for you will henceforth see me but darkly, as you behold me by the light of the dull sun of the earth!"
Seraphita stole up with her head gently bent on one side, her hair flowing about her in the airy pose which the sublimest painters have attributed to messengers from heaven; the folds of her dress had the indescribable grace which makes the artist, the man to whom everything is an expression of feeling, stop to gaze at the exquisite flowing veil of the antique statue of Polyhymnia.
Then she extended her hand and Wilfrid rose.
When he looked at Seraphita, the fair girl was lying on the bearskin, her head resting on her hand, her face calm, her eyes shining. Wilfrid gazed at her in silence, but his features expressed respectful awe, and he looked at her timidly.
"Yes, dear one," said he at last, as if answering a question, "whole worlds divide us! I submit; I can only adore you. But what is to become of me thus lonely?"
"Wilfrid, have you not your Minna?"
He hung his head.
"Oh, do not be so scornful! a woman can understand everything by love. When she fails to understand, she feels; when she cannot feel, she sees; when she can neither see, nor feel, nor understand—well, that angel of earth divines your need, to protect you and to hide her protection under the grace of love."
"Seraphita, am I worthy to love a woman?"
"You are suddenly grown very modest! Is this a snare? A woman is always so much touched to find her weakness glorified!—Well, the evening after to-morrow, come to tea. You will find our good Pastor Becker, and you will see Minna, the most guileless creature I ever knew in this world.—Now leave me, my friend; I must say long prayers this evening in expiation of my sins."
"How can you sin?"
"My poor, dear friend, is not the abuse of power the sin of pride? I have been, I think, too arrogant to-day.—Now go. Till to-morrow."
"Till to-morrow!" Wilfrid feebly echoed, with a long look at the being of whom he desired to carry away an indelible memory.
Though he meant to leave, he remained standing for some moments outside, looking at the lights that beamed from the windows of the Swedish castle.
"What was it that I saw?" he asked himself. "No, it was not a single being, but a whole creation. I retain, of that world seen through veils and mists, a ringing echo like the remembrance of departed pain, or like the dizziness caused by dreams in which we hear the moaning of past generations mingling with the harmonious voices of higher spheres, where all is light and love. Am I awake? Do I still slumber? Have I not yet opened my sleeping eyes, those eyes before whose sight luminous spaces stretch into infinitude, eyes that can discern those spaces?—In spite of the night and the cold, my head is still on fire. I will go to the manse. Between the pastor and his daughter I may recover my balance."
But he did not yet leave the spot whence he could see into Seraphita's sitting-room. This mysterious being seemed to be the radiant centre of a circle which formed an atmosphere about her rarer than that which surrounds others: he who came within it found himself involved in a vortex of light and of consuming thoughts. Wilfrid, obliged to struggle against this inexplicable force, did not triumph without considerable efforts; but when he had got out of the precincts of the house, he recovered his freedom of will, walked quickly to the parsonage, and presently found himself under the lofty wooden porch that served as an entrance hall to Pastor Becker's house. He pushed open the first door, packed with birch bark, against which the snow had drifted, and knocked eagerly at the inner door, saying:
"Will you allow me to spend the evening with you, Pastor Becker?"
"Yes," was the answer in two voices speaking as one.
On entering the parlor, Wilfrid was gradually brought back to real life. He bowed very cordially to Minna, shook hands with the minister, and then looked about him on a scene which soothed the excitement of his physical nature, in which a process was going on resembling that which sometimes takes place in men accustomed to long contemplation. When some powerful conception carries away a man of science or a poet on its chimera-like wings, and isolates him from the external surroundings that hedge him in on earth, soaring with him through those boundless regions where vast masses of fact appear as abstractions and the most stupendous works of nature seem but images, woe to him if some sudden noise rouses his senses and recalls his wandering soul to its prison of bone and flesh! The collision of the two powers: body and spirit, one of which has something of the invisible element of lightning; while the other, like all tangible forms, has a certain soft resistancy which for the moment defies destruction—this collision, or, to be accurate, this terrible reunion, gives rise to unspeakable suffering. The body has cried out for the fire that consumes it, and the flame has recaptured its prey. But this fusion cannot take place without the ebullition, the crepitation and convulsions, of which chemistry affords visible examples when two hostile elements are sundered that have been joined by its act.
For some days past, whenever Wilfrid went to Seraphita's house, his body there fell into an abyss. By a single look this wonderful creature translated him in the spirit to the sphere whither meditation carries the learned, whither prayer transports the pious soul, whither his eye can carry the artist, and sleep can waft some dreamers; for each there is a call bidding him to that empyrean void, for each a guide to lead him there—for all there is anguish in the return. There alone is the veil rent, there alone is Revelation seen without disguise—an ardent and awful disclosure of the unknown sphere of which the soul brings back nought but fragments. To Wilfrid, an hour spent with Seraphita was often like the dream so dear to the opium eater, in which each nerve-fibre becomes the focus of radiating rapture. He came away exhausted, like a girl who should try to keep up with the pace of a giant.
The sharp, punishing cold began to subdue the agony of trepidation caused by the re-amalgamation of the two elements in his nature thus violently wrenched asunder; then he always made his way to the manse, attracted to Minna by his thirst for the scenes of homely life, as an European traveler thirsts for his native land when home-sickness seizes him in the midst of the fairy splendors that tempted him to the East.
At this moment the visitor, more exhausted than he had ever been before, dropped into a chair and looked about him for some minutes, like a man aroused from sleep. Pastor Becker and his daughter, accustomed no doubt to their guest's eccentricity, went on with their occupations.
The room was decorated with a collection of Norwegian insects and shells. These curiosities, ingeniously arranged on the background of yellow pinewood with which the wall was wainscoted, formed a colored ornamentation to which tobacco smoke had imparted a soberer tone. At the further end, opposite the door, was an enormous wrought-iron stove, carefully rubbed by the maid-servant till it shone like polished steel.
Pastor Becker was seated in a large armchair, covered with worsted work, near the stove and in front of a table, his feet in a foot-muff, while he read from a folio supported on other books to form a sort of desk. On his right stood a beer-jug and a glass; on his left a smoky lamp fed with fish oil. The minister was a man of about sixty years; his face of the type so often painted by Rembrandt: the small, keen eyes set in circles of fine wrinkles under thick grizzled brows; white hair falling in two silky locks from beneath a black velvet cap; a broad, bald forehead, and the shape of face which a heavy chin made almost square, and, added to this, the self-possessed calm that betrays to the observer some conscious power—the sovereignty conferred by wealth, by the judical authority of the burgomaster, by the conviction of Art, or the stolid tenacity of happy ignorance. The handsome old man, whose substantial build revealed sound health, was wrapped in a dressing-gown of rough cloth with no ornament but the binding. He gravely held a long meerschaum pipe in his mouth, blowing off the tobacco smoke at regular intervals, and watching its fantastic spirals with a speculative eye, while endeavoring, no doubt, to assimilate and digest by meditation the ideas of the author whose works he was studying.
On the other side of the stove, near the door that led into the kitchen, Minna was dimly visible through the fog of smoke, to which she seemed to be inured. In front of her, on a small table, were the various implements of a needle-woman; a pile of towels and stockings to be mended, and a lamp like that which shone on the white pages of the book in which her father seemed to be absorbed. Her fresh, young face, delicately pure in outline, harmonized with the innocence that shone on her white brow and in her bright eyes. She sat forward on her chair, leaning a little towards the light to see the better, unconsciously showing the grace of her figure. She was already dressed for the evening in a white calico wrapper; a plain, cambric cap, with no ornament but its frill, covered her hair. Though lost in some secret meditation, she counted without mistake the threads in the towel, or the stitches in her stocking. Thus she presented the most complete and typical image of woman born to earthly duties, whose eye might pierce the clouds of the sanctuary, while a mind at once humble and charitable kept her on the level of man. Wilfrid, from his armchair between the two tables, contemplated the harmonious picture with a sort of rapture; the clouds of smoke were not out of keeping.
The single window which gave light to the room in the summer was now carefully closed. For a curtain, an old piece of tapestry hung from a rod in heavy folds. There was no attempt at the picturesque or showy—austere simplicity, genuine homeliness, the unpretentiousness of nature, all the habits of domestic life free from troubles and anxieties. Many dwellings leave the impression of a dream; the dazzling flash of transient pleasure seems to hide a ruin under the chill smile of luxury; but this parlor was sublimely real, harmonious in color, and apt to suggest patriarchal ideas of a busy and devout life.
The silence was broken only by the heavy step of the maid preparing the supper, and by the singing in the pan of the dried fish she was frying in salt butter, after the fashion of the country.
"Will you smoke a pipe?" said the pastor presently, when he thought that Wilfrid would heed him.
"No, thank you, dear Pastor Becker," he replied.
"You seem less well than usual this evening," said Minna, struck by the visitor's weak voice.
"I am always so when I have been to the castle."
Minna was startled.
"A strange creature dwells there, Pastor Becker," he went on after a pause. "I have been six months in the village, and have never dared to question you about her; and to-night I have to do violence to my feelings even to speak of her. At first I greatly regretted to find my travels interrupted by the winter, and to be obliged to remain here; for the last two months, however, the chains binding me to Jarvis have been more closely riveted, and I fear I may end my days here.—You know how I first met Seraphita, and the impression made on me by her eyes and her voice, and how at last I was admitted to visit her though she receives nobody. On the very first day, I came to you for information concerning that mysterious creature. Then began for me the series of enchantments——"
"Of enchantments?" exclaimed the pastor, shaking out the ashes of his pipe into a coarse pan of sand that served him as a spittoon. "Are enchantments possible?"
"You, certainly, who at this very moment are so conscientiously studying Jean Wier's book of Incantations, will understand the account I can give you of my sensations," Wilfrid replied quickly. "If we study nature attentively, alike in its great revolutions and in its minutest works, it is impossible not to admit the possibility of enchantment—giving the word its fullest meaning. Man can create no force; he can but use the only existing force, which includes all others, namely, Motion—the incomprehensible Breath of the Sovereign Maker of the Universe. The elements are too completely separated for the hand of man to combine them; the only miracle he can work consists in the mingling of two hostile substances. Even so, gunpowder is akin to thunder!
"As to effecting an act of creation, and that suddenly!—All creation needs time, and time will neither hurry nor turn backwards at our bidding. Hence, outside us, plastic nature obeys laws whose order and procedure cannot be reversed by any human effort.
"But after conceding this to mere matter, it would be unreasonable to deny the existence, within us, of a vast power, of which the effects are so infinitely various that past generations have not yet completely classified them. I will say nothing of man's faculty of abstracting his mind, of comprehending nature in the limits of speech, a stupendous fact, of which common minds think no more than they think out the act of motion, but which led Indian Theosophists to speak of creation by the Word, to which they also attributed the contrary power. The tiniest item of their daily food—a grain of rice, whence proceeds a whole creature, which presently results in a grain of rice again—afforded them so complete a symbol of the creative Word and the synthetical Word, that it seemed a simple matter to apply the system to the creation of worlds.
"Most men would do well to be content with the grain of rice that lies at the origin of every genesis. Saint John, when he said that the Word was in God, only complicated the difficulty.
"But the fruition, the germination, and the blossoming of our ideas is but a trifle if we compare this property, which is distributed among so many men, with the wholly personal faculty of communicating it to certain more or less efficient forces by means of concentration, and thus raising it to the third, ninth, or twenty-seventh power, giving it a hold on masses, and obtaining magical results by concentrating the action of Nature. What I call enchantments are the stupendous dramas played out between two membranes on the canvas of the brain. In the unexplored realms of the spiritual world we meet with certain beings armed with these astounding faculties—comparable only to the terrible powers of gases in the physical world—beings who can combine with other beings, can enter into them as an active cause, and work magic in them, against which their hapless victims are defenceless; they cast a spell on them, override them, reduce them to wretched serfdom, and crush them with the weight and magnificent sway of a superior nature; acting, now like the gymnotus which electrifies and numbs the fisherman; now, again, like a dose of phosphorus which intensifies the sense of life or hastens its projection; sometimes like opium, which lulls corporeal nature, frees the spirit from its bondage, sends it soaring above the world, shows it the universe through a prism, and extracts for it the nourishment that best pleases it; and sometimes like catalepsy, which annuls every faculty to enhance a single vision.
"Miracles, spells, incantations, witchcrafts, in short all the facts that are incorrectly called supernatural, can only be possible and accounted for by the authority with which some other mind compels us to accept the effects of a mysterious law of optics which magnifies, or diminishes, or exalts creation, enables it to move within us independently of our will, distorts or embellishes it, snatches us up to heaven, or plunges us into hell—the two terms by which we express the excess of rapture or of pain. These phenomena are within us, not outside us.
"The being we call Seraphita seems to me to be one of those rare and awe-inspiring spirits to whom it is given to constrain men, to coerce nature, and share the occult powers of God. The course of her enchantments on me began by her compelling me to silence. Every time I dared wish to question you about her, it seemed to me that I was about to reveal a secret of which I was bound to be the impeccable guardian; whenever I was about to speak, a burning seal was set on my lips, and I was the involuntary slave of this mysterious prohibition. You see me now, for the hundredth time, crushed, broken, by having played with the world of hallucinations that dwells in that young thing, to you so gentle and frail, to me the most ruthless magician. Yes—to me she is a sorceress who bears in her right hand an invisible instrument to stir the world with, and in her left the thunderbolt that dissolves everything at her command. In short, I can no longer behold her face; it is unendurably dazzling.
"I have for the last few days been wandering round this abyss of madness too helplessly to keep silence any longer. I have, therefore, seized a moment when I find courage enough to resist the monster that drags me to her presence without asking whether I have strength enough to keep up with his flight.—Who is she? Did you know her as a child? Was she ever born? Had she parents? Was she conceived by the union of sun and ice?—She freezes and she burns; she comes forth and then vanishes like some coy truth; she attracts and repels me; she alternately kills and vivifies me; I love her and I hate her!—I cannot live thus. I must be either in heaven altogether, or in hell."
Pastor Becker, his refilled pipe in one hand and in the other the stopper, listened to Wilfrid with a mysterious expression, glancing occasionally at his daughter, who seemed to understand this speech, in harmony with the being it referred to. Wilfrid was as splendid as Hamlet struggling against his father's ghost, to whom he speaks when it rises visible to him alone amid the living.
"This is very much the tone of a man in love," said the good man simply.
"In love!" cried Wilfrid, "yes, to ordinary apprehensions; but, my dear Mr. Becker, no words can describe the frenzy with which I rush to meet this wild creature."
"Then you do love her?" said Minna reproachfully.
"Mademoiselle, I endure such strange agitation when I see her, and such deep dejection when I see her not, that in any other man they would be symptoms of love; but love draws two beings ardently together, while between her and me a mysterious gulf constantly yawns, which chills me through when I am in her presence, but of which I cease to be conscious when we are apart. I leave her each time in greater despair; I return each time with greater ardor, like a scientific inquirer seeking for Nature's secrets and for ever baffled; like a painter who yearns to give life to his canvas, and wrecks himself and every resource of art in the futile attempt."
"Yes, that strikes me as very true," said the girl.
"How should you know, Minna?" asked the old man.
"Ah! father, if you had been with us this morning to the summit of the Falberg, and had seen her praying, you would not ask me. You would say, as Wilfrid did the first time he saw her in our place of worship, 'She is the Spirit of Prayer!'"
A few moments of silence ensued.
"It is true!" cried Wilfrid. "She has nothing in common with the creatures who writhe in the pits of this world."
"On the Falberg!" the old pastor exclaimed. "How did you manage to get there?"
"I do not know," said Minna. "The expedition is to me now like a dream of which only the remembrance survives. I should not believe in it, perhaps, but for this substantial proof."
She drew the flower from her bosom and showed it to him. They all three fixed their eyes on the pretty saxifrage, still quite fresh, which under the gleam of the lamps shone amid the clouds of smoke like another light.
"This is supernatural," said the old man, seeing a flower in bloom in the winter.
"An abyss!" cried Wilfrid, fevered by the perfume.
"The flower fills me with rapture," said Minna. "I fancy I can still hear his speech, which is the music of the mind, as I still see the light of his gaze, which is love."
"Let me entreat you, my dear Pastor Becker, to relate the life of Seraphita—that enigmatical flower of humanity whose image I see in this mysterious blossom."
"My dear guest," said the minister, blowing a puff of tobacco-smoke, "to explain the birth of this being, it will be necessary to disentangle for you the obscurest of all Christian creeds; but it is not easy to be clear when discussing the most incomprehensible of all revelations, the latest flame of faith, they say, that has blazed on our ball of clay.—Do you know anything of Swedenborg?"
"Nothing but his name. Of himself, his writings, his religion, I am wholly ignorant."
"Well, then, I will tell you all about Swedenborg."
III
SERAPHITA—SERAPHITUS
After a pause, while the pastor seemed to be collecting his thoughts, he went on as follows:—
"Emanuel von Swedenborg was born at Upsala, in Sweden, in the month of January 1688, as some authors say, or, according to his epitaph, in 1689. His father was bishop of Skara. Swedenborg lived to the age of eighty-five, and died in London on the 29th March 1772. I use the word 'died' to express a change of condition only. According to his disciples, Swedenborg has been at Jarvis and in Paris since that time.—Permit me, my dear friend," said the pastor, with a gesture to check interruption, "I am relating the tale without affirming or denying the facts. Listen, and when I have done you can think what you choose. I will warn you when I myself judge, criticise, or dispute the doctrines, so as to show my intellectual neutrality between reason and the man himself.
"Emanuel Swedenborg's life was divided into two distinct phases," Becker went on. "From 1688 till 1745 Baron Emanuel von Swedenborg was known in the world as a man of vast learning, esteemed and beloved for his virtues, always blameless, and invariably helpful. While filling important public posts in Sweden, he published, between 1709 and 1740, several important books on mineralogy, physics, mathematics, and astronomy, which were of value in the scientific world. He invented a method of constructing docks to receive vessels; he treated many very important questions, from the height of the flood-tide to the position of the earth in space. He discovered the way to construct more efficient locks on canals, as well as simpler methods for the smelting of metals. In short, he never took up a science without advancing it.
"In his youth he studied Hebrew, Greek, Latin, and the Oriental languages, and became so familiar with these tongues that several celebrated professors constantly consulted him, and he was enabled to discover in Tartary some traces of the earliest book of God's Word, called the Book of the Wars of Jehovah, and of the Judgments mentioned by Moses (Numbers xxi. 14, 15), by Joshua, Jeremiah, and Samuel. The wars of the Lord are said to be the historical portion, and the Judgments the prophetic portion, of this book, written prior to Genesis. Swedenborg even asserted that the Book of Jasher, or of the Upright, mentioned by Joshua, existed in Eastern Tartary with the worship by Correspondences. A Frenchman, I have been told, has recently confirmed Swedenborg's anticipations by announcing the discovery at Bagdad of several parts of the Bible unknown in Europe.
"In 1785, on the occasion of the discussion on animal magnetism started in Paris, and raised almost throughout Europe, in which most men of science took an eager part, Monsieur de Thomé defended Swedenborg's memory in a reply to the assertions so rashly made by the Commissioners appointed by the King of France to inquire into this subject. These gentlemen stated that there was no theory accounting for the action of the lodestone, whereas Swedenborg had made it his study so early as in 1720. Monsieur de Thomé took the opportunity to point out the reasons for the neglect in which the most celebrated savants had left the name of the learned Swede, so as to be free to plunder his volumes and use his treasures in their own works. 'Some of the most illustrious,' said Monsieur de Thomé, alluding to Buffon's Theory of the Earth, 'are mean enough to dress in the peacock's plumage without giving him the credit.' Finally, by several convincing quotations from Swedenborg's encyclopædic writings, he proved that this great prophet had outstripped by many centuries the slow progress of human learning; and, indeed, to read his works is enough to carry conviction on this point.
"In one passage he is the precursor of the present system of chemistry, announcing that the products of organic nature can all be decomposed and resolved into two pure elements; that water, air, and fire are not elements; in another he goes in a few words to the heart of magnetic mystery, and thus anticipates Mesmer.—In short," said the minister, pointing to a long shelf between the stove and the window, on which were books of various sizes, "there are seventeen works by him; one of them, published in 1734, Studies in Philosophy and Mineralogy, consists of three folio volumes.
"These books, which bear witness to Swedenborg's practical knowledge, were given to me by Baron Seraphitus, his cousin, and Seraphita's father.
"In 1740 Swedenborg sank into complete silence, never relaxing it excepting to renounce temporal studies and to think exclusively of the spiritual world.
"He received his first commands from heaven in 1745. This is how he relates his call:
"'One evening, in London, after he had dined, eating heartily, a thick mist filled the room. When the darkness cleared away, a being that had assumed a human form rose up in a corner of the room and said in a terrible voice, "Do not eat so much." He then fasted completely. Next evening the same man was visible, radiant with light, and said to him:
"'"I am sent by God, who has chosen thee to set forth to men the meaning of His word and His creation. I will dictate what thou shalt write."
"The vision lasted but a few minutes. The angel, he said, was clad in purple.
"During that night the eyes of his inner man were opened and enabled to see into the heavens, into the world of spirits, and into hell, three different circles, where he met persons he had known who had perished from their human state, some long ago, and some quite recently. From that time Swedenborg always lived the spiritual life, and remained in this world as a being sent from God.
"Though his mission was disputed by the incredulous, his conduct was visibly that of a being superior to human weakness. In the first instance, though limited by his means to the strictest necessaries, he gave away immense sums, and was known to be the means of restoring, in various commercial towns, some great houses of business that had failed, or were failing. No one who appealed to his generosity went away without being helped on the spot. An incredulous Englishman, going in search of him, met him in Paris, and he has recorded that Swedenborg's doors were always left open. One day his servant complained of this neglect, which exposed him to suspicion if his master should be robbed.
"'Let him make his mind easy,' said Swedenborg, smiling; 'I forgive him want of faith; he cannot see the guardian who keeps watch before my door.'
"And, in fact, in whatever country he might be living, his doors were never shut, and he never lost anything.
"When he was at Gothenburg, a town sixty miles away from Stockholm, three days before the news arrived of the great fire that raged at Stockholm, he had announced the hour at which it had begun, adding that his house was unharmed—which was true.
"The Queen of Sweden, when at Berlin, told the King, her brother, that one of her ladies being summoned to repay a sum of money which she knew that her husband had returned before his death, being unable to find the receipt, had gone to Swedenborg and begged him to inquire of her husband where the proof of payment could be. On the following day Swedenborg told her the place where the receipt was; then, in accordance with the lady's desire, he called upon the dead man to appear to his wife, and she saw her husband, in a dream, in the dressing-gown he had worn before his death, and he showed her the document in the place mentioned by Swedenborg, where in fact it lay hidden.
"One day, on sailing from London in the ship of a Captain Dixon, he heard a lady asking if there were a good stock of provisions on board.
"'You will not need a very large quantity,' said he. 'In a week, at two o'clock, we shall be in the port of Stockholm,' and it was so.
"The state of second sight, into which Swedenborg could pass at will in relation to earthly things, astonishing as it was to all who knew him, by it marvelous results, was no more than a weaker development of his power of seeing into the skies.
"Of all his visions, those in which he traveled to other astral worlds are not the least curious, and his descriptions are no doubt surprisingly artless in their details. A man whose great scientific acquirements are beyond question, who combined in his brain conception, will, and imagination, would certainly have invented something better if he had invented at all. Nor does the fantastic literature of the East contain anything that can have suggested the idea of this bewildering narrative full of poetic germs, if we may compare a work of faith to the writings of Arab fancy.
"The account of his being snatched up by the angel who guided him in his first voyage is sublime to a degree as far beyond the poems of Klopstock, Milton, Tasso, and Dante, as the earth, by God's will, is from the sun. This chapter, which forms the introduction to his Treatise on the Astral Worlds, has never been published; it remains among the oral traditions left by Swedenborg to the three disciples who were dearest to him. M. Silverichm has it in writing. Baron Seraphitus sometimes tried to tell me of it; but his memory of his cousin was so vivid that he stopped after a few words, and fell into a reverie from which nothing could rouse him.
"The discourse in which the angel proved to Swedenborg that those planets are not created to wander uninhabited, crushes all human science, the Baron assured me, under the grandeur of its divine logic.
"According to the Seer, the inhabitants of Jupiter do not affect the sciences, which they call Shades; those of Mercury object to the expression of ideas by words, which they think too material, and they have a language of the eye; those of Saturn are persistently tormented by evil spirits; those of the Moon are as small as children of six years old, their voice proceeds from the stomach, and they creep about; those of Venus are of gigantic stature, but very stupid, and live by robbery; part of that planet, however, is inhabited by beings of great gentleness, who live loving to do good. Finally, he describes the customs of the people who dwell on those globes, and gives an account of the general purpose of their existence as part of the universe in terms so precise, adding explanations which agree so well with the effects of their apparent motion in the system of the universe, that some day, perhaps, scientific men will drink of these luminous founts. Here," said the pastor, taking down a volume and opening it at a page where a marker was placed, "these are the words which conclude this great work: 'If any one should doubt my having been transported to so many astral earths, let him remember my remarks as to distances in the other life. They exist only in relation to the external form of man; now I, having been inwardly constituted like the angelic spirits of those globes, have been enabled to know them.'
"The circumstances to which we owed the residence in this district of Baron Seraphitus, Swedenborg's dearly loved cousin, made me intimately familiar with every fact of the life of that extraordinary man.
"Not long since he was accused of imposture in some European newspapers, which reported the following facts as related in a letter from the Chevalier Beylon. Swedenborg, 'informed,' it was said, 'by some senators of a secret correspondence between the late Queen of Sweden and her brother, the Prince of Prussia, revealed the contents to that Princess, leaving her to believe that he had acquired the information by supernatural means. A man of the highest credit, Monsieur Charles-Léonard von Stahlhammer, Captain of the King's Guard and Knight of the Sword, refuted this calumny in a letter.'"
The pastor hunted through some papers in his table-drawer, found a newspaper, and handed it to Wilfrid, who read aloud the following letter: