Towards noon he opened his weary eyes, but only to let them fall into the grave, which death had opened beside him during his sleep. However, one madman had been the God of Medicine to the other; his dream of Elysium was dreamed out, shortly before it seemed about to be fulfilled, and he was rational again. Victor saw by all signs, that toward sundown at least death with his fruit-gatherer would pluck this white fruit from its stem; but he saw it more calmly than yesterday. As he had already rehearsed the part of disconsolateness, the instruments of grief sawed no fissure into his heart, but only moved bloodily to and fro in the old one. Whoever after years deposits for the second time in the coffin one who has been once awakened therein, scarcely mourns with so much intensity as the first time.
With what altered eyes did Emanuel awake in the evening hour, when he yesterday had shed the first tears for joy! His soul, like the mourning tree of Goa,[158] let fall by day the nightly load of blossoms; to his chilled head the earth turned no longer the meadow-side of poesy, but the light side of cold reason. He confessed now that he had nourished into fulness of blood the nobler parts of his inner man at the expense of the lower,—that his hope of death had been too great as well as his poetic wing-feathers,—that he had contemplated the earth not from the earth, but too much from Jupiter, seen from whose observatory it must needs dwindle to a fiery spark, and that he had therefore lost the earth without getting Jupiter instead. Vainly did Victor oppose him with the true proposition, that the higher man, as the painters do with water-colors, always begins his life-piece with the background and with the sky, which the painters in oil and inferior men make last; his answer was the complaint that he unfortunately had not completed his picture so far as the foreground. At last he reproached himself with having made too much ado about so slight a separation as death was, at least for him who goes, since the other separations on the earth were after all longer, more bitter and two-sided.
They came in this way upon the subject of recognitions on the other side of this stage of being. Victor said, he could not decry, as many a philosopher had done, conjectures reaching out beyond the earth; for after all we must guess about what was beyond this world, whether we asserted or denied. "Without the continuance of memory," said he, "the continuance of my conscious self is no more than that of my knowledge of another's, i. e. nothing at all; so soon as I forget my present self, then surely might any other one instead of me be immortal. Nor does the destruction of my memory follow from its earthly dependence on my body; for this dependence all the spiritual powers have in common with it, and in that case the destruction of the others would follow from this dependence; and what then would be left for immortality?"—Emanuel said: the thought of recognition, however much it presupposed of the sensuous, was so sweet and transporting, that, if men could make themselves sure of it, no one would be willing to tarry here an hour, particularly if one painted out to himself the heavenly thought of finding all great and noble men at once. "I have often," said he, "pictured out the future recollection after the analogy of the present, and always had to leave off for rapture when I thought to myself how in that remembrance the earth would shrink up to a dim morning-meadow, and our life to a far-removed day illumined with moonlight.—Oh, if we now, dissolve at the image even of a few years of childhood, how tenderly will the image of all childish years one day look upon us!"—Victor waived off these deathly raptures, and after saying, by way of transition, "one connection, at all events, this world must have with the second," he came upon something else, which had struck him so much among the incidents of this night....
* * * * *
* * * * *
I still throw a veil to-day over what Victor asked and what Emanuel disclosed; the new perspective would draw away our eyes too long from the great patient.
The blind one held in one steady and agonized grasp his hot hand, in order not to lose the beloved father; and when Emanuel had for a long time been laying soft consolation concerning his death, like cool leaves around the inflamed temples, he still said nothing except, in a tone of fervent supplication, "Ah, father, if I had only seen thee, only once!"—
Emanuel seemed to be composed; but he deceived himself; his present indifference to the earth was in fact more piercing than that in the night, which was merely a different enjoyment of life mixed with the magic drinks of fantasy. With his remorse for his poetic suicide there seemed almost to mingle joy at its consequences. Hence he said, with a look of touching certainty: "To-day towards evening he should certainly go, and no longer torment his two last and best friends with these delayings of his departure. The genius of the world would forgive him his last fault, and not let their to-day's separation from him, which for him was too long, be followed by any second one yonder."
The longer he spoke, so much the more did the old blooming Eden re-enter into his languid soul.—Now he made a singular, heart-rending request to his friends. As, notoriously, the sense of hearing remains longest with the dying, when all other senses have already closed to earth, Emanuel said to Victor: "So soon as thou seest that a change is about to come over me, then give thy Julius the flute, and thou! play me then the old song of rapture, that I may die upon the tones, as I have already often wished, and continue to play on some minutes after the end."
He began now to reflect how beautifully tones would glide around his last thoughts, like the song of birds around the setting sun; and in his extinguished spirit the old sparks flew up again: "Ah, I shall go hence blissfully,—O my soul could even to-night lay upon this earthly soil a super-earthly adornment, and take it for Eden: ah then, at length; when the soil is fairer and the soul is greater...."
He swooned away again, but the pulse still beat faintly.—And here, in this brooding state, it was that he received from the earth as a last gift the awfully-sweet dream, into which the body infused the feelings of its sickliness, and which, after his resuscitation, he related with a new after-dreaming. It is the last soft triad of our body with our expiring soul, that the former, even in its dissolution (as we know by fainting persons and those apparently dead under the water, &c.), communicates to the latter sweet plays and dreams.—
He reposed in a glorified form in a transparent, dark, and yet colored tulip-cup, which rocked him to and fro, because a gentle earthquake made the tulip-bower sway on its bowed shaft. The flower stood in a magnetic sea, which attracted the blest one more and more strongly; at last he was drawn so far out, that he weighed it down, and fell as a pearl of dew out of the drooping chalice....
What a colored world! A fleecy throng of ethereal forms like his stood hovering over a broad island, about which played a circular balustrade of great flowers in full blow,—above, in mid-heaven, over the island, flew evening suns behind evening suns,—farther in, beside them ran white moons,—near the horizon, stars traced their circles—and as often as a sun or a moon flew downward, they gazed with a heavenly look as of angels' eyes through the great flowers along the shore. The suns were divided from the moons by rainbows, and all the stars ran between two rainbows, and embroidered with silver the variegated ring of the heavenly sphere. One above another rose gay clouds, in which burned a kernel of gold, of silver, of precious stones,—from butterflies' wings clouds of dust were shed, which like flying colors mantled the ground, and out of the cloud flashed rushing floods of light, which were all intertwined in one another....
And in this din of colors a sweet voice went round, saying everywhere, Die more sweetly of light.
But the souls were only dazzled, and did not yet die.
Then evening winds and morning winds and noonday winds conspiring fell upon the meadow and wafted down the bright-blue and gold-green clouds, which had arisen out of flower-fragrance, and unfolded the ring of flowers on the horizon, and bore the sweet perfume to the hearts of the blest. The cloud of blossoms swallowed them into itself, the heart was baptized into the dark scents as into a feeling from the deepest depths of childhood, and, overwhelmed with the hot steam of flowers, would fain drop asunder therein.—Now the unknown voice drew nearer, and softly whispered, Die more sweetly of fragrance.
But the souls only grew giddy, and did not yet die. Far in the depths of Eternity out of the south rose and fell, as in a curve, a single tone,—a second rose in the east,—a third in the west,—at last from the distance the whole heaven sounded, and the tones streamed over the island, and seized upon the softened souls.... When the tones were upon the island, all beings wept for bliss and longing.... Then on a sudden the suns ran still faster, then the tones flew still higher, and, ascending spirally, lost themselves in a keen, endless height,—ah, then all the wounds of men opened again, and warmed softly with the trickling blood every breast, which died in its melancholy,—ah then, indeed, all came flying before us that we had loved here, all that we had lost here, every precious hour, every lamented pasture, every beloved being, every tear and every wish.—And when the highest tones were hushed and pierced again, and were still longer mute and pierced more deeply; then harmonica-bells trembled beneath human beings who stood upon them, so that the piercing hum agitated to pieces every trembler.—And a lofty form, around which a little dark cloud floated, came up in a white veil and said melodiously, Die more sweetly of tones.
Ah! they would have died and died gladly of the sadness of melody, if every heart had held the heart for which it languished on its breast; but every one still wept on lonesomely without his beloved.
At last the form threw off the white veil, and the Angel of the end stood before men. The little cloud that floated round him was Time,—so soon as he should grasp the little cloud, he would crush it, and time and men would be annihilated.
When the Angel of the end had unveiled himself, he smiled on men with indescribable affection, in order to dissolve their hearts with bliss and with smiles. And a soft light fell from his eyes upon all the shapes, and every one saw standing before him the soul he most loved,—and when they gazed upon each other with a dying look for love and sent a languid smile after the angel, he grasped at the little cloud which was near him,—but he could not reach it.
Suddenly each one saw once more beside him his own self,—the second I trembled transparently beside the first, and the two smiled consumingly on each other and exalted each other,—the heart which trembled in man hung once more, tremblingly, in the second self, and saw itself dying therein.—
O then was every one constrained to fly from himself to his beloved, and, seized with dread and love, to twine his arms round other beings who were dear to him.—And the angel of the end opened his arms wide, and clasped the whole human race together in one embrace.—Then the whole meadow glimmers, breathes fragrance, rings with music,—then the suns stop, but the island itself whirls around the suns,—the two sundered selves run into each other,—the loving souls fall on each other like snow-flakes,—the flakes become cloud,—the cloud melts into a dark tear.—
The great tear of bliss, made out of us all, swims more transparent and yet more transparent in Eternity.—
At last the Angel of the end said softly, They have died most sweetly of their beloved.—
And he crushed weeping the little cloud of time.—
* * * * *
The fever images of death, with which every sleep, even the last, begins, gleamed in Emanuel's eyes. His spirit hung swaying in his loose nerves, breathed upon by soft airs; for he was already in that dissolving nervous ecstasy of the fainting, the child-bearing, the exhausted by bleeding, the dying. But his emptied breast rose the more lightly, his departing spirit drew out thinner the thread of life.
Victor would have enjoyed the comfort of the dull numbness, wherewith pains heaped one upon another crush us down, had he not been obliged every minute to tell these pains, i. e. all the preparations of death, to the poor blind youth. Ah, the blind one feared perhaps that he might call after this teacher too late with the song of rapture.
Evening came. Emanuel grew stiller and his eye more rigid, and it seemed to see the fantasies of his busy brain in the apartment, until the gold strip of the far-sinking sun, which a looking-glass directed towards him, darted like a lightning-flash through his world of dream. Softly, but with altered voice, he said, "Into the sun!"—They understood him, and moved his bed and his head toward the evening-rain of the setting sun, to which he had of old so often unfolded his susceptible heart. Victor started, when he saw that his eyes stood, undazzled and immovable, open to the sun.
There was a sublime stillness round three discomposed beings; only a breath of evening wind fluttered among the linden-leaves of the apartment, and a bee hovered about the linden-blossoms; but out of doors away from the theatre of distress a blissful evening reposed on the pastures red with sunlight, among joyous, fluttering, singing, intoxicated creatures.
Emanuel gazed silently into the sun, which sunk lower toward the earth; he clutched not at the bed-clothes like others, but flung his arms aloft as if for a flight or an embrace. Victor took his beloved hands, but they hung down into his without a pressure. And when the sun, like a blazing world on the day of judgment, sank down in a last upshooting glow: then the silent one still hung with cold eyes on the vacant place of the sun, and remarked not the setting; and Victor saw suddenly shifting flashes of the scythe of death pass yellow across the undistorted face.—Then, deeply troubled, he handed the flute to Julius, and said in a broken voice, "Play the song of rapture, he is dying now."—
And Julius, with streaming, darkened eyes, compressed his sobbing breath into the flute and raised his sighs to heavenly tones, that he might muffle and benumb the parting soul, during the tearing away of its earthly roots, with the after-echoes of the first world, with the preluding echoes of the second.
And as, during the song, a blissful smile at an unknown dream glorified the face that was growing cold,—and when only a quiver of the hand pressed the hand of the disconsolate friend, and only a quiver winked with the eyelid and farther down opened the pale lips and passed away, and when the evening redness overspread the pale form,—lo, then death, cold to the earth and our lamentations, iron, erect, and dumb, stalked through the fair evening under the linden blossoms to the enwrapped soul in the tranquillized corpse and transferred the veiled soul with immeasurable arms from the earth through unknown worlds into Thy eternal, warm, fatherly hand which has created us,—into the Elysium for which Thou hast formed us,—among the kindred of our hearts,—into the land of rest, of virtue, and of light....
Julius stopped for sorrow, and Victor said, "Play on the song of rapture, he has only just died."—During the tones Victor shut to the eyes of his beloved, and said with a heart above the earth, "Now close yourselves,—the spirit is above the earth, to which you gave light,—thou pale, hallowed form, thou hallowed heart, the angel within thee is gone out and thou fallest back into the earth."—And here he embraced once more the cold, empty wrappage, and pressed the heart, which beat no more, knew him no longer, to his hot bosom; for the flute-tones tore his pale wounds too widely open.—Oh, it is well that when man in grim woe stiffens to solid ice, no tones are with him: the tender tones would lick all the sad blood out of his transpierced bosom, and man would die of his agonies, because he would be able to express his agonies....
—Here let my curtain fall before all these scenes of death, before Emanuel's grave and Horion's grief!—Thou and I, my reader, will now go forth from another's death-chamber, to look into nearer ones where we ourselves lie prostrate or where our dearest have lain. We will in those chambers behold our death-bed, but let not our eye sink;—the flame of love and of virtue blazes upward above the corruptions,—around the death-bed we see a bier as a couch of rest on which all burdens are laid down, and the broken heart also,—around the deathbed we see a great, unknown form, who breaks off from the image of God the earthly frame.—But if the heart is made great beside our own resting-place, it becomes tender beside another's.—If thou, my reader, and if I now, with this deeply moved soul, look into the chambers where we received the perpetual wounds of earth, then will the pale forms which therein raise their dead men's eyes once more to meet us, agitate and wound us too sorely.—Ah, that may you well do, too, ye loved mutes,—what have we then left to give you, but a tear which pains us, a sigh which oppresses our hearts? Ah, if the mourning-crape on our faces is torn as soon as the funeral veil on yours,—if the marble gravestone with your name must be turned over above your corpses, in order to cover a new one with its new name,—O, if we so easily forget all the eternal love, the eternal remembrance, which we promised you in your last hour,—ah, then, indeed, in these tumultuous days of life a still hour like this is holy and beautiful, in which we lay our ear as it were close to the sunken graves, and, from the depth of the earth, although every day more darkly, hear the voices that we know call up: "Forget us not,—forget me not, my son—my friend—my beloved, forget me not!"
No, and we will not forget you! And, if it makes us ever so sad, still let each one of us at this moment summon the most precious forms before him out of their resting-places, and behold the wasted features, the reopened eyes full of love, which were so long closed, and contemplate full long the dear, uncovered face, till the old remembrances of the fair days of their love break the heart and he can weep no more.
rivetstart
Great Disclosure.—New Separations.
I will now disclose what in the former chapter I concealed.—When Emanuel on that Elysian morning of the delirium had said to Julius, "Shadow! hence!" he went on: "Conjure not up with thy juggling the blind Son of my Horion [Lord Horion] who takes me still for his father,—fear before God, who has just passed by, and vanish!"—And turning to Victor he said: "Shadow! if thou knowest not who thou art, and knowest not thy father Eymann, then descend to the earth again and into the shadow which my Victor casts there."—And when Victor the next day recalled the dying man to these words, he asked distressfully: "Ah, did I not say it in a delusion, when I dreamed I was in the land beyond earthly oaths?" and he turned mutely his affrighted face to the wall....
He has, then, in the illusion of having passed through death, spoken it out, that Julius is the son of his Lordship, and Victor the son of Pastor Eymann.... But what a bright illumination does not this full moon give to our whole history, on which hitherto only a moon-sickle has shone—
I confess, in the very first chapter it struck me singularly that Victor should be a physician; now it is explained; for the medical doctor's hat was the best Montgolfier[159] and Fortunatus's wishing-cap for a citizen-legate of his Lordship, in order thereby the more easily to hover round the throne and work upon the frail January; then, too, Victor, after his future devalvation,[160] and after the loss of the feather-hat, could best gather into the medical one his daily bread as a citizen,—his Lordship saw. This was one reason why the latter gave him out as his son. Another is, Victor was best fitted to play the part with the prince by his humor, cleverness, good nature, &c., to which was added as a further recommendation the resemblance he bore in everything, except age, to the fifth and up to this time still lost son, whom January so loved. As, now, a physician in ordinary was to be the favorite, his Lordship could not take any one of the princely sons for his purpose, because they must be jurists, in order to fit into their future offices.—His own son Julius he could not use, because he was blind,—by the way! his Lordship was also blind once, and thus adds his example to the cases of blindness inherited from father to son, but even independently of the blindness he could not possibly, by reason of his disinterested delicacy, let his son reap the advantages of princely favor while he withheld from them January's own sons themselves.
Thou good man without hope! when I compare now thy poetic education of the blind youth with thy cold principles,—when I consider how thou—dead to lyric joys, hardened to the tears of enthusiasm—nevertheless causest the dark soul of thy Julius curtained with eyelids to be filled by his teacher with poetic flower-pieces, with dew-clouds of sensibility, and with the nebulous star of the second life,—then does it enhance quite as much my sorrow as my esteem, that thou findest nothing on the earth which thou canst press to thy starved-out heart, and that thou raisest thine eye withered on empty tear-ducts coldly to heaven, and even there findest nothing but a void waste of blue!—
This painful observation Victor made still sooner than myself.—But to the story! The past portion of it sent a thousand thorns through his heart. We no longer recognize now our once joyous Sebastian,—he has lost four beings, as if to pay off therewith the four days of Whitsuntide: Emanuel has vanished, Flamin has become an enemy, his Lordship a stranger, and Clotilda—a stranger. For he said to himself: "Now, when she is removed so far above me, I will not cost the sufferer, from whom I have already taken so much, absolutely everything, absolutely her father's love and her position,—I will not insist upon the love which, in her ignorance of my connections, she has bestowed upon me.—No, I will cheerfully tear away my soul from the most precious one amidst a thousand wounds of my breast, and then lay myself down and bleed to death." Now this determination was easy for him; for after the death of a friend we love to take a new load of misery on our breast; that shall crush it, for we will die.
Yet destiny had still left two loved ones in his arms; his Julius and his mother. In the former he loves so many sweet associations; even this was one, namely, that one always loves him with whom one has been confounded; and he would fain fulfil the place of father with him as his Lordship had done with him, in order not so much to requite as to emulate that noble man. And still more ardently did his soul embrace the excellent wife of the Pastor, to whom his heart had already hitherto beat responsive with the soft warmth of a son. Ah, how would it have comforted in its longing his childlike breast, from which one hitherto his father was thrust away, to be clasped to a maternal heart, and to hear from a mother the words, "Good son, why comest thou to me so unhappy and so late?" But he dared not, because in that case he would have broken the oath to leave Flamin's extraction under the cover of mystery.
He shut himself up four days with the blind one in the house of death;—he saw no one,—did not visit the mourning convent, where from all fair eyes flowed similar tears,—renounced the fragrant park and the blue sky,—and let the flowerage of the departed one fade after him.—He consoled the forsaken blind one, and all day long they rested in each other's embrace, and pictured to each other weeping their teacher and his teachings and the radiant hours of their childhood. At last, on the fourth day, he conducted the blind one forever out of the beautiful Maienthal,—the evening-bell sent after them from afar the knell of a whole coffined life,—Julius wept aloud,—but Victor had only a moist eye, and consoled not himself, but the blind one; for his soul was now otherwise than one would guess; his soul was exalted above this eventide-life: his departed one, like a genius, held it high up above the clouds and above the plays of our little time. Victor stood on the high mountain, where one stands on the burial-day of a friend; at the foot of the mountain stretched far away the dead sea of the abyss,[161] and drained an expanded, trembling cloud which reared itself on the sea,—and on the cloud were painted gay cities, and swaying landscapes hung therein, and the little tribes of people with red cheeks ran over the landscapes of vapor,—and all, people and cities, dropped down like tears into the absorbing sea,—only down below along the horizon in the dusky cloud was a lighted rim like morning glow; for a sun rises behind the twilight, and then the cloud has passed away, and a new green continent lies stretching into the immensity.—
He would have gone on the whole night, but something frightful in the next village, which is called Upper-Maienthal, arrested him. He recognized in the coachhouse of the inn, by its coat of arms, the carriage of the Chamberlain. He set the blind one down on a stone bench at the door, where he could listen to the rustle of unloading hay. Victor, in answer to his question in the house, got the intelligence: "There were two ladies overhead, one of them they did not know (he immediately discovered, however, by the first sketch of her attire, the wife of the Parson),—the other had often passed that way; it was the daughter of the Chief Chamberlain, and had on full mourning, because her father some days before had been shot dead in a duel with the Regency-Councillor Flamin, and the two were travelling, as these people said, to England."
He screamed in vain, half choking in blood and agony, "It is impossible,—with the page Von Schleunes, you mean." But nevertheless it was so,—Flamin was in prison,—Matthieu out of the country,—Le Baut already under the ground.... But demand not now the history of this murder!—Victor slowly drew out the watch of the happy Bee-father, and stared rigidly at the index of joyous hours, which, for want of winding up, had stopped some days since; something within him counselled the wild and desperate thought to hurl it against the stone floor and smash it to pieces. But three lute-breaths of the flute, with which the blind youth conjured before his benumbed soul a fairer, warmer past, dissolved his congealing heart into a wet eye, and he lifted it up overflowing, and only said, "Forgive me for it, All-gracious One,—ah, I will gladly do nothing but weep."—When the pangs of grief are too heart-rending within us, then something in us gnashes against fate, and the heart infuriate clenches itself like a fist, as it were, for resistance,—but this strength is blasphemy. O, it is more comely towards thee, All-gracious One, to let the crushed and broken heart melt away and become a tear, and to love and be silent until one dies!
The familiar tones of the flute penetrated into Clotilda's thick rain-cloud of grief,—she staggered to the window,—she saw the blind one,—but she went slowly back and wrapped her heart deeper in the cold cloud,—for now she knew all; the blind one was the messenger of death, come to tell that her great friend had left the earth and the disconsolate ones behind him. "My teacher, too, is dead," she said to her companion; and when Victor sent up a request for an interview, she could only nod her head speechlessly.—Then she begged the Parson's wife to step into another chamber, because the sight of Victor, for many reasons, must be oppressive to her. Victor ascended the staircase as if to a scaffold on which fate was to pluck out his heart, namely, the good Clotilda, from whom, as well by her journey as by his purpose of resigning her, he was to-day being separated. When he opened the door and beheld the afflicted maiden leaning pale and weary against the wall; and as both with hands hanging down looked into each other's eyes red with weeping, and trembled in the sombre interval between the sight of each other and the first word, as in the fearful pause between the fire of a great gun and the arrival of the ball, and when at last Clotilda asked in a low voice, "It is all true?" and he said, "All!"— then she slowly laid her beautiful head round to the wall again, and repeated, in one continuous utterance, but in a low, wailing tone, with the soft, muffled funeral tones of exhausted anguish, the words, "Ah! my good teacher; my never to be forgotten friend!—Ah, thou great spirit! thou fair, heavenly soul, why hast thou gone so soon after my Giulia!—O, dearest friend, be not angry, I could wish now only to be, where my father is, in the still grave."—Victor began eagerly the question, "Has Flamin—" but he could not add, "killed him"; for she lifted up her head and looked upon him with a swelling, a laboring, unspeakable sorrow, and that sorrow was her yes.—
Exhausted with the bleeding of tears and convulsed amidst remembrances, which, like brain-borers, touched the soul, she was on the point, at last, of sinking down by the wall; but Victor sustained her with inexpressible compassion, and held her upright on his breast and said, "Come, innocent angel, come to my heart, and weep thyself dry thereon,—we are unhappy, but innocent.—O, take thy rest, thou tormented head, rest softly under my tears."—But always in the height of woe a mountain-air began to flutter around him; it seemed to him as if an iron lever lifted up the broken-in skull, as if vital air streamed in through the pierced, inwardly mouldering breast; the reason why he felt so was that the life of men became little to him, death great, and earth dust. "Sleep, harassed one,"—he said to Clotilda, who leaned languidly upon him,—"sleep away the woe,—life is a sleep, an oppressed, sultry sleep; vampyres sit upon it, rain and wind fall upon us sleepers, and we vainly clutch at waking.—O, life is a long, long sigh before the going out of the breath.—But alas that the wretched meteor should be permitted so to torment just this good soul, just thyself!"—"Ah," said Clotilda, "if only the so sad flute would cease! My heart is ready to fly to pieces for agony!" But her friend cruelly tore open again all the springs of her tears and poured his into hers, and depicted to her the past: "Four weeks ago it was otherwise; then the flute-tones passed over a fairer region; through the happy plaints of the nightingale they found their way into our hearts, which were then so joyous.—On the first Whitsuntide-day I found thee, when the nightingale throbbed,—on the second, I sank down before thee for rapture and reverence, when the rain glistened round about us,—on the third, at the evening fountain a broad heaven rose, and I saw a single angel stand sparkling and smiling therein.—Our three days were dreams of fair flowers, for dreams of flowers signify sorrow."—He had hitherto hardened his soft soul against this cruel picture, but when he had actually, with oppressed voice, added, "At that time our Emanuel was still living, and visited at evening his open grave..." then must his heart needs burst, and all his tears gushed out over the deeply buried sword-blade like bloody drops, and he said, straining her more passionately to himself "O, come, we will weep without measure: we will not console ourselves. We shall not be much longer together: O, I could now tear myself to pieces with sorrow.—Exalted Dahore! look upon this dying one and her tears over thee, and requite her mourning, and give the weary soul at length repose, and thy peace, and all that is wanting to man."
The two souls sank, entwined together, into a single tear, and the stillness of mourning hallowed the moment,—and let me not with my oppressed breath say any more of this.
—As if awaking, she drew her head from his heart and with an enervated smile took his hand; for notwithstanding all unhappy events she loved him inexpressibly, and was even now on the way to Maienthal for the very purpose of seeing him once more,—and she said, "I am going to England to my mother, to find his Lordship, and to beg him to come sooner and act as intercessor, and end the sorrows of others and my own."—Her pause, which her look filled out, disclosed to him as much as it concealed from the unhappy wife of the Parson, who could hear a good deal in the adjoining chamber;—what she suppressed was, that she would urge upon his Lordship the expediting of the disclosure that Flamin was the son of the Prince. Besides, this journey withdrew her eyes from so many images of grief, as well as her ears from so many a discordant tone of mockery. To be sure, the design of taking motion on the coach-cushion and on shipboard as a tincture of iron, had only been her pretext at court, where polite untruths are not merely forgiven, but even required.
Victor promised her, under a dark presentiment of his strength and disinterestedness,—for the unhappy makes sacrifices more freely and easily than the happy,—that "he would care for him like a sister."—Their eyes exchanged confessions of their secrets, and, for that very reason, of their love, and Clotilda overflowed with tearful love, first on account of the journey (because to her sex a journey by reason of its rarity is something of consequence); secondly, on account of sorrow, for love makes a woman's heart in full mourning warmer than one in half-mourning, as burning lenses heat black-colored things more powerfully than white.
And this very day, when she looked into his eyes with so much renewed love, he was to be torn from her! He spared her, it is true, the revelation of his birth and his eternal separation, in order not to lay upon her lacerated heart new loads of sorrow; but he would fain wholly gather, in this last minute of his fair love, this gleaning and this after-bloom of his life. Ah, he would fain look upon her as never before,—he would press her hand intensely as he had never before done,—he would say a farewell to her like a dying man.—For it is all—his innermost being cried unceasingly—for the last, last time!—Only he would not kiss her: a shrinking reverence, the thought of having played out the part of the lover, forbade him to make a selfish use of her ignorance. But when he was about to direct towards her the last look of love,—then did fate thrust all the sharpened weapons, which had hitherto been driven into his nerves, once more into the bleeding openings, just as they replace in the wounds of murdered men the old instruments, to see whether they are the same,—ah, they were the same,—the chamber was darkened as if by an extinguisher,—the tones of the flute were stifled in the internal din,—he must needs look upon her and yet could not for the water in his eyes,—he must look upon her with a long, retentive look, because he wanted to impress her beautiful face as a shadow-image of the shadowy Eden forever upon his soul.—At last he succeeded; amidst a thousand woes he seized with an intense look her tear-bedewed face, through which virtue pulsed like a heart, and shadowed it out in his desolate soul even to every line, to every drop.—So much of her he took away with him,—no more; he left her everything, his heart and his joy.—Ah, tender Clotilda! if thou hadst guessed it!—The sobbing of his mother hurried him to the adjoining chamber; he flung open the door, cried in a crushed voice to his mother, whose face was averted: "Dearest! by the Almighty, your son is no murderer and no reprobate,"—and compressed the hand she gave him behind her back with a wild intensity of grasp.
Look not now, my friends, at the dismal moment when for the last time he takes Clotilda's hand, and severs his heart from hers, and yet only says, "A happy journey, Clotilda, a peaceful life, Clotilda, joy be with thee, Clotilda!"
—And at a distance from the village he fell on his knees beside the blind one, with a mute prayer for the mourning heart which he had now lost for the last time.—
Not until four o'clock in the morning did he arrive with the blind-one, without weariness, without tears, and without thoughts, at Flachsenfingen.
hornstart
The Murderous Duel.—Apology for the Duel.—Prisons regarded as Temples.—Job's-Wails of the Parson.—Legends of my Biographical Past.—Potato-Planting.
As I am on the point of entering upon the fortieth day with the observation, "The history of the duel is still full of regular ciphers, and is a true unfigured thorough-bass,"-a piece of the forty-third comes to hand and figures the bass and puts the vowel-points to the Hebrew consonants. To this young forerunning[162] of the forty-third chapter one is indebted for the fact that I can relate the shooting-history with better spirits.
It will not be guessed who boiled up the most furiously at Clotilda's engagement,—namely, the Evangelist. He was vexed with the bold faithlessness of the Chamberlain, whose courtliness he had hitherto managed by coarseness, and so much the more because a human mixture of imbecility and flattery like Le Baut exasperates us unspeakably, when it passes over from flatteries to insults. Still more was he who set on Flamin himself set on by the widow of the Chamberlain, who stirred into his elementary fire soft oil and some matches; she hated Clotilda because she was loved, and our hero because he did not, like the Evangelist, set the step-mother above the step-daughter. A woman who has gone to the death for a man, i. e. into a short sleep (which is death to the good), namely, into a swoon,—as this very widow did in the Eighth Post-Day,—must be expected of course to hate this man, if he will not let himself be loved. The Evangelist, who had hitherto taken the love of Victor and Clotilda only for the accidental gallantry of a moment, and who had also looked upon the flying attachment to his sister Joachime as nothing more serious, was devilishly mad at the mis-shot in the first case, and at the royal shot in the second; and he determined to avenge himself and his sister, whom he loved more than his father, on both.
Joachime was additionally and bitterly enraged with Victor, because she believed herself and her love to have been hitherto abused as a mere cloak for his love to Clotilda. I have stated above that Matthieu, after the Eymann visit, made his to Flamin. When the Councillor had disclosed to him the interview with the Parson and his decisory oath, Mat formed his resolution and threw much upon the Chamberlain: "This fellow was a small sharper and a great courtier,—he had perhaps had more to do than the lover had with Clotilda's excursion to the baths of Maienthal,—he, and not so much Victor, sought to make out of his daughter a lark's net for the Prince's heart and a gradus ad Parnassum of the Court." Flamin was right down glad that his vengeance had got another object besides him with whom he had sworn to his father not to quarrel. Meanwhile he did not conceal from the Councillor (to be impartial) that the Apothecary proclaimed everywhere, from exasperation against Sebastian, that the latter had gotten the plan of this marriage as a stepping-stone to promotion entirely from him, from Zeusel. Flamin, in such bone-fractures of the breast, always resorted at once to the chalybeate (steel-cure) of the sword, the lead-water of bullets; and the cautery of the sabre; and as the duel with Victor, one of noble extraction, had spoiled him, he would also in the first heat have proposed it to the three-buttoned[163] fellow, when Mat ridiculed the incompetent plebeian. Flamin cursed in vain fury his defect of ancestry, which hindered him from letting himself be shot by one ancestrally endowed; nay, he would have been capable—as he kindled quickly and yet cooled slowly—for a mere verbal insult from a nobleman (as one actually did on a certain occasion)—of becoming a soldier, then an officer and a nobleman, merely for the sake of afterward summoning the canonical and challengeable defamer before the muzzle of his pistol.
But the faithful Matthieu,—whose spotted soul turned a different side to every one, like the sun, which, according to Ferguson, on account of its spots, revolves on its axis, so as to give all the planets equal light,—he understood the business; he said, he would in his own name challenge the Chamberlain, and in fact to a masked duel, and then Flamin in the disguise could take his part, while he himself stood by under the name of the third Englishman, and the two others as seconds.
Flamin was overmastered by rapidity; but now again there was a want of something, which is still more indispensable than nobility to a game of fighting,—namely, of a good, legitimate offence. Matthieu, to be sure, was ready with pleasure to offer one to the man which should adequately justify a duel; but the man with the Chamberlain's master-key was one who, there was every reason to fear, would forgive it,—and there would be nobody to shoot.—Most fortunately the Evangelist remembered, that he himself had already received one from him, which he knew how profitably and honestly to bring to bear upon the case: "Le Baut had, indeed, three years before, as good as promised him his daughter; and however indifferent this perjury was in itself, still, as a pretext for the chastisement of a greater fault, it retained its full value." ... Thus on a smutty tongue does truth take the form of a lie, provided the lie cannot dress itself in that of truth. And Flamin did not dream that his alleged groomsman was no other than the veritable Sabine robber of his bride.
I am concerned lest it should be thought that Matthieu imputes to a Chamberlain, especially one with whom making and keeping a promise were the most distant cousins, less full-power of lying than to a Court-Page, and that he forgets how, in general, one gets over the stream of the court and of life as over any natural one, not in a direct line, but in a diagonal and oblique manner. But the rascal despises the rascal still more than he hates the good man. Besides, he acted thus not merely from passion, but from calculation: if Flamin were killed, then he must needs receive from Agnola, who now was becoming more and more the Princess of the Prince, and for whom naturally an after-bloom of January's and his Lordship's former sowings was a hedge of thorns, the honest man's fee and fairing, and a higher place on the merit-roll of the court;—furthermore, his Lordship in that case could no longer trundle through the gate and bring word, "Your Grace's son is to be had and is alive."—If the Chamberlain fell, then, too, the result was not to be despised; this former boarder and protégé[164] of the princely crown was, after all, gone to the Devil, and his Lordship would have at least to be ashamed to think that by his silence he had entangled the Regency-Councillor in a deadly relation with a man to whom he had, at all events, publicly to pay the veneration of a son. Matthieu could not lose,—besides, he could disguise or disclose his knowledge of Flamin's extraction, as the case might require.
As there was nothing to prevent the Englishmen's being seconds, Flamin said, Yes; but Le Baut said, No, when he received Mat's manifesto and war-articles; he was frightened to death almost at the very death-prescription without the ingredient of the bullet. I shall never so belittle a courtier, as to allege that he declines such a potato-war from virtue or from faint-heartedness,—such men tremble certainly not at death, but merely at a disgrace,—but this latter, which Le Baut feared at the hands of the Prince and Minister, was precisely what deterred him. He therefore, on fine paper and with fine turns of expression, which outsparkled the black sand, represented to Mat their former friendship, and dehortations from this glaring "ordeal,"[165] and declared himself besides entirely willing to do everything which his honor—would be offended at, in case he only were not obliged by this sham-fight to violate the laws of the duel. But he was,—Matthieu wrote back, he would pledge himself for the secrecy as well as for the silence of the seconds, and he made the additional proposal to him, that they should insinuate into each other dragon-[166] and pitch-balls in the night and in masks; "for the rest he remained in future his friend as ever, and would visit him, for only honor demanded of him this step." ... And of the Chamberlain too;—for these men swallow only great offences, but no little ones, just as those bitten by mad dogs can get down solids, but no liquids,—and herewith in my eyes is a courtier like Le Baut sufficiently excused, if he makes believe he were an honest man, or as if he were very different from those who pawn their honor for the whole year, and—as in the case of imperial pledges or living pledges of love—never redeem the pawn.
All was fixed for the very evening when Victor sorrowfully entered into Maienthal,—the theatre of war was between St. Luna and the city.