Part 10

However, she was not embarrassed. He thought it unjust toward Flamin to observe her sentiments towards himself; but still he remarked this much,--that the observatory on which one would watch the occultations of her heart must be higher than is necessary in regard to other women. The custom of being admired had made her proof against that showing up, as in a glass, the impression of her charms with which men so often win to themselves the attention of woman's vanity. She was, as I have said, not embarrassed, but went on to tell her listener something further of Emanuel's character, which she lately, out of respect for her teacher, had not been willing to lay before such unholy ears,--namely, that he firmly believed he should die a year hence in the midnight of St. John's day.[77] Victor could easily guess that she herself believed it; but what he did not guess was, that this proud one, from pure tenderness of heart, had hastened her purpose of leaving Maienthal on St. John's day, in order not to meet the beloved man on the anniversary of the future day of his death. According to her account, this Emanuel had had a painfully exalted position among men; he was alone; he had had great friends on his bosom, but all had passed into the grave, and therefore he would also hide there his own head. Years give to stormy, over-vigorous men a finer harmony of the heart, but from refined, cold natures they take more than they give. Those strong hearts resemble English gardens, which age always makes greener, fuller, more leafy; whereas the man of the world, like a French one, is covered by years with dried-up and disfigured boughs.

Victor grew more troubled; every word which he won from her he regarded as a sacrilege upon his friend, the more so as the latter did not understand so well as he the art of opening a conversation with a lady. He had not the heart to shine, because he feared thereby to be a rival of his friend for her good graces. His Flamin seemed to him to-day taller, more beautiful, and better than ever, and he himself shorter and more stupid. He wished a thousand times his father had already come, that he might deliver to him with the greatest ardor Flamin's prayer for his aid in obtaining Clotilda.

At last he came, and Victor drew a full breath again. The good youth often seeks, by acts of sacrifice, to reconcile his conscience again with his _thoughts_. With heart-beatings of enthusiasm he awaited the moment of solitude. A garden detaches and draws together people in the easiest manner, and only in such a place should one impart secrets; Victor could soon, in an arbor which wove itself on four chestnut-trees with its blooming vein-work nest-wise over their heads, embrace his father with trembling emotion, and speak and glow for his friend with tongue and heart. His Lordship's surprise was greater than _his_ emotion. "Here," said he, "is something which has long since fulfilled thy prayer in a different way; but I wished to reserve for thee the joy of bearing the message";--and therewith he gave him a most gracious autograph, wherein the Prince called the practising Advocate Flamin into the Administrative Council.

A most gracious autograph is the _Tetragrammaton_[78] and means of grace, which works supernatural effects and state-miracles; and the illustrious writing-thumb is the magic thief's-thumb,[79] as it were, by which the different wheels of the state-repeating-watch--the lever-wheel, the face-wheel, often merely the hand--is shoved forward or backward, according as it desires an hour earlier or later. Hence ministers often climb up and cut off for themselves such a thief's-thumb to carry in their pockets.

Sebastian is seized by joy, as by Habakkuk's angel, by the hair of the head, and carried through the garden, and driven with his news to the first he might meet, and that proved to be the Chaplain, who, with a comic face, swore it was all a fib of Victor's; but his restrained jubilation almost burst his compressed veins. Victor had no time for refutation, but hurried off with such a message to the heart to which it rightly belonged,--the mother's. The mother could not shape her mouth to anything but a blessed smile, into which the drops of joy overflowed from her eyes. No joy in nature is so sublimely affecting as the joy of a mother at the good fortune of a child. But the son, in whose soul, such as it was to-day, this sunbeam of fate was really needed, could not, in the surprise, be immediately found.

His Lordship, meanwhile, talked with Clotilda as with a daughter, and gave her a letter from her mother and the intelligence of his approaching departure. His manly kindness, guided by respect and graced by refinement, ennobled her attentiveness to his looks; and as she came forth from the affectionate and low-toned conversation with sparkling eyes, her tall form, which usually stooped a little, was raised by a certain inspiration to a noble stature, and she stood in the temple of Nature, as a priestess of the temple, infinitely beautiful. His Lordship separated from her. She found Flamin near the tulip-formed letter C, and the Goddess of Fortune appeared to him in the sweetest human incarnation, to deliver to him her gift. We need not say that the news and the news-bearer threw him into equal ecstasy.

Joy had shaken up the whole bee-garden in a swarming-bag and turned it into chaos. The foaming wine-fermentation could not work itself off till it ended in clear, tranquil rapture. His Lordship took himself out of the way of a gratitude swelled by so many ripieno[80] voices and off to his carriage, when the mother with her dumb heart-fulness overtook him; but nothing could she get from her blissfully burdened heart to her lips, save the modest words, that "to-day was his birthday, and his son did not know it, and ought _also_ to have been surprised with a rapture." He tried to escape from her with a grateful smile, and said that he must hasten back to the Prince, who perhaps had taken as kind an interest in this very day as she; but Sebastian, with his friend whom he had found, overtook him at the garden-gate, and the hurrying lord was delayed a little longer by a swift embrace of his son. Not until he was off did the mother, who longed to unburden her love, clasp tenderly Victor's hand, and, forgetting the agreement, asked: "O dearest, why, then, did you not congratulate him on his birthday? For, indeed, _I_ could not." Now for the first time he understood and felt the sudden embrace of his father, and stretched out his arms after him and would fain reciprocate it.

Here the old Parson, also coming out of the garden, struck in and said, as if talking nonsense, "I wish he were Administrative Councillor"; but his wife, without making any reply to that, said to him with overflowing voice and love, "Such a cradle-festival thou hast never yet lived to see as to-day's, Peter!" Agatha looked at her inquiringly and admonishingly. "Just out with it," said she, and enfolded the children and drew them both into the paternal embrace, "and wish your good father length of days and three more blessed children."

The father could not say anything, but stretched his hand toward the mother, to round the group of the loving Eden. Victor's sympathetic blood swelled up in his heart, to dissolve it in love, and he thought the silent prayer: "Never may any misfortune, All-gracious One, tear these entwined arms asunder!" But Flamin soon drew himself out of the concatenation, and said to Victor with a most grateful pressure of the hand, "Thou knowest not how I am always wronging thee." The Chaplain thought he should hide his emotion from all by saying: "I wish I had not deceived you. I have let myself be bled, but it was a stupid thing; if I had only known! only known! It is true; there, see for yourselves!" And finding that this mask was not adequate to cover the whole emotion of his soul, he called, in an overloud tone, to the poor forgotten Apollonia, who was rocking at the house door the awakened Bastian, to "come here!" But the poor girl, whose merely distant participation in the general mingling of hearts touched our Victor's tenderest feelings, shyly hesitated, till the mother came and indemnified her against any loss by all that for which mothers are never repaid. But not until the Parson's wife held her child in her arms and on her lips, did she feel that the imprisoned flames of her affections found vent, and her heart its alleviation.

Ah, that man should receive the fairest love precisely at the time when he does not yet understand it!--alas that not until late in life's year, as he contemplates with a sigh the love of other parents and children, he should say hopefully to himself, "Ah, thus did mine certainly love me too!"--alas that then the bosom to which thou wouldst hasten with thy thanks for half of a life, for a thousand unappreciated anxieties, for an inexpressible, never returning love, is already lying crushed under an old grave, and has lost the warm heart which so long loved thee!...

In domestic happiness the calm, cosey pleasures driven in between four narrow walls are only the most accidental constituent; its nervous and vital fluid is the blazing fire-fountains of love which spring out of kindred hearts into each other. The involuntary surprise had disconcerted the intentional ones. But the flood of joy had swept all parties together; and they still remained in the same confidential closeness to each other, when it had abated again. They sat down to the entertainment in the summer-house. Seldom are banquets spiced as this one was, by two extraordinary advantages,--want of food and want of room. Nothing whets the appetite so much as the fear of its not finding enough to satisfy it. It had been contrived by Sebastian, that for each guest only his favorite dish should be provided; for the Parson, stuffed crabs and potato cheese; for Flamin, ham; for the Hero, good Harry's beans. But in this case every one wanted another's favorite dish, and set his own up at auction.[81] Even the ladies, who generally eat and do not eat, like fishes, nibbled a little. The second intoxicating ingredient which they had, thrown into their cup of joy, was the table, together with the garden-house, of which the former would not hold the food nor the latter the feeders. Sebastian had betaken himself, with Agatha, to an affiliated table which had been adjoined outside to the window of the banquet-hall, merely for the purpose of screaming in from out there and whining, more than eating. This caprice was, at bottom, a covered modesty which feared being honored inside at the expense of the other guests, on his Lordship's account. His own solitude--perhaps in a painful sense--pictured to him the shy Appel, who, as vestal of the hearth, ate only the drawback toll of returning dishes, merely to try how they had tasted to others. He could not longer endure the thought of this separation, but took wine and the best of the dessert, and carried it in to her in her kitchen winter quarters. As, in doing so, he displayed upon his face, instead of his gayety towards girls, of which she might have made a too humble interpretation, the greatest seriousness of courtesy; he was so happy as to have given to a soul pinched up by nature itself--with no other flower-pot here to send its roots round in than a cooking-pot, and only the kitchen for its concert-hall and the spit for its music of the spheres--a golden evening and a long memory of pleasure. Let no one maliciously thrust his fist in the way of such a good snail-soul, and laugh to see how she wriggles over it; and let him who stands upright willingly stoop and gently lift her along over her little stone.

As to Clotilda, before dinner things went very well, but after dinner very ill. I speak of Sebastian, who, after the handing in of the petition to his Lordship, was happier and more light-hearted, and actually talked as frankly with Clotilda as if she were--a bride. For he had already said in Hanover, that "there was not a more tedious and holy thing than a bride, particularly if it were a friend's; sooner would he fritter away his time about the musty Pandects in Florence, or a holy body in a glass shrine at Vienna, than about her." In fact, it was hard to fall in love with Clotilda; I know the reader would not have done it, but would have gone coldly away again. "Her Grecian nose under the almost manly breadth of forehead," he would have said, "this sister-nose to all Madonnas and this frontier wild-game[82] so rare on German faces, her still but bright eyes, which seek nothing beyond themselves, this British gravity, this harmonious thoughtful soul, raise her above the rights of love. And even if this majestic form should incline to love, who could ever be so selfish as to pocket the present of a whole heaven, or so proud as to shoot his heart into hers like a smoke-ball, and becloud thereby this still, pensive serenity?" The reader will be glad to read his own words.

But after dinner things went differently. Under Victor's cerebral membrane, some hobgoblin had so thrown into pi all the letters of his ideas in the inner letter-case, that he was up to this time gay, but unsatisfied. He had tried to tie and untie Agatha's hair, to separate her double-bows into unequal, and for that very reason into equal halves again; but the operation had not pleased him as usual,--to-day's interludes of domestic love had put his mirthful spirit wholly out of joint,--and it seemed to him as if, withdrawn from the present joy, he should be happier, at least for a few minutes, in some quiet corner, and he particularly longed to see the sun set.

Add to all this the sight of Clotilda's increased love towards Agatha,--the sight of his friend, who, by the deepening silence of his tenderness, his mildening voice, and by a devotedness so irresistible in impassioned natures, commanded every heart, "Love me,"--and, finally, the spectacle of night....

He had already been long sad, when he seemed still gay. Now the mother took the little hero of the forenoon out under the bland evening heaven. They all stood outside of the garden-tabernacle-of-the-covenant, in the first temple of man's devotion. The evening-blood of the sinking sun flowed into the clouds, as into the sea sinks the blood of its giants dying in its depths. The porous cloud did not avail to hide the heavens; it swam round about the moon, and let her pale silver glisten from amidst the slags.

The red clouds painted the infant. Every one took lightly his soft hands, which had already burst from the bud of pillows and the chrysalis of swaddling-bands. Clotilda--instead of lavishing on the little one carnally coquettish caresses, as many girls do _before_ or _for_ men--poured down a steadily streaming look full of hearty love on the new man, untied his too tight and cutting shirt-sleeve, screened from him the moon at which he was squinting, and said, playfully, "Smile this way and love me, _Sebastian_!" She could not possibly have meant to charge this line with metaphorical _ricochet_-shots; besides, the elder, unswaddled Sebastian knew full well that she could have anticipated no double sense; nay, he knew the rule, that the very anxiety wherewith some people banish certain subjects from their talk betrays the presence of the same in their thoughts. And yet, for all that, he had not the courage to smile like the rest, or to take the little hand which she had touched in his. She turned to him, and said, "But how does the child learn _our language, unless it has already a language it can master_?"

... I have, out of mere regard to the philosophers, had this printed in italics.

"Then it follows," he answered, "that the language of pantomime must signify just as much as articulate speech. As often as I see a deaf and dumb man go to sacrament, I think of this,--that all the instruction you can give imports nothing into man, but only indicates and arranges what is already there. The child's soul is its own drawing-master, the teacher is simply its colorist."

"What if this lovely evening," she continued, "should one day come up again to the memory of this little one? Why does the sixth year look more beautiful in remembrance than the twelfth, and the third still more beautiful?" A beautiful woman one cannot interrupt so easily as an ex-Dean; and so she was permitted to recur to this reminiscence: "Herr Emanuel once said, one should relate to children every year the story of their past years, in order that they might one day look back through all their years, even into the haze of the second." It is as if I heard the above-mentioned maid of honor[83] personally speaking, under whose thin lace cap there lay more philosophy than under many a doctor's beaver, as quicksilver sticks in crape, and runs through leather.

Victor answered, with the usual sympathy of his good heart: "Emanuel stands near to man, and knows him. Two scene-painters lead man, beset by magic, through the whole stage,--_Memory_ and _Hope_; in the present he is uncomfortable; enjoyment is poured out for him, as for Gulliver, only into a thousand Liliputian moments; how shall that intoxicate or satisfy? When we picture to ourselves a happy day, we compress it into a single happy thought; when we come upon it, this thought is diluted through: the twenty-four hours."

"I think of that," she replied, "as often as I walk through meadows; in the distance are flowers upon flowers, but, near at hand, they are all scattered apart, and separated by the grass. But yet, after all, _memory is enjoyed only in the present_."

Victor continued to think only of the flowers, and said, abstractedly, "And in the _night_ the flowers themselves look like grass,"--when it began suddenly to sprinkle.

They all stepped, in solemn mood, into the summerhouse, on whose roof the rain pattered down, while through the open windows the alternately shutting and opening moon's eye threw in like a glacier its snow-glances,--the tepid blossom-breath of the whole glistening landscape stole with healing balm on every human sigh, every burdened bosom. In this confined circle, separated from nature by the alternation of night and moonshine, one must needs take refuge in something near and familiar, in the old harpsichord. Clotilda's voice might make a flute-accompaniment to the whispering rain without. The Parson's wife begged--her to favor them, and with her favorite _aria_ from Benda's Romeo,--"Perchance, my lost repose! perchance one day in the grave I may find thee!" &c.,--a song whose tones like fine dissolving perfumes penetrate the heart through a thousand entrances, and tremble there, and tremble more and more intensely, till at last they shiver it to atoms, and leave nothing of it behind in the harmonious annihilation but tears.

Clotilda without any hesitating vanity consented to sing. But for Sebastian, in whom all tones came in contact with naked, quivering feelers, and who could work himself into sadness at the very songs of the herdsmen in the fields--this, on such an evening, was too much for his heart; under cover of the general musical attentiveness, he had to steal out of the door....

But here, under the great night-heaven, amidst higher drops, his own can fall unseen. What a night! Here a splendor overwhelms him, which links night and sky and earth all together; magic Nature rushes with streams into his heart, and forcibly enlarges it. Overhead, Luna fills the floating cloud-fleeces with liquid silver, and the soaked silver-wool quivers downward, and glittering pearls trickle over smooth foliage, and are caught in blossoms, and the heavenly field pearls and glimmers. Through this Eden, over which a double snow-shower of sparks and of drops played and whirled through a misty rain of blossom-fragrances, and wherein Clotilda's tones, like angels that had got lost, went flying about, now sinking and now soaring through this magic-maze, Victor staggered, dazzled, overwhelmed, trembling and weeping, and sank down exhausted into the arbor where he had to-day fallen on his father's heart. He thought over the wintry life of that good father amidst mere strangers to the heart, and his solitary, sad celebration of today's festival, and the cold, empty room in the paternal bosom, which once the lost form of the beloved one had inhabited, and he yearned painfully for the heart of his invisible mother. He lifted his leaning head into the rain, and from the large open eyes fell not strange drops alone. He glowed through his whole being, and night-clouds must cool it. His finger-tips hung down, lightly folded in one another. Clotilda's tones dropped now like molten silver-points on his bosom, now they flowed like stray echoes from distant groves into this still garden. He spoke no name, he thought no thought, he neither acquitted himself nor accused himself; he saw it all as in a dream, when now a thick night glided across the garden, and now a sea of light swept after it.

But it seemed to him as if his bosom would burst, as if he should be blest could he at this moment embrace beloved persons, and crush in the closeness of that embrace in a blissful frenzy his bosom and his heart. It was to him as if he should be over-blessed, could he now before some being, before a mere shadow of the mind, pour out all his blood, his life, his being. It was to him as if he must scream into the midst of Clotilda's tones, and fold his arms around a rock, only to stifle the painful yearning.

He heard the leaves drip, and took it for a continuing rain. But the _Staub-bach_ of the heavens had scattered itself in spray, and only Luna's fall of light any longer besprinkled the landscape. The sky was deep-blue. Agatha had been seeking him during the rain, and had only just found him. He woke up, obediently and silently went out with her, and met only cleared-up heavenly faces,--then all his nerves quivered, and he was compelled with a mute obeisance to take his painful and friendly leave. Each one had his own thoughts on the subject. But the Parson's wife told the company, he loved to hear music at a distance, only it always made him too melancholy.

Ah, when he reached his chamber, a happy and consoling thought embraced his soul. Clotilda's dirge, and all, fixed before his sight the form of the exalted Emanuel,--and it seemed to say: "In a year I shall be already under the ground, only come to me, poor child, I will love thee till I die!" Without desiring a light, he wrote with streaming eyes, which no light could have helped, this letter to Emanuel:--

"EMANUEL!

"Say not to me, I know thee not! How can man, on this little grain of sun-dust called the earth, on which he warms himself, and during the swift moments which he counts off on his pulse between the flash of life and the stroke of death, still make a distinction between acquaintances and non-acquaintances? Why do not these little creatures, who have wounds of the same kind, and for whose coffins Time takes the same measure, fall without hesitation into each other's arms, and sigh, 'Ah, we are doubtless like each other and acquainted!' Why must first these fleshly statues into which our spirits are chained move towards and touch each other, before the beings disguised therein can imagine and love each other? And yet it is so human and so true a thought: what then does Death take from us except fleshly statues, what from our eyes but the loved countenance, what from our ears but the dear voice, and the warm bosom from our own? Ah, Emanuel! be to me no dead man! Accept me! Give me thy heart! I will love it!