Part 31

And the same morning, this son, our Victor, was _not_ happy. It seemed to him, at the report of Flamin's discharge and of Matthieu's officiousness, as if he heard the hissing and the bullet-like whistle of the swooping hawk, that hitherto in motionless poise, as if with nailed pinion, had hung high in the blue above his prey.--Think not too hardly of the Doctor, that he mourned the lost opportunity of freeing his friend out of the narrow prison, and himself out of the wide one of life. For he has lost too much and is too lonely; men appear to him as people in the Polish rock-salt mines, who grope round with a light bound to their heads, which they call "I," encircled with the unenjoyable glitter of the salt, clad in white and with red fillets,[192] as if they were bandages.--The speech of his acquaintances, like that of the Chinese, is monosyllabic.--He must live to see the mortifying day when January and the city will set down against him the lowliness of his rank as a fraud.--Before every eye he stands in a different light, or shade rather. Matthieu regards him as coarse; January, as intriguing; the women, as trifling,--just as Emanuel regarded him as pious, and Clotilda as too ardent; for every one hears in a full-toned, harmonious man only his own echo. What heart could henceforth induce him--his own could not--to hold an oar any longer in the slave-ship of life? O, one could do it, a warm and mighty one,--his mother's! "Only once plunge out of this world," said his conscience, "then will thy mother, in the fulness of love, die after thee, and appear before thee in the next world with so many tears, with all her hot wounds, and say, 'Son, this sorrow is thy work!'"--He obeyed, and perceived that, if it is noble to die for a mistress, it is still nobler to live for a mother.

He therefore determined this very evening--in the evening, so that night might place its screen before certain weather-wasting ruins of better times, before certain gliding _night-corpses_ of memory--to go to St. Luna, to call to his mother, and to refresh her sick and weary heart with at least _one_ flower of joy, and say to her,--as no oath any longer bound him,--"Now for the second time thou givest me life!" How sweet was the thought to him!--A single good purpose makes up and airs the sharp sick-bed of a shattered life.

But at evening, you good, oppressed souls, in the evening--not of life, but--of the 21st of October, all will be lighter and fresher to you, and the ball of your fortune will revolve from the stormy to the sunny side.

At evening, Victor arrived at St. Luna, and ensconced himself in the arbor of the parsonage garden, where he had given Clotilda the first tears of love.--The parsonage, the hall, the observatory, the two gardens, lay around him like dilapidated knightly castles, from which all joys and inmates have long since departed!--All so autumnally still, so stationary around him,--the bees sat mute on the sill of the hive beside the executed drones,--even the moon and a little cloud stood fast beside each other,--the wax mummy stood with rigid face turned round toward the still chamber!--At last the Parson's wife came through the garden, on her way to the hall. He knew how exceedingly she must needs love him again, now that his fidelity to the jealous Flamin had come to light. O, she looked so weary and sickly, so red with weeping, and exhausted with bleeding, and prematurely old! It grieved him, that he must say first an indifferent word, in order to call her into the arbor. When she entered, he raised himself up, and bowed low, and laid himself, as if he would expire, on the dear bosom, within which was a world full of sighs and a heart full of love, and said: "O mother, I am thy son!--accept me; thy son has nothing, loves nothing more on the whole wide earth, nothing more but thee.--O dear mother, I have lost much before finding thee.--Why dost thou look on me thus?--If thou despisest me, then give me thy blessing, and let me flee.... Oh! and besides it was only for thy sake that I chose to live any longer."--She looked upon him, bending backward, with a moist eye, full of inexpressible tenderness and sorrow, and said: "Is it true, then? O God! if you were my son!--Ah, good child!--I have long loved thee as a mother.--But deceive me not, my heart is so sore!"--The son gave his oath.... and here let the curtain slowly sink on the maternal embrace, and when it has wholly covered son and mother, then let a good child look back into his own soul, and say, here dwells everything that thou canst not describe!

And now, at evening, the Chaplain was stealing home from the field and through the garden, and cried out, as he came to meet his new son: "Ah! Herr Hofmedicus, I am falling away abominably. I look really and manifestly like an _Ecce Homo_ and feverish patient. I am doomed.--I am destined to make a _soiffre-douleur_, a _persona miserabilis_, a Patripassian."[193]--When Victor had reported to him, "It is all over, the Regency-Councillor is liberated and innocent," Eymann looked steadfastly up at the observatory, and said, "Verily there sits the Councillor up there, peeping over," and was on the point of going up to him; but Victor gently held him back, and said tenderly, "I am your son," and disclosed to him all.--"What?--you?--thou?--the son of such an eminent Lord, my son?--I to have begotten my Herr Godfather?--That is unheard of, one brother to be another's godson.--I have two Sebastians in my house at once."--He got sight of the Parsoness, and began a quarrel,--which was always with him a sign of joy.--"So, wife! thou hast known this all day, and let me sit out there in the quarry, on the anxious seat, in the midst of grief, tolling away till night at the poor-sinners'-bell? Couldst thou not have let the bellows-blower come out to notify me? That was very ill done,--the wife sits at home and drinks bitters, into which are thrown whole casks of sugar and dishes of comfits,--and the man keeps himself in stone-quarries, and swills down steadily his bitter extracts out of an emetic-cup."--She never answered a word.

Now, for the first time, Victor learned from his mother that it was only for his friend (Matthieu), and for his country, Flamin had meant to die; that he repented his unjust jealousy, and bewailed the friendship he had trifled away; and that she had sent for him for the very reason that she might conduct him to the arms of his true mother, and before the face of an afflicted sister. It had been this morning a human weakness, that the frozen limb of friendship, his heart, had been a little more cold and unfeeling towards Flamin, when he heard of his deliverance from imprisonment,--but it was now, at evening, the part of human kindness, that Flamin's great resolve to die restored, like a chilblain ointment, to his stiff heart warmth and motion. His inner being stirred itself mightily, welled up, overflowed his crushed resentment, and the image of the youthful friend rose up and said: "Victor, give thy hand again to thy school-friend,--O, he has suffered so much, and acted so nobly!" Tears shot from his quivering eyes, as he resolved to ascend the observatory, and say to his old favorite, "Let it be forgotten,--come, we will go together to thy sister." He went alone up to the tower,--intending to present him to the lady afterward. The Parson's wife flew off some minutes before Victor started, to inform and bring his two sisters, and send for the blind Julius to be conducted from the city, that no link might be missing in the golden necklace of love.

What a Jacob's ladder, on which every minute is a higher round, is set up this night on the swinging earth, whereon good beings climb up one after another!--

Down on the lowest step of the throne of reconciliation was Victor's heart laboring mightily in the hot blood through which it struggled. Flamin saw him slowly coming up, but he came not to meet him; because he was uncertain whether Victor came angry or forgiving. When the latter at last reached the top, Flamin, ashamed, supported his averted face in the branches; for he could not look his so sorely abused darling in the eye, till he knew that he had forgiven him. They maintained an awful silence beside each other, under the rippling linden-top,--they could not wholly guess each other's feelings, and that made the silence more gloomy, and the reconciliation doubtful. At last, Flamin, breathing intensely, and with his face buried in the foliage, reached out to him a trembling hand. When Victor saw the trembling of this dumb hand imploring reconciliation, boiling tears dropped through his heart and dissolved it asunder, and only from sadness and loving forbearance he delayed taking the lowly hand; but at this moment Flamin turned round (under the influence of a false suspicion), proud, blushing, full of tears and full of love, and said: "I beg thy forgiveness with all my heart for having been a devil to thee, an angel; but then if thou dost not grant it to me, I hurl myself down, that only the devil may get me!"--Singular! this extortion of forgiveness contracted a little Victor's open soul; but still he embraced the friendly wildling, and said with the mild voice of tranquil love: "From the bottom of my soul have I to-day forgiven thee; but loved thee I ever and always have, and in a few weeks would have died for thee, to save thy life."--Now their souls approached each other without reserve, and disclosed their lives,----and when both had told all, and Victor had unfolded to him, that he had been substituted in his place, and was the son of the bereaved mother, then would Flamin have died for remorse, and only pressed his face more closely for shame into Victor's bosom,--and their newly wedded souls celebrated their silver wedding on the nuptial altar of the watchtower, under the bridal torch of the moon; and their bliss was equalled by nothing but their friendship.

They wandered in the tender intoxication slowly into Le Baut's garden, and the stream of rapture grew deeper and deeper; but suddenly ice-cold waves, as from the river Styx, terrified the softly warmed Victor, when he came to the mournful bower, where, exactly a year ago to-day, on the 21st of October,--to-day then is Clotilda's birth-day,--he had torn her image out of his distracted heart, and where he now arrived again, perhaps again to tear it out from the old scars. For the lowering of his rank had made him a little--prouder, and his love for Clotilda more shy. To tell the truth, he could not himself fully believe that his inferior extraction had been unknown to her; he rather inferred the opposite, from the interest which his Lordship had let her take in his letters, and all secrets,--from her struggle in the beginning against her germinating love, and from the slight haughtiness towards him on the first day,--from her praise of misalliances,--from her favoring of Giulia's love for Julius, whom she knew to be his Lordship's son,--from her ready assent to the betrothal, which certainly otherwise her father, after the recognition, would no longer have granted,--and from other signs which one will more easily gather up for himself on the second reading of this work. As was said, this hope, that she had all along known who he was, refuted certain objections of his delicacy and of his spirit of renunciation, and bloomed out still higher to-day, among so many joys and pleasant incidents.--Ah! if he had been devoid of all hope, then he would certainly, in the midst of the circle of so many blessed ones, have been obliged to fall as the last victim!--But that something in man, which always prefigures to him a great loss as so probable, and a great gain as so improbable, united with melancholy remembrances, now tormented his soul.

He therefore begged Flamin to leave him alone for a while in the bower, and to hasten alone (as the Parson's wife was already in the garden) to the friendly arms of the newly-found sister and mother, and added that he would presently follow him. When Flamin was gone, Victor began to tremble more and more at the thought of the agitation of Clotilda, which would perhaps get the mastery of her at the intelligence of his pedigree; and it oppressed him sorely when he thought that for all in the garden sorrow had been removed from the black-hung mourning-chamber of earth, only for him haply not.--

But at that moment came his mother, beaming with the reflection of new raptures, and before questioning him first wiped his eyes. Her new raptures proceeded from this, that Clotilda, when she had related his descent, had fallen on her neck and begged her forgiveness for so long a concealment of the so long continued robbery of a child,--and that she had reminded the mother of a promise which had been given during the walk after the betrothal and was now redeemed. Much had escaped the mother,--and, I fear, the reader,--and Clotilda only glided hastily and blushingly over the matter; but had she not there said to her, "We change not our _relation_"? namely, that of a sister by marriage.--The Parson's wife concluded her report with the entreaty of her Ladyship, that she would bring her new son to her as speedily as possible. Victor could say nothing, for tearful rapture, except, "Have not then my good Agatha and the blind one yet arrived?"--And both stood--behind him; and he concealed the overmeasure of his bliss under the caressings of the sister and the friend; his capacious cup of sorrow was truly poured full of tears of joy.

As, in the accompanying circle of three loving souls, he entered upon the fair road to the dear united ones, they all came to meet him with radiant features,--with swimming glances,--with remembrances from which the sting had been extracted, or rather which had been turned into joys; for from the crushed flowers of gladness on the road of life a sweet perfume is wafted over to the present hour, as marching armies often send out from heaths the fragrance of trampled plants. Her Ladyship was conducted by her two children, and said, with an obliging smile: "I present to you here my beloved children; continue towards them the friendship which you have hitherto shown them."--Her son Flamin, heedless of decorum, flew to him and flung himself upon his neck. Clotilda bowed lower than she would have done before a Prince, and in her eye swam the question of melancholy love, "Art thou still unhappy? Have I still thy heart? Why is thy eye moistened? why is thy voice broken?"--Victor replied with quite as much tenderness as dignity, as he turned to the Lady, "You could not on a fairer day find again your son than on the birthday of your daughter." ...

Of _that_, in the previous whirlwinds, no one had thought. What a chaos of gladness! What a hearty, loving confusion of tongues on the part of congratulating improvisators! What affecting eye-thanks from Clotilda for such an obliging remembrance!

They went in ecstasy through the cool garden to the hall. O, when sisterly love, filial love, maternal love, love of lovers, and friendship burn side by side on the altars, then does it make a good man feel glad that the human heart is so noble, and preserves the material for so many flames, and that we feel love and warmth only when we dispense them out of ourselves, just as our blood never appears to us warm, until it flows, outside of our veins, in the open air.--O love! how happy are we that thou, when contemplated by a second soul, regeneratest and redoublest thyself,--that warm hearts attract and create warm ones, as suns do planets, the greater the lesser, and God, all,--and that even the dark planet is only a lesser, veiled, monœcian[194] sun!... All these souls stood today high on their Alp, and saw--as on a natural one--the _rainbow_ of human fortune hanging as a great completed _magic circle_ between the earth and the sun.--In the hall the Lady begged her daughter to go alone into the dark Jew's-harp chamber; she wanted to give her her birthday present. Clotilda's eye bade her friend, as she left him, with a second expression of thanks for his soul, a tender farewell.

After her departure, the Lady gave him a sign to stay with her behind the rest,--then he gladly fell on his knee before Clotilda's mother, who had not yet been asked her consent to his love, with the words, "If you do not guess my prayer, I have not the courage to begin it." She raised him up and said, "Prayers that are made so silently are quite as silently fulfilled; but rather come now and see what present I make to my daughter."--He must first, however, for a long time, moisten and kiss the hand which is about to offer him the lime-blossom honey of a whole life.

The two proceeded now, in this evening sent over out of the millennial kingdom, to the dark chamber of the daughter. Why did tears flow from Clotilda's eyes for rapture, even before her mother spoke?--Because she could already guess everything. The mother conducted the lover to his beloved, and said to the bride: "Take here thy birthday present. Few mothers are rich enough to give such a one; but then few daughters good enough to receive such a one."--The bridal pair were brought to their knees before her by the weight of overwhelming bliss and great, dumb gratitude, and took respectively the two beneficent hands of the mother; but she gently drew them out of theirs, and laid those of the loving ones in each other, and slipped away with the whisper, "I will bring our guests hither!"----

--O ye two good souls, kneeling beside each, blest at last! how unhappy must a man be who, without a tear of joy, or how happy one who, without a tear of longing, can see you now fall speechless and weeping into each other's arms,--after so many painful partings, at last linked together,--after so many exhaustive bleedings, at last healed,--after thousands and thousands of sighs, yet at last blest,--and inexpressibly blest by innocence of heart and peace of soul and God!--No, I cannot to-day take my wet eyes away from you,--I cannot to-day behold and sketch the other good souls,--but I lay my eyes, with the _two_ tears which belong to the happy and the unhappy man, softly and steadfastly on my two still lovers in the dusky chamber, where once the breath of the harmonica tones wafted their two souls together like gold- and silver-leaves.--O, as my book now ends, and my beloved vanish from me,--withdraw thyself, dim Holy of Holies, with thy two angels,--send back a long echo, when thou fliest upward with thy melodious souls, as swans in the night glide with flute-tones through the heavens.----But, alas! does not the Holy of Holies already stand far away and high above me, and hang as a little silver cloud on the horizon of dream?--O these good souls, this good Victor, this good Emanuel, this good Clotilda, all these vernal dreams have gone up, and my heart looks up sorrowfully and calls after them without hope, "Dreams of spring, when will ye return?"

O why should I do it, were it not that the friends whom we firmly grasp by the hand are also dreams that soar upward? But the convulsive, prostrate, moaning heart on the gravestone does not call after these, "Dreams of spring-time, when will ye return?"----

SUPPLEMENT TO THE 44TH DOG-POST-DAY.

Nothing.

As this supplement to a little Post-Day was too small, I kept waiting for the dog and for new biographical pipe-clay and dough.--Since, however, the _post-aux-chiens_ still delays, I will just score down the few cat-tones which I left out of the concert of love in the former chapter. It is nothing but vexatious stuff that I have still to supply here, and just these creaking tones may topple down again a new avalanche and institute new mischief. It is simply stupid that in this way the book is done, and yet not done, since the dog of a--dog is quite unexpectedly out of the way, like snuff.

The step-mother, the Chamberlain's lady, who has been long since banished the country by the biographical conjurer of spirits and bodies out of these leaves, had, on the advent of her Ladyship, from a very natural antipathy, marched off to a little country-seat. Speed on; besides, thou art not my Amancebada![195]--Matthieu had, in the former chapter, conformably to his old audacity, stayed awhile among none but antagonists of his dark nature, and was sitting in the hall as the happy procession marched in from the garden. He knew not yet that the courtier Victor was in reality nothing but a mere, flat parson's son. At first he continued to carry on the antique joke of his declaration of love to Agatha, and set the Parson up to compliments and addresses of thanks for the services which he had rendered all to-day. But when he found there was too much indifference to his cold malice, he took away from his contempt its ambiguity. In fact, his heart was sincere, and rather made itself out more malicious, than more virtuous, than it was; he hated a dissimulation, whereby many a courtling easily gives himself that look of the virtuous man, which is best to be explained by Lavater's observation, that the angry person transfers to his own face the looks of the one whom he hates.

At last, Matthieu guessed the secrets, and the Parson ratified his guess. Such a water for his saw-mill, on which he cut men straight for his throne-scaffolding, had never before flowed in upon him.--If he represents to the Prince this falsehood, this new, terrible, abominable fraud, which his Lordship has played upon him, then--he concludes--must January go beside himself with amazement at Lord Horion's lies and at Matthieu's truths.--Now, he held it for his duty to smile, indeed, but no more with malicious pleasure, like Mat, but with a regular contemptuousness, as a court-vassal should; he felt, too, how much beneath his dignity it was to let himself any longer be twisted into this citizenly quodlibet, without at least making a fool of it. He went accordingly,--for the sake of throwing out the news from his seed-apron into good ground,--after a short but sincere congratulation upon the marriage, the very same night back to the court,----and the Devil, following him as attendant blackamoor, decorously brought up the rear.