Part 25

Beata almost sacrificed her eyes to the intense interest which she felt in no one else (as she thought) than the one who had gone hence. Her heavy looks were often turned toward the hermitage-mountain; at evening she herself visited it, and brought to the sleeper the last offering which friendship has then to give, in overmeasure. Thus, then, do the fangs of misfortune strike into tender hearts the most deeply; thus are the tears which man sheds so much the greater and swifter the less the earth can give him and the higher he stands above it, as the cloud which hangs higher than others over the earth, sends down the biggest drops. Nothing raised Beata up but the redoubling of the alms which she gave certain poor people weekly or after every pleasure, and her solitary intercourse with the Resident Lady, with her Laura and the two children of the gardener.

The two travelers were better off. As Doctor Fenk visited, _ex-officio_, the government physicians, who made medicines, together with the apothecaries, who employed reprisals and made receipts, he fortunately was so often vexed that he had no convenient season for indulging grief; in this way government physicians, who were always in the country (except just when epidemics happened to be prevalent), and midwives, who in extreme baptism still better provide for the regeneration of young non-Christians than for their birth, and whom Pharaoh ought to have had,--these two classes brought the afflicted Pestilentiary in some measure upon his legs again. Anger is so grand a purgative of sorrow, that legal persons, who seal and inventory for widows and orphans, cannot vex them enough; hence I shall hereafter leave by will to my heirs, whom my death will too sorely afflict, nothing but the remedy for that affliction--exasperation at the deceased!

At last the two came back with mutually opposite emotions, and their way led them by the resting-place, the manor of Ottomar and near the orphaned temple of the park. The temple, however, was lighted; it was far into the night. Around the temple hung a buzzing bee-swarm of hunting-dresses, in which were encased half the Court. Fenk and Gustavus elbowed their way therefore through greater and greater personages and horses, swept like comets by one star after another, and into the church: therein were one or two unexpected things--the Prince and a dead body--for the fighting thing behind at the altar was nothing unexpected, but the parson. Gustavus and Fenk had ensconced themselves in the confessional. Gustavus could hardly tear his eye away from the Prince, who, with that look of noble indifference which is seldom wanting in people of _ton_ or from large cities and funeral-bidders, glanced far over the dead man--the Prince had that heart peculiar to the great folk, which is a petrifaction in the good sense, and is with them the first among their solid parts, and which betrays in the finest manner that they hold to the immortality of the soul, and that when they have one of their own connection buried, they are not at home--[are out of their element.]

All at once the Doctor laid his head upon the cushion of the confessional and covered his face; he stood up again and gazed with an eye which he could not keep dry, toward the uncovered corpse and sought in vain to see. Gustavus also looked that way and the form was known to him, but not the name, which he vainly asked of the speechless Doctor--at last the funeral preacher named the name. I need not, as if for the first time, say in double-black-letter, that the dead man on whom just now so many hard eyes and a pair of disconsolate ones rested, looked just like the Player Reinecke, whose noble figure also the heavy grave-stone crushes into confusion. I need not repeat after the pastor the name of _Ottomar_. The poor Doctor seemed for some time to have been determined that the anguish of his nerves should resolve itself into a _nervous preparation_, and was practising in that direction. Singularly enough, Gustavus took no interest in the dead, but only in the mourning friend.

The good Medical Counsellor shut to with a violent slam the hymn-book which lay in his hands; he heard not when the Prince, (who had been there only three minutes) rode away to get the death-certificate, but every word of the pastor he caught, for the sake of learning something of the history of his friend's last sickness; but he learned nothing except the cause of his death (burning fever). At last all was over, and he walked mutely and with staring eyes in between the funeral torches and up to the bier, shoved aside with his left hand without look or sound whatever might hinder him, and clutched at the sleeper's with his right. When at last he once held in his grasp the hand which Alps and years had torn from his, without however being any nearer to him for whom he had so long yearned, and without the joy of reunion, then did his anguish grow dense and dark, and spread heavily and formlessly over his whole soul. But when he found again on that hand two warts, which he had so often felt in grasping it, then did his sorrow assume the veiled form of the past; Milan passed before him with the bloom of its vineyards and the summits of its chestnut-trees and the lovely days spent among both, and looked mournfully on the two men, to whom nothing was left. And now he would have fallen with his two streaming eyes on the two that were dry, if the undertaker had not said: "One does not like to do that, it is not well." A lock was all the grave gave back of the whole friend of whom it had robbed him, a lock which for the eye is so little and for the touch of the finger so much. He tenderly laid down again the hand which had so sadly closed the last letter, upon the untouched one and took a last leave of his Ottomar for this world.

He had not observed that the dead man's Pomeranian dog and two tonsured strangers were there, one of whom had six fingers.--Once out of the church and on the road, one branch of which ran toward the palace of Ottomar and the other around the hermitage-mountain, Gustavus and Fenk looked upon each other with a mute, inconsolable inquiry--they answered each other by a leave-taking. The Doctor turned about and continued his journey--Gustavus went into the park and there at the foot of hermitage-mountain, reflected upon the fate--not of his friend, nor his own, but--that of all men....

And when am I writing this? On this 16th day of November, which is the baptismal day of the encoffined Ottomar.

THIRTY-THIRD, OR XXVI TRINITATIS, SECTION.

Great Aloe-blooming of Love; or, the Grave.--The Dream.--The Organ.--Together with my Apoplectic Attack, Fur-boots and Ice-liripipium.[74]

In the soul of Gustavus the highest lights passed slowly over from the friend's image to that of the beloved. Now, for the first time, did her face, which at the death-bed had beamed eternal rays upon him, come forth out of the cypress-shadow. The solitary pyramid stood sublimely, as angel-watcher beside the buried one. He climbed the hill with still sad, but softened feelings; he had now, indeed, the indescribably sweet consolation of never having harmed the man lying under the ground there, and having often forgiven him; he wished Amandus had still oftener given occasion for his forgiveness; even _this_ wrapped his wounded bosom in warm solace, that he at this moment so loved, so lamented him, unseen, unrequited.

At the summit he still trod upon some thorns of anguish, which make one cry out aloud; but soon, on the bridge of light, which ran from a lamp out of Beata's chamber across the garden over to the mountain, his yearning eyes flew like other butterflies toward her bright windows. He saw nothing except now the light and now a head which eclipsed it; but this head he dressed up within his far more beautifully than any woman does her own. He lay and leaned, half-kneeling and half-standing, with his eyes turned toward the long stream of light, on the pedestal of the pyramid. Weariness and sleepless nights had filled his tear-glands with those oppressive and yet enrapturing tears, which often without occasion and so bitterly and so sweetly stream out shortly before sickness or after exhaustion.--The same causes spread between him and the outer world the semblance of a dark misty day or yellow fog; his inner world on the contrary grew, without effort of his own, from a pen-and-ink-sketch to a glistening oil-painting, then to a mosaic, at last to an _alto relievo_.--Worlds and scenes moved up and down before him--at last dream shut up the whole outer world of sight with his eye-lids, and opened behind them a new-created paradisiacal one; like a dead man lay his slumbering body beside a grave-mound and his spirit in a heavenly meadow stretching over the whole abyss. I will presently relate the dream and its end, when I have shown the reader the person by whom the dream was at once prolonged and ended.

Namely Beata--she came. She could not know either of his return or of his last station. The recentness of the funeral-ceremonies for Ottomar, the withdrawal of Gustavus, whose image since that last scene had been impressed so deeply upon and almost _through_ her heart, and the retiring of Summer, who daily rolled up her many-colored blooming picture some inches further,--all this had compressed itself in Beata's bosom to an oppressive sigh, which the noisy hunting-seat with its close atmosphere painfully confined, and with which she sought purer spheres of ether, in order to breathe it out upon a grave, and therefrom to breathe-in material for now ones. Enthusiastic heart! with thy feverish throbbings thou dost, indeed, send thy blood coursing in too torrent-like a circle and with thy gushing washest away shores, flowers and lives; but surely thy fault is fairer than if, with phlegmatic movement, thou shouldest, out of the stagnant water of the blood, cast up only a residuum of fatty slime!

The night-walker was startled when she saw the fair sleeper; she had not in all the garden, through which in these still minutes she had been roving, anticipated or found anyone. He lay, as he had sunk softly down, upon one knee; his pale face was irradiated by a lovely dream, by the rising moon and by Beata's eye. It did not occur to her that he was perhaps only feigning slumber; with trembling she therefore drew half a step nearer, in order, in the first place, to be certain who it was, and, secondly, to let her eye rest full upon the form, at which she had hitherto only ventured a side glance. During the gaze she could not properly tell just when she should end it. At last she turned her back upon her paradise, after she had once more stepped quite up to him; but while slowly walking backward it occurred to her (_without_ alarm). "He surely cannot be actually dead." She therefore turned back again and heard his increasing respirations. Near him lay two small sharp stones about as large as my inkstand. She bent down _twice close by him_ (she would not do it at once, or even with her foot) in order to remove them, that he might not fall upon their points....

Really I should have filled an alphabet, or twenty-three sheets, with this scene; fortunately it does not properly go on, until he awakes, and the reader is to-day the happiest of men....

By this time she had already, as a veteran, become more familiar with the danger, and was so sure he would not wake that she ceased to fear it, and almost began to wish it, for it occurred to her "the night-air might be injurious to him." It further occurred to her how sublime a thing it was that the two friends should so rest side by side; and her blue eye relieved itself of a dewdrop, as to which I know not whether it fell for the heart that beat above the ground or the one that lay motionless beneath it. At last she made serious arrangements to withdraw, in order, upon the whole, at a distance to awaken him by a rustling, and in order to indulge her emotions without fear of his waking. She would merely just pass by him (for she stood four and a half paces distant), because she _must_ go down on the other side of the mountain (unless she _chose_ the reverse). His smiles betrayed even increasing raptures, and she was, of course, curious to observe how the play of his features would end, but she must needs leave the smiling dreamer. When, therefore, she had approached two hesitating steps nearer to him, in order to withdraw to a distance of several, all at once the organ of the solitary church of the resting-place where Ottomar had to-day been buried, began to sound in the middle of the night so solemnly and sadly, as if Death were playing it; and the countenance of Gustavus became suddenly transfigured by the reflection of an inner Elysium, and he stood erect with closed eyes, snatched the hand of the motionless Beata, and said to her in the intoxication of drowsiness: "O take me wholly, blessed soul! Now I have thee, beloved Beata; I, too, am dead!"

The dream, which expired with these words, had been this: He sank away into an immense meadow, which extended away over fair earths placed one after another. A rainbow of suns, which had been strung in the manner of a pearl-necklace, encircled the earths and revolved around them. The circle of suns, going down, sank to the horizon and on the rim of the great round landscape stood a girdle of brilliants, composed of a thousand red suns, and the loving heaven had opened a thousand mild eyes.--Groves and alleys of giant flowers, as tall as trees, intersected the meadow in transparent zig-zag; the high-stemmed rose flung over it a gold-red shadow, the hyacinth a blue one, and the mingling shadows of all tinged it with a silver-hue. A magic evening glimmer hovered over the landscape like a flush of gladness between the shores of shadow and the stems of the flowers, and Gustavus felt that this was the evening of eternity and the rapture of eternity.--Blessed souls, far away from him and nearer the receding suns, plunged in the commingling evening rays, and a muffled murmur of joy hung in dying cadence, like an evening bell, over the heavenly Arcadia;--Gustavus alone lay forsaken in the silvery shadow of the flowers, with an endless yearning, but none of the exulting souls came over to him. At last two bodies in the air dissolved into a thin evening cloud and the falling cloud revealed two spirits, Beata and Amandus--the latter would fain lead the former into the arms of Gustavus, but could not gain an entrance into the silver shadow--Gustavus would fain fall into her arms, but could not extricate himself from the silver shadow--"Ah, it is only that thou art not yet dead;" (cried the soul of Gustavus) "but when the last sun is gone down, then will thy silver shadow float over all and thy earth will flutter away from thee, and thou will sink on the bosom of thy friend,"--one sun after another dissolved--Beata spread down her arms--the last sun sank from view--an organ-peal that might have shaken the worlds and their coffins to atoms, rang down like a flying heaven and by its far-reaching tremor loosed from him the fibrous wrappage and over the outspread silver-shadow floated a rapture which bore him upward and he took--the actual hand of Beata and said to her while he woke and still dreamed and saw not, these words: "O take me wholly, blessed soul; I have thee now, beloved Beata; I, too, am dead!" He held her hand as fast as the good man does virtue. Her endeavors to tear herself away drew him at last out of his Eden and his dream; his blessed eyes opened and exchanged heavens; before him stood sublimely the white ground flooded with moonlight, and the park-lawn and the thousand suns diminished to stars, and the beloved soul which until the setting of all the suns he could not reach.--Gustavus must needs think that the dream had passed over out of his sleep into real life, and that he had not slept; his spirit could neither move nor unite the great precipitous ideas before him. "What world are we in?" he said to Beata, but in an exalted tone, which almost answered the question. His hand had clung so that it almost grew to her struggling one. "You are still in a dream," said she softly, and trembling. This _you_ and the voice thrust his dream at once away from the present into the background; but the dream had made the form which contended with his hand more dear and familiar to him, and the dreamed dialogue acted in him like a real one, and his spirit was a still vibrating chord into which an angel had struck his rapturous emotion--and now when, in the deserted temple over yonder, the organ by a fresh peal raised the scene above the earthly ground, on which the two souls now were; when Beata's position swayed to and fro, her lip quivered, her eye gave way--then again it seemed to him, as if the dream were true, as if the mighty tones drew him and her from the earth into the land of the embrace, his being reached on every side its limits: "Beata," he said to the lovely form dying away under conflicting emotions, "Beata, we are dying now--and when we are dead, I will tell thee my love and embrace thee--the dead man beside us has appeared to me in a dream and has again given me his hand...." She would fain have sunk down upon the grave--but he held up the falling angel in his arms--he let her head which had sunk to slumber fall under his and beneath her motionless heart glowed the throbs of his--it was a sublime moment, when, with his arm folded around a slumbering blessedness, he looked out alone upon the sleeping night of earth, was the sole listener to the organ, the only voice in the solitude, was the sole watcher in the circle of sleep....

The sublime moment passed, the most blissful began; Beata raised her head and showed to Gustavus and to heaven upon her backward bent face the wandering and wept-out eye, the exhausted soul, the transfigured features and all that Love and Virtue and Beauty can compress into one heaven on this earth.... Then came on the supernal moment, descending through thousand heavens upon the earth, in which the human heart lifts itself to the highest love and beats for two souls and two worlds--that moment united forever the lips on which all earthly words were extinguished, the hearts which wrestled with the oppressive rapture, the kindred souls which like two lofty flames pulsated into each other....

--Ask not of me any landscape picture of the blooming worlds they passed over, at a moment which hardly our feelings, not to say words, can grasp. I could as well give a silhouette of the sun.--After that moment Beata, whose body already collapsed under a great tear as a flowret under a rain-drop, sought to seat herself upon the grave; she softly waved him off from her with one hand, while she resigned to him the other. In this situation he opened to her his large soul, and told her all, his history and his dream and his conflicts. Never was a man more sincere in the hour of his fortune than he; never was love more coy after the moment of embrace than here with Beata, the oil of joy floated, as ever, thinly upon the water of tears; a coming sorrow stood before her and looked upon her with steady, dry eyes, but no remembered one nor any coming joy. She had now hardly the courage to speak, hardly the courage to recollect herself, hardly the courage to be enraptured. To him she only lifted up her shy glance, when the moon, that climbed up over a broken stairway of clouds stood overshadowed behind a little white cloudlet. But when a thicker cloud buried the lunar torch, then the two ended the loveliest day of their life, and in their parting they felt that there was for them no more parting forever.

Alone in her chamber, Beata could not think, nor feel, nor remember; she experienced what are tears of joy; she let them stream down, and when at length she would fain stay them, she could not, and when sleep came to close her eyes, they still lay glistening under heavenly drops....

Ye innocent souls, to you I can better say than to the dead one: sleep softly! We generally, that is I and the reader, take very little pleasure in the bravura and stilted parts of lovers in romances, because either the one party is not worthy to enjoy such rain-torrents of the light of joy, or the other to occasion them; but here we have neither of us anything to object.... If heaven would only, grant, ye loving ones, that your lame biographer could make his pen a Blanchard's wing and transport you thereby out of the mine-chambers and mine-damps of the court to some free poplar-island or other, whether in the Mediterranean or the Southern Seas!--As, however, I cannot do it, I nevertheless imagine it, and as often as I go to Auenthal or Scheerau, I picture it out to myself how much I should bestow upon you, if in that poplar or rose-vale, which I had set in water, you could, far from the German winter, amidst eternal blossoms, far from the cutting faces of the moral manufacturers, without any more dangerous murmur than that of the brooks, without any higher complications than those of intertangled flower bushes, or any influence of harder stars than the peaceful ones in heaven,--that you might draw breath in guiltless joy and peace--not, indeed, forever, but at least through the one or two flower-months of your first love.