He led him back to dinner; but he himself remained till afternoon under the open heaven, and his heart put on silent mourning under trees full of bees, near thickets full of feeding birds, on all the former walks and ecliptics of this dying festival,--and all the hours of childhood rose out of the winter-sleep of memory and stirred his heart, but it dissolved.--O when far distant moments sound on our ears with their chime, then great drops fall from the softened soul, as the increasing nearness of far-off bells sounding across betokens rain. I blame thee not, Victor,--thou art, after all, only _feminine_, but not _effeminate_,--if thy biographer can describe thy emotion and thy reader can feel it, without relaxing the firm muscles of the heart, thou canst do it quite as well, and only a man who can wring bitter tears from others will scorn sweet ones and shed none himself.
At length Victor went to take his last pleasure, to the garden of termination, in order to take leave with tender tears of all his female friends at the Abbey. A singular incident delayed it a little: for as he left Emanuel, he encountered Julius coming from the garden, who told him, "if he wanted to find Emanuel, he was in the garden."--This raised a friendly dispute, because each of them insisted on having just talked with him. Victor went back with him to Emanuel, and Julius related to his teacher every word of the alleged garden-talk with him: "e. g.
about Victor, about Clotilda, about the farewell he was to-day taking, about his previous happy days."
During the narration Emanuel"s face grew radiant, as if moonlight flowed down from it,--and instead of representing to the beloved child the impossibility of his appearance in the garden, he humored his notion of the apparition, and said with delight: "I shall die, then!--It was my departed father,--his voice sounds like mine,--he promised me when he died to come back from the next world to this before I should go hence.--Ah, ye beloved ones beyond the graves over yonder, ye still then think of me.--O thou good father! break through even now into my presence with thy fatal radiance, and release my spirit in thy lips!"--
He was still more confirmed in his conclusion, because, Julius added that the shape had demanded of him the angel"s letter, but given it back again after a short whisper. The seal was uninjured. Emanuel"s joyful enthusiasm at these telegraphs of death implied that he had drawn dissatisfying inferences from his previous health. Victor never set himself in opposition to the exalted errors of his teacher; thus, e. g., he never arrayed the reasons he had, and which I will show in the next Intercalary day, against the innocent delusion, that "from dreams, and from the independence of the personal consciousness on the body, one could infer its future independence after death,"--that "in dream the inner diamond dusted itself and drank in light from a fairer sun."--Victor was alarmed about the matter,--but for other reasons, Julius took them both along with him to the place of the interview, which was in the darkened avenue near the blossoming hollow. No one was there, nothing appeared; leaves whispered, but no spirits; it was the place of bliss, but of earthly bliss.--
Victor went into the other place of bliss, the Abbey. Clotilda was not over there, but in the intricate labyrinth of the Park, probably for the purpose of facilitating for its possessor, Julius, the opportunity of hearing read the angel"s letter. Just as the sun blazed over against the window-panes, he took leave of the good Abbess with that refined, feeling courtesy to which in her position the highest enthusiasm was limited. The refined Abbess said to him: "The visit was so short, that it would be inexcusable, if Victor did not make it good by persuading her second spring guest (Clotilda) to lengthen hers; for she too was going soon to leave them."--He took his leave of her with a heart-felt respect: for his tender heart knew, quite as well behind the lace mask of refinement and knowledge of the world as behind the leather-crust of roughness, how to feel the tender heart of another.
But as he hastened to the garden, the tears of his heart gushed up higher and warmer,--and he felt as if he must here in the face of the sun embrace the rising moon, as he thought: "Ah, when thy pale fleece hangs this evening brighter overhead there, when thou lookest down alone, I shall have departed or be in the act of departing from my pastoral world."--And below near the nightingale"s hedge reposed his Julius, shedding bright streams of tears,--for this whole evening swarmed with greater and greater wonders[123] of chance,--he hastens down to him, the letter of the so-called angel is opened in his hand, Victor says softly, "Julius, why weepest thou so?"--"O G.o.d," said the latter in broken tones, "guide me under a bower!"--He conducted him to the c.r.a.pe one. Julius said, when they were under cover: "Good! here the sun does not burn!" and flung his right arm around Victor, and gave him the letter, and folded his arm round even to his heart and said: "Thou good soul! tell me when the sun is down, and read me once more the letter of the angel!"
Victor began: "Clotilda!"--"To whom is it?" said he.--"To me!" said Julius, "and Clotilda has already read it to me; but I could not understand her on account of her weeping, and besides I also was too much distressed.--I shall die for sorrow, thou good Giulia, why didst thou not tell me of it before thy death.--The dead one wrote it, read on!"--He read:
"CLOTILDA!
"I cover my blushing cheeks with the funeral veil. My secret lies hidden in my heart, and will be laid with it under the grave-stone.
But after a year it will force its way out of the mouldered heart. O, then let it rest forever in thine, Clotilda!--and forever in thine, Julius!--Julius, was not a silent form often about thee that called itself thy angel? Did it not once, as the death-bell tolled for the burial of a blooming maiden, lay a white hyacinth in thy hand, and say, Angels pluck such _white_ flowers? Did not a mute form once take thy hand and wipe away its tears therewith, and it could not tell why it wept? Did not a low voice once say, Farewell, I shall no more appear to thee, I go back to heaven? That form was I, O Julius; for I have loved thee and even unto death. Lo! here I stand on the sh.o.r.e of the second world, but I look not over into its infinite fields, but I turn my face, while I am still sinking, back to thee, to thee, and my eye grows dim over thy image.--Now I have told thee all.--Now come, quieting death, crush slowly the white hyacinth, and rend the heart asunder speedily, that Julius may see the love enclosed therein.--Ah, wilt thou then take a dead one into thy soul? Wilt thou weep, when thou hearest this read? Ah, when my covered, sunken dust can no more touch thee, will my remote spirit be loved by thine?--But I conjure thee, O ever-remembered one, go, on the day when this tearful leaf is read to thee, then go, at sundown, up to my grave and offer to the pale face below, which the old mound is already crushing asunder, and to the dissolved heart that can beat for nothing more, then present to the poor heart that has loved thee so much, and on thy account has hid itself under the earth, thy funeral offering,--bring to it on thy flute the tones of my loved song, "The grave is deep and silent."--Sing it softly to the accompaniment, Clotilda, and thou too visit me.--Ah, poor Giulia, lift up thy soul, and sink not now, as thou imaginest thy Julius on thy grave!--When thou bringest thy offering to the dead, my spirit will, it is true, already have gone up higher; I shall have lived a year beyond the earth, I shall already have forgotten the earth,--but nevertheless, but, O G.o.d, if Thou shouldst let the tones above my grave penetrate into Elysium, then should I sink down and shed hot tears and stretch out my arms and cry: Yes! here in eternity I love him still,--may it fare well with him on the earth, may his soft heart repose softly and long on life below there!--No, not long! Come up hither, mortal, to the Immortals, that thine eye may be healed, and see the friend who died for thee!
"GIULIA."
"I will go,"--said Julius hesitatingly, but with quiverings in his face,--"although the sun is not down. My father shall console me till sundown, that my heart may not beat so violently against my breast, when I stand at the grave and make the offering to the dead."----Let me say nothing, reader, of the choking heart with which I proceed,--nor of this too sensitive Giulia, who like a morning sun-dial was ere noon in shade and coolness, who, like a dove, unfolded her wings to the rain and to tears,--nor of her soul"s-sisters, who in the second decade of life hang, the skeleton of death all over with flowers, that they may not be able to see its limbs, and who rest their white arm merely on a myrtle-twig of love as upon a bleeding-support, and watch calmly the bleeding to death of its severed veins!--
I could not have said even this, if Victor had not thought it, whose heart was mortally distraught by an infinite grief and an infinite love; for ah! how far on the way was not his irreplaceable Clotilda already, to follow her friend and hide her unloved heart in the earth, as they lay down carnations in the frost?
The sun sank lower, the moon mounted higher,--Victor saw Clotilda, like an ethereally embodied angel, reclining in a niche that opened towards the west,--the little girl mentioned yesterday played, in her lap, with a new doll,--it seemed to him as if he saw her soaring toward heaven, and when she lifted her great eyelids, weighed down with tears for the departed friend, whose secret she had long since guessed and concealed, towards him, who to-day increased them by his departure; and when she saw his face also melted in emotion; then did like sorrowful thoughts drown in both even the first sounds of welcome, and both turned away their faces, because they wept for the parting.----"Have you,"
said Clotilda, at least with a composed voice, "just spoken with Julius?"--Victor did not answer, but his eyes said yes, in the simple fact that they streamed more pa.s.sionately and looked on her fixedly.
She cast hers down with a slight blush for Giulia. The little child took the falling of the eyelids over the great drops for a sign of sleepiness, and drew the little hay-stuffed pillow away from the doll, spread it out for Clotilda, and said innocently, "There, lie down on it and go to sleep!" A shudder thrilled through her friend, as she answered, "Not to-day, dear; on pillows of hay only the dead sleep." He shuddered, as he saw a snow-white pink, in the centre of which there was a great dark-red point, like a b.l.o.o.d.y drop, trembling on her agitated bosom. The fearful pink seemed to him to be the lily which superst.i.tion formerly found in the choir-seat of the priest, whose death was said thereby to be predicted.
She fixed her gaze painfully on, the low sun and the churchyard, behind which in the May days it sank like a mortal. "Leave this prospect, dearest," he said, though without a hope of obedience,--"a tender integument is most easily destroyed by a tender soul,--your tears make you too sad." But she replied: "Only in earlier years--but long ago it ceased to be so--did they make my eye-sockets burn and benumb my brain."--Suddenly, as the thought of the beclouded perspective of her eyes exhausted with weeping wrung his heart out of his bosom, the sunlight died upon her cheeks,--streams of tears broke violently from her eyes,--he turned round,--over on the churchyard the veiled youth had prostrated himself on the grave-mound of the veiled one beneath,--the sun was already below the earth, but the flute had as yet no voice, sorrow has only sighs,--no tones.... At last the beautiful blind one raised himself erect, amidst convulsive sorrows, for the funeral-offering, and the wailings of the flute went up from the closed grave into the evening-redness,--three hearts melted away like the tones, like the fourth heart that was buried below. But Clotilda lifted herself up by force out of her dumb woe, and sang low as an offering to the dead the heavenly song, for which the departed one had entreated her and which I give with inexpressible emotion:--
The grave is deep and dismal,-- How solemn there to stand!
Below, in gloom abysmal, There lies an unknown land.
There sounds, when daylight closes, No nightingale"s sweet tone; And Friendship strews with roses The mossy mound alone.
In vain the bride, forsaken, May wring her hands and weep: Nor orphans" wail may waken The dead one from his sleep.
_Yet_ nowhere else can mortals Attain the wished repose, And through these gloomy portals, Alone, man homeward goes.
O Salis! in that _yet_ are all our expired sighs, all our dried-up tears, and they lift the aspiring heart from its roots and veins, and it fain would die!
The voice of the n.o.ble singer gave way to sadness, but still she sang the last of the strophes of this song of the spheres, though lower under the--weight of overmastering sorrow:--
The weary heart, storm-driven, There, where all tempests cease, Finds home at length and heaven, And everlasting peace.[124]
Her voice broke, as an eye breaks into tears or a heart in death....
Her friend veiled his head with the leaves of the bower,--the whole of earthly life pa.s.sed before him like a dirge.--Clotilda"s sad past, Clotilda"s dark future, drew together before his vision, and cast, in the darkness, the funeral veil over this angel, and bore her shrouded into the grave of her sister.... He had even forgotten his farewell....
He had not the heart to look upon the great scene around him and the bowed form beside him....
He heard the little one go and say, "I will fetch thee a larger pillow to put under thy head."
Clotilda stood up and clasped his hand,--he turned round again toward the earth,--and she looked on him with eyes worn with weeping, yet tender, whose drops were too pure for this unclean world, but in those large eyes stood something like the terrible question, "Do we not love each other in vain for this world?" And her beating heart shook the b.l.o.o.d.y pink. The moon and the evening star gleamed solitary, like a past, in heaven.--Julius lay mute and prostrate, with outspread arms, on the low mound which had been rolled upon the dust of his shattered paradise.
The tones of the nightingale throbbed now like high waves on the night,--then he gathered up his courage to bid her farewell....
Reader! raise not thy spirit to any pitch of rapture, for it will soon stiffen in a spasm,--but I raise my soul thereto, because even the fatal stumble at the gate of paradise is not unlovely when one is going out of it!
The first call of the confiding nightingale was suddenly answered still-higher by a new nightingale that had fluttered along and whose voice was m.u.f.fled by thick blossoms, who kept flying as she sang, and now made her languishing melody flow out of the blossoming hollow. The two lovers, who delayed and dreaded parting, wandered confusedly after the receding nightingale, and were on the way to the blessed blooming hollow; they knew not that they were alone; for in their hearts was G.o.d; before their sight shone the whole second world full of risen souls. At last Clotilda recovered herself, turned round before the nightingale, and gave the mournful sign of separation.--Victor stood on the sh.o.r.e of his late blissful island,--all, all was now over,--he lingered, took both her hands, could not yet look upon her for anguish, bowed down with tears, raised himself up again, when he was able to say softly: "Farewell,--my heavy heart can say no more,--fare thee right well, far better than I,--weep not so often as thou usedst to do, that thou mayest not perchance have to leave me utterly.--For then I too should go."--Louder and more solemnly he continued: "For we can no more be separated,--here under Eternity I deliver to thee my heart,--and when it forgets thee, then--may a sorrow crush it which shall reach over the two worlds." ... In a lower and tenderer tone, "Weep not to-morrow, angel,--and Providence give thee rest." Like a transfigured one to a transfigured he inclined himself modestly to her holy lip, and in a gentle, devout kiss, in which the hovering souls only glide tremulously from afar to meet each other with fluttering wings, with a light touch he took from the yielding, dissolving lips the seal of her pure love, the repet.i.tion of his late Eden, and her heart and his all----
--But here let the gentler soul, which the thunderbolts of fate too sorely agitate, turn its eye away from the great yellow flash which suddenly darts through the still Eden!
"Scoundrel!" cried Flamin, rushing out with sparkling looks, with snow-white cheeks, with locks hanging down like a mane, with two pocket-pistols in his hands,--"there take, take; blood I want," and thrust the deadly weapon towards him; Victor forced Clotilda aside, saying, "Innocent one! do not aggravate thy sorrows!"--Flamin cried in a new kindling of fury, "Blood!--Faithless one, take, fire!"--Matthieu fell upon his right arm, but the left, trembling, forced the weapon upon Victor.--Victor s.n.a.t.c.hed it towards him, because the muzzle was swaying about Clotilda.--"Thou art in truth my brother," cried the tortured girl, whose deathly agony alone kept her by its rack from the death of a swoon.--Flamin with both arms flung all from him and said with a horribly low and long-drawn voice in his raving exhaustion, "Blood!--Death!"--Clotilda sank to the ground. Victor looked at her and said, turning to him, "Only fire, here is my life!"--Flamin cried aloud, "Thou first!"--Victor shot, lifting his arm high up, so as to shoot into the air, and the splintered top of a branch was brought down by his ball.--Clotilda came to.--Emanuel flew to the spot,--threw himself on his pupil"s heart,--from his breast for the first time in years rent with pa.s.sion the sickly blood gushed out. Flamin proudly hurled away his pistol and said to Matthieu, "Come!--it isn"t worth the trouble," and went off with him.
When Clotilda saw Emanuel"s blood on her lover"s clothes, she supposed him to have been hit, and laid her handkerchief on the blood and said, "Ah, you have not deserved this of me!"--Emanuel breathed again through his blood, no one could speak any more, no one could think, every one feared to give consolation, the mortally crushed hearts parted with suppressed woe; only Victor, whom the horrible word "scoundrel" at every recollection of it pierced through like a dagger, said to the sister: "I love him no more, but he is unhappier than we; ah! he has lost all and kept nothing but a devil."
Namely, Matthieu. It was he who had to-day imitated the voice of Emanuel, which had seemed to speak with Julius, and whose voice Dah.o.r.e had taken for his father"s, and afterward the voice of the nightingale, which Victor had followed, in order to convince the Regency Counsellor through his own ears and eyes of Victor"s love for Clotilda.
Victor led his weak teacher to the Indian cottage. He felt his nerves now after so many relaxing days cooled and steeled by this tempest; his anguish of soul and sacrifice had made his blood, as the confinement of narrowing channels does streams, more swift and impetuous, and his love for Clotilda had been made manlier and bolder by the thought that he now entirely deserved it. There is nothing more beautiful than magnanimity and gentleness, except the union of the two.
Emanuel was nothing more than faint, and, as the evening brooded with a sweltering influence over all, he seated himself with Victor on the gra.s.sy bench of his house in order to keep his palpitating breast in an erect posture, and a tender joy gleamed in his features at every fallen drop of blood, because each was a red seal upon his hope of dying. But when Victor took the good man"s weary head to his bosom and let him go to sleep thereon, then in the still evening sadness came over him again, and for the first time his heart pained him. He thought to himself all alone there, how over at the Abbey hot swords would pa.s.s hissing through the innocent bleeding soul,--he felt how now the two-syllabled, two-edged word of Flamin"s wrath had cut through the whole bond of their friendship,--he represented to himself the blooming theatre of beautiful days beside him deserted and desolate, and the sweeping by of joys, which only play round us like b.u.t.terflies in wide circles, while the hairworm[125] of grief bites deeply into our nerves.
At last he leaned weeping on the slumbering father, and pressed him softly, and said, "Ah! without friendship and love I could not bear the earth."--And at length his distracted and exhausted soul also was weighed and dragged down by the heavy body into the thick atmosphere of sleep.
Reader! the last moment in Maienthal is the greatest,--raise thy soul through awe and mount up on graves as on high mountains, in order to look over into the other world!
At midnight when fancy draws the buried dead from their coffins and sets them upright in the night round about her, and unknown shapes drift to us from the second world,--just as indistinguishable corpses driven from America to the coasts of the Old World announced to it the New,--in the ghostly hour Victor opened his eyes, but with inexpressible serenity. A forgotten dream had sunk far away to-day"s past with all its din and cloud;--the bright moon stood overhead in the blue dark like the silvery fissure and sparkling fountain-like mouth, from which the stream of light out of the other world breaks into ours and comes down in ethereal vapor.--"How still and radiant is all!" said Victor. "Is not this glimmering region a relic of my dream? is not this the magic suburbs of the supernal city of G.o.d?"--A voice hurrying over said, Death! I am already buried.
Emanuel opened his eyes at that, sent them through the foliage over to the churchyard that overlooked the village and said, with a convulsion of his being, "Horion, wake up; Giulia has left eternity and is standing on her grave."--Victor cast a feverish glance up thither; and all the warm thoughts and nerves of life grew hard and stiff in a cutting ice-cold shudder, as he saw up there a white, veiled form resting on the grave. Emanuel s.n.a.t.c.hed himself up, and his pupil, and said: "We will go up to the theatre of the spirits; perhaps the dead one will lay hold on my soul and take me with her." ... Fearful was the silence of the regions around their way.... Men start up out of the ground like dumb-waiters, like serving-machines, and drop down again when they are emptied.... The human race darts like a flying summer through the sunshine, and the bedewed web hangs fluttering on two worlds and in the night it pa.s.ses away.... So thought both on their pilgrimage to the dead one; they wondered at their own heavy incarnation and at the noise of their steps. Emanuel fastened his gaze on the veiled form that now knelt down; he thought she heard his thoughts and would fly over to his heart through the moonlight....
The hearts of the two men rose and fell as if under two gravestones, as they climbed the long, gra.s.s-grown steps to the churchyard, and touched and opened the heavy gate which was painted with forms of risen saints, half effaced by the weather. The warm earthly blood congeals and the soft brain runs to a single image of terror, when the great cloud rolls away from eternity and from the gate of the spiritual world; on the stage of the dead Emanuel called as if beside himself: "Awful spirit, I am a spirit like thee, thou too standest below G.o.d,--wilt thou kill me, then kill me not by a stroke of horror, not by a crushing form, but smile like men and quietly wring off my heart."--Then the veiled form rose up and came,--Emanuel wildly grasped his friend, buried himself in his face, and said clinging to him: "On thee I die, on thy warm heart,--O live happy, unless thou wilt grow cold with me, ah! go with me!" ...
"Ah, Clotilda!" said Victor; for she was the form. She was dumb as the realm of spirits, for the dead one whom she had visited still clung around her heart; but she was great as a spirit from that realm: for the ethereal luminous nebula of the moon, the standing over the dead, the look into eternity, the lofty night, and the mourning exalted her soul, and one almost forgot that she wept.--Emanuel still held his wings spread out over the scene, and looked sublimely over the graves: "How all sleeps and rests here on this great green death-bed! I would lie down there and die.--Did not something just speak?--The thoughts of mortals are words of spirits.--We are night birds stealing through the dubious atmosphere, we are dumb night-walkers who fall into these pits, when they awake.--Ye dead! crumble not so mutely into dust; ye spirits, ye that come forth out of your buried hearts, flutter not so transparent around us!--O, man were vanity and ashes and a plaything and vapor on the earth, did he not feel that he were so[126]----O G.o.d, this feeling is our immortality"[127]----
Clotilda, by way of drawing him down from this desolating inspiration, took him by the hand and said: "Farewell, O worthy of veneration! I bid farewell this very day, because to-morrow I leave Maienthal. Live happily,--happily till we see each other again; my heart will never forget your greatness, but I shall see you again soon." ... Her melancholy at the thought of his predicted death, her fear of an eternal parting, stifled her remaining words, for she wanted to say more and thank him more warmly. Emanuel said: "We shall never see each other again, Clotilda; for I die in four weeks."--"O G.o.d! no!" said Clotilda with the most heart-felt and impa.s.sioned tone.--"My good Emanuel," said Victor, "torment not this tormented one.--Cheer thyself, O tortured one, our friend will certainly stay with us."--Here Emanuel raised his eyes to heaven and said with a look in which a world lay, "Eternal One! Couldst thou hitherto have so deceived me?--No, no, on the longest day thy stars will draw me upward, and thy earth will cool my heart.--And thee, thou good Clotilda, thou soul from heaven, thee, then, I certainly see to-day, G.o.d knows! for the last time with thy lovely cheeks and in thy earthly form,--I bless thee and bid thee farewell, but heavily and sadly, because I must still live so many days without thee. Go through life with soft influences breathing around thee, keep thy heart high above the many-colored mist of earth and above its storm-clouds,--indeed, thou hearest me not, thou bitterly weeping face; G.o.d pour solace into thy soul, let thy parting be more glad!--Thy friend will be with me when I go hence."--Here Victor grasped the hands of the trembling form, exhausted with weeping, who vainly wiped away her tears to see her teacher once more and press his image on her soul; and when Victor cried wildly, "Giulia! sainted one!
mitigate the woe of thy friend in this hour, hold this breaking heart,"
then said Emanuel, looking on both with indescribable tenderness: "I bless you, like a father, holy pair of souls! never forsake, never forget each other!--O ye blessed spirits here above the glimmering mould of the crumbling coffins, give these two hearts peace and, happiness, and when I am dead, I will float around your souls and quiet them. And Thou, Eternal One, make these two mortals beneath thy stars as happy as I,--O take nothing from them, nothing on the earth, but life.--Good-night, Clotilda!" ...
--The Whitsuntide days are over!--