CHAPTER XIV.A LOVER’S DISMISSAL—FANTAISIE—THE CHILD WITH THE BOUQUET—THE EDEN OF THE NIGHT, AND THE ANGEL AT THE GATE OF PARADISE.It was not the deeper blue of the sky (which, on the Saturday, was as rich and pure as in winter, or by night)—nor the thought of actually standing in the very presence of the sorrowing soul whom he had driven from Paradise with the Sodom apple of the serpent (Venner)—nor his own feeble health—nor memories of his own domestic life;—it was none of these matters taken singly, but the combination of all these semitones and minor intervals together which attuned our Firmian to a meltingmaestoso, and gave to his looks and thoughts (for his afternoon visit) much such a kind and degree of tenderness as he expected he should find in Nathalie’s.What he did find was precisely the reverse. In and about Nathalie there reigned such a noblecold, serene gladsomeness as you may find upon the loftiest mountain peaks; the cloud and the storm arebeneath, while around there rests a purer, colder air, but a deeper blue, too, and a paler sunlight.It cannot, of course, surprise me that you are on the tenter-hooks of anxiety to hear the account she is going to give of her rupture with Everard. But her account of it was so brief—it might have been written round a Prussian dollar—so that I must supplement it with mine, which I have taken from Rosa’s own written record of it. The fact is, the Venner, five years afterwards, wrote a very passable novel (if we may credit the praise bestowed upon it in the ‘Universal German Library’), into which he artfully built the whole of the rupture with Nathalie—(that severance between soul and body); at all events, this is the conclusion to which sundry hints of Nathalie’s would point us. The said novel, accordingly, is my fountain of Vaucluse. Emasculate intelligences, such as Rosa’s, can only reproduceexperiences; their poeticfœtusesare nothing but adopted children of the actual.To be brief, what took place was as follows. Scarce were Firmian and Heinrich gone out among the trees, when the Venner brought up his reserve of vengeance, and asked Nathalie, in a tetchy manner, how it was that she could tolerate visitors of such a poor and plebeian sort. The haste and the coldness of the departed pair had already set Nathalie on fire, and this address made her blaze forth in a flame upon her yellow-silken questioner. “A question such as that,” she answered, “is very little short of an insult;” and she immediately added one of her own—for she was too warm and too proud to dissemble in the slightest, or to hold other than the straightest course with him. “You call at Mr. Siebenkæs’s pretty often yourself, do you not?” “Oh!” said this empty braggart, “I call on hiswife(to speak the simple truth);heis merely my pretext.” “Really,” said she, making her syllables last as long as her look of scorn. Meyern, amazed at this behaviour, so very unlike the tone of the antecedent epistolary correspondence (he gave the twin cronies the credit of it)—Meyern, whom her beauty, his own money, and her poverty and dependence upon Blaise (to say nothing of his position of betrothed bridegroom), had now inspired with the utmost audacity—Meyern, this brave and courageous lion, undertook, without a moment’s hesitation, a task which nobody else would have ventured upon, namely, that of humiliating and bringing to her proper senses this irate Aphrodite, by reading to her the catalogue of his Cicisbean appointments, and, in general terms, unfolding before her the long perspective of the hundreds of gynæcœa and jointure-houses open to him. “It is such an easy matter to worship false goddesses and open their temple doors, that I am charmed to be restored to the worship of the true feminine godhead, through my Babylonish captivity to you.”All her crushed heart sighed forth, “Ah! then it is all true—he is a wicked wretch, and I am miserable indeed.” But she kept silence, outwardly, and went and looked out of the window, in anger. Her soul was one of those whose seats are the knight’s upper dais of womankind; it was ever eager to do rare, heroic acts of self-devotion and self-sacrifice; indeed, a fondness for remarkable and out-of-the-way greatness was the only littleness about it. And now, when the Venner tried to make amends for his braggadocio by a sudden jump into a light and sportive tone (a tone which, in minor warfares with the ordinary fair sex, heals breaches much quicker and better than a more serious one)—and proposed a walk in the pretty park to her, as being a spot better adapted for a reconciliation—this noble soul of hers spread wide its pure white pinions and soared away from out the foul heart of this crooked pike with his silver scales for ever! And she drew near to him and said (all a-glow, but dry-eyed wholly), “Mr. von Meyern, I have quite decided—we are parted for ever. We have never known each other, and our acquaintance is at an end. I will send you back your letters to-morrow, and you will have the goodness to return mine to me.” Had he employed a more serious tone, he might have kept hold of this strong soul for some days—perhaps weeks—longer. Without looking at him anymore, she opened a casket and began arranging letters. He tried, in a hundred speeches, to flatter and pacify her; she answered never a word. His heart boiled within him, for he gave the two advocates the blame for all this. At length he thought he would humble this deaf mute (as well as make her alter her determination), by saying, as he now did, “I don’t know what your uncle in Kuhschnappel will say to all this.Heappears to me to set a much greater value upon my sentiments towards you than you do yourself; indeed, he seems to consider our marriage as essential to your happiness as I think it to mine.” This was a burden heavier than her back, so sore bent down by Fate, could bear. She shut up the casket hurriedly, sat down, and rested her bewildered head upon her trembling arms, shedding burning tears, which her hands strove in vain to hide. A reproach of our poverty uttered by lips we have loved, darts like red-hot iron into the heart, and scorches it dry with fire. Rosa, whose vengeance, now wreaked, gave place to the most eager love, (in hopes that her feelings were of the same selfish type as his own), threw himself on his knees before her, crying, “Oh! forget it all! What are we breaking with one anotherfor, if we come really to think about it? Your precious tear-drops wash it all away. I mingle mine with them in rich abundance.”She arose with haughty port, leaving him on his knees. “My tears,” she said, “have not the smallest reference to anything connected with you. Iampoor, and I would not be rich. After the base, ignoble insult you have put upon me, you shall not stay and see me weep. Have the goodness to leave the room.” So that he retired; and—when one considers the weight of the sacks he had to carry—sacks of every kind (including one full of muzzles)—he really did it in a surprisingly brisk and lively manner, holding his head pretty high. His command of his temper and his apparent good humour strike one the more (for I may give him what praise he deserves), that he retained them and took them home with him, and this on an afternoon when, with the two finest and longest levers in all his collection he had utterly failed in touching the smallest point in Nathalie’s heart, or the auricles thereof. One of these levers was his old one, which he had tried upon Lenette—that of gradually twisting himself in, corkscrew fashion, in spiral serpentine lines of petty advances, approaches, attentions and illusions; but Nathalie was neither weak nor light enough to be penetrated thus. The other lever was one from which something might really havebeenexpected in the way of effect—though it actuallyhadless than even the first. It consisted in showing his old scars (like an old warrior), and rejuvenating them into wounds; in this manner he bared his suffering heart, pierced by so many a false love, and which (like a dollar with a hole in it), had hung as a votive offering upon so many a shrine. His soul put on Court mourning (of sorrow) of all degrees, whole and half, in hopes of being, like a widow, more enchanting in black. The friend of a Leibgeber, however, could be softened by manly sorrows only—the womanly sort could but harden her.Meanwhile (as we have said), he left, hisfiancéewithout any pity for her self-sacrifice indeed, and equally without the slightest indignation at her refusal of him. He merely thought, “She may go to the devil;” and he could scarce sufficiently congratulate himself that he had so easily escaped the incalculable annoyance of having to endure life with a creature of the kind from one year’s end to another, and to pay her the necessary respect throughout an infernal, long matrimonial life. On the other hand, his bile was mightily stirred against Leibgeber, but more particularly against Siebenkæs (whom he suspected of being the real judge of his Divorce Court), and he laid the foundation of several gall-stones in his gall-bladder, and of a slight bilious yellow tint in his eyes, with hating the advocate, which he could not do enough.We return to the Saturday. Nathalie derived her calmness and serenity partly from her own strength of mind, but also in good measure from the pair of horses (and of rose maidens) with whom Rosa had been seen driving to the Hermitage. A woman’s jealousy is always a day or two older than her love. Moreover, I know of no excellence, no weakness, shortcoming, virtue, womanliness,manliness, in a woman which does not tend rather to enkindle than to appease jealousy.Not only Siebenkæs, but even Leibgeber (anxious to breathe some warmth upon her freezing soul, all stripped of its warm plumage), was this afternoon serious and cordial, not (as he usually did) dressing his rewards and punishments up in irony. Perhaps, too, her gratifying (and flattering) readiness to obey him tamed him down to some extent. Firmian had, in addition to the reasons above set forth, the more powerful ones—that the English lady was expected home the next day but one, and her coming would put a stop to all this garden pleasure, or interfere with it at all events—that he who knew well, from his own experience, what the wounds of a lost love were, had a boundless compassion for hers, and would gladly have given his own heart’s blood to make up for the loss of hers—moreover, accustomed all his life to bare, mean and empty rooms, he felt a keen enjoyment in being in the richly-furnished, bright and tasteful chamber he was now in, and naturally carried over a portion of this to the account of their inhabitant and hermit.The maid-servant, whom we have seen this week already, came in just then, with tears in her eyes, faltering out that she was going to confession, and hoped she had done nothing to displease her, &c., &c. “Anything to displease me?” cried Nathalie; “most certainly not—and I know I can say the same in your mistress’s name;” and went out of the room with her and kissed her, unseen, like some good genius. How beautiful are pity and kindness to distress, in a soul which has just risen up in might to resist oppression.Leibgeber took a volume of ‘Tristram Shandy’ from the English lady’s library, and lay down with it on the lawn under the nearest tree, with the view of making over to his friend the undivided fruition of this anise, marchpane and honeycomb of an afternoon of talk, which to him was merely so much every-day household fare. Moreover, all that day when he made any sign of jesting, Nathalie’s eyes would implore him, “Please do not, for just this one day. Do not take pains to point out every pock-pit which Fate has left upon my inner soul to him—spare me for this once.” And lastly (which was his principal reason), it would be much easier for Firmian to tell this sensitive Nathalie (now upon one-eighth pay) all his project of making her his appanaged widow, his heiress in jest—to tell it to her wrapped in a triple shroud, written in distorted characters.Siebenkæs looked upon this undertaking as a sort of day’s work at fortification making, a journey across the Alps—round the globe—into the grotto of Antiparos, a discovery of the longitude; he had not the slightest notion how even tobeginto set about it. Indeed, he had previously told Leibgeber that, if his death were but a real one, nobody would be more ready to talk to her about it, but that for a sham death, he really could not sadden her; so that she would have to consent, altogether by some chance, and unconditionally, to become his widow. “And is my death a thing so very improbable after all?” he said. “Of course it is,” answered Leibgeber. “If it were not, what would become of our death in jest. The lady will e’en have to make the best of it.” It would appear that he dealt with women’s hearts in a fashion somewhat colder and harder than Siebenkæs, in whose opinion (hermit connoisseur as he was of rarities in the shape of strong female souls) a delicate, suffering one like this could not be too tenderly treated. However, I do not set up to judge between the two friends.When Leibgeber had gone out with Yorick, Siebenkæs went and stood before a fresco representing the said Yorick, and poor Maria with her flute and her goat. For the chambers of the great are picture-bibles, and anorbis pictus,—they sit, eat and walk in picture exhibitions, which makes it all the harder a matter for them that two, at least, of the greatest expanses in nature—the sky and the sea—cannot be painted over for them. Nathalie went up to him, and at once cried out, “What is there to see in that to-day? Away from it!” She was just as open and unconstrained in her manner with him as he could not manage to be with her. She displayed the warmth and beauty of her soul in that wherein we (unconsciously) unveil, or unmask(as the case may be), ourselves more completely than in anything—namely, her mode of bestowing praise. The illuminated triumphal arch which she erected over the head of her English lady-friend, elevated her own soul so that she stood at that gate of honour as conqueror, in laurel wreath, and glittering collar of the Order of Goodness and Worth. Her praises were the double chorus and echo of the other’s excellence; she was so warm and so earnest! Ah! maidens, fairer are ye a thousand times when ye twine bridal-wreaths and laurel garlands for your companions than when ye plait them crowns of straw, and bend them collars of iron.She told him how fond she was of British men and women, both in and out of print, although she had never seen any until the previous winter. “Unless,” she said, with a smile, “our friend outside may be considered one.”Leibgeber, out on his grass mattress, raised his head and saw the couple looking down at him with faces of regard; and the shimmer of love shone forth in three pairs of eyes. One single moment of time thus clasped three sister souls together in one tender embrace.The maid coming back from confession about this juncture in her white dress—(’twas heavy-wingcasesrather than light butterfly wings to her)—with a trifle of pretty-tinted ribbon about it here and there; Firmian looked at this absolved one for a minute or two, and then took up her black and gold hymn-book, which she had laid down in her haste, finding inside it a whole pattern-card of silks, besides peacock’s feathers. Nathalie, who saw a satirical expression dawning on his face, drove it away in an instant. “Your sex attaches just as much value to adornment as ours. Look at your Court dresses, the Coronation robes at Frankfort, and uniforms and official costumes of all kinds. Then, the peacock was the bird of the old knights and poets, and if you make vows upon his feathers, or wear garlands of them,wemay surely wear them, or at all eventsmark(if not reward) songs with them.” Every now and then a barely polite expression of astonishment at what she knew escaped the advocate in spite of himself. He turned over the leaves of the festival hymns, and came upon gilt figures of Our Lady, and found a picture wherein were two parti-coloured blotches (supposed to represent two lovers), and a phosphorescent heart, which the male blotch was offering to the female with the words:“And is to thee my fond love all unknown!How my heart burns is here full plainly shown”—the whole surrounded by a tracery of leafwork. Firmian loved family and society miniature pictures when (as in this case) they were exceedingly poor as works of art. Nathalie saw and read this; she took the book in haste, snapped the clasp to, and then, when she had done so, said, “You have no objection, have you?”Courage towards women is not inborn, but acquired. Firmian had had familiar experience of very few; wherefore this natural awe made him look upon every feminine body—particularly if of any standing in society—as a kind of sacred Ark of the Covenant whereon no finger might be laid; (for though it is proper to rise superior to considerations of rank where men are concerned, it is otherwise with women), and upon every female foot as that on which a Queen of Spain stands, and every female finger as a Franklin point emitting electric sparks. If in love with him, I might have likened her to an electrified person,feelingall the sparks and mock pains she emitted. At the same time, nothing could be more natural than that his reverent timidity should diminish as time went on, and that at length, (at a moment when she was looking the other way) he should take courage to deftly snatch hold of the end of one of the ribbons in her hair between his fingers—and she never be aware of it. It may have been by way of preliminary studies towards the execution of this feat that he had previously once or twice tried the effect of taking up into his hands things which had been a good deal in hers—such as her English scissors, a broken pincushion, and a pencil-case.Taking heart of grace hereupon, he thought he would venture to take up a bunch of wax grapes (which he imagined to be made of stone, like those upon butter-boats). He gripped them, accordingly, in his fist as in a wine-press, crushed two or three of them to pieces, and then proffered as many petitions for mercy and pardon as if he had knocked over and broken the porcelain Pagoda of Nanking. “There’s no harm done,” she said, laughing. “We all find plenty such berries in life—with fine ripe skins—no intoxicating juice—and as easily broken—or easier.”He was in terrible dread lest this glorious, many-tinted rainbow of happiness of his should melt away into evening dew, and it disconcerted him that he no longer saw Leibgeber reading upon the flowery turf. Outside, the world was brightened into a land of the sun—every tree was a rich, firm-rooted joy-flower—the valley a condensed universe, ringing with music of the spheres. Nevertheless he had not the courage to proffer his arm to this Venus for a stroll through the sun,i. e. the sunny Fantaisie; the Venner’s fate, and the fact that there was a late harvest of a few visitors still walking about the gardens, rendered him bashful and mute. Of a sudden Leibgeber knocked at the window with the agate-head of his stick, crying, “Come over to dinner. My stick-head is the Vienna lantern.[67]We are sure not to get home before midnight.” He had ordered a dinner in the café. Presently he cried out, “There is a pretty child here asking for you.” Siebenkæs hurried out, and found it was the very child into whose hand he had pressed his flowers on the evening when, after the great feast-eve at the Hermitage, he had been soaring along on the wings of fancy through the village of Johannis. “Where is your wife, sir?” asked the child; “the lady who took me out of the water the day before yesterday? I have some beautiful flowers here that my godpapa sent me to give her. Mother will come and give her best thanks, too, as soon as she can, but just now she’s in bed very unwell.”Nathalie, who had heard what the child said, came down, and said, with a blush, “Is it I, darling? Give me your flowers, then.” The child, recognising her, kissed her hand, the hem of her dress, and, lastly, her lips, and would have recommenced this round of kisses, when Nathalie, in turning the flowers over, came upon three silken counterfeits amidst its living forget-me-nots and red and white roses. To Nathalie’s questions as to whence these costly flowers came, the child answered, “Give me a kreuzer or two, and I’ll tell you.” This was done, and she added, “I got them from my godpapa, and he is a very, very grand gentleman;” then ran away among the bushes.This bouquet was a veritable Turkish Selam-and-Flower riddle to them all. Leibgeber accounted with ease for the child’s sudden marriage of Nathalie and Siebenkæs, by the circumstance that the advocate had been standing beside her at the water-side, and people, who had seen no one so constantly with her as himself, had been misled by the bodily likeness between them.Siebenkæs’s mind, however, ran more on the machine-master, Rosa (so fond of setting his patchwork life-scenes for every woman to play her part before), and the resemblance these silk flowers bare to those which the Venner had once redeemed from pawn for Lenette in Kuhschnappel struck him at once; yet how could he sadden this gladsome time, and spoil the pleasure of receiving these votive flowers, by giving words to his suspicions? Nathalie insisted upon a distribution of this floral inheritance, inasmuch as each of the three had taken part in the rescue, and Siebenkæs and Leibgeber had, at all events, rescued the rescuer. She kept the white silk roses for herself, allotted the red ones to Leibgeber (who would not have them, but asked for a proper, real, living rose instead, which he immediately put in his mouth); to Siebenkæs she gave the silken forget-me-nots, and one or two living, perfume-breathing ones as well (souls, as it were, of the artificial ones). He took them with rapture, and said the tender real ones should never wither for him. Nathalie here took a brief temporary leave of the pair, but Firmian could not find words to express all his gratitude to his friend for the means he had adopted to prolong this little day of grace which orbed his whole life round with a new heaven and a new earth.No King of Spain ever took as little out of some six, or so (at the outside), of the hundred dishes which, by the laws of the realm, are daily served at his table, than Siebenkæs did that day out of one. Historians, worthy of credence, inform us, however, that he managed to drink a very little—a little wine it was—and that in a considerable hurry for he could not be happy enough that day to satisfy Leibgeber. The latter, not apt to be easily swayed by heart and feeling, was all the more delighted that his beloved Firmian should at last have a pole star of happiness shining in the zenith point of the heavens above his head, beaming down genial warmth upon the blossoming time of his few scattered flowers.The rapid rate at which his duplex enjoyment kept on moving enabled him to steal a march upon the sun, and he arrived once more at the villa, whose walls were now tinted red by his beams, while the glory of evening was gilding its windows into fire. Nathalie, on the balcony, was like some sunlit soul, just ready to take wing after the departing sun, hanging with her great eyes upon the shining, quivering world rotunda all full of church-music—and on the sun flying downward from this temple, like some angel—and at the holy, luminous tomb of night into which earth was sinking.When they came under the balcony (Nathalie beckoning them to come up to her) Heinrich handed him his stick, saying, “Keep that for me. I have enough to carry without it—if you want me, blow the whistle.” As regarded hismoraleand physique, our good Henry had the kindest and softest of human hearts within his shaggy, Bruin breast.Ah! happy Firmian, happy in spite of all your troubles. When now you pass through the door of glass and on to the floor of iron, the sun confronts you, and sets for a second time. Earth closes her great eye, like some dying goddess! Then the hills smoke like altars—choruses call from the woods—shadows, the veils of day, float about the enkindled, translucent tree-tops and rest upon their many-tinted breast-pins (of flowers), and the gold-leaf of the evening sky throws a dead-gilt gleam towards the east, and touches with a rosy ray the vibrating breast of the hovering lark, far up evening bell of Nature. Ah! happy Firmian, should some glorious spirit from realms afar wing its flight athwart earth and her spring tide, and, as he passes, a thousand lovely evenings be concentrated into one burning one—it would not be more Elysian than this, whereof the glow is now dying out around you as the moments fly.When the flames of the windows paled, and the moon was rising heavily behind the earth, they both went back into the twilight room, silent, and with full hearts. Firmian opened the pianoforte and, in music, went through his evening once more. The trembling strings were as tongues of fire to his full heart; the flower-ashes of his youth were blown away, and two or three youthful minutes bloomed back into life.But as the music poured its warm life-balsam upon Nathalie’s swollen heart in all its constraint (for its wounds were only closed, not healed), it melted and gave way, the heavy tears which had been burning within it flowed forth, and it grew weak and tender, but light. Firmian, who saw she was passing once more through the gate of sacrifice towards the sacrificial knife, stopped the sacrificial music, and tried to lead her away from the altar. Just then the first beam of the moon alighted, like a swan’s wing, upon the waxen grapes. He asked her to come out into the silent, misty, after-summer of the day, the moonlit evening. She placed her arm in his without saying yes.What a sparkling, gleaming world! Through the branches, through the fountains, over the hills and over the woodlands, the flashing molten silver was flowing, which the moon was fining from out the dross of night. Swiftly shot her glance of silver athwart the rippling wavelet, and the glossy, shining, gently-trembling apple-leaves, pausing to rest upon the marble pillars and birch-tree stems. Nathalie and Firmian paused upon the threshold of the magic valley (it gleamed like some enchanted cavern, where night and light were playing, and all the founts of being—which by day cast up sweet odour, melody of songs and voices, feathery wings, translucent pinions—seemed sunk in voiceless slumber deep into some silent chasm). They looked up to the mountain, the Sophienberg, with its summit flattened as by the weight of years; a great mist Colossus was veiling all its Alp-like peak; next at the pale-green world, lying asleep beneath the shimmering radiance of the far-off silent suns, gleaming depths of silver star-dust, flowing faint and far before the ever-brightening rising moon; and then at one another, with hearts full to the brim of holy friendship, such a gaze as only two blest angels, new created, free and gladsome, bend in rapture on each other. “Are you as happy as I?” he asked. “No,” she answered, involuntarily pressing his arm, “that I am not; for, on a night like this should follow, not a day, but something far lovelier and richer—something that should satisfy the heart’s thirst, and staunch its bleeding for ever.” “And what should that be?” he asked. “Death,” was her answer. She lifted her streaming eyes to his and said, “You think so, too, do you not? Death forme.” “No, no,” he added quickly, “forme, if you will, not foryou.” To break the course of this overpowering moment, she added hurriedly, “Shall we go down to the place where we first met, and where, two days too soon, I became your friend;[68]and yet it was not too soon. Shall we?”He obeyed her; but his soul was still a-swim among his precious thoughts, and as they went down the long, hollow, gravel-way, besprent with the shadows of the shrubs, and moonlight rippling over its white bed (flecked with shadows for stones), he said, “Yes, in an hour like this, when death and sleep send forth their brothers to us, a soul like yours may think of death.[69]But I have more cause than you, for I am happier. Oh! of all guests at Joy’s festival-banquet, Death is the one whom she loves best to see; for he is himself a joy, the last and highest rapture upon earth. None but the common herd can associate humanity’s lofty flight of migration into the distant land of spring with ghosts and corpses here below on earth; as when they hear the owls’ voices when they are going away to warmer countries they take them for the cries of goblins. But, oh! dear, dear, Nathalie, I cannot and will not bear to think of what you say as in any shape connected withyou. No, no, so rich a soul must come into full bloom in a far nearer, earlier spring than that beyond this life! Oh, God! itmust!” They had reached a wall of rock over which a broad cascade of moonlight was falling; against it leant a trellis of roses, whence Natalie gathered a spray, all green and tender, with two young rose-buds just beginning to swell, and, saying “You will never blow,” she placed it on her heart, and said (looking at him with a strange expression), “While they are young they scarcely prick at all.”And when they got down to the stone water-basin—the sacred spot where they first met—and could as yet find no words to utter what was in their hearts, they saw some one come up out of the dry basin. Though they smiled, it was a smile full of emotion—in all three cases—for this was their Leibgeber, who had been lying in wait for them in hiding, with a bottle of wine, among the imaged water-gods. A certain something there had been in his troubled eyes, but it had been poured out by way of libation to this spring night from our cup of joy. “This port and haven of your first landing here,” said he, “must be properly consecrated, andyou(to Nathalie) must join in the pledge. I swear by Heaven that there is more fruit hanging on its blue dome to-night within reach than ever hung on any green one.” They took three glasses, pledged one another, and said (some of them, I imagine, in somewhat subdued tones). “To friendship! may it live for ever! may the spot where it commenced be always green! May every place blossom where it has grown, and, though all its flowers may fade, and its leaves fall and wither, may it live on for ever and for evermore!” Nathalie was obliged to turn her eyes away. Heinrich laid a hand upon the agate head of his stick (but only because his friend’s hand which was holding it was over the top of it, that he might give the latter a warm and hearty pressure), and said, “Give it me; you shall have no clouds in your hand to-night;” for nature had graven cloud-streaks on the agate in her subterranean studio. Any heart—not Nathalie’s only—must have been touched by this bashful cloaking of the warm token of friendship. “Are you not going to stay with us?” she asked somewhat faintly, as he was leaving them. “I’m going up to the landlord,” he said, “to see if I can get hold of a flute or a horn, and if I do I shall come out and musicise over the valley, and play the springtime in.”When he was gone his friend felt as if his youth had gone with him. Suddenly he saw, high above the whirling may-beetles and the breeze-born night-butterflies, and their arrow-swift pursuers, the bats, a great train of birds of passage winging their way through the blue, like some broken cloud, coming back to our spring. Then flashed upon his open heart the memory of his lodgings in the market-town, and the time when he saw a similar flight of (earlier) birds of passage, and thought that his life would soon be at an end. These recollections, with all their tears, brought back the belief that he was soon to die; and this he must tell Nathalie. He saw the wide expanse of night stretched over the world like some great corpse but her shadowy limbs quiver under the moonlit-branches at the first touches of the morning breeze awaking in the east. She rises towards the coming sun as a dissolving vapour, an all-embracing cloud, and man says “It is day.” Two crape-covered thoughts, like hideous spectres, fought within Firmian’s soul. The one said, “He is going to die of apoplexy, so he never can see her more.” And the other said, “He is going through the farce of a pretended death, and then he nevermustsee her more.” Overborne by the past as well as by the present, he took Nathalie’s hand, and said, “You must pardon my being so deeply moved to-night. I shall never see you more. You are the noblest of your sex that I have ever met, but we shall never meet again. Very soon you must hear that I am dead, or that myname, from one cause or other has passed away, but myheartwill still be yours, bethine. Oh! that the present, with its mountain-chains of grave-hillocks, but lay behind me, and the future were come, with all its open graves, and I stood on the brink of my own! For I would look once more onthee, then throw myself into it in bliss.”Nathalie answered not a word. She faltered suddenly in her walk, her arm trembled, her breath came thick and fast. She stopped, and, with a face as pale as death, said, in trembling accents, “Stay here on this spot; let me sit alone for a minute on that turf-bank. Ah! I am so headlong!” He saw her move trembling away. She sank, as if overwhelmed with some burden, down upon a bank of turf. She fixed her blinded eyes upon the moon (the blue sky around it seemed a night, the earth a vapour); her arm lay rigid on her lap; she did not move, except that a spasm, distantly resembling a smile, played about her lip; her eyes were tearless. But to her friend, life at that moment seemed a realm of shadows, whose outlines were floating and blending in endless changes of confusion; a tract all hollow, sunken mine-shafts full of mists in the likeness of mountain-spirits, with butonesingle opening of outlet to the heavens, the free air, the spring, the light of day; andthatoutlet so narrow, so remote, and far above his head.There sat Nathalie in the white crystal shimmer, like some angel upon an infant’s grave; and, suddenly, the tones of Heinrich’s music broke in, like bells pealing in a storm, upon their souls as they paused, all stunned (like Nature before the thunder breaks), and the warm river of melody bore away their hearts, dissolving them the while. Nathalie made an affirmative sign with her head, as if she had come to some conclusion: she rose and came forward from the green, flowery grave like some enfranchised, glorified spirit; she opened her arms wide, and came towards him. Tear after tear came coursing down her blushing face, but as yet her heart could find no words; sinking undertheWORLD which was in her heart, she could totter no further, and he flew to meet her. She held him back that she might speak the first, her tears flowing faster and faster, but when she had cried, “My firstfriend, and my last—for the first and last time,” she grew breathless and dumb, and, overburdened with sorrow, sank into his arms, upon his lips, upon his heart.“No! no!” she murmured; “Oh! Heaven, give me but the power to speak. Firmian! my Firmian! Take all my happiness away with you—all that I have on earth. But never, by all you hold most sacred, never see me more in this world. Now” (she added very softly), “you mustswearthis to me.” She drew her head back, and the tones of Heinrich’s music flowed between and around them like the voice of sorrow. She gazed at him, and his pale care-worn face wrung her heart with agony; with eyes dim with tears, she implored him to swear that he would never see her more.“Yes, noble, glorious soul,” he answered, in trembling tones; “yes, then, Iswearto thee I will never see thee more.” Mute and motionless, as if smitten by the hand of death, she sank with drooping head upon his breast; and once again, like one dying, he said, “I will never see thee more.” Then, beaming like some angel, she raised her face, worn with emotion to him, saying, “All is over now; take the death kiss, and speak no more.” He took it, and she gently disengaged herself from his arms. But as she turned away, she put back her hand and gave him the green rosebuds with the tender thorns, and saying, “Think of to-night,” went resolutely away (trembling, nevertheless), and was soon lost in the dark-green alleys, where but few beams of light struck through.And the end of this night every soul that has loved can picture for itself without the aid of any words of mine.
A LOVER’S DISMISSAL—FANTAISIE—THE CHILD WITH THE BOUQUET—THE EDEN OF THE NIGHT, AND THE ANGEL AT THE GATE OF PARADISE.
It was not the deeper blue of the sky (which, on the Saturday, was as rich and pure as in winter, or by night)—nor the thought of actually standing in the very presence of the sorrowing soul whom he had driven from Paradise with the Sodom apple of the serpent (Venner)—nor his own feeble health—nor memories of his own domestic life;—it was none of these matters taken singly, but the combination of all these semitones and minor intervals together which attuned our Firmian to a meltingmaestoso, and gave to his looks and thoughts (for his afternoon visit) much such a kind and degree of tenderness as he expected he should find in Nathalie’s.
What he did find was precisely the reverse. In and about Nathalie there reigned such a noblecold, serene gladsomeness as you may find upon the loftiest mountain peaks; the cloud and the storm arebeneath, while around there rests a purer, colder air, but a deeper blue, too, and a paler sunlight.
It cannot, of course, surprise me that you are on the tenter-hooks of anxiety to hear the account she is going to give of her rupture with Everard. But her account of it was so brief—it might have been written round a Prussian dollar—so that I must supplement it with mine, which I have taken from Rosa’s own written record of it. The fact is, the Venner, five years afterwards, wrote a very passable novel (if we may credit the praise bestowed upon it in the ‘Universal German Library’), into which he artfully built the whole of the rupture with Nathalie—(that severance between soul and body); at all events, this is the conclusion to which sundry hints of Nathalie’s would point us. The said novel, accordingly, is my fountain of Vaucluse. Emasculate intelligences, such as Rosa’s, can only reproduceexperiences; their poeticfœtusesare nothing but adopted children of the actual.
To be brief, what took place was as follows. Scarce were Firmian and Heinrich gone out among the trees, when the Venner brought up his reserve of vengeance, and asked Nathalie, in a tetchy manner, how it was that she could tolerate visitors of such a poor and plebeian sort. The haste and the coldness of the departed pair had already set Nathalie on fire, and this address made her blaze forth in a flame upon her yellow-silken questioner. “A question such as that,” she answered, “is very little short of an insult;” and she immediately added one of her own—for she was too warm and too proud to dissemble in the slightest, or to hold other than the straightest course with him. “You call at Mr. Siebenkæs’s pretty often yourself, do you not?” “Oh!” said this empty braggart, “I call on hiswife(to speak the simple truth);heis merely my pretext.” “Really,” said she, making her syllables last as long as her look of scorn. Meyern, amazed at this behaviour, so very unlike the tone of the antecedent epistolary correspondence (he gave the twin cronies the credit of it)—Meyern, whom her beauty, his own money, and her poverty and dependence upon Blaise (to say nothing of his position of betrothed bridegroom), had now inspired with the utmost audacity—Meyern, this brave and courageous lion, undertook, without a moment’s hesitation, a task which nobody else would have ventured upon, namely, that of humiliating and bringing to her proper senses this irate Aphrodite, by reading to her the catalogue of his Cicisbean appointments, and, in general terms, unfolding before her the long perspective of the hundreds of gynæcœa and jointure-houses open to him. “It is such an easy matter to worship false goddesses and open their temple doors, that I am charmed to be restored to the worship of the true feminine godhead, through my Babylonish captivity to you.”
All her crushed heart sighed forth, “Ah! then it is all true—he is a wicked wretch, and I am miserable indeed.” But she kept silence, outwardly, and went and looked out of the window, in anger. Her soul was one of those whose seats are the knight’s upper dais of womankind; it was ever eager to do rare, heroic acts of self-devotion and self-sacrifice; indeed, a fondness for remarkable and out-of-the-way greatness was the only littleness about it. And now, when the Venner tried to make amends for his braggadocio by a sudden jump into a light and sportive tone (a tone which, in minor warfares with the ordinary fair sex, heals breaches much quicker and better than a more serious one)—and proposed a walk in the pretty park to her, as being a spot better adapted for a reconciliation—this noble soul of hers spread wide its pure white pinions and soared away from out the foul heart of this crooked pike with his silver scales for ever! And she drew near to him and said (all a-glow, but dry-eyed wholly), “Mr. von Meyern, I have quite decided—we are parted for ever. We have never known each other, and our acquaintance is at an end. I will send you back your letters to-morrow, and you will have the goodness to return mine to me.” Had he employed a more serious tone, he might have kept hold of this strong soul for some days—perhaps weeks—longer. Without looking at him anymore, she opened a casket and began arranging letters. He tried, in a hundred speeches, to flatter and pacify her; she answered never a word. His heart boiled within him, for he gave the two advocates the blame for all this. At length he thought he would humble this deaf mute (as well as make her alter her determination), by saying, as he now did, “I don’t know what your uncle in Kuhschnappel will say to all this.Heappears to me to set a much greater value upon my sentiments towards you than you do yourself; indeed, he seems to consider our marriage as essential to your happiness as I think it to mine.” This was a burden heavier than her back, so sore bent down by Fate, could bear. She shut up the casket hurriedly, sat down, and rested her bewildered head upon her trembling arms, shedding burning tears, which her hands strove in vain to hide. A reproach of our poverty uttered by lips we have loved, darts like red-hot iron into the heart, and scorches it dry with fire. Rosa, whose vengeance, now wreaked, gave place to the most eager love, (in hopes that her feelings were of the same selfish type as his own), threw himself on his knees before her, crying, “Oh! forget it all! What are we breaking with one anotherfor, if we come really to think about it? Your precious tear-drops wash it all away. I mingle mine with them in rich abundance.”
She arose with haughty port, leaving him on his knees. “My tears,” she said, “have not the smallest reference to anything connected with you. Iampoor, and I would not be rich. After the base, ignoble insult you have put upon me, you shall not stay and see me weep. Have the goodness to leave the room.” So that he retired; and—when one considers the weight of the sacks he had to carry—sacks of every kind (including one full of muzzles)—he really did it in a surprisingly brisk and lively manner, holding his head pretty high. His command of his temper and his apparent good humour strike one the more (for I may give him what praise he deserves), that he retained them and took them home with him, and this on an afternoon when, with the two finest and longest levers in all his collection he had utterly failed in touching the smallest point in Nathalie’s heart, or the auricles thereof. One of these levers was his old one, which he had tried upon Lenette—that of gradually twisting himself in, corkscrew fashion, in spiral serpentine lines of petty advances, approaches, attentions and illusions; but Nathalie was neither weak nor light enough to be penetrated thus. The other lever was one from which something might really havebeenexpected in the way of effect—though it actuallyhadless than even the first. It consisted in showing his old scars (like an old warrior), and rejuvenating them into wounds; in this manner he bared his suffering heart, pierced by so many a false love, and which (like a dollar with a hole in it), had hung as a votive offering upon so many a shrine. His soul put on Court mourning (of sorrow) of all degrees, whole and half, in hopes of being, like a widow, more enchanting in black. The friend of a Leibgeber, however, could be softened by manly sorrows only—the womanly sort could but harden her.
Meanwhile (as we have said), he left, hisfiancéewithout any pity for her self-sacrifice indeed, and equally without the slightest indignation at her refusal of him. He merely thought, “She may go to the devil;” and he could scarce sufficiently congratulate himself that he had so easily escaped the incalculable annoyance of having to endure life with a creature of the kind from one year’s end to another, and to pay her the necessary respect throughout an infernal, long matrimonial life. On the other hand, his bile was mightily stirred against Leibgeber, but more particularly against Siebenkæs (whom he suspected of being the real judge of his Divorce Court), and he laid the foundation of several gall-stones in his gall-bladder, and of a slight bilious yellow tint in his eyes, with hating the advocate, which he could not do enough.
We return to the Saturday. Nathalie derived her calmness and serenity partly from her own strength of mind, but also in good measure from the pair of horses (and of rose maidens) with whom Rosa had been seen driving to the Hermitage. A woman’s jealousy is always a day or two older than her love. Moreover, I know of no excellence, no weakness, shortcoming, virtue, womanliness,manliness, in a woman which does not tend rather to enkindle than to appease jealousy.
Not only Siebenkæs, but even Leibgeber (anxious to breathe some warmth upon her freezing soul, all stripped of its warm plumage), was this afternoon serious and cordial, not (as he usually did) dressing his rewards and punishments up in irony. Perhaps, too, her gratifying (and flattering) readiness to obey him tamed him down to some extent. Firmian had, in addition to the reasons above set forth, the more powerful ones—that the English lady was expected home the next day but one, and her coming would put a stop to all this garden pleasure, or interfere with it at all events—that he who knew well, from his own experience, what the wounds of a lost love were, had a boundless compassion for hers, and would gladly have given his own heart’s blood to make up for the loss of hers—moreover, accustomed all his life to bare, mean and empty rooms, he felt a keen enjoyment in being in the richly-furnished, bright and tasteful chamber he was now in, and naturally carried over a portion of this to the account of their inhabitant and hermit.
The maid-servant, whom we have seen this week already, came in just then, with tears in her eyes, faltering out that she was going to confession, and hoped she had done nothing to displease her, &c., &c. “Anything to displease me?” cried Nathalie; “most certainly not—and I know I can say the same in your mistress’s name;” and went out of the room with her and kissed her, unseen, like some good genius. How beautiful are pity and kindness to distress, in a soul which has just risen up in might to resist oppression.
Leibgeber took a volume of ‘Tristram Shandy’ from the English lady’s library, and lay down with it on the lawn under the nearest tree, with the view of making over to his friend the undivided fruition of this anise, marchpane and honeycomb of an afternoon of talk, which to him was merely so much every-day household fare. Moreover, all that day when he made any sign of jesting, Nathalie’s eyes would implore him, “Please do not, for just this one day. Do not take pains to point out every pock-pit which Fate has left upon my inner soul to him—spare me for this once.” And lastly (which was his principal reason), it would be much easier for Firmian to tell this sensitive Nathalie (now upon one-eighth pay) all his project of making her his appanaged widow, his heiress in jest—to tell it to her wrapped in a triple shroud, written in distorted characters.
Siebenkæs looked upon this undertaking as a sort of day’s work at fortification making, a journey across the Alps—round the globe—into the grotto of Antiparos, a discovery of the longitude; he had not the slightest notion how even tobeginto set about it. Indeed, he had previously told Leibgeber that, if his death were but a real one, nobody would be more ready to talk to her about it, but that for a sham death, he really could not sadden her; so that she would have to consent, altogether by some chance, and unconditionally, to become his widow. “And is my death a thing so very improbable after all?” he said. “Of course it is,” answered Leibgeber. “If it were not, what would become of our death in jest. The lady will e’en have to make the best of it.” It would appear that he dealt with women’s hearts in a fashion somewhat colder and harder than Siebenkæs, in whose opinion (hermit connoisseur as he was of rarities in the shape of strong female souls) a delicate, suffering one like this could not be too tenderly treated. However, I do not set up to judge between the two friends.
When Leibgeber had gone out with Yorick, Siebenkæs went and stood before a fresco representing the said Yorick, and poor Maria with her flute and her goat. For the chambers of the great are picture-bibles, and anorbis pictus,—they sit, eat and walk in picture exhibitions, which makes it all the harder a matter for them that two, at least, of the greatest expanses in nature—the sky and the sea—cannot be painted over for them. Nathalie went up to him, and at once cried out, “What is there to see in that to-day? Away from it!” She was just as open and unconstrained in her manner with him as he could not manage to be with her. She displayed the warmth and beauty of her soul in that wherein we (unconsciously) unveil, or unmask(as the case may be), ourselves more completely than in anything—namely, her mode of bestowing praise. The illuminated triumphal arch which she erected over the head of her English lady-friend, elevated her own soul so that she stood at that gate of honour as conqueror, in laurel wreath, and glittering collar of the Order of Goodness and Worth. Her praises were the double chorus and echo of the other’s excellence; she was so warm and so earnest! Ah! maidens, fairer are ye a thousand times when ye twine bridal-wreaths and laurel garlands for your companions than when ye plait them crowns of straw, and bend them collars of iron.
She told him how fond she was of British men and women, both in and out of print, although she had never seen any until the previous winter. “Unless,” she said, with a smile, “our friend outside may be considered one.”
Leibgeber, out on his grass mattress, raised his head and saw the couple looking down at him with faces of regard; and the shimmer of love shone forth in three pairs of eyes. One single moment of time thus clasped three sister souls together in one tender embrace.
The maid coming back from confession about this juncture in her white dress—(’twas heavy-wingcasesrather than light butterfly wings to her)—with a trifle of pretty-tinted ribbon about it here and there; Firmian looked at this absolved one for a minute or two, and then took up her black and gold hymn-book, which she had laid down in her haste, finding inside it a whole pattern-card of silks, besides peacock’s feathers. Nathalie, who saw a satirical expression dawning on his face, drove it away in an instant. “Your sex attaches just as much value to adornment as ours. Look at your Court dresses, the Coronation robes at Frankfort, and uniforms and official costumes of all kinds. Then, the peacock was the bird of the old knights and poets, and if you make vows upon his feathers, or wear garlands of them,wemay surely wear them, or at all eventsmark(if not reward) songs with them.” Every now and then a barely polite expression of astonishment at what she knew escaped the advocate in spite of himself. He turned over the leaves of the festival hymns, and came upon gilt figures of Our Lady, and found a picture wherein were two parti-coloured blotches (supposed to represent two lovers), and a phosphorescent heart, which the male blotch was offering to the female with the words:
“And is to thee my fond love all unknown!How my heart burns is here full plainly shown”
—the whole surrounded by a tracery of leafwork. Firmian loved family and society miniature pictures when (as in this case) they were exceedingly poor as works of art. Nathalie saw and read this; she took the book in haste, snapped the clasp to, and then, when she had done so, said, “You have no objection, have you?”
Courage towards women is not inborn, but acquired. Firmian had had familiar experience of very few; wherefore this natural awe made him look upon every feminine body—particularly if of any standing in society—as a kind of sacred Ark of the Covenant whereon no finger might be laid; (for though it is proper to rise superior to considerations of rank where men are concerned, it is otherwise with women), and upon every female foot as that on which a Queen of Spain stands, and every female finger as a Franklin point emitting electric sparks. If in love with him, I might have likened her to an electrified person,feelingall the sparks and mock pains she emitted. At the same time, nothing could be more natural than that his reverent timidity should diminish as time went on, and that at length, (at a moment when she was looking the other way) he should take courage to deftly snatch hold of the end of one of the ribbons in her hair between his fingers—and she never be aware of it. It may have been by way of preliminary studies towards the execution of this feat that he had previously once or twice tried the effect of taking up into his hands things which had been a good deal in hers—such as her English scissors, a broken pincushion, and a pencil-case.
Taking heart of grace hereupon, he thought he would venture to take up a bunch of wax grapes (which he imagined to be made of stone, like those upon butter-boats). He gripped them, accordingly, in his fist as in a wine-press, crushed two or three of them to pieces, and then proffered as many petitions for mercy and pardon as if he had knocked over and broken the porcelain Pagoda of Nanking. “There’s no harm done,” she said, laughing. “We all find plenty such berries in life—with fine ripe skins—no intoxicating juice—and as easily broken—or easier.”
He was in terrible dread lest this glorious, many-tinted rainbow of happiness of his should melt away into evening dew, and it disconcerted him that he no longer saw Leibgeber reading upon the flowery turf. Outside, the world was brightened into a land of the sun—every tree was a rich, firm-rooted joy-flower—the valley a condensed universe, ringing with music of the spheres. Nevertheless he had not the courage to proffer his arm to this Venus for a stroll through the sun,i. e. the sunny Fantaisie; the Venner’s fate, and the fact that there was a late harvest of a few visitors still walking about the gardens, rendered him bashful and mute. Of a sudden Leibgeber knocked at the window with the agate-head of his stick, crying, “Come over to dinner. My stick-head is the Vienna lantern.[67]We are sure not to get home before midnight.” He had ordered a dinner in the café. Presently he cried out, “There is a pretty child here asking for you.” Siebenkæs hurried out, and found it was the very child into whose hand he had pressed his flowers on the evening when, after the great feast-eve at the Hermitage, he had been soaring along on the wings of fancy through the village of Johannis. “Where is your wife, sir?” asked the child; “the lady who took me out of the water the day before yesterday? I have some beautiful flowers here that my godpapa sent me to give her. Mother will come and give her best thanks, too, as soon as she can, but just now she’s in bed very unwell.”
Nathalie, who had heard what the child said, came down, and said, with a blush, “Is it I, darling? Give me your flowers, then.” The child, recognising her, kissed her hand, the hem of her dress, and, lastly, her lips, and would have recommenced this round of kisses, when Nathalie, in turning the flowers over, came upon three silken counterfeits amidst its living forget-me-nots and red and white roses. To Nathalie’s questions as to whence these costly flowers came, the child answered, “Give me a kreuzer or two, and I’ll tell you.” This was done, and she added, “I got them from my godpapa, and he is a very, very grand gentleman;” then ran away among the bushes.
This bouquet was a veritable Turkish Selam-and-Flower riddle to them all. Leibgeber accounted with ease for the child’s sudden marriage of Nathalie and Siebenkæs, by the circumstance that the advocate had been standing beside her at the water-side, and people, who had seen no one so constantly with her as himself, had been misled by the bodily likeness between them.
Siebenkæs’s mind, however, ran more on the machine-master, Rosa (so fond of setting his patchwork life-scenes for every woman to play her part before), and the resemblance these silk flowers bare to those which the Venner had once redeemed from pawn for Lenette in Kuhschnappel struck him at once; yet how could he sadden this gladsome time, and spoil the pleasure of receiving these votive flowers, by giving words to his suspicions? Nathalie insisted upon a distribution of this floral inheritance, inasmuch as each of the three had taken part in the rescue, and Siebenkæs and Leibgeber had, at all events, rescued the rescuer. She kept the white silk roses for herself, allotted the red ones to Leibgeber (who would not have them, but asked for a proper, real, living rose instead, which he immediately put in his mouth); to Siebenkæs she gave the silken forget-me-nots, and one or two living, perfume-breathing ones as well (souls, as it were, of the artificial ones). He took them with rapture, and said the tender real ones should never wither for him. Nathalie here took a brief temporary leave of the pair, but Firmian could not find words to express all his gratitude to his friend for the means he had adopted to prolong this little day of grace which orbed his whole life round with a new heaven and a new earth.
No King of Spain ever took as little out of some six, or so (at the outside), of the hundred dishes which, by the laws of the realm, are daily served at his table, than Siebenkæs did that day out of one. Historians, worthy of credence, inform us, however, that he managed to drink a very little—a little wine it was—and that in a considerable hurry for he could not be happy enough that day to satisfy Leibgeber. The latter, not apt to be easily swayed by heart and feeling, was all the more delighted that his beloved Firmian should at last have a pole star of happiness shining in the zenith point of the heavens above his head, beaming down genial warmth upon the blossoming time of his few scattered flowers.
The rapid rate at which his duplex enjoyment kept on moving enabled him to steal a march upon the sun, and he arrived once more at the villa, whose walls were now tinted red by his beams, while the glory of evening was gilding its windows into fire. Nathalie, on the balcony, was like some sunlit soul, just ready to take wing after the departing sun, hanging with her great eyes upon the shining, quivering world rotunda all full of church-music—and on the sun flying downward from this temple, like some angel—and at the holy, luminous tomb of night into which earth was sinking.
When they came under the balcony (Nathalie beckoning them to come up to her) Heinrich handed him his stick, saying, “Keep that for me. I have enough to carry without it—if you want me, blow the whistle.” As regarded hismoraleand physique, our good Henry had the kindest and softest of human hearts within his shaggy, Bruin breast.
Ah! happy Firmian, happy in spite of all your troubles. When now you pass through the door of glass and on to the floor of iron, the sun confronts you, and sets for a second time. Earth closes her great eye, like some dying goddess! Then the hills smoke like altars—choruses call from the woods—shadows, the veils of day, float about the enkindled, translucent tree-tops and rest upon their many-tinted breast-pins (of flowers), and the gold-leaf of the evening sky throws a dead-gilt gleam towards the east, and touches with a rosy ray the vibrating breast of the hovering lark, far up evening bell of Nature. Ah! happy Firmian, should some glorious spirit from realms afar wing its flight athwart earth and her spring tide, and, as he passes, a thousand lovely evenings be concentrated into one burning one—it would not be more Elysian than this, whereof the glow is now dying out around you as the moments fly.
When the flames of the windows paled, and the moon was rising heavily behind the earth, they both went back into the twilight room, silent, and with full hearts. Firmian opened the pianoforte and, in music, went through his evening once more. The trembling strings were as tongues of fire to his full heart; the flower-ashes of his youth were blown away, and two or three youthful minutes bloomed back into life.
But as the music poured its warm life-balsam upon Nathalie’s swollen heart in all its constraint (for its wounds were only closed, not healed), it melted and gave way, the heavy tears which had been burning within it flowed forth, and it grew weak and tender, but light. Firmian, who saw she was passing once more through the gate of sacrifice towards the sacrificial knife, stopped the sacrificial music, and tried to lead her away from the altar. Just then the first beam of the moon alighted, like a swan’s wing, upon the waxen grapes. He asked her to come out into the silent, misty, after-summer of the day, the moonlit evening. She placed her arm in his without saying yes.
What a sparkling, gleaming world! Through the branches, through the fountains, over the hills and over the woodlands, the flashing molten silver was flowing, which the moon was fining from out the dross of night. Swiftly shot her glance of silver athwart the rippling wavelet, and the glossy, shining, gently-trembling apple-leaves, pausing to rest upon the marble pillars and birch-tree stems. Nathalie and Firmian paused upon the threshold of the magic valley (it gleamed like some enchanted cavern, where night and light were playing, and all the founts of being—which by day cast up sweet odour, melody of songs and voices, feathery wings, translucent pinions—seemed sunk in voiceless slumber deep into some silent chasm). They looked up to the mountain, the Sophienberg, with its summit flattened as by the weight of years; a great mist Colossus was veiling all its Alp-like peak; next at the pale-green world, lying asleep beneath the shimmering radiance of the far-off silent suns, gleaming depths of silver star-dust, flowing faint and far before the ever-brightening rising moon; and then at one another, with hearts full to the brim of holy friendship, such a gaze as only two blest angels, new created, free and gladsome, bend in rapture on each other. “Are you as happy as I?” he asked. “No,” she answered, involuntarily pressing his arm, “that I am not; for, on a night like this should follow, not a day, but something far lovelier and richer—something that should satisfy the heart’s thirst, and staunch its bleeding for ever.” “And what should that be?” he asked. “Death,” was her answer. She lifted her streaming eyes to his and said, “You think so, too, do you not? Death forme.” “No, no,” he added quickly, “forme, if you will, not foryou.” To break the course of this overpowering moment, she added hurriedly, “Shall we go down to the place where we first met, and where, two days too soon, I became your friend;[68]and yet it was not too soon. Shall we?”
He obeyed her; but his soul was still a-swim among his precious thoughts, and as they went down the long, hollow, gravel-way, besprent with the shadows of the shrubs, and moonlight rippling over its white bed (flecked with shadows for stones), he said, “Yes, in an hour like this, when death and sleep send forth their brothers to us, a soul like yours may think of death.[69]But I have more cause than you, for I am happier. Oh! of all guests at Joy’s festival-banquet, Death is the one whom she loves best to see; for he is himself a joy, the last and highest rapture upon earth. None but the common herd can associate humanity’s lofty flight of migration into the distant land of spring with ghosts and corpses here below on earth; as when they hear the owls’ voices when they are going away to warmer countries they take them for the cries of goblins. But, oh! dear, dear, Nathalie, I cannot and will not bear to think of what you say as in any shape connected withyou. No, no, so rich a soul must come into full bloom in a far nearer, earlier spring than that beyond this life! Oh, God! itmust!” They had reached a wall of rock over which a broad cascade of moonlight was falling; against it leant a trellis of roses, whence Natalie gathered a spray, all green and tender, with two young rose-buds just beginning to swell, and, saying “You will never blow,” she placed it on her heart, and said (looking at him with a strange expression), “While they are young they scarcely prick at all.”
And when they got down to the stone water-basin—the sacred spot where they first met—and could as yet find no words to utter what was in their hearts, they saw some one come up out of the dry basin. Though they smiled, it was a smile full of emotion—in all three cases—for this was their Leibgeber, who had been lying in wait for them in hiding, with a bottle of wine, among the imaged water-gods. A certain something there had been in his troubled eyes, but it had been poured out by way of libation to this spring night from our cup of joy. “This port and haven of your first landing here,” said he, “must be properly consecrated, andyou(to Nathalie) must join in the pledge. I swear by Heaven that there is more fruit hanging on its blue dome to-night within reach than ever hung on any green one.” They took three glasses, pledged one another, and said (some of them, I imagine, in somewhat subdued tones). “To friendship! may it live for ever! may the spot where it commenced be always green! May every place blossom where it has grown, and, though all its flowers may fade, and its leaves fall and wither, may it live on for ever and for evermore!” Nathalie was obliged to turn her eyes away. Heinrich laid a hand upon the agate head of his stick (but only because his friend’s hand which was holding it was over the top of it, that he might give the latter a warm and hearty pressure), and said, “Give it me; you shall have no clouds in your hand to-night;” for nature had graven cloud-streaks on the agate in her subterranean studio. Any heart—not Nathalie’s only—must have been touched by this bashful cloaking of the warm token of friendship. “Are you not going to stay with us?” she asked somewhat faintly, as he was leaving them. “I’m going up to the landlord,” he said, “to see if I can get hold of a flute or a horn, and if I do I shall come out and musicise over the valley, and play the springtime in.”
When he was gone his friend felt as if his youth had gone with him. Suddenly he saw, high above the whirling may-beetles and the breeze-born night-butterflies, and their arrow-swift pursuers, the bats, a great train of birds of passage winging their way through the blue, like some broken cloud, coming back to our spring. Then flashed upon his open heart the memory of his lodgings in the market-town, and the time when he saw a similar flight of (earlier) birds of passage, and thought that his life would soon be at an end. These recollections, with all their tears, brought back the belief that he was soon to die; and this he must tell Nathalie. He saw the wide expanse of night stretched over the world like some great corpse but her shadowy limbs quiver under the moonlit-branches at the first touches of the morning breeze awaking in the east. She rises towards the coming sun as a dissolving vapour, an all-embracing cloud, and man says “It is day.” Two crape-covered thoughts, like hideous spectres, fought within Firmian’s soul. The one said, “He is going to die of apoplexy, so he never can see her more.” And the other said, “He is going through the farce of a pretended death, and then he nevermustsee her more.” Overborne by the past as well as by the present, he took Nathalie’s hand, and said, “You must pardon my being so deeply moved to-night. I shall never see you more. You are the noblest of your sex that I have ever met, but we shall never meet again. Very soon you must hear that I am dead, or that myname, from one cause or other has passed away, but myheartwill still be yours, bethine. Oh! that the present, with its mountain-chains of grave-hillocks, but lay behind me, and the future were come, with all its open graves, and I stood on the brink of my own! For I would look once more onthee, then throw myself into it in bliss.”
Nathalie answered not a word. She faltered suddenly in her walk, her arm trembled, her breath came thick and fast. She stopped, and, with a face as pale as death, said, in trembling accents, “Stay here on this spot; let me sit alone for a minute on that turf-bank. Ah! I am so headlong!” He saw her move trembling away. She sank, as if overwhelmed with some burden, down upon a bank of turf. She fixed her blinded eyes upon the moon (the blue sky around it seemed a night, the earth a vapour); her arm lay rigid on her lap; she did not move, except that a spasm, distantly resembling a smile, played about her lip; her eyes were tearless. But to her friend, life at that moment seemed a realm of shadows, whose outlines were floating and blending in endless changes of confusion; a tract all hollow, sunken mine-shafts full of mists in the likeness of mountain-spirits, with butonesingle opening of outlet to the heavens, the free air, the spring, the light of day; andthatoutlet so narrow, so remote, and far above his head.
There sat Nathalie in the white crystal shimmer, like some angel upon an infant’s grave; and, suddenly, the tones of Heinrich’s music broke in, like bells pealing in a storm, upon their souls as they paused, all stunned (like Nature before the thunder breaks), and the warm river of melody bore away their hearts, dissolving them the while. Nathalie made an affirmative sign with her head, as if she had come to some conclusion: she rose and came forward from the green, flowery grave like some enfranchised, glorified spirit; she opened her arms wide, and came towards him. Tear after tear came coursing down her blushing face, but as yet her heart could find no words; sinking undertheWORLD which was in her heart, she could totter no further, and he flew to meet her. She held him back that she might speak the first, her tears flowing faster and faster, but when she had cried, “My firstfriend, and my last—for the first and last time,” she grew breathless and dumb, and, overburdened with sorrow, sank into his arms, upon his lips, upon his heart.
“No! no!” she murmured; “Oh! Heaven, give me but the power to speak. Firmian! my Firmian! Take all my happiness away with you—all that I have on earth. But never, by all you hold most sacred, never see me more in this world. Now” (she added very softly), “you mustswearthis to me.” She drew her head back, and the tones of Heinrich’s music flowed between and around them like the voice of sorrow. She gazed at him, and his pale care-worn face wrung her heart with agony; with eyes dim with tears, she implored him to swear that he would never see her more.
“Yes, noble, glorious soul,” he answered, in trembling tones; “yes, then, Iswearto thee I will never see thee more.” Mute and motionless, as if smitten by the hand of death, she sank with drooping head upon his breast; and once again, like one dying, he said, “I will never see thee more.” Then, beaming like some angel, she raised her face, worn with emotion to him, saying, “All is over now; take the death kiss, and speak no more.” He took it, and she gently disengaged herself from his arms. But as she turned away, she put back her hand and gave him the green rosebuds with the tender thorns, and saying, “Think of to-night,” went resolutely away (trembling, nevertheless), and was soon lost in the dark-green alleys, where but few beams of light struck through.
And the end of this night every soul that has loved can picture for itself without the aid of any words of mine.