Later in the evening David re-entered the salon.
“I know who it is you have come to announce,” said Seraphita in a sleepy
voice. “Wilfrid may enter.”
Hearing these words a man suddenly presented himself, crossed the room
and sat down beside her.
“My dear Seraphita, are you ill?” he said. “You look paler than usual.”
She turned slowly towards him, tossing back her hair like a pretty woman
whose aching head leaves her no strength even for complaint.
“I was foolish enough to cross the fiord with Minna,” she said. “We
ascended the Falberg.”
“Do you mean to kill yourself?” he said with a lover’s terror.
“No, my good Wilfrid; I took the greatest care of your Minna.”
Wilfrid struck his hand violently on a table, rose hastily, and made
several steps towards the door with an exclamation full of pain; then he
returned and seemed about to remonstrate.
“Why this disturbance if you think me ill?” she said.
“Forgive me, have mercy!” he cried, kneeling beside her. “Speak to me
harshly if you will; exact all that the cruel fancies of a woman lead
you to imagine I least can bear; but oh, my beloved, do not doubt my
love. You take Minna like an axe to hew me down. Have mercy!”
“Why do you say these things, my friend, when you know that they are
useless?” she replied, with a look which grew in the end so soft that
Wilfrid ceased to behold her eyes, but saw in their place a fluid light,
the shimmer of which was like the last vibrations of an Italian song.
“Ah! no man dies of anguish!” he murmured.
“You are suffering?” she said in a voice whose intonations produced upon
his heart the same effect as that of her look. “Would I could help you!”
“Love me as I love you.”
“Poor Minna!” she replied.
“Why am I unarmed!” exclaimed Wilfrid, violently.
“You are out of temper,” said Seraphita, smiling. “Come, have I not
spoken to you like those Parisian women whose loves you tell of?”
Wilfrid sat down, crossed his arms, and looked gloomily at Seraphita. “I
forgive you,” he said; “for you know not what you do.”
“You mistake,” she replied; “every woman from the days of Eve does good
and evil knowingly.”
“I believe it,” he said.
“I am sure of it, Wilfrid. Our instinct is precisely that which makes us
perfect. What you men learn, we feel.”
“Why, then, do you not feel how much I love you?”
“Because you do not love me.”
“Good God!”
“If you did, would you complain of your own sufferings?”
“You are terrible to-night, Seraphita. You are a demon.”
“No, but I am gifted with the faculty of comprehending, and it is awful.
Wilfrid, sorrow is a lamp which illumines life.”
“Why did you ascend the Falberg?”
“Minna will tell you. I am too weary to talk. You must talk to me,--you
who know so much, who have learned all things and forgotten nothing; you
who have passed through every social test. Talk to me, amuse me, I am
listening.”
“What can I tell you that you do not know? Besides, the request is
ironical. You allow yourself no intercourse with social life; you
trample on its conventions, its laws, its customs, sentiments, and
sciences; you reduce them all to the proportions such things take when
viewed by you beyond this universe.”
“Therefore you see, my friend, that I am not a woman. You do wrong
to love me. What! am I to leave the ethereal regions of my pretended
strength, make myself humbly small, cringe like the hapless female of
all species, that you may lift me up? and then, when I, helpless and
broken, ask you for help, when I need your arm, you will repulse me! No,
we can never come to terms.”
“You are more maliciously unkind to-night than I have ever known you.”
“Unkind!” she said, with a look which seemed to blend all feelings into
one celestial emotion, “no, I am ill, I suffer, that is all. Leave me,
my friend; it is your manly right. We women should ever please you,
entertain you, be gay in your presence and have no whims save those that
amuse you. Come, what shall I do for you, friend? Shall I sing, shall I
dance, though weariness deprives me of the use of voice and limbs?--Ah!
gentlemen, be we on our deathbeds, we yet must smile to please you; you
call that, methinks, your right. Poor women! I pity them. Tell me, you
who abandon them when they grow old, is it because they have neither
hearts nor souls? Wilfrid, I am a hundred years old; leave me! leave me!
go to Minna!”
“Oh, my eternal love!”
“Do you know the meaning of eternity? Be silent, Wilfrid. You desire
me, but you do not love me. Tell me, do I not seem to you like those
coquettish Parisian women?”
“Certainly I no longer find you the pure celestial maiden I first saw in
the church of Jarvis.”
At these words Seraphita passed her hands across her brow, and when
she removed them Wilfrid was amazed at the saintly expression that
overspread her face.
“You are right, my friend,” she said; “I do wrong whenever I set my feet
upon your earth.”
“Oh, Seraphita, be my star! stay where you can ever bless me with that
clear light!”
As he spoke, he stretched forth his hand to take that of the young girl,
but she withdrew it, neither disdainfully nor in anger. Wilfrid rose
abruptly and walked to the window that she might not see the tears that
rose to his eyes.
“Why do you weep?” she said. “You are not a child, Wilfrid. Come back to
me. I wish it. You are annoyed if I show just displeasure. You see that
I am fatigued and ill, yet you force me to think and speak, and listen
to persuasions and ideas that weary me. If you had any real perception
of my nature, you would have made some music, you would have lulled my
feelings--but no, you love me for yourself and not for myself.”
The storm which convulsed the young man’s heart calmed down at these
words. He slowly approached her, letting his eyes take in the seductive
creature who lay exhausted before him, her head resting in her hand and
her elbow on the couch.
“You think that I do not love you,” she resumed. “You are mistaken.
Listen to me, Wilfrid. You are beginning to know much; you have suffered
much. Let me explain your thoughts to you. You wished to take my hand
just now”; she rose to a sitting posture, and her graceful motions
seemed to emit light. “When a young girl allows her hand to be taken it
is as though she made a promise, is it not? and ought she not to fulfil
it? You well know that I cannot be yours. Two sentiments divide and
inspire the love of all the women of the earth. Either they devote
themselves to suffering, degraded, and criminal beings whom they desire
to console, uplift, redeem; or they give themselves to superior men,
sublime and strong, whom they adore and seek to comprehend, and by whom
they are often annihilated. You have been degraded, though now you are
purified by the fires of repentance, and to-day you are once more noble;
but I know myself too feeble to be your equal, and too religious to bow
before any power but that On High. I may refer thus to your life, my
friend, for we are in the North, among the clouds, where all things are
abstractions.”
“You stab me, Seraphita, when you speak like this. It wounds me to hear
you apply the dreadful knowledge with which you strip from all things
human the properties that time and space and form have given them,
and consider them mathematically in the abstract, as geometry treats
substances from which it extracts solidity.”
“Well, I will respect your wishes, Wilfrid. Let the subject drop. Tell
me what you think of this bearskin rug which my poor David has spread
out.”
“It is very handsome.”
“Did you ever see me wear this ‘doucha greka’?”
She pointed to a pelisse made of cashmere and lined with the skin of the
black fox,--the name she gave it signifying “warm to the soul.”
“Do you believe that any sovereign has a fur that can equal it?” she
asked.
“It is worthy of her who wears it.”
“And whom you think beautiful?”
“Human words do not apply to her. Heart to heart is the only language I
can use.”
“Wilfrid, you are kind to soothe my griefs with such sweet words--which
you have said to others.”
“Farewell!”
“Stay. I love both you and Minna, believe me. To me you two are as one
being. United thus you can be my brother or, if you will, my sister.
Marry her; let me see you both happy before I leave this world of trial
and of pain. My God! the simplest of women obtain what they ask of a
lover; they whisper ‘Hush!’ and he is silent; ‘Die’ and he dies; ‘Love
me afar’ and he stays at a distance, like courtiers before a king! All
I desire is to see you happy, and you refuse me! Am I then
powerless?--Wilfrid, listen, come nearer to me. Yes, I should grieve to
see you marry Minna but--when I am here no longer, then--promise me to
marry her; heaven destined you for each other.”
“I listen to you with fascination, Seraphita. Your words are
incomprehensible, but they charm me. What is it you mean to say?”
“You are right; I forget to be foolish,--to be the poor creature whose
weaknesses gratify you. I torment you, Wilfrid. You came to these
Northern lands for rest, you, worn-out by the impetuous struggle of
genius unrecognized, you, weary with the patient toils of science, you,
who well-nigh dyed your hands in crime and wore the fetters of human
justice--”
Wilfrid dropped speechless on the carpet. Seraphita breathed softly on
his forehead, and in a moment he fell asleep at her feet.
“Sleep! rest!” she said, rising.
She passed her hands over Wilfrid’s brow; then the following sentences
escaped her lips, one by one,--all different in tone and accent, but all
melodious, full of a Goodness that seemed to emanate from her head in
vaporous waves, like the gleams the goddess chastely lays upon Endymion
sleeping.
“I cannot show myself such as I am to thee, dear Wilfrid,--to thee who
art strong.
“The hour is come; the hour when the effulgent lights of the future cast
their reflections backward on the soul; the hour when the soul awakes
into freedom.
“Now am I permitted to tell thee how I love thee. Dost thou not see the
nature of my love, a love without self-interest; a sentiment full of
thee, thee only; a love which follows thee into the future to light that
future for thee--for it is the one True Light. Canst thou now conceive
with what ardor I would have thee leave this life which weighs thee
down, and behold thee nearer than thou art to that world where Love is
never-failing? Can it be aught but suffering to love for one life only?
Hast thou not felt a thirst for the eternal love? Dost thou not feel the
bliss to which a creature rises when, with twin-soul, it loves the Being
who betrays not love, Him before whom we kneel in adoration?
“Would I had wings to cover thee, Wilfrid; power to give thee strength
to enter now into that world where all the purest joys of purest earthly
attachments are but shadows in the Light that shines, unceasing, to
illumine and rejoice all hearts.
“Forgive a friendly soul for showing thee the picture of thy sins, in
the charitable hope of soothing the sharp pangs of thy remorse. Listen
to the pardoning choir; refresh thy soul in the dawn now rising for thee
beyond the night of death. Yes, thy life, thy true life is there!
“May my words now reach thee clothed in the glorious forms of dreams;
may they deck themselves with images glowing and radiant as they hover
round you. Rise, rise, to the height where men can see themselves
distinctly, pressed together though they be like grains of sand upon
a sea-shore. Humanity rolls out like a many-colored ribbon. See the
diverse shades of that flower of the celestial gardens. Behold the
beings who lack intelligence, those who begin to receive it, those who
have passed through trials, those who love, those who follow wisdom and
aspire to the regions of Light!
“Canst thou comprehend, through this thought made visible, the destiny
of humanity?--whence it came, whither to goeth? Continue steadfast in
the Path. Reaching the end of thy journey thou shalt hear the clarions
of omnipotence sounding the cries of victory in chords of which a single
one would shake the earth, but which are lost in the spaces of a world
that hath neither east nor west.
“Canst thou comprehend, my poor beloved Tried-one, that unless the
torpor and the veils of sleep had wrapped thee, such sights would rend
and bear away thy mind as the whirlwinds rend and carry into space the
feeble sails, depriving thee forever of thy reason? Dost thou understand
that the Soul itself, raised to its utmost power can scarcely endure in
dreams the burning communications of the Spirit?
“Speed thy way through the luminous spheres; behold, admire, hasten!
Flying thus thou canst pause or advance without weariness. Like other
men, thou wouldst fain be plunged forever in these spheres of light and
perfume where now thou art, free of thy swooning body, and where thy
thought alone has utterance. Fly! enjoy for a fleeting moment the wings
thou shalt surely win when Love has grown so perfect in thee that thou
hast no senses left; when thy whole being is all mind, all love. The
higher thy flight the less canst thou see the abysses. There are none in
heaven. Look at the friend who speaks to thee; she who holds thee above
this earth in which are all abysses. Look, behold, contemplate me yet a
moment longer, for never again wilt thou see me, save imperfectly as the
pale twilight of this world may show me to thee.”
Seraphita stood erect, her head with floating hair inclining gently
forward, in that aerial attitude which great painters give to messengers
from heaven; the folds of her raiment fell with the same unspeakable
grace which holds an artist--the man who translates all things into
sentiment--before the exquisite well-known lines of Polyhymnia’s veil.
Then she stretched forth her hand. Wilfrid rose. When he looked at
Seraphita she was lying on the bear’s-skin, her head resting on her
hand, her face calm, her eyes brilliant. Wilfrid gazed at her silently;
but his face betrayed a deferential fear in its almost timid expression.
“Yes, dear,” he said at last, as though he were answering some question;
“we are separated by worlds. I resign myself; I can only adore you. But
what will become of me, poor and alone!”
“Wilfrid, you have Minna.”
He shook his head.
“Do not be so disdainful; woman understands all things through love;
what she does not understand she feels; what she does not feel she sees;
when she neither sees, nor feels, nor understands, this angel of earth
divines to protect you, and hides her protection beneath the grace of
love.”
“Seraphita, am I worthy to belong to a woman?”
“Ah, now,” she said, smiling, “you are suddenly very modest; is it a
snare? A woman is always so touched to see her weakness glorified. Well,
come and take tea with me the day after to-morrow evening; good Monsieur
Becker will be here, and Minna, the purest and most artless creature
I have known on earth. Leave me now, my friend; I need to make long
prayers and expiate my sins.”
“You, can you commit sin?”
“Poor friend! if we abuse our power, is not that the sin of pride? I
have been very proud to-day. Now leave me, till to-morrow.”
“Till to-morrow,” said Wilfrid faintly, casting a long glance at the
being of whom he desired to carry with him an ineffaceable memory.
Though he wished to go far away, he was held, as it were, outside the
house for some moments, watching the light which shone from all the
windows of the Swedish dwelling.
“What is the matter with me?” he asked himself. “No, she is not a mere
creature, but a whole creation. Of her world, even through veils and
clouds, I have caught echoes like the memory of sufferings healed,
like the dazzling vertigo of dreams in which we hear the plaints of
generations mingling with the harmonies of some higher sphere where all
is Light and all is Love. Am I awake? Do I still sleep? Are these the
eyes before which the luminous space retreated further and further
indefinitely while the eyes followed it? The night is cold, yet my head
is on fire. I will go to the parsonage. With the pastor and his daughter
I shall recover the balance of my mind.”
But still he did not leave the spot whence his eyes could plunge into
Seraphita’s salon. The mysterious creature seemed to him the radiating
centre of a luminous circle which formed an atmosphere about her wider
than that of other beings; whoever entered it felt the compelling
influence of, as it were, a vortex of dazzling light and all consuming
thoughts. Forced to struggle against this inexplicable power, Wilfrid
only prevailed after strong efforts; but when he reached and passed the
inclosing wall of the courtyard, he regained his freedom of will, walked
rapidly towards the parsonage, and was soon beneath the high wooden
arch which formed a sort of peristyle to Monsieur Becker’s dwelling. He
opened the first door, against which the wind had driven the snow, and
knocked on the inner one, saying:--
“Will you let me spend the evening with you, Monsieur Becker?”
“Yes,” cried two voices, mingling their intonations.
Entering the parlor, Wilfrid returned by degrees to real life. He bowed
affectionately to Minna, shook hands with Monsieur Becker, and looked
about at the picture of a home which calmed the convulsions of his
physical nature, in which a phenomenon was taking place analogous to
that which sometimes seizes upon men who have given themselves up
to protracted contemplations. If some strong thought bears upward on
phantasmal wing a man of learning or a poet, isolates him from the
external circumstances which environ him here below, and leads him
forward through illimitable regions where vast arrays of facts become
abstractions, where the greatest works of Nature are but images, then
woe betide him if a sudden noise strikes sharply on his senses and calls
his errant soul back to its prison-house of flesh and bones. The
shock of the reunion of these two powers, body and mind,--one of which
partakes of the unseen qualities of a thunderbolt, while the other
shares with sentient nature that soft resistant force which deifies
destruction,--this shock, this struggle, or, rather let us say, this
painful meeting and co-mingling, gives rise to frightful sufferings. The
body receives back the flame that consumes it; the flame has once more
grasped its prey. This fusion, however, does not take place without
convulsions, explosions, tortures; analogous and visible signs of which
may be seen in chemistry, when two antagonistic substances which science
has united separate.
For the last few days whenever Wilfrid entered Seraphita’s presence his
body seemed to fall away from him into nothingness. With a single
glance this strange being led him in spirit through the spheres where
meditation leads the learned man, prayer the pious heart, where vision
transports the artist, and sleep the souls of men,--each and all have
their own path to the Height, their own guide to reach it, their own
individual sufferings in the dire return. In that sphere alone all veils
are rent away, and the revelation, the awful flaming certainty of an
unknown world, of which the soul brings back mere fragments to this
lower sphere, stands revealed. To Wilfrid one hour passed with Seraphita
was like the sought-for dreams of Theriakis, in which each knot of
nerves becomes the centre of a radiating delight. But he left her
bruised and wearied as some young girl endeavoring to keep step with a
giant.
The cold air, with its stinging flagellations, had begun to still
the nervous tremors which followed the reunion of his two natures, so
powerfully disunited for a time; he was drawn towards the parsonage,
then towards Minna, by the sight of the every-day home life for which
he thirsted as the wandering European thirsts for his native land when
nostalgia seizes him amid the fairy scenes of Orient that have seduced
his senses. More weary than he had ever yet been, Wilfrid dropped into
a chair and looked about him for a time, like a man who awakens from
sleep. Monsieur Becker and his daughter accustomed, perhaps, to the
apparent eccentricity of their guest, continued the employments in which
they were engaged.
The parlor was ornamented with a collection of the shells and insects
of Norway. These curiosities, admirably arranged on a background of the
yellow pine which panelled the room, formed, as it were, a rich tapestry
to which the fumes of tobacco had imparted a mellow tone. At the further
end of the room, opposite to the door, was an immense wrought-iron
stove, carefully polished by the serving-woman till it shone like
burnished steel. Seated in a large tapestried armchair near the stove,
before a table, with his feet in a species of muff, Monsieur Becker was
reading a folio volume which was propped against a pile of other books
as on a desk. At his left stood a jug of beer and a glass, at his right
burned a smoky lamp fed by some species of fish-oil. The pastor seemed
about sixty years of age. His face belonged to a type often painted by
Rembrandt; the same small bright eyes, set in wrinkles and surmounted by
thick gray eyebrows; the same white hair escaping in snowy flakes from a
black velvet cap; the same broad, bald brow, and a contour of face
which the ample chin made almost square; and lastly, the same calm
tranquillity, which, to an observer, denoted the possession of some
inward power, be it the supremacy bestowed by money, or the magisterial
influence of the burgomaster, or the consciousness of art, or the
cubic force of blissful ignorance. This fine old man, whose stout body
proclaimed his vigorous health, was wrapped in a dressing-gown of rough
gray cloth plainly bound. Between his lips was a meerschaum pipe,
from which, at regular intervals, he blew the smoke, following with
abstracted vision its fantastic wreathings,--his mind employed, no
doubt, in assimilating through some meditative process the thoughts of
the author whose works he was studying.
On the other side of the stove and near a door which communicated with
the kitchen Minna was indistinctly visible in the haze of the good man’s
smoke, to which she was apparently accustomed. Beside her on a little
table were the implements of household work, a pile of napkins, and
another of socks waiting to be mended, also a lamp like that which shone
on the white page of the book in which the pastor was absorbed. Her
fresh young face, with its delicate outline, expressed an infinite
purity which harmonized with the candor of the white brow and the clear
blue eyes. She sat erect, turning slightly toward the lamp for better
light, unconsciously showing as she did so the beauty of her waist and
bust. She was already dressed for the night in a long robe of white
cotton; a cambric cap, without other ornament than a frill of the same,
confined her hair. Though evidently plunged in some inward meditation,
she counted without a mistake the threads of her napkins or the meshes
of her socks. Sitting thus, she presented the most complete image, the
truest type, of the woman destined for terrestrial labor, whose glance
may piece the clouds of the sanctuary while her thought, humble and
charitable, keeps her ever on the level of man.
Wilfrid had flung himself into a chair between the two tables and
was contemplating with a species of intoxication this picture full of
harmony, to which the clouds of smoke did no despite. The single window
which lighted the parlor during the fine weather was now carefully
closed. An old tapestry, used for a curtain and fastened to a stick,
hung before it in heavy folds. Nothing in the room was picturesque,
nothing brilliant; everything denoted rigorous simplicity, true
heartiness, the ease of unconventional nature, and the habits of a
domestic life which knew neither cares nor troubles. Many a dwelling is
like a dream, the sparkle of passing pleasure seems to hide some ruin
beneath the cold smile of luxury; but this parlor, sublime in reality,
harmonious in tone, diffused the patriarchal ideas of a full and
self-contained existence. The silence was unbroken save by the movements
of the servant in the kitchen engaged in preparing the supper, and
by the sizzling of the dried fish which she was frying in salt butter
according to the custom of the country.
“Will you smoke a pipe?” said the pastor, seizing a moment when he
thought that Wilfrid might listen to him.
“Thank you, no, dear Monsieur Becker,” replied the visitor.
“You seem to suffer more to-day than usual,” said Minna, struck by the
feeble tones of the stranger’s voice.
“I am always so when I leave the chateau.”
Minna quivered.
“A strange being lives there, Monsieur Becker,” he continued after a
pause. “For the six months that I have been in this village I have never
yet dared to question you about her, and even now I do violence to
my feelings in speaking of her. I began by keenly regretting that my
journey in this country was arrested by the winter weather and that I
was forced to remain here. But during the last two months chains have
been forged and riveted which bind me irrevocably to Jarvis, till now
I fear to end my days here. You know how I first met Seraphita, what
impression her look and voice made upon me, and how at last I was
admitted to her home where she receives no one. From the very first day
I have longed to ask you the history of this mysterious being. On that
day began, for me, a series of enchantments.”
“Enchantments!” cried the pastor shaking the ashes of his pipe into an
earthen-ware dish full of sand, “are there enchantments in these days?”
“You, who are carefully studying at this moment that volume of the
‘Incantations’ of Jean Wier, will surely understand the explanation of
my sensations if I try to give it to you,” replied Wilfrid. “If we study
Nature attentively in its great evolutions as in its minutest works, we
cannot fail to recognize the possibility of enchantment--giving to that
word its exact significance. Man does not create forces; he employs the
only force that exists and which includes all others namely Motion, the
breath incomprehensible of the sovereign Maker of the universe. Species
are too distinctly separated for the human hand to mingle them. The only
miracle of which man is capable is done through the conjunction of
two antagonistic substances. Gunpowder for instance is germane to a
thunderbolt. As to calling forth a creation, and a sudden one, all
creation demands time, and time neither recedes nor advances at the word
of command. So, in the world without us, plastic nature obeys laws the
order and exercise of which cannot be interfered with by the hand of
man. But after fulfilling, as it were, the function of Matter, it would
be unreasonable not to recognize within us the existence of a gigantic
power, the effects of which are so incommensurable that the known
generations of men have never yet been able to classify them. I do not
speak of man’s faculty of abstraction, of constraining Nature to
confine itself within the Word,--a gigantic act on which the common
mind reflects as little as it does on the nature of Motion, but which,
nevertheless, has led the Indian theosophists to explain creation by
a word to which they give an inverse power. The smallest atom of their
subsistence, namely, the grain of rice, from which a creation issues and
in which alternately creation again is held, presented to their minds so
perfect an image of the creative word, and of the abstractive word, that
to them it was easy to apply the same system to the creation of worlds.
The majority of men content themselves with the grain of rice sown in
the first chapter of all the Geneses. Saint John, when he said the
Word was God only complicated the difficulty. But the fructification,
germination, and efflorescence of our ideas is of little consequence if
we compare that property, shared by many men, with the wholly
individual faculty of communicating to that property, by some mysterious
concentration, forces that are more or less active, of carrying it up
to a third, a ninth, or a twenty-seventh power, of making it thus fasten
upon the masses and obtain magical results by condensing the processes
of nature.
“What I mean by enchantments,” continued Wilfrid after a moment’s pause,
“are those stupendous actions taking place between two membranes in the
tissue of the brain. We find in the unexplorable nature of the Spiritual
World certain beings armed with these wondrous faculties, comparable
only to the terrible power of certain gases in the physical world,
beings who combine with other beings, penetrate them as active agents,
and produce upon them witchcrafts, charms, against which these helpless
slaves are wholly defenceless; they are, in fact, enchanted, brought
under subjection, reduced to a condition of dreadful vassalage. Such
mysterious beings overpower others with the sceptre and the glory of
a superior nature,--acting upon them at times like the torpedo which
electrifies or paralyzes the fisherman, at other times like a dose of
phosphorous which stimulates life and accelerates its propulsion; or
again, like opium, which puts to sleep corporeal nature, disengages the
spirit from every bond, enables it to float above the world and shows
this earth to the spiritual eye as through a prism, extracting from it
the food most needed; or, yet again, like catalepsy, which deadens
all faculties for the sake of one only vision. Miracles, enchantments,
incantations, witchcrafts, spells, and charms, in short, all those
acts improperly termed supernatural, are only possible and can only be
explained by the despotism with which some spirit compels us to feel the
effects of a mysterious optic which increases, or diminishes, or exalts
creation, moves within us as it pleases, deforms or embellishes all
things to our eyes, tears us from heaven, or drags us to hell,--two
terms by which men agree to express the two extremes of joy and misery.
“These phenomena are within us, not without us,” Wilfrid went on. “The
being whom we call Seraphita seems to me one of those rare and terrible
spirits to whom power is given to bind men, to crush nature, to enter
into participation of the occult power of God. The course of her
enchantments over me began on that first day, when silence as to her
was imposed upon me against my will. Each time that I have wished to
question you it seemed as though I were about to reveal a secret of
which I ought to be the incorruptible guardian. Whenever I have tried
to speak, a burning seal has been laid upon my lips, and I myself have
become the involuntary minister of these mysteries. You see me here
to-night, for the hundredth time, bruised, defeated, broken, after
leaving the hallucinating sphere which surrounds that young girl, so
gentle, so fragile to both of you, but to me the cruellest of magicians!
Yes, to me she is like a sorcerer holding in her right hand the
invisible wand that moves the globe, and in her left the thunderbolt
that rends asunder all things at her will. No longer can I look upon her
brow; the light of it is insupportable. I skirt the borders of the abyss
of madness too closely to be longer silent. I must speak. I seize this
moment, when courage comes to me, to resist the power which drags me
onward without inquiring whether or not I have the force to follow. Who
is she? Did you know her young? What of her birth? Had she father and
mother, or was she born of the conjunction of ice and sun? She burns and
yet she freeze; she shows herself and then withdraws; she attracts me
and repulses me; she brings me life, she gives me death; I love her and
yet I hate her! I cannot live thus; let me be wholly in heaven or in
hell!”
Holding his refilled pipe in one hand, and in the other the cover
which he forgot to replace, Monsieur Becker listened to Wilfrid with a
mysterious expression on his face, looking occasionally at his daughter,
who seemed to understand the man’s language as in harmony with the
strange being who inspired it. Wilfrid was splendid to behold at this
moment,--like Hamlet listening to the ghost of his father as it rises
for him alone in the midst of the living.
“This is certainly the language of a man in love,” said the good pastor,
innocently.
“In love!” cried Wilfrid, “yes, to common minds. But, dear Monsieur
Becker, no words can express the frenzy which draws me to the feet of
that unearthly being.”
“Then you do love her?” said Minna, in a tone of reproach.
“Mademoiselle, I feel such extraordinary agitation when I see her, and
such deep sadness when I see her no more, that in any other man what I
feel would be called love. But that sentiment draws those who feel it
ardently together, whereas between her and me a great gulf lies, whose
icy coldness penetrates my very being in her presence; though the
feeling dies away when I see her no longer. I leave her in despair; I
return to her with ardor,--like men of science who seek a secret from
Nature only to be baffled, or like the painter who would fain put life
upon his canvas and strives with all the resources of his art in the
vain attempt.”
“Monsieur, all that you say is true,” replied the young girl, artlessly.
“How can you know, Minna?” asked the old pastor.
“Ah! my father, had you been with us this morning on the summit of the
Falberg, had you seen him praying, you would not ask me that question.
You would say, like Monsieur Wilfrid, that he saw his Seraphita for the
first time in our temple, ‘It is the Spirit of Prayer.’”
These words were followed by a moment’s silence.
“Ah, truly!” said Wilfrid, “she has nothing in common with the creatures
who grovel upon this earth.”
“On the Falberg!” said the old pastor, “how could you get there?”
“I do not know,” replied Minna; “the way is like a dream to me, of which
no more than a memory remains. Perhaps I should hardly believe that I
had been there were it not for this tangible proof.”
She drew the flower from her bosom and showed it to them. All three
gazed at the pretty saxifrage, which was still fresh, and now shone in
the light of the two lamps like a third luminary.
“This is indeed supernatural,” said the old man, astounded at the sight
of a flower blooming in winter.
“A mystery!” cried Wilfrid, intoxicated with its perfume.
“The flower makes me giddy,” said Minna; “I fancy I still hear that
voice,--the music of thought; that I still see the light of that look,
which is Love.”
“I implore you, my dear Monsieur Becker, tell me the history of
Seraphita,--enigmatical human flower,--whose image is before us in this
mysterious bloom.”
“My dear friend,” said the old man, emitting a puff of smoke, “to
explain the birth of that being it is absolutely necessary that
I disperse the clouds which envelop the most obscure of Christian
doctrines. It is not easy to make myself clear when speaking of that
incomprehensible revelation,--the last effulgence of faith that has
shone upon our lump of mud. Do you know Swedenborg?”
“By name only,--of him, of his books, and his religion I know nothing.”
“Then I must relate to you the whole chronicle of Swedenborg.”