Cantata-Sunday.--Two Testaments.--Pontac; Blood; Love.
The spring months clothe the earth in new variegated hues; but man they
usually dress in black. Just when our icy regions are becoming
fruitful, and the flower-waves of the meadows are rolling together over
our quarter of the globe, we on all hands meet with men in sables, the
beginning of whose Spring is full of tears. But, on the other hand,
this very upblooming of the renovated earth is itself the best balm for
sorrow over those who lie under it; and graves are better hid by
blossoms than by snow.
In April, which is no less deadly than it is fickle, old Senior
Astmann, our Conrector's teacher, was overtaken by death. His departure
it was meant to hide from the Rittmeisterinn; but the unusual ringing
of funeral peals carried his swan-song to her heart; and gradually set
the curfew-bell of her life into similar movement. Age and sufferings
had already marked out the first incisions for Death, so that he
required but little effort to cut her down; for it is with men as with
trees, they are notched long before felling, that their life-sap may
exude. The second stroke of apoplexy was soon followed by the last; it
is strange that Death, like criminal courts, cites the apoplectic
thrice.
Men are apt to postpone their _last_ will as long as their _better_
one; the Rittmeisterinn would perhaps have let all her hours, till the
speechless and deaf one, roll away without testament, had not
Thiennette, during the last night before from sick-nurse she became
corpse-watcher, reminded the patient of the poor Conrector, and
of his meagre, hunger-bitten existence, and of the scanty aliment and
board-wages which Fortune had thrown him, and of his empty Future,
where, like a drooping, yellow plant in the parched deal-box of the
school-room, between scholars and creditors, he must languish to the
end. Her own poverty offered her a model of his; and her inward tears
were the fluid tints with which she colored her picture. As the
Rittmeisterinn's testament related solely to domestics and dependants,
and as she began with the male one, Fixlein stood at the top; and
Death, who must have been a special friend of the Conrector's, did not
lift his scythe and give the last stroke, till his _protege_ had
been with audible voice declared testamentary heir; then he cut all
away,--life, testament, and hopes.
When the Conrector, in a wash-bill from his mother, received these two
Death's-posts and Job's-posts in his class, the first thing he did was
to dismiss his class-boys, and break into tears before reaching home.
Though the mother had informed him that he had been remembered in the
will (I could wish, however, that the Notary had blabbed how much it
was), yet almost with every O which he masoretically excerpted from his
German Bible, and entered in his Masoretic Work, great drops fell down
on his pen, and made his black ink pale. His sorrow was not the
gorgeous sorrow of the Poet, who veils the gaping wounds of the
departed in the winding-sheet, and breaks the cry of anguish in soft
tones of plaintiveness; nor the sorrow of the Philosopher, who, through
one open grave, must look into the whole catacomb-Necropolis of the
Past, and before whom the spectre of a friend expands into the spectral
Shadow of this whole Earth; but it was the woe of a child, of a mother,
whom this thought itself, without subsidiary reflections, bitterly
cuts asunder: "So I shall never more see thee; so must thou moulder
away, and I shall never see thee, thou good soul, never, never any
more!"--And even because he neither felt the philosophical nor the
poetical sadness, every trifle could make a division, a break in his
mourning; and, like a woman, he was that very evening capable of
sketching some plans for the future employment of his legacy.
Four weeks after, to wit, on the 5th of May, the testament was
unsealed; but not till the 6th (Cantata-Sunday) did he go down to
Hukelum. His mother met his salutations with tears; which she shed,
over the corpse for grief, over the testament for joy.--To the now
Conrector Egidius Zebedaeus was left: _In the first place_, a large
sumptuous bed, with a mirror-tester, in which the giant Goliath might
have rolled at his ease, and to which I and my fair readers will by and
by approach nearer, to examine it; _secondly_, there was devised to
him, as unpaid Easter-godchild-money, for every year that he had lived,
one ducat; _thirdly_, all the admittance and instalment dues, which his
elevation to the Quintate and Conrectorate had cost him, were to be
made good to the utmost penny. "And dost thou know, then," proceeded
the mother, "what the poor Fraeulein has got? Ah Heaven! Nothing! Not
one brass farthing!" For Death had stiffened the hand, which was just
stretching itself out to reach the poor Thiennette a little rain-screen
against the foul weather of life. The mother related this perverse
trick of Fortune with true condolence; which in women dissipates envy,
and comes easier to them than congratulation, a feeling belonging
rather to men. In many female hearts sympathy and envy are such near
door-neighbors that they could be virtuous nowhere except in Hell,
where men have such frightful times of it; and vicious nowhere except
in Heaven, where people have more happiness than they know what to do
with.
The Conrector was now enjoying on Earth that Heaven to which his
benefactress had ascended. First of all, he started off--without
so much as putting up his handkerchief, in which lay his
emotion--up-stairs to see the legacy-bed unshrouded; for he had a
_female_ predilection for furniture. I know not whether the reader ever
looked at or mounted any of these ancient chivalric beds, into which,
by means of a little stair without balustrades, you can easily ascend;
and in which you, properly speaking, sleep always at least one story
above ground. Nazianzen informs us (_Orat_. XVI.) that the Jews, in old
times, had high beds with cock-ladders of this sort; but simply because
of vermin. The legacy bed-Ark was quite as large as one of these; and a
flea would have measured it, not in Diameters of the Earth, but in
Distances of Sirius. When Fixlein beheld this colossal dormitory, with
the curtains drawn asunder, and its canopy of looking-glass, he could
have longed to be in it; and had it been in his power to cut from the
opaque hemisphere of Night, at that time in America, a small section,
he would have established himself there along with it, just to swim
about, for one half-hour, with his thin lath figure, in this sea of
down. The mother, by longer chains of reasoning and chains of
calculation than the bed was, had not succeeded in persuading him to
have the broad mirror on the top cut in pieces, though his large
dressing-table had nothing to see itself in but a mere shaving-glass;
he let the mirror lie where it was for this reason: "Should I ever, God
willing, get married," said he, "I shall then, towards morning, be able
to look at my sleeping wife, without sitting up in bed."
As to the second article of the testament, the godchild Easter-pence,
his mother had, last night, arranged it perfectly. The Lawyer took her
evidence on the years of the heir; and these she had stated at exactly
the teeth-number, two-and-thirty. She would willingly have lied, and
passed off her son, like an Inscription, for older than he was; but
against this _venia aetatis_, she saw too well the authorities would
have taken exception, "that it was falsehood and cozenage; had the son
been two-and-thirty, he must have been dead some time ago, as it could
not but be presumed that he then was."
And just as she was recounting this, a servant from Schadeck called;
and delivered to the Conrector, in return for a discharge and
ratification of the birth-certificate given out by his mother, a gold
bar of two-and-thirty ducat age-counters, like a helm-bar for the
voyage of his life; Herr von Aufhammer was too proud to engage in any
pettifogging discussion over a plebeian birth-certificate.
And thus, by a proud open-handedness, was one of the best lawsuits
thrown to the dogs; seeing this gold bar might, in the wire-mill of the
judgment-bench, have been drawn out into the finest threads. From such
a tangled lock, which was not to be unravelled--for in the first place,
there was no document to prove Fixlein's age; in the second place, so
long as he lived, the necessary conclusion was, that he was not yet
thirty-two[50]--from such a lock might not only silk and hanging-cords,
but whole drag nets, have been spun and twisted? Clients in general
would have less reason to complain of their causes, if these lasted
longer. Philosophers contend for thousands of years over philosophical
questions; and it seems an unaccountable thing, therefore, that
Advocates should attempt to end their juristical questions in a space
of eighty, or even sometimes of sixty years. But the professors of Law
are not to blame for this; on the other hand, as Lessing asserts of
Truth, that not the _finding_, but the _seeking_ of it profits men, and
that he himself would willingly make over his claim to all truths in
return for the sweet labor of investigation, so is the professor of Law
not profited by the finding and deciding, but by the investigation of a
juridical truth,--which is called pleading and practising,--and he
would willingly consent to approximate to Truth forever, like an
hyperbola to its asymptote, without ever meeting it, seeing he can
subsist as an honorable man with wife and child, let such approximation
be as tedious as it likes.
The Schadeck servant had, besides the gold legacy, a further commission
from the Lawyer, whereby the testamentary heir was directed to sum up
the mint-dues which he had been obliged to pay while lying under the
coining-press of his superiors, as Quintus and Conrector; the which,
properly documented and authenticated, were forthwith to be made good
to him.
Our Conrector, who now rated himself among the great capitalists of the
world, held his short gold-roll like a sceptre in his hand; like a
basket-net lifted from the sea of the Future, which was now to run on,
and bring him all manner of fed-fishes, well-washed, sound, and in good
season.
I cannot relate all things at once; else I should ere now have told the
reader, who must long have been waiting for it, that to the moneyed
Conrector his two-and-thirty godchild-pennies but too much prefigured
the two-and-thirty years of his age; besides which, to-day the
Cantata-Sunday, this Bartholomew-night and Second of September of his
family, came in as a further aggravation. The mother, who should have
known the age of her child, said she had forgotten it; but durst wager
he was thirty-two a year ago; only the Lawyer was a man you could not
speak to. "I could swear it myself," said the capitalist; "I recollect
how stupid I felt Cantata-Sunday last year." Fixlein beheld Death, not
as the poet does, in the uptowering, asunder-driving concave-mirror of
Imagination; but as the child, as the savage, as the peasant, as the
woman does, in the plane octavo-mirror on the board of a Prayer-book;
and Death looked to him like an old white-headed man, sunk down into
slumber in some latticed pew.--
And yet he thought oftener of him than last year; for joy readily melts
us into softness; and the lackered Wheel of Fortune is a cistern-wheel
that empties its water in our eyes.... But the friendly Genius of this
terrestrial, or rather aquatic Ball--for, in the physical and in the
moral world, there are more tear-seas than firm land--has provided for
the poor water-insects that float about in it, for us, namely, a quite
special elixir against spasms in the soul; I declare this same Genius
must have studied the whole pathology of man with care; for to the poor
devil who is no Stoic, and can pay no Soul-doctor, that for the
fissures of his cranium and his breast might prepare costly
prescriptions of simples, he has stowed up cask-wise in all cellarages
a precious wound-water, which the patient has only to take and pour
over his slashes and bone-breakages--gin-twist, I mean, or beer, or a
touch of wine.... By Heaven! it is either stupid ingratitude towards
this medicinal Genius on the one hand, or theological confusion of
permitted tippling with prohibited drunkenness on the other, if men do
not thank God that they have something at hand, which, in the nervous
vertigoes of life, will instantly supply the place of Philosophy,
Christianity, Judaism, Paganism, and _Time_;--liquor, as I said.
The Conrector had long before sunset given the village post three
groschens of post-money, and commissioned--for he had a whole cabinet
of ducats in his pocket, which all day he was surveying in the dark
with his hand--three thalers' worth of Pontac from the town. "I must
have a Cantata merry-making," said he; "if it be my last day, let it be
my gayest too!" I could wish he had given a larger order; but he kept
the bit of moderation between his teeth at all times; even in a
threatened sham-death-night, and in the midst of jubilee. The question
is, whether he would not have restricted himself to a single bottle, if
he had not wished to treat his mother and the Fraeulein. Had he lived in
the tenth century, when the Day of Judgment was thought to be at hand,
or in other centuries, when new Noah's Deluges were expected, and when,
accordingly, like sailors in a shipwreck, people boused up all,--he
would not have spent one kreuzer more on that account. His joy was,
that with his legacy he could now satisfy his head-creditor
Steinberger, and leave the world an honest man. Just people, who make
much of money, pay their debts the most punctually.
The purple Pontac arrived at a time when Fixlein could compare the
red-chalk-drawings and red-letter-titles of joy, which it would
bring out on the cheeks of its drinker and drinkeresses,--with the
Evening-carnation of the last clouds about the Sun....
I declare, among all the spectators of this History, no one can be
thinking more about poor Thiennette than I; nevertheless, it is not
permitted me to bring her out from her tiring-room to my historical
scene before the time. Poor girl! The Conrector cannot wish more warmly
than his Biographer, that, in the Temple of Nature as in that of
Jerusalem, there were a special door--besides that of Death--standing
open, through which only the afflicted entered, that a Priest might
give them solace. But Thiennette's heart-sickness over all her vanished
prospects, over her entombed benefactress, over a whole life enwrapped
in the pall, had hitherto, in a grief which the stony Rittmeister
rather made to bleed than alleviated, swept all away from her,
occupations excepted; had fettered all her steps which led not to some
task, and granted to her eyes nothing to dry them or gladden them, save
down-falling eyelids full of dreams and sleep.
All sorrow raises us above the civic Ceremonial-law, and makes the
Prosaist a Psalmist; in sorrow alone have women courage to front
opinion. Thiennette walked out only in the evening, and then only in
the garden.
The Conrector could scarcely wait for the appearance of his fair
friend, to offer his thanks,--and to-night also--his Pontac. Three
Pontac decanters and three wineglasses were placed outside on the
projecting window-sill of his cottage; and every time he returned from
the dusky covered-way amid the flower forests, he drank a little from
his glass,--and the mother sipped now and then from within through the
opened window.
I have already said, his Life-laboratory lay in the southwest corner of
the garden or park, over against the Castle-Escurial, which stretched
back into the village. In the northwest corner bloomed an acacia grove,
like the floral crown of the garden. Fixlein turned his steps in that
direction also; to see if, perhaps, he might not cast a happy glance
through the wide-latticed grove over the intervening meads to
Thiennette. He recoiled a little before two stone steps leading down
into a pond before this grove, which were sprinkled with fresh blood.
On the flags, also, there was blood hanging. Man shudders at this oil
of our life's lamp where he finds it shed; to him it is the red
death-signature of the Destroying Angel. Fixlein hurried apprehensively
into the grove; and found here his paler benefactress leaning on the
flower-bushes; her hands with her knitting-ware sunk into her bosom,
her eyes lying under their lids as if in the bandage of slumber; her
left arm in the real bandage of bloodletting; and with cheeks to which
the twilight was lending as much red, as late woundings--this day's
included--had taken from them. Fixlein, after his first terror--not at
this flower's sleep, but at his own abrupt entrance--began to unroll
the spiral butterfly's-sucker of his vision, and to lay it on the
motionless leaves of this same sleeping flower. At bottom, I may
assert, that this was the first time he had ever looked at her; he was
now among the thirties; and he still continued to believe, that, in a
young lady, he must look at the clothes only, not the person, and wait
on her with his ears, not with his eyes.
I impute it to the elevating influences of the Pontac, that the
Conrector plucked up courage to--turn, to come back, and employ the
resuscitating means of coughing, sneezing, trampling, and calling to
his Shock, in stronger and stronger doses on the fair sleeper. To take
her by the hand, and with some medical apology, gently pull her out of
sleep, this was an audacity of which the Conrector, so long as he could
stand for Pontac, and had any grain of judgment left, could never
dream.
However, he did awake her, by those other means.
Wearied, heavy-laden Thiennette! how slowly does thy eye open! The
warmest balsam of this earth, soft sleep has shifted aside, and the
night-air of memory is again blowing on thy naked wounds!--and yet was
the smiling friend of thy youth the fairest object which thy eye could
light on, when it sank from the hanging-garden of Dreams into this
lower one round thee.
She herself was little conscious,--and the Conrector not at all,--that
she was bending her flower-leaves imperceptibly towards a terrestrial
body, namely, towards Fixlein. She resembled an Italian flower, that
contains cunningly concealed within it a new-year's gift, which the
receiver knows not at first how to extract. But now the golden chain of
her late kind deed attracted her as well towards him, as him towards
her. She at once gave her eye and her voice a mask of joy; for she did
not put her tears, as Catholics do those of Christ, in relic-vials,
upon altars, to be worshipped. He could very suitably preface his
invitation to the Pontac festival with a long acknowledgment of thanks
for the kind intervention which had opened to him the sources for
procuring it. She rose slowly, and walked with him to the banquet of
wine; but he was not so discreet, as at first to attempt leading her,
or rather not so courageous; he could more easily have offered a young
lady his hand (that is, with marriage ring) than offered her his arm.
One only time in his life had he escorted a female, a Lombard Countess
from the theatre; a thing truly not to be believed, were not this the
secret of it, that he was obliged; for the lady, a foreigner, parted in
the press from all her people, in a bad night, had laid hold of him as
a sable Abbe by the arm, and requested him to take her to her inn. He,
however, knew the fashions of society, and attended her no farther than
the porch of his Quintus-mansion, and there directed her with his
finger to her inn, which, with thirty blazing windows, was looking down
from another street.
These things he cannot help. But to-night he had scarcely, with his
fair, faint companion, reached the bank of the pond, into which some
superstitious dread of water-spirits had lately poured the pure blood
of her left arm,--when, in his terror lest she fell in, with the rest
of her blood, over the brink, he quite valiantly laid hold of the sick
arm. Thus will much Pontac and a little courage at all times put a
Conrector in case to lay hold of a Fraeulein. I aver that at the
banquet-board of the wine, at the window-sill, he continued in the same
conducting position. What a soft group in the penumbra of the Earth,
while Night, with its dusky waters, was falling deeper and deeper, and
the silver-light of the Moon was already glancing back from the copper
ball of the steeple! I call the group soft, because it consists of a
maiden that in two senses has been bleeding; of a mother again with
tears giving her thanks for the happiness of her child; and of a pious,
modest man, pouring wine, and drinking health to both, and who traces
in his veins a burning lava-stream, which is boiling through his heart,
and threatening piece by piece to melt it and bear it away. A candle
stood without among the three bottles, like Reason among the Passions;
on this account the Conrector looked without intermission at the
window-panes, for on them (the darkness of the room served as
mirror-foil) was painted, among other faces which Fixlein liked, the
face he liked best of all, and which he dared to look at only in
reflection, the face of Thiennette.
Every minute was a Federation-festival, and every second a
Preparation-Sabbath for it. The Moon was gleaming from the evening dew,
and the Pontac from their eyes, and the bean-stalks were casting a
shorter grating of shadow. The quicksilver-drops of stars were hanging
more and more continuous in the sable of night. The warm vapor of the
wine set our two friends (like steam-engines) again in motion.
Nothing makes the heart fuller and bolder than walking to and fro in
the night. Fixlein now led the Fraeulein in his arm without scruple. By
reason of her lancet-wound, Thiennette could only put her hand, in a
clasping position, in his arm; and he, to save her the trouble of
holding fast, held fast himself, and pressed her fingers as well as
might be with his arm to his heart. It would betray a total want of
polished manners to censure his. At the same time, trifles are the
provender of Love; the fingers are electric discharges of a fire
sparkling along every fibre; sighs are the guiding tones of two
approximating hearts; and the worst and most effectual thing of all in
such a case is some misfortune; for the fire of Love, like that of
naphtha, likes to swim on water. Two tear-drops, one in another's, one
in your own eyes, compose, as with two convex lenses, a microscope
which enlarges everything, and changes all sorrows into charms. Good
sex! I too consider every sister in misfortune as fair; and, perhaps,
thou wouldst deserve the name of the Fair, even because thou art the
Suffering sex!
And if Professor Hunczogsky in Vienna modelled all the wounds of the
human frame in wax, to teach his pupils how to cure them, I also, thou
good sex, am representing in little figures the cuts and scars of thy
spirit, though only to keep away rude hands from inflicting new
ones....
Thiennette felt not the loss of the inheritance, but of her that should
have left it; and this more deeply for one little trait, which she had
already told his mother, as she now told him. In the last two nights of
the Rittmeisterinn, when the feverish watching was holding up to
Thiennette's imagination nothing but the winding-sheet and the
mourning-coaches of her protectress; while she was sitting at the foot
of the bed, looking on those fixed eyes, unconsciously quick drops
often trickled over her cheeks, while in thought she prefigured the
heavy, cumbrous dressing of her benefactress for the coffin. Once after
midnight, the dying lady pointed with her finger to her own lips.
Thiennette understood her not; but rose and bent over her face. The
Enfeebled tried to lift her head, but could not,--and only rounded her
lips. At last, a thought glanced through Thiennette, that the
Departing, whose dead arms could now press no beloved heart to her own,
wished that she herself should embrace her. O then, that instant, keen
and tearful, she pressed her warm lips on the colder,--and she was
silent like her that was to speak no more,--and she embraced alone and
was not embraced. About four o'clock, the finger waved again; she sank
down on the stiffened lips,--but this had been no signal, for the lips
of her friend under the long kiss had grown stiff and cold....
How deeply now, before the infinite Eternity's-countenance of Night,
did the cutting of this thought pass through Fixlein's warm soul: "O
thou forsaken one beside me! No happy accident, no twilight hast thou,
like that now glimmering in the heavens, to point to the prospect of a
sunny day; without parents art thou, without brother, without friend;
here alone on a disblossomed, emptied corner of the Earth; and thou,
left Harvest-flower, must wave lonely and frozen over the withered
stubble of the Past." That was the meaning of his thoughts, whose
internal words were: "Poor young lady! Not so much as a half-cousin
left; no nobleman will seek her, and she grows old so forgotten, and
she is so good from the very heart,--Me she has made happy,--Ah, had I
the presentation to the parish of Hukelum in my pocket, I should make a
trial." ... Their mutual lives, which a straitcutting bond of Destiny
was binding so closely together, now rose before him overhung with
sable,--and he forthwith conducted his friend (for a bashful man may in
an hour and a half be transformed into the boldest, and then continues
so) back to the last flask, that all these upsprouting thistles and
passion-flowers of sorrow might therewith be swept away. I remark, in
passing, that this was stupid; the torn vine is full of water-veins as
well as grapes; and a soft oppressed heart the beverage of joy can melt
only into tears.
If any man disagree with me, I shall desire him to look at the
Conrector, who demonstrates my experimental maxim like a very
syllogism.--One might arrive at some philosophic views, if one traced
out the causes, why liquors--that is to say, in the long run, more
plentiful secretion of the nervous spirits--make men at once pious,
soft, and poetical. The Poet, like Apollo his father, is _forever a
youth_; and is, what other men are only once, namely, in love,--or only
after Pontac, namely, intoxicated,--all his life long. Fixlein, who had
been no poet in the morning, now became one at night; wine made him
pious and soft; the Harmonica-bells in man, which sound to the tones of
a higher world, must, like the glass Harmonica-bells, if they are to
act, be kept _moist_.
He was now standing with her again beside the wavering pond, in which
the second blue hemisphere of heaven, with dancing stars and amid
quivering trees, was playing; over the green hills ran the white,
crooked footpaths dimly along; on the one mountain was the twilight
sinking together, on the other was the mist of night rising up;
and over all these vapors of life hung motionless and naming the
thousand-armed lustre of the starry heaven, and every arm held in it a
burning galaxy....
It now struck eleven.... Amid such scenes, an unknown hand stretches
itself out in man, and writes in foreign language on his heart, a dread
_Mene Mene Tekel Upharsin_. "Perhaps by twelve I am dead," thought our
friend, in whose soul the Cantata-Sunday, with all its black funeral
piles, was mounting up.
The whole future Crucifixion of his friend lay prickly and bethorned
before him; and he saw every bloody trace from which she lifted her
foot,--she who had made his own way soft with flowers and leaves. He
could no longer restrain himself; trembling in his whole frame, and
with a trembling voice, he solemnly said to her: "If the Lord this
night call me away, let the half of my fortune be yours; for it is your
goodness I must thank that I am free of debts, as few Teachers are."
Thiennette, unacquainted with our sex, naturally mistook this speech
for a proposal of marriage; and the fingers of her wounded arm to-night
for the first time pressed suddenly against the arm in which they lay;
the only living mortal's arm by which Joy, Love, and the Earth were
still united with her bosom. The Conrector, rapturously terrified
at the first pressure of a female hand, bent over his right to take
hold of her left; and Thiennette, observing his unsuccessful movement,
lifted her fingers, and laid her whole wounded arm in his, and
her whole left hand in his right. Two lovers dwell in the
Whispering-gallery,[51] where the faintest breath bodies itself forth
into a sound. The good Conrector received and returned this blissful
love-pressure, wherewith our poor, powerless soul, stammering, hemmed
in, longing, distracted, seeks for a warmer language, which exists not;
he was overpowered; he had not the courage to look at her; but he
looked into the gleam of the twilight, and said (and here for
unspeakable love the tears were running warm over his cheeks): "Ah, I
will give you all; fortune, life, and all that I have, my heart and my
hand."
She was about to answer, but, casting a side glance, she cried, with a
shriek: "Ah, Heaven!" He started round, and perceived the white muslin
sleeve all dyed with blood; for in putting her arm into his, she had
pushed away the bandage from the open vein. With the speed of
lightning, he hurried her into the acacia-grove; the blood was already
running from the muslin; he grew paler than she, for every drop of it
was coming from his heart. The blue-white arm was bared; the bandage
was put on: he tore a piece of gold from his pocket; clapped it, as one
does with open arteries, on the spouting fountain, and bolted with this
golden bar, and with the bandage over it, the door out of which her
afflicted life was hurrying.--
When it was over, she looked up to him; pale, languid, but her eyes
were two glistening fountains of an unspeakable love, full of sorrow
and full of gratitude.--The exhausting loss of blood was spreading her
soul asunder in sighs. Thiennette was dissolved into inexpressible
softness; and the heart lacerated by so many years, by so many arrows,
was plunging with all its wounds in warm streams of tears, to be
healed, as chapped flutes close together by lying in water, and get
back their tones. Before such a magic form, before such a pure,
heavenly love, her sympathizing friend was melted between the flames of
joy and grief; and sank, with stifled voice, and bent down by love and
rapture, on the pale, angelic face, the lips of which he timidly
pressed, but did not kiss, till all-powerful Love bound its girdles
round them, and drew the two closer and closer together, and their two
souls, like two tears, melted into one. O now, when it struck twelve,
the hour of death, did not the lover fancy that her lips were drawing
his soul away, and all the fibres and all the nerves of his life closed
spasmodically round the last heart in this world, round the last
rapture of existence.... Yes, happy man, thou didst express thy love;
for in thy love thou thoughtest to die....
However, he did not die. After midnight, there floated a balmy morning
air through the shaken flowers, and the whole spring was breathing.
The blissful lover, setting bounds even to his sea of joy, reminded
his delicate beloved, who was now his bride, of the dangers from
night-cold; and himself of the longer night-cold of Death, which was
now for long years passed over.--Innocent and blessed, they rose
from the grove of their betrothment, from its dust broken by white
acacia-flowers and straggling moonbeams. And without, they felt as if a
whole wide Past had sunk away in a convulsion of the world; all was
new, light, and young. The sky stood full of glittering dew-drops from
the everlasting Morning; and the stars quivered joyfully asunder, and
sank, resolved into beams, down into the hearts of men.--The Moon, with
her fountain of light, had overspread and kindled all the garden, and
was hanging above in a starless blue, as if she had consumed the
nearest stars; and she seemed like a smaller wandering Spring, like a
Christ's-face smiling in love of man.--
Under this light they looked at one another for the first time after
the first words of love; and the sky gleamed magically down on the
disordered features with which the first rapture of love was still
standing written on their faces....
Dream, ye beloved, as ye wake, happy as in Paradise, innocent as in
Paradise!