Great Disclosure.--New Separations.
I will now disclose what in the former chapter I concealed.--When
Emanuel on that Elysian morning of the delirium had said to Julius,
"Shadow! hence!" he went on: "Conjure not up with thy juggling the
blind _Son_ of my Horion [Lord Horion] who takes me still for his
father,--fear before God, who has just passed by, and vanish!"--And
turning to Victor he said: "Shadow! if thou knowest not who thou art,
and knowest not thy father Eymann, then descend to the earth again and
into the shadow which my Victor casts there."----And when Victor the
next day recalled the dying man to these words, he asked distressfully:
"Ah, did I not say it in a delusion, when I dreamed I was in the land
beyond earthly oaths?" and he turned mutely his affrighted face to the
wall....
He has, then, in the illusion of having passed through death, spoken it
out, that Julius is the son of his Lordship, and Victor the son of
Pastor Eymann.... But what a bright illumination does not this full
moon give to our whole history, on which hitherto only a moon-sickle
has shone--
I confess, in the very first chapter it struck me singularly that
Victor should be a physician; now it is explained; for the medical
doctor's hat was the best Montgolfier[159] and Fortunatus's wishing-cap
for a citizen-legate of his Lordship, in order thereby the more easily
to hover round the throne and work upon the frail January; then, too,
Victor, after his future devalvation,[160] and after the loss of the
feather-hat, could best gather into the medical one his daily bread as
a citizen,--his Lordship saw. This was _one_ reason why the latter gave
him out as his son. Another is, Victor was best fitted to play the part
with the prince by his humor, cleverness, good nature, &c., to which
was added as a further recommendation the resemblance he bore in
everything, except age, to the fifth and up to this time still lost
son, whom January so loved. As, now, a physician in ordinary was to be
the favorite, his Lordship could not take any one of the princely sons
for his purpose, because they must be jurists, in order to fit into
their future offices.--His own son Julius he could not use, because he
was blind,--by the way! his Lordship was also blind once, and thus adds
his example to the cases of blindness inherited from father to son, but
even independently of the blindness he could not possibly, by reason of
his disinterested delicacy, let his son reap the advantages of princely
favor while he withheld from them January's own sons themselves.
Thou good man without hope! when I compare now thy poetic education of
the blind youth with thy cold principles,--when I consider how thou--dead
to lyric joys, hardened to the tears of enthusiasm--nevertheless causest
the dark soul of thy Julius curtained with eyelids to be filled by his
teacher with poetic flower-pieces, with dew-clouds of sensibility, and
with the nebulous star of the second life,--then does it enhance quite
as much my sorrow as my esteem, that thou findest nothing on the earth
which thou canst press to thy starved-out heart, and that thou raisest
thine eye withered on empty tear-ducts coldly to heaven, and even there
findest nothing but a void waste of blue!--
This painful observation Victor made still sooner than myself.--But to
the story! The past portion of it sent a thousand thorns through his
heart. We no longer recognize now our once joyous Sebastian,--he has
lost four beings, as if to pay off therewith the four days of
Whitsuntide: Emanuel has vanished, Flamin has become an enemy, his
Lordship a stranger, and Clotilda--a stranger. For he said to himself:
"Now, when she is removed so far above me, I will not cost the
sufferer, from whom I have already taken so much, absolutely
everything, absolutely her father's love and her position,--I will not
insist upon the love which, in her ignorance of my connections, she has
bestowed upon me.--No, I will cheerfully tear away my soul from the
most precious one amidst a thousand wounds of my breast, and then lay
myself down and bleed to death." _Now_ this determination was easy for
him; for after the death of a friend we love to take a new load of
misery on our breast; _that_ shall crush it, for we _will_ die.
Yet destiny had still left two loved ones in his arms; his Julius and
his mother. In the former he loves so many sweet associations; even
this was one, namely, that one always loves him with whom one has been
confounded; and he would fain fulfil the place of father with him as
his Lordship had done with _him_, in order not so much to requite as to
emulate that noble man. And still more ardently did his soul embrace
the excellent wife of the Pastor, to whom his heart had already
hitherto beat responsive with the soft warmth of a son. Ah, how would
it have comforted in its longing his childlike breast, from which one
hitherto his father was thrust away, to be clasped to a maternal heart,
and to hear from a mother the words, "Good son, why comest thou to me
so unhappy and so late?" But he dared not, because in that case he
would have broken the oath to leave Flamin's extraction under the cover
of mystery.
He shut himself up four days with the blind one in the house of
death;--he saw no one,--did not visit the mourning convent, where from
all fair eyes flowed similar tears,--renounced the fragrant park and
the blue sky,--and let the flowerage of the departed one fade after
him.--He consoled the forsaken blind one, and all day long they rested
in each other's embrace, and pictured to each other weeping their
teacher and his teachings and the radiant hours of their childhood. At
last, on the fourth day, he conducted the blind one forever out of the
beautiful Maienthal,--the evening-bell sent after them from afar the
knell of a whole coffined life,--Julius wept aloud,--but Victor had
only a moist eye, and consoled not himself, but the blind one; for his
soul was now otherwise than one would guess; his soul was exalted above
this eventide-life: his departed one, like a genius, held it high up
above the clouds and above the plays of our little time. Victor stood
on the high mountain, where one stands on the burial-day of a friend;
at the foot of the mountain stretched far away the dead sea of the
abyss,[161] and drained an expanded, trembling cloud which reared
itself on the sea,--and on the cloud were painted gay cities, and
swaying landscapes hung therein, and the little tribes of people with
red cheeks ran over the landscapes of vapor,--and all, people and
cities, dropped down like tears into the absorbing sea,--only down
below along the horizon in the dusky cloud was a lighted rim like
morning glow; for a sun rises behind the twilight, and then the cloud
has passed away, and a new green continent lies stretching into the
immensity.----
He would have gone on the whole night, but something frightful in the
next village, which is called Upper-Maienthal, arrested him. He
recognized in the coachhouse of the inn, by its coat of arms, the
carriage of the Chamberlain. He set the blind one down on a stone bench
at the door, where he could listen to the rustle of unloading hay.
Victor, in answer to his question in the house, got the intelligence:
"There were two ladies overhead, one of them they did not know (he
immediately discovered, however, by the first sketch of her attire, the
wife of the Parson),--the other had often passed that way; it was the
daughter of the Chief Chamberlain, and had on full mourning, because
her father some days before had been shot dead in a duel with the
Regency-Councillor Flamin, and the two were travelling, as these people
said, to England."
He screamed in vain, half choking in blood and agony, "It is
impossible,--with the page Von Schleunes, you mean." But nevertheless
it was so,--Flamin was in prison,--Matthieu out of the country,--Le
Baut already under the ground.... But demand not now the history of
this murder!--Victor slowly drew out the watch of the happy Bee-father,
and stared rigidly at the index of joyous hours, which, for want of
winding up, had stopped some days since; something within him
counselled the wild and desperate thought to hurl it against the stone
floor and smash it to pieces. But three lute-breaths of the flute, with
which the blind youth conjured before his benumbed soul a fairer,
warmer past, dissolved his congealing heart into a wet eye, and he
lifted it up overflowing, and only said, "Forgive me for it,
All-gracious One,--ah, I will gladly do nothing but weep."--When the
pangs of grief are too heart-rending within us, then something in us
gnashes against fate, and the heart infuriate clenches itself like a
fist, as it were, for resistance,--but this strength is blasphemy. O,
it is more comely towards thee, All-gracious One, to let the crushed
and broken heart melt away and become a tear, and to love and be silent
until one dies!
The familiar tones of the flute penetrated into Clotilda's thick
rain-cloud of grief,--she staggered to the window,--she saw the blind
one,--but she went slowly back and wrapped her heart deeper in the cold
cloud,--for now she knew all; the blind one was the messenger of death,
come to tell that her great friend had left the earth and the
disconsolate ones behind him. "My teacher, too, is dead," she said to
her companion; and when Victor sent up a request for an interview, she
could only nod her head speechlessly.--Then she begged the Parson's
wife to step into another chamber, because the sight of Victor, for
many reasons, must be oppressive to her. Victor ascended the staircase
as if to a scaffold on which fate was to pluck out his heart, namely,
the good Clotilda, from whom, as well by her journey as by his purpose
of resigning her, he was to-day being separated. When he opened the
door and beheld the afflicted maiden leaning pale and weary against the
wall; and as both with hands hanging down looked into each other's eyes
red with weeping, and trembled in the sombre interval between the sight
of each other and the first word, as in the fearful pause between the
fire of a great gun and the arrival of the ball, and when at last
Clotilda asked in a low voice, "It is all true?" and he said, "All!"--
then she slowly laid her beautiful head round to the wall again, and
repeated, in one continuous utterance, but in a low, wailing tone, with
the soft, muffled funeral tones of exhausted anguish, the words, "Ah!
my good teacher; my never to be forgotten friend!--Ah, thou great
spirit! thou fair, heavenly soul, why hast thou gone so soon after my
Giulia!----O, dearest friend, be not angry, I could wish now only to
be, where my father is, in the still grave."----Victor began eagerly
the question, "Has Flamin--" but he could not add, "killed him"; for
she lifted up her head and looked upon him with a swelling, a laboring,
unspeakable sorrow, and that sorrow was her _yes_.----
Exhausted with the bleeding of tears and convulsed amidst remembrances,
which, like brain-borers, touched the soul, she was on the point, at
last, of sinking down by the wall; but Victor sustained her with
inexpressible compassion, and held her upright on his breast and
said, "Come, innocent angel, come to my heart, and weep thyself dry
thereon,--we are unhappy, but innocent.--O, take thy rest, thou
tormented head, rest softly under my tears."----But always in the
height of woe a mountain-air began to flutter around him; it seemed to
him as if an iron lever lifted up the broken-in skull, as if vital air
streamed in through the pierced, inwardly mouldering breast; the reason
why he felt so was that the life of men became little to him, death
great, and earth dust. "Sleep, harassed one,"--he said to Clotilda, who
leaned languidly upon him,--"sleep away the woe,--life is a sleep, an
oppressed, sultry sleep; vampyres sit upon it, rain and wind fall upon
us sleepers, and we vainly clutch at waking.----O, life is a long, long
sigh before the going out of the breath.--But alas that the wretched
meteor should be permitted so to torment just this good soul, just
thyself!"--"Ah," said Clotilda, "if only the so sad flute would cease!
My heart is ready to fly to pieces for agony!" But her friend cruelly
tore open again all the springs of her tears and poured his into hers,
and depicted to her the past: "Four weeks ago it was otherwise; then
the flute-tones passed over a fairer region; through the happy plaints
of the nightingale they found their way into our hearts, which were
then so joyous.--On the first Whitsuntide-day I found thee, when the
nightingale throbbed,--on the second, I sank down before thee for
rapture and reverence, when the rain glistened round about us,--on the
third, at the evening fountain a broad heaven rose, and I saw a single
angel stand sparkling and smiling therein.----Our three days were
dreams of fair flowers, for dreams of flowers signify sorrow."--He had
hitherto hardened his soft soul against this cruel picture, but when he
had actually, with oppressed voice, added, "At that time our Emanuel
was still living, and visited at evening his open grave..." then must
his heart needs burst, and all his tears gushed out over the deeply
buried sword-blade like bloody drops, and he said, straining her more
passionately to himself "O, come, we will weep without measure: we will
not console ourselves. We shall not be much longer together: O, I could
now tear myself to pieces with sorrow.--Exalted Dahore! look upon this
dying one and her tears over thee, and requite her mourning, and give
the weary soul at length repose, and thy peace, and all that is wanting
to man."
The two souls sank, entwined together, into a single tear, and the
stillness of mourning hallowed the moment,--and let me not with my
oppressed breath say any more of this.
--As if awaking, she drew her head from his heart and with an enervated
smile took his hand; for notwithstanding all unhappy events she loved
him inexpressibly, and was even now on the way to Maienthal for the
very purpose of seeing him once more,--and she said, "I am going to
England to my mother, to find his Lordship, and to beg him to come
sooner and act as intercessor, and end the sorrows of others and my
own."--Her pause, which her look filled out, disclosed to him as much
as it concealed from the unhappy wife of the Parson, who could hear a
good deal in the adjoining chamber;--what she suppressed was, that she
would urge upon his Lordship the expediting of the disclosure that
Flamin was the son of the Prince. Besides, this journey withdrew her
eyes from so many images of grief, as well as her ears from so many a
discordant tone of mockery. To be sure, the design of taking motion on
the coach-cushion and on shipboard as a tincture of iron, had only been
her pretext at court, where polite untruths are not merely forgiven,
but even required.
Victor promised her, under a dark presentiment of his strength and
disinterestedness,--for the unhappy makes sacrifices more freely
and easily than the happy,--that "he would care for him like a
_sister_."--Their eyes exchanged confessions of their secrets, and, for
that _very_ reason, of their love, and Clotilda overflowed with tearful
love, first on account of the journey (because to her sex a journey by
reason of its rarity is something of consequence); secondly, on account
of sorrow, for love makes a woman's heart in full mourning warmer than
one in half-mourning, as burning lenses heat black-colored things more
powerfully than white.
And this very day, when she looked into his eyes with so much renewed
love, he was to be torn from her! He spared her, it is true, the
revelation of his birth and his eternal separation, in order not to lay
upon her lacerated heart new loads of sorrow; but he would fain wholly
gather, in this last minute of his fair love, this gleaning and this
after-bloom of his life. Ah, he would fain look upon her as never
before,--he would press her hand intensely as he had never before
done,--he would say a farewell to her like a dying man.----For it
is all--his innermost being cried unceasingly--for the last, last
time!--Only he would not kiss her: a shrinking reverence, the thought
of having played out the part of the lover, forbade him to make a
selfish use of her ignorance. But when he was about to direct towards
her the last look of love,--then did fate thrust all the sharpened
weapons, which had hitherto been driven into his nerves, once more into
the bleeding openings, just as they replace in the wounds of murdered
men the old instruments, to see whether they are the same,----ah,
they _were_ the same,--the chamber was darkened as if by an
extinguisher,----the tones of the flute were stifled in the internal
din,--he must needs look upon her and yet could not for the water in
his eyes,--he must look upon her with a long, retentive look, because
he wanted to impress her beautiful face as a shadow-image of the
shadowy Eden forever upon his soul.--At last he succeeded; amidst a
thousand woes he seized with an intense look her tear-bedewed face,
through which virtue pulsed like a heart, and shadowed it out in his
desolate soul even to every line, to every drop.--So much of her he
took away with him,--no more; he left her everything, his heart and his
joy.--Ah, tender Clotilda! if thou hadst guessed it!--The sobbing of
_his_ mother hurried him to the adjoining chamber; he flung open the
door, cried in a crushed voice to his mother, whose face was averted:
"Dearest! by the Almighty, your _son_ is no murderer and no
reprobate,"--and compressed the hand she gave him behind her back with
a wild intensity of grasp.
Look not now, my friends, at the dismal moment when for the last time
he takes Clotilda's hand, and severs his heart from hers, and yet only
says, "A happy journey, Clotilda, a peaceful life, Clotilda, joy be
with thee, Clotilda!"
--And at a distance from the village he fell on his knees beside the
blind one, with a mute prayer for the mourning heart which he had now
lost for the last time.--
Not until four o'clock in the morning did he arrive with the blind-one,
without weariness, without tears, and without thoughts, at
Flachsenfingen.