"Alide! Alide!" interposed the shrill voice of Rahel, who now hastened to her sister's side, "come and see these beautiful holy relics the sacristan has been showing us. And then we are going to mount to the platform and see the view from the gallery."
How often these trivial intrusions occur at moments that seem like the crises of our lives! and yet perhaps all had been said that either just then was able or ready to speak, and it may have been well for both that the peremptory demands of the hour forced them back to the actual world.
The panorama from the gallery above the Cathedral fully answered their expectations. The romantic city, the level-stretching meadows, the golden river with the noontide sunshine flashing upon it, the far-away mountains, but, above all, a just perceptible glimpse of Sesenheim, set Rahel fairly wild with delight, and struck them all with wondering admiration. This was the crowning pleasure of the day, and, after so much enjoyment and novelty, all were ready to return home and take some rest before they met again at dinner.
Alide was unusually pale, and confessed to feeling somewhat wearied, but the equable cheerfulness of her mind had already been restored to her by the unwonted tenderness and caressing attentions with which Goethe sought to make her forget their painful conversation in the Minster.
CHAPTER XII
HAMLET
"When we are man and wife." These half-dozen words kept ringing in Goethe's ears and haunting persistently his brain. Each one seemed to fall separately upon his sense with its own little shock of surprise, though the idea they conveyed had been long, in a vague way, familiar to his mind. It would be idle to assert that he had drifted blindly to this end and that he now for the first time realized the significance and result of his passion. But it is true that he had never before framed this idea in words, nor imagined it as it now presented itself, an incongruous and inevitable fact. He who felt conscious of a superabundant vitality that was to expend itself in every phase of experience, he who awoke daily to a keener perception of the capabilities of a worthily-developed soul, he who fancied in his exalted hours that he heard the voices of art, science, and nature invoking him, their darling son,—in the recklessness of his extravagant youth he had fettered himself for the remainder of his days, he had cramped his wide-soaring flight to keep pace with the halting footsteps of a child; at the threshold of a world that seemed all too narrow for his energies and capacities he had bound himself to tread the accustomed, decorous paths of a commonplace German citizen. For so long a time he had been in the habit of seeing all things through the medium of his passion, that it seemed as if a film or a glamour had been brushed suddenly from before his eyesight.
And yet it was no witchcraft that had made him find her marvelously pretty; for so she looked at this moment as she advanced towards him, with her half-timid, half-confident air, and her free, graceful carriage, as though she stepped on grass and heath.
"I have come to beg a favor of you, Wolfgang," said she; "but you must promise beforehand to grant it."
"Naturally," answered he, forcing a smile, "that is the way you women always beg: first must come the consent, and then you humbly present your petition." Then, seeing her discomfited expression, he added, with his usual spirit, "But you know very well that I am always at your service, Alide. What is it now? I am ready for anything you propose."
"Ah, now I recognize you again," cried she. "The girls are expecting some friends this evening, and they have sent me to beg you to entertain the company with reading aloud as you used to do for us at the parsonage."