CHAPTER XVII
FREEDOM
It would be difficult for a person of moderate emotions or well-disciplined temperament to conceive the thrilling sense of power and freedom with which Goethe started on his journey from Strasburg to Frankfort. Now at last the whole world was before him, and he was tied down by no bond of duty to the period of his immaturity: now he was free to develop all that he felt engendering and growing within him. Progress and activity,—with those two watchwords, what could he not dare and accomplish? He experienced, moreover, a purely animal sensation of delight in his liberty, as he traveled over the rich and beautiful country, reveling in the brilliant sunshine, the large air, and the sweet smells of the spacious fields. There was something contagious in the reckless exhilaration of his spirits, and all who met him were impressed by the spectacle of this handsome, happy youth, gifted with an organization of mind and body in which one could scarcely detect a flaw, and seeming to enjoy unbounded delight in the mere consciousness of existence.
Mentally and physically he was in a condition of perfect health, and he was thus fitted to receive impressions which modified for the rest of his life his whole tone of thought. At Mannheim he saw in plaster, for the first time, some of the masterpieces of Greek art, which from that moment became for him the most beautiful type of the ideal. He made companions of all whom he met by the way: now it was a learned professor, now an enthusiastic artist, a handsome peasant-woman, a burly farmer, or a prosaic burgher. He could find entertainment in the society of all, or he could pass, with higher pleasure, hours of silence and solitude among the relics of the Greeks, or in the open meadows. At Mainz he fell in with a wandering harpist, and, as the lad was clever and honest-faced, nothing would serve but that he must be Goethe's minnesinger and his fellow-traveler for the rest of the journey, and accept the hospitality of his father's house in Frankfort. So these two odd companions fared merrily through the prosperous summer fields, without the shadow of a care between them; and during all their progress Goethe was so full of mad freaks and whims, and took such fantastic pleasure in quaint disguises, and the poor harpist was so sanguine and so elated, that it would have been hard to tell who of the happy pair was the poet and who was the beggar.
When Alide, after bidding farewell to Goethe, turned in from the sunny air which struck a chill through her every bone and nerve, she succeeded with difficulty in mounting the stairs and reaching her room; but, as she entered, a faint, short cry escaped her, and she fell upon the floor. It was thus they discovered her, white as death, even to the lips, with no other sign of life than the just-perceptible pulsation of the heart. To their terror, they found it impossible to rouse her from her swoon: at times her fingers would stir, or she would slowly change the posture of an arm or a hand; but their beseeching, piteous glances of grief and affection were answered by no gleam of consciousness from her blank blue eyes, when the heavy lids were for a moment wearily raised.
They clad her in her night-dress and laid her on her bed, and through the changeless, unnatural quiet of the darkened days, and the oppressive, awful stillness of the creeping hours of night, they kept watch beside her pillow, awaiting in sickening suspense the signs of returning reason. She looked divinely peaceful in that mysterious trance: the fragile physical frame seemed utterly exhausted and as if broken, but so much the more ethereal was the spiritual calm that had settled upon the exquisite, restful face. Is it true, then, that life is the highest and the sweetest gift? Might not one hesitate to decide whether it were better to win back to earth this almost disembodied spirit, or rather thus quietly and painlessly to let her float into eternal repose?
But no such thoughts found entrance into the overwrought brain of the mother, who, with wide, dry eves, was sitting now at midnight beside her darling's prostrate form. She was the last watcher left awake in the household: the pastor and his son, useless in the sick-room, had succumbed to fatigue and anxiety and retired to seek a few hours' forgetfulness. Rahel, her pale, troubled face still streaming with tears, lay, utterly worn out, fast asleep on a couch near Alide's bedside. Madame Duroc had sat for a long time motionless as Alide herself, never turning her tearless, aching eyes away from her unconscious child. Even now she suffered less through the realization of her own approaching loss than through her overpowering maternal pity for this passionate, broken young heart that had wrestled and endured alone. She had had bitter, wicked thoughts in her weary vigil: the poor, pious mother had been tempted to invoke curses upon the stranger who had wrecked this precious life and had bereaved her own declining years. Now she could no longer pray nor think; a dull despair had absorbed all her faculties.
Suddenly a change came upon the face of Alide; the serene expression was replaced by a slight contraction of the brows, as though she suffered pain; the lips, which had been relaxed almost into a smile, were drawn closely together, and her hands, that had rested crossed over her breast, fell by her sides.
"My child! my child!" cried Madame Duroc, fancying that this was the very shadow of death darkening over her daughter's face; and, clasping her arms about Alide's neck, she raised her head from the pillow and strained it to her breast amid a passion of tears and caresses.
"What is the matter?" said Alide, in an almost inaudible voice.
In an instant Rahel also was by the bedside. "Mamma! mamma!" whispered she, "for God's sake, do not give way now!"