At a sign from his mistress, David left her, and she advanced towards Wilfrid and Minna.
"Let us go to the falls of the Sieg," said the mysterious being; it was the wish of a sufferer which all hasten to accede to.
A thin, white haze hung over the heights and dales of the fiord, and the peaks, glittering like stars, pierced above it, giving it the effect of a milky way moving onwards. Through this earth-born vapor the sun was visible as a globe of red-hot iron. In spite of these last freaks of winter, gusts of mild air, bringing the scent of the birch-trees, already covered with their yellow flowers, and the rich perfume exhaled by the larches, whose silky tufts were all displayed—breezes warm with the incense and the breathing of the earth testified to the exquisite springtime of Northern lands, the brief rapture of a most melancholy nature.
The wind was beginning to roll away the veil of mist that hardly hid the view of the gulf. The birds were singing.
Where the sun had not dried off the frost that trickled down the road in murmuring rills, the bark of the trees was pleasing to the eye by its fantastic appearance.
They all three went along the strand in silence. Wilfrid and Minna were lost in contemplation of the magical scene after their long endurance of the monotonous winter landscape. Their companion was pensive, and walked as though trying to distinguish one voice in the concert. They reached the rocks between which the Sieg tumbles, at the end of the long avenue of ancient fir-trees which the torrent had cut in meandering through the forest, a path covered in by a groined arch of boughs, meeting like those of a cathedral. From thence the whole of the fiord was seen, and the sea sparkled on the horizon like a steel blade. At this instant the clouds vanished, showing the blue sky. Down in the hollows and round the trees the air was full of floating sparkles, the diamond dust swept up by a light breeze, and dazzling gems of drops were hanging at the tip of the branches of each pyramid. The torrent was rolling below; a smoke came up from the surface, tinted in the sunshine with every hue of light; its beams, decomposed, displayed perfect rainbows of the seven colors, like the play of a thousand prisms meeting and crossing there. This wild shore was curtained with various kinds of lichen, a rich web, sheeny with moisture, like some gorgeous hanging of silk. Heath, already in blossom, crowned the rocks with flowers in skilful disorder. All this stirring foliage, tempted by the living waters, hung their heads over it like hair; the larches waved their lace-like arms, as if caressing the pines, that stood rigid like careworn old men.
This luxuriant display was a contrast to the solemnity of the antique colonnades of the forests, range upon range on the hillside, and to the broad sheet of the fiord, in which the torrent drowned its fury at the feet of the three spectators. Beyond it all, the open sea closed in this picture, traced by the greatest of poets—Chance—to which we owe the medley beauty of creation when left, as it would seem, to itself. Jarvis was a speck almost lost in this landscape, in this immensity—sublime, as everything is, which, having but a brief existence, offers a transient image of perfection; for by a law, fatal only to our sight, creations that appear perfect, the delight of our heart and of our eyes, have but one spring to live here.
At the top of that cliff these three beings might easily fancy themselves alone in all the world.
"How exquisite!" exclaimed Wilfrid.
"Nature sings its hymns," said Seraphita. "Is not this music delicious? Confess now, Wilfrid, no woman you ever knew could create for herself so magnificent a retreat. Here I experience a feeling that the sight of great cities rarely inspires, and which makes me long to remain here, lying among these grasses of such rapid growth. Then, with my eyes on the sky, my heart laid bare, lost in the sense of immensity, I could let myself listen to the sighs of the flower, which, scarcely released from its primitive nature, would fain run about; and to the cries of the eider, aggrieved at having only wings, while I thought of the cravings of man, who has something of everything, and who also is for ever full of desires!—But this, Wilfrid, is a woman's poetic fancy! You can find a voluptuous thought in that hazy expanse of water; in those fantastic veils, behind which nature plays like some coquettish bride; and in this atmosphere, where she perfumes her green hair for her bridal. You would fain see the form of a naiad in that wreath of mist, and I, as you think, ought to hear a manly voice in the torrent."