"I will tell thee all. Now let us live and die together."
"O Flamin! how inexpressibly I love thee to-day!"
"Now will I let thee see into my whole heart, Victor, and reveal to thee all."
But, before he could do it, he had to man himself by holding his peace; and they remained a long time silent, lost in the depths of the inner and outer heavens.
At last he was able to begin, and to tell him that that Clotilda, about whom he had jested to-day, had written herself in ineffaceable characters on his heart; that he could neither forget nor possess her; that the creeping fever of a frightful, frenzied jealousy burned, galling, within him; that he could not, to be sure, say a word to her about his love, according to her prohibition, until her brother (the Infante) should come back and be present; but that she, to judge by her demeanor, and according to Matthieu's assurances, had perhaps some regard for him; that her position must be an eternal wall of separation between them, so long as he took the juristic instead of the military road to promotion; and that on this last, if his Lordship would lend him a hand in the matter, he would attain to Clotilda more swiftly on similar steps; and that the request of which he had spoken in his letters to Victor was just this,—that he would repeat all to his Lordship, and beg his assistance. In fact, his wild arm could hold the sword better than the balance of justice. A frightful predisposition to jealousy, which even from future possibilities catches palpitations, was the chief reason.—Victor rejoiced that he could give his feelings the best language,—namely, action, and assented to all he required, with delight at his confidence, and at the absence from his communication of dreaded news; and so, newly attached to each other, they went to rest. And the Twins—that ever-burning, intertwined name of friendship—glimmered in the west, beckoning upward out of an earthly eternity; and the heart of the Lion blazed on their right....
There are men laid upon this earth, and bound to the soil, who never erect themselves to the contemplation of a friendship which winds around two souls, not earthy, metallic, and unclean bonds, but the spiritual ones that interweave this world itself with another and man with God. Such ones, degraded to the dust, it is, that, like travellers, regard from below the temple that hangs round the Alpine peaks as baseless and airy, because they do not themselves stand on the heights, and on the great floor of the temple,—because they know not that in friendship we revere and love something higher than self (which latter cannot at once be the source and the object of love),—something higher, namely, the embodiment and reflection of the virtue which in ourselves we only approve, and not till we see it in others can love.
Ah! can, then, higher beings judge severely the weaknesses of the shadowy groups that seek to hold fast to one another, driven apart as they are by north winds,—who would fain press to their bosoms the noble, invisible form of each other over which the thick and heavy earthly mask hangs,—and who fall, one after another, into graves into which the mourned draw their mourners?
[4. DOG-POST-DAY.]
Profile-Cutter.—Clotilda's Historic Figure.[[40]]—Courtiers, and a Noble Man.