Add to all this the sight of Clotilda's increased love towards Agatha,—the sight of his friend, who, by the deepening silence of his tenderness, his mildening voice, and by a devotedness so irresistible in impassioned natures, commanded every heart, "Love me,"—and, finally, the spectacle of night....
He had already been long sad, when he seemed still gay. Now the mother took the little hero of the forenoon out under the bland evening heaven. They all stood outside of the garden-tabernacle-of-the-covenant, in the first temple of man's devotion. The evening-blood of the sinking sun flowed into the clouds, as into the sea sinks the blood of its giants dying in its depths. The porous cloud did not avail to hide the heavens; it swam round about the moon, and let her pale silver glisten from amidst the slags.
The red clouds painted the infant. Every one took lightly his soft hands, which had already burst from the bud of pillows and the chrysalis of swaddling-bands. Clotilda—instead of lavishing on the little one carnally coquettish caresses, as many girls do before or for men—poured down a steadily streaming look full of hearty love on the new man, untied his too tight and cutting shirt-sleeve, screened from him the moon at which he was squinting, and said, playfully, "Smile this way and love me, Sebastian!" She could not possibly have meant to charge this line with metaphorical ricochet-shots; besides, the elder, unswaddled Sebastian knew full well that she could have anticipated no double sense; nay, he knew the rule, that the very anxiety wherewith some people banish certain subjects from their talk betrays the presence of the same in their thoughts. And yet, for all that, he had not the courage to smile like the rest, or to take the little hand which she had touched in his. She turned to him, and said, "But how does the child learn our language, unless it has already a language it can master?"
... I have, out of mere regard to the philosophers, had this printed in italics.
"Then it follows," he answered, "that the language of pantomime must signify just as much as articulate speech. As often as I see a deaf and dumb man go to sacrament, I think of this,—that all the instruction you can give imports nothing into man, but only indicates and arranges what is already there. The child's soul is its own drawing-master, the teacher is simply its colorist."
"What if this lovely evening," she continued, "should one day come up again to the memory of this little one? Why does the sixth year look more beautiful in remembrance than the twelfth, and the third still more beautiful?" A beautiful woman one cannot interrupt so easily as an ex-Dean; and so she was permitted to recur to this reminiscence: "Herr Emanuel once said, one should relate to children every year the story of their past years, in order that they might one day look back through all their years, even into the haze of the second." It is as if I heard the above-mentioned maid of honor[[83]] personally speaking, under whose thin lace cap there lay more philosophy than under many a doctor's beaver, as quicksilver sticks in crape, and runs through leather.
Victor answered, with the usual sympathy of his good heart: "Emanuel stands near to man, and knows him. Two scene-painters lead man, beset by magic, through the whole stage,—Memory and Hope; in the present he is uncomfortable; enjoyment is poured out for him, as for Gulliver, only into a thousand Liliputian moments; how shall that intoxicate or satisfy? When we picture to ourselves a happy day, we compress it into a single happy thought; when we come upon it, this thought is diluted through: the twenty-four hours."
"I think of that," she replied, "as often as I walk through meadows; in the distance are flowers upon flowers, but, near at hand, they are all scattered apart, and separated by the grass. But yet, after all, memory is enjoyed only in the present."
Victor continued to think only of the flowers, and said, abstractedly, "And in the night the flowers themselves look like grass,"—when it began suddenly to sprinkle.
They all stepped, in solemn mood, into the summerhouse, on whose roof the rain pattered down, while through the open windows the alternately shutting and opening moon's eye threw in like a glacier its snow-glances,—the tepid blossom-breath of the whole glistening landscape stole with healing balm on every human sigh, every burdened bosom. In this confined circle, separated from nature by the alternation of night and moonshine, one must needs take refuge in something near and familiar, in the old harpsichord. Clotilda's voice might make a flute-accompaniment to the whispering rain without. The Parson's wife begged—her to favor them, and with her favorite aria from Benda's Romeo,—"Perchance, my lost repose! perchance one day in the grave I may find thee!" &c.,—a song whose tones like fine dissolving perfumes penetrate the heart through a thousand entrances, and tremble there, and tremble more and more intensely, till at last they shiver it to atoms, and leave nothing of it behind in the harmonious annihilation but tears.