The beating of my own heart, a stranger's, is to me a measure of the beating of the happier one. But before I relate what at the outset disturbed, and then doubled Victor's joy over this letter, let me be allowed to make two good observations. The first is: the enhanced sensibility, in a proud bosom (such as Clotilda's), which otherwise would call back sighs and send out only female satires at us lords of the creation, is the fairest token that her heart is melting in the sunshine of love. For this sentiment reverses women; it makes out of a Columbine a female Young, out of an orderly a disorderly one, out of a fine woman a frank one, out of a maker and wearer of finery a female philosopher, and so vice versâ. And do thou, dear Philippina, prove the second remark, for thou answerest here as well as thy own brother: Is not the concealment of love the sweetest confession of it? Does not a veil—a moral one, I mean—show the whole face, and is it not permeable to everything except the wind,—the moral wind, I mean?—Does not the glass case of a lady's watch reveal the whole varnished watch-portrait at the bottom, and exclude merely soiling, not seeing? And what observations wilt thou make, when I rehearse to thee these two!
The letter strengthened at once Victor's wish to be about Clotilda, and his power to give it up,—until, the next day at supper-time, an accident changed all. Matthieu, who paid almost more visits to enemies than to friends, came up from the Apothecary's. He saw the views of Maienthal and the crape hat; and as he knew that his sister Joachime had both, he said jokingly, "I fancy, you are going to dress yourself up in borrowed robes, or somebody has been disrobing." Victor fluttered away over the subject with a gay, vacant "Both." He was unwilling to take upon his lips the name of love or of a woman before a man who had no faith in virtue, least of all in woman's, who, to be sure, as other spiders do on other music, let himself down by his threads upon love, but who, as mice do, from love for the tones, crept over the strings and snapped them. Victor never loved (before his court-life) to be with such philosophical defamers among blameless maidens, because it pained him even to be reminded of their point of view. "They must not," said he, "learn so much as the existence of a daughter of mine, because they insult a father in the very act of imagining her to themselves."
Matthieu spoke of the next Patriotic Club (on the 4th of May, the birth-day of the Parson) and asked whether he would be there. Agatha, however, had already reminded him of it yesterday (the last day but one of April). At last Mat proposed his question, "Whether he would not also be of the party at Whitsuntide. He had planned a little excursion with the Regency-Councillor (Flamin), who always needed holidays for that purpose, to Grosskussewitz to the Count of O.'s. He had business there, to pay for some lodgings of the court to the Kussewitzers, and put the Count of O. in tune for an amicable adjustment of the recent misunderstanding; therefore he must have the lawyer with him. Perhaps the Englishmen would be at this Congress,—the travelling corps might then have as great entertainment as a corps diplomatique, after having first had just such occupation as theirs. The Count of O., in fact, loved Englishmen very much, though he did not like to ride English horses,—for he had been very sorry that he had lately talked with the distinguished Court-Physician at the Princess's without knowing you." Sebastian had concluded his long, dumb attention with a cold "No!" because the perspiration of this false, flying cat[[68]] overspread his unprotected heart with an eating poison. "What have I done to this man," thought he during that invitation, "that he pursues me eternally,—that with a knife, of which one side is poisoned, or both, he cuts away, amidst the double pangs of both of us, my youth's friend from my soul,—that he runs out his mines even to strange places, in order in all situations to have me over his powder?" Victor had, namely, after all, reason to fear that the Whitsuntide journey was a voyage of discovery, upon which Joachime might propound to her brother, as Chevalier Michaelis[[69]] did to the Oriental travellers, questions about the case of the watch-letter, about Tostato, &c., in order, perhaps, to form out of it all an impeachment before the Prince. He held the lower side of his card, i. e. of his virtuous pain, in such a way that Matthieu could not quite see it, so as to deprive him of a malicious pleasure. The latter, who wore not a lace mask, but an iron one, and besides one with a neck, showed often such coldness, that one did not comprehend his furious wrath and vice versâ,—but the one (the coldness) he had in camp, the other (the wrath) in the fight against the foe. If any one immediately enraged him, it was a good sign, and meant that he had no design against him.
After the evacuation of the Evangelist,—when he had done scolding at himself for letting him find the crape hat, which, in fact, he would have kept more concealed if Flamin had came oftener,—he looked round for Clotilda's profile, that the charming shadow might cool his wrath. It was not to be found: his first hypothesis was that Mat had quietly stolen it, which was the more likely, as he had cut it. If he has really pocketed the profile, then must the Evangelist—for, as is well known, the silhouette was made over to me at the very beginning of this story—be actually my corresponding fellow-member Knef, and it is he who sent me the advice-boat,—namely, the Pomeranian dog.—Odd enough it is that my correspondent himself by such intelligence sets me upon the suspicion.
While Victor took the dear crape hat into his hand as a compensation for the likeness, and dreamily contemplated it, there sprang forth on the hat wholly new, fresh flowers for his soul. "What!" he said to himself, "must I then have only the profile to look at? Can I not choose the—original itself for that purpose?" In short, the hat became an urn of fortune, from which he drew a joyous hour, that is the determination to travel on Whitsuntide, but to—Maienthal. He seriously reflected, that for him and Clotilda this excessive indulgence of a jealous brother, whose mistaken hopes no sister indeed was obliged to strengthen, was besides aggravated and frustrated by the misanthropic suggestions of Matthieu,—that, therefore, their separation was as little of an alleviation as their meeting was a crime,—that, meanwhile, it would be a fine thing to spare the brother and to take merely the time of his absence for a suspicious excursion, till one day the drawing down of the bandage should disclose in the unfaithful one the sister, and in the rival the forbearing friend,—and that it was at all events better to talk with her in Maienthal than, at his return, when he was near,—and that a brother enlightened in regard to his origin would certainly one day have nothing to reproach him with, except that he had taken from him no other illusions than, at most, disagreeable ones.—O, Love and Virtue have a naked conscience, and apologize for their heavenly pleasures longer and more than other qualities do for their infernal ones!
When Victor further thought on this, how soon leaf and blossom drop off from the days of love, and that Emanuel, and even Clotilda, were two flowers moved close to the brink of the grave, whose loose, naked roots already hung down dead, then was his resolution fixed, and he wrote to Emanuel the intelligence of his intended arrival at Whitsuntide, in order not to anger Clotilda by a surprise, and in order, besides, to allow her the opportunity of a countermand. The way in which he put it was this: "If his Socratic genius would allow it (i. e. Clotilda), who always told him what he must not do, then he was coming on Whitsuntide, as, besides, the town would then be deserted, as Flamin was to be gone for four or five days to Kussewitz, &c."
When he had finished the letter, it occurred to him that this very day a year ago; on the 29th of April, he had travelled all night, in order with the first of May in the morning to enter through the mist into the parsonage. "I can, verily, again spend the sultry zephyr-night, not under the coverlet, but under the stars. I can take one steady gaze into the evening-red towards Maienthal's mountains. I can, indeed, better still, go half the way over them,—or in fact the whole. I can post myself on a hill and look down into the hamlet. Truly I can then deliver my billet here incognito to some Maienthaler, and take flight again before it is yet day."
At seven o'clock in the evening he went, like the sea, from east to west. Orion, Castor, and Andromeda glisten in the west, not far from the evening-red, over the fields of the loved one, and, like her, will soon sink from one heaven into another. His heart agitated by nothing but hopes, the heated chambers of his brain, on whose walls Maienthal sketched with sympathetic ink came forth in ever clearer outlines and brighter colors, this inner and almost painful din of joy deprived him at first of the power of taking in the temple of Spring, built up in Grecian beauty, with a still, luminous soul. Nature and Art are best enjoyed only with a clean eye, from which both kinds of tears have been wiped away.
But at last the outspread night-piece covered over his hot fever-images, and heaven with its lights, and earth with its shadows, made their way into his expanded heart. The night was without moonlight, but without clouds. The temple of nature, like a Christian temple, was sublimely dimmed. Victor could not make his way up out of the trenches of long valleys, out of the glooms of woods, and out of the mists of meadows with their play of colors, till the midnight hour, when he climbed a mountain like a throne, and there lay down on his back in order to plunge his eyes into the heavens, and cool off from his dreaming and racing. The low-hanging blue of heaven seemed to him to be a thin blue cloud, a sea dashed into blue mists, and one sun after another with its long rays slightly parted this blue flood. Arcturus, who stood over against the reclining man, was already descending from the battlements of heaven, and three great constellations, the Lynx, the Bull, and the Great Bear, marched far in the van under the western gate.—These nearer suns were encircled by remote milky-ways with a swimming halo, and thousands of vast heavens flung into eternity stood in our heaven as white vapors a span in length, as faintly luminous snow-flakes out of immensity, as silver circles of hoar-frost.—And the strata of suns crowded together, which only before the thousand-eyed eye of Art let fall their misty veil, played like streaks of our little particles of sun-dust in the glowing sunbeam of the Eternal that burned through the immeasurable space. And the reflection of his throne, glowing through and through, lay bright on all the suns.—
—Suddenly, nearer at hand, molten cloudlets of light, nearer mists, which had flown upward out of dew, take their stations, during their silvering, low down before the suns, and the silvery gleam of heaven comes on apace with scattered dark fleeces.—Victor cannot comprehend the supernatural kindling, and starts up, enchanted, to his feet.... and lo, our good neighbor and kinsman, the moon, the sixth grand division of our little earth, had silently, and without the morning's cry of joy, entered beside the triumphal gate of the sun into the night of her mother earth with her half-day.