In short—church was out, and he had to go behind a leafy hunter's-screen, in order, when the Panists[[106]] of the Lord's Supper should march by out of the church, whose organ-music still followed, and under the tower that still trumpeted after them, that then he might see with his pocket-glass who looked out of the convent. Clotilda's face floated, as if called forth by magic out of the second world, close to the glass, and he could, without fear of being driven away, close his butterfly-wings around this flower; he could freely sink into her great eyes, as into two flower-cups filled with the splendor of dew. Never did he see so pure a snow of the white around the blue heaven's-opening, which went far into the soul, now fairer than ever; and when she cast down her eye toward the garden, the great veiling eyelid with its trembling lashes stood just as beautifully over it as a lily over a fountain. Love, like drawing and like the germ of man, begins at the eye.—When the children had gone by, then Clotilda slowly and freely turned her face toward Emanuel's cottage, and gazed across with the far-reaching, longing look of love....
And with such a love, beating like a heart in his innermost consciousness, Victor with his two friends arrived up at the convent. The Abbess (her name is not reported to me at all, not even her pseudonyme) received him with a stately air, which her station had not imparted to her, but had attempered. Her soul was born crowned. The Princess of —, whose chief governess she was, loved sometimes to play the child (children inversely reciprocate, and represent their representatives): but although she possessed a pride of thirty years, she checked her hobby-horse so soon as the monarchical chief governess appeared, than whom no one in the land (the swans excepted) carried her head back so high. A lady like her, whose looks were throne-insignia, and her words mandata sacræ cæsareæ majestatis propria,[[107]] had from the hands of Nature herself the allegiance-medals and the throne scaffolding, so as to weigh her imperial apple against young maidens' apple of beauty,—such a one could rule and mould a Clotilda. Her soul was painted by three masters:—the back-ground by the world,—the foreground by the church,—the middle-ground by Virtue. Her æsthetic parts placed her in a singular manner in a certain elective-affinity with Emanuel's East Indian ones.
I know nothing more touching and beautiful than a woman's obeisance when it springs from that deep respect with which alone good maidens venture to speak their love.—Happy Victor! thy Clotilda received thee with as much reverence as her teacher. Only the coquette is made by love more dictatorial[[108]] (a silicious juristic word!); but the proud one it makes modest and gentle. Never did he take a meal more delightedly than in this bright pleasure-villa, before whose open windows reposed a blue horizon and nearer at hand murmuring avenues, filled with music, than in this decorated orangery of blooming girls,—(whereas a gymnasium is a menagerie and a house of sisters an aviary.)—Victor, who understood how to manage women even better than men, felt himself as well in the busy ant-hill of these lively maidens, as in an ant-bath,[[109]] and he was a second Bee-father Wildau, who constructed for himself out of the swarm of bees now a beard and now a muff. More manly sense is required for a certain refined gallantry, than they have who in their satires confound it with the insipid kind; just as only mountains afford the sweetest honey. Earnest must be the groundwork of jest; respect and kindliness, of praise. Victor could more easily before two than before thirty-two female eyes fall into embarrassment, which, by the way, is the grossest blunder and Germanism in female grammar. He had long since learned to combine the volatile salts of woman's wit with the fixed ones of man's, as well as the art, in great circles, of setting every soul, every caterpillar, on the right leaf for its nourishment.
To him who had once said, "I wish I had to converse at least four times a year with ladies, with whom one should have to apply so much tournture,[[110]] that one actually would not know what he wanted, and who were fine even to nonsense,"—to him a high lady like the Abbess, whom, since the laying down of her high governess-ship, one could confound a very, very little with a précieuse,[[111]] was a true refreshment; for he could sketch her at least the physiognomical fragments of the court with a thousand turns, i. e. a full face with five dots. But he had in this the still nobler design to draw off his adoring attention, his heart that sometimes started in the shape of a tear to his eye, from his beloved Clotilda, in order to spare her a wholly different attention from his own. In a singular manner his satirical feeling, precisely, always drew off the Moses' veil from his serious feelings, from his softened soul,—that is to say, he was not ashamed of a tear, simply because he knew that his humor could protect him against the suspicion of exaggeration and against the mocker; just as, on the other hand and inversely, his playing and flashing of wit under tears, like phosphorus under water, conserved and nourished its light.—
Fortunately, at this point, Emanuel, who in the midst of dinner had gone out into the garden, came back and proposed taking a walk. For in his soul great ideas were all that remained standing of life, as of old Egypt only temples were left behind, no houses; and his ignorance in little things must be ridiculous to little things.[[112]]—The Abbess had taken Clotilda beside her on the throne as under-queen of the fiery nuns. Victor represented in his single person the board of wards of the Electorate of Brandenburg among these fluttering graces. Clotilda gave over the blind one just to a whole dove-flock of the liveliest way-guides, because they all sued for the boatman's and forefinger's-office with the blind youth; they all loved him on account of his heavenly beauty, but (as he could not see theirs) only in the same way as they would caress a beautiful boy of five years.... At another time Victor would certainly have looked round and made the fine allusion that beauty was leading blindness; but to-day he only looked round for other reasons.
—At last the Island of the Blest, which had already gleamed far, far out through the mist of his childhood's dreams, was now the ground under his feet, and he made the voyages of discovery through his heaven;—he and Clotilda were silent for some minutes, because their hearts began to be softly agitated with joy, that they were at last alone together and stood before the great esplanade of spring. Amidst the blissful smiles, the dumb alphabet of rapture, and amidst trembling respirations, that holy sanscrit of love, they had already arrived at the first pond, over whose crystal mirror a bridge winds like gilded foliage-work.—They stopped dazzled in the midst of this moon-disk and looking-glass, because the parasol could not screen from two suns at once, reckoning the one in the water; they turned half round, and sought with their eyes in the picturing water the deeper heaven's-blue, and two still, blissful forms, that looked at each other with their moist eyes. O, his eye rested warmly in her reflected one, like the sun upon the subterranean sun, and his trembling look was the long tremolo and continuance of a single tone; for the goddess dwelling in the water sank with her eyes to meet his soul, because she would fain avail herself of the doubled distance of his form, which amounted to ten feet.—To conclude at last the overmastering rapture, he withdrew his eyes from this glass-painting and directed them (i. e. he merely redoubled it) to the archetype itself; and the mutual inflowing of glances, the trembling together of souls, threw into the short moment the fields of a long heaven.—And they saw that they had found each other, and that they had loved each other, and that they deserved each other. As they went on, Victor could only say, "O that you might be to-day as inexpressibly happy as I am."—And she answered softly, softly as a zephyr exhaled from among tender, leafless blossoms, "I am so indeed." ... Ah, I have often pictured to myself, if we all loved one another as two lovers do, if the emotions of all souls, as these are, were tied notes, if Nature drew from us all at once, the resonance of her strings stretching even beyond the stars, instead of moving only a loving couple as a double harpsichord,—then should we see that a human heart full of love contains an immeasurable Eden, and that Deity itself created a world in order to love one.
But I will write again, as Clotilda spoke, who manifested the poetic spirit only by actions, not by words, like players who know how in speaking to evade the rhyme and metre of their poet.
The village, or rather the inn, gave their Jacob's ladder a fourth round, the fourth Whitsuntide-day.—The Englishman, Cato the elder, who had run away from Kussewitz and from his club with a travelling orchestra of virtuosos from Prague, came out to see Maienthal also. He could never in his life wait for anything. He told Victor he was coming to see him to-morrow, to-day he should survey the cultivated prospects and he was waiting with the overture of the Prague musicians only for the close of the vesper-sermon. At last he told him that Flamin and Matthieu were going a journey day after to-morrow, and were going back again to Kussewitz, and consequently would stay there longer than they had intended. This presence of the Englishman and the delayed return of the jealous one settled all at once in Victor his last will, to stretch the fourth Whitsuntide-day also as the fourth string on this tetrachord of joy. And as on this fourth day the riddle about the angel running through all the parts of this book is brought into the deciphering-office of time, because Julius delivers the letter of the said angel to Clotilda to read, he could make believe to himself he stayed merely for that reason, and say to himself: "For the novelty's sake surely one should tarry, to see what the state of the case is about the angel."—Good hero! thou confoundest every angel with thine, nor do I know why thou shouldst not!...
Now a shadow of a cloud flitted over them, a sort of forerunner of a darker one which was seeking their souls. For Victor, who before a fair heart could never shut up his own, who in the consecration of love scorned all dissimulation, related to Clotilda, with that heartiness which so easily marries itself to refinement, the reasons of Matthieu's journey, namely, his own little folly in Kussewitz, when he played into the Princess's hands the little billet-doux. He would at any rate have been obliged, too, to make this disclosure, by way of obviating the extraneous one of an accuser. But he presupposed too hastily on the part of Clotilda a calculation of the chronology of his little annual registers, and did not remark that he had written the billet before he knew that Clotilda was not Flamin's sweetheart, but only his sister.[[113]] She was silent for some time. He feared this pantomime of anger, and did not dare to convince himself of it by looking into her face. At length, on her favorite green spot, where in the greatest depth the vale's green shadow rocks its painted twigs in the sheen of sun and water, there she begged him with a voice neither cold nor proud, but almost a voice of emotion, to let her rest a little on her favorite grass-bench, whose arms were great flowers. As he stood before her, he saw with alarm in her animated face—not a resentment wrestling with courtesy, but—the touching struggle against the destiny which darkened for her the darling of her soul, the unselfish grief at the closed scar, which she wished away from his virtue. She felt, he felt, as if the former year lifted itself up again from its death-pillow of flowers of joy, which it had trampled on for both; they were right sad,—Clotilda had hardly the mastery of her eyes or Victor of his tongue,—till at last upon the latter the misunderstanding dawned. He therefore said softly to her and in English: "Had his father made all his disclosures to him earlier, he would have spared him more than one conflict, more than one dark hour, and first of all the foregoing folly."
In the higher love anger is only sorrow over the object. Clotilda continued, however, the solar-eclipse of her fair features; but it proceeded not from the continuance of the previous sigh, nor from the usual inability to carry over at once a reconciled soul into an angry face, but her discontent with her own hastiness always looked like that which has another's for its object. She rose up therefore to give him back her arm, and, as it were, the heart which lay near it. Victor did not allow himself to break the doubled-voiced silence.—Emanuel came after, and then Clotilda said with emotion, as if she were just answering what had been said before: "Ah, I am only too closely related to my brother on the side of my faults."—Did she mean Flamin's jealousy, or suspecting nature, or more probably his temperament?—Victor turned to her, as if to beg her pardon for what she had said,—and her eyes said, "O, I ought not to have misunderstood thee,"—and his said, "I ought not, even though unknown, to have denied thee,"—and their hearts made peace, and the olive-branch twining among the old flowers of joy bound their souls to each other.