Victor led his weak teacher to the Indian cottage. He felt his nerves now after so many relaxing days cooled and steeled by this tempest; his anguish of soul and sacrifice had made his blood, as the confinement of narrowing channels does streams, more swift and impetuous, and his love for Clotilda had been made manlier and bolder by the thought that he now entirely deserved it. There is nothing more beautiful than magnanimity and gentleness, except the union of the two.
Emanuel was nothing more than faint, and, as the evening brooded with a sweltering influence over all, he seated himself with Victor on the grassy bench of his house in order to keep his palpitating breast in an erect posture, and a tender joy gleamed in his features at every fallen drop of blood, because each was a red seal upon his hope of dying. But when Victor took the good man's weary head to his bosom and let him go to sleep thereon, then in the still evening sadness came over him again, and for the first time his heart pained him. He thought to himself all alone there, how over at the Abbey hot swords would pass hissing through the innocent bleeding soul,—he felt how now the two-syllabled, two-edged word of Flamin's wrath had cut through the whole bond of their friendship,—he represented to himself the blooming theatre of beautiful days beside him deserted and desolate, and the sweeping by of joys, which only play round us like butterflies in wide circles, while the hairworm[[125]] of grief bites deeply into our nerves. At last he leaned weeping on the slumbering father, and pressed him softly, and said, "Ah! without friendship and love I could not bear the earth."—And at length his distracted and exhausted soul also was weighed and dragged down by the heavy body into the thick atmosphere of sleep.
* * * * *
Reader! the last moment in Maienthal is the greatest,—raise thy soul through awe and mount up on graves as on high mountains, in order to look over into the other world!
At midnight when fancy draws the buried dead from their coffins and sets them upright in the night round about her, and unknown shapes drift to us from the second world,—just as indistinguishable corpses driven from America to the coasts of the Old World announced to it the New,—in the ghostly hour Victor opened his eyes, but with inexpressible serenity. A forgotten dream had sunk far away to-day's past with all its din and cloud;—the bright moon stood overhead in the blue dark like the silvery fissure and sparkling fountain-like mouth, from which the stream of light out of the other world breaks into ours and comes down in ethereal vapor.—"How still and radiant is all!" said Victor. "Is not this glimmering region a relic of my dream? is not this the magic suburbs of the supernal city of God?"—A voice hurrying over said, [Death! I am already buried.]
Emanuel opened his eyes at that, sent them through the foliage over to the churchyard that overlooked the village and said, with a convulsion of his being, "Horion, wake up; Giulia has left eternity and is standing on her grave."—Victor cast a feverish glance up thither; and all the warm thoughts and nerves of life grew hard and stiff in a cutting ice-cold shudder, as he saw up there a white, veiled form resting on the grave. Emanuel snatched himself up, and his pupil, and said: "We will go up to the theatre of the spirits; perhaps the dead one will lay hold on my soul and take me with her." ... Fearful was the silence of the regions around their way.... Men start up out of the ground like dumb-waiters, like serving-machines, and drop down again when they are emptied.... The human race darts like a flying summer through the sunshine, and the bedewed web hangs fluttering on two worlds and in the night it passes away.... So thought both on their pilgrimage to the dead one; they wondered at their own heavy incarnation and at the noise of their steps. Emanuel fastened his gaze on the veiled form that now knelt down; he thought she heard his thoughts and would fly over to his heart through the moonlight....
The hearts of the two men rose and fell as if under two gravestones, as they climbed the long, grass-grown steps to the churchyard, and touched and opened the heavy gate which was painted with forms of risen saints, half effaced by the weather. The warm earthly blood congeals and the soft brain runs to a single image of terror, when the great cloud rolls away from eternity and from the gate of the spiritual world; on the stage of the dead Emanuel called as if beside himself: "Awful spirit, I am a spirit like thee, thou too standest below God,—wilt thou kill me, then kill me not by a stroke of horror, not by a crushing form, but smile like men and quietly wring off my heart."—Then the veiled form rose up and came,—Emanuel wildly grasped his friend, buried himself in his face, and said clinging to him: "On thee I die, on thy warm heart,—O live happy, unless thou wilt grow cold with me, ah! go with me!" ...
"Ah, Clotilda!" said Victor; for she was the form. She was dumb as the realm of spirits, for the dead one whom she had visited still clung around her heart; but she was great as a spirit from that realm: for the ethereal luminous nebula of the moon, the standing over the dead, the look into eternity, the lofty night, and the mourning exalted her soul, and one almost forgot that she wept.—Emanuel still held his wings spread out over the scene, and looked sublimely over the graves: "How all sleeps and rests here on this great green death-bed! I would lie down there and die.—Did not something just speak?—The thoughts of mortals are words of spirits.—We are night birds stealing through the dubious atmosphere, we are dumb night-walkers who fall into these pits, when they awake.—Ye dead! crumble not so mutely into dust; ye spirits, ye that come forth out of your buried hearts, flutter not so transparent around us!—O, man were vanity and ashes and a plaything and vapor on the earth, did he not feel that he were so[[126]]—O God, this feeling is our immortality"[[127]]—
Clotilda, by way of drawing him down from this desolating inspiration, took him by the hand and said: "Farewell, O worthy of veneration! I bid farewell this very day, because to-morrow I leave Maienthal. Live happily,—happily till we see each other again; my heart will never forget your greatness, but I shall see you again soon." ... Her melancholy at the thought of his predicted death, her fear of an eternal parting, stifled her remaining words, for she wanted to say more and thank him more warmly. Emanuel said: "We shall never see each other again, Clotilda; for I die in four weeks."—"O God! no!" said Clotilda with the most heart-felt and impassioned tone.—"My good Emanuel," said Victor, "torment not this tormented one.—Cheer thyself, O tortured one, our friend will certainly stay with us."—Here Emanuel raised his eyes to heaven and said with a look in which a world lay, "Eternal One! Couldst thou hitherto have so deceived me?—No, no, on the longest day thy stars will draw me upward, and thy earth will cool my heart.—And thee, thou good Clotilda, thou soul from heaven, thee, then, I certainly see to-day, God knows! for the last time with thy lovely cheeks and in thy earthly form,—I bless thee and bid thee farewell, but heavily and sadly, because I must still live so many days without thee. Go through life with soft influences breathing around thee, keep thy heart high above the many-colored mist of earth and above its storm-clouds,—indeed, thou hearest me not, thou bitterly weeping face; God pour solace into thy soul, let thy parting be more glad!—Thy friend will be with me when I go hence."—Here Victor grasped the hands of the trembling form, exhausted with weeping, who vainly wiped away her tears to see her teacher once more and press his image on her soul; and when Victor cried wildly, "Giulia! sainted one! mitigate the woe of thy friend in this hour, hold this breaking heart," then said Emanuel, looking on both with indescribable tenderness: "I bless you, like a father, holy pair of souls! never forsake, never forget each other!—O ye blessed spirits here above the glimmering mould of the crumbling coffins, give these two hearts peace and, happiness, and when I am dead, I will float around your souls and quiet them. And Thou, Eternal One, make these two mortals beneath thy stars as happy as I,—O take nothing from them, nothing on the earth, but life.—Good-night, Clotilda!" ...
—The Whitsuntide days are over!—