At evening, Victor arrived at St. Luna, and ensconced himself in the arbor of the parsonage garden, where he had given Clotilda the first tears of love.—The parsonage, the hall, the observatory, the two gardens, lay around him like dilapidated knightly castles, from which all joys and inmates have long since departed!—All so autumnally still, so stationary around him,—the bees sat mute on the sill of the hive beside the executed drones,—even the moon and a little cloud stood fast beside each other,—the wax mummy stood with rigid face turned round toward the still chamber!—At last the Parson's wife came through the garden, on her way to the hall. He knew how exceedingly she must needs love him again, now that his fidelity to the jealous Flamin had come to light. O, she looked so weary and sickly, so red with weeping, and exhausted with bleeding, and prematurely old! It grieved him, that he must say first an indifferent word, in order to call her into the arbor. When she entered, he raised himself up, and bowed low, and laid himself, as if he would expire, on the dear bosom, within which was a world full of sighs and a heart full of love, and said: "O mother, I am thy son!—accept me; thy son has nothing, loves nothing more on the whole wide earth, nothing more but thee.—O dear mother, I have lost much before finding thee.—Why dost thou look on me thus?—If thou despisest me, then give me thy blessing, and let me flee.... Oh! and besides it was only for thy sake that I chose to live any longer."—She looked upon him, bending backward, with a moist eye, full of inexpressible tenderness and sorrow, and said: "Is it true, then? O God! if you were my son!—Ah, good child!—I have long loved thee as a mother.—But deceive me not, my heart is so sore!"—The son gave his oath.... and here let the curtain slowly sink on the maternal embrace, and when it has wholly covered son and mother, then let a good child look back into his own soul, and say, here dwells everything that thou canst not describe!
And now, at evening, the Chaplain was stealing home from the field and through the garden, and cried out, as he came to meet his new son: "Ah! Herr Hofmedicus, I am falling away abominably. I look really and manifestly like an Ecce Homo and feverish patient. I am doomed.—I am destined to make a soiffre-douleur, a persona miserabilis, a Patripassian."[[193]]—When Victor had reported to him, "It is all over, the Regency-Councillor is liberated and innocent," Eymann looked steadfastly up at the observatory, and said, "Verily there sits the Councillor up there, peeping over," and was on the point of going up to him; but Victor gently held him back, and said tenderly, "I am your son," and disclosed to him all.—"What?—you?—thou?—the son of such an eminent Lord, my son?—I to have begotten my Herr Godfather?—That is unheard of, one brother to be another's godson.—I have two Sebastians in my house at once."—He got sight of the Parsoness, and began a quarrel,—which was always with him a sign of joy.—"So, wife! thou hast known this all day, and let me sit out there in the quarry, on the anxious seat, in the midst of grief, tolling away till night at the poor-sinners'-bell? Couldst thou not have let the bellows-blower come out to notify me? That was very ill done,—the wife sits at home and drinks bitters, into which are thrown whole casks of sugar and dishes of comfits,—and the man keeps himself in stone-quarries, and swills down steadily his bitter extracts out of an emetic-cup."—She never answered a word.
Now, for the first time, Victor learned from his mother that it was only for his friend (Matthieu), and for his country, Flamin had meant to die; that he repented his unjust jealousy, and bewailed the friendship he had trifled away; and that she had sent for him for the very reason that she might conduct him to the arms of his true mother, and before the face of an afflicted sister. It had been this morning a human weakness, that the frozen limb of friendship, his heart, had been a little more cold and unfeeling towards Flamin, when he heard of his deliverance from imprisonment,—but it was now, at evening, the part of human kindness, that Flamin's great resolve to die restored, like a chilblain ointment, to his stiff heart warmth and motion. His inner being stirred itself mightily, welled up, overflowed his crushed resentment, and the image of the youthful friend rose up and said: "Victor, give thy hand again to thy school-friend,—O, he has suffered so much, and acted so nobly!" Tears shot from his quivering eyes, as he resolved to ascend the observatory, and say to his old favorite, "Let it be forgotten,—come, we will go together to thy sister." He went alone up to the tower,—intending to present him to the lady afterward. The Parson's wife flew off some minutes before Victor started, to inform and bring his two sisters, and send for the blind Julius to be conducted from the city, that no link might be missing in the golden necklace of love.
What a Jacob's ladder, on which every minute is a higher round, is set up this night on the swinging earth, whereon good beings climb up one after another!—
Down on the lowest step of the throne of reconciliation was Victor's heart laboring mightily in the hot blood through which it struggled. Flamin saw him slowly coming up, but he came not to meet him; because he was uncertain whether Victor came angry or forgiving. When the latter at last reached the top, Flamin, ashamed, supported his averted face in the branches; for he could not look his so sorely abused darling in the eye, till he knew that he had forgiven him. They maintained an awful silence beside each other, under the rippling linden-top,—they could not wholly guess each other's feelings, and that made the silence more gloomy, and the reconciliation doubtful. At last, Flamin, breathing intensely, and with his face buried in the foliage, reached out to him a trembling hand. When Victor saw the trembling of this dumb hand imploring reconciliation, boiling tears dropped through his heart and dissolved it asunder, and only from sadness and loving forbearance he delayed taking the lowly hand; but at this moment Flamin turned round (under the influence of a false suspicion), proud, blushing, full of tears and full of love, and said: "I beg thy forgiveness with all my heart for having been a devil to thee, an angel; but then if thou dost not grant it to me, I hurl myself down, that only the devil may get me!"—Singular! this extortion of forgiveness contracted a little Victor's open soul; but still he embraced the friendly wildling, and said with the mild voice of tranquil love: "From the bottom of my soul have I to-day forgiven thee; but loved thee I ever and always have, and in a few weeks would have died for thee, to save thy life."—Now their souls approached each other without reserve, and disclosed their lives,—and when both had told all, and Victor had unfolded to him, that he had been substituted in his place, and was the son of the bereaved mother, then would Flamin have died for remorse, and only pressed his face more closely for shame into Victor's bosom,—and their newly wedded souls celebrated their silver wedding on the nuptial altar of the watchtower, under the bridal torch of the moon; and their bliss was equalled by nothing but their friendship.
They wandered in the tender intoxication slowly into Le Baut's garden, and the stream of rapture grew deeper and deeper; but suddenly ice-cold waves, as from the river Styx, terrified the softly warmed Victor, when he came to the mournful bower, where, exactly a year ago to-day, on the 21st of October,—to-day then is Clotilda's birth-day,—he had torn her image out of his distracted heart, and where he now arrived again, perhaps again to tear it out from the old scars. For the lowering of his rank had made him a little—prouder, and his love for Clotilda more shy. To tell the truth, he could not himself fully believe that his inferior extraction had been unknown to her; he rather inferred the opposite, from the interest which his Lordship had let her take in his letters, and all secrets,—from her struggle in the beginning against her germinating love, and from the slight haughtiness towards him on the first day,—from her praise of misalliances,—from her favoring of Giulia's love for Julius, whom she knew to be his Lordship's son,—from her ready assent to the betrothal, which certainly otherwise her father, after the recognition, would no longer have granted,—and from other signs which one will more easily gather up for himself on the second reading of this work. As was said, this hope, that she had all along known who he was, refuted certain objections of his delicacy and of his spirit of renunciation, and bloomed out still higher to-day, among so many joys and pleasant incidents.—Ah! if he had been devoid of all hope, then he would certainly, in the midst of the circle of so many blessed ones, have been obliged to fall as the last victim!—But that something in man, which always prefigures to him a great loss as so probable, and a great gain as so improbable, united with melancholy remembrances, now tormented his soul.
He therefore begged Flamin to leave him alone for a while in the bower, and to hasten alone (as the Parson's wife was already in the garden) to the friendly arms of the newly-found sister and mother, and added that he would presently follow him. When Flamin was gone, Victor began to tremble more and more at the thought of the agitation of Clotilda, which would perhaps get the mastery of her at the intelligence of his pedigree; and it oppressed him sorely when he thought that for all in the garden sorrow had been removed from the black-hung mourning-chamber of earth, only for him haply not.—
But at that moment came his mother, beaming with the reflection of new raptures, and before questioning him first wiped his eyes. Her new raptures proceeded from this, that Clotilda, when she had related his descent, had fallen on her neck and begged her forgiveness for so long a concealment of the so long continued robbery of a child,—and that she had reminded the mother of a promise which had been given during the walk after the betrothal and was now redeemed. Much had escaped the mother,—and, I fear, the reader,—and Clotilda only glided hastily and blushingly over the matter; but had she not there said to her, "We change not our relation"? namely, that of a sister by marriage.—The Parson's wife concluded her report with the entreaty of her Ladyship, that she would bring her new son to her as speedily as possible. Victor could say nothing, for tearful rapture, except, "Have not then my good Agatha and the blind one yet arrived?"—And both stood—behind him; and he concealed the overmeasure of his bliss under the caressings of the sister and the friend; his capacious cup of sorrow was truly poured full of tears of joy.
As, in the accompanying circle of three loving souls, he entered upon the fair road to the dear united ones, they all came to meet him with radiant features,—with swimming glances,—with remembrances from which the sting had been extracted, or rather which had been turned into joys; for from the crushed flowers of gladness on the road of life a sweet perfume is wafted over to the present hour, as marching armies often send out from heaths the fragrance of trampled plants. Her Ladyship was conducted by her two children, and said, with an obliging smile: "I present to you here my beloved children; continue towards them the friendship which you have hitherto shown them."—Her son Flamin, heedless of decorum, flew to him and flung himself upon his neck. Clotilda bowed lower than she would have done before a Prince, and in her eye swam the question of melancholy love, "Art thou still unhappy? Have I still thy heart? Why is thy eye moistened? why is thy voice broken?"—Victor replied with quite as much tenderness as dignity, as he turned to the Lady, "You could not on a fairer day find again your son than on the birthday of your daughter." ...
Of that, in the previous whirlwinds, no one had thought. What a chaos of gladness! What a hearty, loving confusion of tongues on the part of congratulating improvisators! What affecting eye-thanks from Clotilda for such an obliging remembrance!