Hesperus or Forty-Five Dog-Post-Days Volume I Part 13

Opposite to this gate lay the twenty-seventh stone. Victor's father displaced it, took out a magnet, bent down, and held its _south_ pole to the gap. Suddenly machines began to gnar, and the waves to whirl, and an iron bridge rose out of the water. Victor's soul was overfilled with dreams and expectations. Shuddering, he followed his father, and set foot upon the magic island. Here his father touched a thin stone with the _north_ end of the magnet, and the iron bridge sank down again. Before they stepped up to the elevated gate a key turned itself from within, and unlocked, and the gate flew open. His Lordship was silent. On his face a higher soul had risen like a sun: one no longer knew him; he seemed to be transformed into the genius of this magic island.

What a scene! So soon as the gate was opened there ran to and fro through all twigs an harmonious murmur; breezes flew in through the gate, and absorbed the sounds into themselves, and floated on with them, trembling, and reposed only on bended blossoms.--Every step opened farther a great, sombre stage.--Round about the scene lay marble fragments, on which the blacksmiths' coals had drawn forms of Raphael's, sunken Sphinxes, map-stones, whereon dim Nature had etched little ruins and effaced cities, and deep openings in the earth, which were not so much graves as moulds for bells that had been cast therein.

Thirty poisonous trees stood twined round with roses, as if they were signs of the thirty years of man's pa.s.sionate madness. Three-and-twenty weeping birches had bent themselves down to form a low bush-work, and were crowded into each other; into this bush ran all the paths of the island. Behind the bushes ninefold c.r.a.pe-veils, in waves that mutually swallowed each other, obscured the sight of the high temple; through the veils five lightning-rods rose into the heavens, and a rainbow, formed of two shoots of water that leaped up and arched over into each other, hovered glittering over the twigs, and evermore the two streams arched themselves aloft, and evermore they shivered each other to pieces overhead by their contact.

As Horion led his son, whose heart was grasped, affrighted, oppressed, kindled, chilled, by invisible hands, into the low birch thicket, the stammering dead-man's-tongue of an organ-trill began to speak, through the lone silence, to the sigh of man, and the tremulous tone sank too deeply into a soft heart.--There stood the two on a grave darkly built over with bush-work; on the grave lay a black marble, on which were chiselled a bloodless white heart, with a veil over it, and the pale words, "_It is at rest_." "Here," said his Lordship, "my second eye became blind; _Mary's_[152] coffin lies in this grave; when that arrived at the island from England, the diseased eye was too severely inflamed, and never saw again."--Never did Victor shudder so; never did he see on a face such a chaotic, shifting world of flying, coming, conflicting, vanishing emotions; never did such an ice of brow and eyes congeal upon convulsive lips;--and so a father looked, and a son felt every sensation repeated in himself.

"I am unhappy," said his father, slowly; a more bitter, biting tear burned on the pupil of his eye; he hesitated a little, and placed his five open fingers upon his heart, as if he would grasp and pluck it out, and looked upon the pale stone one as if he would say, Why is not mine resting too? The good, dying Victor, crushed with the anguish of affection, melting into pity, longed to--fall upon the dear, desolated bosom, and to say more than the sigh, "O G.o.d, my good father!" But his Lordship gently repelled him, and the tear of gall, unshed, was stifled by the eyelids. His Lordship resumed, but more coldly: "Think not that I am specially affected; think not that I desire a joy or deprecate a sorrow: I live now without hope, and without hope I die."

His voice came cutting over ice-fields; his glance was made sharp by frost.

He continued: "When I have, perhaps, made _seven_ human beings happy, then must it be inscribed on _my_ black marble, _It rests_.... Why dost thou wonder so? Art thou even _now_ at peace?"--The father stared at the white heart, and then stared more fixedly straight before him, as if a shape had risen out of the grave,--the freezing eye laid and turned itself about on a rising tear, as if to smother it. Suddenly he drew back a veil from a mirror, and said, "Look in, but embrace me immediately after!" ... Victor gazed into the mirror, and saw, with a shudder, an eternally loved face appear therein,--the face of his teacher _Dah.o.r.e_; his knees smote together, but still he did not look over, his shoulder, and embraced that father who was without hope.

"Thou tremblest far too violently," said his Lordship; "but ask me not, my dear boy, why all is so. At a certain stage of years one opens no more the old breast, full as it may be."

Ah, I pity thee! For _those_ wounds which can be disclosed are not deep; _that_ grief which a humane eye can discover, a soft hand alleviate, is but small; but the woe which a friend must not see, because he cannot take it away,--that woe which sometimes rises into the eye in the midst of blessedness in the form of a sudden trickle which the averted' face smothers,--_this_ hangs in secret more and more heavily on the heart, and at last breaks it, and goes down with it under the healing sod. So are iron b.a.l.l.s tied to man when he dies on the sea, and they sink with him more quickly into his vast grave.--

He continued: "I am going to tell thee something; but swear, here upon these precious ashes, never to divulge it. It concerns thy Flamin, and from him thou must conceal it."

Victor, so hurled from one wave to another, started at this. He remembered that Flamin had wrung from him on the watch-tower the promise, that, if ever they should have offended each other too sorely, they would die together. He hesitated to take the oath; at last he said, "But shortly before my death may I tell it to him?"

"Canst thou know when that will be?" said his father.

"But in case--?"

"Then!" said his father, coldly and curtly.--

Victor swore, and trembled at the future import of the oath.

He also had to promise not to visit this dark island before his Lordship's return.

They pa.s.sed out of the leafy mausoleum, and sat down on an overturned stalact.i.te. At times, during the conversation, a strange harmonica-tone fell from leaf to leaf, and, at a great distance, the four rivers of Paradise seemed to go sounding away under a zephyr that trembled with it.

The father began: "Flamin is Clotilda's brother, and the Prince's son."--

Only such a lightning-flash of thought could now have penetrated into Victor's already dazzled soul; a new world now started up within him, and s.n.a.t.c.hed him away from the great one before his senses.--

"Furthermore," continued Horion, "January's three other children still live in England,--only the fourth, on the Seven Islands, is invisible."

Victor comprehended nothing; his Lordship rent away all veils from the past, and introduced him to a new outlook into the life immediately before him, and into that which had flown away. I shall, in the sequel, communicate all his Lordship's disclosures and secrets to the reader; at present I will first relate the leave-taking of father and son.

While his Lordship accompanied his son into the dusky, subterranean pa.s.sages of former times, and told him all that he concealed from the world, tears started from Victor's eyes at many a trifle which could not deserve any; but the stream of these soft eyes,--it was not the narrative, but the returning contemplation of his unhappy father and the neighborhood of the buried and mouldering fair form and of the funereal marble, that wrung it out of the incessantly weeping heart.--At last all tones on the island ceased,--the black gate seemed to shut to,--all was still,--his Lordship came to an end with his revelations, and said, "Fulfil thy purpose of going to-day to Maienthal, and be cautious and happy!"--But although he took his leave with that refined reserve which in his rank guides and governs the hands and arms of even parents and children, still Victor pressed his childish bosom, so big with sighs and emotions, to his father's, with such an intensity as if he would fain crush in two his impoverished heart for the sake of the tears which he was compelled to let rise to sight ever hotter and larger. Ah, the forsaken one! When the bridge which clove asunder the father's and the son's days had risen up, Victor went over it alone, staggering and speechless; and when it had sunk into the water again, and the father had disappeared into the island, pity weighed him down to the ground; and when he had drawn all his tears, like arrows, out of his suffering heart, slowly and dreamily he quitted the still region of riddles and sorrows, and the dark funeral garden of a dead mother and a gloomy father, and his whole agitated soul cried incessantly, "Ah, good father! hope at least, and come back again, and forsake me not!"--

And now all that in the foregoing part of the story has created obscurities, all that his Lordship exposed to his son, we will explain to ourselves also. It will still be remembered that, at the time when he set out for France to fetch away the Prince's children,--the so-called Welshman, Brazilian, and Asturian, and the _Monsieur_,--the dark intelligence of their abduction came to hand. This abduction, however, he had (as he now confessed) himself arranged,--only the disappearance of the _Monsieur_ on the Seven Islands had occurred without his knowledge, and he could therefore with his untruth mix some truth, as mouth-glue. These three children he caused secretly to be taken to England, and educated at Eton for scholars, and in London for civilians,[153] in order to give them back to their father as blood-related a.s.sistants of his tottering administration. Hence he had helped the so-called Infante (Flamin) become an administrative councillor. So soon as he once gets the whole infant colony together, he means to surprise and bless the father with the delightful apparition. The (at present) invisible son of the Chaplain, who before the embarkation took the small-pox and blindness, he therefore keeps in the dark, because otherwise it would be too easily guessed to whom Flamin properly belonged.

Victor asked him how he would convince the Prince of a relationship to four or five strangers. "By my word," was Horion's first reply; then he subjoined the remaining evidences,--in Flamin's case, the testimony of his mother (the niece), who would come with him; in the case of the others; their resemblance to their pictures, which he still possessed, and finally the maternal mark of a Stettin apple.

Victor had already often heard from the Parson's wife that all January's sons had a certain mother's or father's mark on the left shoulder-blade, which looked like nothing, except in autumn, when the Stettins ripen; then it also grew red, and resembled the original. The reader himself must remember, in the annals of the curious and learned societies, whole fruit-basketfuls of cherries, whose red pencilling was only faint on children, and heightened in redness not until the ripening of the prototypes on the twigs. If I could believe a fellow-bather of mine, I myself should have such a Stettin fruit-piece hanging on my shoulder; the thing is not probable nor important; meanwhile next autumn,--for I have proposed it to myself several autumns, but now Knef, through his dog, reminds me of it,--so soon as the Stettins mature, I might, to be sure, take a looking-gla.s.s and examine myself behind.--And on the same ground this Stettin festoon puts off the return of his Lordship, at least the transfer and recognition of the children, till the autumnal season of its reddening.--

I make no scruple of communicating here a satirical note from my correspondent. "Make believe," he writes, "in regard to this intelligence, as if you did it at my behest, and, when you have once related his Lordship's _expose_ and revelation, very quietly relate it over to your reader a second time; so that he may not forget, or get it confused. One cannot cheat readers enough, and a clever author will be fond of leading them into marten-traps, wolf-pits, and deer-nets." I confess, for such tricks I always had a poor talent; and, in fact, will it not be more creditable, both to me and to the reader, if he fixes it at once in his mind, at first hearing, that Flamin is January's natural and Le Baut's a.s.sumed son,--that the Parson's is blind, and not yet apparent,--that three or four other children of January's, from the Gallic seaboard towns, are still to follow;--more creditable, I say, than if I should now have to chew it over for him a second time, (in fact, it would be a third time,) that Flamin is January's natural and Le Baut's a.s.sumed son,--that the Parson's is blind, and not yet apparent,--and that three or four other children of January's, from the Gallic seaboard towns, are still to follow?

The reason why his Lordship required of his son the oath of silence towards Flamin was, that the latter, by his native honesty, kept all secrets, but in a heat of pa.s.sion betrayed all; because in such a case he would make his birth tell, merely for the sake of backing himself in a quarrel with an adversary; because he might the very next day, on account of this revelation, become, instead of a fencing-master with the sword of Themis, a fencing-scholar with the war-blade; and because, in fact, a secret, like love, fares still better between two partners than among three. His Lordship thought, too, that out of a man to whom you gave money in order that he might become something, more would be made than out of one who should be something because he had money, and who looked upon the coins as his hereditary arms, and not as the prize-medals laid out for his future redemption of them.

After all these developments, his Lordship made to our Victor still one more, and a weighty one, upon which he was always to look back on the icy career of his future court-life as to a warning-tablet.

When his Lordship was struck blind before the house that held the ashes of his beloved, his whole correspondence with England, with the niece and with the tutors of the princely children, was embarra.s.sed, or at least changed. He was obliged to have the letters received by him read to him by a friend whom he could trust: but he could trust no one. Only one female friend he found out who deserved the distinguished preference of his confidence, and that was none else than Clotilda. He who did not, like a youth, squander his secrets, could nevertheless venture to put Clotilda in possession of his greatest, and to make her book-keeper and reader to him of the letters of her mother, the so-called niece. In fact, he held women's power of keeping a secret to be greater than ours,--at least in weighty matters and in the concerns of men whom they love.--But just hear what the Devil did last winter: to me it is memorable.

His Lordship received a letter from Flamin's mother, in which she renewed her old entreaties for a speedier promotion of the beloved child, and her inquiries after his fortunes at the Parsonage. Luckily just then Clotilda was making a visit at St. Luna, and saved him the journey to Maienthal. He visited the Chamberlain, to hear the letter from the mouth of his reader. He had great difficulty in securing in Clotilda's chamber an hour free from eavesdroppers. When he at last got it, and Clotilda began to read to him the letter, the latter was called away from the reading by her step-mother. He hears her immediately come back again, read the letter over in a sort of darkly murmuring tone, and say softly that she was going away again, but would come back in a moment. After some minutes Clotilda appears, and when his Lordship asks why she went out the second time, she denies a second leaving,--his Lordship insists,--she likewise persists,--finally Clotilda falls upon the bitter conjecture whether Matthieu may not have been there, and with his theatrical art and throat, which contained all human voices, himself have mocked and travestied her, in order under her credentials to read the important letter. Ah, there was too much in favor of the conjecture and too little against it! To be sure Matthieu could not now undertake upon Flamin, whose academic career had just expired, the October-test of the shoulder-device; but he stuck (so it afterward seemed to Clotilda and his Lordship) with his green-frog-feet to that good soul, and, under the cloak of love for Agatha and for his friend, hung out his threads, let the wind swing and stretch them across between the princely palace and the Parsonage-house,--kept on spinning one after another, until at last his father, the minister Schleunes, should have woven the right web for the entangling of the prey.... I confess, this conjecture throws light for me on a thousand things.--

Victor was even more astounded than we are, and proposed to his Lordship whether he might not, without injury to his oath, reveal to Clotilda his induction into these mysteries, as he had two reasons for it: first, her delicacy would be spared embarra.s.sment at the appearance which her sisterly love must otherwise, in her opinion, have in his eyes;[154] secondly, one keeps a secret better, if only _one_ more person helps him hold his tongue about it, as is well known from the case of Midas's barber and the reeds; the third reason was, that he had several reasons. His Lordship naturally did not refuse.

For the rest, he introduced his Victor with no pedantic rules of march to the ice-course and tilt-yard of the court. He merely advised him neither intentionally to seek nor to shun any one, particularly the house of Schleunes,--to unbridle his friend Flamin, who was in Matthieu's leading-strings, and to guide him, instead of by the bit, rather with a friendly hand,--and himself to covet the rank of a doctor, and nothing more. He said, rules before experience were like geometry before the operation for the cataract. Even after the harvest of experience Gratian's _homme de cour_ and Rochefoucauld's Maxims were not so good as the memoirs and history of courts, i. e. the experiences of others. Finally he appealed to his own example, and said, it was only within a few years that he had understood the following rules of _his_ father's.

The greatest hatred, like the greatest virtue and the worst dogs, is quiet.--Women have more _flow_, and fewer _overflows_, of emotion than we.--There is nothing one hates so much in another as a _new_ fault, which he does not show till after some years.--One commits the most follies among people who are of no account.--It is the most common and pernicious delusion, that one always takes one's self to be the only one who remarks certain things.--Women and soft-hearted people are timid only in their own dangers, and courageous in those of others, where they have to save them.--Trust no one (and though it were a saint) who in the smallest trifle leaves his honor in the lurch; and a woman of that kind still less.--Most persons confound their vanity with their sense of honor, and allege wounds inflicted on the one as wounds inflicted on the other, and the reverse.--What we undertake from humanity, we should always accomplish, if we mixed in no selfishness with our motive.--The warmth of a man is by nothing more easily misunderstood than by the warmth of a young man.

The last observation, which perhaps had a nearer reference, he had made while he was already on the sh.o.r.e of the island in the att.i.tude of leave-taking, which he did with that considerate courtesy which in his rank guides the hands and arms of even parents and children.[155]

THIRD INTERCALARY DAY.

Meteorological Observations upon Man.

When, in the former chapter, I wrote down his Lordship's pithy sayings, I found that some came into my own head, which might be serviceable for the Intercalary Day. I have never made one observation alone, but always twenty, thirty, in succession, and this very first one is a proof of it!

When any one remains modest, not after praise, but after censure, then he is really so.

The talk of the people, and still more the letters of maidens, have a peculiar euphony, arising from a constant interchange of long and short syllables (Trochees or Iambuses).

The two things which a maiden most easily forgets are, first, how she looks (hence mirrors were invented); and, secondly, wherein the p.r.o.noun _that_ differs from the conjunction _that_. I fear, however, that they will from to-day forward observe the distinction, merely for the sake of upsetting my a.s.sertion. And _then_ one of my two touchstones is lost[156] with which I have hitherto tested learned ladies; the second, which I retain, is the left thumb-nail, which the penknife has sometimes notched full of red marks, but seldom, however, because they drive the quill more easily than they make the pen.

One who has received many benefits ceases to _count_, and begins to _weigh_ them, as if they were votes.

The transporting one's self into good characters does more harm to a poet or player, who retains his own, than entering into bad ones. A clergyman who, besides, is free to take only the first of these steps, is more exposed to moral _atony_[157] than the maker of verses and parts, who is able to make up again for a holy part by an unholy one.

Pa.s.sion makes the best observations and the wretchedest conclusions. It is a telescope whose field is so much the brighter, as it is narrower.