The Wagnerian Romances Part 9

Have you come to pasture your sight upon my bliss, to share that which has befallen me?"

The suggestion is verily too much! "To share the tumult which, insensate, possesses you? A different matter it is which impelled me, fearful, to break Wotan's commandment...." Brunnhilde wakes to the sister's troubled looks, but she can still think of but one reason for them. "The stern one has not forgiven? You stand in terror of his anger?" "Had I need to fear him--there would be a term to my fear!" "Amazed, I do not understand you!" "Master your agitation, listen attentively. The terror which drove me forth from Walhalla, drives me back thither...." "What has happened to the eternal G.o.ds?" cries Brunnhilde, at last alarmed. Waltraute unfolds to her then the sorrowful plight of the G.o.ds, making her even over the events in Walhalla since her cutting off from the eternal dynasty. She describes Walvater returning home from his wanderings with his broken spear, the erection around the Hall of the Blessed of the funeral pile cut from the World-Ash, the a.s.sembling about Wotan's throne of the G.o.ds and heroes. "There he sits, speaks no word, the splinters of the spear clenched in his hand. Holda's (Freia's) apples he will not touch. Fear and amazement bind the G.o.ds. His ravens both he has sent ranging; should they return with good tidings, then once again--for the last time!--the G.o.d would divinely smile. Clasping his knees lie we Valkyries; he is blind to our entreating looks. I pressed weeping against his breast, his glance wavered--Brunnhilde, he thought of you!

Deeply he sighed; he closed his eyes and as if in dream he breathed forth the words: "If to the daughters of the deep Rhine she would restore the Ring, delivered from the weight of the curse were the G.o.ds and the world!" I bethought me then; from his side, between the rows of silent heroes, I stole. In secret haste I mounted my horse and rode upon the storm to you. You, oh, my sister, I now conjure: that which lies in your power, bravely do it,--end the misery of the Immortals!"

Brunnhilde speaks to her pityingly and gently; it is so long since she emerged from the vapour-dimmed atmosphere of her heavenly home that she receives no clear impression, she owns, of the affair related to her; but: "What, pale sister, do you crave from me?"

"Upon your hand, the ring--that is the one! Listen to my counsel, for Wotan's sake cast it from you!" "The ring? Cast it from me?"

"To the Rhine-daughters give it back!" "To the Rhine-daughters, I, this ring? Siegfried's love-token? Are you mad?"

Brunnhilde is unshaken by Waltraute's insistence. Good or bad arguments have nothing to do with the case, as it stands in her feeling.

Indignation possesses her at the bare notion of the exchange proposed to her, out of all reason and proportion: Siegfried's love, of which his ring is the symbol, for Walhalla's and the world's peace!

"Ha! do you know what the ring is to me? How should you grasp it, unfeeling maid? More than the joys of Walhalla, more than the glory of the Immortals, is to me this ring; one look at its clear gold, one flash of its n.o.ble l.u.s.tre, I prize more than the eternally enduring joy of all the G.o.ds, for it is Siegfried's love which beams at me from the ring! Oh, might I tell you the bliss.... And that bliss is safeguarded by the ring. Return to the holy council of the G.o.ds; inform them, concerning my ring: Love I will never renounce; they shall never take love from me, not though Walhalla the radiant should crash down in ruins!" When Waltraute with cries of "Woe!" flees to horse, she looks after her unmoved: "Lightning-charged cloud, borne by the wind, go your stormy way! Nevermore steer your course toward me!" She has no regrets; the request has been in her judgment so monstrous that it has hardened and shut her heart toward those who made it. She gazes quietly over the landscape. Her sense of security in Siegfried's love is no doubt at its firmest in these moments following her fiery defence of it, her sacrifice to it of old allegiances. The very peace of possession is upon her.

Twilight has fallen; the guardian fire glows more brightly as the darkness thickens. Of a sudden, the flames leap high,--Loge's signal that some one draws near. At the same moment Siegfried's horn is heard, approaching. With the cry: "In my G.o.d's arm!" Brunnhilde rushes to meet him.

A figure springs from the flames upon a rock, a form foreign to Brunnhilde's eyes. The flames drop back. The figure remains, dark against the dim glow of the sky. His head and the greater part of his face are concealed by a helmet of curious fashion; she does not, in the uncertain light, recognise the Tarnhelm. The fact itself of his being there is terrifying, arguing some singular treachery somewhere. "Treason!" is Brunnhilde's first cry, as she recoils and from a distance stares breathlessly at the sinister intruder. He stands motionless, leaning upon his shield and regarding her. "Who is it that has forced his way to me?" she gasps. He is silent still; the horror of him is increased by his silence and motionlessness and his metal mask. The motif of evil enchantment is woven through the whole of this scene. In a hard masterful voice he speaks at length: "Brunnhilde! A suitor is come whom your fire does not alarm!

I seek you for my wife; follow me unresistingly." It is all so strange, so like the agonising impossibilities of a dream,--Brunnhilde falls to trembling. "Who are you, dreadful one? Are you a mortal?

Do you come from h.e.l.la's army of the night?" Still watching her, motionless on his point of vantage, he replies: "A Gibichung am I, and Gunther is the hero's name, whom, woman, you must follow."

It flashes upon Brunnhilde that this, this must have been the true point of Wotan's punishment. When the figure springs from the rock and approaches her, she raises, to hold him off, the hand with Siegfried's ring. "Stand back! Fear this sign!... Stronger than steel I am made by this ring; never shall you rob me of it!" "You teach me," he replies, with his dark calm, "to detach it from you!"

He reaches for it, she defends it. They wrestle. She escapes from him with a victorious cry. He seizes her again. The former Valkyrie, reinforced by the Ring, is a match very nearly for the stalwart Walsung. A shriek is heard. He has caught her hand, and draws the ring from her finger. As if all her strength had been in it and were gone with its loss, she sinks, broken, in the arms of the disguised Siegfried. He coldly lets her down upon the seat of rock.

"Now you are mine, Brunnhilde,--Gunther's bride. Withhold not your favour from me now!" She cowers, shattered and stupefied, murmuring, "How could you have helped yourself, miserable woman!" The right of the stronger she recognises, primitive woman, as a right. Fairly vanquished, she must accept the fate of battle,--no dignity, as no success, would pertain to further struggle. When with a gesture of command he points her to her stone chamber, trembling and with faltering step she obeys. Siegfried, following, draws his sword and in his natural voice again, smooth and happy, addresses it: "Now, Nothung, do you bear witness to the restraint which marks my wooing. Guarding my truth to my brother, divide me from his bride!"

II

The Hall of the Gibichungen once more, seen from the outside. It is night. Hagen sits as we left him, in guard over the hall. He sleeps leaning against a pillar of the portal. A burst of moonlight shows Alberich crouching before him. "Are you asleep, Hagen, my son? Are you asleep and deaf to my voice, whom sleep and rest have forsaken?" "I hear you, hara.s.sed spirit; what message have you for my sleep?" Remember! remember! is the burden of Alberich's communication. Be true to the task for the purpose of which you were created. The old enemy, Wotan, is no longer to be feared; he has been made powerless by one of his own race. The object now singly to be kept in view is the destruction of this latter, and capture of the Ring in his possession. Quickly it must be done, for "a wise woman there is, living for love of the Walsung; were she to bid him restore the Ring to the Rhine-daughters, for ever and ever lost were the gold!" "The Ring I will have!" Hagen quiets the care-ridden Nibelung, "rest in peace!" "Do you swear it to me, Hagen, my hero?" "I swear it to myself!" Dawn has been creeping over the sky. The form of Alberich fades in the growing light and his voice dies on the ear: "Be faithful, Hagen, my son, be faithful--faithful!" Hagen sits alone in the broadening day, seemingly asleep, yet with eyes wide open. He starts. Flushed with the morning-red, Siegfried strides up from the river-bank, uttering his joyful "Hoiho!" "Siegfried, winged hero, whence do you come so fast?" "From Brunnhilde's rock. I there took in the breath which I put forth in calling you,--so rapid was my journey. A couple follows me more slowly. Their journey is by boat. Is Gutrune awake?"

"Now make we welcome, Gibich's-child!" he greets her, as at Hagen's call she comes hurrying out to him. "I bring good tidings!" In exuberantly good spirits he tells them the story of his bad action.

The magic draught administered to him had more than destroyed his memory of Brunnhilde, we must believe; the inflaming potion had somehow blotted out, or covered over and for the time cast into the background, his father's part in him, the part of Siegmund, who fought to the end an unequal and losing battle to save a girl from a marriage without love. "Across the expiring fire," he concludes his report, "through the mists of early dawn, she followed me from the mountain-top to the valley. At the sh.o.r.e, Gunther and I, in a trice, changed places, and by virtue of the Tarnhelm I wished myself here. A strong wind is even at the moment driving our dear pair up the Rhine." "Let us display all kindness in our reception of her," Gutrune proposes, with the generosity of overflowing happiness; "that she may be pleased and glad to sojourn with us here! Do you, Hagen, summon the va.s.sals to the wedding at Gibich's court, while I will gather the women." Siegfried fondly offers her his help; hand in hand they go within.

Hagen is conscious, presumably, of an incongruity in the task a.s.signed to him, the genial office of gathering together the clans for a wedding-feast. However that may be, he does not, to perform it, depart at all from his character. Ascending to an eminence, he blows a melancholy blast through a great steer-horn, and, in a voice portending tidings the most alarming, gives the call to arms: "Hoiho! Gibich's men! Up! Arms in the land! Danger! Danger!" In this he persists until from all sides, singly at first, then in groups and lastly in crowds, the va.s.sals, hurriedly armed, come flocking. "Why does the horn sound? Why are we called to arms?

Here we are with our weapons.... Hagen, what danger threatens?

What enemy is near? Who attacks us? Is Gunther in need of us?"

"Forthwith prepare, and dally not, to receive Gunther returning home. He has wooed a wife!" This still in a tone befitting the announcement of disaster. "Is he in trouble? Is he hard pressed by the foe?" "A formidable wife he brings home!" "Is he pursued by the hostile kindred of the maid?" "He comes alone, unpursued."

"The danger then is past? He has come forth victorious from the encounter?" "The dragon-slayer succoured him in his need; Siegfried, the hero, secured his safety." "How then shall his followers further help him?" "Strong steers you shall slaughter and let Wotan's altar stream with their blood." "And what, Hagen, are we to do after that?" "A boar shall you slay for Froh, a mighty ram for Donner; but to Fricka you shall sacrifice sheep, that she may bless the marriage!"

The men are beginning to penetrate through Hagen's sullen aspect to his joke; with heavy playfulness they help it on. "And when we have slaughtered the animals, what shall we do?" "From the hands of fair women take the drinking-horn, pleasantly br.i.m.m.i.n.g with wine and mead." "Horn in hand,--what then?" "Bravely carouse until drunkenness overwhelm you--all to the honour of the G.o.ds, that they may bless the marriage!" The rough warriors break into laughter, and in uncouth jollity stamp with their feet and spear-b.u.t.ts. "Great good fortune is indeed abroad on the Rhine when Hagen the grim grows jovial!" Not the faintest smile illumines the bleak face. At sight of Gunther's skiff approaching, he checks the men's laughter.

Moving among them, with careful foresight he drops seed toward fruits of trouble: "Be loyal to your sovereign mistress, serve her faithfully; if she should suffer wrong, be swift to avenge her!" Hagen's plan for bringing about Siegfried's destruction is not yet at this point settled in outline. We see him grasping at whatever can be construed into a weapon against him. There are repeated attempts on his part in the scene following to stir against Siegfried some fatal demonstration of popular anger.

The skiff draws to land. The va.s.sals greet their lord and his bride with noisy chorus of welcome, clashing their arms together, beating their swords against their bucklers.

Brunnhilde stands beside Gunther in the boat, statue-still, her eyes bent on the ground, like one who neither sees nor hears. Without resistance she lets Gunther take her hand to help her ash.o.r.e; but a suppressed s.n.a.t.c.h of the motif of Wotan's resentment suggests the shudder ominous of danger overrunning his Valkyrie daughter at the contact.

This is Gunther's hour, this for him the supreme occasion in life; the star of his destiny rides the heavens unclouded; he feels now magnificent indeed in his seat on the Rhine, as he stands before his people with the regal creature beside him whom he calls his wife.

As if to express the momentary expansion of his nature, his motif resounds, as proudly he presents her, quite changed in character; it has taken on a grandeur approaching pomp: "Brunnhilde, the glory of her s.e.x, I bring to you here on the Rhine. A n.o.bler wife was never won! The race of the Gibichungen, by the grace of the G.o.ds, shall now tower to crowning heights of fame!" Brunnhilde does not heed or hear. When, as Gunther leads her toward the Hall, Siegfried and Gutrune meet them, coming forth from it with strains of marriage-music and a festal train of ladies, her eyes never moving from the ground, she does not see them. "Hail, beloved hero! Hail, dearest sister!" Gunther greets the bridal pair. "Joyfully I behold at your side, sister, him who has won you. Two happy pairs are here met--Brunnhilde and Gunther, Gutrune and Siegfried!"

At the name, Brunnhilde looks quickly up.... Her astonished gaze fastens upon Siegfried's face and dwells intently upon it. Her action is so marked that Gunther drops her hand; all watch her in wonder. A murmur runs through the a.s.sembly: "What ails her? Is she out of her mind?" Brunnhilde, still speechless, falls visibly to trembling. Siegfried becomes at last aware of something out of the common in the gaze so persistently fixed upon him. He goes quietly to the woman and asks: "What trouble burdens Brunnhilde's gaze?" She has hardly power to frame words, make sounds, her emotion still further intensified by his cool and disengaged address.

"Siegfried, here!... Gutrune!" she painfully brings forth. "Gunther's gentle sister," he enlightens her, in his major, matter-of-fact manner, "wedded to me, as you to Gunther!" At this she recovers her voice to hurl at him startlingly: "I--to Gunther?... A lie!" She is swooning with the helpless horror of all this monstrous mystery.

Siegfried, who stands nearest, receives her as she totters, near to falling. As she lies for a moment in the well-known arms, it seems impossible, beyond everything impossible, that his unimaginable purpose should not break down, that he should not be forced to drop this incomprehensible feint of strangeness. But her dying eyes searching the face close to them discover in it no glimmer of feeling. Her heart-broken murmur: "Siegfried.... knows me not?"

touches no chord. The hero is for handing her over with all convenient haste to her proper guardian. "Gunther, your wife is ailing!" As Gunther comes, he rouses her: "Awake, woman! Here is your husband!"

Because her senses seem clouded and she a moment before rejected the statement that she was married to Gunther, he singles out for her with his finger the personage he means. Her eyes, as he makes this gesture, are caught by the Ring on his hand. Her mind leaps, inevitably, to the conclusion that Siegfried, who feigns not to know her, not only has cast her off, but is in collusion with this man Gunther, her captor.

Trying by a supreme effort to govern her agitation and anger at the revelation of this unspeakable baseness, till she shall have sounded the affair, "A ring I saw upon your finger," she addresses him; "not to you does it belong; it was torn from me by this man!"

indicating Gunther. "How should you have received the ring from him?" Siegfried looks reflectively at the ring. Since all trace of the former Brunnhilde is wiped from his brain, he cannot remember his parting gift to her of the Ring. Certainly, he wrested a ring from this woman, in the twilight.... What became of it?... But the ring on his hand is indisputably a relic of the old days of the fight with the dragon. "I did not receive the ring from him,"

he replies. She turns to Gunther: "If you took from me the ring, by which you claimed me for wife, declare to him your right to it, demand back the token!" Gunther is sore perplexed. "The ring?...

I gave him none.... Are you sure that is the one?" "Where do you conceal the ring," Brunnhilde presses him, "which you robbed from me?" Gunther is stupidly silent, not knowing what he should say; his confusion is so obvious and his blankness so convincingly una.s.sumed, that the truth is borne upon Brunnhilde: It was not he, despite all appearances, who took the ring from her, and if not he--"Ha!"

she cries, in a burst of furious indignation, "This is the man who tore the ring from me; Siegfried, trickster and thief!"

Siegfried has been still gazing at the ring on his hand, trying to puzzle out points which the lacunae in his memory do not permit him to make clear. The contemplation has brought back old scenes and distant events. He speaks, unruffled: "From no woman did I receive the ring; nor did I take it from any woman. Full well do I recognise the prize of battle, won by me before Neidhohle, when I slew the mighty dragon."

With what quiet and conviction he makes the statement, as if verily he spoke the truth! Such a.s.surance is hardly imaginable, save as based upon conscious integrity.... Hagen now, the fisher in troubled waters, interferes, still further to increase Brunnhilde's bewilderment: "Are you sure you recognise the ring? If it is the one you gave to Gunther, it belongs to him, and Siegfried obtained it by some artifice which the deceiver shall be made to rue!"

Plainly, there is no way of help in clearing up this desperate tangle. The goaded woman bursts into a wild outcry, sharp as a knife by which she should hope to cut through the coil in which she is caught: "Deceit! Deceit! Dastardly deceit!... Treachery!

Treachery! such as never until this moment called for vengeance!"

Gutrune catches her breath: "Deceit?..." The quickly roused suspicion of the crowd takes up Brunnhilde's word: "Treachery?... To whom?..."

"Holy G.o.ds! Heavenly leaders!" Brunnhilde's madness clamours to heaven: "Did you appoint this in your councils? Do you impose upon me sufferings such as never were suffered? Do you create ignominy for me such as never was endured? Prompt me then to vengeance such as never yet raged! Enkindle anger in me such as never was quelled!

Teach Brunnhilde to break her own heart that she may shatter the one who betrayed her!" The ineffectual Gunther tries vainly to hush her, to stop the scandalous scene. "Away!" she thrusts him from her, "cheat!... Yourself cheated!" and she announces ringingly to them all the one thing which in all this confusion she knows to be true: "Not to him (Gunther) am I married, but to that man, there!"

"Siegfried?... Gutrune's husband?" the murmur pa.s.ses through the astonished crowd.

"Love and delight he forced from me...." Her momentary hatred of Siegfried thus distorts the image of the past. Siegfried's only possible interpretation of this astonishing declaration is that the Tarnhelm did not properly conceal his ident.i.ty--but even so the woman is not speaking the truth. What her purpose can be in thus darkening her own fame he is at a loss to divine. He replies to her charge directly, careless at this point that the plot between Gunther and himself stands betrayed by his words. "Hear, whether I have broken my faith! Blood-brotherhood I swore to Gunther: Nothung, my worthy sword, guarded the vow of truth; its sharp blade divided me from this unhappy woman!" Brunnhilde hears him with a jeer. They are speaking at cross purposes; he, as it should be remembered, of the foregoing night alone, while she speaks of that past so wholly blotted from his mind. "Oh, wily hero! see how you lie!

how ill-advisedly you call to witness your sword! I am acquainted indeed with its sharpness, but acquainted, too, with the sheath--in which, pleasantly encased, Nothung, the faithful friend, hung against the wall, while the master courted his dear!"

"How?... How?..." the agitated followers are beginning to ask. "Has he broken his word? Has he smirched Gunther's honour?" Gunther, Gutrune, the va.s.sals, all a little shaken in their faith in Siegfried by the a.s.surance of his accuser, press him to refute her charge, clear himself, take the oath which shall silence the disgraceful accusation. He unhesitatingly asks for a weapon upon which to swear.

Hagen craftily offers his spear. Siegfried placing his right hand on the point, solemnly calls upon the sacred weapon to register his oath, wording it in the following ill-omened fashion: "Where sharpness may pierce me, do you pierce me; where death shall strike me, do you strike me, if yonder woman spoke the truth, if I broke my vow to my brother!" Brunnhilde hearing, flings his hand from the spear-point, and grasping it in her own, p.r.o.nounces the counter-oath: "Your weight I consecrate, spear, that it may overthrow him! Your sharpness I bless, that it may pierce him! For, having broken every vow, this man now speaks perjury!" Siegfried and Brunnhilde each believe that what he swears is true; but the Oath, the blind power which takes no account of intention, of moral right or wrong, gives right in sequence to Brunnhilde. The spear pierces the hero who invokes it so to do "if the woman spoke true."

There is nothing more, the solemn oath taken, that Siegfried can do, and in his stalwart fashion he turns his back on the whole troublesome business, with the sensible suggestion that the wild woman from the mountains be given rest and quiet "until the impudent rage shall have spent itself which some unholy wizardry has suscitated"

against them all.

"You men, come away!" he subjoins, all his heroic good-humour recovered.

"When the fighting is to be done with tongues, we will willingly pa.s.s for cowards!" For Gunther, whom he sees darkly brooding, he has a word in the ear: "Believe me, I am more vexed than you that I should not have more perfectly deceived her; the Tarnhelm, I could almost believe, only half disguised me. But the anger of women is soon appeased. The woman will beyond a doubt be grateful hereafter that I should have won her for you!" The winged exhilaration of the bridegroom repossessing him, he invites them all in to the wedding-feast, and casting his arm gaily around Gutrune draws her along with him into the Hall--whither the people swarm after them.

The three are left outside whom no festivity can allure. In long silence they remain, sunk in gloomy study, each on his side. To attempt arriving at clearness by questions does not occur to them; and, indeed, what to each is the princ.i.p.al thing, known from the proof of his eyes, no discussion could affect: for Brunnhilde, Siegfried is estranged from her; for Gunther, his marriage is turned to Dead-Sea apples.

The cheerful music, the summons to the wedding, dies away. Hagen bends his black brow in reflection as to how he shall utilise to his advantage the pa.s.sions he has aroused; covertly he watches his victims. Gunther has cast himself down and m.u.f.fled his face from the day, in the clutch of his jealous suspicion of Siegfried and the smart of his public shame.

Brunnhilde stands staring ahead, with set countenance of horror and grief. In an hour she has lived the tragedy which, spread over howsoever many years, is still one of the hardest in human experience, the tragedy which extorted Oth.e.l.lo's groan: "But there, where I have garnered up my heart, where either I must live or bear no life--to be discarded thence!" She seeks in the void and blackness some glimmer of light on the incredible mystery of these events.

With returning calm, a flash of the truth illuminates her, to the extent that she suspects in the unnatural developments of the last hour the work of sorcery. While hardly helping the actual situation, this interpretation frees Siegfried from the hatefulness of such black guilt as has appeared his, and we feel from this moment that Brunnhilde's undeterred reaching after vengeance, her consent to Siegfried's death, is less a personal need to make an offender pay, than the instinct to cut short the dishonour in which the most magnificent hero in the world is fallen. Impossible of endurance is a world where Siegfried is false to all his vows, where Siegfried and Brunnhilde are no longer each to the other "for ever and ever, his only and his all!" Heartbreak much more than resentment stamps Brunnhilde's cry: "Where is my wisdom against this enigma? Where are my runes? Oh, lamentation! All my wisdom I bestowed on him.

In his power he holds the bondmaid, in thongs the captive, whom, wailing over her wrong, the rich one joyously makes gift of to another! Where shall I find a sword with which to cut the thongs?"

Hagen approaches her: "Place your trust in me, deceived woman! I will avenge you on him who betrayed you...."

"On whom?..." she inquires, hazily. _Him who betrayed you_ describes more than one. "On Siegfried, who betrayed you." "On Siegfried...

you?..." She laughs, bitterly, while her unquelled pride in her faithless lord mocks: "A single glance of his flashing eye, which even through the lying disguise shed its radiance upon me, and your best courage would fail you!"

"But is he not, by reason of his perjury, reserved for my spear?"

"Perjury or none, you must fortify your spear by something stronger, if you think of attacking that strongest of all!" "Well I know," the subtle Hagen, with an effect of humbleness, continues, "Siegfried's victorious strength, and how difficult to overcome him in battle; wherefore do you give me good counsel: by what device may this giant be defeated by me?"