Part 65 (1/2)
”Yes, you too take pleasure in confusing my mind.--Who is she? What is your idea of her?”
”What I feel is inexplicable,” said Minna, coloring.
”You are both mad!” said the pastor.
”Then we meet to-morrow,” said Wilfrid, as he left.
IV
THE CLOUDS OF THE SANCTUARY
There are spectacles to which all the material magnificence at man's command is made to contribute. Whole tribes of slaves or divers go forth to seek in the sands of the sea, in the bowels of the rocks, the pearls and diamonds that adorn the spectators. These treasures, handed down from heir to heir, have blazed on crowned heads, and might be the most veracious historians of humanity if they could but speak. Have they not seen the joys and woes of the greatest as well as of the humblest? They have been everywhere--worn with pride at high festivals; carried in despair to the money-lender; stolen amid blood and pillage; treasured in miracles of artistic workmans.h.i.+p contrived for their safe keeping. Excepting Cleopatra's pearl, not one has perished.
The great and the rich are a.s.sembled to see a king crowned--a monarch whose raiment is the work of men's hands, but who, in all his glory, is arrayed in purple less exquisite than that of a humble flower. These festivities, blazing with light, bathed in music through which the words of men strive to be heard in thunder,--all these works of man can be crushed by a thought, a feeling. The mind of man can bring to his ken light more glorious, can make him hear more tuneful harmonies, show him among clouds the glittering constellations he may question; and the heart can do yet more! Man may stand face to face with a single being and find in a single word, a single look, a burden so heavy to be borne, a light so intense, a sound so piercing, that he can but yield and kneel. The truest splendors are not in outward things, but in ourselves.
To a learned man, is not some secret of science a whole new world of wonders? But do the clarions of force, the gems of wealth, the music of triumph, the concourse of the crowd, do honor to his joy? No. He goes off to some remote nook, where a man, often pale and feeble, whispers a single word in his ear. That word, like a torch in an underground pa.s.sage, lights up the whole of science.
Every human conception, arrayed in the most attractive forms that mystery can invent, once gathered round a blind man sitting in the mud by a roadside. The three worlds--the Natural, Spiritual, and Divine--were revealed to an unhappy Florentine exile; as he went he was escorted by the happy and by the suffering, by those who prayed and those who cursed, by angels and by the d.a.m.ned. When He who came from G.o.d, who knew and could do all things, appeared to three of His disciples, it was one evening at the common table of a poor little inn; there and then the Light broke forth, bursting material husks, and showing its spiritual power. They saw Him in His glory, and the earth clung to their feet no more than as the sandals they could slip off them.
The pastor, Wilfrid, and Minna were all three excited to alarm at going to the house of the extraordinary being they proposed to question. To each of them the Swedish castle was magnified into the scene of a stupendous spectacle, like those of which the composition and color are so skilfully arranged by poets, where the actors, though imaginary to men, are real to those who are beginning to enter into the spiritual world. On the seats of that amphitheatre the pastor beheld arrayed the dark legions of doubt, his gloomy ideas, his vicious syllogisms in argument; he called up the various philosophical and religious sects, ever contentious, and all embodied in the shape of a fleshless system, as lean as the figure of Time as imagined by man--the old mower who with one hand raises the scythe, and in the other carries a meagre world, the world of human life.
Wilfrid saw there his first illusions and his last hopes; he imagined human destiny incarnate there and all its struggles; religion and its triumphant hierarchies.
Minna vaguely found heaven there, seen through a vista; love held up a curtain embroidered with mystical figures, and the harmonious sounds that fell on her ears increased her curiosity. Hence this evening was to them what the supper at Emmaus was to the three travelers, what a vision was to Dante, what an inspiration was to Homer; to them, too, the three aspects of the world were to be revealed, veils rent, doubts dispelled, darkness lightened. Human nature in all its phases, and awaiting illumination, could find no better representatives than this young girl, this man, and these two elders, one of them learned enough to be sceptical, the other ignorant enough to believe. No scene could be simpler in appearance or more stupendous in fact.
On entering, shown in by old David, they found Seraphita standing by the table, on which were spread the various items const.i.tuting a Tea, a meal which takes the place in the north of the pleasures of wine-drinking, reserved for southern lands. Nothing certainly betrayed in her--or in him--a wondrous being who had the power of appearing under two distinct forms, nothing that showed the various forces she could command. With a homely desire to make her three guests comfortable, Seraphita bid David to feed the stove with wood.
”Good-evening, neighbors,” said she. ”Dear Pastor Becker, you did well to come; you see me alive, perhaps, for the last time. This winter has killed me.--Be seated, pray,” she added to Wilfrid.--”And you, Minna, sit there,”
and she pointed to an armchair near the young man. ”You have brought your work, I see. Did you find out the st.i.tch? The pattern is very pretty. For whom is it to be? For your father or for this gentleman?” and she turned to Wilfrid. ”We must not allow him to leave without some remembrance of the damsels of Norway.”
”Then you were in pain again yesterday?” asked Wilfrid.
”That is nothing,” she replied. ”Such pain makes me glad; it is indispensable to escape from life.”
”Then you are not afraid of dying?” said the minister, smiling, for he did not believe in her illness.
”No, dear pastor; there are two ways of dying--to some death means victory, to some it is defeat.”
”And you think you have won?” said Minna.
”I do not know,” said she. ”Perhaps it is only a step more.”
The milky radiance of her brow seemed to fade, her eyes fell under her lids, which slowly closed. This simple circ.u.mstance distressed the three inquirers, who sat quite still. The pastor was the boldest.
”My dear girl,” said he, ”you are candor itself; you are also divinely kind. I want more of you this evening than the dainties of your tea-table.
If we may believe what some people say, you know some most wonderful things; and if so, would it not be an act of charity to clear up some of our doubts?”
”Oh yes!” said Seraphita, with a smile. ”They say that I walk on the clouds; I am on familiar terms with the eddies in the fiord; the sea is a horse I have saddled and bridled; I know where the singing flower grows, where the talking light s.h.i.+nes, where living colors blaze that scent the air; I have Solomon's ring; I am a fairy; I give my orders to the wind, and it obeys me like a submissive slave; I can see the treasures in the mine; I am the virgin whom pearls rush to meet, and----”
”And we walk unharmed on the Falberg,” Minna put in.