Villa Eden: The Country-House on the Rhine

"Don't forget, Captain, that I have told you so this day. I know a little something about men. I have never had a word from Baron Pranken except the question, 'Where is the Major?' He never addressed me myself in any way, and I do not take it ill of him, but still, for all that, I know him."

Eric's countenance brightened; he had no reason for putting faith in Fräulein Milch's conjecture, and still he did put faith in it. And now it occurred to him, that he had joyfully anticipated something, he knew not what, to-day; now he had experienced it.

He accompanied Fräulein Milch home. The Major was not in; he had gone to the castle, for there was still a great deal to be done, to be ready for the solemn opening of the castle-which was soon to take place.

Eric turned back and went, to his mother's.

CHAPTER XIII.

A GRACIOUS HAND POURS OUT THE WINE

"Are you, too, down-hearted and meditative?" cried the Doctor, meeting him as he was entering the house. "I find here a whole colony of low-spirited people. What is there then in this whole affair so discouraging? Herr Sonnenkamp is getting new clothes and a new equipage made. In old times, I still remember them, a commoner did not dare to drive out in a coach and four, or, if he did, the horses had to be put in hempen traces. Well, Herr Sonnenkamp is getting leather traces made. What of that? Frau Ceres is sick, Manna is sick, the Professorin is sick, the Captain looks sick; Fräulein Perini and your aunt are the only ones in health in the hospital. Effervescing powders must be the prescription for everybody to-day." The Doctor brought with him a cheerful tone, which, like a spicy breeze from the mountain forests, was sweeping away the mists. The Mother could not tell why she was so uneasy, Eric could not tell why he was. The Doctor counselled Eric to take shares in the new mine; and keep his knowledge as a jewel for himself.

They had discovered a new stratum of manganese in the soil of Mattenheim; his son-in-law had been to see him, and had said a great deal to him about the favorable impression Eric had left behind him in the family there.

The Doctor took Eric back to the villa with him, and just as they were entering the courtyard there came a telegram to Eric. It was from Herr Sonnenkamp, and contained a request that he would let Frau Ceres know that at that very moment he was on his way to court.

The Doctor undertook the responsibility of holding back this news from Frau Ceres; she was near enough to delirium without that; he had ordered her a sleeping potion.

At table appeared Fräulein Perini, Manna, and Eric. After the first course, Fräulein Perini was called to Frau Ceres, and did not come back.

Manna and Eric were left alone.

"You were also in the church to-day," said Manna.

"Yes."

"I must beg your forgiveness, I have done you wrong."

"Done me wrong?"

"Yes, I thought you were without religion."

"So I am, according to strict opinions."

Manna said nothing; she laid the bit she was just raising to her mouth down again on her plate. Both sat silent, opposite each other, for a long while; each was seeking after a safe topic of conversation.

"You had a younger brother whom you have lost? I heard you speaking of him to-day," began Manna, blushing up to her temples.

"Yes, he was of the age of Roland, and this very day I have been wondering why I could not be as much to my dear brother as I have been to our Roland."

"Do not say have been; you are still, and will remain so to him. Roland repeated to me, an expression of yours: 'Friends who can forsake one another were never friends.'"

"Certainly, but what comfort is that thought, if one no longer breaks the daily bread of life with another? I have known, however, that this separation must occur, I have recognized it as necessary; and still, for the first time, I see how almost constantly, for a long while, I have thought of nothing, felt nothing, experienced nothing, but that I forthwith connected Roland with it, – living only for him. Now the whole bent of my thoughts must be changed, a new object found, for the old chain is crushed, severed, cast off, and I feel so homeless and forlorn."

"I understand that perfectly," said Manna, as Eric paused for a moment.

She sipped the wine that stood before her.

Eric continued: —

"I have a poetic friend, a peculiar man, who takes everything terribly hard: he is a man, who, with his whole soul, unreservedly and exclusively, forgetful of all else, loves his calling. He complained to me once how empty, lonely and forsaken he seemed to himself, when he had put the finishing stroke to a work which was then about to go forth from him into the wide world, to find its home everywhere, and to remain with him no more. He had devoted all his thought and feeling, night and day, to the creations of his fancy, and now they had wandered across the sea into another world, there to be no longer his. He could not withdraw his thoughts from them, and yet he could do nothing more for them, for their clearer presentation, for their perfect development. Yes, my dear Fräulein, and these are only creations of the fancy that forsake the man and make him so lonely. How much stronger must the feeling be then, when a living man, who has taken root in our soul, has forsaken us."

Manna was gazing full at him; big tears hung on her long eye-lashes, and she saw a dewy lustre in his; she folded her hands on the table, and quietly looked into Eric's countenance.

He felt this look, and said confusedly: —

"Forgive my egotism in speaking only of myself. I would not put any further burden upon the sister, and I can straightway give you the consolation which I have found for myself, and which will serve for you too. We have no right to give our soul one exclusive interest, and in that way lose sight of all the world beside; our soul must be satisfied to feel that there are other things in the world, of which account must be taken. Only, in the sense of desertion, while this inevitable wound still bleeds, one can do nothing else than wait quietly, and compose one's self in the thought of the fullness of the powers of the world, and the fullness of the duties and joys which lie in our fitness to use those powers. Ah, my dear Fräulein," he said, interrupting himself, "my mother likes to tell of an old parson, who cried out to his congregation: – 'Children, I preach not for you alone, I preach also for myself; I have need of it.'"

A smile flitted across Manna's countenance, and Eric smiled too.

"Yes, so it is!" he continued, "it is not to the isolated, to the wandering, to the changeable, but to the Everlasting, we should devote our service; to the Spirit abiding in the universal, that we should be submissive, until he calls us to another post. Whither? Wherefore? Who can say? We experience the death of sweet individual relations, to enter anew into the grand community of the eternal whole."

"You are without religion – no; you shall not say that of yourself, you are not irreligious," exclaimed Manna.

"Many hold me for a laggard, others as cowardly and obsequious, because I believe in God, in a wise consistency and gracious providence, in the events which we meet in the history of mankind in general, and in the course of life of individual men in particular."

Manna's cheeks were glowing, she unfolded her hands, she stretched forth her hand as if she wished to give it to Eric, but, on its way, it seized the flask and she said: —

"We are so grave; and really, am I not a sorry hostess?"

She poured out the wine for him, he drank it at a draught, and while he was drinking, his gaze rested on Manna. She knew that he was contemplating her, she cast down her eyes.

"I must make still another acknowledgment to you," she said. She stopped as if waiting for breath, then she continued: —

"As you were speaking of your being now so sad because you can do nothing more for Roland, it was becoming clearer and clearer to me anew what happiness, what faith I also have lost."

She closed her eyes, she breathed heavily; then she opened her eyes once more, and said: —

"I believed at one time that one could pray for another, for one absent, a distant one, wherever and whatever he might be; I believed that one could sacrifice himself for another, and everything would be atoned for. Ah! now I believe so no more."

Eric made no answer; he knew with what a struggle this acknowledgment was wrung from her lips. Silent they sat opposite each other, and a thrill went through Eric. Now he knew that Manna loved him, for only to the man she loved could she have confided what she had. A spiritual cloud of joy and of grief seemed around him; this maiden loved him and he loved her, her with such a dowry from such a father.

Luckily, a servant entered and told Eric that his mother was expecting him.

"I will accompany you," said Manna, rising. She went to get her hat.

Eric was standing in the dining-hall; the plates and glasses and dishes were dancing before his eyes. Manna returned quickly; her countenance was more serene than ever; she was once more the young maiden, she had the clear voice and the brisk movement of youthfulness, as she made a gentle bow, and invited Eric to go with her. They were detained in the entrance hall; a package for Manna had been received.

"Ah! the silk dress from the Moravians," she said. "I suppose you know, Captain, that these people are not of our church, and still they get their support from the church. Or are you a contemner, of the Moravians, also?"

"'Contemner' is not my word, but I find their conduct inconsistent. They are constantly preaching simplicity, renunciation of self, contempt of show, and of worldly enjoyments, and they trade in silken goods and, Havana cigars; they rely on the sinfulness of other men just like the mendicant friar who says: 'I will not work and earn money, but of course others should earn money for me to beg.'"

"Take in the package," said Manna to the servant.

She walked quietly on with Eric.

CHAPTER XIV.

FROM SIBYLLINE BOOKS

On the way Manna said: —

"Do you know that I had an aversion for you, when I came here?"

"Yes indeed, I knew it."

"And why didn't you try to convert me from it?"

Eric was silent, and Manna asked him once more: —

"Is it then a matter of so much indifference to you what people think of you?"

"No, but I am a servant of your house, and have no right to seek for any special consideration in your sight."

"You are very proud."

"I do not deny it."

"Don't you know that pride is a fault?"

"To be sure, when one makes pretensions and detracts from the worth of others. But I keep my pride for myself alone, or rather, I say with St. Simon: – 'If I consider myself I feel dejected, if I consider my fellow-men I feel proud.'"

"You are too: clever for me," said Manna, banteringly.

"I don't like to hear you say so, for those are only empty words. No man is too clever for another, if each one says to himself: 'I have something in my own way too. You should not make use of such expressions. My respect for you rests upon the very fact that I never before heard from you an empty phrase. What you say is not always logically true, but it is true for you."

"I thank you." Said Manna quickly, resting the tips of her fingers upon his hand; and, as if recollecting herself, she added hastily once more: —

"I thank you."

"I know not why it is; I have been delivered from an oppressive melancholy, and I feel as if it was a whole year since I was so sad. We have the good fortune to understand each other in the highest, thoughts, and thought in the highest strain admits no measurement of time."

"Ah yes," rejoined Manna, "in the very midst of all my sorrows the thought has been present to me all day: 'Something is coming that will give you joy.' Now I know what it was. You were the friend and instructor of Roland; take me instead of him; be my friend and instructor. Will you?"

She stretched out her hand to him, and both gazed at each other with a look of joy.

"Ah, there sits your mother," cried Manna all at once; with a swift step she hastened to the Professorin, and kissed her passionately.

The Professorin was astonished to see her. Is this the same maiden at whose bedside she had sat the evening before, whose chilled hands she had warmed, to whom she had spoken the words of encouragement? Youth is an everlasting riddle.

Manna held her hand to her eyes for some time, and as she opened them once more, she said: —

"Ah, if I only were the bird up there in the air!"

The mother made no answer, and Manna continued: —

"I see everything to-day for the first time; there is the Rhine, there are the mountains, there the houses, there the men; a bird of passage, – yes, one that has been hatched in Asia. – is coming towards us, towards you. I am really so sorrowful, so sad; and still there is something within me singing lustily and singing always; 'Thou art merry, do not seek to be otherwise.' Ah, mother, it is dreadfully sinful to be as I am."

"No, my child, you are still a child, and a child, they say, has smiles and tears in the same bag. Rejoice that you are so young; perhaps something of childhood has been repressed in you, and now it is coming out. No one can say when, and no one can say where. We take things too hard altogether; things are not quite so frightful as we women imagine. I am quite cheerful since the Doctor was here. We may become accustomed to look at everything in a gloomy way; then it is well if some one comes and says: 'But just see the world is neither so wicked not so good as we persuade ourselves it! is, and things run on either well or ill, and not in their logical course.' My blessed husband said that many and many a time."

Manna seemed not to have heard what the Mother said; she exclaimed in a merry tone: —

"At this moment we are all ennobled, and still I do not perceive anything of the nobility in me, and yet one ought to be able to perceive something."

There was an unusually light-hearted tone in everything she said, and she continued: —

"Tell me now, how did you feel on the day you laid aside your nobility?"

"No trace of sorrow; it only pained me when my lady friends assured me strongly that they would always remain the same to me; and in this very assurance lay the conviction that it was otherwise; and they were all the time telling me how they had loved me, as if I were no longer living, and indeed to many I was already dead, for to them a human being that has lost the rank of noble, is, as it were, sunk into the realm of the departed spirits."

The Mother and Manna sat trustfully beside each other; for a time every sorrow was forgotten, every care, every anxiety.

Eric had left the Mother and Manna alone; he was standing near a rose-bush and observing how the rose leaves were falling off, so softly, so quietly, as if plucked by a spirit-hand. He gazed at the leaves on the ground, he knew not his thoughts. Roland, Manna, his mother, the terrible past of Sonnenkamp, all was confusion in his mind; he believed that he no longer saw the world as it is. If he only had some one to call him to himself. He felt how his cheeks were glowing, and how he was trembling.

You love and are beloved by this maiden, by the daughter of this man.

What is a daughter?

Every one exists for himself alone.

On the ground floor was his father's library; the windows were open; he went in.

It entered into his mind that there must be something in the manuscripts left by his father that would give him consolation and support; perhaps the spirit of his father would speak to his joyful and sorrowful perplexity. He began to search amongst the papers; everything seemed to be ready for his hand that was not wanted. He untied a bundle of pieces, the superscription of which bore the title, "Sibylline Books;" he took up a leaf.

"That's the thing!" he exclaimed.

He was standing with his back leaned against the open window; he heard his mother advising Manna to adhere right steadfastly and faithfully to her religious convictions. There were, it is true, forms and observances in it which she did not recognize as her own, but there was also in it the indwelling of the Holy Ghost, which alone gives us strength to bear misfortune and sustain joy.

"Mother," he called out, suddenly turning round.

The women started.

"Mother, I bring you something that carries on your idea."

He went out, showed them his father's writing, and said that he would read to them.

"Ah yes," exclaimed Manna; "it is good and kind of you to bring your father here; how I would have liked to know him. Do you not believe that he is now looking down upon us?"

Eric looked at his mother; he did not know what answer to give, and the Mother said: —

"According to the ordinary conception of the word 'looking,' we cannot conceive its being done without eyes. We have no conception how a spirit exists, but there is not a day nor an hour that I do not live in communion with my departed husband; he has come with me here, he will remain with me wherever I go, till my last breath. But let me see – what is it, Eric?"

"It has an odd title," answered the latter; "it treats of these things, which I cannot explain, and which perhaps no one can explain."

"Read, I beg of you," entreated Manna.

Eric began to read: —

"Two things there are which stand firm, while the heart of man is kept vacillating between defiance and despondency, haughtiness and faint-heartedness; they are nature and the ideal within us. The church is also a strong-hold of the ideal, firm and secure; although for me and many like me, it is not the only one.

"You say, nature does not help us. What help is she to me, when the crushing conviction of imperfection, of perdition, of guilt comes upon me and takes me captive? Well, nature does not speak; she simply permits herself to be explained, understood; she gives back the echo of what we call out to her. The church, on the contrary, speaks to us in our individual griefs, she takes us up into the universal; that is the great lesson of the expiatory suffering. We lay our grief aside when we think of the great grief which the greatest of hearts took unto itself.

"And what is the third? you ask.

"A third is, nature and the ideal combined, which together elevate and sustain us.

"What is the third? We call it art, we can also call it love, heroism. In this view of mine, all philosophy also belongs to art. What the genius of a man has created and fashioned out of himself as the evidence of his existence, insight, and will, appears in art as visible forms, looks down upon us in marble and in color, makes itself heard by us in word and in melody, allows us to be conscious and to feel sure that our fractional, half-expressed being has fullness and completion.

"These are the images, these are the deeds of genius, wrought in consecrated moments.

"Art does not console sorrow, it does not heal directly, but it brings before the eyes, it sounds in the ear, saying, 'Attend! there is a life, pure and perfect, that we carry within us. Art is an image of strength, of joy, of content, of courage; it does not reach out its hand to us, it simply enables us to compose ourselves in the knowledge, in the consciousness, in the perception of an existence reposing in itself outside of us; this we comprehend.'"

Eric interrupted himself, saying: —

"Here the remark is made: 'I knew a woman once, who would neither make nor listen to music during her period of mourning, showing what art was to her.'"

A pause followed.

Eric continued his reading: —

"In the hours of deepest tribulation I have found consolation, peace, restoration, solely in wandering among ancient works of art; others may derive the same benefit from music that I have from viewing these forms of antiquity. It was not the thought of the grand world which had here become bronze and marble; it was not the remembrance of the soul speaking out of these forms that held me fast, but something far different from either. Behold here, they seemed to say to me, a blissful repose, which has nothing in common with thee, and yet is with thee. A breath of the Eternal was wafted over me, a peaceful rest flowed into my troubled heart, filled my gaze, and calmed my emotions. In listening to music I could always dwell dreamily upon my own life and thought, but never here.

"If I were only able to unfold whither this led me, how I wandered in the infinite, and then how I went abroad into the tumultuous whirl of life, feeling that I was attended by these steadfast, peaceful, godlike forms; that I was-"

Eric broke off abruptly.

Manna begged: —

"Do read on."

"There is nothing further. My beloved father, alas! left only fragments behind him."

"This is no fragment, it is complete and perfect. No man could say or write anything further," said Manna; "nothing else is needed but to allow it to have its inward work. Ah, I have one request – give me the sheet."

Eric looked towards his mother, who said that she had never yet parted with a single line of her husband's.

"But you, my child," she said, "you shall have it. Eric shall copy it for us so that we may not lose it."

She gave the manuscript to Manna, who pressed it to her heaving breast.

"Oh, I never imagined," she cried, "that there was such a world in the world."

Every drop of blood seemed to have retreated from her face; she begged the Mother to be allowed to go into the house; she would like to be alone, she was so weary.

The Mother accompanied her. Manna reclined upon the sofa, and the curtains were drawn; she fell asleep with the manuscript in her hand.

The Mother and Eric sat together, and Eric determined to make use of this first opportunity, when there was no immediate duty binding him, to publish the incomplete and fragmentary writings left by his father, as there would be found many to make them into a whole within their own souls.

He now felt all at once free and full of life; now there was something for him to do; and he could fulfil at the same time a pious, filial duty, and his duty as a man. He could make essential additions from his own knowledge, and from his father's verbal statements.

He went back to the library, and was deeply engaged in the writings, when Manna entered.

"You here?" she said. "I wanted to take one look at the outside of all the books on which your father's eye has rested. I must now go home, but I have to day received a great deal more than I can tell."

"May I accompany you?"

Manna assented.

They went together across the meadow to the Villa.

CHAPTER XV.

EVERYTHING IN FLAMES

With lingering step they walked by each other's side, Manna often looking aside to survey the landscape, and yet conscious all the time that Eric was observing her. And then Eric would turn away, still feeling that her eye rested upon him.

"You are happy in possessing the thoughts of such a father," said Manna, feelingly.

Eric could make no reply, for the feeling oppressed him, how the poor rich child would be overwhelmed, if she knew what he did concerning her own father; he had no conception that Manna's words were wrung out by this very tribulation.

"I cannot become the heir of my father's thoughts," he said, after an interval. "Each child must live out his own life."

They continued to walk side by side, and it seemed to them, at every step, that they must stop and hold each other in a loving embrace.

"Roland and my father are now on their way home," said Manna.

"And Herr von Pranken also," Eric was about to add, but refrained from doing it.

Manna perhaps felt that he might think strangely of her omitting to mention Pranken's name, and she asked: —

"Were not you and Baron von Pranken formerly intimate friends?"

"We were comrades, never friends."

They were silent again; there were so many things to be spoken of, crowding upon both of them, that they did not seem to know where to begin.

The evening bell tolled, and Manna saw that Eric did not remove his hat. She trembled. Every thing stood as an obstacle between them; even the Church separated them from each other.

Manna wore around her waist, beneath her clothes, a small hempen cord that a nun had given her as a perpetual reminder of her promise to assume in public the hempen girdle. It seemed to her now as if the hidden cord were suddenly tightened, and then it appeared to have become loosened. With her left hand she grasped tightly a tree by the road-side, and breathed heavily.