"Yes," answered the young girl, weeping; "We must lose him!""Mademoiselle," cried Wilfrid, endeavoring to repress the loud tones of his angry voice, "do not jest with me.You can love Seraphita only as one young girl can love another, and not with the love which she inspires in me.You do not know your danger if my jealousy were really aroused.Why can I not go to her? Is it you who stand in my way?""I do not know by what right you probe my heart," said Minna, calm in appearance, but inwardly terrified."Yes, I love him," she said, recovering the courage of her convictions, that she might, for once, confess the religion of her heart."But my jealousy, natural as it is in love, fears no one here below.Alas! I am jealous of a secret feeling that absorbs him.Between him and me there is a great gulf fixed which I cannot cross.Would that I knew who loves him best, the stars or I! which of us would sacrifice our being most eagerly for his happiness! Why should I not be free to avow my love? In the presence of death we may declare our feelings,--and Seraphitus is about to die.""Minna, you are mistaken; the siren I so love and long for, she, whom I have seen, feeble and languid, on her couch of furs, is not a young man.""Monsieur," answered Minna, distressfully, "the being whose powerful hand guided me on the Falberg, who led me to the saeter sheltered beneath the Ice-Cap, there--" she said, pointing to the peak, "is not a feeble girl.Ah, had you but heard him prophesying! His poem was the music of thought.A young girl never uttered those solemn tones of a voice which stirred my soul.""What certainty have you?" said Wilfrid.
"None but that of the heart," answered Minna.
"And I," cried Wilfrid, casting on his companion the terrible glance of the earthly desire that kills, "I, too, know how powerful is her empire over me, and I will undeceive you."At this moment, while the words were rushing from Wilfrid's lips as rapidly as the thoughts surged in his brain, they saw Seraphita coming towards them from the house, followed by David.The apparition calmed the man's excitement.
"Look," he said, "could any but a woman move with that grace and langor?""He suffers; he comes forth for the last time," said Minna.
David went back at a sign from his mistress, who advanced towards Wilfrid and Minna.
"Let us go to the falls of the Sieg," she said, expressing one of those desires which suddenly possess the sick and which the well hasten to obey.
A thin white mist covered the valleys around the fiord and the sides of the mountains, whose icy summits, sparkling like stars, pierced the vapor and gave it the appearance of a moving milky way.The sun was visible through the haze like a globe of red fire.Though winter still lingered, puffs of warm air laden with the scent of the birch-trees, already adorned with their rosy efflorescence, and of the larches, whose silken tassels were beginning to appear,--breezes tempered by the incense and the sighs of earth,--gave token of the glorious Northern spring, the rapid, fleeting joy of that most melancholy of Natures.The wind was beginning to lift the veil of mist which half-obscured the gulf.The birds sang.The bark of the trees where the sun had not yet dried the clinging hoar-frost shone gayly to the eye in its fantastic wreathings which trickled away in murmuring rivulets as the warmth reached them.The three friends walked in silence along the shore.Wilfrid and Minna alone noticed the magic transformation that was taking place in the monotonous picture of the winter landscape.
Their companion walked in thought, as though a voice were sounding to her ears in this concert of Nature.
Presently they reached the ledge of rocks through which the Sieg had forced its way, after escaping from the long avenue cut by its waters in an undulating line through the forest,--a fluvial pathway flanked by aged firs and roofed with strong-ribbed arches like those of a cathedral.Looking back from that vantage-ground, the whole extent of the fiord could be seen at a glance, with the open sea sparkling on the horizon beyond it like a burnished blade.
At this moment the mist, rolling away, left the sky blue and clear.
Among the valleys and around the trees flitted the shining fragments, --a diamond dust swept by the freshening breeze.The torrent rolled on toward them; along its length a vapor rose, tinted by the sun with every color of his light; the decomposing rays flashing prismatic fires along the many-tinted scarf of waters.The rugged ledge on which they stood was carpeted by several kinds of lichen, forming a noble mat variegated by moisture and lustrous like the sheen of a silken fabric.Shrubs, already in bloom, crowned the rocks with garlands.
Their waving foliage, eager for the freshness of the water, drooped its tresses above the stream; the larches shook their light fringes and played with the pines, stiff and motionless as aged men.This luxuriant beauty was foiled by the solemn colonnades of the forest-trees, rising in terraces upon the mountains, and by the calm sheet of the fiord, lying below, where the torrent buried its fury and was still.Beyond, the sea hemmed in this page of Nature, written by the greatest of poets, Chance; to whom the wild luxuriance of creation when apparently abandoned to itself is owing.
The village of Jarvis was a lost point in the landscape, in this immensity of Nature, sublime at this moment like all things else of ephemeral life which present a fleeting image of perfection; for, by a law fatal to no eyes but our own, creations which appear complete--the love of our heart and the desire of our eyes--have but one spring-tide here below.Standing on this breast-work of rock these three persons might well suppose themselves alone in the universe.
"What beauty!" cried Wilfrid.
"Nature sings hymns," said Seraphita."Is not her music exquisite?