But Wilfrid now encountered the wall of brass for which he had been seeking up and down the earth.He went impetuously to Seraphita, meaning to express the whole force and bearing of a passion under which he bounded like the fabled horse beneath the iron horseman, firm in his saddle, whom nothing moves while the efforts of the fiery animal only made the rider heavier and more solid.He sought her to relate his life,--to prove the grandeur of his soul by the grandeur of his faults, to show the ruins of his desert.But no sooner had he crossed her threshold, and found himself within the zone of those eyes of scintillating azure, that met no limits forward and left none behind, than he grew calm and submissive, as a lion, springing on his prey in the plains of Africa, receives from the wings of the wind a message of love, and stops his bound.A gulf opened before him, into which his frenzied words fell and disappeared, and from which uprose a voice which changed his being; he became as a child, a child of sixteen, timid and frightened before this maiden with serene brow, this white figure whose inalterable calm was like the cruel impassibility of human justice.The combat between them had never ceased until this evening, when with a glance she brought him down, as a falcon making his dizzy spirals in the air around his prey causes it to fall stupefied to earth, before carrying it to his eyrie.
We may note within ourselves many a long struggle the end of which is one of our own actions,--struggles which are, as it were, the reverse side of humanity.This reverse side belongs to God; the obverse side to men.More than once Seraphita had proved to Wilfrid that she knew this hidden and ever varied side, which is to the majority of men a second being.Often she said to him in her dove-like voice: "Why all this vehemence?" when on his way to her he had sworn she should be his.Wilfrid was, however, strong enough to raise the cry of revolt to which he had given utterance in Monsieur Becker's study.The narrative of the old pastor had calmed him.Sceptical and derisive as he was, he saw belief like a sidereal brilliance dawning on his life.He asked himself if Seraphita were not an exile from the higher spheres seeking the homeward way.The fanciful deifications of all ordinary lovers he could not give to this lily of Norway in whose divinity he believed.
Why lived she here beside this fiord? What did she? Questions that received no answer filled his mind.Above all, what was about to happen between them? What fate had brought him there? To him, Seraphita was the motionless marble, light nevertheless as a vapor, which Minna had seen that day poised above the precipices of the Falberg.Could she thus stand on the edge of all gulfs without danger, without a tremor of the arching eyebrows, or a quiver of the light of the eye? If his love was to be without hope, it was not without curiosity.
From the moment when Wilfrid suspected the ethereal nature of the enchantress who had told him the secrets of his life in melodious utterance, he had longed to try to subject her, to keep her to himself, to tear her from the heaven where, perhaps, she was awaited.
Earth and Humanity seized their prey; he would imitate them.His pride, the only sentiment through which man can long be exalted, would make him happy in this triumph for the rest of his life.The idea sent the blood boiling through his veins, and his heart swelled.If he did not succeed, he would destroy her,--it is so natural to destroy that which we cannot possess, to deny what we cannot comprehend, to insult that which we envy.
On the morrow, Wilfrid, laden with ideas which the extraordinary events of the previous night naturally awakened in his mind, resolved to question David, and went to find him on the pretext of asking after Seraphita's health.Though Monsieur Becker spoke of the old servant as falling into dotage, Wilfrid relied on his own perspicacity to discover scraps of truth in the torrent of the old man's rambling talk.
David had the immovable, undecided, physiognomy of an octogenarian.
Under his white hair lay a forehead lined with wrinkles like the stone courses of a ruined wall; and his face was furrowed like the bed of a dried-up torrent.His life seemed to have retreated wholly to the eyes, where light still shone, though its gleams were obscured by a mistiness which seemed to indicate either an active mental alienation or the stupid stare of drunkenness.His slow and heavy movements betrayed the glacial weight of age, and communicated an icy influence to whoever allowed themselves to look long at him,--for he possessed the magnetic force of torpor.His limited intelligence was only roused by the sight, the hearing, or the recollection of his mistress.She was the soul of this wholly material fragment of an existence.Any one seeing David alone by himself would have thought him a corpse; let Seraphita enter, let her voice be heard, or a mention of her be made, and the dead came forth from his grave and recovered speech and motion.The dry bones were not more truly awakened by the divine breath in the valley of Jehoshaphat, and never was that apocalyptic vision better realized than in this Lazarus issuing from the sepulchre into life at the voice of a young girl.His language, which was always figurative and often incomprehensible, prevented the inhabitants of the village from talking with him; but they respected a mind that deviated so utterly from common ways,--a thing which the masses instinctively admire.
Wilfrid found him in the antechamber, apparently asleep beside the stove.Like a dog who recognizes a friend of the family, the old man raised his eyes, saw the foreigner, and did not stir.
"Where is she?" inquired Wilfrid, sitting down beside him.
David fluttered his fingers in the air as if to express the flight of a bird.
"Does she still suffer?" asked Wilfrid.
