Phantastes: A Faerie Romance for Men and Women
intimations from the senses, the two ladies, who sat beside her, spoke
in the gentlest tones of subdued sorrow. “She has lain so for an hour.”
“This cannot last long, I fear.”
“How much thinner she has grown within the last few weeks! If she would
only speak, and explain what she suffers, it would be better for her. I
think she has visions in her trances, but nothing can induce her to
refer to them when she is awake.”
“Does she ever speak in these trances?”
“I have never heard her; but they say she walks sometimes, and once put
the whole household in a terrible fright by disappearing for a whole
hour, and returning drenched with rain, and almost dead with exhaustion
and fright. But even then she would give no account of what had
happened.”
A scarce audible murmur from the yet motionless lips of the lady here
startled her attendants. After several ineffectual attempts at
articulation, the word “_Cosmo!_” burst from her. Then she lay still as
before; but only for a moment. With a wild cry, she sprang from the
couch erect on the floor, flung her arms above her head, with clasped
and straining hands, and, her wide eyes flashing with light, called
aloud, with a voice exultant as that of a spirit bursting from a
sepulchre, “I am free! I am free! I thank thee!” Then she flung herself
on the couch, and sobbed; then rose, and paced wildly up and down the
room, with gestures of mingled delight and anxiety. Then turning to her
motionless attendants—“Quick, Lisa, my cloak and hood!” Then lower—“I
must go to him. Make haste, Lisa! You may come with me, if you will.”
In another moment they were in the street, hurrying along towards one
of the bridges over the Moldau. The moon was near the zenith, and the
streets were almost empty. The Princess soon outstripped her attendant,
and was half-way over the bridge, before the other reached it.
“Are you free, lady? The mirror is broken: are you free?”
The words were spoken close beside her, as she hurried on. She turned;
and there, leaning on the parapet in a recess of the bridge, stood
Cosmo, in a splendid dress, but with a white and quivering face.
“Cosmo!—I am free—and thy servant for ever. I was coming to you now.”
“And I to you, for Death made me bold; but I could get no further. Have
I atoned at all? Do I love you a little—truly?”
“Ah, I know now that you love me, my Cosmo; but what do you say about
death?”
He did not reply. His hand was pressed against his side. She looked
more closely: the blood was welling from between the fingers. She flung
her arms around him with a faint bitter wail.
When Lisa came up, she found her mistress kneeling above a wan dead
face, which smiled on in the spectral moonbeams.
And now I will say no more about these wondrous volumes; though I could
tell many a tale out of them, and could, perhaps, vaguely represent
some entrancing thoughts of a deeper kind which I found within them.
From many a sultry noon till twilight, did I sit in that grand hall,
buried and risen again in these old books. And I trust I have carried
away in my soul some of the exhalations of their undying leaves. In
after hours of deserved or needful sorrow, portions of what I read
there have often come to me again, with an unexpected comforting; which
was not fruitless, even though the comfort might seem in itself
groundless and vain.
CHAPTER XIV
“Your gallery
Have we pass’d through, not without much content
In many singularities; but we saw not
That which my daughter came to look upon,
The state of her mother.”
_Winter’s Tale_.
It seemed to me strange, that all this time I had heard no music in the
fairy palace. I was convinced there must be music in it, but that my
sense was as yet too gross to receive the influence of those mysterious
motions that beget sound. Sometimes I felt sure, from the way the few
figures of which I got such transitory glimpses passed me, or glided
into vacancy before me, that they were moving to the law of music; and,
in fact, several times I fancied for a moment that I heard a few
wondrous tones coming I knew not whence. But they did not last long
enough to convince me that I had heard them with the bodily sense. Such
as they were, however, they took strange liberties with me, causing me
to burst suddenly into tears, of which there was no presence to make me
ashamed, or casting me into a kind of trance of speechless delight,
which, passing as suddenly, left me faint and longing for more.
Now, on an evening, before I had been a week in the palace, I was
wandering through one lighted arcade and corridor after another. At
length I arrived, through a door that closed behind me, in another vast
hall of the palace. It was filled with a subdued crimson light; by
which I saw that slender pillars of black, built close to walls of
white marble, rose to a great height, and then, dividing into
innumerable divergent arches, supported a roof, like the walls, of
white marble, upon which the arches intersected intricately, forming a
fretting of black upon the white, like the network of a skeleton-leaf.
The floor was black.
Between several pairs of the pillars upon every side, the place of the
wall behind was occupied by a crimson curtain of thick silk, hanging in
heavy and rich folds. Behind each of these curtains burned a powerful
light, and these were the sources of the glow that filled the hall. A
peculiar delicious odour pervaded the place. As soon as I entered, the
old inspiration seemed to return to me, for I felt a strong impulse to
sing; or rather, it seemed as if some one else was singing a song in my
soul, which wanted to come forth at my lips, imbodied in my breath. But
I kept silence; and feeling somewhat overcome by the red light and the
perfume, as well as by the emotion within me, and seeing at one end of
the hall a great crimson chair, more like a throne than a chair, beside
a table of white marble, I went to it, and, throwing myself in it, gave
myself up to a succession of images of bewildering beauty, which passed
before my inward eye, in a long and occasionally crowded train. Here I
sat for hours, I suppose; till, returning somewhat to myself, I saw
that the red light had paled away, and felt a cool gentle breath
gliding over my forehead. I rose and left the hall with unsteady steps,
finding my way with some difficulty to my own chamber, and faintly
remembering, as I went, that only in the marble cave, before I found
the sleeping statue, had I ever had a similar experience.
After this, I repaired every morning to the same hall; where I
sometimes sat in the chair and dreamed deliciously, and sometimes
walked up and down over the black floor. Sometimes I acted within
myself a whole drama, during one of these perambulations; sometimes
walked deliberately through the whole epic of a tale; sometimes
ventured to sing a song, though with a shrinking fear of I knew not
what. I was astonished at the beauty of my own voice as it rang through
the place, or rather crept undulating, like a serpent of sound, along
the walls and roof of this superb music-hall. Entrancing verses arose
within me as of their own accord, chanting themselves to their own
melodies, and requiring no addition of music to satisfy the inward
sense. But, ever in the pauses of these, when the singing mood was upon
me, I seemed to hear something like the distant sound of multitudes of
dancers, and felt as if it was the unheard music, moving their rhythmic
motion, that within me blossomed in verse and song. I felt, too, that
could I but see the dance, I should, from the harmony of complicated
movements, not of the dancers in relation to each other merely, but of
each dancer individually in the manifested plastic power that moved the
consenting harmonious form, understand the whole of the music on the
billows of which they floated and swung.
At length, one night, suddenly, when this feeling of dancing came upon
me, I bethought me of lifting one of the crimson curtains, and looking
if, perchance, behind it there might not be hid some other mystery,
which might at least remove a step further the bewilderment of the
present one. Nor was I altogether disappointed. I walked to one of the
magnificent draperies, lifted a corner, and peeped in. There, burned a
great, crimson, globe-shaped light, high in the cubical centre of
another hall, which might be larger or less than that in which I stood,
for its dimensions were not easily perceived, seeing that floor and
roof and walls were entirely of black marble.
The roof was supported by the same arrangement of pillars radiating in
arches, as that of the first hall; only, here, the pillars and arches
were of dark red. But what absorbed my delighted gaze, was an
innumerable assembly of white marble statues, of every form, and in
multitudinous posture, filling the hall throughout. These stood, in the
ruddy glow of the great lamp, upon pedestals of jet black. Around the
lamp shone in golden letters, plainly legible from where I stood, the
two words—
TOUCH NOT!
There was in all this, however, no solution to the sound of dancing;
and now I was aware that the influence on my mind had ceased. I did not
go in that evening, for I was weary and faint, but I hoarded up the
expectation of entering, as of a great coming joy.
Next night I walked, as on the preceding, through the hall. My mind was
filled with pictures and songs, and therewith so much absorbed, that I
did not for some time think of looking within the curtain I had last
night lifted. When the thought of doing so occurred to me first, I
happened to be within a few yards of it. I became conscious, at the
same moment, that the sound of dancing had been for some time in my
ears. I approached the curtain quickly, and, lifting it, entered the
black hall. Everything was still as death. I should have concluded that
the sound must have proceeded from some other more distant quarter,
which conclusion its faintness would, in ordinary circumstances, have
necessitated from the first; but there was a something about the
statues that caused me still to remain in doubt. As I said, each stood
perfectly still upon its black pedestal: but there was about every one
a certain air, not of motion, but as if it had just ceased from
movement; as if the rest were not altogether of the marbly stillness of
thousands of years. It was as if the peculiar atmosphere of each had
yet a kind of invisible tremulousness; as if its agitated wavelets had
not yet subsided into a perfect calm. I had the suspicion that they had
anticipated my appearance, and had sprung, each, from the living joy of
the dance, to the death-silence and blackness of its isolated pedestal,
just before I entered. I walked across the central hall to the curtain
opposite the one I had lifted, and, entering there, found all the
appearances similar; only that the statues were different, and
differently grouped. Neither did they produce on my mind that
impression—of motion just expired, which I had experienced from the
others. I found that behind every one of the crimson curtains was a
similar hall, similarly lighted, and similarly occupied.
The next night, I did not allow my thoughts to be absorbed as before
with inward images, but crept stealthily along to the furthest curtain
in the hall, from behind which, likewise, I had formerly seemed to hear
the sound of dancing. I drew aside its edge as suddenly as I could,
and, looking in, saw that the utmost stillness pervaded the vast place.
I walked in, and passed through it to the other end.
There I found that it communicated with a circular corridor, divided
from it only by two rows of red columns. This corridor, which was
black, with red niches holding statues, ran entirely about the