by Charles W. Brooks.
Originally published in Ainsworth's Magazine: A Miscellany of Romance (Chapman and Hall) vol.5 #3 (Mar 1844).
Fatigued with waltzing, yet desirous to give philosophy a turn, Adolph left the brilliant saloon of the Baron von Neuburg, and wandered down the wild and spacious gardens, with his hands behind him and the Rhine before him. Alternately apostrophizing the stars, and anathematizing the steep descent of the path, Adolph von Rosenheim reached the bank of the stream. It was a lovely summer night, more fit for dreaming than for dancing, but then the roads to the castle were so bad in other weather, that the ladies of the neighbourhood had agreed to compound for the certainty of not sticking in their way by taking the chance of fainting in the waltz. The ladies were right; there is some romance in a swoon, but none in a slough, except the Slough of Despond, into which indeed many romances bring us.
As he arrived at the river, his walk and his wrath ended together, and ere he had watched the bright waters, leaping in the moonlight, for many minutes, he had returned to the conviction that the world, though full of woes, is, upon the whole, worth living in. He thus afforded a proof of the advantage of educating the eye of youth. Had Adolph never been taught to recognise the picturesque, he might, laden with dissatisfactions, have thrown himself into the river—as it was, he only threw himself down beside it.
I use that phrase merely out of regard to the etiquette of story-telling, for in truth Adolph did nothing of the kind. He was exceedingly well dressed, and knew it perfectly well, and so far from offering violence to his faultless costume, he carefully took a seat upon a little rocky hillock, which he previously covered with his pocket-handkerchief. If ladies and gentlemen really dashed and flung and tumbled themselves about as stated in several novels, they would look slovenly and slatternly long before the end of the second volume.
Adolph, then, sat and gazed upon the Rhine. He had come out to philosophize, and he meditated upon a certain beautiful Bertha von Herold, from whom he had just parted in the saloon. He reviewed with accuracy, yet with some leaning in his own favour, her conduct to him during the evening. Divers things, as we have said, dissatisfied him. The chief of these was her being engaged when he first solicited her hand. He had, it was true, arrived very late; but still he was dissatisfied. And, moreover, she had since waltzed several miles with him; nay, had given him some violets, and yet the unreasonable philosopher was dissatisfied. In love affairs, these philosophers know too much and too little. It is good to be quite blindfold when you play that game—your head is quite as safe, and your fun is much greater. But Adolph was not pleased, and still he gazed upon the sparkling waters.
"Could one but know what a woman is," muttered Adolph, with less reasonableness than one would have expected from a young gentleman who had glided, covered with university honours, into the position of secretary to a minister. Thesis and protocol had it seems taught him insufficiently.
A silvery, but passionless voice, answered the philosopher. It was a voice whose words fell like the plash of a gentle fountain, distinct, but without emphasis. Yet it spoke in music, and its perfect articulation proved that the singer had never been educated at the R.A.M. And this was—
The Song of the Rhine Nymph.
O'er the waste of waters floating,
I have sigh'd through countless years,
From my couch of crystal noting
Life's vain joys and vainer tears.
Mourners, whom bright stars are leading
By the wave to wander lone,
Oft, my hoarded sorrows heeding,
Half forget to weep their own.
Thou, whose love yon maid returning,
Warmly meets with voice and eyes,
Yet for deeper proof art burning,
Claim and clasp thy priceless prize.
Yield to chains thy Fate is weaving,
Yield—nor seek their links to prove;
Lip from lip the vow receiving,
Faith should ask no more from Love.
And as the singer paused, she smiled—a sweet smile; but cold beyond the coldness of the lip of the statue which has smiled away a thousand generations. Adolph looked in wonder upon the form which floated in the stream. A being, lovely as woman, but which he felt it would be impious to call woman, was before him. A face of exquisite regularity, but intense in its melancholy, was surrounded by a mass of golden hair which fell over shoulders and a bosom whiter than those of mortal. The symmetry of that bust was perfect, as was that of the waist round which the waters lingered, claspingly, fit wooers for such a form. One rounded arm with its transparent hand was holding back the clustering tresses, the other hand bore a small mirror, set in silver—it might have been the toy of a maiden who had gone down, with some foundering bark, to the ocean deeps. Adolph gazed for one moment in admiring wonder, which the next turned to a shudder. A breeze had driven the ripples from the breast of the songstress. It was but for an instant, but that instant shewed Adolph that a monster was before him, and not the work of Him who created humanity in his own image.
The Mermaid approached. For it was indeed one of those dreadful beings, framed by the exulting fiends in impious mockery while the waters of the deluge lay upon the earth, the bodies of whose expiring daughters were desecrated to aid in the unholy union of humanity with the lower creation. Adolph would have risen to flee; but the surpassing loveliness of the fearful object before him enchained eye and limb. He remained without motion, and that passionless voice spoke.
"Adolph von Rosenheim seeks the truth. Let him take this mirror, discover the truth, and be wretched." And with another melancholy smile the being, extending its arm, laid the glass upon his hand. It thrilled him to the bone as if it had been of white-hot steel. Glancing at it for an instant, he again raised his eyes. He was alone, but he imagined that he heard a wailing and gradually diminishing sound, which formed itself into the words—
"Yield—nor seek their links to prove."
The sound, if sound there were, then ceased.
The philosopher sat, as if stupified, for some time, when a human and familiar voice addressed him. It was that of Carl Osten, for merly his fellow-student at Halle, now his most intimate friend. But at that moment the sound even of an enemy's voice would have been welcome.
"Adolph! Yes, by all the divinities in and out of the saloon, by the goddesses in the skies and the goddesses in the satins. Why, man, we have been in consternation on your behalf. Most of us supposed you had been spirited away, and the baroness, who avers that she saw you mixing water with your hock, declares that she suspects you are a river demon in disguise."
Adolph shuddered.
"Pray," continued his friend, "do something in one or other of your characters, and return to the waltz, or to the water."
"I was heated and tired," said Adolph.
"Heated and tired, and Bertha von Herold in the room? Credat Judæus Apella, non Carl. You have had a quarrel with her. Is it so? Heaven, Adolph! how you start and glare. Are you wild?"
He might well ask the question. As Adolph rose, the mermaid's mirror had turned towards the bosom of Carl. Glancing at its surface, Adolph read the heart of his friend—read words which Carl had died ere he had dared to utter. They were words of love, and jealousy, and hope that kindled, as the idea of a difference having arisen between Bertha and Adolph crossed the mind of Carl. In the desperation which we too often mistake for a fate, Adolph asked, hurriedly—
"You, too, Carl,—you love Bertha, do you not?"
The lips of Carl attempted a denying smile; but there, in the fatal glass, was the heart, glowing with passion and hate, and even a thought of murder was present for an instant. With a violent effort, Adolph dashed Carl away; he staggered, and fell into the stream. Adolph looked but once; but as the rapid tide bore away the struggling Carl to death, his face became that of the fearful mermaid. The slayer rushed to the house, bearing with him the demon's glass.
He entered the splendid saloon, and was again amid light, music, and perfumes. Smiles and gentle glances greeted him, but he scowled in return, even when the bright forehe ad of Bertha glowed at his approach. He felt the mirror as a dreadful and clinging weight, yet he longed to try its efficacy here.
Several acquaintances addressed him; a poet, who had published his rhymes solely at the request of his (he feared) too partial friends; a placeman, who had thrown off a showy political pamphlet, merely lest its subject should not receive due attention from the legislature; a husband, with Petruchio's words in his mouth, and his wife's clogs in his pocket; a minister's secretary needed no glass como from the fiend, to read those transparencies. But, tremblingly, he advanced to Bertha; on her, he had resolved to make his mad experiment. As he drew near, he gazed upon her beauty, then radiant with pleasure and excitement, as upon a loved thing he beheld for the last time.
Adolph placed himself on a couch, by her side; she spoke to him in low love tones, and he listened until he half repented of his distrust. Yet, hardening his spirit, he drew forth the infernal mirror, and, unseen by the beautiful girl, he turned its polished face upon her. She continued to whisper low; and he led her to speak of their last interview in her own little garden. She spoke of the bright dreams he had then summoned around her—of the wild and noble imaginations he had laid open before her. Gradually, her words toned down to the lower and sweeter voice of affection—she whispered of the dwelling they had marked for their own, when Adolph should have added one more to the honours he was earning, of the happy home which they would make their Eden, of the cheerful hearth over which they would sit in the winter evenings.
His eye dropped upon the accursed glass, the heart spoke—
"And often Carl Osten shall have a seat there with you, and more often without you."
"Merciful God!" cried Adolph, "is it to be always thus. I have sought a gift which will render my life one long agony. I should have contented myself with trying the hearts of those I hate, or despise; I am now doomed to read what I would have given a world not to know. Oh! that I had been satisfied to love and to believe!"
H[e would have dashed the glass to the earth, but it clung to his hand, as though a part of his frame; and his frenzied rage availed him nothing, the accusing witness resisted every effort. Henceforth, life was to be a hollowness and a mockery.
"Have I no means," he gasped frantically out, "to render the mirror harmless?"
"If it were mine," said a loud, laughing voice at his ear, "I should rub off the quicksilver from the back;" and a hand upon his shoulder somewhat roughly assisted to scatter his slumbers.
"You, Carl!" he exclaimed, with a glance at the river, "and Bertha, too, have you come for me. What must you think of me?" he added, taking the unresisting hand of the bright-eyed girl.
"I don't mean ever to think of you again," said Bertha. "Tell me what you have been dreaming about."
"Not for worlds, dearest," said Adolph, as he led her towards the saloon.
Oh, then he had been asleep by the side of the river all the time. That's such a very old way of managing a story—why, I have read a hundred dream tales. ‘There was one by Dr. Maginn, in an annual, and there was Victorine, which we saw at the Adelphi—Mrs. Yates waking up in a hurry, and putting both her shoes on the same foot, you know, and there was—
Perfectly true; and if we had supposed that you would be deceived for a moment, we should at once have explained that Adolph had dropped asleep, and that his dream was only a dream, and might be called Bottom's dream, for that gentleman's own exquisite reason—because it had no bottom. We are above mystification, by no means considering it in good taste. But we may as well add, that though the reflections which Adolph saw in the mermaid's glass were false ones, he was wise enough to take one other reflection from it; and as his bearing that reflection in mind materially increased the married happiness of the Von Rosenheims, we shall offer it for the benefit of every other Adolph and Bertha.
"WHEN YOU ARE TEMPTED TO HOLD THE MIRROR TOO NEAR TO THE HEARTS OF THOSE YOU WISH TO LOVE, RUB OFF THE QUICKSILVER."