Albano, like a world, was wonderfully changed by Rome. After he had thus, for several weeks, lain encamped among Rome's creations and ruins; after he had drunk out of Raphael's crystal magic goblet, whose first draughts only cool, while the last send an Italian fire through all the veins; after he had seen the mountain-stream of Michael Angelo, now as a succession of cataracts, now as a mirror of the ether; after he had bowed and consecrated himself before the last greatest descendants of Greece, before her gods, who, with calm, serene countenance, stand looking into the inharmonious world, and before the Vatican Apollo, who is indignant at the prose of the age, at the abject Pythonian serpent, which is ever renewing its youth;—after he had stood so long in splendor before the full moon of the past, all at once his whole inner world was overcast, and became one great cloud. He sought solitude; he ceased to draw or to practise music; he spoke little of Rome's magnificence. By night, when the daily rain ceased, he visited alone the great ruins of the earth, the Forum, the Colosseum, the Capitol; he became more passionate, unsocial, sharp; a deep, brooding seriousness reigned on the lofty brow, and a sombre spirit burned through the eye.
Gaspard, unobserved, kept his eye upon all secret unfoldings of the youth. A mere sorrow for Liana did not seem to be his case. In the northern winter this wound would only have frozen up, and not healed up; but here, in the temple of the world, where gods lie buried, a noble heart gathered strength, and beat for older graves. The Princess, who, under the mask of friendship for the father, aspired after the son, he sought less than the old, cold Lauria and the fiery Dian.
At this same period, he longed sadly for his Schoppe; on that breast, he thought, would the secret of his own have found the right place and comfort. It was to him as if he had, since this separation, lived with him uninterruptedly, and become bound to him by a faster fraternal bond. Thus do spirits dwell and melt together in the invisible land; and when the bodies again meet each other in the visible, the hearts find each other again mutually more acquainted. Unfortunately, among all the letters that his father received from Pestitz, he heard not one sound from his friend over the mountains, whom he had left behind in the dark relations of a strange, perplexing passion. He never reckoned silence as a fault against Schoppe, whose hatred and spite against all letter-writing he well knew. However, his own heart could not bear it any longer, and he wrote to him as follows:—
"We were torn from each other sleeping, Schoppe. That time has veiled itself, and remains so. Very wide awake will we be when we look on each other again. Of thee I know nothing; if Rabette does not write to me, I shall have to bear about with me and endure this burning impatience till our meeting in summer. Of myself what is there to write? I am changed even to my innermost being, and by an ingrasping giant-hand. When the sun passes over the zenith of countries, they all wrap themselves in a deep cloud; so am I now beneath the sun at its highest point, and I am also shrouded. How a man in Rome, in actual Rome, can merely enjoy and weakly melt away before the fire of art, instead of starting up red with shame, and striving and struggling for power and exploits, is what I cannot comprehend. In painted Rome, in the Rome of poetry, there laziness may luxuriate; but in the real Rome, where obelisks, Colosseum, Capitol, triumphal arches, incessantly behold and reproach thee,—where the history of ancient deeds, all day long, like an invisible storm-wind, sweeps and sounds through the city, and impels and lifts thee,—O, who can stretch himself out in inglorious ease and contemplation before the magnificent stirring of the world? The spirits of saints, of heroes, of artists, follow after the living man, and ask, indignantly, 'What art thou?' With far other feelings dost thou go down out of the Vatican of Raphael, and over the steps of the Capitol, than thou comest out of any German picture-gallery or antique cabinet. There thou seest, on all hills, old, eternal majesty. Even a Roman woman is, in shape and pride of stature, still related to her city. The dweller beyond the Tiber is a Spartan, and thou wilt no more find a Roman than a Jew stupid; whereas in Pestitz thou must become impatient with the very contrast of the mere form. Even the calm Dian maintains that the odious masks of the ancients look like the faces in the German streets, and their Fauns and other bestial gods like nobler court-faces, and that their copy-pictures of Alexander, of the philosophers, of the Roman tyrants, however pointedly and prosaically they stand out in contrast to their poetical statues of the gods, resemble the present ideals of the painters.
"Is it enough, here, to creep around the giants with eyes full of astonishment and folded hands, and then languidly and pusillanimously to lie pining at their feet? Friend, how often in the days of discontent did I pronounce the artists and poets happy, who at least may appease their longing by light and joyous creations, and who with beautiful plays celebrate the mighty dead,—Archimimes of the heroic age. And yet, after all, these voluptuous plays are only the jingling of the bells on the lightning-conductor: there is something higher; action is life; therein the whole man bestirs himself, and blooms with all his twigs. Not of the narrow, timid achievements of littleness on the oar-bank and the lolling-bank of the times are we speaking here. There still stands a gate open to the coronation-city of the spirit,—the gate of sacrifice, the door of Janus. Where else on earth than on the battle-field is the place to be found in which all energies, all offerings, and virtues of a whole life, crowded into an hour, play together in divine freedom with thousand sister powers and offerings? Where else do all faculties—from the most rapid sharp-sightedness even to all bodily capacities of despatch and of endurance, from the highest magnanimity down to the tenderest pity, from all contempt of the body even up to the mortal wound—find the lists so freely open for a covenant-rivalry? although, for the very same reason, the play-room of all the gods stands open also to the mask-dance of all the furies. Only take war in a higher sense, where spirits, without relation of gain and loss, only by force of honor and of object, bind themselves over to destiny, that it shall select from among their bodies the corpses, and draw the lot of victory out of the graves. Two nations go out on the battle-plain, the tragic stage of a higher spirit, in order to play against one another, without any personal enmity, their death-parts; still and black hangs the thunder-cloud over the battle-field; the nations march on into the cloud and all its thunders; they strike, and gloomily and alone burns the death-torch above them; at last it is light, and two triumphal gates stand built up,—the gate of death and the gate of victory,—and the host has divided and passed through both, but through both with garlands of honor. And when it is over, the dead and the living stand exalted in the world, because they had not cared for life. But when the great day is to be still greater, when the most costly thing is to come to the spirit which can hallow life, then does God place an Epaminondas, a Cato, a Gustavus Adolphus, at the head of the consecrated host, and freedom is at once the banner and the palm. O, blessed he who then lives or dies at once for the god of war and for the goddess of peace!
"Let me not profane this by speaking of it. But take here my softly spoken but firmly meant word, and lay it up in thy bosom, that so soon as the probable war of Gallic freedom breaks out, I take my part decidedly in it, for it. Nothing can hold me back, not even my father. This resolution belongs to my peace and existence. Not from ambition do I form it; though I do from an honorable self-love. Even in my earlier years I could never enjoy the flat praise of an eternal domestic felicity, which certainly beseems women rather than men. Of course hardly any one else hasthystrength or disposition to take everything great quietly, and silently to melt down the world into an internal dream. Thou gazest upon the coming clouds and along the milky-way, and sayest coldly, Cloudy! But dost thou not, prithee, allow thyself too deeply in this feeling, in this cold vault? It is true, the poison of this feeling will, in all parts of Rome particularly, that churchyard of such remote nations, such opposite centuries, consume one more sweetly than anywhere else; but couldst thou know the changeable, except by contrast with the unchangeable, standing side by side with it? and where does death dwell but in life? Let decay and dust reign! there are, after all, three immortalities; although in the first, the superterrestrial, thou dost not believe; then the subterranean, for the universe may decay, but not its dust; and the immortality which ever worketh therein, namely, this, that every action becomes more certainly an eternal mother than it is an eternal daughter. And this union with the universe and with eternity encourages the ephemera, in their flying-moment, to carry and sow still farther abroad the blossom-dust, which in the next thousand years will perhaps appear as a palm-grove.
"Whether I disclose myself to my father is to me still a matter of doubt, because I am still in doubt on the subject, whether I am to take his previous expressions against the modern French for sharp earnest, or only as another instance of the sportive coldness wherewith he was formerly wont to treat his very divinities,—Homer, Raphael, Cæsar, Shakespeare,—from disgust at the mimicking idolatry which the vulgar show to true elevation and to false. Greet my brave, manly Wehrfritz, and remind him of our union-festival on the day when the news comes of the demolition of the Bastille. Farewell, and stay by me!
"Albano."
On the evening of writing this letter he went with his father to aConverzationein thePalazzo Colonna; here they found the dark marble gallery, full of antiques and pictures, perverted from a chamber of art and a parlor into a fencing-school; all arms and tongues of Romans were in commotion and in conflict about the latest developments of the French Revolution, and most in its favor. It was at the time when almost all Europe forgot for some days, what it had been for centuries learning from the political and poetic history of France, that this same France could more easily become a magnified than a great nation. The Knight alone gave himself up rather to the works of art than to the sham-fight in his neighborhood. At length, however, he heard distant words which announced how Albano, like all the youth of that day, was marching exultingly after theQueen of Heaven,Liberty, following on in the train of eternal freemen and eternal slaves after theequalityof the times; then he drew nearer and remarked, in his manner, "That the Revolution was something very great; but that he found, however, in great works, e. g. in a Colosseum or obelisk, in the bloom of a science, in war, in the heights of astronomy, of physics, less to admire than others, for it was merely a mass in time or space that created it, a considerable multitude oflittleforces. But only great ones a man should respect.[83]In revolution he saw more of the former than of the latter. Freedom was as little gained as lost inoneday; as weak individuals in a state of intoxication were exactly the opposite of themselves, so too there was a sort of intoxication of the multitude by multitude."
Hereupon Bouverot replied, "That is exactly my sentiment, too." Albano made answer, and very visibly only to his father, because he profoundly despised the German gentleman, and held him utterly unworthy of enjoying high works of art, for which he had brought with him an eminenttaste, although no sense, and said: "Dear father, the twelve thousand Jews did not design the Colosseum which they built, but the idea was, after all, at some time or other, entirely inoneman, in Vespasian; and so universally must there preside over the concentric directions of little forces some great one, and though it were God himself." "To that source," said Gaspard, "to which everything godlike is referred, thou mayst transfer it if thou wilt." Bouverot smiled. "The Gallic intoxication," replied Albano, warmly, "is surely and verily no accidental one, but an enthusiasm grounded at once in humanity and in time, for whence otherwise the universal interest in it? They may perhaps sink, but only to soar higher. Through a red sea of blood and war humanity wades toward the promised land, and the wilderness islong; with gashed hands, gluing themselves in their own blood, they, like the chamois-hunters, climb upward." "The chamois-hunters themselves," said the Knight, "do the same still more, when they undertake to comedown from the Alps; meanwhile such hopes are charming, and we will gladly wish their fulfilment." "Signor Conte," added Bouverot, "was very happy in naming the outbreak a fit of intoxication. One sleeps it out; but in the morning there is a great deal broken and to pay." "Intoxication?" said Albano; "what best thing has not occurred in a state of enthusiasm, and what worst thing has not been done in cold blood? Say, Herr von Bouverot? Yes, there is a grim, dreadful frost of the soul, as well as a similar physical frost, which, like the greatest heat, makes one black and blind and sore;[84]something like French tragedy,cold, and yetbarbarous."
"Thou approachest the tragic, son," said Gaspard, interrupting him, and reinforcing the German gentleman; "we may expect of the French very much political sagacity, especially in distress; that is their forte. Therein they match women. They are, too, like women, either uncommonly tender, moral, and humane, when they are good, or, like them, quite as cruel and rough, when they are beside themselves. It may be predicted, that, in a liberation-war, if one should break out, they will, in valor, take precedence of all parties. That will dazzle exceedingly, since, after all, nothing is rarer than a cowardly people. One learns to estimate military courage very moderately, when one sees that the Roman Legions, precisely when they were mercenary, bad, slavish, and half freedmen, namely, under the Triumvirate, fought more courageously than ever. The citizens fought and died to the very last man for that insignificant incendiary, Catiline, and only slaves were made prisoners."
This speech set a hot seal upon Albano's mouth; it seemed exactly as if his father had found him out, and took his old pleasure in damping, like a fate, all enthusiasm, and giving all expectations, even gloomy ones, the lie. The offended, self-inflaming spirit remained now fast covered from Gaspard and Bouverot.
But to his Dian he showed all on the morning after. He knew how this friend, with the arm of an artist and a youth at once, bore and waved the banner of freedom, and therefore he broke before him the dark seal of his previous melancholy. He confessed to his most beloved teacher his full-grown purpose, so soon as the unholy war against Gallic liberty, which now hung out its pitchy torch in all streets of the city of God, burst into flames, to repair to the side of freedom, and to fall himself sooner than see her fall. "Truly, you are a brave man," said Dian. "Had I not child and profession hanging upon my neck, by Heaven, I myself would join you. An old fellow like that yonder sees much and hears badly. He shall not nose out anything, nor his beast of aBarigelloneither." He meant the Counsellor of Arts, Fraischdörfer, whom he, with an artist's obstinacy, eternally abominated, because the Counsellor painted worse and criticised better than himself. "Dian, your word is finely said; yes, indeed, age makes one physically and morallyfar-sightedfor one's self, anddeafto others," said Albano. "Have I spoken well, Albano? But truly such is the fact," said he, very much pleased, in his diffidence with respect to his language, at the praise of its beauty.
After some time, the Knight, just as if he saw away through the seal, uttered some words which took hold of the youth on all sides. "There are," said he, "some vigorous natures which stand exactly on the boundary-line of genius and talent, fitted out, half for active, half for ideal effort, and, withal, of burning ambition. They feel forcibly all that is beautiful and great, and would fain create it again out of themselves; but they succeed only very feebly in doing so. They have not, like genius, one direction toward the centre of gravity, but they stand themselves at the gravitating point, so that the directions destroy each other. They are now poets, now painters, now musicians; most of all do they love in youth bodily courage, because in that strength most easily and expeditiously expresses itself through the arm. Hence, in early life, everything great which they see enraptures them, because they think to create it anew, but later in life quite annoys them, because, after all, they have not the power. They should, however, perceive that it is just they, if they know early how to guide their ambition, who have drawn the finest lot of various and harmonizing powers. They seem to be rightly fitted for the enjoyment of all that is beautiful, as well as for moral development and for the care of their being, forwholemen,—something like what a prince must be, because in that office one must have for his all-sided destination all-sided directions of effort and kinds of knowledge."
They stood, as he said this, just on Mount Aventine; before them the Pyramid of Cestius, that epitaphium of the Heretics' Churchyard, wherein so many an undeveloped artist and youth sleeps, and, near by, the lofty potshard mountain[85](monte testaccio), before which Albano always passed along with a miserable, sickly feeling of stale dreariness. The shock which his father's ideas gave his own, and the relationship of the potshard mountain to the strangers' churchyard, caused Albano to answer rather himself than his father, with a melted ice-drop of displeasure in his eye: "Such a nameless mountain of pots is, upon the whole, also the history of nations. But one would much rather kill one's self on the spot than, after a long life, to bury one's self so namelessly and ingloriously in the mass at last."
After his union with himself, he grew more happy. Already he began with zeal to set himself to work, agreeably to his nature, which, as in the seed-corn, put forth out of one seed-point stem and root, thoughts and actions.
He threw all other pursuits away, and studied the art of war, ancient and modern, for which Dian borrowed and supplied him the books and the study-chamber. With unspeakable delight and exaltation, he ran over again the sun-charts of the Roman history, here on the very body of the burnt-out sun itself, and often, when he read descriptions of its volcanic eruptions, he stood in the very craters where they had occurred.
Dian gave, into the bargain, his knowledge of the small service, and gladly gave himself for bodily exercises, when he had previously ushered him up to divine service under the heaven of Raphael's art, where graces, like constellations, walk in the lofty ether; for with Dian body and soul wereonecasting; the most delicate ocular nerve and the hardest brachial muscle wereoneband. At last, as a word was much more disagreeable to him than an action, and as he had much rather bestir the whole body than the tongue, he introduced to the Count an oratorical brother-in-arms, a young Corsican, all alive, as if formed out of the clear marrow of life.
The two young men loved and exercised each other for a time in romantic freedom, without so much as asking each other's name. They fought, read, swam. The Corsican almost idolized Albano's form, strength, head, and soul, and poured his whole heart into one which he could not wholly comprehend; as many maidens do only when in love, so did he only when playing war show soul and sense. Albano's clear gold complacently reflected back the strange form, without, like glass, annihilating its own at the same time.
On one occasion the glow of the Corsican grew into a flame, which showed up the whole character of his life to his friend in a bright illumination, and his peculiar aim and thirst, namely, for Frenchmen's blood, "which," he said, "he hoped to quench in the approaching war." Had Albano been like him, then would they, like fighting stags, have mortally entangled themselves in each other's antlers; for the obstinate, inflexible courage of the Corsican—more a sensual courage as Albano's was more a spiritual—could not endure a contradiction. Like his class, he desired of Albano a right strong backing word to his speech; but Albano said: "This is the very greatness in war, that one can and dare do without exasperated passion, without personal enmity, all that which the weakling can do only by such means; verily it were nobler," said he, "to kill in battle a loved than a hated one." "Silly chimeras!" said the Corsican, angrily; "what? Thou wilt kill the French and yet love them?" Albano's magnanimity threw off at once every timid mask, and he said: "In one word, I shall some time fightforthe French and with them." "Thou, false one?" said the Corsican, "impossible! Against me?" "No," replied Albano, "I pray God that we may never meet in that hour!" "And I will supplicate Him right earnestly," said the Corsican, "that we never may meet again at all except one day at the point of the bayonet. Adio!" So saying, he turned on his heel in a fury and never came back again.
Unlike other fathers, Gaspard had been, since the first battle about war, the same as ever, yes, almost better than ever; with his old respect for every strong individuality, he took it quite agreeably that the sun of the youth entered so perceptibly into the signs of summer, and soared above the earth higher as well as warmer.
He gave him the nearest proof of his undiminished regard in the fact, that, amidst the gradual preparations for returning to Pestiz, he answered in the affirmative to a quite unexpected wish of his son's for—separation. That is to say, Albano, who now, like ivy, wandered with all his blossoms and twigs among the monuments of the heroic past, and twined himself faster and faster around them, would not part from Rome without having seen Naples. To reinforce his own longing came also Dian's inspiration for the daughter-land of his father-land, for the splendor of its sky and earth, for its Grecian ruins, which the Architect preferred to the Roman. "In Rome," Dian had said, "you have the past; in Naples, on the other hand, the bold present. I will accompany you to and fro, and we will go home together. For you are not, to be sure, as yet, properly speaking, versed in the beautiful, but in nature, in the heroic and in effect. Naples is the place, then." The Knight—although the whole object of the journey had been already gained by Albano's having regained his spirits—consented without hesitation to the appendix of a second, on the condition that he should not stay behind longer than a month.
But just at this time, when his inner world seemed at liberty to tune itself so harmoniously, came hostile discords nearer and nearer, which at a distance he still took for harmonies. The discord evolved itself slowly out of his indefinite connection with the Princess, because every such connection with women decided itself uncomfortably at last, seldomer ending in love than in hatred.
The Princess hitherto had done and suffered everything, in order to be dangerous to him, even before she became intelligible. She played Liana as well as she knew how, and took out of her theatrical wardrobe the nun's veil of a religious virginity, although women of genius are mostly sceptical, as men of genius are credulous. She made him the confidant of her past life, and gave the history of those who had died for her, or at least pined away, and she told all this, after the manner of women, with more satisfaction than remorse; only her connection with his father she indulgently let rise from its grave behind a touching nun's veil, and in fact imitated the son in his respect for the Knight, whom in her soul she bitterly hated. When Albano for hours forgot the present, and steadfastly gazed into the sacrificial fire of the past and of art, and showed her on the mountains of his world flames which burned not on her altar, then did she patiently accompany him on this road of art, and only stopped when she could, before spots where one had a view of the—present.
He became daily her warmer friend, without so much as dreaming of her intentions. Only a man—no woman—can wholly overlook another's love; the love which is long overlooked seldom, if ever, becomes a reciprocated love. Albano was too delicate to presuppose in the beloved of his father, and in the wife of another, and in a friend of his own beloved, this desire of an impropriety. Moreover, he always placed quite as small a reliance upon his desert as he did a great reliance on his right.
She doubted, but despaired not of a warmer feeling on his part. A woman hopes as long as a second does not hope with her. Albano's nocturnal visits to the Capitol and the Colosseum were always found by the eyes which followed him to be worthy of his noble character. Daily did the firm youth become dearer to her by his new bloom and by his manly development. Sometimes she strongly hoped, beguiled by his friendly sincerity and by that heroic melancholy which was not to be explained by her on any other principle, far or near. This to her so unusual rising and sinking on her waves shook her health and her character, and she became involuntarily more like Liana, with whose dove's plumage she had in the beginning been fain only to array herself in white; the sparkling sun-rainbow became a moon-rainbow; with her strong powers she flung half of her former self away,—her mania for decoration, art, and pleasing,—and she became intensely uneasy when a Roman fair one, with southern liveliness exclaimed, as often happened, behind the Count, as he walked before her, "How beautiful he is!" Sorely was she punished for her earlier malicious sportings with others' hearts and sorrows by her own; but such dark days are the very ones in which love more especially roots itself, as trees are best grafted in cloudy days.
Albano observed her change. The charming melancholy of her once vigorous countenance, this reflection of her silent cloud, moved him to a sympathizing inquiry into her health and happiness. She answered him so confusedly and confoundingly,—sometimes even imputing to Albano, with all his sharp-sightedness, dissimulation and wickedness,—that she led him into the strangest error.
Namely, under so great a certainty that some earth-shadow had passed across her whole life, and would not stir, he must needs seek the body which cast it,—which was, in his mind, Gaspard, whom she, as he imagined, still loved. He carried this presumption back very reasonably through all her earlier conversations and looks. It was so natural that they who were at an earlier period separated by a throne should now, in this lovely land of free connections, long for each other again. Beside all this, the Knight had, according to his inexorable irony, received her show of courting him with show on his part,—that is to say, with seriousness,—and therefore always served himself up as a side-dish to her enjoyment of his son, and carried over an after-winter into the spring. This double show Albano recalled to himself as double truth.
Then, too, fate stepped in suddenly among his new conclusions. His father was taken dangerously sick of an unnerving spring-fever, caught from the sirocco-wind. "Take no special interest," said Gaspard to him, "either in my sufferings or expressions. I have, in such situations, a weakness which I am afterwards ashamed of, and yet cannot avoid." Albano was moved, by many an unexpected outbreak of the sick man's heart, even to the warmest love. If the ruins of a temple inspire melancholy, thought he, why shall not the ruins of a great soul affect me so still more? There are men full of colossal relics, like the earth itself. In their deep heart, already grown cold, lie fossil flowers of a fairer period; they resemble northern rocks, on which are found the impress of Indian flowers.
The sickness undermined itself. Gaspard remained without sympathy for himself; only his affairs, not his end, troubled him. He held private interviews with his step-father Lauria, by way of impressing the finishing black seal of justice on his life. An express must stand in readiness to fly, the moment after his death, with a letter to Linda; his son must himself break one open, and deliver a sealed one to the Princess. Very harshly and imperiously did he demean himself toward the son, when he demanded of him an oath, immediately after his death, to travel off to Pestitz; for when Albano, who so longed to see Naples, and upon whom all these conditions, presupposing his father's death, fell hard, hesitatingly declined, Gaspard said, "That is so really human and common, to bewail the pains of others immoderately, and sympathize with them sincerely, and yet ungraciously to sharpen them so soon as the smallest thing must be done." Albano gave his word and oath, and never let himself be seen by his father again, when he wept out of a child's love.
Unexpectedly there presented himself before this sickbed Gaspard's nearest and earliest kinsman, his brother. Albano stood by when the strange being came up and spake to the mortally sick man, and turned two stiff, glassy eyes, which looked as if they had been set in, quite away from him with whom he spake,—so fantastic, and yet full of the cold world toward his dying brother,—with loosely hanging face-skin upon significant face-bones,—a gray were-wolf on his hind legs, just charmed out of the beastly hide into the human skin,—like the destroying angel, a destroying man, and yet without passion. It stretched out toward Albano its long hand, but he, repelled by something unnamable, could not grasp it. This brother said he had come from Pestitz,—handed over two letters from there, one to Gaspard, one for the Princess,—and began to say something about his travels, which seemed uncommonly acute, fantastical, learned, incredible, and oft really unintelligible. Once Albano said, "That is a downright impossibility." He began the narration again, made it still more incredible, and insisted it was actually so. Thereupon he went away, to Greece, as he said, and took the coolest leave imaginable of his dying brother.
Gaspard now said to Albano, "I should like to have you, after my death, rightly estimate this strangeling, if he ever comes near you, or rather avoid him altogether, as he never says a true word, and that from a pure and disinterested delight in pure lies; still more," he continued, "shun the deep, deadly scorpion-sting of Bouverot, as well as his cheating hand at play." Albano was surprised at the aspect of this speech (agreeably so at its moral sharpness), for he had hitherto imagined that he found in his father quite other sentiments regarding Bouverot.
The next day he found his father already with his foot on the steps to come up out of the tomb. The express had been discharged,—all letters remanded,—the Prince Lauria stood there with beaming face. "Simply another's sickness has cured me of mine," said the father. The letter which his brother had brought him from Pestitz had contained the intelligence that his old friend, the reigning Prince, was swiftly approaching his last hour, because they had held his dropsy to beembonpoint, and had delayed the treatment of it. "I hope," said Gaspard, "to have been so wholesomely agitated by my sympathies in this matter, that I shall still be able to make the journey in season for the last hour of friendship." He added, that then this journey would make way again for Albano's to Naples.
Then came the Princess in consternation about the letter, which announced her husband's danger and her own departure. Gaspard answered by giving his son a hint expressive of his desire for a private interview with her. They remained alone together for a long time. At last the Princess came back quite changed, and begged him, with almost stammering hesitation, to accompany her to theopera seria. She was moved and embarrassed, her eyes glistening, her features inspired; his father, too, he found excited, but apparently strengthened.
Here a long beam of noonday shot through his whole previous labyrinthine wood, namely, the confirmed presumption of his father's love, which now, through the approaching dissolution of the marriage chain of the Princess, and in the debility of sickness had broken out more strongly; hence Gaspard's letter to the Princess, hence their keeping together in Rome and on the way thither, &c.
Never did Albano love his energetic father more than after this discovery of a tender sentiment; and toward the Princess his heart now grew from a friend to be all at once a son. Besides, as among the five prizes of hereditary human love he had gained only one,—a father (no mother, no brother, no sister, and no child),—so was he filled with this new delight at the gain of a mother. All that respect could do, warmth express, and hope betray, he indulged.
It was a night when in Rome spring already threw flowers again through the clouds of winter. At the theatre they gave Mozart'sTito. How on a foreign soil is one carried away by a strain from one's native land, which has followed him hither! The lark that sings over Roman ruins exactly as over German fields is the dove which, with her well-known song, brings us the olive-branch from our native land. Up to this time, Albano, on the Alpine road over ruins, had sent his eye eagerly forward only along the future race-ground of war, and had seldom raised it toward the heaven where the glorified Liana was, and he had forcibly dashed away every rising tear. But now his sick father had lifted the curtain of the bed under the ground where her remains slept; now did the clear stream of tones which had passed through the lands of his youth and his paradises come all at once strongly over the mountains, and murmur down so near to him with its old waters. At first his spirit defended itself against the old, slumbering days, which spoke in their sleep; but when at length the tones which Liana herself had once played and sung before him came across over the bier of the mountains, and hung down as shining tapestries of golden days,—when he reflected what hours he and Liana might have found here, but had not found,—then his dark grief ran up the scale of tones as an evil, plundering genius, and Albano saw his dreadful loss stand clearly in heaven. Then he turned not his eye toward the Princess, but in the consecration of music pressed the hand by which the departed saint was once to have come into these fields. By and by he said, "I shall, in the rich Naples, long more and more after my only female friend, and envy the happy man who is permitted to accompany her." She fell into great emotion at this new intelligence of his intended separation, and into a still greater at his passionate transformation, which she knew how to deduce, with the richest dowry for her tenderest hopes, from her departure, and even the approaching departure of her spouse. But she concealed the greater emotion behind the lesser. They parted from each other with mutual joys and errors. Albano was made more and more happy by the improvement of his father's health; the Princess was made so by the increase of the son's warmth, and her life mounted out of the ship of war into an express-balloon, an air-vessel winged with tidings of peace. Thus did both approach closer and closer to the curtain, whose pictures they took for the scenery of the stage itself, only to be so much the more astonished when it rose.
The dried-up bed of the Knight's life had been richly inundated again by the agitations of his heart. Even because, in well days, he held himself together, like mountains, with ice and moss, so in sick days, it seemed, did a real, internal commotion more easily restore his old energy and repose. He armed and equipped himself for travelling, which best built up and built upon his capricious body. The Princess put off her departure from day to day, merely in the firm and ardent expectation that Albano would impart to her, to take with her on her way, the fairest concluding word of her whole life. In Albano this blooming land awakened longings for—Spain, and Naples, he hoped, would appease them. Spring was already dawning upon Rome, and rising in Naples; the nightingale and man sang all night long, and the almond-trees were everywhere in bloom. But it seemed as if the three travellers were waiting for each other. Could the Princess hurry away from the heart upon which her being bloomed and took root,—she, like a torn-up rosemary twig, whose roots, at the same time with those of a germinating wheat-grain, take a double hold of the earth? Albano, too, would not hasten the hour which cast him into remote corners of the earth, far away at once from his father and his friend,—them into an after-winter, him into an early and latter spring,—and least of all just now. His spirit had appeased itself, and become reconciled with itself, by the resolution of war. His Portici was gloriously built up on the buried Herculaneum of his past.
A letter from Pestitz decided matters. The mortally sick Prince wrote to the Princess, and begged to see her again; the letter was like a fire, bursting the common ground and scattering all that stand thereupon; the three confederates formed the purpose to set off on one and the same day,—on one morning,—so that one dawn might shed its gold into three travelling-carriages at once.
Yet one thing the Princess desired on the evening previous to the departure, namely, Albano's company to the dome of St. Peter's in the morning; she wished to take Rome once more into her parting soul, when the dawn in its redness and splendor gilded the city. Albano, too, was glad to drink the must of a fiery hour, which might clear itself up into an eternal wine for the whole of life; for he knew not that the lively Princess,—made still more lively by Italy,—after waiting so long and impatiently for the fairest word from his lips, at last ventured indignantly upon a parting hour, in which it must escape from him.
Early before sunrise, when, in Rome, many more go to bed than get up, he waited upon her; only her faithful Haltermann accompanied them. She still glowed with her night-long vigils, and seemed very much moved. Rome still slept; occasionally they were met by coaches and families, which were just finishing their night. The sky stood cool and blue over the dawning morn, the fresh son of the fair night.
The wide circus before St. Peter's Church was solitary and dumb as the saints upon the columns; the fountains spoke: one constellation more went out above the obelisk. They went up by the winding stairway of a hundred and fifty steps to the roof of the church, and came out through a street of houses, columns, little cupolas and towers, through four doors into the monstrous dome,—into a vaulted night. In the depths below the temple rested, like a broad, gloomy, lonesome valley with houses and trees, a holy abyss, and they walked along close by the mosaic-giants, the broad colored clouds on the heaven of the dome. While they were ascending in the high vault, Aurora's golden foam glistened redder and redder on the windows, and fire and night swam into each other among the arches.
They hastened yet higher and looked out, just as a single living ray darted upon the world, as out of an eye, from behind the mountains; around the old Alban mountain smoked a hundred glowing clouds, as if his cold crater was again bringing forth a flame-day, and the eagles with golden wings baptized in the sun flew slowly along over the clouds. All at once the sun-god stood upon the fair ridge; he stood erect in heaven, and rent away the network of night from the covered earth; then burned the Obelisks and the Colosseum and Rome from hill to hill, and on the solitary Campagna sparkled in manifold windings the yellow giant snake of the world, the Tiber,—all clouds dissipated themselves into the depths of heaven, and golden light ran from Tusculum and from Tivoli, and from the vine-hills into the many-colored plains, over the scattered villas and cottages, into the citron and oak groves; low in the far west the sea was again as at evening, when the hot god visits it, full of splendor, ever kindled by him, and became his eternal dew.[86]
In the morning world below lay far and wide the great, still Rome,—no living city, a solitary, enormous, enchanted garden of the old, hidden, heroic spirits, laid out on twelve hills. The unpeopled pleasure-garden of spirits announced itself by its green meadows and cypresses between palaces, and by its broad, open stairways and columns and bridges, by its ruins and high fountains and garden of Adonis, and its green mountains and temples of the gods; the broad city avenues had passed away; the windows were barred up; on the roofs the stony dead looked steadfastly at each other; only the glistening fountain waters were awake and alive and active, and a single nightingale sighed, as if she would die at last.
"That is great," said Albano, at length, "that all is solitary down below and one sees no present. The old heroic spirits can pursue their existence in the vast vacuity, and march through their old arches and temples and play, up on the columns, with the ivy."
"Nothing," replied the Princess, "is wanting to the magnificence but this dome, which from the Capitol we might in fact see besides. But never shall I forget this spot."
"What were all beside?" said he. "The flat regions of life in general pass by without a memorial; from many a long past no echo reverberates, because no mountain breaks the broad surface! But Rome and this hour with you will live within us forever."
"Albano," said she, "why must we find each other so late and part so early? Yonder goes your way along by the Tiber,—God grant into no devouring sea!"
"And yonder goes yours over the bright mountains," said he. She took his hand, for his tone expressed and excited so much emotion. Divinely gleamed the world from the dark spring flowers even up to the lofty Capitol, and the bells sounded down the hours; the festal fires of day blazed on all heights; life was broad and high as the prospect; his eye stood under a tear,—no sad one, however, but such a tear as when the world's eye glances sunnily under the water, and has higher hues, which the dry world destroys. He pressed her hand, she his. "Princess, friend," said he, "how I esteem you! After this holy hour we separate. I would fain give you a sign that shall not pass away, and say a bold word to my father, which should express myself and my respect, and which, perhaps, might solve many a riddle."
Her eye fell, and she merely said, "May you venture?" "O forbid it not!" said he; "so many a divine bliss has been lost by one hour's hesitation. When shall man act extraordinarily, then, except in extraordinary situations?" She was silent, awaiting the morning-sound of love, and in a continued pressure of hands they went down from the lofty place. Alban's being was a trembling flame. The Princess comprehended not why he still deferred this spring-tone; no more did he see through her, unskilled in reading women and their broken words, those picture-poems, half form and only half speech. Just as if an eagle had flown down from his morning splendor, and, as a predatory genius, flapped his wings over his eyes; so had the flashing morn dazzled him so exceedingly that he meant to venture, now in the parting hour, to be mediator between his father and the Princess, by a word which should take away the partition-wall between their loves. His delicacy made many an objection against this proceeding, but when a weighty object was in sight, there was nothing he so abhorred as quailing caution; and daring he held to be worth as much to a man as winning.
The Princess, misunderstanding, but not mistrusting, followed him into his father's house with an expectation—bolder than his—that he would perhaps actually confess to the Knight his love for her. They found the father alone and very serious. Albano, although aware of his aversion to bodily signs of the heart, fell on his neck with the half-choked words of the wish: "Father! a mother!" To this childlike relation had his previous feelings raised and refined themselves. "Heavens, Count!" cried the Princess, astounded and enraged at Albano's assumed insinuation. The Knight, sparkling with wrath, and full of horror, seized a pistol, saying, "Unlucky—" but before one knew at which of the three he would shoot it off, his numbness seized and held him like a coiling snake imprisoned in a murderous embrace. "Count, did I understand you?" said the Princess, flinging the word at him, indifferent toward the petrified foe. "O God," said Albano, moved by the sight of the paternal form, "I meant no one!" "None were capable of that," said she, "but a base creature. Farewell. May I never meet you again!" So saying, she went off.
Albano stayed, unconcerned as to whether he himself was not meant by the pistol at the side of the sick man, who had stiffened exactly opposite to a man's corpse across the way which they were just busied in painting. Gradually life wrestled again out of winter, and the Knight, as cataleptics must, finished the address which he had begun with the word "Unlucky—" "woman, of whom art thou mother?" He came to himself and looked wakefully around; but soon the lava of wrath ran again through his snow: "Unlucky boy, what was the talk about?" Albano disclosed to him, with innocent soul, that he had cherished the hope, in the probable event of the Prince's death, of a union between his father and the Princess, and for himself, of the good fortune of having a mother.
"You young people always imagine one cannot have any genuine love without carrying it out and directing it to some one," replied Gaspard, and began to laugh hard and to find something very comic in the "sentimental misunderstanding"; but Albano asked him now very seriously about the origin of his misunderstanding. Gaspard gave him the following account: Lately, in his sickness, he had, upon the first news of the Prince's approaching death, a desperate battle with the Princess, who in the event of this death desired a regency,—or guardianship,—even on the bare ground of the possibility of an heir to the princely hat. The Knight said to her decidedly thispossibilitywas an impossibility, and he would, without further preamble, attack her with new proofs yet unknown to her. He gave her directly to understand that he was even armed against the case of an ocular demonstration of the contrary (a Hereditary Prince) being presented to him. The Princess replied with bitterness, she could not conceive why he need in the least concern himself any more about the Haarhaar line and succession, or take any more care for it than for that of Hohenfliess. He brought her even to tears, for he could unsparingly hurl the most barbarous words, like harpoons, deep into her heart; he had the perfect resolution of a statesman, who, like a great bird of prey, drives the victim, which he can neither conquer nor draw away, to a precipice, and beats it over the brink with his wings, in order that he may find it subdued for him down below. A life which even as it passes away, like the sinking glaciers, discovers old corpses! Just as the happy one spreads out his love of an individual warmingly over humanity, so does the misanthrope hold the stinging focus (or freezing-point) of his broad and general coldness toward humanity atonegreat foe alone, whereas previously every smaller offence was forgiven the individual, and imputed only to mankind in a mass.
This, then, was that secret interview whose traces Albano had taken for fairer emotions than of hatred. "And now," said the Knight openly, in order to punish his high feeling with cutting impudence, "when thou madest to me the concise and obscure speech: 'A mother!' I could not but take thee for the father, and from this thou mayst easily explain the rest." "Father," said he, "that was a crying injustice to each"; and departed with three hot wounds, torn in him by the trident of fate. At his departure Gaspard reminded him to keep his word of returning in a month, and added jokingly, that the old man whom they were painting over yonder was a German gentleman, with whom he once carried on the joke of a sudden conversion.[87]
Before an hour Albano was travelling with his Dian out of the illuminated Rome. The blue heavens, floating down, undulated on the heights and on the dome of St. Peter's, and long shadows, begemmed with pearls of dew, still slept on the flowers; but the blessed morn had flown far back out of the hard day. They met before the gate a circular crowd, who stood around the beautiful form of one murdered, and who repeated, with a pleased expression, over the prostrate body, instead of casting the word with indignation in the teeth of the murderer, "Quanto e' bello!"[88]And Albano thought how often they had exclaimed behind his back, "Quanto e' bello!"