Here the intensely excited soul held itself in. He went or glided down the declivity towards Portici. In a house which had been mutually fixed upon beforehand he thought to find again his friend. But he found neither Dian nor the expected letter from Linda. Enervated by walking, watching, and glowing, he fell, in the cool, still chamber into a dreamy sleep. When he awoke, the midnight of the Italian day, the siesta, embosomed him. All rested under the hot, still light; there was not a lark in heaven; the green parasols near his window, the pines, stood unmoved in the earth, and only the poplars rocked gently the new-born blossoms of the vine which lay in their arms; and the ivy, which hung from summits, swayed a little. Such shadowy twigs played once in Lilar in Chariton's chamber, when he was expecting Liana, and then thought of Italy. The great, level, simple garden from Portici to Naples—a garden web of villages, groves, and country-houses, washed by waves—carried his eye over blossoms to his paradise in the sea. This lonely, still time, full of longing, softened infinitely his fair heart. He ended the interrupted letter thus:—
"In Portici.
"O my Linda! I am nearer to thee again, but the distance between us seems to me here in the stillness so vast! O Linda, I love thee with pangs, both when near and when far,—O with what yet unfelt pangs should I lose thee? Why am I, then, so certain of thy love? Or so uncertain? Softly does thy heart speak to me.Softmusic or love is like adistant,—and the distant again is like the soft. Has the sublime pedestal of the thunder-god beside me agitated me so much, or do I think too vividly of the hollow, dead Herculaneum under me, where one city is one coffin? Weeping and oppressed, I look over the sea to the still island whereon thou dwellest. O that it is so long before we see each other again; that thou dost not draw every thought immediately out of my heart and I out of thine! Why does the delay of thy letter prefigure at once greater pains, ah, the greatest, before my soul? Why do I think; the deepest lines of pain upon our brow, the wrinkles of life, are only little lines out of the monstrous building-plan which the world-spirit draws, unconcerned what brows and joys his line of bliss painfully cuts through? If this line should one day go through our love—O forgive this premature pang! in this life, this alternation of transient showers and sunbeams, it may well be permitted."
Here he was interrupted by joy and Dian, attended by an Ischian, who brought a letter from Linda, and came to take his back with him. He read it passionately, and added to his own these few more words as a tear of joy: "Day after to-morrow I come upon the island. What is the earth in comparison with a heart? Thou art mighty; thou holdest my whole blooming existence high into the heavens, and it falls upon thee, if it falls. Farewell! I fear verily neither the hot oil nor the flame of Psyche."
Here is Linda's letter:—
"We have both been living very quietly since our agreeable runaway has been revelling about on mountains and in palaces. We have talked almost too much about him, besides sending for the prattling Agata to tell us something about his journey. Your Julia is full of blessings and helps for Linda. Never did I see before such a clear, determined, sharply discerning and yet cold nature, which only loves in giving, rather than gives in loving. She will never, it is true, feel the pangs which Venus Urania sends her chosen ones; but she is a born mother, and a born sister; and I ask her sometimes, why hast thou not all brothers and all orphans?
"Since the earthquake I have been somewhat ill. I have, perhaps, not been accustomed to love, and so to die. I take a philosophical book,—for poets just now take too violent a hold of me,—and fancy I am still following it, when I have been long since flown away over the sea. I am reading at this moment the life of the glorious Guyon. She knows what love is,—that godlike affection for the godlike, that losing of self in God, that eternal living and abiding steadfast in one great idea,—that growing sanctification through love, and that growing love through sanctification! The book falls out of my hands, I close my eyes, I dream and weep and love thee. O Albano, come earlier. What wilt thou now seek on mountains and ruins? Shall we not come hither again? But you roving men! Only women love, whether it be God, or yourselves, alas! Guyon, the holy Thérèse, the somewhat prosaic Bourignon, loved God as no man ever did (except the holy Fénelon); man deals with the highest being not much better than with the fairest. Albano, if thou hast any other longing than I, if thou desirest more on earth than me, more in Paradise than me, then say so, that I may leave off and die. Truly, when thou embracest thy sister, then I am jealous and long to be thy sister, and thy friend Schoppe, and thy father, and everything that thou lovest, and thy very self, if thou lovest it, and thy whole heaven and thy whole thou in me, thy I in thee.
"I will tell you something of my history. I went for a long time in silence over the earth; I saw courts, nations, and lands, and found that mostmenare onlypeople. What did it concern me? One must never say of anything, that is bad, but only, that is stupid, and think no more of it. What I do not love has for me no existence, and instead of hating or despising it long, I have forgotten it. I was scolded at as proud and fantastic, and could not satisfy any one. But I kept and cherished my inner being, for no ideal must be given up, else the holy fire of life goes out, and God dies without resurrection. I saw men, and found always the simple distinction among them, that some were fine, intelligent, and delicate, without spirit or enthusiasm, and the rest very hearty and enthusiastic with shallow rudeness, but all selfish; although when their heart is full, and not on the wane, they, even like the full moon, show the fewest spots. Beside the teachings of my great mother, beside your great father, no one of them could hold up his head. Your Roquairol one could neither love nor hate, nor respect nor fear, although one could come very near to all these at once.
"It had a great effect, too, that I was always travelling: travelling often keeps one colder. When I look toward the coast, and think that a great Roman was now in Baja, now in Germany, now in Gaul, now in Rome, and that to him the earth was a great city, then I easily comprehend how to him men became masses. Travelling is an employment that we women always miss. Men have always something to do, and send the soul outward; women must stay all day at home with their hearts. In Switzerland I (as the Princess Idoine does) imposed upon myself a little economy, and I know how by means of little objects which one daily attains one consoles one's self for the high one which lies, like a god's throne, on an eminence.
"So I came just in this still week of life to the mer-de-glace inMontanvert. Of picturesque mountains, plains, dells, I had seen my fill in Spain, and of ice-mountains in Switzerland. But a sea of ice at that height, a solitary, primeval, blue-green sea surrounded with red rocks, a broad waste full of restless, upheaving, tempestuous billows, which a sudden death, a Medusa's head, had so, in the midst of life, frozen stiff and fast! At that time a storm, which at any other time would have been frightful to me, swept up the mountain with flames; I hardly noticed it, my soul hung musingly on the stillness of a petrified storm, on the repose of—ice! I shuddered, wept unusually all the way down the mountain, and the same week laid my economical play-work aside and continued my travels.
"I made, however, no storm-prayers, but dwelt down below there without complaint in the rainy hollow of a dark, cold existence. Then fate brought me to Epomeo, and there the gods willed that the scene should be changed.
"But now it must remain as it is. When a singular being has said to a singular being, 'Thou art the one!' then do they exist only through and for each other. The Psyche with her lamp will not feel it, if the lamp catches and consumes her locks and her hand and her heart, while she blissfully gazes upon the slumbering Cupid; but when the hot drop of oil escapes from the lamp and touches the god, and he awakes and angrily flies away from her forever—forever—Ah, thou poor Psyche! Of what avail to thee is death in the dissolved ice-sea? Has, then, no man ever yet experienced the pain of lost love, that he may know what a thousand times harder desolation it inflicts upon a woman? Who of them has fidelity, the genuine, which is neither a virtue nor a sensation, but the very fire which eternally animates and sustains the kernel of existence?
"I am sick, Albano, else I know not how I come by these gloomy ideas. I am so tranquil in my innermost heart; I have shown only the chords, not the tune. We must work and look, not upon the future, but upon the next coming present. If the time should ever, ever appear—I have neither remorse nor patience—the time when thou lovedst me no more, heartily—ah! I should be stiller, stronger, briefer than now: and what could there be beyond, except to die eitherforthe loved one or—byhim?
"Come soon, sweet one! It is very beautiful around us; it has rained, all the world is in jubilee, and sees the sun-drops, and has gathered itself a heavenly drink. I, too, have set out in haste for thee dishes and vases. Come; I will bring thee the olive-leaf and the myrtle-twig, and wind around thy head roses and violets. Come. Once I little thought that I should look so often toward Posilippo.
L."
"P. S.—The rival also looks toward Posilippo, and rejoices in the thought of thy return. Yet do not hurry anything.Adio, caro.
J."
Albano found in this character a silent justification and satisfaction of all demands which at an earlier period, when Liana was still living, he had always felt compelled to make upon a loved being. He did not, however, perceive, in the innocence of his love, that this was the very being whom the longing after war and exploits that reigned in his letter could not please.
He visited now the subterranean city in its churchyard, near the Cestius' pyramid, as it were, of the volcano. Dian went through Herculaneum with him as an antiquarian lexicon, in order to unroll before him the whole domestic economy of the ancients, up to their very painting; but Albano was more moved than his friend by this picture of the past dwelling in the midst of the present,—by the still houses, and night-like streets, and by the frequent traces of flying despair. "Would not all these people, then, have been dead now, after all, if it had not been for Vesuvius?" asked Dian, gayly, in this gay region. "I ask you, rather," he continued, "whether an architect who comes out of this chamber or city of art can take any longer much pleasure in sketching in your Germany, after seeing these ruins of the earth, the petty, pitiful ones for your princely gardens?" They saw in a dark vestibule one of those earthern masks which they used to put into graves, with lamps like eyes behind. Then Albano looked at him staringly, and said, "Are we not gleaming earth-masks on graves?" "Fie! what an odious idea!" said Dian.
Yet a long time, out there in the living sunshine, did gloomy forms follow him. Near the shining Portici stood Vesuvius, like a funeral pile, and on it the death-angel. He thought of Hamilton's prediction, that the lovely Ischia would one day perish over the mine of an earthquake. Even Linda's letter troubled him, with the bare imagination of the possibility of losing her.
In Naples he examined a few more curiosities; then on the next morning he embarked for the Eden of the waves.
And when they saw and embraced each other again, they were even more enraptured and devoted to each other than any happy heart could have foreseen. Linda sat still and soft, looked upon the fair youth, and let him and his sister tell their stories, the latter often interrupting herself to kiss both. He spoke with great joy about Linda's letter. Men always make more out of what is written than women. Linda spoke indifferently: "Ah, well, once written and read, let it be forgotten. In yours, too, there is occasionally a northernfaux brillant." "The Countess," said Julienne, "never praises any one to the face, but herself." Linda bore the joke with characteristic good-nature. Albano, often pleasing and often offending her when he was not conscious of it, forgave love ever so easily. Friendship finds it harder to get forgiveness from offended vanity.
"Yes, indeed!" cried Julienne, suddenly starting under the veil of mirthfulness for a serious discourse; "thy project of emigrating to France is afaux brillant. Canst thou then believe that they will allow a princess-sister of Hohenfliess to sign a pass to her brother for a democratic campaign? Never! And nobody at all will do it who loves thee!" Albano smiled, but at last grew serious. Linda was silent, and cast down her eyes. "Can you show me," said he, softly, as half in earnest and half in jest, "a purer field of spurs on the whole map?" "A poorer field of spurge!"[103]said she, playing on the words. "Hardly, I should think!" Now she began to shadow forth, with aristocratic, feminine, and princely colors at once, with tri-colored paints, all the flames, smoke-clouds, and waves with which theMonte Nuovoof the Revolution had come up from the ground, and added, "Better an idle count than that!" He grew red. Always had this womanly fettering of man's energy, this affectionate fastening of one down to flowers, this unrighteous forging over of the love-ring into a galley-ring, been to him a crying and odious thing. "In a world which is only a fair-week and mask-ball, not to be able to maintain even the freedom of fair and masquerade, is tough," Schoppe had once said; and he had never forgotten it, because it came right out of his own soul back into it again. "Sister, either thou art not my brother, or I am not thy sister," said he, "else we should understand each other more easily." Linda's hand quivered in his, and her eye rose slowly towards him, and quickly sank again. Julienne seemed to be touched with the reproach cast upon her sex. Albano thought of the time when he had crushed a heart of wax with one of iron, and said, more brightly and coldly, "Julienne, I should be very willing not to say no to thee, if thou wouldst not take the absence of a negative for an affirmative." He could, it occurred to him, easily hide his contradiction behind the future, since in fact no war was as yet decided upon in Europe; but he did not deem that honorable and dignified enough. "Do not torment!" said Linda to her. "Certainly," said Julienne, with quickness, "I can, indeed, only think of this and that; what do I know?" and looked very serious. "Two days longer," she added, and sought to escape from the serious mood, "can we spend like gods, yes, like goddesses, upon the island,—although, at all events, I should answer for a god, only not for a goddess; that requires a taller person. I am only a foil to the Countess out of infinite good-nature." For Julienne's stature lost by the neighborhood of the majestic Linda.
The war of the loving beings had, however, not concluded with a peace, and therefore remained an armistice. As Vesuvius throws glowing stones, so does man throw his objections up in himself, alternately flinging them aloft and swallowing them again, till at last a more lucky direction sends them out over the brink.
In Albano, as may well be supposed, the question was working, what Linda's silence in the little war imported respecting and against the great one; but he did not propose it. Conscious of the unchangeableness of his purpose, he was milder toward his sister, whom he, as he believed, should surely one day exceedingly wound by it. Thus had he become soft by the cold and warm alternation of life, as a precious stone, by rapid heating and cooling, is transformed into medicine.
Swiftly and sweetly glided the last days of joy over the island, which after the rain glistened in greenness like a German garden. The soft, cool air, the fragrance of myrtles and oranges, single clouds of brightness in the warm sky, the magic-smoke of the coasts, the golden sun at morning and evening, and love and youth decked and crowned the rare season. High burned on the blooming earth the sacrificial flame of love into the still, blue heavens. As two mirrors stand before one another, and one pictures the other and itself and the world, and the other represents all this and also the pictures and the painter, so tranquilly stood Albano and Linda before each other, attracting and imaging soul within soul. As Mont Blanc majestically mirrors himself down in the still lake of Chede in a paler heaven, so stood Albano's whole, sound, light spirit in Linda's. She said he was an honest and an honorable man at once, and had, what was so rare, awholewill; only, as is often the case with men, he wanted to love still more than he did love, and therefore did not sufficiently recognize his quiet, original sin, from egotism. There was nothing against which he bristled up more indignantly and excitedly than against this latter charge, and he would not forgive it in any one save the Countess. He refuted her as strongly as he could; but her opinion became, under the best annihilation, only a mock corpse, and came back alive against him the very next hour.
He became through her more nearly acquainted with himself than even with her. He called her the Uranide, because she seemed to him, like the heavens, at once so near and so far off; and she had no objection to this full laurel-wreath. There is a heavenly unfathomableness, which makes man godlike, and love toward him infinite; so did the ancients make Friendship the daughter of Night and of Erebus. When Albano thus looked out over the broad, rich spirit of Linda,—at once living for her love, and harboring every other's love, and yet, as it were, intoxicated with the thirst for knowledge; at once a child, a man, and a virgin; often hard and bold with the tongue for and against religion and womanhood, and yet full of the tenderest, most childlike love toward both; melting in her glow before the beloved, and quickly stiffening at a cold assault; without any vanity, because she always stood before the throne of a divine idea, and man is never vain before God, but entirely confiding in herself and submissive to no one, without, however, any comparison of herself or others; full of bold, manly uprightness, and full of respect for talent and for shrewd understanding of the world; so perfectly free from selfishness, and with such a childlike delight in others' gladness, without special anxiety or respect for persons; so inconstant and inflexible, the one in wishing, the other in willing; but with her eye and life ever directed toward the sun and moon of the spiritual kingdom, character and love, toward her own and toward a beloved heart;—when Albano saw all this playing and flitting before him, then did he live, as it were, on the single and yet immense, the movable and yet almighty sea, whose limit is only the clear sky, which has itself none.
In the heaven of the three loving ones appeared at length the dawn of the day of departure. It was determined by the two friends that Albano might accompany them only as far as Naples, where their people waited for them, then find them once in Rome accidentally, then on Isola Bella for the last time accidentally,—a very unfriendly subjection to worldly appearance, upon which Linda, however, insisted as strongly as Julienne, and to which Albano himself, who by his birth was more hardened to the constraints of rank than a plebeian youth of like soul, easily yielded up the bitter yes, under the heavy veil which hung over all his connections. Julienne decided upon all lesser ways and means; she had been during the whole tour the business-agent of the Countess, who, as she said, had not head enough to buy herself a hat for it, so impetuous, absent in money matters, and dreamy was she. The sister was so lively, and entirely restored, but said, all the five and thirty hot springs of the island could not have done half so much for her recovery as the same number of tears of joy which she had fortunately shed.
Singular did all around them appear on the morning of departure. A bright, warm cloud dropped silvery drops; the sun looked in between two mountains; the enraptured islanders sang a new popular song, amidst the rain-harvest or drop-gleaning; while their friends were hastily borne away by the waves out of their circle of joy. Agata stood, in order to cool herself, on the shore, with a snake in her hand, and Albano felt a pain at the sight which he knew not how to explain to himself.[104]At this moment Epomeo parted the cloud-heaven, and shining fragments of cloud sailed slowly along before them toward the Apennine to the north, the heavenly dwelling-place of the mist, and swiftly and lightly glided the shadows of the sky over the swarming peaks of the waves.
"Ever mayest thou," said Albano, looking toward the island, which was swimming backward to the west, "stand fast with thy mountain; never may a calamity tear the fairest leaf out of the book of the blest!" "How will it be with us all," said Linda, "when we meet again, and seek again the lovely soil?" Just then they espied a high-arched rainbow; that stood half on the island and half on the waves, which seemed to fling it out as a gay, arching water-column upon the shore. "We are going," said Julienne, delighted, "to pass under the arch of peace." At this word the rain and the wreath of colors disappeared, and the sun alone shone behind them.
The passage ran through the torch-dance of the waves. The distances shone and smoked magnificently. "Why do distances take so mighty a hold of the soul, although painted with the same colors as what is nearer?" said Albano. "That is the very question," said Dian. Mightily lay the sea like a monster along the coasts stretched out over their whole way to Rome, and tossed up and down the scales of waves. Albano said, "When I saw on Vesuvius the mountain and the sea, I thought how pettily and falsely narrow man sunders the two Colossi of the earth into little, familiar members, and acts as if the same sea did not stretch round the whole earth."
His friends were too deeply and sadly moved to make any reply, and before strange eyes neither words nor hardly looks were at their command. When Albano saw again more nearly the battle-field of time,—the ruin-coasts, which ever grasp and lift the man; the old temples and Thermæe, like old ships, dying on the land; here a crushed and crumbling giant temple, there a city street down on the bottom of the sea;[105]the holy memorial-columns and light-houses of former greatness deserted and extinguished amidst the eternally youthful beauty of ancient nature,—he forgot the neighborhood of his own transitoriness, and said to Linda, whose eye he saw directed thither, "Perhaps I can guess what you are now thinking of,—that the ruins of the two greatest times, the Greek and the Roman, remind us only of astrangepast, whereas other ruins, like music, only admonish us of ourown. That was perhaps your thought." "We think of nothing at all here," said Julienne; "it is enough, if we weep that we are obliged to go away." "Truly the Princess is right," said Linda, and added, as if displeased at Albano and everything, "and what is life, more than a glass door to heaven? It shows us what is fairest and every joy, but it is, after all, not open."
By the accident of strangers' company they were compelled to leave each other with cold show, and, according to the custom of teasing, tantalizing fate, to conclude a great past with a little present.
Albano travelled as hastily as his sensibility would allow over the sublime world round about him. When he arrived in Mola, he heard the singular intelligence that they had found in Gaeta a whole leathern dress, with a mask, swimming far out to sea, which must have belonged to the ascended monk, and in respect to which they found nothing so inexplicable as the empty casing, without the dead body. In Mola, the fair island of Ischia at length breathed out its last fragrance; the high citadel of heaven and the ascending pole hid among other southern constellations this warm one also, which had so long gleamed over him with suns of bliss; and the last star of the short spring went down.
Such is life; such is bliss. Like the playing moon, it consists of first and last quarters, and slowly waxes and slowly wanes. In its hope, in its fear, a brief flash is the full moon of the deepest rapture; a short invisibility the new moon of the deepest desolateness;—and always is the light game, like the moon, beginning its circle anew.
rivetstart
Albano alighted again at the Prince Lauria's, who had hitherto swum in such a flood-tide of new incidents, that he had hardly been conscious of the absence, and was disposed to wonder at the return. Meanwhile the German war against France had been settled upon. This news he brought to his grandson, full of the joyful expectation what great scenes such a struggle must unfold. Even Albano was for a long time carried away with him by this high stream, before he thought that this intelligence would work otherwise and more dishearteningly on his sister than on him. But the heroic fire, into which he talked himself with the political Lauria, preluded to him easy victory over a sister's affection.
He was going to announce his arrival to his two friends, when he heard from the Prince that they had both, as he had heard from the Princess Altieri, with whom they resided, already gone to Tivoli. How happily he departed, guessing the friendly design of this episode journey, out of Rome, radiant as it was with love and spring, and looked quite as gayly towards the future, where his life opened so bloomingly before him, as toward Tivoli, where he hoped to press two hearts to one.
He found, when he arrived in the town of Tivoli, that the ardent maidens had already stolen away to the cascade. As a man in the Vale of Tempe, or before the Lake of Geneva, passes along only in a careless dream over the shore by the watery images of the heavens and the earth, because the blooming originals round about seize and kindle him,—even so the rocks of the thickly peopled landscape, and the round Temple of Vesta, and the vales dissolving into one another, from the Roman gate to the temple,—this shining procession glided by only as dream- and water-images before a heart, in which a living loved one bloomed, and crowded out a world with a world's fulness.
He roved around amidst the swarm of prospects, without finding the fairest, when a short, pale-yellow, richly dressed man eyed him with a shrivelled up face, and with a silken arm pointed unasked the way to the falls, saying if he were looking after the ladies, he would find them at the great cascade.
Albano said nothing, went onward, saw two, and recognized Linda by her tall form. At length the three friends saw, found, embraced each other, and the magnificent water-storm breathed into the delight. Linda spake tender words of love, and felt as if she were dumb, for the beautiful tempest of streams tore the tender syllables to pieces like butterflies. They had not heard each other, and stood before each other, pining for their sounds, encompassed with five thunders, with weeping eyes, full of love and joy. Holy spot, where already so many thousand hearts have sacredly burned and blissfully wept, and been constrained to say, Life is great! Serenely and steadily sparkles the city overhead in the sunshine down over the watery crater; proudly does the rent Temple of Vesta, garlanded with almond-blossoms, look down from its rock upon the whirlpools which undermine it; and opposite to it the tempestuous Anio preludes at once all that earth and heaven have of greatness,—the rainbow, the eternal lightning and thunder, rain, cloud, and earthquake.
They gave each other signs to go, and to seek the more quiet vale. How sounded to them therein the words, brother, sister, Linda, like new human tones in Paradise! Here, before ascending the hill full of new waterfalls, lightnings, and colors, they sought to report to each other their journeys and their news. Julienne made the happy report that her brother, the Prince, gave again hope of recovery, since he had, with waking eyes, as he insisted, seen his dead father, who had promised him a longer life. The fair Linda bloomed in the Paradise like a veiled goddess who had long been seeking and at last found her beloved on the earth. She took his hand often, and pressed it against her eyes and lips, and whispered, hardly audibly, when he spoke to her or Julienne, "Dear! friendly man!" As to the scenery she was silent, for she never spoke of any till she had once come out of it.
Julienne, so happy about her brother's recovery, began all manner of jokes,—said she regretted having sent to her Lewis, from Naples, a vain specific against his malady, and at length asked Albano, "Dost thou know a youth namedCardito? He wants to know thee." He said, "No," but related how a little stout man had seemed to know him hereabouts, and showed him the way to the cascade. Julienne started, and said it was decidedly the Haarhaar Prince, who so maliciously built his hopes upon Luigi's death and throne. He lived in Tivoli, in the house of the Duke of Modena, and was certainly going about as a spy upon them all. In order to tune herself again after this hated discord, she continued her question aboutCardito, and said, "It is a very beautiful, sound Corsican (that living deformity is surely the Prince), and he declares very seriously war against thee."
"That shall he verily have," said Albano, who now comprehended all, and—related all. Cardito was that Corsican with whom he had formerly split on the subject of the Gallic war. "Brother, that is still thy serious meaning?" said Julienne, with protracted accent. "Now especially," said he, with decision, in order immediately to exclude all strife. Linda with intensity pressed his hand to her eyes, as if she would cover them with it. "Well, argue thy case with me, as reasonably as thou canst, and let's hear thy grounds of justification; but first let us ascend the hill, that one may have something to see at the same time," said the sister.
On the hill, before the green of the flashing vale, where the stream, like a wounded eagle, has beat its wings all about on the earth, before the three lesser cascades that leap down with their lightnings upon the flowers, Albano began, with emotion and inspiration: "I have only one reason, dear sister; I am not yet anything,—I am no poet, no artist, no philosopher,—but nothing, namely, a Count. I have, however, powers for much; why shall I not say so? Verily, if a Da Vinci is all things, or a Crichton, or if a Richelieu, though he asserts the political throne, will yet mount the poetic, also, shall not another be justified in lesser wishes? And, by Heaven! properly speaking, a man will, after all, be everything, for he cannot help it; he longs and aspires after that, and the inner, stifled heart weeps drops of blood, which no human hand can wipe away,—only the high iron barriers of necessity hold him back. Sister, Linda, what have I, after all, yet done upon the earth?"
"Thou hast made this question, and this is enough in the sight of God," said Julienne, moved by the proud, wounded modesty of the youth, and by his beautiful voice, which, when indignant, sounded as if he were tenderly touched. "Words! what are words?" said he. "O one surely may well be ashamed that one has even to think and speak of anything before he does it, although poor, imperfect man cannot otherwise, but every action, like a statue, must first be modelled in the miserable wax of words. Ah, Linda, do not here deeds lie everywhere around us, instead of words and wishes? Have not I, also, an arm, a heart, a beloved, and powers, as well as others, and shall I go out of the world with a musty, mouldy Spanish or German Count's life? O my Linda, do thou contend for me!"
"I am not," said she, looking sharply toward the principal little cascade, which stormed down from among the trees overhead,—"I am not of many or eloquent words; and, moreover, I do not quite understand you. I must always translate words for myself into ideas and truths, and I cannot always do it. In the case of your words, Count, I cannot form any idea at all. He whom love alone does not satisfy, cannot have been filled with it. Of course, so all-forgetting with their hearts as we, so concentrated upon one idea of life, men never are. Ah, and so little is man to man, an image of man is more to him, and every little future!"
"Thou, too, Brutus!" said Albano, astonished. "Would you," he continued, collecting himself, "lay out an eternity of that elysium-life in Ischia as adequate to a man? Would you send him as a youth into the cloister of the most blissful repose? Certainly only as an old man. The former would be like planting the tree top downward in the dark earth."
"There spoke the German again," said she; "for ever and ever real, indefatigable industry. The tranquil Neapolitans, the people on the Apennines or the Pyrenees, on the Ganges, in Otaheite, full of enjoyment and contemplativeness, are to this Spaniard an abomination. I should think, if a man were only somewhat for himself, not for others, that would be all-sufficient. Whatgreat actionsare I do not know at all; all I know is agreat life; for something like them every sinner can do."
"Verily, that is true," said he; "there is nothing more pitiable than a man who will show himself by this or that, which appears to himself great, rare, and without relation to his being, and therefore does not belong to him at all. Every nature puts forth its own fruit, and cannot do otherwise; but its child can never seem great to it, but always only small, or just as it should be. If it be otherwise, then it must be that an entirely foreign fruit has been hung upon its branches."
"Albano, how true! But you had once never more than half a will; how is it?" said Linda. "Neither have I now," said he, without severity. "One is gentlest when one is strongest in a resolution." He endeavored now carefully to spare and avoid his own words,—which were the oil and wind to his fire,—and he did it the more because words, after all, are of no help against anything, but much rather blow up instead of blowing out the feelings of another. He was also mindful, in this connection, of the frequent cases in which he had, by a single word, with all innocence, excited Linda to a flame. They stopped, and he looked out over the divine land, when Linda, after a silent look into his face, in spite of her apparently calm philosophizing, at once passionately grasped his hand and cried, "No, thou canst not!—by my happiness, by all saints, by the holy Virgin, by the Almighty,—thou canst, thou must not!" There is a robbery against which man always protests with an irrepressible fire, and though a goddess committed it out of love, and offered him in compensation a world of paradises; it is the robbery of his freedom and free development. Yes, its being love,—despotic, however, at once exercising and robbing freedom,—only exasperates him the more, and out of thecloudof error grows by and by thetempestof passion. Linda repeated, "Thou canst not." He looked upon her excited, brilliant countenance, whose Southern intensity resembled more, however, an enthusiasm than indignation, and said, firmly, "O Linda, I shall indeed both dare and do!" "No! I say no!" cried she.
"Brother!" the sister began. "O sister," cried he, "speak softly; I am a man, and have violent faults." The sublime war of the water with the earth and with rocks, the intermingling storms of the flashing rain-constellations around him, drew him as on wings into the whirl,—the great cascade flung its shower out of high trees, and out of heaven sprinkled incessantly a glimmering world,—and in the east the sea showed itself afar in dark sleep, and the setting sun sank gleaming into the general splendor.
"Certainly I will speak softly," said the Princess, who, much more sensitive and resonant than Linda, had some trouble in tuning her tone of speech to her promise; "nothing further is needed than the consideration that our quarrel is premature; I make merely the request to adjourn it till October, and the promise thatthenthe issue will be quite different." "O let it be!" said Albano. Linda nodded softly and slowly, and, contrary to expectation, laid his hand with both hers on her heart, and looked upon him weeping, with her large eyes, to which fire was more usual than water. He was melted at beholding that this powerful nature had only intensity without hate or wrath, and infinitely was he refreshed by his former secret suppression of his passionate flames.
The sister was softened by both, and a minute of the tenderest love soon entwined the three beings in one embrace. The hyperboles of anger are never so serious with man as those of love; the former only the other party must believe, the latter he believes himself. All had been brightened and cleared up by this free expression.
If generally a cold past moment shuts up to lovers, as a cold night does to bees, the flowers out of which they take the honey, here, however, after the storm, the clear blue air of heaven had become purer and stiller, and the tranquillity became bliss, as the bliss tranquillity. Through Albano, although rapidly, the Fury of fear had passed, who holds an inverted telescope, and through it shows man a very distant, empty heaven, without stars. But not so through Linda; she had throughout spoken in love and hope, and for her glowing heart there were no icy places. Therefore was he now so happy and so blessed by the contemplation of that vigorous nature! A long, deep chain of valleys, wherein wine and oil flowed in the fragrance of blossoms, led them all towards the great Rome. For a space the youth could accompany them; at last, for a long separation, he must tear heart and eye away from the loved ones, when over the green, glistening vales the mighty dome of St. Peter's already sparkled, and the cypresses, proudly encircled only with cypresses, bore the gold of evening on their twigs without stirring them. All had their eyes on the fair Rome, but their hearts were only on Isola Bella, where they promised to find each other again.
On the way to Isola Bella, he thought of his hour of contention with the vehement Linda, and the character of this war-goddess. He shuddered at the very recollection of the steep precipice upon which, within a few days, he had leaned so far over; for Linda is so decided, knows no alternative between passion and annihilation. And yet, in this time of cool reflection, he felt her imperious demand upon his liberty more severely than ever, and said to himself, firmly, "Woman must not be allowed to circumscribe or rule the holy domain of man's development." On the other hand, it was, to be sure, all love, and an excess of it; and the longer he journeyed and compared, so much the darker and lonelier was it on that spot of his life upon which she alone cast the great flame. She moved before him much more clearly and nearly in spirit by his still contemplation of her spirit, than in bodily presence, because the former presented her at once in harmony, the latter with the individual dissonances without the solution. Her power of all-sided impartiality towards all characters had appeared to him, for a woman, quite as rare as it was great, especially as he himself let this power work more in the shape of respect for her and in a glad, free appreciation of great, eccentric, poetical manifestations, but not of all, even the flat and the worthless.
Alike mighty and full-grown stood Love and Liberty within him, side by side. They were bound together and reconciled only by a new resolution to be gentle, not merely strong, to lay before her with all frankness his right of freedom and his loving soul, and to be to her the noble character which belonged to her. "Am I not such, if I really will it?" said he.
In the highest joy of life, in perfect oneness with himself and destiny, he made his journey to Isola Bella as rapidly as if he were going to find there a beloved, instead of merely awaiting one. How many a thing seemed now smaller along his road, to which he applied the Roman measure, and not the German, and before which he now, as his father had foretold him, passed along flying!
At last he saw the artificial Alp of Isola Bella standing in the waves, and disembarked joyfully with his teacher, Dian, in the garden of childhood, where he was to expect so much, and, with fresh Italian life-blossoms on his heart, bid farewell to the land of promise.
He waited several long days, yearning and anxious for his two friends, although his sunny companion was always reminding him to make allowance for the rapidity of his own journey. His determination to be gentle grew continually more and more unnecessary and involuntary. The very island itself, with its springs born of perfumes and with the distant garland of Alps, melted his soul. In the former year he had seen it more in leaves than in blossoms. It was, indeed, his land of childhood. From many places on the lake stars glimmered up to him out of a deep, early, after-midnight hour of life. Here had he for the first time found his father, and for the first time seen Linda's form across the waters; here he finds and loses them again, after the longest separation, for a still longer one; and here he stands in the gateway between north and south. The free, fragrant land, full of islands, the Jacob's-ladder of his life mounts back into the ether, and he goes down into a cold region full of constraint and eyewitnesses; his love is judged by his father, it is assailed by the downfallen friend. "Ye days in Ischia," he sighed, "ye hours in Vesuvius and in Tivoli, can you reverse your course? can you ever come back again and overflow anew the insatiable heart, that it may drink, and say, 'It is enough'?"
To his Dian, as if by way of justifying himself and his illimitable longing, he spoke frequently of Chariton and their children, and asked him how it was with his heart when he thought of them. "Don't talk to me so much of them," said he, after his manner, feeling more than he suspected or betrayed, "we are still so cruelly far off from them; one only spoils one's journey without cause. But when I have them all.... Well, ah God!" Then he paused, snatched the youth to his arms, and did not kiss him.
On a fresh, blue morning Albano stood, before the resurrection of the sun in heaven, on the high, bloom-encircled pyramid of terraces, where he had once, on awaking, seen his dear father flee without farewell; and he gazed with emotion down into the vacant, broad lake, and around on the summits of the glaciers, which already bloomed in the reflection of Aurora riding down from on high,—and no one was with him but the past. He looked upon himself and into his breast, and thought: "What a long, heavy time has already passed through this bosom since that day! A whole world has become a dream within me! And the heart still beats fresh and sound within thee!" All at once he saw, in the light morning-smoke of the lake, a skiff rowing along. Slowly, lazily it waded, for he saw it from a great distance. At last it glided, it flew; the sail bloomed up in the morning-blaze, and the green waves became a wild-fire, playing around it, as formerly in Ischia, on that evening, around Linda's skiff.
Linda it was, and his sister. They looked up, and motioned a greeting. He cried, in hasty joy, "Dian! Dian!" and ran down the long flight of steps, all astonished and enraptured at the wide-spread splendor, because, on account of the glad apparition, he had not seen the sun rise, for it was he who was strewing before the loved one the fair flames, like morning flowers along the path of the waters.
"Is it you again, ye divine ones? O speak, weep for joy, that I am blest and have you once more. Come ye then again with your real old love?" Thus he went on speaking in eloquent ecstasy, born of his long-dreaming expectation. Linda looked with secret angelic pleasure, with lovely reflection into the high-playing flames of his love; and his sister enjoyed in a sweet emotion of sympathy the beautiful mildness on both their countenances, which, in union with energy, is as enchanting as moonlight on a mountain. Descriptions of travels were begun by both parties, but ended by neither; arrangements for the day and plannings out of the island were projected, but none chosen. Julienne held up before his heart his own word and her stipulation, that at evening he must pursue his journey, as a slight cooling against the fire of joy that burned therein; sadly he looked up to the friendly, serene morning sun, as if it were not mounting higher, but already going downward.
They went now on a lovely stroll through the island; everywhere bloomed beside the present a still past, under the rose a forget-me-not. Here, in this grotto before the leaping waves, had he once played with his sister Severina, and on this island was her death announced to him. "But, Julia, thou art my Severina, and more," said he. "I think," said she, softly, "quite as much." Not far from the arcade was it that he had for the first time gazed into the face of his father. "But O when wilt thou findthyfather at last? Speak about this, good Linda!" said he. She blushed, and said, "I shall find him when fate permits." "But when is that?" "I know nothing about it," said she, with a soft hesitation. Then Julienne touched him, nodding, and said, in as much French Latin as she could muster together, but in an indifferent tone, as if she were soliloquizing to the air, "Non eam interroga amplius, nam pater veniet(ut dicitur)die nuptiarum."[106]He looked at her with astonishment; she nodded repeatedly. "Julia," said Linda, smiling, "is like women, as cunning in acting as she is open in speaking. I could not have disguised myself from a brother so long." "When the brother and sister," replied she, "do not find each other till they are equally grown up and with all perfections, they can easily become lovers of each other, while other sisters have first for many years to conquer the faults of the brother growing up."
Now they came upon the gallery, amid lemon-blossoms, where Gaspard had let his son see so many veils and masks hanging about the future; then Albano said, with displeasure, "Here I had to let many riddles be announced to me,—and there"—he meant the spot in the sea where Linda's image had first appeared to him on the waves—"even this precious form was mimicked." "My God!" said Linda, vehemently, "why speak any more of it at all? O it was so wicked to do it!" "No one, however, has lost much by it," said Julienne, joking, "except a couple who have lost their hearts, and I my anonymousness!" "Could we not both answer, Albano?" said Linda, softly, and raised her eyes. "By Heaven, that we could!" said he, strongly, for without those preludes they would have sought and found each other earlier.
Amidst these lookings into a past so singularly interwoven with futurity, they had stepped into the Borromæan palace, which to-day was fortunately without occupants; because Albano, at Linda's request, was to usher them both into the chamber, where he and Severina were brought up. The palace-keeper, supposing they were only in quest of a prospect,—for the nursery apartments were in the fifth story,—would have led them out on the roof; he insisted they were dusty children's-chambers, and had been locked up from time immemorial. With difficulty the man turned, with a rusty key, a rust-eaten lock. They stepped into the bedusted, clear-obscure, high, empty chamber, wherein a vacant cradle, a flower-pot with a little Chinese rose-bush dried up like its earth, a child's pewter watch, a girl's baby-kitchen with old-fashioned utensils, a rolled-up shining harpsichord string, a German almanack of 1772, many black seals with bare antique heads, a dried-up twig of the liana, and the like, lay as cast-off lumber round about. Man looks with emotion down into the far, low-lying time, when the spindle of his life ran round as yet almost naked without threads; for his beginning borders more nearly upon his end than the middle, and the outward bound and the homeward bound coasts of our life hang over into the dark sea. Albano was touched with melancholy at the scene around him, and at this glimpse of human life and this out-look upon his own green fields yet standing in wintry lowness,—and at the sight of the spot where he had lived with a mother and a sister, who had vanished from the earth, yes, even out of his imaginings. He took up the pewter watch, and said, "Is there a better watch for that age which knows no time but only eternity, than this one with only an index and no wheel-work?"
Linda was surprised as she drew away a curtain from a glass casket and a waxen child, of angelic beauty, lying therein, caught the light in her clear eyes. "It is the dead Severina," said Albano, hastily, with the harsh adjective "dead," which Linda could not well endure. It became more and more uncomfortable to him in the clear-obscure chamber,—a streak of sunshine burned in singularly down through the lofty window,—animated resurrection-dust played therein,—the spirits of the sister and of Liana might at any moment flash across the earthly light,—and the mountains out in real life receded into the distance. When he looked again upon the blooming Linda, all at once she appeared to him changed, strange, supernatural, as if she appeared among spirits, and was going hence again. She looked upon him significantly, with the words, "One is not at home here, let us go!" "Woman!" said he, with strong voice, in German, making answer to an inward terror, and grasped her hand, "we will hold together like a live heart, if one should try to tear it asunder." Linda replied, "I cannot stay longer, Julienne!" and they went.
On the threshold it occurred to the Count to look into the next chamber; he opened it and shrank back, but cried, "You only go on," and he himself went in. He had, namely, beheld himself twice imaged as in a mirror. Within the chamber he found himself standing in wax in a niche in French uniform, but as a youth still, and close by, which the door had concealed, his father also as a youth, dressed in the old fashion, but beautiful as a Grecian god; the warm, full, flowery face had not yet been iced over in the winter of mature life, and still bloomed with love. He plunged deep into the sea of the past. The colossal statues out of doors, and the illuminated mountain ridges had risen up out of the dark waves, and stood in dripping splendor. There was a call from without. He looked again into his face, but angrily. "Why twice over?" said he, and crushed his face, but it was to him like suicide and laying hands upon his very self and soul. The form of his father he still more begrudged to the strange, unguarded place, but it was to him too holy for the slightest touch.
He went back, and remained silent on the subject of the images, in order not to ruffle the great, stubborn wings of Linda's fancy. The green, glistening, blooming day soon swallowed up the cold shadows which had fallen in from the heights and grave-mounds of the past. "But now," said Albano to Linda, "as you have just come out of my nursery, lead me once into yours." "I will not crown thee until we are at the right place," said she, and broke off and bound together twigs of the laurel wood, through whose swarm of light and dark waves they were now passing, for a garland. Bodily activity gave to this maiden, who, with more than common ease, knit together tones and colors and ideas, a peculiarly touching aspect of childlikeness and naive condescension. She braided the wreath, but with difficulty, confounded once the arbutus with the laurel that resembles it, put in one more blooming myrtle-twig, and decked his curled hair with it, but very seriously. "The garland becomes thee; the high laurels up on the summit thou wilt one day get for thyself," said she. He thought she was playing behind this seriousness; but she looked joyfully and searchingly and smilingly on the crowned one, but like a mother, and said: "It is right so! What wilt thou more? I will bring it. Albano, I have at this hour a very peculiar and new love for thee. I could do much for thee, endure much. My heart is moved with exceeding love. Kiss me not. I will tell thee." The fair womanliness which loves the beloved more ardently and intimately when it has for the first time gone over his homestead, the scenes of his childhood, his dwelling-places, unconsciously filled her strong heart. He kissed her not; he looked upon her, and wept in the ecstasy of love. She inclined her head towards him, and said, but cheerfully, "It is hard for me to weep, dearest! I will tell thee what thou desiredst to know about my childhood. Of the first places of my childhood but a very faint impression remains with me,—perhaps because we were always travelling, and because I look more for persons than for scenes,—except my having stayed longest in Valencia. Probably from this early travelling I derive my travelling mania. After all, however, it lies in my nature. Butyoualways believe, like the Germans, that you learn that which you properly inherit or create. By my mother I was more hated and loved than by any one. I am now clear about her. She was wholly born for art or for the arts, although I believe that she was originally marked out by the gods for the stage. She was everything this minute, nothing the next; curses and prayers, belief and unbelief, hatred and love, alternated in this epic nature. She could have lavished a world, and she could have stolen one. She once pressed me to her heart, and said, 'Wert thou not my daughter, I would steal or kill thee out of mere love'; and that was when I had said, 'I love Medea more than Creusa.'
"However, she was too inconsistent to be wholly loved; I loved my invisible father far more. I thought he wasGod the Father. I once imagined he must dwell in thePorta Cœli;[107]for whole hours together I went round the garden of the dead of the cloister, and looked longingly through the palms over the roses of the graves; I hung on every living thing, even to pain. A dying canary-bird once made me sick, and I thought the mass for the dead was read for him. On God and spirits also I hung in a sort of intoxication. They once flashed by before me in the fire which I struck out of sugar in the dark. I never played, but read early. As I was very serious, and my form developed itself precociously, I was early treated as a grown person, and I desired it too. No one was earnest enough for me, except my guardian, who, with secret hand, governed my development. Over books and in travelling carriages my early life passed away. I envied men, and their knowledge, and their freedom, but they did not please me, still less did women. I passed for proud—and at an earlier period I was so too—and for fantastical. I took it not ill, and said, 'You have your way, and I mine.'" The narrative was interrupted by Dian and Julienne.