Take now a nearer look at the blind Liana! From the day when her mother bore her home, a ruined creature, there gradually began for her, under her solar eclipse, a cooler and a tranquil life. Earth had changed; her duties towards it seemed rolled off from her; the silver-glance of youth, like a human look, now blinded; her short joys, those little May-flowers, plucked off already under the morning-star; the object of her first love, alas! as her mother had predicted, not so tender as she had thought, but very masculine, rough, and wild, like her father, time and the future extinguished, and the coming days for her only a blind, painted show-gate, which men's hands do not open, and through which she can no longer force her way, except with her unencumbered soul, when it has thrown back on the earth the heavy trailing mantle of the flesh.
Her heart clung now—as Albano did to a man's—more than ever to a female heart, which beat more tenderly and without the fever of the passions; just as the compass-needle shows itself as a spiral lily, so did virtue show itself to her as female beauty.
Her mother never left her blind-chair; she read to her, even the French prayers, and kept her up by consolation; and she was easily consoled, for she saw not her mother's distressed face, and heard only the quiet tones of her voice. Julienne, since the burial of the first love, had thrown off an old crust, and a fresh flame for her friend sprang up in her heart. "I have dealt by thee honestly," said she, upon one occasion; then they secretly declared themselves to each other, and then their souls, like flower-leaves, linked themselves together to form one sweet cup. The Princess spoke seriously about studies and sciences, and gained even the mother, whom in men's society she had pleased less. At evening, before retiring, Caroline flew down, still, as from the heaven of joy, into her realm of shadows, and grew daily in brilliancy and beauty of complexion, but spoke no more; and Liana fell softly to sleep, while they looked upon each other.
At times a pang came to her when she thought that she should perhaps never see her precious parents, especially her mother, any more; then it seemed to her as if she were herself invisible and already making her pilgrimage alone down the deep, dark avenue to the next world and heard her friends and companions at the gate far behind calling after her. Then she tenderly sent her love over, as if out of death, and rejoiced in the great reunion. Spener visited his pupil daily; his manly voice, full of strengthening and solace, was, in her darkness, the evening-prayer-bell, which leads the traveller out of the dusky thicket back to the more cheerful lights. Thus was her holy heart drawn up to still greater heights of holiness, and the dark passion-flowers of her sorrows shut themselves up to sleep in the tepid night of blindness. How different are the sufferings of the sinner and those of the saint! The former are an eclipse of the moon, by which the dark night becomes still blacker and wilder; the latter are a solar eclipse, which cools off the hot day, and casts a romantic shade, and wherein the nightingales begin to warble.
In this way Liana maintained, in the midst of the sighs of others around her, and in the tempestuous weather that enveloped her, a tranquil, healing bosom. So does the tender white cloud often in the beginning hurry away, a torn and tattered fugitive through the heavens, but at last move along in rounded form and slow pace overhead there, when down below the storm still sweeps over the earth, and whirls and tears everything. But, good Liana, all the thirty-two winds, let them waft pleasant days to thee or blow them away, hold on longer than the dead calm of repose!
The Minister, when she came home from Lilar with murdered eyes, had set inhisright eye a hell, and into his left a purgatory, for no fatality had ever before so cheated him, namely, so completely upset all his projects and prospects,—the office of court-dame for his daughter, that ring guard on the finger of the Princess, and finally every chance of a haul with his double-woven net.
Unspeakably did the man struggle against the spoon in which fate offered him the powder wherein he was to let the swallowed diamonds of his plans go down; he delivered the strongest sermons,—so did he, like Horace, name his Satires against "his women"; he was a war-god, a hell-god, a beast, a monster, a satan,—everything;—he was in a frame now to undertake anything and everything,—but what availed it?—Much, when the German gentleman surprised him just in this mood of moral feeling. He made no scruple of refreshing the paternal memory on the subject of the promised sitting of the daughter for a miniature, and asserting his claim to it; for the rest he was all-knowing, and seemed to know nothing. For the sitting-scene of a blind girl he had cut out certain original, romantic situations, according to the notices which he had drawn out of the Captain. His artistic love for Liana had hitherto suffered little, and his slow, stealthy advances and reconnoitrings were in accordance with his viper-coldness and his worldsman-like energy. The old father—who in life, as in an imperial advertiser, always sought a partner with 60-80,000 dollars for his business—declared himself anything but averse to the match. These two falcons on one pole, trained by one falcon-master, the Devil, understood and agreed with each other excellently well. The German gentleman gave to understand that her miniature-likeness would, through her striking resemblance to Idoine, who, like her, had never been willing to sit, be serviceable for many a piece of pleasantry with the Princess, but still more indispensable to his "flame" for Liana, and just now, in her blindness, one might, indeed, sketch her without her knowledge,—and he would write under the picture,La belle aveugle, or something of the kind. The old Minister, as was said, swallowed the idea with perfectgoût. As the Italian female singers carry a so-called mother instead of a passport on their journeys, so did he regard himself as in a similar sense a so-called father; he thought to himself: at all events there is little more to be done with the girl; she lies there as so much dead capital, and pays a miserable interest; I can take the god-penny-medal which the German gentleman in his godfatherly capacity offers to me as the father like a name for the child, and just put it in my pocket.
This duplicate of rogues was held back in mid-current merely by a drag-rake, which threatened to draw the prey out of their pike-like teeth. An old, scolding, but true-souled chambermaid from Nuremberg was the rake; she could not be drawn away from Liana, or reduced to silence. Bouverot, to be sure, a Robespierre and destroying angel to his servants, would, in Froulay's place, have caused the Nuremberg dame, a couple of days beforehand, to be furnished by a servant with some complex fractures, and then thrown upon the street; but the Minister—his heart was soft—could not do that. All that was possible for him was this: He sent for her to his chamber; represented to her that she had stolen his Magdeburg ear; remained, in his present state of hearing, deaf to every objection, but not to every incivility, and at last found himself under the necessity (a word and a blow) of driving the thievish wench out of service. With every successor to the office, as being a new one, money would have weight, he knew.
He proposed thereupon to beg of the Princess an invitation for himself and his lady to tea and supper, to bespeak the miniature-painter, to instruct the new chambermaid, and put all things in a right train.
Two tigers, according to the legend, digged the Apostle Paul's grave; so do our two men here scratch away at one for a saint. So much the more confidently do I say this, as I do not otherwise see through—if nothing is to be made but a picture—the meaning of so many circumstances. But the father I could almost excuse. In the first place, he said expressly to the German gentleman, the Abigail might, in his opinion, as well stay in the chamber, or in the adjoining one, in case the patient wanted anything; secondly, the otherwise soft man had contracted, from his ministerial commerce with justice, a certain grit, a certain barbarity, which is so much the more natural to Themis, passing sentence behind the bandage, and, as an Areopagus, without the sight of the pains, as even Diderot[23]asserts that blind people are more cruel than others; and, thirdly, no one could well be more ready than he to pity the more deeply, in case she should die, the very child whom he, as it was once pretended Jews and witches did with Christian children, crucified, in order, like them, to do something with the blood (as parents generally, and particularly human parents, can indeed get over easily the misfortunes of those who are near and dear to them, but hardly their loss, just as we, in the case of the hair of the head, which is still nearer to us, feel not the singeing or cutting of it, but very painfully the tearing of it up by the root); and, fourthly, Froulay had always the misfortune that thoughts which in his head had a tolerable, innocent hue, became, like muriate of silver or good ink, black on the spot, when they once came to light.
Otherwise, and without taking these alleviating circumstances into view, there remains, indeed, much in his conduct which I do not vindicate.
The evening appeared. The Minister's lady went on her husband's arm to the court. The new chambermaid had, as Bouverot's bridesmaid, already, three days beforehand, made the most necessary arrangements or manœuvres. She had, with great ease, borrowed for him Liana's letters to Albano, as the mother, from habit, forgot that a present eye was not necessarily a seeing one; and he could extract from them the historical touches or watercolors, wherewith he could assume, before the blind one, in case of a recognition on the stage, the semblance of her hero,—namely, Albano's. With Roquairol he had played often enough to have his voice, consequently Albano's, in his power. Methinks his preparation-days for the festal evening were suitably spent.
He could, as little residences drink tea earlier than others, make his appearance quite as early as a miniature-painter in September absolutely must. When he beheld the silent form in the easy-chair, with the discolored flower-cups of the cheeks, but more firmly rooted in every purpose, a more coldly commanding saint, then did the exasperation and inflammation which he had imbibed at once from her letters kindle each other into a higher flame. Only in such chests, strung at once with metal and catgut, with cruelty and sensuality, is such an alliance of lust and gall conceivable. Bouverot's whole past, the books of his life's history, ought, as those of Herodotus are to the nine Muses, to have been dedicated to the three Fates, one to each.
He stole to the window, seated himself, set down his paint-box, and began hastily to dot. Meanwhile Liana heard her very cultivated, well-read chambermaid read to her out of the second volume of Fénelon'sŒuvres Spirituelles. Zefisio was not affected by the Archbishop in the least,—what he caught about pure love (sur le pur amour de Dieu) he perverted into an impure by applications, and let himself be devilishly inflamed by the divine,—for the rest what there was touching in Liana's relations he left as it was, as he had now to paint. Odiously did his motley-colored panther-eyes lick like red, sharp tiger-tongues over the sweet, soft countenance!—"Dear Justa, stop, the reading is disagreeable to thee, thou breathest so short!" said she at last, because she heard the portrait-painter breathe. It was no sacrifice to him, but a foretaste, a sweet early-bit, to put off the kiss of this tender little hand and lip and the whole exhibition of his burning heart, until he saw her outline dotted off with the poison-tints on the white ivory by the rapid dotting machine of his hand. At length he had her, many-colored[24]on white. "Very well, dear Justa," said she, "the prayer bell tolls; thou canst not see any longer. Rather lead me to the instrument,"—namely the harmonica. She did so. Bouverot gave Justa a sign to retire. She did that too. The yellow garden-spider now ran up to the tender, white flower. The spider heard her evening choral not without enjoyment, and the devout upcasting of her ruined eyes seemed to him a right picturesque idea, which the truepainter[25]resolved to transfer to the ivory leaf, if it could be done.
"Lovely goddess!" cried he, suddenly, with Albano's stolen voice, into the midst of those holy tones, which Albano had once, in a happier hour, but more nobly, interrupted. She listened with alarm, but hardly believing her own ear in this night. The astonishment did not displease the prospect painter—for her face was his prospect—by any means whatever; "remember this harmonica in the thunder-house." He confounded it with the water-house. "You here, Count?—Justa! where art thou?" cried she distressfully. "Justa, come here!" he added, calling after her. The maiden followed his voice and his—eye. "Gracious damsel?" asked she. But now Liana had not the heart to ask about the door and the admission-ticket of the Count. To speak French with her lover would not do, as the maid understood it; hence it was that in Vienna in the years of the Revolution they forbade this language very judiciously, because it so surely and pestilentially spreads a certainequality,—freedomfollows,—between the nobility and the servile orders.
Maliciously and joyfully did Bouverot, to whom she now seemed to betray a serviceable mistrust about the Count, which pointed out a freer play-room for his character mask, remind the perplexed maiden of her commands for Justa; she must now cause her to bring a light.
"Infidèle," he thereupon began, "I have overcome all obstacles, in order to throw myself at your feet and supplicate your forgiveness.Je m'en flatte à tort pent être, mais je l'ose," he went on, made more passionate through her. "O cruelle! de grace, pourquoi ces régards, ces mouvements? Je suis ton Alban et il t'aime encore,—Pense à Blumenbühl, cé sejour charmant,—Ingrate, j'esperais te trouver un peu plus reconnaisante. Souviens-toi de ce que tu m'a promis," said he, by way of sounding her, "quand tu me pressas contre ton sein divin." ...
A pure soul mirrors, without staining itself, the unclean one and feels darkly the distressing neighborhood, just as doves, they say, bathe themselves in limpid water, in order to see therein the images of the hovering birds of prey. The short breath, the wavering tone of speech, every word, and an indefinable something, drove the frightful spectre close before her soul, the suspicion that it was not Albano. She started up; "Who are you? God, you are not the Count. Justa, Justa!" "Who else could it be," replied he, coldly, "that would dare to assume my name?O, je voudrais que je ne le fusse pas. Vous m'avez écrit, que l'esperance est la lune de la vie. Ah, ma lune s'est couchée, mais j'adore encore le soleil, qui l'éclaire."
Here he grasped the hand of this eclipsed sun fighting with a dragon. Then his gnawed finger-nails and dry fingers, and a passing touch of his order-cross, discovered to her the real name. She tore herself loose with a shriek, and ran away without seeing whither, and fell into his hands again. He snatched her violently to his meagre hot lips: "Yes, it is I," said he, "and I love you more than does your Count with hisétourderie."
"You are wicked and godless toward a blind maiden; what will you? Justa! is there no one then to help me? Ah, good God, give me my eyes," she cried, flying, without knowing whither, and again overtaken. "Bouverot! Thou evil spirit!" she cried, warding off in places where he was not. He, like gunpowder, cooling on the tongue, and singeing and shattering when greed kindled him, placed himself at a considerable darting-distance from her, threw a painter's eye at the charming waves and bendings of her tempest-struck flowerage, and said quietly, with that mildness which resembles the eating and devouring milk of spunges: "Only be calm, fairest; it is I still; and what would it all avail thee, child?"
Giddy with the snake-breath of distress, wandering nature began to sing, but only beginnings: "Joy, thou spark of Heaven-born fire!"—"I am a German maiden." She ran round and sang again: "Know'st thou the land?" "Thou evil spirit!"
At this moment the giant snake, thus charmed, reared himself aloft on his cold rings, with darting tongue, to spring and to coil; "Mon cœur," said the snake, who always in passion spoke French, "vole sur cette bouche qui enchante tous les sens." "Mother!" cried she, "Caroline! O God, let me see, O God—my eyes!" Then did the All-gracious give them back to her once more; the agony of nature, the noisy preparations for the burial, opened again the eye of the tranced victim.
How eagerly she flew out of the chamber of torture! The disappointed, mortified beast of prey was still reckoning on blindness and distraction. But when Bouverot saw that she ran lightly up the stairway to the Italian roof, then he merely sent the maid, who came running in, after her, to see that she received no injury; and now again he held her previous blindness for dissimulation. He himself took from the chamber the miniature sketch, and dragged himself like a hungry, wounded monster sullenly and slowly out of the house.
rivetstart
"She can see again," cried Charles to the Count the morning after, in the intoxication of joy, without concerning himself at all about the cold relations of the recent period; and was entirely his old self. His enmity was more frail and fleeting than his love, for the former dwelt, in his case, on the ice, which soon melted and ran away, the latter upon the fluid element, on which he always sailed. Coloring, Albano asked who had been the ophthalmist. "A well-meant fright," said he; "the German gentleman made as if he would paint her, when my parents, according to appointment, were not there,—or he really painted her,—at this moment I have but a confused idea of the whole,—all at once she heard a strange man's voice, and terror and fright worked naturally like electric shocks!" Although the Captain heard, down on the bottom of his billowy sea, all voices only confusedly, nevertheless he had this time heard correctly; for Liana had extorted from her mother the concealment of the martyrology, in order to take away from her brother the occasion of proving his love to her by a duel with her adversary.
Albano laid up many questions about the dark history in his breast; and broke off the conversation by a description of his journey.
After some days he heard that Liana with her mother had left the city, and gone to visit the mountain-castle of a solitary old noble widow, which lay above Blumenbühl. Out in the clean country, it was hoped light would fall again upon her life, and the maternal hand was to paint over anew its fading colors. The Minister, who, like other old men and like old hair, was hard to frizzle and to shape, was, in this last and deepest pitfall of fate, struck quite spiritless, so that he did not devour Liana, who was also caught therein, but let her go. The whole story was to the public eye very much covered over and beflowered like the wall of a park. Only the Lector knew it in full, but he could hold his tongue. He demanded back the miniature from the German gentleman, in the name of the mother; that personage gave in its stead cold, hollow lies; nevertheless Augusti, at the entreaty of mother and daughter, knew how to control himself, and sacrifice to them the challenge wherewith he was going to take satisfaction for all.
Our friend was now, since his conscience had been appeased with respect to accidental consequences, smitten with new and unmingled sorrow over the emptiness of his present condition; the most precious soul was nothing to him any longer; his hours were no more harmoniously sounded out by the chime of love and poesy, but monotonously by the steeple-clock of every-day routine. Therefore he took refuge with men and friendship, as under trees still blooming in greenness near the smouldering ruins of a conflagration; women he shunned, because they—as strange children do a mother who has lost hers—too painfully reminded him of his loss. How gayly, on the contrary, does a general lover, who celebrates only all-souls' and all-saints' days, go about like one new-born, when he has happily slipped the noose of a heart which had caught him, and now can reckon up all female forms again with the prospect of a redeemed estate! The very feeling of this freedom may animate him to surrender himself the oftener, by way of tasting it again, as prisoner to a female heart.
Albano let himself be drawn by the hands of Roquairol and Schoppe to wild festivals of men,—which would fain render the sphere-music of joy on the kettle-drum;—they were only the thorn-festivals after the feasts of roses. So there is a despair which relieves itself by revelry; as, for example, during the plague at Athens,—or in the expectation of the last day,—or in the anticipation of a Robespierre's butcher-knife. The Captain went back deeper into his old labyrinth and wilderness, and drew, so far as he could, the innocent youth into his popular festivals with so-called sons of the muses, into his recruiting places of pleasure, just as if he had need on his own account to bring his friend down to himself a little.
Albano fancied, with these Dithyrambics, his weeping soul would be quite sung to sleep, and he only gave it in addition a gentle rocking. Meanwhile, although he would not have confessed it, his young rosy cheeks grew as pale as a forehead, and his face fell in like a piano-forte key upon the snapping of a string. It was touching and hard at once, when he sat laughing among his friends and their friends with a colorless face,—with higher, sharper bones of eyes and nose,—with a wilder eye, which blazed out of a darker socket. From music, especially Roquairol's, wherein under the hackneyed, artistical alternation of damper and thunder, the passionate rolling and plunging of our ship were too vividly represented, his ear and heart fled as from a destroying siren. The broken-off lance-splinter of the wound rankled and festered in his whole being. O, as, in the years of childhood, when the rosy cloud in heaven seemed to him to lie directly on the mountain where it was so easy to be reached, the magnificent pile retired far into the sky so soon as he had climbed the mountain, so now did the aurora of life and the spirit, which he would fain seize and hold near to him, stand so high and far overhead beyond his reach in the blue! Painfully does man attain the alp of ideal love; still more painful and dangerous—as in the case of other alps—is the descent from it.
One day Chariton came into town, merely to hand him at last a letter of her husband's,—for Dian, like all artists, much more easily and agreeably executed a work of art than a letter,—wherein he expressed his joy that he should see Albano so soon. "Is he coming back, then?" asked the Count. She exclaimed, with a sad tone: "Body o' me!—that indeed!—according to his former letter he has still to stay his year longer." "I do not understand him so," said Albano.
The same evening he was invited by the Princess to see the engravings of Herculaneum, which had come by the same post with Chariton's letter. She welcomed him with that animated look of love which we put on before one who will immediately, as we hope, pour out before us the unmeasured thanks of his heart. But he had nothing to pour out from his. She asked at length, somewhat surprised, whether he had received no letters to-day from Spain. She forgot that the post is courteous and expeditious toward no house except the princely house. As, however, his letter must certainly be already lying in his chamber, she allowed herself to take upon herself the part of Time, who brings all things to daylight, and told what was in the letter, namely, "that she should in autumn undertake a little artistic journey to Rome, upon which his father would accompany her, and he him if he liked; that was the whole secret." It was only the half; for she soon added, that she should be most glad to extend the pleasure of this tour to the best draughtsman in the city, as soon as she recovered,—Liana.
As the whole heart is suddenly illuminated with joy, when, after a long, dark rainy day, at last in the evening the sun arches for himself under the heavy water a golden, open western gate, stands therein pure and brilliant as in a rose-bower before the mirroring earth, announces to her a fairer day, and then, with warm looks, disappears from the open rose-bower, so was it with our Albano.
The fair day had not yet come, but the fair evening had. He left the Herculanean pictures under their rubbish, and hastened, as quickly as gratitude allowed, back to the letter of his father, who so seldom sent such a favor.
Here it is:—
"Dearest Albano: My affairs and my health are at length in such order, that I can conveniently carry out my plan, which I have proposed, in conjunction with the Princess, of making a short artistical tour to Rome this very autumn, to which I invite thee, and will come myself to take thee in October. The rest of the travelling party will not displease thee, as it consists entirely of clever connoisseurs, Herr von Bouverot, Mr. Counseller of Arts Fraischdörfer, Mr. Librarian Schoppe (if he will). Unfortunately Herr von Augusti must stay behind as Lector. Thy teacher in Rome (Dian) is expecting thee with much eagerness. They have written to me that thou art particularly partial to the new court-dame of the good Princess, Madlle. von Fr., whom I recollect as a very capital draughtsman. It will interest thee, therefore, to know, that the Princess takes her, too, with her, especially since, as I hear, a journey for health is as needful to her as to me. In spring, which, besides, is not the pleasantest season of the year in Italy, thou wilt return to Germany to thy studies. One thing more, in confidence, my best one! They have unreservedly communicated to my ward, the Countess of Romeiro, thy ghost-visions in Pestitz. Now, as she is to spend the autumn and winter during my absence with her friend, the Princess Julienne, and besides will arrive earlier than I, let it not strike thee as strange that she shuns thy acquaintance, because her female and personal pride has been mortified by the juggling use of her name, and feels itself challenged to a direct refutation of the juggler. In fact, if the game has really a serious object, one could not well choose worse means to effect it.—Thou wilt do what honor bids, and, although she is my ward, not insist upon seeking her company. All this between ourselves. Adio!
"G. v. C."
These prospects,—the elevating one of being so long with his father; the healing one of wading out from this deep ashes into a freer, lighter land; the flattering one that the sick, tormented heart in the mountain-castle might perhaps, in citron and laurel groves, find, yes, and haply give back, too, joy and health again,—these prospects were, what the joys of human beings are, very pleasant walks in a prison-yard.
On this happy walk he was soon disturbed by the image of the coming Linda, not, however, on his own account, but on that of his poor sister and his friend. How malignantly must this strangeignis fatuus, thought he, dance into the nightly conflict of all these clashing relations! Roquairol seemed, besides, to leave the too intensely loving Rabette alone with her solitary wishes. She sent him weekly, under cover to Albano,—once it was the reverse,—her epistolary sighs and tears, all which he coldly pocketed, without speaking of them or of the forlorn one.
Albano, weighing in silence Liana and Rabette, compassionated, himself, the unequal lot of his over-hasty friend, over whose sun-steeds only an Amazon and Titaness, but not a good country-girl, could fling the bridle, and whose Psyche's-chariot and thunder-car seemed to him too good for a mere connubial post-chaise or child's carriage. What a strangling struggle of all feelings will there be, thought he, when he, kneeling at the nuptial altar with Rabette, accidentally looks up, and discovers among the spectators the never-to-be-forgotten lofty bride of his whole youth, and must stammer out the renouncing "Yes!"
He was therefore in doubt whether he might venture to disclose to him the contents of the letter, but not long indeed. "Shall I," said he, "dissemble and juggle before a friend? May I dare to presuppose him weak, and shun the acceleration of connections, which, after all, must come with her?"
So soon as Charles came to him, he spoke to him first of the intended journey, and even added the request for his company, moved by the thought of the first parting with his youthful friend. The Captain, whose heart always needed the sounding-board of fancy for musical utterance, was not able, on the spot, to have or to picture any considerable emotions about the farewell. Then Albano, who could not get it over his lips, gave him the whole letter.
During the reading, Roquairol's whole face became hateful, even in his friend's eye. He darted then such a flaming look of indignation at Albano, that the latter involuntarily and unconsciously returned it. "O, verily, I understand it all," said Charles; "so was the thing to be solved. Only wait till to-morrow!" All muscles in him were alive, all features distorted, everything in commotion, just as, in a violent tempest, little cloudlets whirl around each other. Albano would fain question and detain him. "To-morrow, to-morrow!" he cried, and went off like a storm.
On the morrow, Albano received a singular letter from Roquairol, for the understanding of which some notices of his connection with Rabette must be prefixed.
Nothing is harder, when one really loves one's friend, than scarcely to look at that friend's sister. Nothing is easier (except only the converse) than, after being disenchanted by city hearts, to be enchanted by country hearts. Nothing is more natural for a general lover, who loves all, than to love one among them. It needs not be proved that the Captain had been in all three cases at once, when he, for the first time, told Rabette she had his heart, as he was pleased to call it. She, of course, should not have worshipped, at such a nearness, the Hamadryad in such a Upas-tree, with whose sap so many of Cupid's arrows are poisoned; but she and most of her sisters are so dazzled by men's advantages as not to see men's misuse of them.
In the beginning many things went well; the pure innocence of his sister and his friend threw a strange magic light upon the unnatural union. The prominent advantage was, that he, as concert-master of his love, needed little more of Rabette than her ears; loving was with him talking, and he looked upon actions merely as the drawing of our soul; words being the colors. There is a twofold love,—love of the feeling and love of the object. The former is more man's love; it wishes the enjoyment of its own being, the foreign object is to it only the microscopic object-bearer, or much rather subject-bearer, whereupon it beholds its "I" magnified; it can therefore easily let its objects change, if only the flame into which they are thrown as fuel continues to blaze up high; and it enjoys itself less through actions, which are always long, tedious, and troublesome, than by words, which picture and promote it at the same time. The love of the object, on the contrary, enjoys and desires nothing but its welfare (such is for the most part female and parental love), and only deeds and sacrifices give it peace and satisfaction; it loves for the sake of blessing, whereas the other only blesses for the sake of loving.
Roquairol had long since devoted himself to the love of the feeling. Hence it was that he must make so many words; at the Rhine-fall of Schaffhausen he would not have been in the best, that is, the most excited mood, merely because he could not—since the flood out-thunders everything—have delivered anything himself in praise thereof, on account of the sublime uproar.
His Romance with Rabette after the declaration of love was divided into distinct chapters.
The first chapter he sweetened for himself in her society, by the consideration that she was new and belonged to him and yielded him an admiring obedience. He painted for her therein great pieces of beautiful nature, mixed therewith some nearer emotions, and thereupon kissed her; so that she really enjoyed his lips in two forms, that of action and that of speech; from her, as has been said, he wanted only a pair of open ears. In this chapter he assumed also some possibility of their marriage; men so easily confound the charm of a new love with the worth and duration of it.
He set himself about his second chapter, and swam therein blissfully in the tears with which he sought to write it out. In fact, this ocular pleasure afforded him more true joy than almost the best chapters. When, in such mood, he sat and drank by her side,—for, like a dead prince's heart, he loved to bury his living one in cups,—and then began to describe his life, particularly his death, and his sorrows and errors in the interval, and his suicide and infanticide at the masquerade, and his rejected and spurned love for Linda: who was then more moved to tears than himself? No one but Rabette, whose eyes,—having been, through her father and brother, as little acquainted with men's tears as with elephants', stags', or crocodiles' tears,—so much the more richly, but not so sweetly as bitterly, streamed over into his sorrow and love. This poured fresh oil again into his flame and lamp, until he at last, like that pupil of Goethe's master wizard, with the brooms that carried water, could no longer govern his spirits. Poetic natures have a sympathetic one; like justice, they keep a surgeon in their pay near the rack, who immediately sets again the broken limbs, yes, even regulates beforehand the places for the crushing fractures.[26]
A man should never weep on his own account, except for ecstasy. But poets and all people of much fancy are magicians who—exact counterparts of the burnt enchantresses—weep more easily, although more at images, than at the rough, sore calamity itself, in order to put the poor enchantresses to the worst water-ordeal. Trust them not! On the machinelle-poison-tree the rain-drops are poisonous which roll from its leaves.
Meanwhile it must never be concealed, that the Captain in this second chapter strengthened his resolution of really marrying the good and so tender Rabette. "Thou knowest," he said to himself, "what upon the whole there is in and about women, one or two deficiencies, more or less, make little difference; thy man-like folly of requiring her, as they do hired animals, to be warranted without fault, may surely be regarded as gone by, friend."
Now he set himself down to dip into the ink for his third chapter, wherein he merely sported. His lip-omnipotence over the listening heart refreshed him to such a degree, that he made frequent experiments to see whether she could not laugh herself almost to death. Women in love, by reason of weakness and fire, take the laughter-plant most easily; they hold the comic heroic-poet still more as their hero, and prove therewith the innocence of their laughing at him. But Roquairol loved her less when she laughed.
In his fourth chapter,—or sector, or Dog-Post-day, or letter-box,[27]or in whatever other way I have (ludicrously enough) made my divisions, instead of using the Cycle,—in his fourth Jubilee, I say, it went, so to speak, harder with him. Rabette grew at last sated and sick of his eternally jumping off and opening the pot of the lachrymal glands that hung between the wheels, to grease his mourning-coach. Deep emotion was every day made more disagreeable and bitter to him; he must be ever giving longer and more vivid tragedies. Then he began to perceive that the tongue of the country maiden is not the very greatest landscape-painter, soul-portrayer, and silhouettiste, and that she hardly knew how to say much more to him than, "Thou, my heart!" He made, on that account, in the fourth chapter, rarer visits; that again helped him considerably, but only for a short time. Fortunately, the half-mile from Pestitz to Blumenbühl counted in with Rabette's lines and rays of beauty; in the city, in the same street, or in fact under the same roof, he would have remained too cold from very nearness.
The most natural consequence of such a chapter is the fifth, or the chapter of alternations, which still blows up some flames by the ever-swifter interchange of reproaches and reconciliations, so that the two, as electrical bodies do little ones, alternately attract and repel each other. Sometimes he drank nothing, and merely treated her harshly. Sometimes he took his glass, and said to her: "I am the devil, thou the angel." The greatest offence to his love his father gave, by the approbation which, most unexpectedly, he bestowed upon it. It was to the Captain exactly as if he should realize the silver-wedding if he ever solemnized the golden one. In the service of the goddess of love one more easily grows bald than gray; he was already morally bald toward the silver-bride. Fortunately, a short time before the illumination Sunday in Lilar,[28]he carried all sins of omission and commission so far, that on Sunday he was in a condition to curse them; only after scolding and sinning could he with comparative ease love and pray, as the grovelling spring-scarabee snaps up only when turned over on his back. It has probably slipped, or at least escaped, the memory of few readers, among the events of that Sunday, that Roquairol sat in the morning with Rabette in the flute-dell, that Rabette sang there in a depressed and lonesome mood, and how he, dissolved thereby, encountered his friend glorified by love. The dell affair is natural; after so long coolness (not coldness) on this breezy, free Otaheite-day, with all that he had in his hands (another's hand—and a flask) beside that heart of hers, as warm and yet as tranquil as the sun in the heavens,—and then the solitary orphan flute which he made play its call,—and with his most hearty wish to profit somewhat by such a day and sky,—under these circumstances he found himself actually compelled to draw upon his genuine emotions, to give himself vent on the subject of his past life (he resembled the old languages, which, according to Herder, have many Preterites and no Present),—yes, even on the subject of his death (also a fragment of the past),—and then as on a heavenly way to move forward. Of course he went not far; he let his blood of St. Januarius, namely, his eyes, become fluid again, (his own blood having previously become so,) and then demanded of the enraptured soul, whirled about in the fairest heaven nothing less than—since she was mute before the pocket-handkerchief thrown to her as the canary-bird is under the one thrown over him,—a faint singing. Rabette could not sing; she said so, she declined, at last she sang; but during the empty singing she thought of nothing save him and his wild, wet face.
The most miserable chapter of all, which he brought out in his Romance, may well be the sixth, which he wrote down on the night of the illumination in Lilar. In the beginning he had left Rabette to stand alone a mute, inglorious[29]spectator, while he ran, jumping up behind the car of Venus full of strange goddesses. Gradually one pleasure after another crept along toward him and gave him the Tarantula bite, which was followed by a sick raving. As moderation is a true strengthening medicine of life, so did he uncommonly seldom resort to this powerful medicine, in order not to be obliged to use it in stronger and stronger doses, and he did not accustom himself to it at all. At last, when he was full, forms appeared in him as in Chinese porcelain;[30]he stepped sympathizingly and lovingly to Rabette, and fancied, as she did, that he was tender or affectionate towards her, when he merely was so towards all.
He would fain draw her away from the hostile array of eyes, to seek from her the kiss to which interdiction and privation lent honey again; but she refused, because there, where the eye stops, suspicion begins, when he unfortunately caught sight of the blind girl from Blumenbühl, and could call her as a pretended guard of Rabette, in order to lead her out of the temptation among men to the temptation in the wilderness. Pressing her to him with such a passionate impetuosity of love as he had never showed before,—so that the poor soul who had been so forsaken and forlorn this evening wept over the return of all her joys,—and speaking to her like an angel, who acts like none, he involuntarily arrived with her at the silent Tartarus, where all was blind and dumb.
Rabette had not suffered the blind girl to leave her; but when they entered the catacomb-avenue, which holds only two persons, unless the third will creep along in the water, the eyeless maid was stationed at the gate, and so much the more, because he would not willingly let himself be checked by a superfluous listener. And besides, what then was there to fear in the very raree-show of the grave?
Within there he spoke about the everywhere stretched-out index-finger of death,—how "it indicated that life, stupid as it is, should not be made by us more stupid, but joyous." He seated himself by her side, caressing her,—as the destroying angel sits invisible beside the blooming child that plays in the old masonry, and into whose tender hands he presses the black scorpion. It was the very spot where he had sat in that first covenant-night, with Albano, opposite the skeleton with the Æolian-harp, when his friend swore to him his renunciation of Linda. His tongue streamed like his eye. He was tender, as, according to the popular superstition, corpses are tender which mourners die after. He threw fire-wreaths into Rabette's heart, but she had not, like him, streams of words to quench them withal. She could only sigh, only embrace; and men fall into sin most easily from weariness of good, but tedious hearts. More swiftly did laughter and weeping, death and drollery, love and wantonness, spring over into each other; moral poison makes the tongue as light as physical makes it heavy. Poor girl! the maidenly soul is a ripe rose, out of which, so soon as one leaf is plucked, all its mates easily fall after. His wild kisses broke out the first leaves; then others fell. In vain the good genius wafts holy tones from the harp of death, and sends up angry murmurs in the orcus-flood of the catacomb,—in vain! The darkest angel, who loves to torture, but rather innocent ones than the guilty, has already torn from heaven the star of love, to bear it as a murder-brand into the cavern. The poor, narrow little life-garden of the defenceless maid, wherein but little grows, stands over the long mine-passage which runs away under Roquairol's wide-extended pleasure-camp; and the darkest, angel has the lint-stock already lighted. With fiery greediness the spark-point eats its way onward; as yet her garden stands full of sunshine, and its flowers wave; the spark gnaws a little into the black powder. Suddenly it tears open a monstrous flame-throat; and the green garden reels, then flies, blown up, scattered to atoms, falls in black clods out of the air down upon far distant places; and the life of the poor maiden is all smoke and ruin.
But Roquairol's wide-spread and jointly rooted pleasure-parks withstood the earthquake much more vigorously. Both then came up out of the mine-passage sorrowfully, for the Captain had lost a little arbor in the explosion; but they found no more the blind girl, who, in her search for them, had lost herself. They encountered only the roving Albano, who himself was sorely wailing and raving, although he this evening had lost nothing but—pleasures.
Let us lead up the deluded maiden and her million companions with some words before a mild judge! This is not the only thing which that judge will weigh, that she, stupefied by the blossom-dust of a reeking spring season of joys, smothered into dumbness with the virgin's veil, prostrate before the storm of fancy (as women fall so much the more easily before another's fancy and a poetic one, the seldomer their own blows upon them, and accustoms them to standing firmly), suffered the reward of a whole virgin life to die; but this is what most strongly mitigates the sentence, that she bore love in her heart. Why, then, do not the male sex recognize that the loving female, in the hour of love, will really do nothing less than all for her beloved, that woman has all powerforlove,againstwhich she has so little, and that she, with the same soul and at the same moment, would just as readily sacrifice her life as her virtue, and that only the demanding and taking party is bad, deliberately and selfishly?
The last or seventh chapter of his robber romance is very short and contradictory. The third day he visited her in her garden, was delicate, rational, temperate, reserved, as if he were a married man. As he found her full of trouble, which she, however, only half expressed, he accordingly, out of anxiety for her health, came again several times; and, when he found that she had not suffered in the least, he stayed—away. Towards Albano, during the aforesaid anxiety, he behaved meekly, and, after it, he was the same as ever, but not long; for when his sister, whom of all human beings he perhaps loved most purely, became blind through Albano's wildness, he then, even on account of a similarity of guilt, flung at him a real hatred, and something like it at all his (Albano's) relations. Rabette got nothing from him now but—letters and apologies, short pictures of his wild nature, which must, he said, have free play-room, and which, fastened to another, must beat and bruise and gall that one with the chain quite as much as itself. All objections of Rabette's he knew how to remove so well, as they consisted only in words, and not in looks and tears, that he at last himself began to perceive he was right; and almost nothing was left to the poor May-flower, crushed by the fall of this smooth May-pole, than the real last word,—namely, the mute life, which is not the first thing to announce to the murderer that he has smitten and destroyed a heart.