Albano heard the report; the Minister had long appeared to him contaminating, like a cold corpse of a soul; now he hated him still more as a tormenting, blood-sucking dead man. For the Princess his heart had hitherto stood security to him. She was to him a blue day-sky, wherein to others only a hot sun blazes, wherein he, however, through the mysterious depths of the soul and of friendship, had found soft constellations beaming. But now since the rumor, which, like the magicians in the presence of Moses, threw soot into her heaven, she stood, to his eyes, shining under new lights. The hatred which he by his very nature, i. e. from pride, had of all rumor, because it controls and is not to be controlled, worked in him with fresh fire; he resolved, even because Liana must be the daughter either of her hereditary foe or of her lover, and the Princessherrival, to venture freely on the strength of his heart and what it knew, and at this very juncture to communicate openly to the Princess his prayer for her mediation in favor of Liana's company upon the journey,—in other words, of his heaven.
On the morning after, the Prince came back,—the Princess immediately had her carriage tackled,—toward evening she came with one carriage more into town. The report ran through all card-tables that the Spanish Countess Romeiro had arrived at the Palace. Reports are polypuses; wounding and mutilating only multiplies them; only sticking them into each other makes one out of two: the report of Linda's arrival swallowed up the report of Froulay's disgraceful attempt.
But Albano! Like the discovery of a new world, this turned his old one topsy-turvy. Linda, that foreign tropical bird, came flying in advance of his approaching father, who rose before him like a rich land out of the distance,—the soil where he had found so many thorns and flowers soon sank behind him, with all its treasures and days, below the horizon. Only Liana could not vanish with it; that muse of his youth must he lead with him into the land of youth. By those usual magic arts of the heart had Linda's nearness awakened in him an insuperable longing for Liana.
He was now decided to remind the Princess of her earlier promise to pour the life-balsam of a southern tour upon Liana's sick nerves, and through her now, betimes, before the confusion of the last pressing moments should prostrate anything, to put the Minister's lady in tune, and gain her over, who, like all court people, would certainly hardly resist a princely wish and a happy prospect.
If, however, Liana, from any fault of her own or of others, stayed behind, then was it his sworn determination, for no power, not even his father's, to stir from the native land of his eternal bride; but to root himself before her sick-cloister, until she either passed out therefrom free and cheerful again into open life, or buried herself, darkly veiled, in the gloomy nun-choir of the dead. O, to come back to seek her in the romantic grounds of olden time, and to find her nowhere but behind the speech-grating of the hereditary vault,—this was a thought his heart could not endure!
The Princess herself furnished him an opportunity of making his request; she sent him an invitation to an astronomical party at the observatory, through her faithful court-dame Haltermann: "I have to write to you, verbally, merely the following," wrote she. "Come this evening to the observatory; I and my good Haltermann are going thither." This Haltermann, a Fraülein of few charms of spiritual flag-feathers, but of many dogmas and premature wrinkles, had already for years hung indissolubly upon the Princess, keeping everything secret, and favoring all her "make-your-appearances" (rendez-vous) by merely saying, "My princess is as pure as gold, and only few know her as I do."
Nothing could happen more propitious to Albano's wishes. He stood earliest of all on the noble observatory, in the midst of the lovely night. It was some days after the full moon; that shining world was as yet hidden behind the earth, but the let-on jets of its rays shot up by fits and starts. On all mountain-peaks glimmered even now a pale light, as if the distant morning of super-terrestrial worlds were falling upon them. Through the valleys the light-shunning, black, earthly beast, Night, still stretched himself out, and reared himself up against the mountains. The mountain-castle of Liana was invisible, and showed, like a fixed star, only a light. Suddenly the autumnal purple upon all summits around the castle was bedewed with silver by the moon, and a shower of light came down on the white walls and along the white avenues of the garden; at last, a strange, pale morning, glimmering through all bowers, lay in the garden, as it were the tender gleaming of a high, perfectly pure spirit, who only in the holy, silent night trod the low earth, and then and there sought nothing but the pure, still Liana.
As Albano looked and dreamed and longed, the Princess came up, with her Haltermann. The Professor almost broke himself in two with his salam before them, and allowed the fixed suns no astrological influence upon his erect posture. Albano and the Princess met each other again with an increase of reciprocal warmth. But the first question of the Princess was, whether he had seen the Spanish countess. Indifferently he said, he had been invited by the Princesse since her arrival, but had not gone. "Ma belle sœuradmires her most," continued the Princess; "but she deserves it somewhat. She is majestically built, taller than I, and fair, especially her head, her eye, and her hair. She is, however, more plastically than picturesquely beautiful, rather resembling a Juno or Minerva than a Madonna. But she has her peculiarities. She cannot endure any women, except such as are simple, straightforward, and blindly good; hence her chamber-women live and die for her. Men she holds to be poor creatures, and says she should despise herself if she should ever become the wife or slave of a man; but she seeks them for the sake of information. To the Prince she has unnecessarily, though she was in the right as to the matter of fact, said bitter things. He laughs at it, and says there is nothing she does love, not even children and lap-dogs. You must see her. She reads much; she lives only with the Princesse, and seems, if one may judge by her dress, to count little upon any conquests, at least at our court."
Albano said, many of these traits were truly grand, and broke short off. During the conversation the Professor had diligently arranged and screwed up everything, and was now ready to commence. He remarked upon the bright, bland, summer-like night,—proceeded, after some introductory observations, into the moon, in order to lead the six eyes to the most considerable lunar spots,—foreshadowed, in a preliminary way, several shadows overhead there,—introduced them to the Crater of Bernoulli ("I make use of Scröter's nomenclature," said he),—the highest mountain range Dörfel ("it consists, of course, of three summits," said he),—the Landgrave of Hesse-Cassel ("Hevel, however, calls it Mount Horeb," said he),—then Mont Blanc, and the ring-mountains in general; and concluded with the sly assurance, that the observatory was, to be sure, still very deficient in instruments.
The Haltermann longed indescribably after the Landgrave of Hesse-Cassel in the moon, and endeavored to get at the telescope. "It is only a spot in the planet, my child!" said the Princess. "And is the Mont Blanc overhead, then, nothing but a spot, too?" asked she, disappointed. The Princess nodded, and looked into the telescope; the magic moon hung like a piece of day-world close to the glass. "How its fair, pale light and all its magic passes away when it is brought near! as when the future becomes present!" said she, to the astonishment of the Professor, who could never make anything out of the planet excepting precisely when itwasnear. She interrogated him about Saturn's ring. "There are properly two, your Highness; but the observatory just at this time wants an instrument to see it," said he, and aimed again in the direction of the former shot.
Albano saw his life-gardens sparkling round about him with the warm glimmer of an after-spring; and his inner being trembled sweetly and sadly. He took a comet-seeker, and flew round among the stars, towards Blumenbühl, into the city, up the mountains, only not to the white castle with the illuminated corner-chamber and the little garden. His whole heart turned backward for shame and love before the gate of Paradise.
At this moment, the Haltermann, at a hint to retire, led the way down with the astronomer, in order to favor the Princess with a moment free from witnesses. Albano stood before her, noble in the moonlight; his eye was radiant; his features showed emotion. She grasped his hand, and said, "We certainly do not misunderstand each other, Count?" He pressed her hand, and his eyes gushed full. "No, Princess!" said he, softly. "You give me your friendship. I do not deserve it, if I do not trust it entirely. I give you now the proof of my open confidence. You know, perhaps, the history of my fortunes and my loss; you know the Minister." "Alas, alas!" said she; "even your hard history, noble man, has become familiar to me."
"No!" replied he, passionately; "I was more cruel than my fate. I tormented an innocent heart; I made an obedient daughter miserable, sick, and blind. But I have lost her," he continued, with rising emotion, and turned sidewise, in order not to see the glimmering heights of Liana's residence, "and bear it as I can, but without any secret way to repossession. Only the victim cannot be permitted to bleed to death over yonder, with her stern, narrow-hearted mother. O, the honey-drops of the pleasures, they and Italy's heaven, might well healher. She dies if she stays, and I stay to look on. Friend, O how great is the favor I ask!"
"Gladly shall it be granted you! Day after to-morrow I visit the mother and daughter, and certainly will decide the latter for the journey, in so far as it depends upon me. I do it, however,—to be frank,—merely out of genuine friendship for you; for the girl does not please me entirely with her mysticism, and certainly does not love as you do. She does everything for people merely from love to God; and that I do not like."
"Ah, so thought I, too, once; but whom should the pious love, except God?" said he, absorbed in himself and the night, and in too hyberbolical a style for the taste of the Princess. His glimmering eye hung fast on the white mountain-palace, and spring-times floated down from the moon, and glided to and fro on the illuminated track of his vision; and the beautiful youth wept and pressed ardently the hand of the Princess, without being conscious of either. She respected his heart, and disturbed it not.
At last, they both came down the high stairway, where the astronomer joyfully awaited them, and confessed to both how very much, to speak freely, their attachment and devotion to astronomy not only gladdened, but even animated and inspired him.
"Day after to-morrow, certainly!" With these words, the Princess departed, in order to grant the pensive, full-hearted youth consolation and dreams.
shieldstart
Albano was now again lashed to the Ixion's wheels of the clock. The setting off of the Princess and her answer were to suddenly set up lights in the dark, wide cavern in which he had so long travelled, without knowing whether it harbored frightful formations and venomous beasts, or whether it was vaulted, and filled with glistening arches and subterranean pillared halls. Over Liana's condition two hands—Augusti's and that of the Minister's lady—had hitherto held fast the veil. Both were persons who never liked to answer the question, How do you do? However, he now let his whole soul rest upon the Princess, since the astronomical evening, in remembering which, he could hardly comprehend how it was that he was able at that time to speak to a female friend about his love as much and more than ever to a friend of his own sex. But man does not love to speak of his feelings before a man, and does love to before a woman. A woman, however, loves best to do so before a woman. Meanwhile, the Princess held him in bonds by the finest flattery which can be,—by decided and silent attention. He was as sick and sated of verbal praise as he was partial and tributary to that which came in a practical shape.
Pending the arrival of the decision, a confused time elapsed; like a man who travels in the night, he heard voices and saw lights; and it needed morning to decide upon their hostile or friendly significance. Rabette lay sick and bleeding away her faint heart; for not he had drawn out of it the astringent dagger,—namely, Charles's love,—but the latter had himself anticipated him with bitter-sweet tears over the bitterest.
Charles had met him once, with his hat drawn down over his brows, and grimly-stinging look, without a greeting. Everywhere he heard that Charles in vain besieged and blockaded Linda's and Julienne's double gate. This and Liana's illness made the tropical savage like a grownup wild boy of the woods. Even in the present state of separation,—on the death-field offriendship,—Albano felt it as a wound tohumanity, that Charles did not take for granted—for to the contrary presumption he imputed the street-grimness—that he would not seek to see the Countess.
Even in the Librarian, for several days, a mystery seemed to have been lurking. He, however, since it had been growing lighter and lighter to Alban in Schoppe's depths, and he had looked in behind his comic mask, even to the honest eye and loving lips, became very near to his heart, especially after so many partings; for even the Lector, according to his custom never to court the love of any man, or, at least, faithless friend, kept himself aloof from him,—a thing which afflicted the very same youth, who inwardly approved it.
For several days, I say, Schoppe had been transposed into an entirely new tune, and become his own remainder and after-summer. It began with his blowing away at a miserable haying song a whole half-day on the bugle; the remaining half he sang it off vocally. Instead of reading and writing, he went up and down in the city and in his chamber. All that which he had formerly despatched with rapidity,—running, swallowing of victuals, speaking, smoking, starting up,—all this went now club-footed, and finally stood fast. His slow rousing up, and his tender, gentle step, might have seemed ludicrous to those who were acquainted with his former days. His large, noble wolf-dog, whom he had ten times a day suffered to hug him round the neck with his fore-paws, and whose breast, drawn up on the skin, he so fondly pressed to his own, when he held with him a Lange's and consistorial colloquy, he now neglected to such a degree that the dog became attentive, and did not know what to think of it. How little could he once endure the yelp of a cudgelled hound without sallying out of his house-door as protector and patron, because he conceived one might well treat men like dogs, but not dogs themselves so! Now he could hear their screaming, merely because, as it seemed, he did not hear it.
As he formerly often went to Albano merely to walk up and down, without a loud word,—because he said, "By this I recognize my friend, that he does not undertake to entertain me or himself, but will merely sit there,"—so now he came still more mute, often touched tenderly, like a playful child, the shoulder of Albano as he sat reading, and said, when the latter looked behind him, "Nothing!" Meanwhile, Albano inquired not about the change; for he knew he would surely unveil it to him in good time. Their hearts stood over against each other like open mirrors.
So lay the dark wood of life before Albano, with its paths running through each other and deep into the thicket, as he stood upon the cross-way of his future and waited for his genius, who, either as a hostile or as a good one, was to bring him Liana's decision. At last there came from the gloomy wood a genius, but it was the dark genius, and gave him this note from the Princess:—
"Dear Count: I am always true, and would rather be unsparing thanuntrue. The sick Mademoiselle v. F. is no longer in a condition to make a tour or profit by it. I take a lively interest in the case. However fondly I could wish to-day myself to speak consolation to you, I hope, nevertheless, after this intelligence, not to have occasion to do so.
"Your Friend."
What a dark cloud-break out of the morning redness of youth! So then the secret joy which he had hitherto nourished had been the forerunner of the dreadful blow,[43]the soft murmuring before the waterfall.[44]That his very love was to be the blazing sword which pierced through her life: O, he dwelt upon that so constantly;thatpained him so! But there was no moisture in his eye; the wormwood of conscience embitters even sorrow.
When man is no longer his own friend, then he goes to his brother, who is a friend still, in order thathemay softly speak to him and restore his heart and soul; Albano went to his Schoppe.
He found not him, but something else. Schoppe, namely, kept a diary about "himself and the world," wherein his friend might read whatever and whenever he wished; only he must pardon it, if he carried away with him from the reading, since it was written throughout just as if no one were to see it again,—angry slaps of the fan, and that, too, with the hard end. "Why should I spare thee any more than myself?" said Schoppe. To thisthouthey had come without being able to say when, chary as they generally were of this official style of the heart, this holiest dual of souls toward others; "for I thank God," said Schoppe, "that I live in a language in which I can sometimes say you, yes even (if men and monkeys are subjects for it) between every two commas, your Well-born, as well as your High-born, or Otherwise-born."
Albano found the diary open, and read with astonishment this:—"Amandus-day. A stupid and extremely remarkable day for the well-known Hesus or Hanus![45]I can hardly persuade myself that the poor Thunder-god deserved to walk along behind the tall Proserpine,[46]and at last to peep into her face, her brow, her lips, her neck! O God! If such a god had stayed now on the spot! AsPastor fidohe by good fortune rose up again and went on his way. O hell-goddess, heaven-stormer of Hesus, thou hast made thyself his heaven! Can he ever let thee go?
"Afternoon. ThePastorbecomes his own baiting-house, he knows not how to stay; he lives now in all streets, in order to behold hisJeanne d'Arc-en-ciel,[47]and suffers enough. But, Hesus, are not sorrows the thorns, wherewith the buckle of love fastens? To-day Friday[48]went with the Princess to the observatory. The wind is south-east-east,[49]—read thirteen monthlies in one hour,—Spener sees life transfigured and poetic in the shining magnifying-mirror God, as well as another man.
"Sabina's day. With thePastorit grows worse, if I see right. He is in the way to work himself over into abillet-doux-presser, to powder himself by night in bed; and the knave already raises in the heat, like milk which is kept warm, poetic cream. Only may Heaven never grant him to fall into a rational discourse with his hell-goddess, face to face, breath to breath, and the two souls be confounded together! Verily, Flins[50]would snatch him away, Hesus would devour a millennial kingdom at once; I fear he would become too wild with the nectar, and too hard for me to control.
"Evening. Is it not already so far gone with thePastor, that he has borrowed him an author out of the whining decade of the age (he is ashamed to name him), and will fain let himself be affected by the stupid stuff, while he muses upon the effect which the author had upon him in his fourteenth year. Of course he stumbles at him, in his present period of life, like a night-watchman by day; but still he cries back his cry, and has a new affection on the subject of his old. So does the declension ofcornuin the grammar still smile upon me, even to this hour, because I recollect how easily and glibly in the golden moons of childhood I retained the whole of theSingular.
"Simon Jud.[51]Curse on it! A fair face and a false Maxd'or make, in the course of a year, a couple of hundred knaves, who differ from each other only in this, that one wishes to keep and the other to get rid of the article. Hesus frowns, and charges home upon a million rivals already. Like button- and lace-makers, or like copper- and brass-founders, two so nearly of a trade cannot let each other get on.[52]Right! hell-goddess, that thou hatest all men! That is, to be sure, something for thePastor,—a wound-salve! Scioppius, the two Scaligers, and the vigorous Schlegels, &c.—"
Here the diary passes to other matters. An old portrait, for which Schoppe had sat to himself, he had retouched. A notice to be inserted in the "Pestitz Weekly Advertiser" announced the purpose of the picture:—
"The undersigned, a portrait-painter of the Flemish school, makes known that he has taken up his residence in Pestitz, and that he is ready to paint all of every station and sex that may sit to him. As a sample of his execution may be seen at his studio a portrait of himself, which represents him sneezing, and which may be compared with the original on the spot. I also cut profiles.
"Peter Schoppe,"No. 1778."
Probably that was to move the hell-goddess to sit for once to the sneezing painter. Albano could not but be astonished in the midst of deep pain. In the beginning, he had imagined, according to the simplicity of his nature, that he himself was meant by Hanus.
At this moment, Schoppe appeared. Albano spoke first, and said, softly, "I, too, have read thy diary." The Librarian started back with an exclamatory curse, and looked glowingly out of the window. "What is the matter, Schoppe?" asked his friend. He whirled round, stared at him, and said, twisting the skin of his face apart, like one who is cleaning his teeth, and drawing up his upper lip, like a boy who bites into his bread and butter, "I am in love," and ran up and down the chamber in a flame, bewailing, at the same time, that he must live to experience such a thing in himself in these his oldest days. "Read my diary no more," he continued. "Ask not about the name, brother; no devil, no angel, not the hell-goddess, shall know it. One day, perhaps, when I and she lie in Abraham's bosom, and I on hers—thou art so troubled, brother!"
"Fly gayly in the sun-atmosphere of love!" said his friend, in that sadness of conscience which makes man simple, calm, and lowly; "I will never ask nor disturb thee! Read that!" He gave him the note of the Princess, and said to him also, while he read, "Cursed be every joy where she has none! I stay here till it is decided whether she lives or not." "I stay here too," rejoined Schoppe, with an involuntarily comic expression. "Be serious!" said Albano. "Once I could," said he, tearfully; "since day before yesterday no more!"
Meanwhile, Albano approved Schoppe's separation from the travelling company; both secured to each other, even in friendship, the most precious freedom. Of tutors' attendance neither made account. Schoppe often ridiculed tutors of much information and manners, when they assumed he educated anything out of Albano or into him. He said: "The age educated, not a ninny; millions of men, not one; properly, at most, a pedagogical group of Pleiades sent their light after him,—namely, the seven ages of man, every age into the next following. The individual resembled very much the entire humanity, whose revolutions and improvements were nothing more than retouchings of a Schickaneder's magic flute by a Vulpius. Meanwhile, however, there hovered around the silly, discordant piece a melody of Mozart, in respect to which one outstrips father and language-master."
"Wherefore do we sinners creep and buzz about here? Let us to Ratto's!" said Schoppe. With extreme reluctance, Albano agreed to it; he said the cellar had in it for him something uncomfortable, and a sultry foreboding oppressed his bosom. Schoppe referred the presentiment to the pressure of the rafters of his ruined pleasure-castle, which still lay upon his breast, and the remembrance of that Roquairol, now flying in the abyss, who had once drunk his health in the cellar, and afterwards confessed to him in Lilar. Albano followed at last, but reminded him of the fulfilment of another presentiment, which he had had on the hill above Arcadia.
"We neither of us play the best personages in love; meanwhile let us go into the cellar," said Schoppe, on the way, and, with a quite unwonted hardness, stretched his favorite upon the rack of his drollery. Once, when he was not himself in love, he was so capable of a tender, indulgent, serious silence on that subject; but now no more.
In the cellar there was the old running in and out of strange and familiar faces. Albano and Schoppe climbed together those pure heights of the mountains of the Muses, where, as on natural ones, the atmosphere of life rests lighter, and the ether draws nearer to the shortening column of air. Men comfort each other more easily on their Ararat than women in their vales of Tempe. After Schoppe, made more fiery by the tempestuous atmosphere of punch and love, had for a considerable time played off the lightning-spark of his humor in zigzag, and with a calcining effect, through the world-edifice, suddenly an unknown person, like a death's-head, perfectly bald and even without eyebrows, but with a rosy hue on his withered cheeks, stepped up to their table and said, with iron mien, to Schoppe: "Within fifteen months this day you will have become crazy, my merry cock-sparrow!"
"O ho!" Schoppe broke out, inwardly shrinking up the while. Albano grew pale. Schoppe collected himself again, stared sharply and courageously at the repulsive shape, which rolled its withered but rosy skin to and fro upon sharp, high cheek-bones, and said: "If you understand me, prophetic gallows-bird and cock-sparrow, and are not yourself crack-brained, then am I in a condition to prove that one can make very little of a case out of such a thing as madness." Hereupon he showed—but as one cooled-down, burnt-out, and deserted by his host of images—that madness, like epilepsy, gave more pain to the spectator than the performer; for it was only an earlier death, a longer dream, a day-walking instead of night-walking; for the most part, it gave what the whole of life and virtue and wisdom could not,—anenduringagreeable idea.[53]Even if, which was rare, it chained a man to a tormenting one, still this became, nevertheless, a panoply against all bodily sufferings. He had, therefore, for himself, never feared madness any more than dreaming, but could not bear to hear others speak, or even to see them, in either of these states. "We shudder," said Albano, "at a man who talks to us in his sleep as to an absent person, or who, when awake, talks only to himself alone; and whenever I hear myself soliloquize, it is just the same."
"I am no philosopher," said the Baldhead, indifferently, whose perfect, shining baldness was more frightful than hateful. Schoppe asked angrily, "Who he was, then,quisandquidandquibus auxiliis, andcurandquomodoandquando."[54]"Quando?—After fifteen months I come again.Quis?—Nothing; God uses me only when he has to make some one unhappy," said the bald one, and begged a glass and the liberty of drinking with them. Albano, freely granting it, said, in an inquiring tone, he had probably just arrived? "Just from the great Bernhard," said the bald one, growing more repulsive with every word, because his old rosy face was a zigzag of convulsive distortions, so that at every moment a different man seemed to be standing there. He went out a moment. Schoppe, quite beside himself, said: "I grow more and more exasperated with him, as with a hideous, hovering fever-image. For God's sake, let us go. I have a feeling behind me all the time, as if a wicked fist were thrusting me upon him, that I should strangle him. He grows, too, more and more familiar to me, like an old moss-grown deadly foe."
Albano answered softly: "See, my presentiment! But now that I have not hearkened to it, I must even see where it will come out." His courageous nature, his romantic history and position, would not let him draw back from a prospect so full of adventure.
"But why," inquired Schoppe of the bald one, when he came back, "do you cut so many faces, which do not present you exactly in the most favorable light?" "They come," said he, "from poison which was given me ten years ago. Have you observed howaqua toffana, taken in quantities, distorts? In Naples, I forced it down the throat of a beautiful girl of sixteen, who had for some years dealt in it, and caused her to die before my eyes. I fancy there is nothing more godless than poison-mixing." "Abominable!" cried Albano, seized with the deepest repugnance for the man; as to Schoppe,hisfury had actually relieved him.
At this moment a poor, meagre joiner's wife came in for liquor, who kept her eyes cast down and half closed with shame and weakness; she ventured not to look up, because the whole town knew that she was forcibly driven out of her bed at night into the street to see a funeral procession, which some days after was really to move through it, already in prelude and prefiguration pass before her. Hardly had the bald one beheld her, when he covered his face. "There is only a single innocent one among us," said he, all pale and uneasy; "this youth here," pointing to Albano. Just then a carriage with six horses thundered by overhead. Schoppe jumped up, twice in succession put the question to Albano, who was lost in thought: "Wilt thou go with me?" turned angrily away at the word No, stepped close up to the bald one, and said furiously: "Dog!" and turning on his heel went out. On the pale, bloodless skin of the Baldhead no expression stirred, only his hand twitched a little, as if there were near it a stiletto to lay hold of, but he sent after him that look at which the maiden in Naples died.
Albano was enraged at the look, and said: "Sir, this man is a thoroughly honest, true, vigorous nature; but you have exasperated him even against himself, and must acquit him of blame." With soft, flattering voice he replied: "My acquaintance with him dates not from to-day, and he knows me, too." Albano asked whether, when he spoke of the great Bernhard some time since, he meant the Swiss mountain of that name. "Certainly!" replied he. "I travel thither yearly to spend a night with my sister." "So far as I know, there are only monks there," said Albano. "She stands among the frozen ones in the cloister-chapel,"[55]he replied. "I stay all night before her, and look upon her, and sing Horæ."
Albano, while listening, felt himself singularly changed, which he could ascribe only to the punch,—it was less intoxication than glow; a flying blaze roared over his inner world, and the red lustre hovered about on its farthest borders; now did it seem to him as if he stood entirely on the same ground with the Baldhead, and could wrestle with this evil genius. "I had a sister, too," said Albano; "can one call up the dead?" "No, but the dying," said the Baldhead. "Ugh!" said Albano, shuddering. "Whom would you see?" asked the Baldhead. "A living sister, whom I never have seen yet," said Albano, in a glow. "It requires," said the Baldhead, "a little sleep, and your knowing also where your sister was on her last birthday." Luckily Julienne, whom he took for his sister, had, onhers, been at the Palace in Lilar. He told him so. "Then come with me!" said the Baldhead.
At this moment Schoppe's servant brought Albano a sword-cane and the following note:—
"Brother, brother, trust him not. Here is a weapon, for thou art quite too foolhardy. Run him right through, if he does so much as make faces. All sorts of unknown people have this evening asked after thee and thy whereabouts. It is to me as if no life at all were safe to me from the beast,—thine or hers. Be on thy guard, and come!
Schoppe.
"Run him through, however, I pray thee."
"Are you afraid, perhaps?" asked the Baldhead. "That will appear," said Albano, angrily, and, taking the sword-cane, went with him. As the two passed through the little, dark anteroom of the cellar, Albano saw in a mirror his own head set in a fiery ring. They passed out of the city into the open country. The bald one went ahead. The sky was bright with stars. It seemed to the Count as if he heard the subterranean waters and fires of the globe and the creation. Hardly did he recognize out there the way to Blumenbühl. Suddenly the bald one ran into a field on the left. The lean joiner's wife stood on the Blumenbühl road quite stiff, and saw abstractedly a corpse move along invisible, and heard the far-off bell, which is borne by the mute Death. So it seemed.
Then did Albano follow the Baldhead more daringly: the fear of spirits kills the fear of man. Both moved along in silence beside each other. In the depth of the distance, it seemed as if a man floated, without walking or stirring, slowly and steadily onward through the air. The white skin on the bald one twitched incessantly, and one invisible fist after another thrust itself forth from the clay of his face, as in the act of striking. Once there flitted over it the look of the Father of Death.[56]
Suddenly Albano heard around him the smothered murmur and confused talk of a throng. There was nothing on either side. "Do you hear nothing?" he asked. "All is still," said the Baldhead. But the swarm kept on murmuring and whispering eagerly and hotly, as if it could not be ready and agreed. The bold youth shuddered. The gates of the shadowy kingdom stood far open into the earth; dreams and shadows swarmed in and out, and flew near to bright life.
The two stepped up to the thicket before Lilar. There came a boy out of the wood with an enormously big head, helping himself along on two crutches, and holding a rose, which he offered, with a nod, to the youth. Albano took it, but the little fellow nodded incessantly, as if he would say he should like to have him smell of it. Albano did so; and suddenly the sinking of the stage of life, a bottomless slumber, drew him down into the dark, unfathomable depths.
When he awoke heavily, he was alone and unarmed, in an old dusty Gothic chamber. A faint little light scattered only shadows around. He looked through the window; it seemed to be Lilar, but on the whole landscape snow had fallen, and the heavens were white with cloud, and yet the stars singularly pierced through. "What is this? Am I standing in the mask-dance of dreams?" he asked himself.
Then an arras went up; a covered female form, with innumerable veils on the face, stepped in, stood a moment, and flew to his heart. "Who is it?" he asked. She pressed him to her bosom more passionately, and wept clear through the veil. "Knowest thou me?" he asked. She nodded. "Art thou my unknown sister?" he asked. She nodded, and with a sister's close embrace, with hot tears of love, with rapturous kisses, held him fast to herself. "Say, where livest thou?" She shook her head. "Art thou dead or a dream?" She shook her head. "Is thy name Julienne?" She shook her head. "Give me a sign of thy truth!" She showed him half of a gold ring on a table that stood near. "Show thy face, that I may believe thee!" She drew him away from the window. "Sister, by Heaven, if thou liest not, then raise thy veil!" She pointed with her long, outstretched, enveloped arm to something behind him. He kept on intreating. She motioned vehemently toward a certain place, and repelled him from herself. At length he obeyed, and turned sidewards; then he saw in a mirror how she suddenly threw up the veils, and how, beneath them, the superannuated form appeared whose image, with the signature, his father had given him on Isola Bella. But when he turned round again, he felt on his face a warm hand and a cold flower; and a second slumber drew downward his conscious being.
When he awoke, he was alone, but with his weapon, and on the wooded spot where he had first sunk to sleep. The sky was blue, and the light constellations glimmered; the earth was green, and the snow gone; the half-ring he no longer held in his hand; around him was no sound, and no human being. Had all been but the fleeting cloud-procession of dreams, the brief whirl and shaping that goes on in their magic smoke?
But life and truth had burned so livingly into his breast, and the tears of a sister still lay on his eye. "Or might they be only my brotherly tears!" said his perplexed spirit, as he rose, and in the bright night went homeward. All was as still as if life were yet sleeping on; he heard himself, and feared to waken it; he looked upon his own body as he walked along. Yes, thought he, this thick bed in which we are wrapped plays off before us even the woes and joys of life. Just as, in our sleep, we seem to stifle under falling mountains when the coverlet settles over our lips, or to stride over sticky, melted metal when it oppresses the feet with too great a thickness of feathers, or to freeze, like naked beggars, when it is shoved off, and exposes us to the night-chill, so does this earth, this body, throw into the seventy years' sleep of the immortal lights and sounds and chills, and he shapes to himself therefrom the magnified history of his joys and sorrows; and, when he once awakes, only a little of it proves true!
"Heavens! why comest thou so late, and so pale?" asked Schoppe, who had been a long time in Albano's chamber, waiting for him. "O, ask me not to-day!" said Albano.
barstart
Ever did Schoppe let fly at himself more curses than on the morrow, during Albano's recital, and on this account, to be sure, that he had not stayed so as to arrest the Baldhead, the fly-wheel of so many ghostly movements, in the midst of the revolutions, by dashing right at the spokes. He earnestly besought the Count, at the next appearance, at least,—especially in Italy,—to tear off, without mercy, the Baldhead's mask, though life hung upon it. The youth had been moved too intensely by the events of the night. He therefore spoke of them reluctantly, and without dwelling upon them. As in him all sensations stirred more intensely and overpoweringly than in Roquairol, he had not, like him, pleasure in portraying them, but shrank from it. He looked up the little old likeness of his sister which his father had given him on the island. What a striking reflection of the nightly image in the mirror! This moss of age on a sister must have been artificially produced there, merely for the purpose of hiding the resemblance. The presumption of its being Julienne he gave up again, after the denial of the veiled one, and from the improbability of such a nocturnal performance, and postponed measuring the altitudes of all these incomprehensible airy apparitions till he should have the aid of his daily expected father.
Ah, over all his thoughts swept incessantly in vulture-circles a distant, dark form, the destroying angel, that would fain stoop greedily upon the helpless Liana! The staring stiffness of the corpse-seeress on the Blumenbühl road—especially since the sad billet of the Princess—now in the dark intersecting thicket paths, into which his life's course had entangled itself, danced on before him as a juggling phantom of terror.
A new and single resolve stood now in his soul like a rigid arm fast by the way-side, pointing ever in one direction, up the Blumenbühl road. "Thou must go to her," said the resolve; "she must not die in the delusive belief of thy anger and thy old severity; thou must see her again, to ask her pardon, and then shalt thou weep till her grave opens and takes her away." "O, how I then," he said to himself, "before the dying-throne of this angel, shall bruise with contrition my hard, haughty, wild heart, and take back everything, everything whereby I blinded and wounded the tender soul in Lilar, that she may not despise too much the short days of her love, and that her heart may at least part from me with one little farewell pleasure! And that, O God, grant us!"
In vain did Schoppe propose thereupon, that he should seek with him the business-office of the night-wonders, which so probably must be found in the Gothic-temple; this very day he would force his way into the presence of his pale loved one. Schoppe continued to insist vehemently on the visit to Lilar, and at last demanded it, and commanded compliance; but now it was a lost case, and Albano's refusal was panoplied. "Plague take it! why let myself, then, be boiled in these tear-pots?" said Schoppe, and marched out.
But after a short time he came back with a billet from—Gaspard, wherein the latter demanded for to-day relay-horses from the post-house, and with a proposition from himself that they should go to meet his father. How refreshingly did the nearness of his father breathe over Albano's sultry waste! Nevertheless, he said No the second time; his long willing and warring and every hour's lapse veiled Liana more and more darkly from him in her cloud, and he thought anxiously of his dream about her on Isola Bella;[57]and finally he had his suspicions aroused by Schoppe's holding him back so significantly.
And herein he erred not. Schoppe acted upon quite other grounds than Albano had yet learned. The Lector, namely, who with wise old honesty kept a distant watch, through Schoppe's agency, over the rebellious youth, whom, however, he took every occasion to praise, had pointed out to his proxy the up-towering, leaden-heavy cloud-pile which was moving onward and lowering over the head of the youth; namely, Liana's impending death.
At first, for some time the quarrel with her parents, that poetic hardening, as it were, of Liana's nerves, had been to them wine of iron, but afterward they melted in the soft water of renunciation, autumnal rest and devotion. There is a bland calm which loosens men as well as ships; a warmth in which the wax-figure of the spirit melts down. Every day, too, came the pious father and spread her wings, loosed her from earthly hopes and earthly anxieties, and led her up into the glory of the throne of God. The fair spring-breezes of her ended love she let breathe again, but in a higher region; they were now thin, mild, ethereal zephyrs, breaths of flowers. She knew now, at once, that she was dying and loved God. She stood already like a sun, tranquil and far away in her heaven, but like a sun she seemed to move obediently around the little day of her mother, and shed on her a soft warmth. Her tears flowed out as sweetly as sighs, as evening dew out of evening redness. As one sinks, blissfully cradled, in joyous dreams, so she floated, long borne up, drawn slowly onward, with buoyant fleshly-garment, on the flood of death.
Only a single earthly obstacle had hitherto broken the gentle fall,—the ardent expectation of the coming of the Romeiro, whom she so dearly loved as the friend of her friend Julienne. At last she made her appearance, and took too powerful a hold of Liana's fancy; for it was just the wings of fantasy which, in this tender, constant swan,[58]were too strong. How did the sick one humble herself at the feet of this shining goddess! How unworthy did she find herself of her former love for Albano! So little had Spener, humble only before God, been able to prevent her taking up with her two jewels out of her former life into her present glorified state, her old lowliness before men and her old anxiety for those she loved.
Julienne sought again and again to dissuade her; but one evening—when she learned that Albano was to be taken to Italy—she twined herself around Linda's heart, and told her, with her wonted over-fulness of feeling, only Albano deserved her. Linda answered with astonishment; she could not comprehend a self-annihilating love; inhercase she should die. "And am not I, then, dying?" said Liana.
Julienne, thereupon, immediately begged Liana to spare the embarrassment of the noble Countess on this subject. Liana, without being offended, remained silent; but the new desire now possessed her to see once more her lost Albano, and show him her former fidelity and his error, and with dying heart to make over to him a new and great one. She was very frank in uttering all the last wishes of her holy soul. Her mother and Augusti held her from her purpose as long as they could, that she might not take so dark, poisonous a flower as the pleasure of such a meeting must be to her sick heart. But she entreated her mother: How could it harm her this year, as it was not till the next—according to Caroline's prediction—she was to go hence? Meanwhile they sought to put farther and farther off from her the last purpose, in the hope that Gaspard would carry away the Count, and with the intention, only in the extreme case of having to give up all hopes, of gratifying for her this fatal wish.
Then she turned with her request to her brother; but he, partly from mortified vanity and partly from love for his sister, depicted Albano on the colder side, said he was going off to a gay country, would easily cease to regret her, &c. How did it almost provoke the gentle soul, because, with a woman's sharpsightedness, she detected in this an approaching breach of love towards Albano and Rabette, and a return of partiality for Linda, who was to be left behind! She had already for some time been curious about Rabette's being so long invisible. For the poor soul had not, since her fall, since the burial of her innocence, been in a state to be prevailed upon, by prayers or commands, to appear with her downcast, sinful eye before the friend of eternal purity; and now it was absolutely impossible for her, since Linda's arrival and visits had crushed even the lightest, lingering gossamer-web of her flying summer, and her throat, full of anguish, was stifled and choked with the closeness of the funeral-veil. "Brother, brother," said Liana, with inspiration, "think what our poor parents get from us children! I fulfil no hope of theirs; every hope rests on thee! Ah, how angry will our father be!" she added, with her old dread and love. Her brother held it right to keep from her the truth (about Rabette's degradation and concealment), which would this time wear the form of an armed fate, and so he put in the place of the truth his brotherly love. Hence he had hitherto denied himself the only opportunity of speaking with the Countess—by Liana's sick chair. "Thou must die," he once said to her in enthusiasm; "it is well that thy web is so delicate, that the cross-play of so many talons may rend it asunder. What mightest thou not have suffered, even to thy seventieth year, from the world and men!" He, too, believed—from his own experience—that there are more sorrows of women than of men, just as, in heaven, there are more eclipses of the moon than of the sun.
So things stood till the night when Albano saw the Baldhead, the playing of the eclipses, and his veiled sister. That night one string after another snapped in Liana's life; a rapid change came over her; and early the next morning she had already received the last sacrament from her Spener's hands. The Lector got this sad intelligence from the Minister's lady at nine of the morning. Hence it was that he sought so eagerly through Schoppe to hold back the youth from the sight of a dying bride.
Subsequently came Gaspard's billet, which put it into the heads of both to try to induce him to go meet his father, and—by a message to him—to persuade the latter, at least for some days, to turn back with Albano from the approaching earthquake, that the ground might sink before the son should tread upon it.
But this, too, as has been already related, missed the mark. Albano acquainted Schoppe directly with his suspicion of some unpleasant event. The latter was just on the point of giving an answer, when he was spared the necessity by a panting messenger from Blumenbühl, who handed Albano the following note from Spener:—