barstart
If in the foregoing night a strange, hostile spirit cruelly drove against each other and away from each other human beings with bandaged eyes, so will that spirit on the morning after, when from a cold cloud he surveyed his battle-field with sparkling eyes, have almost smiled at all the joys and harvests which lie prostrate round about him down below there.
In Blumenbühl, Rabette, in lonely corners, wrings her hands with trembling arms, and breathes upon the wall-plaster, to wipe away the redness of wet eyes; out of Lilar comes Albano, gloomily looks upon the earth instead of its inhabitants, and from the astronomical tower gazes eagerly into the heavens, and seeks no friend; Roquairol musters up horses and riders, and makes himself, out in the country, a merry, drunken evening; Augusti shakes his head over letters from Spain, and reflects upon them disagreeably, but deeply; Liana leans in an easy-chair, all crushed, with her face falling towards her shoulder, and nothing blooming in it any longer save innocence; her father strides up and down, with a reddish-brown complexion; she answers but faintly, lifting from time to time her folded hands a little. Before the night-spirit on the cloud men's time goes swiftly by, as a fleeting pair of wings without beak or tail; the spirit has near him the distant week when Albano shall see by night from the observatory how in the Blumenbühl church there burns an altar-light, how Liana kneels therein with uplifted hands, and how an old man lays his own on her serene, shining brow, which directs itself with tearless eyes toward heaven.
The spirit looks down deeper into the months; he writhes around himself for delight, and grins over all dwelling-places and pleasure-haunts of men which lie about him; often a laugh runs round along all his open hell-teeth, only sometimes he gnashes them under the cover of the lip-flesh.
Look away,—for he too sees and wills it,—and step down from the wintry spectre among the warm children of men, and on the firm ground of reality, where flying time, like the flying earth, seems to rest upon steadfast roots, and where only eternity, like the sun, seems to rise.
Albano's wound, which cut through his whole inner man, you can best measure by the bandage which he sought to bind around it. Our grief may be guessed from the solace and self-deception we resort to. The next morning he let his griefs discourse across one another, and lay still, before their funeral wail, as a corpse; then he rose up, and spoke thus to himself: "Only one of two things is possible,—either she is still true to me, and only her parents now constrain her,—then they again must be constrained, and there is nothing at all to be lamented,—or else, from some weakness or other, perhaps towards her tyrannical and beloved parents, she is no longer true to me, or it may be out of coldness toward me, or from religious scruples, error, and so on; in that case I see," he continued, and tried to tread his two feet deeper and firmer into the ground, without, however, having anypurchase, "nothing else to be done than to do nothing; not to be a crying suckling, a groaning sickling, but an iron man; not to weep blood over a past heart, over the ashes of death lying deep upon all fields and plantations of my youth, and over my monstrous grief." Thus did he delude himself, and mistake the necessity of consolation for its actual presence.
Every evening he visited the star-tower out of the city, on the Blumenbühl heights. He found the old, solitary, meagre, eternally-reckoning, wifeless, and childless keeper, always friendly and unembarrassed as a child, making no inquiries after war-news, journals of fashion, and poesies, and never paying money for his pleasure, except on the coach to Bode and Zach. But the old eye sparkled when it looked from under the sparse eyebrows into heaven, and his heart and tongue rose to poetry when he spoke of the highest mundane spot, the light heaven over the dark, low earth,—of the immense, universal sea without shore, wherein the spirit, which in vain seeks to fly across it, sinks exhausted, and whose ebb and flow only the Infinite One sees at the foot of his throne,—and of the hope of a starry heaven after death, which then no earthly disk, as now, shall intersect, but which shall arch itself around itself, without beginning and without end.
If Socrates humbled the proud Alcibiades with a map of the world, so, when this in turn is annihilated by a chart of the heavens, must our pride and sorrow on the earth be still more put to the blush. Albano was ashamed to think of himself, when he looked up into the immense ascending night above him, wherein days and morning twilights abide and move. He edified himself and his teacher when he spoke ofthis: how even now overhead, in the immensity, spring-times and paradises of new-born worlds and thundering[15]suns and earths burning up are flying across each other's paths, and we stand here below like deaf men under the sublime hurricane, and the roaring tempest and torrent shows itself to us, so far off, only as a still, stationary, white rainbow on the brow of night.
As often as Albano's great eye came back from heaven, it found the earth brighter and lighter. But at length the night came, which the hostile spirit had already so long lived in anticipation. It was already very late, and the heavens quite serene; the nebulæ crowded down nearer, as higher market-towns;[16]the sky seemed more white than blue. Albano thought of the hidden loved one, who, were she by his side, would still more consecrate the heavens and himself with her heartful of unceasing prayers; when suddenly, through his lowered telescope, he espied light in the Blumenbühl church,—the princely vault open,—Liana kneeling at the altar, with uplifted hands,—and an old man near her, as if blessing her. Fearfully stood the torch-flames and Liana's face and arms upside down; for the telescope caused everything to appear inverted.
Albano, shuddering, begged the astronomer to look that way. He too saw the apparitions, to him, however, nameless. "There are probably people in the church," said he, indifferently. But Albano rushed down,—hardly allowing the astonished astronomer time to call out after him with an invitation to the total eclipse of the sun tomorrow,—and ran toward Blumenbühl. How his heart wore itself out in the race, and most of all in the hollows, where he lost sight of the illuminated church, must remain a secret, because it was hidden even from himself in the tempest of his feelings. At last he saw the white church before him, but the church-windows were without any light. He knocked hard at the iron church-door, and cried, "Open!" he heard only the echo in the empty church, and nothing more.
So he went back, with a stormy past in his bosom, through the sleeping night: the earth was to him a spirit-island, the spirit-islands were to him earths; his being, his city of God was burning up, he felt.
It lay on the morrow still in full glow, when the Lector came to him, and brought him the incomprehensible message from Liana, that she wished, about noon, to speak with him alone in Lilar. He was not this time enraged against the suspected messenger, and said, full of wonder, "Yes." With what bold, adventurous forms does our life-cloud rise to heaven, ere it disappears!
Let us go to Liana, with whom the riddles dwell! On the morning after the illuminated night she felt, upon reflection, for the first time, the horrible effort with which she had kept the promise of silence made to her parents; she sank down with unstrung energies, but also with renewed and ardent fidelity. "What," she kept continually saying to herself,—"what then had this noble man done to deserve that I should cause him a whole evening full of pangs? How often he looked at me imploringly and judgingly! O that I might have been permitted to hold up thy beautiful head, when thou leanedst it heavily against the rough pine-bark!" What had made her most melancholy in the heavy midnight had been his silent disappearance; how often had she looked up at his thunder-house outwardly illuminated with lamps, while within only darkness lay at the window! Now she felt how near he dwelt to her soul; and she wept the whole morning over the night, and the ray of love stung her more and more hotly, just as burning-glasses bring the sun before us more potently when it looks down just after rain. The mother showed her gratitude to her to-day for her yesterday's sacrifice in keeping her word by returning love and confidence; though the father did not by any means, since with him one was as little saved by good works as with the elder Lutherans, but only damned for the want of them; even now, however, when the parents had drawn from the previous night the newest hopes of renunciation, the daughter could not humor a single one of them.
How often she thought of Gaspard's letter! Is it a shot-off arrow, which, with a wound on its poisonous point, is on its slow way from Spain to Germany, or the friendly light of a never yet seen fixed star, just entered upon its distant track towards our lower world?
Augusti had, however, received the letter even before the night of the illumination, only he had not found good reasons for delivering it. Here it is:—
"I must needs value your anxiety very much, without, however, adopting it. Albano's love for Mademoiselle von Fr., in whom I have already formerly remarked, with great pleasure, a certainvirtuosity[17]in virtue, so to speak, secures us and him against the influence of the ghostly machinery, and against connections of other kinds which might well be more dangerous for his studies and his warm blood. Only one must leave this kind of youthful plays to their own course. If he becomes too closely attached to her, then he may see to thedénouementof the affair. Why shall we cut this pleasure still shorter for him, when you, too, already complain to me of the sickliness of the fair one? In the latter part of autumn I shall see him. His brave, vigorous nature will know well how to bear privation. Assure the Froulay house of my best sentiments.
G. d. C."
The Lector would gladly have thrown this letter into the paper-mill, so little was there in it that was "ostensible." To be sure, Gaspard's murderously polished and pointed irony about Liana's sickliness, if he showed her the letter, would still remain, to this innocent, unsuspecting peace-princess, a sheathed blade. The north-wind of egotism, too, which ran through the communication would not, as it was, after all, a favorable side-wind for Albano's prosperous passage through life, be felt or heeded by the lovers; but that was the very rub; for she might look upon Gaspard's disguised "No" as a "Yes," and just fatally entangle herself in the thread whereby a friend would draw her up over her steep precipice.
Meanwhile the letter must be delivered; but he did it with long, hesitating evasions, which were intended apparently to withdraw the veil for her from the covered "No." She read it with fear, smiled, weeping, at the murderous irony, and said, softly, "Yes indeed!" The Lector had already half a hope in his eye. "If the knight," said she, "thinks so, can I do less? No, good Albano; now I remain true to thee. My life is so short, therefore let it be cheering and devoted to him as long as is in my power."
She thanked the Lector so warmly and pleasantly for the arrow from Spain, that he had not the capacity of being hard enough to thrust home its darkly poisoned end into the fair heart. She begged him, for the sake of sparing him, not to be present at her firm explanation with her father, but rather, at most, out of indulgence to her own and her mother's feelings, to take upon himself the task of making her explanation to her mother. He consented simply to—both, instead of one, of these things.
The gentle form stepped quietly into her father's presence, and there, shrinking not before thunder and lightning, carried her explanation through to a close, saying that she severely rued her disapproved love, that she would bear all penalties, and do and suffer all, both here and with the Princess, as "cher père" should demand, but that she dared not longer offend the innocent Count of Zesara by the show of a most undutiful desertion. At this address the Minister, who had suffered himself, in consequence of her recent submissive self-denial, to be lifted up by refreshing expectations, now stretched prostrate on the ground, dashed down from his Tarpeian rock, could not utter a single sound but this: "Imbécille! thou marriest Herr von Bouverot; he takes thy picture tomorrow; thou sittest to him." He took her, with stern hand and three terribly long strides, to his lady. "She will remain," said he, "under guard in her chamber; no one may visit her except my son-in-law; he will paint the Imbécilleen miniature." "Go, Imbécille!" said he, beside himself. Her entire want of womanly cunning had actually, to the statesman, drawn a curtain over her deep, sharp eye. A straightforward man and mind resembles a straight alley, which appears only half as long as one which runs by crooks and turns.
The Lector, who never meant to be regarded as a special amateur of connubial sham-fights, had already taken himself off. The thirty years' war of the spouses—for it only wanted a few years of that—gained life and reinforcement. The old bridegroom diffused over his face that convulsive smile which, with some men, resembles the convulsive quiver of the cork when it announces the bite of the fish. He asked whether he were now wrong in trusting neither daughter nor mother, both of whom he charged with a partisan understanding against him, and insisted that now, after such proofs, he ought not to be blamed either for stricter measures or for a straightforward march to his object; and with the sitting, for which the German gentleman had twice begged him, he commenced the campaign. The Minister's lady, as a punishment for Liana, remained silent on the subject of so excessively great a present to Bouverot as a miniature likeness would be.
The tender daughter, jammed and crushed in the meeting between two stone statues, represented to her mother, that she could not possibly hold out under so long inspection of a man's eye, and least of all Herr von Bouverot's, whose looks often went like thorns into her soul. Hereupon the father replied and retorted in the mother's name, by drawing a chair up to the desk, and inviting, on the spot, the German gentleman to come to-morrow and paint. Then Liana was sent away with a word which drew even from this delicate flower the lightning-spark of a momentary hatred.
The Imperial peace-protocol lay open now before the two spouses, and there merely wanted some one to dictate, when the Minister's lady rose up, and said, "You must learn to respect me more."
She had the coach tackled, and drove off to the Court Chaplain, Spener's. She knew Liana's respect for him, and his omnipotence over her pious disposition. Even to herself he was still imposing. Down from that earlier theological age in which the Lutheran Father-confessor still reigned nearer to the Catholic, he had, through the power and magnanimity of his character, brought a shepherd's staff, which was distinguished from a bishop's staff only by being made of better wood. She must needs narrate to him twice over Liana's relations; the ardent, indignant old man could not at all comprehend or believe a love which must have been spun out right under his old eyes without his knowledge. "Your excellence," he at length answered, "has, indeed, committed a mistake in not communicating to me this important circumstance before to-day. How easily, with God's help, would I have conducted all to a blessed issue! However, there is nothing lost. Let your excellence send the maiden this very night to me, but alone, without you; that must be done; then I stand pledged for the rest!"
Objections and cautions would merely have inflamed the old man's ambition and anger,—both which still worked on beneath the ice of his hoary hair; she therefore confidently promised him all, with that submissiveness, which she had also transmitted as an inheritance to Liana.
Right hopefully did Liana receive the command of a night ride to the good, pious father. She started off with only her devoted maiden. With deeply agitated soul she appeared before her father-confessor. She opened herself to him as to a God; he decided just as if he were one. What a sight for another eye less proud than Spener's would have been this lowly, but composed saint, whose heart, like a sunbeam, always appeared loveliest in its breaking asunder.
But here the history moves in veils! The old man commanded her maiden to stay behind, and took her alone over into the silent Blumenbühl. He unlocked for her the church, lighted a torch at the altar, in order that the desolate darkness might not play any prelude to her timid eye, and completed what her parents could not.
How he extorted from her the promise to renounce her Albano forever is a mystery watched and hidden by the Great Sphinx of the oath which she swore to him,—only the far-off man, who lost the fair soul, had from the observatory of the suns gazed at the bright church-windows and discovered behind them disturbing apparitions, without knowing that they were true, and decided his life.
She went back again coldly across the meadows and mountains of old days, which had once been so bright, to the dwelling of the old man, who dismissed her with greater reverence than had marked his reception of her. On the night-journey she was mute, and wrapped up in herself, and exchanged not a word with her maiden. Her parents still awaited her; the mother looked anxiously out into the night and into the future. At length the living carriage rolled into the court. Great and mighty as one who, having been executed in innocence, starts up into life again before the dissector and, regarding him as the judge on high, speaks with unfettered freedom and gladness, so did she come into the presence of her parents: like the cold marble of a god's form, she stood there, pale, tearlessly cold and calm. She knew it not, and she willed it not, but she soared high over life, even beyond a child's love,—she could not kiss her mother so fervently as once,—she stood undismayed before her blustering father, and said, then, without a tear, without emotion, without a blush, and with soft voice, "I have this night renounced my love before God. The pious father has convinced me." "And had the man better reasons for itin pettothan I?" said Froulay. "Yes," said she; "but I have sworn in the Temple to keep silence until time discloses all. Now I pray you by the All-just One only to allow me to give him back in person his letters, and tell him that I cease to be his, not, however, from fickleness, but from duty; I entreat this, dear parents. Then may God dispose of the rest, and I shall never be disobedient to you again." The wretched father, puffed up still more by this triumph, would fain have made this last prayer of the dying heart bitter to her, and even insinuated a flying suspicion of the motive of the interview; but the mother, smitten in her fair soul by the fairest, interceded warmly, and contemptuously and arbitrarily decided in the affirmative. Nor did Liana seem to take much notice of the paternal No. When he had gone, the mother, weeping for bliss, snatched the silent form to her embrace; but Liana wept not so easily upon her bosom as once out of love, whether it was that her heart was too much exalted, or that it came back just as slowly into the old condition as it went out of it. "Receive thanks, daughter," said the mother; "I shall now make thy life more happy." "It was happy enough. I was to die; therefore I must needs love," said she. So she went smiling into the arms of sleep, with hard-beating heart. But in dream it appeared to her as if she were sinking away in a swoon, losing her mother, and struggling up again fearfully out of the grasp of flying death, and then weeping for joy that she lived again. Thereupon she awoke, and the glad drops, softly released by the dream, still flowed from her open eyes, and softened like a thawing-wind the stiff soil of life.
Ye great or blessed spirits above us! When man here, under the poor clouds of life, throws away his fortune, because he prizes it less than his heart, then is he as blessed and as great as you. And we are all worthy of a holier earth, because the sight of the sacrifice exalts, and does not oppress us, and because we shed burning tears, not from pity, but from the deepest, holiest love and joy.
Warmly and brilliantly did the sun, who today, like the unhappy one, was to be eclipsed, begin his morning race. Liana awoke on the burial-day of her love, not with yesterday's strength, but faint and languid, somewhat cheered, however, by the prospect of a return of her peaceful time. The mother, although herself sickly, pressed her, early in the morning, to her heart, in order to prove the pulse of the heart most precious to her. Liana looked affectionately and yearningly, with moist eye, into her moist eye a long time, and was silent. "What wilt thou?" asked her mother. "Mother, love me more now, as I am alone," said she. Then in her mother's presence she bound together all Albano's letters, without reading them, except the one in which he begs her brother for his love. She sported with her mother, as fate does with us and as poor parents do with their children, who at first give them bright, gay garments, because these are more easily dyed into dark ones.
Her mother sought gradually to take away from her her spiritual fantasies, the death-moss, as it were, which clung sucking to her green, young life. "Thou seest," said she, "how thy angel can err, since he approved thy love, which thou now condemnest." But she had an answer: "No, the pious father said, it had been right until the time when he told me the secret, and that the Bible says, one must forsake everything for love." Thus, then, does this poor creature, as they tell of the bird of Paradise, soar straight upward in heaven, until she drops down dead.
She manifested to her mother almost a feverish gayety,—a sunshine on the last day of the year. She said, how it refreshed her, that she could now speak freely with her dear mother of her former lovely days. She portrayed to her Albano's great, glowing heart, and how he deserved the sacrifice, and the "pearly hours" which they had lived together. "After all," said she, cheerfully, but in such a way that tears came into the hearer's eyes, "nothing of it has really passed away. Remembrances last longer than present reality, as I have conserved blossoms many years, but never fruits." Yes, there are tender female souls which intoxicate themselves only among the blossoms of the vineyard of joy, as others do only with the berries of the vine-hill. The Lector's note arrived with the intelligence that Albano was awaiting her in Lilar.
Now, as the hour of interview drew so near, she grew more and more uneasy. "If I can only persuade him," said she, "that I have acted as an upright maiden!" Before exchanging her morning chamber for the mourning-carriage, she set all things to rights there for drawing, when she should return; she had, she said, had a very bad dream, but she hoped it would not come to pass.
With her work-basket on her arm, in which the letters lay, she stepped into the carriage, which they had to open, because its sultry air oppressed her. But the sultriness was the breath and atmosphere of her own spirit, and everything beautiful which met her became to her to-day a benumbing poison-flower. Fearfully she kept grasping and pressing the hand of her mother, because every cry, every form that darted by, fluttered over her like a rustling storm-bird; a crier, with his rough tone, cut across her nerves; they trembled more gently again, only when a pastor and his servant passed by with the sick-cup for the evening drink of weary people. O, the fair way was long to her! She had so long to hold together with fainting powers the breaking heart, which was to speak so firmly and decidedly and distinctly with her beloved.
The sky was blue, and yet neither of them remarked that it was beginning to be dark without clouds, since the moon already stood with her night upon the sun. As they passed over the woodland bridge into the living Lilar, where on all branches hung the old bridal-dresses of a decorated past, Liana said, with intense earnestness, to her mother: "For God's sake, not into the old castle of the dead!"[18]"But which way then? That is his rendezvous," said the mother. "Anywhere else,—into the Dream-temple. He sees us already; yonder he goes over the gates," said she. "God Almighty be with thee, and speak not long," said the weeping mother, as she went from her into the temple, in whose mirrors she could behold the parting of the innocent beings.
Albano came slowly along down through the walks; he had cleared his eye of tears and his heart of storms. O, how had he hitherto, like a long-tossed mariner, peered into his dark clouds, in order between their misty peaks to discover the mountain-peaks of a green continent!—that he was to-day to lose so much, namely all, his most mournful conclusions had not gone so far as that; nay, he maintained so much tranquillity, that he sent back overhead the little Pollux, who came dancing after, not with threats, but with presents.
At last he stood with quivering lips before the beloved, beautiful form, who, childlike, pale, trembling, and watching her work-basket, looked upon him a little, and then struggled with her sinking eyes. Then his heart melted; the flood of old love rushed back high into his life. "Liana," said he, in the softest tone, and drops fell from his eyes, "art thou still my Liana? I am still the same as ever; and hast thou too not changed?" But she could not say no. A gash was made into the arteries of her life, and tears sprang up instead of blood. His good form, his familiar, brotherly voice stood again so near to her, and his hand held hers again, and yet all was over; a hot sun-glance flashed across her former flowery garden-life, and showed it in a melancholy illumination, but it lay far from her. "Let us," he went on, "be strong now at this singular meeting again. Tell me very briefly everything, why thou hast hitherto been so silent and done so. I have nothing to say,—then let all be forgotten." He had unconsciously raised her hand, but the hand pressed itself down and trembled withal. "Dost thou tremble, or do I?" said he. "I, Albano," said she, "but not from any fault: I am true, O God, I am true even unto death!" He looked upon her with a wild, wondering look. "To you, to you I am so, but it is all over," she cried, confounded and confounding. "No," she added, commandingly, as he was accidentally on the point of going with her out of the perspective range of the Dream-temple,—"no, my mother wishes to see us from the Dream-temple yonder."
He grew red at the maternal espionage; his eye flashed into hers a certain resentment against the "you," and his hot looks wanted to draw out of her agitated face the delaying riddle. Necessity commanded strength; she began.
"Here"—she stammered, and could hardly raise the basket for trembling, "your letters to me!" He took them gently. "I have resigned you," she continued; "my parents are not to blame, although they did not like our love. There is a mystery, which concerns merely you and your happiness, that has constrained me to part from you and from every joy." "Do you wish your letters too?" said he. "My parents—" said she. "The mystery about me?" said he. "An oath binds me," said she. "Last night in the church at Blumenbühl before the priest?" he asked. She covered her eyes with her hand and nodded slowly.
"O God!" cried he, weeping aloud, "is it thus with life and joy and all truth? So? How ye have lied"—he looked at his letters—"about eternal fidelity and love! Whom did you mean then, ye hellish liars?" He flung them away. Liana was about to pick them up; he trod on them violently, and looked bitterly upon the affrighted one. Now he fell into a storm, and drew and poured out, like a water-wheel during the influx of the floods, his tumultuous, suffering breast, and ceased not his cruel pictures of his love, her weakness, her coldness, his pain, her former oaths, and her present violated one about his mysterious fortune, which he said he did not want at all. Her silence wrought him up to a wilder whirl. Her quick, intense breathing he heard not.
"Do not torment thyself. It is all impossible now," she answered, imploringly. "O," said he indignantly, "I will not re-change the change, for the Lector and the Pope would again change that!" He fell now into that induration and palsy of the heart which is peculiar to man; the stream of love hung as a frozen, jagged waterfall over the rocks.
"I did not think thou wert so hard," said she, and smiled strangely. "I am harder still," said he; "I speak as thou actest." "Leave off, leave off, Albano,—it grows so dark to me. O, I will instantly to my mother!" she cried suddenly. The two old black spiders, let down by Fate, stood again over her fair eyes and overspun them, busily spinning, with a closer and closer web; and over the golden strips of life already grew a gray mould.
"It is the solar eclipse," said he, ascribing the blindness to the faintly gleaming sickle of the quarter-sun. He saw overhead in the blue heaven the lunar lump cast like a gravestone into the pure sun. Not so much as a real shadow, but only enervated shadows lived in the uncertain gray light; the birds fluttered timidly around; cold shudders played like ghosts of the noonday hour in the little, faint lustre which was neither sunlight nor moonlight. Gloomy, gloomy lay life before the youth; through the long black marble colonnade of the years sorrows came stalking on like panthers, and grew brightly spotted under the retreating sun-glances of the past.
"This is indeed very fitting for to-day," he continued; "such a sudden night without evening-twilight. Lilar must be covered up to-day. Look up at the moon,—how darkly it has rolled over the sun; once she too was our friend. O, make it still gloomier, utter night!" "Albano, forbear; I am innocent, and I am blind. Where is the temple and my mother?" she cried, moaning; the spiders had fast closed the wet, tearful eyes.
"By the Devil, it is the eclipse of the sun!" said he, and gazed into the blindly groping, timid face, and guessed all; but he could not weep, he could not console. The black tiger of the most cruel anguish hung clambering on his breast and carried him away. "No, no," said Liana, "I am blind, and I am innocent too."
Little Pollux, made happy by his presents, had led along a begging mute, who followed with the ringing mute's-bell. "The dumb man cannot say anything," said Pollux. Liana cried, "Mother, mother! my dream comes, the death-bell tolls."
The Minister's lady rushed out. "Your daughter," said Albano, "is blind again, and God send the father and the mother, and whoever is to blame for it, their retribution of misery." "What is the matter?" cried Spener, suddenly stepping out, who had previously seen the meeting, and had come to the mother. "A wretched maiden; your work too!" replied Albano.
"Farewell, unhappy Liana!" said he, and was about to depart; but stopped, and after gazing wildly on the beautiful, tortured countenance which wept with its blind eyes, he cried, "Dreadful!" and went away.
Long did he lie, up in the thunder-house, with his eyes buried in his arms, and when he at last, and quite late, without knowing where he was, roused himself, as from a dream, he saw the whole landscape illumined by a serene day, the sunshine unveiled and warm in the pure blue, and the close carriage with the blind one rolled rapidly across the woodland bridge. Then Albano sank down again on his arms.
flowerstart
Now that Albano lived without love or hope; now that he had seen the polar-star of his life fall like a shooting-star into a wilderness still as death; now that every one of his actions and every recollection darted out a scorpion-sting, and he sent back Liana's letters, forsook Lilar, the house of the Doctor, the Lector, Liana's relatives, and the pious father; now that he directed his face, gradually growing pale, only to books and stars; men who know no higher sorrow than selfish sorrow must needs imagine that nothing weighs upon his bosom but the ruins and rubbish of the shattered air-castles of his hope and youthful love. But he was more nobly unhappy and disconsolate: he was so, because he had for the first time made a human creature and the best of beings miserable,—his beloved blind! Into this abyss of his heart all neighboring fountains of sorrow flowed together. The smallest gayly-painted shards of his urn of fortune were as if shattered afresh, when he heard from day to day that the poor girl, although daily stationed in the bath-house before the healing fountains, was nevertheless brought back each time without a ray of light or hope, and that she now feared nothing more, lamented nothing more on this robbers' earth, than that death might perhaps close her eyes before they had seen her mother again.
O, the wound of conscience is no sear, and time cools it not with his wing, but merely keeps it open with his scythe! Albano called back to remembrance Liana's bitter entreaty for indulgence; and then it was no consolation to him, that, during that eclipse of the sun, he had not wished to sacrifice her eyes, but only her heart. In the burning-glass and magnifying-mirror of consequences fate shows us the light, playing worms of our inner man as grown-up and armed furies and serpents. How many sins pass through us unseen and with soft looks, like nightly robbers, because, like their sisters in dreams, they steal not out from the circle of the breast, and get no outward object to fall upon and strangle. The fair soul readily detects in an accident a sin. Only those hard stormers of heaven and earth before whose triumphal chariots there starts up beforehand a wagon-rampart full of wounds and corpses,—that is, the fathers of war, which, in the long course of history, ministers have oftener been than princes,—only these can calmly kindle all the volcanoes of earth, and let all their lava-torrents stream down, merely that they may have—fair prospects. They manure Elysian fields into a battle-field, in order to raise therein a redder rose-bush for a mistress.
The first thing Albano did, when he arrived at the Doctor's house, was to trudge out of it down into the remote valley town, in order neither to see the suspected Lector, still less to hear daily the malicious Doctor Sphex upon the relapse of the blindness. Only the faithful Schoppe jogged off with him, especially as he, by a well-adapted course of behavior, had contrived to get up an opposition party against himself in the Sphex family, which could no longer suffer him in the house. The Librarian's warmth toward the Count had grown very much with the Lector's coldness, and on similar grounds. The bold march out to Lilar and the passionate wildness of the youth had fastened him more closely to Albano's side. "I thought at first," said Schoppe, "the young man was coming to be nothing but an elderly one, when I saw him stalking along so to school. I often held the man in the moon—where notoriously, from an absence of thirst and atmosphere, there is nothing to drink—to be a greater tippler than he. But at last he strikes out. A youth must not, like old Spener, represent everything in bird's-eye perspective, from the apex downward. He must, in the beginning, like incipients in authors' studies and painters' studios, make all lines a little too large, because the little ones come of themselves. There are thunder-steeds, but no thunder-asses and thunder-sheep; as, however, the tutors and lectors would be glad if there were, and would be glad to have such to drive along before them,—they who, like the billiard-markers, suffer no open fire in the pipe, but only one under cover."
Albano lived alone now among books. Liana's brother came to him seldom, and then ice-cold, and said nothing of the patient, although he always stayed for her sake. As he himself had once woven the first web of her blindness, he must, of course, especially with hisunpainted fire of love for his sister, have a real hatred for him who had drawn it over her again; so Albano thought, and gladly bore it as a punishment. So much the oftener did the Captain let himself be drawn to the German gentleman's, upon whose good graces he now, contrary to what was to be expected, always won. It is a question—that is to say, there can be no question—whether his talent and inclination for winding himself around the most unlike men was not mere coldness toward all hearts, all of which he only travels over, because he does not mean to dwell in any one.
Rabette, also, wrote the Count several bills of impeachment about the Captain's growing coolness. In one she even says, "Could I only see thee, in order for once to have some one who would let me weep, for laughter I have not for a considerable time any longer known." The good Albano entered this desertion also upon his sin-register, as if it were grandchild to his devil's children.
The Princess prevailed occasionally to allure him out of solitude, when she put the gentle bird-whistle to her fair lips. She seemed, for the father's sake, to take a veritable interest in the melancholy son, who showed no grief, to be sure, but also no joy. Besides, the masculine woman, more helmeted than hooded, loves to place the pillow of rest under the sick head, and under the faint head her arm as a chair-back; and such a one consoles fondly and tenderly, often more tenderly than the too feminine woman. Almost every day she visited her future court-dame and visionary sister[19]at the Minister's, and could therefore tell the lover all about her. Meanwhile, she acted as if she knew nothing of Albano's relations to the blind one;—the very dissembling betrays tender forbearance toward two beings at once, Albano said;—so she could freely give him all the medical reports of the fair sufferer's case, as well as the opinions entertained about her in general. After the manner of the strong women, she bestowed upon her all just praise, without any petty womanish deduction, and wished nothing so much as her restoration and future company.
"I am capable of doing everythingforan uncommon woman, as well as everythingagainsta common one," said she, and asked whether his father had already written him about her plan with Liana. He said no, and begged her for it. She referred him, however, to the paternal letter, which must soon come. She found fault only with Liana's propensity to be always embroidering fantasy-flowers into the groundwork of her life, and called her a rich Baroque pearl.
But from all these conversations Albano returned only more confused to Schoppe; he heard only lip-solace, and the death-sentence, that the long-suffering soul from whom he had stolen creation was becoming more and more immured in the deepest cavern of life, near which only the deeper one of the grave lies bright and open. Every soft, soothing, warm gale wafted to him by the sciences or by human beings passed over that cold cavern, and became to him a sharp norther. O, had he been called to release her from his sinking arms amidst lovely days, into a long, eternal Paradise, and had she forgotten him in the intoxication of rapture, he too could have forgotten that; but that he should have thrust her away into a cold realm of shadows, and that she must needs remember him for sorrow,—this must he forever remember.
Schoppe knew no "plaster" for all this distress (to use his own fine play on words) "except the plaster of Paris,"[20]namely, an excursion. At least, he concluded, when one is out in the country, all inquiries about one's health are done with, and all these poisonous anxieties about the answer; and on return one finds much pain spared or in fact all the trouble gone.
Albano obeyed his last friend; and they rode off into the Principality of Haarhaar.
Whoever thinks that Schoppe, on the way, was to Albano a flying field-lazaretto of consolation,—anantispasmodicum,—a Struve's table of ailments and remedies,—a pulverizedFox's lungfor the hectic of the heart, &c., and that at every milestone he delivered a consolatory sermon,—whoever thinks so, Schoppe himself laughs him to scorn.
"What then," said he, "if misfortune does knead a young man thoroughly and soundly in her kneading-trough? The next time, he, who is now in the power of grief, will have her in his power. Whoso has never borne anything, never learns to bear up under anything."[21]As regards weeping, he, as a Stoic, was, as may well be imagined, an enemy to it at least; Epictetus, Antonine, Cato, and several such, men made less of ice than of iron, would very willingly, as he so often said, have allowed the body these extreme unctions of sorrow, provided only the spirit beneath and behind all had kept itself dry. The true disconsolateness is to desire and to accept consolation; why will not one then for once just go through with the pang out and out without any physic?
But his view of things and his actual life became, without his express intention, powerful over the Count, whom everything great only enlarged, as it belittles others. Schoppe sat like a Cato upon ruins, but, to be sure, upon the greatest of all; if the wise man ought to be a barometer-tube at the Equator, in which even the tornado produces little displacement, he was a wise man. Accidentally he tore open the Count's glued-up wings at an inn by means of theHamburg Impartial Correspondent, which he found lying there. Schoppe read aloud out of it two extensive battles, wherein, as by an earthquake, lands instead of houses were buried, and whose wounds and tears only the evil genius of the earth could be willing to know; thereupon he read,—after the death-marches of whole generations, and the rending open of the craters of humanity,—with uninterrupted seriousness, the notices, under the head of Intelligence, where one solitary individual mounts upon an unknown little grave and announces and asseverates to the world, which surely condoles with him,—"Frightful was the blow which laid our child of five weeks—"; or, "In the bitterest anguish which ever—"; or, "Overwhelmed with the loss of our father in the eighty-first year of his age," &c.
Schoppe said, he pronounced that to be right; for every distress, even a universal one, after all, housed itself only in one individual breast; and were he himself lying on a red battle-field full of fallen sheaves, he would sit up among them, if only he could, and deliver to those lying around him a short funeral sermon upon his shot-wound. "So has Galvani observed," he said, "that a frog which stands in electrical relations quivers as often as thunder rolls over the earth."
He adhered to this position, also, out of doors. He cited with disapprobation what Matthison remarks,—as a traveller's note by the way,—that in the modern town,Avenches, in Switzerland, on the site of the Helvetian capital,Aventicum, which was laid in ruins by the Romans, the plan of the streets and walls may be traced by the thinner strips of grass; whereas, in fact, the same stereographic projections of the past lay manifestly all about in every meadow,—every mountain was the shore of a deluged old world; every spot here below was actually six thousand years old and a relic; all was churchyards and ruins on the earth, particularly the earth itself; "Heavens!" he continued, "what is there, in fact, which is not already gone by,—nations, fixed stars, female virtue, the best Paradises, many just men, all Reviews, Eternity aparte ante, and just now even my feeble description of all this? Now, if life is such a game of nothingness, one must prefer to becard-painterrather thanking of cards."
A vigorous, high-minded man, like Albano, will hardly, then, in the midst of thirty-years' wars, last days, emigrating nations, crumbling suns, strip off his coat, and exhibit to himself or the universe the ruptured vein which bleeds on his breast.
So stood matters, when the two friends at evening climbed a half-open woodland height, from which they saw below them a wonderful glory-land, so friendly and foreign, as if it were the remains of a time when the whole earth was still warm, and an ever-green orient land. It seemed, so far as they could see for the trees and the evening-sun, to be a valley formed by the angle of mutually approaching mountains, and stretching away immeasurably toward the west. A party-colored windmill, flinging round its broad wings before the sun, confused the eye, which would fain analyze the throng of evening lights, gardens, sheep, and children; on both steeps white-clad children, with long, green hat-ribbons flowing behind them, were keeping watch; a motley Swissery ran through the meadow-green along the dark brook; on a high-arched hay-wagon there drove along a peasant-woman, dressed as if for a marriage festival, and at the side went country-people in Sunday finery; the sun withdrew behind a colonnade of round, leafy oaks,—those German liberty-trees and temple-pillars,—and they soared aloft, transfigured and magnified in the golden blue. At this moment the surprised travellers saw the shaded Dutch village near below,—composed, as it were, of neat, painted garden-houses clustered together, with a linden-circle in the middle, and a young, blooming hunter not far off, or an Amazon, who with one hand took off her hat, stuck full of twigs, and with the other let the crossbeam with the bucket mount high over the well.
"My friend," inquired Schoppe of an official messenger who came behind them with tin-plate and knapsack, "what do you call this village?" "Arcadia," was the reply. "But to speak without any poetic white-heat or culminating of fancy, my poetic friend, how is that canton down below there properly named?" asked Schoppe again. Petulantly the official messenger answered, "Arcadia, I say, if you cannot retain it,—it is an old crown-domain; our Princess Idone (Idoine) keeps herself there year in and year out for constancy, and does everything there at her own pleasure; what will you have more?" "Are you, too, in Arcadia?"[22]"No, in Sowbow," answered the messenger, very loud, over his shoulders, for he was already five steps ahead.
The Librarian, who saw his friend in great commotion at the messenger's discourse, put to him joyfully the question, whether they could have found better night-quarters than these, except these very same in the moon of May. But how was he astounded at Albano's plunging back into the limbo which conscience and his love had kindled! Idoine's illusive resemblance to Liana had suddenly flashed across his thoughts. "Know'st thou," said he, continuing to tremble more violently in his agitation by reason of the magic of evening, "wherein Idoine is unlike her? Shecansee," he himself added, "for she has not seenmeyet. O forgive, forgive, firm man! truly I am not always so. She is dying at this moment, or some calamity or other draws near to her; like a smoke before a conflagration, it mounts up duskily and in long clouds within my soul. I must absolutely go back."
"Believe me," said Schoppe, "I shall one day tell you all that I now think; for the present, however, I will spare you." Neither did this, however, produce any effect; he turned about; but through the whole of the next day's journey his cup of sorrow, which Schoppe had scoured so shiny, continued to be stained with moisture and blackness. They could not arrive till evening, when a magic mist of twilight, moonlight, smoke, vapor, and cloud-red made the city a somewhat strange place. Albano's eagle eye clove the smoke in twain, and it vanished. He saw only the blind Liana, on the high Italian roof, run against the statues, or headlong down over the edge. Wildly, and without uttering a sound, he ran through the deep streets,—lost sight of the Palace buried in buildings, and ran so much the more furiously; he imagined to find her crushed to atoms on the pavement,—he sees the white statues again, she holds one entwined within her arms, and the old gardener, he of theCereus serpens, stands with his hat on his head before her. When, at length, he arrived directly under the walls of the Palace, there stood overhead a strange maiden beside her, and below women, running together, looked up, asking one another, "God, what is the matter now?" Liana looked (so it seemed) to the heavens, wherein only a few stars burned, and then for a long space into the moon, and then down upon the people; but directly she stepped back from the statues. The gardener came out of the court, and said, as he passed, to his inquiring wife, "She can see." "O my good man," said Albano, "what do you say?" "Only just go up there!" he replied, and strode busily away. At this moment came Bouverot on foot,—Albano, with a short bow and greeting, stepped across his path. Bouverot looked at him a moment: "I have not the honor of your acquaintance," said he, wildly, and hurried off.