shieldstart
Albano meant to incarcerate himself the next day, weep bitterly, and do penance, and not cheer himself with the sunshine of love; but he found at evening the following billet, written by an unknown hand, on his table:—
"Sir Count: You are hereby informed, that on Friday night, when you were gone journeying, the deceased Captain R. von Froulay played your part with the Countess Romeiro throughallthe acts, in the flute-dell. You must, for the sake of rivals, get yourself another voice, and the Countess eyes to use by night, although to her it may not be altogether disagreeable to be often deceived respecting you in this manner. Farewell, and be in future a little more discreet!"
With pale face he stared at the skeleton which two giant hands forcibly held up before him, drawn out all at once from the flesh of blooming, youthful limbs. But the fire of pain speedily shot up again and illumined the whole circle of woe. With the might of agony, with bloody arms, must his spirit hurl back and forth the thought, heavy as a rock, the tombstone of his life, in order to prove whether it fitted into the burial vault;—the dreadful thought fell in so completely with Roquairol's whole play and end and life,—but not, on the other hand, with Linda's character, and with the divine moment which he had spent with her in Liana's last garden,—and yet it did, again, very much with her sudden reconciliation and with single, detached words,—and yet, perhaps, after all, this poisoned letter was only a fruit of the vengeance of the Princess, of whose indignation at Roquairol's murder of himself and the ape Dian had told him.
So painfully did he move himself on his wounds to and fro, and at last he resolved, this very evening to seek out Linda, wherever she might be, when he received from her the following billet:—
"Come to me, I pray, this evening, to Elysium; it will certainly be fair. I give the invitation now, as thou didst lately. Thou shalt lead me upon the fair mountains, and it shall be enough for me if only thou canst see and enjoy. Julienne we need less and less. Thy father urges our union with proposals which you shall this evening hear and weigh. Come without fail! In my heart there are still standing so many sharp tears about the evil tragedy. Thou must change them into tears of another kind, my beloved!
"The Blind One."
He laughed at thechanging. "Into frozen ones, rather," said he. Hot love was to him a passionate kiss into his wound. He went to Lilar gloomily and hastily, deeply enveloped in a red cloak, as if against foul weather,—blind and deaf to himself and the world,—and like a dying man who awaits the moment when he either shall vanish in smoke and be annihilated, or soar away reanimated into divine worlds.
When he entered the precincts of Lilar, the garden did not distort itself as lately, but it merely disappeared, from him. He went along close by some disguised people, who seemed to be making a grave. "It's wrong, I vow," said one of them; "he ought to be buried out in the meadow, like other cattle." Albano looked that way, saw a covered corpse, and thought with a shudder it was the suicide, until he heard the second grave-digger say, "An ape, Peter, if he is kept with distinction, in clothes, looks more reputable than many a man, and I believe he, too, would rise again from the dead, if he were only regularly baptized."
Just as this Gibbon of the Princess, whom they were burying here, recalled before his soul that stormy Friday, he espied Linda, not far from the Dream-temple, on the arm of a seeing gentlewoman. She gave him, according to her manner before others, only a slight greeting, and said to the woman, "Justa, stay here in the Dream-temple; I am going to walk up and down here."
By this limitation of herself to the visual range of the Dream-temple she excluded every fair, visible sign of love, and Albano knew already that silent contentment of hers, with the mere presence of the beloved one, just as he did sometimes the wildness of her sweet lips. When he touched her with trembling, and saw her again near him, then did this powerful being come back to him with the whole divine past. But he deferred not the infernal question, "Linda, who was with thee on Friday evening?" "No one, dearest; where?" replied she. "In the flute-dell," he stammered. "My blind maiden," she answered, calmly. "Who else?" he asked. "God! thy tone distresses me," said she. "Roquairol killed the ape that night. Did he meet thee?"
"O horrible murderer! Me?" he cried; "I was travelling all night long; I was not with thee in any flute-dell." "Speak out, man," cried Linda, grasping him violently with both hands; "didst thou not write to me of having given up thy journey, and then didst thou not come?" "No, nothing like it," said he; "all infernal lies. The dead monster Roquairol used my voice,—thy eyes,—and so it was,—tell the rest." "Jesu Maria!" screamed she, struck by the dashing flood into which the black cloud burst, and grasped with both arms through the leafy branches of the wooded avenue, and pressed them to her, and said supplicatingly, "Ah, Albano, thou wast certainly with me."
"No, by the Almighty, not! Tell the rest," said he.
"Fly from me forever; I amhiswidow!" said she, solemnly. "That thou remainest," said he, severely, and called Justa out of the temple of dream.
"So it must live on,—thy pain, my pain: I see thee nevermore. I will say a farewell to thee. Say thou none to me!" said he. She was silent, and he went. Justa came, and he still heard her praying in the arbor: "Leave me, O God, this eclipse to-morrow; spare the gloomy widow thy daylight!" The maiden roused her, took her by the hand, and she rejoiced, when hanging on her arm, in her night-blindness.
Albano went out into the night. All at once he stood as if he had been carried up on a jagged, rocky peak, below which dashed a foaming stream. He turned back and said, "Thou mistakest, evil genius; I loathe suicide; it is too easy, and belongs to ape-murderers,—but there is something better, and thou shalt attend me."
He lost himself,—could not find his way to the city,—thought he was in Lilar again, and ran round anxiously without any way of egress, until at last he sank exhausted, and as if drawn down into the arms of slumber. When he awoke in the morning, he was in the Prince's garden, and the slumber island waved with its tree-tops before him. A jagged rocky peak over a rushing stream there was not in the whole landscape.
He looked upon the heavens, and the day, and his heart. "Yes, such, then, is life and love," said he. "A good, true fire-work, especially when one is to have a Linda after many preparations! Long it stands there with a gay, high scaffolding, full of statues, with smaller edifices, columns, and wondrous is it, and promises still more than it hides and betrays. Then comes the night in Ischia; a spark darts, the moulds burst, white, shining palaces and pyramids and a hanging city of the sun hover in heaven,—in the night-air a busy, flying world unfolds itself majestically between the stars, and fills the eye and the poor heart, and the happy spirit, itself a fire between heaven and earth, hovers too,—for the space of a whole instant; then it becomes night again and a blank waste, and in the morning there stands the scaffolding dull and black."
"War,"—this word alone gave Albano peace; science and poetry only thrust their flowers into his deep wounds. He made himself ready for a journey to France. Only one thing still delayed his breaking up,—Schoppe's non-appearance, whom he with his riddles must await and, if possible, induce to go away with him. He kept himself in the woods all day so as to avoid his father and Julienne and everybody. Linda's unhappy night had sunk deep into his breast, and only he alone saw down into it, no stranger. He hoped that she herself would keep silent toward Julienne, because the latter, according to the sacred, womanly rules of her order, knew no indulgence for this sin. His first jealous ebullition had now given place to a painful sympathy for the deceived Linda, whose holy temple had been rifled. What pained him insufferably was the feeling of humiliation with which the proud fair one must now, as he imagined, think of him, and which he, with his present bitter contempt of Roquairol, entertained so much the more strongly. "Never, never, though she were my sister, can we see each other more; I can well see her bleeding before me, but not bowed down," he said to himself. Sometimes there came over him a cold fury against a destiny, which always swept with a sudden whirlwind through his embraces, and forced all asunder,—then an indignation against Linda, who had not acted like a Liana, and who was herself partly guilty of the error of the substitution by her principle of forgiving love everything,—then again deep sympathy, since she could not have confounded persons without any spiritual resemblances, as the secret tribunal of conscience told him, and since she now alone was atoning for it, that she was willing to sacrifice herself to him, even to him.
Inexpressibly did he hate the dead seducer, because by his act his death had become only a cowardly flight. The poor deserter, whose escape had been reported during the tragedy, he saw led along as a prisoner before him; but his captain had escaped the hand of vengeance forever. After some days papers of the dead were put into his hands; but, full of abhorrence, he could not look on them. They contained justifications, and at the same time additional sins. Roquairol had, after the pleasure-night, spent the whole morning in the Prince's garden writing, in order to color the remembrance, which alone (so he wrote) had rewarded and satisfied him, that he had not that very night played out the fifth act of the drama of life.
The Lector delivered in Albano's absence short letters from Julienne, wherein she begged him to make his appearance, and appointed him place and time at the castle, whither she had gone from Lilar. He went not. Sometimes it seemed to him as if distant men tracking him stole round him in wide circles.
Once at evening he was still standing at the foot of a woody hill, when he espied overhead a wolf stalk out of the thicket; the wolf saw him, sprang down upon him, and changed into Schoppe's wolf-dog. Soon his friend himself, with an old man, stepped out from the trees above, saw him, hurriedly gave the man money, and came down to him slower than he went up to him. "Ah, a good evening, Albano," said Schoppe, with the old coldness with which he spoke, when he did not write, and smiled at the same time with so many lines and wrinkles that he appeared to Albano altogether strange. Albano pressed him tightly to his heart, and transformed the hot words which his friend did not love into hot tears. It was an old star out of the spring morning when his Liana still lived and loved; it had gone down before him on a grave in that night of his journey; now it rose, and Albano was again unhappy.
Schoppe surveyed with visible complacency Albano's ripened form, and drew asunder, as it were, the young man's shining wings. "Thou hast," said he, "spread out and colored thyself right well,—hast May and August on one bough, like an orange-tree." Albano took no pleasure in this. "Only relate to me thy life, my brother," said he. "Thou shouldst tell thine first, methinks; I am tired even to stupidity," said Schoppe, seating himself and unbuckling his hunting-pouch. "Hereafter," replied Albano, "what thou hast occasion for I will tell thee. I got thy letters,—I really loved the well-known one,—a misfortune divided us,—I am innocent and she is great;—O God, be satisfied with this for to-day!" Never could he complain of misfortunes to his friends; still less now expose the misery of a beloved. "And still longer," replied Schoppe; "only say, does it add new misery if I bring with me from Spain and proceed to unpack proofs of your being related as brother and sister?" "No," said Albano, "I need tremble at no past." "Thou art still going to France?" asked Schoppe. "To-morrow, if thou wilt go too," replied Albano.
"By all means, as thy regiment chaplaincy. Not for want of the spirit of art, as thou writest from Rome, but from a superfluity of it, thou goest among soldiers. I should see it with pleasure, if thou wert to consider that even Dante, Cæsar, Cervantes, Horace, served before they wrote so preciously,—only students invert it, and compose something short and sweet, and take up service afterward. To come to my travels,—it costs me much, namely, time, merely to tell thee that I caught thy absurd uncle with a carriage full of baggage in the little nest ofOndres, a post and a half from Bayonne. I owned to him I was going to Valencia to dissect the silk-stocking-weavers' looms in that place, to enjoy, at the same time, my drop of ice and a waistcoat-pocket full of Valencia almonds, and to visit the few professors who had produced the best compends for three thousand reals.[134]He should certainly arrive before me, he said. We arranged to put up at the same inn in Valencia. I found my account in him, as he could most easily introduce me to Romeiro's house. But I waited and watched there for him fourteen days in vain. With the steward of the house I found no hearing, although I cut out his stupid profile five times, with the request that he would unlock to a travelling painter the picture cabinet, where I wished to find the maternal picture of the Countess.
"Now was I half and half resolved to become pregnant, and in this guise to demand everything for my satisfaction, which even the Spanish King refuses to no pregnant woman.[135]In Italy they carry the child on the arm, in order to beg; in Spain it needs not so much as this visibleness. But fortunately thy uncle came. The picture-gallery door was thrown open. I set myself to copying a stupid kitchen-piece, and looked everywhere after my island portrait. But nothing was to be seen." (Here he drew a wooden case out of his hunting-bag, and laid it before him and went on.) "Until at last I saw it,—a picture leaned on the floor against the wall, turning toward me its back- and wintry-side,—it was the child of my pencil, and I was touched by the neglect it had suffered,—inwardly vexed, but outwardly calm, I put it by,—and snapped off short in the kitchen-piece in the middle of a half-finished pole-cat. Look at the likeness!"
He took off the box-cover, and Linda beamed upon his friend with a stream of mind and charms, only dressed in older fashion. Albano could scarcely stammer for emotion. "That were my father's spouse and my dear mother? And thou knowest assuredly that this picture here is the one you made of her on Isola Bella?"
"I'll just make it manifest," said he, and scoured away at a rose in the picture about the region of the heart. "My then Paphos-nameLoewenskiouldliessub rosaand will be immediately forthcoming. Had I already scraped it open on the road, then you would have believed I had on the road for the first written myself in." As from a ghostly writing hand Albano started back shuddering, when actually an L and an Ö came forth from under the rose: "I shall clear away no further now," said Schoppe, "the rest I keep for her." Albano now poured out his heart before his honest heart's-friend; to him he could say and object that Julienne was his sister,—"against which I have nothing at all to say," said Schoppe,—and that Gaspard had approved an intended marriage between him and Linda. "There is no getting away from it," he added; "if she is his daughter, then I am not his son,—I cannot possibly make his sacred word of honor a lie—and, God! into what a monstrous pit and pool of crime must one then look down!" "Touching the word and the pool," said Schoppe, quite coldly, "there are specious proofs to be adduced (although, to be sure, I have before this spoken superfluously on the subject with thy father, and with the Countess), that the Baldhead, who, as he confessed to me, has been thy father's mass-assistant, groomsman, and bear-leader, was not a man of the freshest morals, but that he—although otherwise upright in many saddlesexceptthe moral—had his hours and centuries when he acted as such a dog and highwayman, that my hound there is a calendar-saint and father of the Church to him. Only I ought not to have blown out the lamp of his life, which of course stank more than it shone."
Albano could not disguise from him his horror at the deed. "I cannot repent it; listen," said Schoppe, and gave this account: "Even in Valencia thy uncle told me that he had met in Madrid such and such a fellow,—exactly like the Baldhead,—who carried round for show a wax-figure-cabinet of nothing but crazy creatures; often the whole cabinet would speak, and he himself would sit therein too, and help discourse; thy superstitious uncle procured and lent him spirits, too, and made evil and frightful things out of it all.
"Once in aPosada[136]I heard in a sleeping chamber near mine all sorts of voices murmuring through each other and saying, 'Schoppe also is coming to us.' I rose; the strange chamber was shut. I listen and hear it again, the devilish cry, 'Schoppe comes in also.' My room had a balcony out of which I could, through the neighboring window, see by the moonlight into the noisy chamber. In horrible, frizzled shapes sat a mass of wax therein and spake, the waxen baldhead in the midst; but I sought the living one. The wax beasts exchange with one another their fixed ideas and slip me in among them: 'There is our honorary fellow-member peeping in,' said the wax baldhead. By Heaven! I must be short, my blood boils and burns again through my heart. I grow furious, take my weapon, and petition God for a peaceable, forbearing disposition. Unfortunately I observe, in a back corner not lighted by the moon, near a father of death and a pregnant woman of wax, a black cloak which stirs, and out of which peeps the living tone-leader, the Baldhead. 'Black master of ventriloquism,' cried I, 'hold thy tongue for God's sake; I see thee behind there and fire in.' I took it for ventriloquism.
"Now for the first time the crazy-house properly began; I heard it laugh,—call me in and dub me a comrade and member of the club. 'Presses,' said I, 'I am notoriously a man, and see thee quite distinctly.' It availed nothing; the waxen baldhead so much the more replied, 'Yes, there sits brother Schoppe already,' and I actually saw myself also embossed and modelled on the spot. 'He is to be had here also,' cried I, grimly, and fired away at the master of the lodge, who tumbled bleeding to the floor.
"I made off with myself in the same hour. As to the uncle, I came across his track afterward for a short time. He dreads madmen, and would not have me long with him, for fear I myself should strike up a bargain with the aforesaid set. He asked me whether the director of the wax-figure travelling madhouse had encountered me. I could not place much confidence in him; I have the secret alone."
"Thou art a wild, true man," said Albano, with such an intense desire to embrace him; "thou dost much for others, and art, after all, much for thyself. I can now leave thee no more. My former life-island, with all its flowers, lies deep under water, and I must cast myself into the infinite sea of the world. Give me thy hand, and swim with me. We travel to-morrow to France."
"To-morrow?" said Schoppe. "Well, yes! then I go this evening to the Countess, and then to Don Cesara." "Tell her," begged Albano, "that I would not visit her even as a brother, if I were such, not from coldness, but because I revere her great spirit; say that to her, and God help thee!" Albano was about to go, and leave him to wander alone into the neighboring Lilar. "No, accompany me, my master," said Schoppe, vehemently; "I have discharged the old churl over there in the woods by fair payment of escort-money, and should now be alonevis-à-vis de moi." "I do not understand thee," said Albano; "what art thou afraid of?" "Albano," said he, in a low and important tone, and his generally direct looks glanced shyly sidewise, and innumerable great wrinkles encircled his smiling mouth, "the 'I' might come; yes, yes!"
Wondering, and asking who that might be, Albano looked into his face. "Plague take it!" said Schoppe; "I apprehend you full well; you hold me to be not one eighth as rational as yourself, but mad. Wolf, come up! Thou, beast, wast frequently, on lonely roads and lanes, my exorcist and devil-catcher, against the 'I.' Sir, he who has read Fichte, and his vicar-general and brain-servant Schelling, out of sport as often as I, will make serious work enough out of it at last. The thing called 'I' presupposes itself, and the person called 'I,' together with that remainder which most call the world. When philosophers deduce anything—for example, an idea or themselves—out of themselves, so do they also deduce whatever else there is about them—the remaining universe—in the same manner. They are exactly that drunken churl who made water into a fountain, and stood there all night before it, because he heard no cessation, and of course set down all the subsequent continuing sound to his own account. The 'I' conceives itself; it is therefore ob-subject, and at the same time the residing-place of both. Gadzooks! there is an empiric and a pure 'I.' The last phrase which the crazy Swift, according to Sheridan and Oxford, uttered, shortly before his death, was, 'I am I.' Philosophical enough!"
"And what fearful conclusion dost thou draw from it all?" said Albano, with the deepest sorrow. "I can bear anything and everything," said Schoppe, "only not theme,—the pure, intellectualme,—the god of gods. How often have I not already changed my name, like my namesake and cousin in renown,Scioppius, orSchoppe, and become every year another person! but still the pure 'I' perceptibly runs after me and besets me. One sees this best on journeys, when one looks at one's legs, and sees them stride along, and then asks, Who in the world is that marching along so with me down below there? I tell you he is eternally talking with me; if he were once to start up in bodily presence before me, I should not be the last to grow weak and deadly pale. To be sure, no dog has occasion to use tooth-powder; but children one should paint up, it stands to reason and propriety. For my part, I have observed the age so so, and smile, because I say nothing. Men, like napkins, are broken up into the finest and greatest variety of forms,—into night-caps, pyramids, cross-bills—zounds, Albano! into what shape are they not folded? But the consequence, brother,—O heavens, the consequence! I say nothing: curse it, I am still as a mouse,—few as much so; but times may come when a gentleman shall haply remark, Men and music-notes, music-notes and men; short and sweet and plain, with both it is now heads up, now tails,—that is to say, when it has to go quick. These are similes, I am well aware, best friend; but the bakers announce a slack batch by a stony or clayey one in the shop, whereas men announce their hardest things, among which belongs the heart, by their softest, to which appertain words."
Speechless with astonishment at these effusions, Albano led him by the hand to Lilar before Linda's residence. All was dark therein; not a light was stirring. "Speak thy word softly up there, my Schoppe, and to-morrow we journey farther!" said Albano below, in a soft tone at parting, and left him to go up alone into the gloomy castle of mourning. "What a meeting!" said Albano, on his way back through the garden.
Long did Albano wait for his friend on the following day; no one appeared, no man knew anything of him. On the second morning a report got wind that the Countess in the night, and Gaspard in the morning, had travelled off. "Has Schoppe driven both away by the truth?" he asked himself, forsaken and alone. In vain did he try to track Schoppe for several days after; not once had he been seen. "Thou, too, dear Schoppe!" said he, and shuddered at the barbarity of fate toward himself. As he thus surveyed himself, and looked out over the still, dark waste of his life, all at once it seemed to him as if his life suddenly lighted up, and a sun-glance fell upon the whole liquid mirror of the dark time which had elapsed. A voice, spake within him: "What has there been then? Men, dreams, blue days, black nights, have flown hither without me, without me flown away again, like the flitting summer, which the hand of man can neither weave nor hold fast. What is there left? A wide woe over the whole heart; but the heart, too, remains,—empty, of course, but firm, sound, hot. Loved ones are lost, not love itself; the blossoms are fallen, not the branches. Verily, I still wish; I still will; the past has not stolen from me the future. Arms I still have to embrace withal, and a hand to lay upon the sword, and an eye to survey the world. But what has gone down will come again, and flee again, and only that will remain true to thee which is forsaken,—thyself alone. Freedom is the glad eternity; calamity is for the slave the breaking out of a fire in the prison. No; I willbe, nothave. What! can the holy storm of tones only stir a particle of dust, while the rude, agitated air displaces mountains of ashes? Only where like tones and strings and hearts dwell, there do they move softly and invisibly. Only sound on, then, sacred string-music of the heart, but wish not to change anything in the rough, hard world, which owns and obeys only the winds, not tones."
At this moment, he was found by the Lector Augusti, who brought, by word of mouth, instant entreaties from the Princesse Julienne to go with him to Gaspard's chamber, where she had the weightiest words to say to him about Schoppe. He complied readily; he expected, first and chiefly, to find with her a key to his Schoppe's covered fate; he saw, too, from the bold choice of a messenger, how important to his poor sister his appearance must be.
In Gaspard's apartment Augusti suddenly left him to announce him, and—leave him, alone. Through his life rolled now a slow thunder; whether it came from heaven, from a stream, or only from a mill, as yet he knew not. Julienne burst in, weeping, unable to speak for the violent beating of her heart. "Thou art going away?" asked she. "Yes!" said he, and besought her to be less passionate; for he knew how easily another's impetuosity set him on fire, as he could not even play chess or fence, for any length of time, without becoming angry. She entreated him still more passionately only to stay till Gaspard came back. "Is he coming back?" asked Albano. "How otherwise? But not the unworthy bride," said she. "Julienne," replied he, seriously, "O, be not as hard against her as fate has been, and let me be silent!" "I hate now all men, and thee, too," said she. "That comes of your poetical souls. O, what honest bride would have let herself so easily be blinded by such a suicide? Who? But I see thou dost not know all." "But is it of any use?" he asked.
Surprised at this question, she began without reply the narration:—
On the day when Albano found Schoppe, Julienne would fain visit again her friend Linda whom she had not seen since the evening of the tragedy. All apartments in Lilar were closely curtained against daylight. Julienne found her sitting in darkness, with downcast, half-open eyelids, outwardly very tranquil, only at long intervals a little tear stole out from her eyes. The sweeping stream went high over the wheels of her life and they stood far under it and still. "Is it thou, Julienne?" she said, softly. "Pardon the darkness; night is green now, to my eyes. It pains me to see anything." The bridal torch of her existence was quenched; she wished now night for night.
Julienne put anxious questions of astonishment; she gave no answer to them. "Is there any trouble between thee and my brother?" asked Julienne, in whom relationship always created a warmer concern than friendship. "Only wait for the Knight," answered she; "I have sent an entreaty to him to come hither."
Just at that moment he entered. She begged him to accommodate himself to this short night. After some silence, she rose proudly from her seat; her black-dressed, tall form raised, in the presence of the Knight, whom she saw not, its great eyes to heaven, her proud life, hitherto enveloped in the winding-sheet, flung back the cloth and rose, blooming, from the dead, and she addressed the Knight: "Respected Gaspard, you promised me, as also did my father, that he would appear to me on my marriage day. The day is gone by. I am a widow: now let him appear to me."
Here the Knight interrupted her: "Gone by? O quite right! Is he, then, anything more discreet and moral than a man?" and jested, contrary to his usual manner, with a glow of indignation, because he supposed it was of Albano, whom he had so long trusted, that she was speaking.
"You misunderstand me," said Linda; "I speak of a deceased one." Suddenly before Julienne Roquairol's shadow passed; distant according tones from the Princess had ushered it in. "Almighty God!" she screamed, "the cursed suicide's play is true?" "He played what actually occurred," said Linda calmly. "We separate. I travel. I desire nothing but my father." Here Gaspard held out toward the Countess an arm petrified by palsy, as if armed with a drawn dagger,—the darkness made the apparition blacker and wilder,—but he broke the ice of death asunder again with cold hands, and stirred and answered with lamed tongue: "God and the Devil! Thy father is at hand. He will take it all—as it is. Doesheknow it?" "Who?" asked Linda. "And what did he determine? Heavens! I mean Albano." Gaspard had, in a passion, at once Cromwell's imbecility of tongue and ingenuity of action; and remained therefore as averse and as far from every ebullition, even of love, as from tameness, which was to him (as he said) "even more odious than downright crime."
"I know not," said Linda. "I belong to the dead one alone, who has twice died for me. Say that to my father. O, I would have followed him long ago, the monster, into the deep realm; I would not stand here before the cold reproach of malice or Christian amazement, for there are still daggers to be used against life!—But I am amother, and therefore I live!"
"I will see you again this evening," said Gaspard composedly, and hurried away. "I believe, dear Julienne," said Linda, "we now no longer quite understand each other, at least not to the highest point, just as we earlier differed about yourbelle-sœur, and you thought her coquetry, but I precisely her prudery, great and immoral." "That may well be true," said Julienne, coldly; "you are so truly poetic, I am so prosaic and old-maidishly pious and orthodox. To love a monster for this, because he cheats me as horribly as he does his regiment-treasury, or because he generally allows himself as much freedom as his regiment, or because after his death he still leaves parts for the remaining players, or letters to me, deceived one—" "Did he so?" asked Albano. "She praised it even as a sign of genius in him," replied Julienne. "To love such a one, said I, or such people as love him, I cannot find it in my heart to do that. Fare you then as well as may be." Linda answered, "I hate all wishes"; gave her her hand, pressed not hers, and remained in profound silence, looking into her night. She knew little of the easy and careless departure of her lost friend.
That same night Linda, after a long private talk with the Knight, travelled off entirely alone, wrapped in her veil, in a carriage without torches, and no one knew whether she had wept or not.—
When Albano had heard his sister out, he said, with a soft voice of emotion: "Make peace with the past; man cannot assail it. Leave to the great unhappy one the night into which she of herself has been drawn. But why were you so eager to have me with you? Particularly if thou knowest aught of my Schoppe, I entreat thee to impart it." "I will answer thee," said she, weeping and wondering; "but, brother, assure me that thy silence is not again the curtain of a new misfortune. I recognize you men by that, one must hate you all, and I do so, too." "I have nothing sad in my mind; before God I affirm it. You women, you who will only quench your hell with tears, and kindle it with the breath of sighs, comprehend not, that often a single hour's thinking can give a man a staff or wings, which shall lift him at once out of hell, and then it may burn on for all him." "Show me, then," said she, in a tearfully comic manner, "thywing." "This," replied he, "that I build not upon man, but upon God in me and above me. The foreign ivy winds around us, runs up on us, stands as a second summit beside ours, and it is thereby withered. Spirits should grow beside each other, not upon each other. We should, like God, as imperishable ones, love the perishable."
"Very good," said she, "if it only insures thee peace. As touching thy poor Schoppe, he has been thrust into the madhouse by way of punishment; but first let me give you a regular account. He dressed up a story about a second sister of thine before thy already so much excited father. One could have let this new distraction of intellect pass; but thy uncle was called, who told him to his face he had murdered the Baldhead; and the choice was haughtily left him between imprisonment and the madhouse; so he betook himself to the latter. Stay, stay! The weightiest is to come. Whatever I may think of him, I see he is thy honest friend; and to speak out freely, even Linda, before her departure, inserted in her last letter to me an intercession for him. He not only made the farcical journey to Spain for thee, he also effected thy cure; perhaps thou owest him thy life. I wonder that I, or somebody or other, has never before mentioned it to thee."
She began now upon Idoine's sound and generous character, her Arcadia, and the last day she had spent with her and looked into her clear soul. She passed on to his bed of fever and his mourning beside Liana's bier, and old Schoppe's talks and runnings to and fro, and his noble victory, when he had brought at length the glorified Liana, in Idoine's form, before his eye, that she might pronounce the healing words: "Have peace!"
Now was he in a storm, and Julienne at peace. "Therefore," she continued, "I hold it to be my duty to interest myself a little in thy friend. The poor devil is innocent,—through stingings of conscience and even by his present situation he may completely lose what understanding he still has,—altogether innocent, I say; for thy uncle, whom I have long hated, and who only a short time ago for the first time, but in vain, sought to come as a ghostly and murderous apparition to my sick brother,—he would also have probably done the same with Liana, if she had lived to admit of it,—this man is—(why may I not make it notorious, now that all has changed and revolutionized itself?)—one and the selfsame person with the Baldhead, and is a ventriloquist! Brother?"
But Albano had already flown from her.
Albano would fain set his friend free before avenging him; therefore he would hasten first to Schoppe and then to his uncle. But as he passed by the lighted apartments of the latter, a sudden indignation seized him, and he must needs go up. The tall, haggard uncle came slowly to meet the excited youth, with the jay on his hand. Albano, without any circumstances, with flaming eyes, charged him with his double part, his heaven-crying destruction of Schoppe, and the illusory operations against himself, and demanded answer and satisfaction. "Yes, yes," said the Spaniard, stroking hisdiablesse; "I have the pistols: I have no time,—no time for talking." "You must have it," said Albano. "I have none,Deo patre et filio et spiritu sancto testibus; it will soon be between eleven and twelve, and the gloomy one stands here." "Heavens! why this silly, tragic scenery? O God, is it not possible, then, that you are even a man,"—looking with horror at the skin of his face, which absolutely could not look joyful or loving,—"so that you can tremble, blush, repent, exult? What knew you of my Schoppe, when you once in Ratto's cellar made believe as if you knew a frightful deed of his?" "No one needs know anything," he replied; "one says to a man, 'I am acquainted with thy villanous deed'; the man sends his thoughts back, he finds such a one." "But what had he done to you?" asked Albano, with agitation. Dryly he replied, "He said to me, 'Thou hound!' It strikes eleven o'clock; I say nothing more than what I will."
Here the Spaniard brought two pistols and a bag, showed him that they were not loaded, asked him to load one (giving him powder and lead), but not the other. "Into the bag, each into the bag," said he; "we draw lots!" The bolder, the better, thought Albano. The Spaniard shook both up, and requested Albano to tread upon one of them, as a sign of his choice. He did so. "We shoot at the same time," said the uncle, "as soon as it has struck the two quarters." "No," said Albano, "you fire at the first stroke, I at the second." "Why not?" replied he.
They posted themselves over against each other in opposite corners of the chamber, with the pistols in their hands, awaiting the stroke of half past eleven. The Spaniard closed his eyes in dumb listening. As Albano looked into this blind, bust-like face, it seemed to him as if no sin at all could be committed upon such a being, least of all a death-stroke. Suddenly there was a murmuring in the still chamber of five voices among each other, as if they came from the old philosophers' busts on the walls; the father of death, the Baldhead, the jay seemed to speak, and an unknown voice, as if it were the so-called Gloomy One. They said to one another, "Gloomy One, is it not so, have I told any falsehood? I bring five tears, but cold ones,—I bear the wheels of the hearse on my head,—I lead the panther by the noose,—I cut him free,—I point with white finger athim,—I bring the mist,—I bring the coldest frost,—I bring the terrible thing!"
Here the bell sounded the first stroke, and the Spaniard fired,—at the second Albano blazed away;—both stood there without a wound; powder-smoke floated round, but nowhere was there any appearance of a splintering, as if the ball had been only a glass ball filled with quicksilver. With grim contempt, Albano looked at him on account of the previous voices. "I was forced to," said the uncle.
Suddenly the Lector broke in, breathless, whom Julienne had despatched to hinder a probable duel. "Count!" he stammered, "has anything happened?" "Something," replied the uncle, "must have happened in the neighborhood, the smoke came in; we were just on the point of embracing and bidding each other good night." He rang, and commanded the servant to ask the host who was firing so late at night. Albano was astounded, and could only say in parting, "So be it! But fear the madman, whom I unchain!" "Ah, do it not!" said the Spaniard, and seemed to fear.
Augusti waited upon him down to the street, nor did he let him go till after he had given his word of honor not to go up there again. But Albano flew, even at this late hour of the night, to the house of woe and to the tormented heart.
Hardly had Albano made known to the overseer of the madhouse, a young, sleek, rosy little man, his name, which the little man already knew, and his petition for Schoppe's liberty, together with his security for him, when the overseer smiled upon him with uncommon complacency, and said, "I have quietly watched the whole house for years. I seize greedily the minutest traits for a future, philosophical public; and so also did I apply myself very seriously to Mr. Schoppe. But never, Sir Count, never have I detected in him a trait or trick which would have promised insanity; on the contrary, he reads all my English and German works on the subject, and converses with me upon the modes of treatment in hospitals for the insane. A disciple of Fichte he may be (I infer it from his 'I'), and a humorist, too; now if each of these is, of itself, hard to distinguish from craziness, how much more their union! with what joyful anticipation of the coincidence of our observations I give you here the key to his chamber, conceive for yourself!" "If he is not a fool," said his wife, "why then does he smash all the looking-glasses?" "For that very reason," replied the overseer; "but if he is a fool, then is thy husband a still greater."
Never did Albano open a door with heavier heart than this to Schoppe's little chamber. "I am come to take thee away, my brother," he cried immediately, by way of sparing himself and him the redness of shame. But when he looked at the old lion more nearly, he found him in this trap quite altered,—not tame, creeping, wagging, but broken in two, and with shattered claws weighed down to the earth. The charge of murder, which he had honestly admitted, united to Gaspard's unmerciful sentence, had filled and eaten up his proud, free breast with poisonous shame. "I fare well here, only I feel symptoms of ill health," said Schoppe, with lustreless eye and toneless voice. Albano could not hide his tears; he clung around the sick man, and said, "Magnanimous man, thou gavest me once in my sickness, health and salvation again, and I knew it not, and thanked thee not. Go with me; I must nurse thee in this thy sickness, heal and comfort thee as I can; then we travel."
"Dost thou imagine, my Criton," he replied, strengthened by the balsam of his wounded pride, "that I am not a sort of Socrates, but will really go out of mytorre del filosopho? A word ofhonoris a thick chain." "Tell me all, spare no one; but I will tell thee thereafter a piece of news, at which thy chain shall instantly melt down!" said Albano.
"Ha! Meanwhile, this place here, for its part, is well enough, as aforesaid, atorre del filosopho, quai de Voltaire, and Shakespeare's street, and whatever else one might, could, would, or should name. Moreover, I always hear by night one or another man speak close by me, and so I have no fear at all that the 'I' will come. I throw every day five little bread-balls: if they form a cross, then it signifies (think what thou wilt) that I do not yet appear to myself. But they always make one. I have been, in this Anticyra here, so quieted about so many a phantom, even by those books,—look at them, nothing but treatises on madness,—that I, although it touches my Mordian[137]quite as little as it does me, am glad to have been here. My intercourse is not the safest, I own, though I talk with the keeper and wife alone (a rhyme), both of whom cleverly understand the prison-fever that prevails here. The man has got the fixed idea into his head, and his wife thereby into hers, that he is our present overseer, and has to assist, oversee, and read excellent books which fall in with his office. Those treatises are by the fool. It is to be presumed he has let his overseeing idea peep out too broadly in the city, and the medical college clapped him in with his serviceable idea; because, in the end, to be sure, every overseer must have it in order to exercise his office, whether he is mad or not. Amongst all here in the house, we two please each other most. He sounded me to my advantage, and I can make great use of him for my liberty, only I must not attack his foul, fixed spot. Only I often improvisate for them an evening blessing,—because they have no prayer-book,—and weave in with the blessing hints which might be of medical service to the pair, if they chose. So we two wander round in the mazes of this labyrinth along before the patients,—behind him, the incurable hub of the whole wheel, I walk quite tolerant. In the club, universal polemics and scepticism reign as in no other university hall. 'It is a thing to make one become crazy,' he says to me, in a low tone. 'To make onebecrazy,[138]they say in thispalais d'égalité,' I reply. I cut him out the profiles of the patients for his manuscript. As children still have something which appears to them childish, so have madmen something which seems even to them madness. But I never become any more pointed with him, and keep sharper jokes to myself. Ah, what is man, especially a discreet one, and how thin are his sticks and staves! Is there anything about me that moves thee, Albano? My dull, pale face, perhaps?"
But Albano could not possibly confess to him, that this wreck of a noble man, with his delusions, and even with his style, whose wings had also wheels on them, brought the tears into his eyes, but he said merely, "Ah, I think of many things, but now, at last, I pray, to thy story, dear friend!" But Schoppe had already forgotten again what he was to tell. Albano named the issue of the portrait-affair with the Countess, and Schoppe began:—
"The Princess Julienne was just jumping into her carriage, when I led the blind maiden up the steps, to let it be said, the Librarian Schoppe was here from Spain. I was ushered into a darkened apartment, wherein I walked quietly up and down waiting or watching for people, until the Countess greeted me out of the gloom 'This darkness,' said I, 'is just what I like for the light which I have to give, only I would rather speak Irish or Lettonian[139]or Spanish, because I don't know who may be eavesdropping about here.' 'Spanish!' said she, seriously. I related to her how I had known thy mother, and painted her, and so forth, and inserted my name indelibly into the likeness; after a long time, had met her in the market-place of this city, and taken her for the looking-glass image of thy mother, so like was she to her own. 'I know not,' said she, breaking in here with heated pride upon the midst of my narrative, 'how far your secrets can become mine.' 'You may,' said I, seriously, 'by letting me ring for a light; for I hold here in my hand the portrait of the Frau von Cesara and von Romeiro, two names of one person.' She comprehended nothing of it, wanted to know nothing of it, and I must not ring. I acknowledged to her that I saw myself necessitated to adorn myself with the rhetorical chessman, generally called repetition of the narrative, and proceeded to move the piece. But as soon as in so doing I came upon thy name again, she said I had probably in my mind relations now entirely done away. 'No,' said I, 'I have an eternal and restored relation in my mind, and bring with me his greeting, full of the most profound regard.' The greeting seemed to touch her sensibilities, just as if one held her to be in need of such an assurance, and she begged me rather to leave thee out. 'Heavens! he is your brother, and here I have about me the portrait of your mother, stolen from Valencia, and only no light to show it by.'
"Light was then ordered. As the flame set the tall, imposing form in gold, I said right out to myself, she was fully as deserving as her brother that one should make that long pilgrimage to the family tree of both, for she is not without her charms. Albano, were I her brother, as thou hast the honor to be, and had she a gondola, but no river of paradise for it, my blood would have to be made navigable for her; I would bear her up not only in my hands, but, like an æquilibrist, on my nose and mouth, the unfortunate one! She no sooner saw the portrait than she cried, 'Mother, mother!' and kept passing her hand over her eyes, complaining that they were now still worse than ever. I resumed my scraping, and at last dug out before her eyes my whole name,Loewenskiould, even with the addition, which had escaped me, 'Loves much.'
"'Was that the painter's name?' she asked. 'Are you he? You loved her too?' 'Beauty is a cliff,' replied I, seriously, 'on which one and another man seeks to shipwreck himself, because it lies full of pearls and oysters.' She begged of me, in a friendly manner, the most distinct repetition of the repetition; she wished to attend better; hearing and thinking were as hard and heavy for her now as living. Albano, you should have despatched me to her with more preparatory information. As it was, I was half confused and cloudy, and when, during my picture of the Long Lake Isle,[140]something moist sprang from her eyes, I sank in the drops, and almost drowned therein, and not till after some time could I rub myself to life. At the end of my discourse, she stood up, folded her hands, and prayed, with weeping, as if she gave thanks: 'O God, O God! thou hast spared me!'—which I, after all, do not wholly understand."
Albano understood it well,—namely, that she thanked fate for the accidental delay of Schoppe's arrival, which had spared her the short but fearful transformation of Roquairol into a brother.
"Thereupon she broke out into too many thanks to the painter, robbers and purveyors of the painted birth-certificate. He whose heart has gone to sleep like an arm, and is feelingless and hard to move, finds a something very droll run through and over the awaking member when he stirs it. 'I could not do less,' said I, 'for your holy brother; the sunny side is, then, the moon-side.' She turned suddenly to the subject of thy father, and asked, as he was immediately coming, whether she or I should propose to him these riddles. 'Or rather both!' I had hardly replied, when he stepped wildly in.
"Now, Gaspard is, to be sure and decidedly, thy own and thy sister's natural father, and filial love toward him is never to be set down againsttheeas a fault; but if I chose to tell thee he was no bear, no rhinoceros, no werewolf or other kind of wolf, I should do it more from singular politeness than from any other cause. He snorted to me a good evening; so did I to him. Many men resemble glass,—smooth and slippery and flat so long as one does not break them, butthencursedly cutting, and every splinter stings. The matter was laid before him with the accompanying frontispiece of the portrait. Wert thou more distantly related to him, I would let myself out on this subject; for his face was overspread with the northern light of grim fury; out of his eyes yellow wasps flew at me; straight lines shot up on his tempestuous brow like electrical lances, particularly two perpendicular lines of discomfort. But, as was said, thou art, to my knowledge, his son. 'My friend,' he thundered away, 'with whatrightdo you steal pictures, then?' 'That ought to be a hard question for me to answer,' replied I, gently; 'but I have aninabilityto look at an unrighteous deception; I march right in.' 'Countess,' said he, gasping, 'in three minutes you shall know thisgentlemanwell enough.' O no, no! he used another word thangentleman, but I will one day clasp him to my breast for it, and though we stood on the highest steps of God's throne, and wrestled in the glory." "Schoppe!" said Albano. "Don't excite me!" replied Schoppe, and went on.
"He rang; a servant flew in with a card; we all were silent. 'Indulgence, Countess,' said he, 'only for the space of one minute.' He thereupon gave her some miserable court-news, but she looked silently on the ground. Then came thy tall uncle, nodded sixteen times with his little head, for that he takes to be an obeisance, and stepped far off from me. 'Brother, simply say, what has this gentleman here done back of Valencia?' 'Murdered, murdered!' said he, rapidly. 'Under what circumstances?' asked thy father. Here he began to depose the minutest particulars of my shot of distress at the Baldhead with such an incomprehensible sharpness that I said, 'That is true!' and went on myself, and kept asking, 'Is it not so?' and he hurriedly nodded, till I had come to the end. Then I asked, 'But, Spaniard, tell me, by Heaven! whence haveyou, then, derived this knowledge?' 'From me!' answered a strange, hollow voice, exactly like the Baldhead's.
"My heart grew cold as a dog's nose, and my tongue full of stone. 'Asconvictusandconfessus,' began thy father, 'you can now prophesy your fate.' 'To be sure,' murmured the uncle, pulling out and putting back his handkerchief, taking the picture up and laying it away,—'prophesy, prophesy!' 'Meanwhile,' thy father continued, 'it is freely left with you whether you will, until a nearer investigation, choose, instead of the prison, which belongs to you in consideration of the murder and theft, a milder place, the madhouse, which befits you in consideration of your journey; if you do not choose, then I choose for you.' 'To the madhouse, to the madhouse!' cried I, 'for the sake of true sociability, on my honor. But I make no questions about anything; on the washing-bill of my conscience stands no murder. Do you only burn yourselves white and clean. Your chariot of the sun and triumphal car goes up to the very hub in dung. Countess, let, I pray, everything be cleared up by you in the best manner, and think unceasingly of me, in order to get a father, like the students' father of his country, to be sure, who consists in a hole through the hat.'[141]'Step farther back!' said thy father to thy uncle, 'the madness is broken out.' Upon that the hare made eighteen springs down over thresholds and steps. I executed my own orders of march and halt. Thy father still crawled after me with a licking, flamy look. I charged my eye with poison, and saw him, down below at the door, fall headlong at the stroke."
Albano shuddered, and inquired about the how. Then Schoppe was silent, buried in thought, for a long time, and said, in a troubled tone, "That, to be sure, was only a dream of mine; but so do I now confound dream with reality, and the reverse. I ought to be more moved about Schoppe; he is, after all, an old man, and old men weep like the jester, when it goes down hill." "I will comfort thee now, my friend," said Albano, with distracted breast; "I will remove an error from thy faithful heart, and then thou wilt certainly go with me. This Baldhead, our mocker and juggler, is, according to the holy word of my sister, one and the same person with my uncle, and is a ventriloquist."
Schoppe stood for a long time like one dead, as if he had not heard a word. Suddenly, with radiant face and sparkling eye, he threw himself on his knee, and stammered, "Heaven, Heaven! make me mad! The rest I will do." Here he made a wicked neck-wringing motion with his hands, and said, in a tone of restored strength, "I can follow thee." He really could now, but before he had hardly been able to stand. And so Albano led the unhappy, excited friend with heavy heart to his own lodgings.