Chapter XI: Part 11

If generally a cold past moment shuts up to lovers, as a cold night does to bees, the flowers out of which they take the honey, here, however, after the storm, the clear blue air of heaven had become purer and stiller, and the tranquillity became bliss, as the bliss tranquillity. Through Albano, although rapidly, the Fury of fear had passed, who holds an inverted telescope, and through it shows man a very distant, empty heaven, without stars. But not so through Linda; she had throughout spoken in love and hope, and for her glowing heart there were no icy places. Therefore was he now so happy and so blessed by the contemplation of that vigorous nature! A long, deep chain of valleys, wherein wine and oil flowed in the fragrance of blossoms, led them all towards the great Rome. For a space the youth could accompany them; at last, for a long separation, he must tear heart and eye away from the loved ones, when over the green, glistening vales the mighty dome of St. Peter's already sparkled, and the cypresses, proudly encircled only with cypresses, bore the gold of evening on their twigs without stirring them. All had their eyes on the fair Rome, but their hearts were only on Isola Bella, where they promised to find each other again.

117. CYCLE.

On the way to Isola Bella, he thought of his hour of contention with the vehement Linda, and the character of this war-goddess. He shuddered at the very recollection of the steep precipice upon which, within a few days, he had leaned so far over; for Linda is so decided, knows no alternative between passion and annihilation. And yet, in this time of cool reflection, he felt her imperious demand upon his liberty more severely than ever, and said to himself, firmly, "Woman must not be allowed to circumscribe or rule the holy domain of man's development." On the other hand, it was, to be sure, all love, and an excess of it; and the longer he journeyed and compared, so much the darker and lonelier was it on that spot of his life upon which she alone cast the great flame. She moved before him much more clearly and nearly in spirit by his still contemplation of her spirit, than in bodily presence, because the former presented her at once in harmony, the latter with the individual dissonances without the solution. Her power of all-sided impartiality towards all characters had appeared to him, for a woman, quite as rare as it was great, especially as he himself let this power work more in the shape of respect for her and in a glad, free appreciation of great, eccentric, poetical manifestations, but not of all, even the flat and the worthless.

Alike mighty and full-grown stood Love and Liberty within him, side by side. They were bound together and reconciled only by a new resolution to be gentle, not merely strong, to lay before her with all frankness his right of freedom and his loving soul, and to be to her the noble character which belonged to her. "Am I not such, if I really will it?" said he.

In the highest joy of life, in perfect oneness with himself and destiny, he made his journey to Isola Bella as rapidly as if he were going to find there a beloved, instead of merely awaiting one. How many a thing seemed now smaller along his road, to which he applied the Roman measure, and not the German, and before which he now, as his father had foretold him, passed along flying!

At last he saw the artificial Alp of Isola Bella standing in the waves, and disembarked joyfully with his teacher, Dian, in the garden of childhood, where he was to expect so much, and, with fresh Italian life-blossoms on his heart, bid farewell to the land of promise.

He waited several long days, yearning and anxious for his two friends, although his sunny companion was always reminding him to make allowance for the rapidity of his own journey. His determination to be gentle grew continually more and more unnecessary and involuntary. The very island itself, with its springs born of perfumes and with the distant garland of Alps, melted his soul. In the former year he had seen it more in leaves than in blossoms. It was, indeed, his land of childhood. From many places on the lake stars glimmered up to him out of a deep, early, after-midnight hour of life. Here had he for the first time found his father, and for the first time seen Linda's form across the waters; here he finds and loses them again, after the longest separation, for a still longer one; and here he stands in the gateway between north and south. The free, fragrant land, full of islands, the Jacob's-ladder of his life mounts back into the ether, and he goes down into a cold region full of constraint and eyewitnesses; his love is judged by his father, it is assailed by the downfallen friend. "Ye days in Ischia," he sighed, "ye hours in Vesuvius and in Tivoli, can you reverse your course? can you ever come back again and overflow anew the insatiable heart, that it may drink, and say, 'It is enough'?"

To his Dian, as if by way of justifying himself and his illimitable longing, he spoke frequently of Chariton and their children, and asked him how it was with his heart when he thought of them. "Don't talk to me so much of them," said he, after his manner, feeling more than he suspected or betrayed, "we are still so cruelly far off from them; one only spoils one's journey without cause. But when I have them all.... Well, ah God!" Then he paused, snatched the youth to his arms, and did not kiss him.

On a fresh, blue morning Albano stood, before the resurrection of the sun in heaven, on the high, bloom-encircled pyramid of terraces, where he had once, on awaking, seen his dear father flee without farewell; and he gazed with emotion down into the vacant, broad lake, and around on the summits of the glaciers, which already bloomed in the reflection of Aurora riding down from on high,--and no one was with him but the past. He looked upon himself and into his breast, and thought: "What a long, heavy time has already passed through this bosom since that day! A whole world has become a dream within me! And the heart still beats fresh and sound within thee!" All at once he saw, in the light morning-smoke of the lake, a skiff rowing along. Slowly, lazily it waded, for he saw it from a great distance. At last it glided, it flew; the sail bloomed up in the morning-blaze, and the green waves became a wild-fire, playing around it, as formerly in Ischia, on that evening, around Linda's skiff.

Linda it was, and his sister. They looked up, and motioned a greeting. He cried, in hasty joy, "Dian! Dian!" and ran down the long flight of steps, all astonished and enraptured at the wide-spread splendor, because, on account of the glad apparition, he had not seen the sun rise, for it was he who was strewing before the loved one the fair flames, like morning flowers along the path of the waters.

"Is it you again, ye divine ones? O speak, weep for joy, that I am blest and have you once more. Come ye then again with your real old love?" Thus he went on speaking in eloquent ecstasy, born of his long-dreaming expectation. Linda looked with secret angelic pleasure, with lovely reflection into the high-playing flames of his love; and his sister enjoyed in a sweet emotion of sympathy the beautiful mildness on both their countenances, which, in union with energy, is as enchanting as moonlight on a mountain. Descriptions of travels were begun by both parties, but ended by neither; arrangements for the day and plannings out of the island were projected, but none chosen. Julienne held up before his heart his own word and her stipulation, that at evening he must pursue his journey, as a slight cooling against the fire of joy that burned therein; sadly he looked up to the friendly, serene morning sun, as if it were not mounting higher, but already going downward.

They went now on a lovely stroll through the island; everywhere bloomed beside the present a still past, under the rose a forget-me-not. Here, in this grotto before the leaping waves, had he once played with his sister Severina, and on this island was her death announced to him. "But, Julia, thou art my Severina, and more," said he. "I think," said she, softly, "quite as much." Not far from the arcade was it that he had for the first time gazed into the face of his father. "But O when wilt thou find _thy_ father at last? Speak about this, good Linda!" said he. She blushed, and said, "I shall find him when fate permits." "But when is that?" "I know nothing about it," said she, with a soft hesitation. Then Julienne touched him, nodding, and said, in as much French Latin as she could muster together, but in an indifferent tone, as if she were soliloquizing to the air, "_Non eam interroga amplius, nam pater veniet_ (_ut dicitur_) _die nuptiarum_."[106] He looked at her with astonishment; she nodded repeatedly. "Julia," said Linda, smiling, "is like women, as cunning in acting as she is open in speaking. I could not have disguised myself from a brother so long." "When the brother and sister," replied she, "do not find each other till they are equally grown up and with all perfections, they can easily become lovers of each other, while other sisters have first for many years to conquer the faults of the brother growing up."

Now they came upon the gallery, amid lemon-blossoms, where Gaspard had let his son see so many veils and masks hanging about the future; then Albano said, with displeasure, "Here I had to let many riddles be announced to me,--and there"--he meant the spot in the sea where Linda's image had first appeared to him on the waves--"even this precious form was mimicked." "My God!" said Linda, vehemently, "why speak any more of it at all? O it was so wicked to do it!" "No one, however, has lost much by it," said Julienne, joking, "except a couple who have lost their hearts, and I my anonymousness!" "Could we not both answer, Albano?" said Linda, softly, and raised her eyes. "By Heaven, that we could!" said he, strongly, for without those preludes they would have sought and found each other earlier.

Amidst these lookings into a past so singularly interwoven with futurity, they had stepped into the Borromæan palace, which to-day was fortunately without occupants; because Albano, at Linda's request, was to usher them both into the chamber, where he and Severina were brought up. The palace-keeper, supposing they were only in quest of a prospect,--for the nursery apartments were in the fifth story,--would have led them out on the roof; he insisted they were dusty children's-chambers, and had been locked up from time immemorial. With difficulty the man turned, with a rusty key, a rust-eaten lock. They stepped into the bedusted, clear-obscure, high, empty chamber, wherein a vacant cradle, a flower-pot with a little Chinese rose-bush dried up like its earth, a child's pewter watch, a girl's baby-kitchen with old-fashioned utensils, a rolled-up shining harpsichord string, a German almanack of 1772, many black seals with bare antique heads, a dried-up twig of the liana, and the like, lay as cast-off lumber round about. Man looks with emotion down into the far, low-lying time, when the spindle of his life ran round as yet almost naked without threads; for his beginning borders more nearly upon his end than the middle, and the outward bound and the homeward bound coasts of our life hang over into the dark sea. Albano was touched with melancholy at the scene around him, and at this glimpse of human life and this out-look upon his own green fields yet standing in wintry lowness,--and at the sight of the spot where he had lived with a mother and a sister, who had vanished from the earth, yes, even out of his imaginings. He took up the pewter watch, and said, "Is there a better watch for that age which knows no time but only eternity, than this one with only an index and no wheel-work?"

Linda was surprised as she drew away a curtain from a glass casket and a waxen child, of angelic beauty, lying therein, caught the light in her clear eyes. "It is the dead Severina," said Albano, hastily, with the harsh adjective "dead," which Linda could not well endure. It became more and more uncomfortable to him in the clear-obscure chamber,--a streak of sunshine burned in singularly down through the lofty window,--animated resurrection-dust played therein,--the spirits of the sister and of Liana might at any moment flash across the earthly light,--and the mountains out in real life receded into the distance. When he looked again upon the blooming Linda, all at once she appeared to him changed, strange, supernatural, as if she appeared among spirits, and was going hence again. She looked upon him significantly, with the words, "One is not at home here, let us go!" "Woman!" said he, with strong voice, in German, making answer to an inward terror, and grasped her hand, "we will hold together like a live heart, if one should try to tear it asunder." Linda replied, "I cannot stay longer, Julienne!" and they went.

On the threshold it occurred to the Count to look into the next chamber; he opened it and shrank back, but cried, "You only go on," and he himself went in. He had, namely, beheld himself twice imaged as in a mirror. Within the chamber he found himself standing in wax in a niche in French uniform, but as a youth still, and close by, which the door had concealed, his father also as a youth, dressed in the old fashion, but beautiful as a Grecian god; the warm, full, flowery face had not yet been iced over in the winter of mature life, and still bloomed with love. He plunged deep into the sea of the past. The colossal statues out of doors, and the illuminated mountain ridges had risen up out of the dark waves, and stood in dripping splendor. There was a call from without. He looked again into his face, but angrily. "Why twice over?" said he, and crushed his face, but it was to him like suicide and laying hands upon his very self and soul. The form of his father he still more begrudged to the strange, unguarded place, but it was to him too holy for the slightest touch.

He went back, and remained silent on the subject of the images, in order not to ruffle the great, stubborn wings of Linda's fancy. The green, glistening, blooming day soon swallowed up the cold shadows which had fallen in from the heights and grave-mounds of the past. "But now," said Albano to Linda, "as you have just come out of my nursery, lead me once into yours." "I will not crown thee until we are at the right place," said she, and broke off and bound together twigs of the laurel wood, through whose swarm of light and dark waves they were now passing, for a garland. Bodily activity gave to this maiden, who, with more than common ease, knit together tones and colors and ideas, a peculiarly touching aspect of childlikeness and naive condescension. She braided the wreath, but with difficulty, confounded once the arbutus with the laurel that resembles it, put in one more blooming myrtle-twig, and decked his curled hair with it, but very seriously. "The garland becomes thee; the high laurels up on the summit thou wilt one day get for thyself," said she. He thought she was playing behind this seriousness; but she looked joyfully and searchingly and smilingly on the crowned one, but like a mother, and said: "It is right so! What wilt thou more? I will bring it. Albano, I have at this hour a very peculiar and new love for thee. I could do much for thee, endure much. My heart is moved with exceeding love. Kiss me not. I will tell thee." The fair womanliness which loves the beloved more ardently and intimately when it has for the first time gone over his homestead, the scenes of his childhood, his dwelling-places, unconsciously filled her strong heart. He kissed her not; he looked upon her, and wept in the ecstasy of love. She inclined her head towards him, and said, but cheerfully, "It is hard for me to weep, dearest! I will tell thee what thou desiredst to know about my childhood. Of the first places of my childhood but a very faint impression remains with me,--perhaps because we were always travelling, and because I look more for persons than for scenes,--except my having stayed longest in Valencia. Probably from this early travelling I derive my travelling mania. After all, however, it lies in my nature. But _you_ always believe, like the Germans, that you learn that which you properly inherit or create. By my mother I was more hated and loved than by any one. I am now clear about her. She was wholly born for art or for the arts, although I believe that she was originally marked out by the gods for the stage. She was everything this minute, nothing the next; curses and prayers, belief and unbelief, hatred and love, alternated in this epic nature. She could have lavished a world, and she could have stolen one. She once pressed me to her heart, and said, 'Wert thou not my daughter, I would steal or kill thee out of mere love'; and that was when I had said, 'I love Medea more than Creusa.'

"However, she was too inconsistent to be wholly loved; I loved my invisible father far more. I thought he was _God the Father_. I once imagined he must dwell in the _Porta Cœli_;[107] for whole hours together I went round the garden of the dead of the cloister, and looked longingly through the palms over the roses of the graves; I hung on every living thing, even to pain. A dying canary-bird once made me sick, and I thought the mass for the dead was read for him. On God and spirits also I hung in a sort of intoxication. They once flashed by before me in the fire which I struck out of sugar in the dark. I never played, but read early. As I was very serious, and my form developed itself precociously, I was early treated as a grown person, and I desired it too. No one was earnest enough for me, except my guardian, who, with secret hand, governed my development. Over books and in travelling carriages my early life passed away. I envied men, and their knowledge, and their freedom, but they did not please me, still less did women. I passed for proud--and at an earlier period I was so too--and for fantastical. I took it not ill, and said, 'You have your way, and I mine.'" The narrative was interrupted by Dian and Julienne.

118. CYCLE.

The first solitary minute which Albano found with his sister he devoted to an inquiry about her Latin intelligence that Linda's father would appear precisely on her marriage-day; but she referred him to his own father, who could tell him all about Linda's, and begged him "to indulge Linda, not only in her tenderness, but also in her characteristic shyness of marriage, which went very far. She could not, upon one occasion, accompany a female friend to the nuptial altar," Julienne added; "she called it the place of execution of woman's liberty, the funeral pile of the fairest, freest love, and said the heroic poem of love became then, at the highest, the pastoral poem of marriage. Of course she knows not whither such principles ultimately lead." "I hope, too, that thou trustest her," said Albano, making other and higher deductions from this singularity than his strict sister. She suddenly broke off, to impart to him a piece of advice which he was to take with him to Pestitz,--namely, to shun the Princess, who was, to the very core, cold, false, revengeful, and selfish. "She has something in view with thee, and, indeed, much; and her hatred toward the Countess must now be added. Linda clearly apprehends her, but yet she lets herself, out of passionateness, be carried away and made use of by all whom she foresees and surveys." Albano adhered to his old, milder judgment of the Princess,--so much the more, as he already knew Julienne's moral severity towards every woman of genius, from her misjudgment in the case of Liana,--but he readily gave her his word to shun the Princess, without telling her the reason,--namely, the love which the woman had for him, and of which it was so hard to disenchant her. To his tender feelings, there was no greater rudeness than this public breaking open and reading of a love-letter, this masculine catching and proclaiming of a woman's sigh of love through a speaking-trumpet for the people.

All came together again, encamped themselves upon a spot which commanded the lake and the Alps, and the shadows of the blossoms. The day cooled its glow, and sank from beauty to beauty down into evening. "On this exquisite island," said Dian, "already the Northern nature begins, and we shall soon find ourselves at home under a peaked roof." "Well, yes," said Julienne; "but, after all, one is glad too, at last, when one sees again a neat man, a blonde, and a shadow, and hears a bird or two."[108] "I think not here of Tivoli and Ischia and Posilippo," said Albano; "I think of my childhood and of the Alps. Over on the shore of the long lake (_Lago Maggiore_) of course the two sugar-loaves may not represent themselves to the best advantage, but, as a compensation for that, here from the sugar-loaf the shore and the lake appear so much the better, and for him who stands on this alp of the lake, it is, after all, made." "All is indifferent to me," said Linda; "for I find myself here entirely well. Remarking upon fine landscapes is also a Northern characteristic, because there one can become acquainted with them only through books. The Italian, who has them, enjoys them as he enjoys health, and is conscious only of the deprivation of them; for this reason he is not even a great landscape-painter."

"One should," said Dian, "celebrate in song the magnificent Italy, even upon the boundary-line, if one could get a _guitarre_ from the Castellain." He went and brought one. He now began to improvisate in Italian. He sang: "Apollo felt his old love for his former pastoral land on the earth and for the lost, veiled Daphne, wake again within him; he came down from heaven to find both. Jupiter had given him Momus as a companion of his journey, who should show him all that was odious, that he might flee back. As a beautiful, smiling youth he went over the islands, through the ruins of the temples, through eternal blossoms; he passed along before divine paintings of an unknown, exalted virgin with a child, and before new tones of music, and moved as over the magic circle of a new and fairer earth. In vain did Momus show him the monks and pirates, and his temples prostrated by the hand of time, and quizzingly make him take columns of thermæ for temple-columns. The god looked up at the high, cold Olympus, and looked down upon this warm land, upon this great, golden sun, these clear, blue nights, these ever-blooming perfumes, these cypresses, these myrtle and laurel woods, and said, 'Here is elysium, not in the subterranean world, not on Olympus.' Then Momus gave him a laurel-twig from Virgil's grave,[109] and said, 'That is thy Daphne.' Now did his great sister Diana grow indignant. She gave Daphne her form and dress, as if she had come over out of the woods of the Pyrenees; but he recognized his beloved, and went back with her into Olympus." As Dian sang this, and let the strains fly with the tones of the strings, there stood high over in heaven the eternal, radiant mountains of ice; from the mountains fluttered streams and shadows into the bright lake, and the evening bestirred itself with kindling and enchanted glow. Then the silent Albano seized the strings, buried his eye in the gleaming of the mountains, and blushing, began: "Linger awhile, O singer, among the lofty spirits who marched, killing, dying, over the battle-field, and who built up the everlasting temples of humanity; linger among the pure diamonds that remained firm and bright under the hammer of destiny; linger in the olden time, in the sea of Rome, which bore upon its bosom one quarter of the world, and undermined the others; but flee before the time which sank its summit in its own crater. Linger, singer, on the heights, and look down into the garden of the world, which is the play of human life. The ruin becomes a rock, and the rock a ruin; on the high promontory the blossom breathes fragrance, below lies the sea with open jaws; over Scylla gleam beautiful houses and streets amidst the lair of frightful rocks. And the god flies over the land and sees the child on the temple-column by the shore, and the temples of the gods full of monks, the marshes full of nameless ruins, and the coasts full of blossoms and grottoes, and the blooming myrtles and grapes, and the fire mountains and the islands, and Ischia."

But the storm-swept _guitarre_ sank from his hands, and his voice died away; his eye lost itself in the depths of heaven and of human life, and he withdrew himself to still his loud heart. In the cooling solitude he observed how far already the sun had flown down, as on Cupid's wings, through a colder heaven; he speedily turned back, and in the evening redness his parting-hour struck.

When he came back, Linda was alone, for Julienne, under the pretext of inspecting the picture cabinet, had drawn away his Dian from the lovers, to whom, besides, only the shortest day of bliss had been to-day allotted, and his beloved looked on him significantly. "Dian, strictly speaking, sang better," said she, "and more epically, but your lyric nature I also hold very dear." She looked at him again and again, then into his eye; then she embraced him impulsively, and not a sound betrayed the sudden kiss. "We will go up on the terrace," said she, softly. They mounted the lovely height of the ten terraces, which fill the sight with laurel and citron trees, and with pyramids and colossal statues, and with the prospect of the distant shore surrounded with villages and alps, and where once Albano had seen his father flee. "Thou pleasest me more and more, Albano," said Linda. "I almost believe thou canst really love. Tell me thy first love; I have told thee my story." "O Linda," said he, "how much thou desirest! But I am true, and tell thee all. Thou wilt love her as she loved thee. See here thy picture, which with her dying hand she made and gave me!"

He handed her the little sketch, and her eye grew moist. Thereupon he began, in a low and solemn tone, the picture of his first love; how he had reverenced and sought her early, when she was yet unseen, and in the first morning beams of life, and how he found her; and how she made him happy, and was not so herself; how gentle she was, and he so wild and harsh; how he demanded of her his own impetuosity of heart; how barbarously he took her renunciation, and how she perished through him. "O, I have dealt hardly, good Linda!" said he. "No," said she, "I weep for you both." "I have great imperfections," said he. "I forgive thee all," said she, "if thou canst only love. But the lovely creature also committed many faults, and against love." She checked herself, then asked, in a low voice, "Albano, is she still in thy heart?" "Yes, Linda," said he. "O thou honest and true man!" cried she, with inspiration, and laid her head upon his breast and prayed, "Holy God, give thy immortals everything, only leave me forever this man's breast, that he may be really loved, inexpressibly, and that I may not sink!" "If thou wilt, dear," she whispered suddenly, and raised herself up, looking upon him with infinite love and resignation, "that I dwell in Lilar, only command it."

This womanly, waiting submission of so free, mighty a spirit, made him speechless. Like an eagle, the flame of love seized him and bore him aloft. He glowed on her blooming countenance, and the bridal torch of the setting sun darted in with great flames between the two. "Linda," he began at length, with trembling, solemn voice, "if we could know that we should ever lose or forsake each other! O Linda," he continued, with difficulty, through his tears and his kisses, "if that were possible, whether through my fault or through cold fate, were it not then better that we at this moment plunged into the lake and died in our love?" The glow of the sun burned in like an aurora, snatching away youths and virgins to the gods, and the twilight of life was kindled into a bright morning redness. "If thou knowest that," said Linda, "then die now with me!" Just then Julienne's distant voice awoke both; at last she came herself with Dian, to take leave. They looked round, awaking, dazzled with the sun and with love, and all was changed. The sun had sunk, the broad lake was overhung with misty shadows, and the world was chilly; only the lofty glaciers blazed still with rosy redness into the blue, like memorial pillars of the flaming covenant-hour.

Before Albano's soul stood even now the form of destiny, so coldly dividing human beings, the veiled rocky form, whose veil is also of stone, which no one raises. He would now fain have burst through it, and directly, without cowardly delay, dashed down into the midst of winter. "O till Hesperus has gone down, pardon me!" whispered Linda. He stayed; but neither had words any longer, only eyes; the reined-in eagles, which had formerly hurried the celestial Venus-car through the heavens, fluttered wildly in the traces. The evening star went down; the half-moon, in mid-heaven, touched the earth with her beams, as with magic wands, and transformed it into a pale, holy world of the heart. "Only let the great star go down now," said she, and looked upon him longingly. He did so. The nightingales skipped musically among the silvery twigs; only the human beings had a voiceless heaven and love.

"Only one little star more!" she begged. He obeyed, touched by the very expression, but she summoned up her resolution, and said, "No, go!" "We will, Dian!" said he. Dian, indulgent to love, led the way down the terraces. Long and ardently lay the brother and sister on each other's hearts, and wished each other a pleasant, undisturbed reunion. Linda gave him only her hand, and said not a word. As the still heaven of night covers its hot sun, so was her flaming heart concealed; and when he went, without looking after him, she clasped his sister to her heaving bosom.

Splendor and night and fragrance bestrewed the Jacob's-ladder of the terraces down which he passed. Lightly flew his boat through the snow of stars and blossoms, which drifted over the waves,--the nightingales of the two islands chimed together,--the seamen sang back to them glad songs,--a favorable wind bore the orange-perfumes after the little vessel,--but Albano, weeping, had his heart and face turned toward the sinking pyramid. His sister alone had looked after him from the eminence; then she, too, was lost to sight,--the nightingales still called faintly after him,--at last all was veiled. He turned himself round toward the pale-glimmering glaciers, as toward the light-houses of his voyage, and of the heaven of this day nothing was now left to him but the pilot, love, as the seaman follows the magnet, when the holy stars have concealed themselves and guide him no more.

119. CYCLE.

Albano and Dian flew joyfully over the German fields to meet so many a precious heart, and nothing was disappointed except their dread of the length of the countries through which they had to travel. Instead of the black lava-sand and the burnt soil behind them, a bright, fresh green now decked the plains and cooled the dazzled eye. The waves of green grain-fields swept and tossed about as merrily as the waves of the blue-green sea. In thicker, longer, higher woods floated new shadows, like lovely little evenings, creeping away from before the light of day. The dark green of the Italian trees was replaced by the bright, laughing green of the German gardens, and new feathered choirs cradled themselves in clouds and in woods, and greeted the heart of man, and sent down to him their light and guileless joy.

From spring to spring went the happy Albano, with his dreams of love; as fast as a southern blossom fell behind him, a northern unfolded itself before him; and his travelling-carriage stopped on the variegated avenue among the blossom-shadows of a long garden.

At length he stood before the house to which the garden conducted him, and before the linden-city; so stood he also in a former year on the heights before it, looking up at the cloud-procession of the future, without being able to divine to what the clouds were shaping themselves, whether into an aurora or into an evening tempest. How many old pangs darted now like shadows of clouds over the old landscape! He was going now, such was his reflection, to meet his father with the news of his fortune; to meet his apostate friend with the stolen beloved; to meet with old and new love his returning Schoppe, whose heart and fate were to him, now, at once so dark and so weighty; and to meet the singular time and hour, when the subterranean waters, whose rush and roar he had hitherto so often experienced, should lie at once uncovered, and with all their windings and springs laid open to the light of day; and to meet the sacred spot where he could take boldly to his heart the beloved, who now, on the German road and in the neighborhood of former trials, seemed to him still greater and more unattainable than on Epomeo, in the neighborhood of all that is sublime in heaven and on earth, and when he might enfold her in his arms forever without asking again, "Wilt thou love me?" Then he went back in thought to an image which Vesuvius[110] had furnished him, and said to Dian: "Behind man there works and travels onward a slow, fiery stream, which consumes and crushes if it overtakes him; but let man only stride boldly forward, and often look backward, and he comes off unscathed. My beloved teacher, so will I now do in my new and momentous relations; do thou, however, make me turn round toward the lava, if in pleasant scenes I should sometimes forget it!"

"Speak better and more propitious words," said Dian. "Hail to us; the gods are already favorable! Yonder comes your father up the palace hill, and looks more gay and happy than I ever before happened to find him!"

THIRTY-FIRST JUBILEE.

Pestitz.--Schoppe.--Dread of Marriage.--Arcadia.--
Idoine.--Entanglement.

120. CYCLE.

Gaspard received his son with the usual stately coldness of the first hour, as letters begin more coldly than they end. Not until this morning-frost had melted away and it grew warmer around him, did Albano disclose to him, without fear or pusillanimous blushing, and with matured manliness, the bond which he had forever concluded with Linda and with himself, and begged him for the third yes. "So after all," replied the Knight, "the old enchanter has carried it through at last; of course under the reinforcement of a young enchantress. That I shall never disturb thee in anything which thou seizest upon with whole soul and forever, that thou knowest already from a similar case in the last year." Albano grew red at the bitter mention of his first love, but had gained strength within a half-year to preserve a manly silence, in cases where he once spoke out like a youth. Gaspard, more glad and warm than usual towards him to-day, nevertheless went on, when he perceived his sensitiveness: "I pronounce it good! As the seal-engraver in the beginning stamps the arms in wax, and then, and not till then, etches them on the precious stone, so does man essay to impress his upon more than one heart, until he at last gets the firmest. It must be owned thou hast not made the worst choice in my ward, and I gladly give my word of assent to it."

Albano pressed the hand which drew the sweet knot of love still tighter, and said, in the entrancement of gratitude: "I found my sister, too, the Princess. I put no question to her, however, as lately, but count upon time." "Mocker!" said Gaspard, and assumed, seemingly by way of cooling him off, the cruel appearance of thinking his pure, noble son had been disposed to retort upon him the bantering allusion to having many love-affairs. "Only be silent about all in thy innermost heart, as I myself have hitherto been, and conceal thy knowledge from the court. Give me thy word of honor."

Albano said he had already given it to Julienne also. He was, however, driven back, by Gaspard's whole deportment, upon conclusions which placed moral garlands neither upon his father nor upon Julienne's mother.

Gaspard added, furthermore, that it was a misfortune for a man to be entangled with fantastic women,--as Albano already knew his mother to have been,--and, in fact, with three at once, and advised him to march on boldly, as hitherto, through all riddles, and leave them to solve themselves. Thereupon he proposed to him, as a test of the third female fancy-monger, the question whether he already knew that the Countess, notwithstanding his guardianship, had still her living father, who would appear for the first time on her wedding-day. He said, "Yes." Gaspard then continued: This reason, of itself,--in order that Linda might find her father, and all of them the peace of clearness at last,--decided him for an early, secret marriage of the two through the honorable Spener.

Albano, really terrified at the prospect of the near and speedy transformation of blissful hours into blissful years, and no more able to think of his Titaness as wife than to think of her as child, answered, modestly and with disinterested reference to Linda's dread of wedlock, that, as to the time of sealing his happiness, no one must or could decide but Linda herself.

Gaspard was well content. "I only insist upon your adjourning the matter awhile," he subjoined. "My friend the Prince is again near his end; the beneficial effect which a spiritual apparition had wrought upon him has gradually subsided, and he fears daily the return of the phantom, which has promised to foretell him his last hours. At such a time your festival does not serve my purpose. To speak in confidence, the poor patient had himself an eye to the fair bride. It is, after all, but fair to spare him the highest certainty of his loss. On his account I also postpone my departure."

As if a man should enter into the new-created paradise, and all birds at once--nightingales and eagles and owls and birds-of-paradise and vultures and larks--should beset him, so confusedly did Albano feel himself excited by these mutually crossing prospects, and he perceived that there could be no dependence nor defence here, except in his own heart and Linda's.

Gaspard seemed to be impatient to see the Countess again, whom he called his only friend. "Unfortunately, I did not believe my brother in Rome," he added, "when he insisted on having met both ladies in Naples. _Apropos_, that brother passed through here some time ago, on his way to Spain; in Rome he asserted he was travelling to Greece. Thou seest with what poetic pleasure and geniality he carries on pure lying."

Gaspard parted from him very warmly, with the words, "Albano, I am very well satisfied with thee; I should be infinitely so if the purity of the youth had passed over into the man; I have not yet found it so." Albano was about to affirm and swear with emotion. "That is why," he continued, waving away the oath with a light motion of the hand, "thou foundest me so glad about thy good fortune, for the Princess's friend had already announced to me thy love in the morning. Take heed to thyself before her, for she hates thee without bounds."

With a hard and horrible aspect, like a new and extraordinary beast of prey behind the grating, does a real though unarmed hatred present itself for the first time before a good heart. Albano demanded no confirmation or explanation of this sad intelligence, for the love and error of the Princess, her acquaintance with his former coldness toward Linda, her silent bitterness toward Linda herself, were quite flames enough for her to cook the strongest poison by.

He took up his residence again, at the request of his father, at the house of Doctor Sphex, situated, unmeaningly to him, down in the valley; and Gaspard resumed his abode in the palace, near his sick friend. The Knight speedily presented him to the court, which soon observed and remarked the brown of travel, the sharper lightning of the eye, and the whole latest development of his great form. The Princess received him with the lightest, finest coldness, a sort of _aqua toffana_, which seems only pure, tasteless water. The Prince sat upright in his sick-bed, with peevish face, before drawings of Herculaneum, and was letting himself be informed on the subject by Bouverot. As a face upon which, in the late, gray years of life, fair joyousness can still picture itself, announces a fair life and fair heart, so the saint never wears a more heavenly smile than on his sick-bed, nor the reprobate a more hard and painful one. Albano turned his eye away from the sickly, withered _brother of his sister_.

Languishing, he looked back toward the past Hesperia, and forward to the gate of paradise which was finally to open, and show Linda and his sister in Eden. "It will certainly meet your approval," Gaspard had said, "that, under the pretext of Luigi's sickness, I have had them both quartered in the old palace at Lilar, where thou canst see them more unobserved." He met the Minister Froulay, and the Lector came to meet him; with both came a dark, manifold shadowy retinue of hard, old recollections. He had not yet seen Captain Roquairol, who was now to him the evening cloud of a sunken spring day.

He carried as speedily as he could his dumb heart--which was an Æolian-harp in a dead calm--to his childhood's Blumenbühl, to greet the parental beings, and to read the papers of his soul's nearest neighbor, Schoppe, for whose promised return he now longed more than ever.

121. CYCLE.

It was a fresh, blue, summer day when Albano went to his old Blumenbühl, without knowing that he did so precisely on the St. James's day, or paternal birthday, which he had once, in childhood, spent in such singular preludes of his life. In the old gardens and on the old heights round about, even over to Lilar's wood, lay everywhere, even now, the young, glistening dew of childhood, not yet dried up by the western sun; many tear-drops, too, stood among the drops of dew on the flowers; but his fresh, healing spirit was on its guard against effeminately floating away into soft transport, that Lethe of the present. In the village he was struck with the sight of a horse whom they were shoeing, for, by the caparison and all, he recognized it as Roquairol's festive steed. He introduced a festival into a festival, when he entered the noisy paternal apartment, full of birthday electors, blooming, fully developed, erect, a confirmed man, with determined look and gait. Rabette screamed out; Roquairol cried, "Aha!" and the old teacher Wehmeier, "God and my master!" and his childhood's angels, the parents, embraced him just as ever, and out of Albina's blue eyes ran the bright drops.

But a change had come over the youth of the others, compared with his. Rabette's countenance, the once full cheeks and blooming lips, had fallen in, and were overlaid and overgrown with the white veil, and she had two gray tears instead of eyes ; yet she smiled a great deal. Like his own Gorgon-head, Roquairol's face appeared pale and hard, as if chiselled on his gravestone; only naked piers stood in the water,--the light arches of the beautiful bridge were gone. Albina and Rabette looked up with a steady gaze at Albano's blooming figure; he seemed to be an Italian growth, a Neapolitan nerved by daily bathing in the gulf. Roquairol had his part immediately at command more easily than Albano his truth; he demeaned himself with the highest courteousness toward one who had broken in two for him the magic wand of life and thrown it away as a pair of beggar's sticks,--kissed him on the cheek, kept up the lightest, often a French tone of conversation, requested the latest intelligence about Italy, and retailed in turn the most edifying news from the country, as well, he said, as he could muster it up for a man with a Hesperian standard of measurement. He related, also, "that the Knight's brother had been there,--a man full of talent, especially the mimetic and that sort, and of the most singularly intense fancy with the highest coldness of character, though perhaps not always sufficiently true. For my tragedy," added he, "he would be worth his weight in gold. Dear brother, hold yourself forthwith as invited on the occasion. The play is called The Tragedian; I give it soon. Rabette is acquainted with it." She nodded. Albano glowed, but was silent. Among all parts, the Captain succeeded most perfectly in that of a world's-man; the show of coldness is more easy and true, also, than the show of warmth. Albano kept a proud distance. Roquairol could not gain in any respect by being opposite to the afflicted, faded Rabette, not even by the intercession of that form of his, full of the ruins of life. Albano found there something forever confused, and the wax wings crushed down into a lump; and it was as close and confining to him as to one who from the bright world creeps down at once into a low, damp cavern of a cellar.

The Captain rose, reminded him once more of his invitation to the "Tragedian," and springing on his festive horse rode away.

Behind his back every one was silent about him, as if embarrassed. The women, a little shy of Albano's brilliant presence, found some difficulty in venturing forth upon the subject of the old familiar past, while the foster-father, Wehrfritz, who having steadily grown on in his opinions and manners, and being still encased in the old cry of dogs and canary-birds, knew nothing at all about time, expressed his hearty thanks to his foster-son for the obliging recollection and choice of his birthday festival, which Albano necessarily and vainly declined, continued in his old thouing and patronizing, wrought himself into ecstasies on the subject of the French and their future victories, and bestowed more premiums of praise now on the older foster-son than he ever had on the younger, in order thereby, as he hoped, to give him as great pleasure as ever. The Magister backed the praise from a distance, although he could not let slip the opportunity, so soon as his pupil had pronounced Napel, Baia, Cuma, to pronounce Neapel, Baiæ, Cumæ. Albano was pure, true, human, frank, and hearty toward all; there was no vanity in his self-forgetting pride.

Rabette found at last a lifting-screw to wind her polished and yet familiar brother out of the receiving-room up into her or his former apartment, so as to be alone on his breast. As they stepped in, she immediately began, as she said, "Dost thou still know the chamber, Albano?" to weep infinitely, with the tears which had been so long gathering; and Albano showed her in his own, his long-cherished sympathy, but tore open thereby all the wounds of the past. She herself seized upon the remedy, namely, the telling of her story,--however earnestly he persisted that he knew, and, indeed, could well guess all,--and drying her eyes, informed him how all stood,--and that Charles was a good deal with his mother in Arcadia; that the Minister still acted the old tyrant toward his only child, and did not dole out to him a farthing more than ever, although he was always heaping up greater and greater debts, especially since there was no longer any Liana silently to wipe them away; that he borrowed everywhere, only, however, he never would accept anything from her; that he still continued to desire and know nothing but the Countess, and that God knew what all this would come to. Anticipating all inquiry, she added: "He knows the whole already, all thy intercourse with that same person. He behaves quietly and pleasantly about it, but I know him as well as I want to. Ah!" she sighed, in the fulness of anguish, and added immediately, with the same voice: "Thou lookest at me; is it not true thou findest me very haggard to what I once was?" "Yes, indeed, poor girl!" "I drank much vinegar on his account, because Charles loves slender figures; and grief has much to do with it too," said she.

Albano would have consoled her with the nearer possibility of a union of Charles with her, since the impossibility of every other union had been decided, and readily tendered his services for any prefatory word or coercive measure. "Before God and us, he is thy husband," said he. "That he never could have been," replied she, blushing, "for he never could have been honest; and did I not write thee that I am now too proud for it, too?" "Then cast him off forever!" said he. "Ah!" said she, fearfully, "do I know, then, that he meditates no harm against himself? Then I should reproach myself with it eternally." Involuntarily he could not but compare with this loving, holy fear, the hardness of the Princess, who could relate so gladly and proudly how many a love-smitten life had fallen a victim to her prudish heart and coquettish face. "What wilt thou do now?" he asked. "I weep," said she. "Ah, Albano, that is enough, indeed, that thou hast given me hearing and counsel; I am cheerful again. But be once more his friend."

He was silent, a little angry at the naughtiness of women, which, under pretence of seeking advice, only desires a hearing. "What is that?" he asked, showing her a leaf. "That is perfectly my hand, and I never wrote it!" She looked at it, and said Charles was often trying experiments with her in this way at handwriting. He wondered, and said: "Nothing, but imitating and counterfeiting all the time! But how canst thou think of my forgiving him?" Some descriptions of travels on her table, formerly so poor in books, met his eye. "I wanted to know, of course," said she, "how you might probably be faring in this, that, and the other place, and that is why I read the long stuff." "Thou art still my sister!" said he, and kissed her heartily. She still asked him much and urgently about his new connection; but chary of words with his full heart, he hastened down stairs.

The first word down below to the Provincial Director was a request for the "deposed letter of Schoppe's." Wehrfritz brought the broad letter, which had been laid up in the little iron box of bonds, and delivered it he hoped, he said, in good order. Hardly could Albano keep back his tears, when he held the crinkled but precious traces of the beloved hand, which certainly never in its life had swerved or stained itself, in his own. As he did not break the seal, they all began good-naturedly to portray to him his friend Schoppe, according to the presumptions and views which man so boldly and complacently indulges upon every higher spirit, with all his actions or colors, as if actions or colors were strokes and outlines. Wehrfritz and Wehmeier deplored that he was growing mad, if not already so. The Magister held back with his main-proof, till the Provincial Director should have contributed the lesser auxiliary ones.