Part 29

Suddenly Julienne stood still, chatting playfully with her, in order to let the Count come up, and to inquire after letters from Don Gaspard, and after tidings of the Countess Romeiro. He communicated, with glowing countenance, the contents of to-day's letter. In Julienne's physiognomy there was a smile almost of raillery. To the intelligence of Linda's intended journey she replied: "That is just herself; she will fain learn everything,--travel over everything. I wager she climbs up _on_ Mont Blanc and _into_ Vesuvius. Liana and I call her, for this reason, the Titaness." How graciously did Liana listen, with her eyes wholly on her female friend! "You are not acquainted with her?" she inquired of the tortured one. He answered, emphatically, in the negative. Roquairol came up; "_Passéz, Monsieur_," said she, making room, and giving him a sign to move on. Liana looked very earnestly after. "_La voici!_" said Julienne, letting the cover of a likeness spring up, by a pressure, on a ring of her little hand. Good youth! it was exactly the form which arose, that magic night, out of Lago Maggiore, sent to thee by the spirits! "She is hit there, exactly," said she to the agitated man. "Very," said he, confusedly. She did not investigate this contradictory[160] "very"; but Liana looked at him; "very--beautifully and boldly!" he continued; "but I do not love boldness in women." "O, one can readily believe that of men!" replied Julienne; "no hostile power loves it in the other party."

They passed along now through the chestnut avenue by the holy spot where Albano had seen, for the first time, the bride of his hopes shining and suffering behind the water-jets. O it was here that he would gladly, with that soul of his painfully excited by the mutual reaction of wonderful circumstances, have knelt down before the still angel so near him! The tender Julienne perceived that she had to spare an agitated heart; after a tolerably loud silence, she said, in a serious tone: "A lovely evening,--we'll go to the water-house. There is where Liana was cured, Count! The fountains must leap, too." "O the fountains!" said Albano, and looked with indescribable emotion upon Liana. She thought, however, he meant those in the flute-dell. Helena cried out behind for them to wait, and came tripping along after with two little hands full of dewy auriculas, which she had plucked, and gave them all to Liana, expecting from her, as collatress of benefices, the flower-distribution. "The little one, too, still thinks of the beautiful Sunday at Lilar," said Liana. She gave the Princess one or two, and Helena nodded; and when Liana looked at her, she nodded again, as a sign the Count should have something too: "More yet!" she cried, when he had got some; and the more Liana gave, the more did the child cry, "More,"--as children are wont to do, in the hyperboles of their tendency to the infinite.

They went over a green bridge, and came into a neat room. Instead of the piano-forte formerly there, stood a glass chapel of the goddess of music, a harmonica. The Captain screwed in behind a tapestry-door, and immediately all the confined spring-waters shot up outside with silvery wings toward heaven. O how the sprinkled world burned as they stepped out on the top!

Why wast thou, my Albano, just at this hour not entirely happy? Why, then, do pains pierce through all our unions,--and why does the heart, like its veins, bleed most richly when it is heated? Above them lay the still, wounded heavens in the bandage of a long, white mass of cloud; the evening sun stood as yet behind the palace, but on both sides of it his purple mantle of clouds floated in broad folds away across the sky; and if one turned round toward the east to the mountains of Blumenbühl, green living flames streamed upward, and, like golden birds, the _ignes fatui_ danced through the moist twigs and on the eastern windows, but the fountains still threw their white silver into the gold.

Then the sun swam forth, with red hot breast, drawing golden circles in the clouds, and the arching water-shoots burned bright. Julienne bent upon Albano--near whom she had constantly remained, as if by way of atonement--a hearty look, as if he were her brother, and Charles said to Liana, "Sister, thy evening song!" "With all my heart," said she; for she was right glad of the opportunity to withdraw herself, with the melancholy seriousness of her enjoyment, and down below in the solitary room to utter aloud, on the harmonica-bells, all that which rapture and the eyes bury in silence.

She went down; the melodious requiem of the day went up,--the zephyr of sound, the harmonica, flew, waving, over the garden-blossoms,--and the tones cradled themselves on the thin lilies of the up-growing water, and the silver lilies burst aloft for pleasure, and from the brightness of the sun, into flamy blossoms, and over yonder reposed mother sun in a blue pasture, and looked greatly and tenderly upon her human children. Canst thou, then, hold thy heart, Albano, so that it shall remain concealed with its joys and sorrows, when thou hearest the peaceful virgin walking in the moonlight of tones? O when the tone which trickles down in the ether announces to her the early wasting away of her life, and when the soft, long-drawn melodies flow away from her like the rose-oil of many crushed days; dost thou not think of that, Albano? How the human creature plays! The little Helena flings up auriculas at the flashing water-veins, in order that she may dash one of them with the spray of the intercepted jet, and the youth Zesara bends far over the balustrade, and lets the stream of water leap off from his sloping hand upon his hot face and eye, in order to cool and conceal himself. The fiery veil was snatched from him by his sister; Rabette was one of those persons whom this musical tremor gnaws upon even physically, just as, on the other hand, the Captain was little affected by the harmonica, and indeed was always least moved when others were most so; there were no pains with which the innocent girl was less familiar than with sweet ones; the bitter-sweet melancholy into which she sank away in the idle solitude of Sundays, she and others had scolded at as mere sullenness. At this moment she felt all at once, with a blush, her stout heart seized, whirled round, and scalded through as by hot whirlpools. Besides it had to-day already been swayed to and fro by the meeting with her brother again, the leaving of her mother, and her confused bashfulness before strangers, and even by the sight of the sunny-red mountain of Blumenbühl. In vain did the fresh brown eyes and the overripe full lip battle against the uprending pain; the hot springs tore their way through, and the blooming face with the strong chin grew red and full of tears. Painfully ashamed, and dreading to be taken for a child, especially as all her companions' emotions had remained invisible, she pressed her handkerchief over her burning face, and said to her brother, "I must go away, I am not well, I shall choke,"--and ran down to the gentle Liana.

Yes, thou needest only carry thither thy shy pangs! Liana turned, and saw her hastily and violently drying her eyes. Ah, hers too were indeed full. When Rabette saw it, she said, courageously, "I absolutely cannot hear it,--I must scream,--I am really ashamed of myself." "O thou dear heart," cried Liana, joyfully falling upon her neck, "be not ashamed, and look into my eye! Sister, come to me, as often as thou art troubled; I will gladly weep with thy soul, and dry thy eye even sooner than my own." There was an overmastering enchantment in these tones,--in these looks of love, because Liana fancied she was mourning over some eclipsed star or other of her life. And never did trembling gratitude embrace more freshly and youthfully a venerated heart than did Rabette Liana.

And now came Albano. Awakened by the dying away of the cradle-song, he had hurried after her, leaving all the cold and other drops unwiped from his fiery cheeks. "What ails thee, sister?" he asked, hastily. Liana, still lingering in the embrace and the inspiration, answered quickly, "You have a good sister; I will love her as her brother does." The sweet words of the so deeply affected souls and the fiery storm of his being carried him away, and he clasped the embracing ones and pressed the sisterly hearts to each other and kissed his sister; when, at the sight of Liana's confused bending aside of her head, he was terrified and flamed up crimson.

He must needs fly. With these wild agitations he could not stay in the presence of Liana, and before the cold, mirroring glances of the company. But the night was to be as wonderful as the day; he hastened with live looks, that appeared like angry ones, out of the city to the Titaness, Nature, who at once calms and exalts us. He went along by exposed mill-wheels, about which the stream wound itself in foam. The evening clouds stretched themselves out like giants at rest, and basked in the ruddy dawn of America, and the storm swept among them, and the fiery Briareuses started up; night built the triumphal-arch of the milky-way, and the giants marched gloomily under. And in every element Nature, like a storm-bird, beat her rustling wings.

Albano lay, without knowing it, on the woodland bridge of Lilar, under which the wind-streams went roaring through. He glowed like the clouds with the lingering tinges of _his_ sun; his inner wings were, like those of the ostrich, full of spines, and wounded while they lifted him; the romantic spiritual day, the letter of his father, Liana's tearful eyes, his boldness, and then his bliss and remorse about it, and now the sublime night-world on all sides round about him, passed to and fro within him and shook his young heart; he touched with his fiery cheek the moistened tree-tops, and did not cool himself, and he was near to that sounding, flying heart, the nightingale, and yet hardly heard her. Like a sun, his heart goes through his pale thoughts, and quenches on its path one constellation after another. On the earth and in the heavens, in the past and in the future, stood before Albano only one form; "Liana," said his heart, "Liana," said all nature.

He went down the bridge and up the western triumphal-arch, and the glimmering Lilar lay before him in repose. Lo! there he saw the old "pious father" on the balustrade of the arch, fast asleep. But how different was the revered form from the picture of it which he had shaped to himself according to that of the deceased Prince. The white locks, flowing richly down under the Quaker hat, the femininely and poetically rounded brow, the arched nose and the youthful lip, which even in late life had not yet withered, and the childlikeness of the soft face, announced a heart which, in the evening-twilight of age, takes its rest and looks toward the stars. How lonely is the holy sleep! The Death-angel has conducted man out of the light world into the dark hermitage built over it; his friends stand without near the cell; within, the hermit talks with himself, and his darkness grows brighter and brighter, and jewels and pastures and whole spring-days gleam out at last,--and all is clear and broad! Albano stood before the sleep with an earnest soul, which contemplates life and its riddles;--not only the incoming and the outgoing of life are hidden with a manifold veil, but even the short path itself; as around Egyptian temples, so around the greatest of all temples sphinxes lie, and, reversing the case as it was with the sphinx, he only solves the riddle who dies.

The old man spoke, behind the speech-grating of sleep, with dead ones who had journeyed with him over the morning meadows of youth, and addressed with heavy lip the dead Prince and his spouse. How sublimely did the curtain of the venerable countenance, pictured over with a long life, hang down before the pastoral world of youth dancing behind it, and how touchingly did the gray form roam round with its youthful crown in the cold evening dew of life, taking it for morning-dew, and looking toward the east, and toward the sun! The youth ventured only to touch lovingly a lock of the old man; he meant to leave him, in order not to alarm him with a strange form, before the rising moon should have touched his eyelids and awakened him. Only he would first crown the teacher of his loved one with the twigs of a neighboring laurel. When he came back from it, the moon had already penetrated with her radiance through the great eyelids, and the old man opened them before the exalted youth, who, with the glowing rosy moon of his countenance, glorified by the moon overhead, stood before him like a genius with the crown. "Justus!" cried the old man, "is it thou?" He took him for the old Prince, who, with just such blooming cheeks and open eyes, had passed before him in the under-world of dreams.

But he soon came back out of the dreamy Elysium into the botanical, and knew even Albano's name. The Count, with open mien, grasped his hands, and said to him how long and profoundly he had respected him. Spener answered in few and quiet words, as old men do who have seen everything on the earth so often. The glory of the moonlight flowed down now on the tall form, and the quietly open eye was illumined,--an eye which not so much penetrates as lets everything penetrate it. The almost cold stillness of the features, the youthful gait of the tall form, which bore its years upright as a crown upon the head, not as a burden upon the back, more as flowers than as fruit, the singular mixture of former manly ardor and of womanly tenderness,--all this called up before Albano the image of a prophet of the Eastern land. That broad stream which came roaring down through the alps of youth, glides now calmly and smoothly through its pastures; but throw rocks before it, and again it starts up roaring.

The old man looked upon the youthful youth, the oftener the more warmly. In our days youth is, in young men, a bodily and spiritual beauty at once. He invited him to accompany him this beautiful night to his quiet cottage, which stands overhead there near the church-spire, that looks down from above into flute-dell. On the singular, mazy paths which they now took, Lilar was transformed to Albano's eyes into a new world; like flying silver clouds of night, the glimmering beauties were continually shifting and arranging themselves together into new groups, and occasionally the two companions penetrated through exotic shrubbery with lively-colored blossoms and wondrous odors. The pious father asked him with interest about his former and present life.

They came to the opening of a dark passage into the earth. Spener, in a friendly manner, took Albano's right hand, and said this way led _up_ to his mountain-abode. But soon it seemed to go downward. The stream of the vale, the Rosana, sounded even in here, but only single drops of moonlight trickled through scattered mountain openings overspun with twigs. The excavation extended farther downward; still more remotely murmured the water in the vale. And yet a nightingale sang a lay that grew nearer and nearer. Albano was composed and silent. Everywhere they went along before narrow gates of splendor which only a star of heaven seemed to fling in. They descended now to a distant, illuminated magic bower of bright red and poisonous dark flowers, arched over at once with little peaked leaves and great broad foliage; and a confusing white light, partly sprinkled about by the living rays that gushed in, and partly flying off from the lilies only as white dust, drew the eye into an intoxicating whirl. Zesara entered with a dazzled eye, and as he looked to the right, in the direction of the fire that rained in, he found Spener's eye sharply fixed upon something to the left; he looked thither, and saw an old man, entirely like the deceased Prince, dart by and stalk into a side cavern; his hand quivered with affright, so did Spener's,--the latter pressed hastily on downward; and at last there glistened a blue, starry opening: they stepped out....

Heavens! a new starry arch; a pale sun moves through the stars, and they swim, as in play, after him,--below reposes an enraptured earth full of glitter and flowers; its mountains run gleaming away up toward the arch of heaven, and bend over toward Sirius; and through the unknown land delights glide, like dreams over which man weeps for joy.

"What is that? Am I on or under the earth?" said Albano, astounded; and his wandering eye fled for refuge to the face of a living man,--"I saw a dead man." Much more affectionately than before, the old man answered, "This is Lilar; behind us is my little house!" He explained the mechanical illusion[161] of the descent. "Here, now, have I stood so many thousand times, and feasted myself with so fervent a heart on the works of God. How looked the form, my son?" "Like the dead Prince," said Alban. In a startled, but almost commanding tone, Spener said, with a low voice, "Be silent, like me, until his time,--it was not he. Thy salvation and the salvation of many hangs thereon. Go no more to-day through the passage."

Albano, half-angered by all the experience of this singular day, said, "Well, then, I go back through Tartarus. But what means the ghostly creation that everywhere pursues me?" "Thou hast," said the old man, lovingly and refreshingly, laying a finger on the youth's brow, "nothing but invisible friends about thee,--and cast thyself everywhere upon God. There are a great many Christians who say, God is near or far off, that his wisdom and his goodness appear quite specially in one age or another,--truly that is idle deception; is he not the unchangeable, eternal Love, and does he not love and bless us at one hour just as much as at another?" As we ought, properly, to call the eclipse of the sun an eclipse of the earth, so it is man who is obscured, never the Infinite; but we are like the people who look at the obscuration of the sun in the water, and then, when the water trembles, cry out, "See how the glorious sun struggles!"

Albano stepped into the solitude of the old man's neatly ordered dwelling, only with heaviness, because, in the hot ashes of his volcano, every feeling put forth and throve the more luxuriantly. Spener pointed over from his mountain-ridge to the little so-called "Thunderhouse,"[162] and advised him to occupy it this summer. Albano took his leave at length, but his agitated heart was a sea, in which the morning sun is glowingly still half reflected, and into which, at evening, a lead-colored storm dips, and which swells glistening under the storm. He looked up from below at the old man, who was looking after him; but he would hardly have wondered to-day if _he_ had either sunk or ascended. With indignant and spirited resolutions, to stake and sacrifice his life for his love, at which cold hands were grasping, he strode without any fear through Tartarus, which, by the magnifying mirror of night, was distorted into a black giant armament: thus is the spirit-world only a region of our inner world, and _I_ fear only _myself_. When he stood before the altar of the heart in the dumb night, where nothing was audible but the thoughts, then did the bold spirit advise him repeatedly to call upon the dead old man, and swear aloud by his heart, full of dust; but when he looked up to the fair heavens, his heart was consecrated, and only prayed, "O good God, give me Liana!"

It grew dark; the clouds, which he had taken for the shining mountains of a new earth, stretching away into the heavens, had reached the moon, and overshadowed it with darkness.

FOOTNOTES:

[138] _Tempestiarii_, or Storm-makers, was a name given, in the Middle Ages, to the master-wizards who could conjure up foul weather. Weather-prayers were used in the churches against them, and other wizard-masters called in to counteract the former.

[139] The Polish dancer always carries a rod under the fur-dress, wherewith his partner is excused by a blow or two, when she makes a misstep.--_Upper Siles. Monthly Mag._, July, 1788.

[140] Dread of spirits.

[141] The German for this is _sauer-stoff_ (sour-stuff).--TR.

[142] A noted review in Richter's day, published at Erlangen near Nuremberg.--TR.

[143] Thus did the turnkeys name their prisoners.

[144] Alexand. ab Al., v. 4.

[145] To distinguish himself from the eagle of the Emperor, who holds something in both claws.

[146] Bouverot was a Catholic.

[147] He meant one with the poor Lector.

[148] Literally, "twilight-bird."--TR.

[149] To _get the basket_ means a refusal.--TR.

[150] I do not mean (as perhaps may appear from the _selling_) Pitt the Minister, but Pitt the Diamond, which the father of the present Pitt traded away to the Duke Regent of France, and for whose splinters he got twelve thousand ducats into the bargain.

[151] I sell only my landscapes, and throw in the figures.

[152] _Stand_, in German, has the double meaning of an _estate_ and a _stand_.--TR.

[153] Plaut. Bacch., Act 4, Scen. 7, 4, 16, 17.

[154] Seventh Part of the new Collection of Travels.

[155] I speak more particularly of the daughters, because they are the most frequent and greatest victims; the sons are bloodless mass-offerings.

[156] Pliny, Nat. Hist., VIII. 16.

[157] And this is quite probable. Dr. Edward Hill reckoned that in England eight thousand die annually of unhappy love,--of broken hearts, as the Englishwomen touchingly express it. Beddoes shows that vegetable food--and of this such victims are particularly fond--fosters consumption, and that females incline to this. Besides, the times of longing, which of itself, even without disappointment, as homesickness shows, is a poisonous revolving leaden ball, occur in youth, when the seed of pectoral maladies most easily springs up. O many married ones fall, under misconstructions, victims to the death-angel, into whose hand they had, previously to marriage, put the sword they themselves had sharpened!

[158] Forster's Views, Vol. I.

[159] A line (French) is one twelfth of an inch.--TR.

[160] Because he had just said he did not know her.--TR.

[161] Weigel. in Jena, invented the inverted bridge (_pons heteroclitus_), a stairway on which a person seems to descend, by going up.--_Bush's Handbook of Inventions_, Vol. VII.

[162] It had the name from its height and its being so often struck with lightning.

THIRTEENTH JUBILEE.

ROQUAIROL'S LOVE.--PHILIPPIC AGAINST LOVERS.--THE PICTURES.--ALBANO ALBANI.--THE HARMONIC TÊTE-À-TÊTE.--THE RIDE TO BLUMENBÜHL.

60. CYCLE.