Part 10

"But why," inquired Schoppe of the bald one, when he came back, "do you cut so many faces, which do not present you exactly in the most favorable light?" "They come," said he, "from poison which was given me ten years ago. Have you observed how _aqua toffana_, taken in quantities, distorts? In Naples, I forced it down the throat of a beautiful girl of sixteen, who had for some years dealt in it, and caused her to die before my eyes. I fancy there is nothing more godless than poison-mixing." "Abominable!" cried Albano, seized with the deepest repugnance for the man; as to Schoppe, _his_ fury had actually relieved him.

At this moment a poor, meagre joiner's wife came in for liquor, who kept her eyes cast down and half closed with shame and weakness; she ventured not to look up, because the whole town knew that she was forcibly driven out of her bed at night into the street to see a funeral procession, which some days after was really to move through it, already in prelude and prefiguration pass before her. Hardly had the bald one beheld her, when he covered his face. "There is only a single innocent one among us," said he, all pale and uneasy; "this youth here," pointing to Albano. Just then a carriage with six horses thundered by overhead. Schoppe jumped up, twice in succession put the question to Albano, who was lost in thought: "Wilt thou go with me?" turned angrily away at the word No, stepped close up to the bald one, and said furiously: "Dog!" and turning on his heel went out. On the pale, bloodless skin of the Baldhead no expression stirred, only his hand twitched a little, as if there were near it a stiletto to lay hold of, but he sent after him that look at which the maiden in Naples died.

Albano was enraged at the look, and said: "Sir, this man is a thoroughly honest, true, vigorous nature; but you have exasperated him even against himself, and must acquit him of blame." With soft, flattering voice he replied: "My acquaintance with him dates not from to-day, and he knows me, too." Albano asked whether, when he spoke of the great Bernhard some time since, he meant the Swiss mountain of that name. "Certainly!" replied he. "I travel thither yearly to spend a night with my sister." "So far as I know, there are only monks there," said Albano. "She stands among the frozen ones in the cloister-chapel,"[55] he replied. "I stay all night before her, and look upon her, and sing Horæ."

Albano, while listening, felt himself singularly changed, which he could ascribe only to the punch,--it was less intoxication than glow; a flying blaze roared over his inner world, and the red lustre hovered about on its farthest borders; now did it seem to him as if he stood entirely on the same ground with the Baldhead, and could wrestle with this evil genius. "I had a sister, too," said Albano; "can one call up the dead?" "No, but the dying," said the Baldhead. "Ugh!" said Albano, shuddering. "Whom would you see?" asked the Baldhead. "A living sister, whom I never have seen yet," said Albano, in a glow. "It requires," said the Baldhead, "a little sleep, and your knowing also where your sister was on her last birthday." Luckily Julienne, whom he took for his sister, had, on _hers_, been at the Palace in Lilar. He told him so. "Then come with me!" said the Baldhead.

At this moment Schoppe's servant brought Albano a sword-cane and the following note:--

"Brother, brother, trust him not. Here is a weapon, for thou art quite too foolhardy. Run him right through, if he does so much as make faces. All sorts of unknown people have this evening asked after thee and thy whereabouts. It is to me as if no life at all were safe to me from the beast,--thine or hers. Be on thy guard, and come! Schoppe.

"Run him through, however, I pray thee."

"Are you afraid, perhaps?" asked the Baldhead. "That will appear," said Albano, angrily, and, taking the sword-cane, went with him. As the two passed through the little, dark anteroom of the cellar, Albano saw in a mirror his own head set in a fiery ring. They passed out of the city into the open country. The bald one went ahead. The sky was bright with stars. It seemed to the Count as if he heard the subterranean waters and fires of the globe and the creation. Hardly did he recognize out there the way to Blumenbühl. Suddenly the bald one ran into a field on the left. The lean joiner's wife stood on the Blumenbühl road quite stiff, and saw abstractedly a corpse move along invisible, and heard the far-off bell, which is borne by the mute Death. So it seemed.

Then did Albano follow the Baldhead more daringly: the fear of spirits kills the fear of man. Both moved along in silence beside each other. In the depth of the distance, it seemed as if a man floated, without walking or stirring, slowly and steadily onward through the air. The white skin on the bald one twitched incessantly, and one invisible fist after another thrust itself forth from the clay of his face, as in the act of striking. Once there flitted over it the look of the Father of Death.[56]

Suddenly Albano heard around him the smothered murmur and confused talk of a throng. There was nothing on either side. "Do you hear nothing?" he asked. "All is still," said the Baldhead. But the swarm kept on murmuring and whispering eagerly and hotly, as if it could not be ready and agreed. The bold youth shuddered. The gates of the shadowy kingdom stood far open into the earth; dreams and shadows swarmed in and out, and flew near to bright life.

The two stepped up to the thicket before Lilar. There came a boy out of the wood with an enormously big head, helping himself along on two crutches, and holding a rose, which he offered, with a nod, to the youth. Albano took it, but the little fellow nodded incessantly, as if he would say he should like to have him smell of it. Albano did so; and suddenly the sinking of the stage of life, a bottomless slumber, drew him down into the dark, unfathomable depths.

When he awoke heavily, he was alone and unarmed, in an old dusty Gothic chamber. A faint little light scattered only shadows around. He looked through the window; it seemed to be Lilar, but on the whole landscape snow had fallen, and the heavens were white with cloud, and yet the stars singularly pierced through. "What is this? Am I standing in the mask-dance of dreams?" he asked himself.

Then an arras went up; a covered female form, with innumerable veils on the face, stepped in, stood a moment, and flew to his heart. "Who is it?" he asked. She pressed him to her bosom more passionately, and wept clear through the veil. "Knowest thou me?" he asked. She nodded. "Art thou my unknown sister?" he asked. She nodded, and with a sister's close embrace, with hot tears of love, with rapturous kisses, held him fast to herself. "Say, where livest thou?" She shook her head. "Art thou dead or a dream?" She shook her head. "Is thy name Julienne?" She shook her head. "Give me a sign of thy truth!" She showed him half of a gold ring on a table that stood near. "Show thy face, that I may believe thee!" She drew him away from the window. "Sister, by Heaven, if thou liest not, then raise thy veil!" She pointed with her long, outstretched, enveloped arm to something behind him. He kept on intreating. She motioned vehemently toward a certain place, and repelled him from herself. At length he obeyed, and turned sidewards; then he saw in a mirror how she suddenly threw up the veils, and how, beneath them, the superannuated form appeared whose image, with the signature, his father had given him on Isola Bella. But when he turned round again, he felt on his face a warm hand and a cold flower; and a second slumber drew downward his conscious being.

When he awoke, he was alone, but with his weapon, and on the wooded spot where he had first sunk to sleep. The sky was blue, and the light constellations glimmered; the earth was green, and the snow gone; the half-ring he no longer held in his hand; around him was no sound, and no human being. Had all been but the fleeting cloud-procession of dreams, the brief whirl and shaping that goes on in their magic smoke?

But life and truth had burned so livingly into his breast, and the tears of a sister still lay on his eye. "Or might they be only my brotherly tears!" said his perplexed spirit, as he rose, and in the bright night went homeward. All was as still as if life were yet sleeping on; he heard himself, and feared to waken it; he looked upon his own body as he walked along. Yes, thought he, this thick bed in which we are wrapped plays off before us even the woes and joys of life. Just as, in our sleep, we seem to stifle under falling mountains when the coverlet settles over our lips, or to stride over sticky, melted metal when it oppresses the feet with too great a thickness of feathers, or to freeze, like naked beggars, when it is shoved off, and exposes us to the night-chill, so does this earth, this body, throw into the seventy years' sleep of the immortal lights and sounds and chills, and he shapes to himself therefrom the magnified history of his joys and sorrows; and, when he once awakes, only a little of it proves true!

"Heavens! why comest thou so late, and so pale?" asked Schoppe, who had been a long time in Albano's chamber, waiting for him. "O, ask me not to-day!" said Albano.

TWENTY-THIRD JUBILEE.

Liana.

95. CYCLE.

Ever did Schoppe let fly at himself more curses than on the morrow, during Albano's recital, and on this account, to be sure, that he had not stayed so as to arrest the Baldhead, the fly-wheel of so many ghostly movements, in the midst of the revolutions, by dashing right at the spokes. He earnestly besought the Count, at the next appearance, at least,--especially in Italy,--to tear off, without mercy, the Baldhead's mask, though life hung upon it. The youth had been moved too intensely by the events of the night. He therefore spoke of them reluctantly, and without dwelling upon them. As in him all sensations stirred more intensely and overpoweringly than in Roquairol, he had not, like him, pleasure in portraying them, but shrank from it. He looked up the little old likeness of his sister which his father had given him on the island. What a striking reflection of the nightly image in the mirror! This moss of age on a sister must have been artificially produced there, merely for the purpose of hiding the resemblance. The presumption of its being Julienne he gave up again, after the denial of the veiled one, and from the improbability of such a nocturnal performance, and postponed measuring the altitudes of all these incomprehensible airy apparitions till he should have the aid of his daily expected father.

Ah, over all his thoughts swept incessantly in vulture-circles a distant, dark form, the destroying angel, that would fain stoop greedily upon the helpless Liana! The staring stiffness of the corpse-seeress on the Blumenbühl road--especially since the sad billet of the Princess--now in the dark intersecting thicket paths, into which his life's course had entangled itself, danced on before him as a juggling phantom of terror.

A new and single resolve stood now in his soul like a rigid arm fast by the way-side, pointing ever in one direction, up the Blumenbühl road. "Thou must go to her," said the resolve; "she must not die in the delusive belief of thy anger and thy old severity; thou must see her again, to ask her pardon, and then shalt thou weep till her grave opens and takes her away." "O, how I then," he said to himself, "before the dying-throne of this angel, shall bruise with contrition my hard, haughty, wild heart, and take back everything, everything whereby I blinded and wounded the tender soul in Lilar, that she may not despise too much the short days of her love, and that her heart may at least part from me with one little farewell pleasure! And that, O God, grant us!"

In vain did Schoppe propose thereupon, that he should seek with him the business-office of the night-wonders, which so probably must be found in the Gothic-temple; this very day he would force his way into the presence of his pale loved one. Schoppe continued to insist vehemently on the visit to Lilar, and at last demanded it, and commanded compliance; but now it was a lost case, and Albano's refusal was panoplied. "Plague take it! why let myself, then, be boiled in these tear-pots?" said Schoppe, and marched out.

But after a short time he came back with a billet from--Gaspard, wherein the latter demanded for to-day relay-horses from the post-house, and with a proposition from himself that they should go to meet his father. How refreshingly did the nearness of his father breathe over Albano's sultry waste! Nevertheless, he said No the second time; his long willing and warring and every hour's lapse veiled Liana more and more darkly from him in her cloud, and he thought anxiously of his dream about her on Isola Bella;[57] and finally he had his suspicions aroused by Schoppe's holding him back so significantly.

And herein he erred not. Schoppe acted upon quite other grounds than Albano had yet learned. The Lector, namely, who with wise old honesty kept a distant watch, through Schoppe's agency, over the rebellious youth, whom, however, he took every occasion to praise, had pointed out to his proxy the up-towering, leaden-heavy cloud-pile which was moving onward and lowering over the head of the youth; namely, Liana's impending death.

At first, for some time the quarrel with her parents, that poetic hardening, as it were, of Liana's nerves, had been to them wine of iron, but afterward they melted in the soft water of renunciation, autumnal rest and devotion. There is a bland calm which loosens men as well as ships; a warmth in which the wax-figure of the spirit melts down. Every day, too, came the pious father and spread her wings, loosed her from earthly hopes and earthly anxieties, and led her up into the glory of the throne of God. The fair spring-breezes of her ended love she let breathe again, but in a higher region; they were now thin, mild, ethereal zephyrs, breaths of flowers. She knew now, at once, that she was dying and loved God. She stood already like a sun, tranquil and far away in her heaven, but like a sun she seemed to move obediently around the little day of her mother, and shed on her a soft warmth. Her tears flowed out as sweetly as sighs, as evening dew out of evening redness. As one sinks, blissfully cradled, in joyous dreams, so she floated, long borne up, drawn slowly onward, with buoyant fleshly-garment, on the flood of death.

Only a single earthly obstacle had hitherto broken the gentle fall,--the ardent expectation of the coming of the Romeiro, whom she so dearly loved as the friend of her friend Julienne. At last she made her appearance, and took too powerful a hold of Liana's fancy; for it was just the wings of fantasy which, in this tender, constant swan,[58] were too strong. How did the sick one humble herself at the feet of this shining goddess! How unworthy did she find herself of her former love for Albano! So little had Spener, humble only before God, been able to prevent her taking up with her two jewels out of her former life into her present glorified state, her old lowliness before men and her old anxiety for those she loved.

Julienne sought again and again to dissuade her; but one evening--when she learned that Albano was to be taken to Italy--she twined herself around Linda's heart, and told her, with her wonted over-fulness of feeling, only Albano deserved her. Linda answered with astonishment; she could not comprehend a self-annihilating love; in _her_ case she should die. "And am not I, then, dying?" said Liana.

Julienne, thereupon, immediately begged Liana to spare the embarrassment of the noble Countess on this subject. Liana, without being offended, remained silent; but the new desire now possessed her to see once more her lost Albano, and show him her former fidelity and his error, and with dying heart to make over to him a new and great one. She was very frank in uttering all the last wishes of her holy soul. Her mother and Augusti held her from her purpose as long as they could, that she might not take so dark, poisonous a flower as the pleasure of such a meeting must be to her sick heart. But she entreated her mother: How could it harm her this year, as it was not till the next--according to Caroline's prediction--she was to go hence? Meanwhile they sought to put farther and farther off from her the last purpose, in the hope that Gaspard would carry away the Count, and with the intention, only in the extreme case of having to give up all hopes, of gratifying for her this fatal wish.

Then she turned with her request to her brother; but he, partly from mortified vanity and partly from love for his sister, depicted Albano on the colder side, said he was going off to a gay country, would easily cease to regret her, &c. How did it almost provoke the gentle soul, because, with a woman's sharpsightedness, she detected in this an approaching breach of love towards Albano and Rabette, and a return of partiality for Linda, who was to be left behind! She had already for some time been curious about Rabette's being so long invisible. For the poor soul had not, since her fall, since the burial of her innocence, been in a state to be prevailed upon, by prayers or commands, to appear with her downcast, sinful eye before the friend of eternal purity; and now it was absolutely impossible for her, since Linda's arrival and visits had crushed even the lightest, lingering gossamer-web of her flying summer, and her throat, full of anguish, was stifled and choked with the closeness of the funeral-veil. "Brother, brother," said Liana, with inspiration, "think what our poor parents get from us children! I fulfil no hope of theirs; every hope rests on thee! Ah, how angry will our father be!" she added, with her old dread and love. Her brother held it right to keep from her the truth (about Rabette's degradation and concealment), which would this time wear the form of an armed fate, and so he put in the place of the truth his brotherly love. Hence he had hitherto denied himself the only opportunity of speaking with the Countess--by Liana's sick chair. "Thou must die," he once said to her in enthusiasm; "it is well that thy web is so delicate, that the cross-play of so many talons may rend it asunder. What mightest thou not have suffered, even to thy seventieth year, from the world and men!" He, too, believed--from his own experience--that there are more sorrows of women than of men, just as, in heaven, there are more eclipses of the moon than of the sun.

So things stood till the night when Albano saw the Baldhead, the playing of the eclipses, and his veiled sister. That night one string after another snapped in Liana's life; a rapid change came over her; and early the next morning she had already received the last sacrament from her Spener's hands. The Lector got this sad intelligence from the Minister's lady at nine of the morning. Hence it was that he sought so eagerly through Schoppe to hold back the youth from the sight of a dying bride.

Subsequently came Gaspard's billet, which put it into the heads of both to try to induce him to go meet his father, and--by a message to him--to persuade the latter, at least for some days, to turn back with Albano from the approaching earthquake, that the ground might sink before the son should tread upon it.

But this, too, as has been already related, missed the mark. Albano acquainted Schoppe directly with his suspicion of some unpleasant event. The latter was just on the point of giving an answer, when he was spared the necessity by a panting messenger from Blumenbühl, who handed Albano the following note from Spener:--

"P. P.

"Your highborn grace must with all speed be informed that the mortally sick Fraülein von Froulay desires most earnestly this very day to speak with your highness _in person_; and you have so much the more need to haste, as, according to her own representation, she can hardly with the least probability be expected, especially as patients of this _genre_ can always foresee their death accurately, to survive the present evening, but must pass out of this mortality into the eternal glory. In my own person, I need hardly admonish your grace as a Christian, that a soft, still, pious, and devout demeanor would be far more suitable and seemly than cruel worldly sorrow beside the dying-bed of this glorious bride of Christ, in regard to whose death every heart will wish, 'Lord, be my death like that of this just one!' With this suggestion, I remain, with distinguished respect,

"Your highborn grace's submissive

"Joachim Spener, _Court Chaplain_.

"P. S. If your highness does not come directly with the messenger, I beg earnestly the favor of a few lines in reply."

Albano said not a word, gave the note to his friend, pressed his hand gently, took his hat, and went slowly and with dry eyes out into the road that led up to the mountain-castle.

96. CYCLE.

He hurried along with a shudder round by the spot where the corpse-seeress had stood the previous night, in order to behold her dreams, transformed into dark-clad human beings, wind slowly down from the mountain-road. It was a still, warm, blue after-summer afternoon. The evening red of the year, the ruddy-glowing foliage, stole from mountain to mountain; on dead pastures the poisonous saffron-flowers stood together untouched; on the overspun stubble spiders were still working away at the flying summer, and setting up a few threads as the ropes and sails wherewith it was to hasten its flight. The wide circle of air and earth was still, the whole heaven cloudless, and the soul of man heavily overcast.

Albano's heart rested upon the season as a head rests upon the executioner's block. Naught did he see in the wide blue of heaven but Liana soaring therein; nothing, nothing on the earth, but her prostrate, empty form.

He felt a sharp pang when suddenly, on the heights of Blumenbühl, the white mountain-palace flashed upon his sight. He ran down wildly along by the abhorred, the transformed, and deformed Blumenbühl, and hurried away up into the deep hollow pass which leads to the mountain-castle. But where this splits into two ascending defiles, the young man, with the veil of sorrow over his eyes, took by mistake the left, and hurried on between its walls more and more eagerly, till, after the long chase, he came out on the heights, and beheld the gleaming palace of sorrow behind him. Then did it seem to him as if the landscape stretching far away below him heaved to and fro confusedly, like a stormy sea, with billowing fields and swimming mountains; and the heavens looked down still and serene on the commotion. Only down below on the western horizon slept a long, dark cloud.

He stormed down again, and in a few minutes arrived at the little flower-garden of the house of mourning. As he strode impetuously through it, he saw, up at the castle-windows, the backs of several people. If they should turn round, said he, the word would immediately go round, There comes the murderer! At this moment, the Minister's lady came to a window, but quickly turned round when she saw him. Heavily he went up the stairs; the Lector came feelingly to meet him, and said to him, "Composure for yourself and forbearance for others! You have no witness of your interview, but your own conscience," and opened to the speechless youth the silent chamber of sickness.