Part 3

The Lector would gladly have thrown this letter into the paper-mill, so little was there in it that was "_ostensible_." To be sure, Gaspard's murderously polished and pointed irony about Liana's sickliness, if he showed her the letter, would still remain, to this innocent, unsuspecting peace-princess, a sheathed blade. The north-wind of egotism, too, which ran through the communication would not, as it was, after all, a favorable side-wind for Albano's prosperous passage through life, be felt or heeded by the lovers; but that was the very rub; for she might look upon Gaspard's disguised "No" as a "Yes," and just fatally entangle herself in the thread whereby a friend would draw her up over her steep precipice.

Meanwhile the letter must be delivered; but he did it with long, hesitating evasions, which were intended apparently to withdraw the veil for her from the covered "No." She read it with fear, smiled, weeping, at the murderous irony, and said, softly, "Yes indeed!" The Lector had already half a hope in his eye. "If the knight," said she, "thinks so, can I do less? No, good Albano; now I remain true to thee. My life is so short, therefore let it be cheering and devoted to him as long as is in my power."

She thanked the Lector so warmly and pleasantly for the arrow from Spain, that he had not the capacity of being hard enough to thrust home its darkly poisoned end into the fair heart. She begged him, for the sake of sparing him, not to be present at her firm explanation with her father, but rather, at most, out of indulgence to her own and her mother's feelings, to take upon himself the task of making her explanation to her mother. He consented simply to--both, instead of one, of these things.

The gentle form stepped quietly into her father's presence, and there, shrinking not before thunder and lightning, carried her explanation through to a close, saying that she severely rued her disapproved love, that she would bear all penalties, and do and suffer all, both here and with the Princess, as "_cher père_" should demand, but that she dared not longer offend the innocent Count of Zesara by the show of a most undutiful desertion. At this address the Minister, who had suffered himself, in consequence of her recent submissive self-denial, to be lifted up by refreshing expectations, now stretched prostrate on the ground, dashed down from his Tarpeian rock, could not utter a single sound but this: "Imbécille! thou marriest Herr von Bouverot; he takes thy picture tomorrow; thou sittest to him." He took her, with stern hand and three terribly long strides, to his lady. "She will remain," said he, "under guard in her chamber; no one may visit her except my son-in-law; he will paint the Imbécille _en miniature_." "Go, Imbécille!" said he, beside himself. Her entire want of womanly cunning had actually, to the statesman, drawn a curtain over her deep, sharp eye. A straightforward man and mind resembles a straight alley, which appears only half as long as one which runs by crooks and turns.

The Lector, who never meant to be regarded as a special amateur of connubial sham-fights, had already taken himself off. The thirty years' war of the spouses--for it only wanted a few years of that--gained life and reinforcement. The old bridegroom diffused over his face that convulsive smile which, with some men, resembles the convulsive quiver of the cork when it announces the bite of the fish. He asked whether he were now wrong in trusting neither daughter nor mother, both of whom he charged with a partisan understanding against him, and insisted that now, after such proofs, he ought not to be blamed either for stricter measures or for a straightforward march to his object; and with the sitting, for which the German gentleman had twice begged him, he commenced the campaign. The Minister's lady, as a punishment for Liana, remained silent on the subject of so excessively great a present to Bouverot as a miniature likeness would be.

The tender daughter, jammed and crushed in the meeting between two stone statues, represented to her mother, that she could not possibly hold out under so long inspection of a man's eye, and least of all Herr von Bouverot's, whose looks often went like thorns into her soul. Hereupon the father replied and retorted in the mother's name, by drawing a chair up to the desk, and inviting, on the spot, the German gentleman to come to-morrow and paint. Then Liana was sent away with a word which drew even from this delicate flower the lightning-spark of a momentary hatred.

The Imperial peace-protocol lay open now before the two spouses, and there merely wanted some one to dictate, when the Minister's lady rose up, and said, "You must learn to respect me more."

She had the coach tackled, and drove off to the Court Chaplain, Spener's. She knew Liana's respect for him, and his omnipotence over her pious disposition. Even to herself he was still imposing. Down from that earlier theological age in which the Lutheran Father-confessor still reigned nearer to the Catholic, he had, through the power and magnanimity of his character, brought a shepherd's staff, which was distinguished from a bishop's staff only by being made of better wood. She must needs narrate to him twice over Liana's relations; the ardent, indignant old man could not at all comprehend or believe a love which must have been spun out right under his old eyes without his knowledge. "Your excellence," he at length answered, "has, indeed, committed a mistake in not communicating to me this important circumstance before to-day. How easily, with God's help, would I have conducted all to a blessed issue! However, there is nothing lost. Let your excellence send the maiden this very night to me, but alone, without you; that must be done; then I stand pledged for the rest!"

Objections and cautions would merely have inflamed the old man's ambition and anger,--both which still worked on beneath the ice of his hoary hair; she therefore confidently promised him all, with that submissiveness, which she had also transmitted as an inheritance to Liana.

Right hopefully did Liana receive the command of a night ride to the good, pious father. She started off with only her devoted maiden. With deeply agitated soul she appeared before her father-confessor. She opened herself to him as to a God; he decided just as if he were one. What a sight for another eye less proud than Spener's would have been this lowly, but composed saint, whose heart, like a sunbeam, always appeared loveliest in its breaking asunder.

But here the history moves in veils! The old man commanded her maiden to stay behind, and took her alone over into the silent Blumenbühl. He unlocked for her the church, lighted a torch at the altar, in order that the desolate darkness might not play any prelude to her timid eye, and completed what her parents could not.

How he extorted from her the promise to renounce her Albano forever is a mystery watched and hidden by the Great Sphinx of the oath which she swore to him,--only the far-off man, who lost the fair soul, had from the observatory of the suns gazed at the bright church-windows and discovered behind them disturbing apparitions, without knowing that they were true, and decided his life.

She went back again coldly across the meadows and mountains of old days, which had once been so bright, to the dwelling of the old man, who dismissed her with greater reverence than had marked his reception of her. On the night-journey she was mute, and wrapped up in herself, and exchanged not a word with her maiden. Her parents still awaited her; the mother looked anxiously out into the night and into the future. At length the living carriage rolled into the court. Great and mighty as one who, having been executed in innocence, starts up into life again before the dissector and, regarding him as the judge on high, speaks with unfettered freedom and gladness, so did she come into the presence of her parents: like the cold marble of a god's form, she stood there, pale, tearlessly cold and calm. She knew it not, and she willed it not, but she soared high over life, even beyond a child's love,--she could not kiss her mother so fervently as once,--she stood undismayed before her blustering father, and said, then, without a tear, without emotion, without a blush, and with soft voice, "I have this night renounced my love before God. The pious father has convinced me." "And had the man better reasons for it _in petto_ than I?" said Froulay. "Yes," said she; "but I have sworn in the Temple to keep silence until time discloses all. Now I pray you by the All-just One only to allow me to give him back in person his letters, and tell him that I cease to be his, not, however, from fickleness, but from duty; I entreat this, dear parents. Then may God dispose of the rest, and I shall never be disobedient to you again." The wretched father, puffed up still more by this triumph, would fain have made this last prayer of the dying heart bitter to her, and even insinuated a flying suspicion of the motive of the interview; but the mother, smitten in her fair soul by the fairest, interceded warmly, and contemptuously and arbitrarily decided in the affirmative. Nor did Liana seem to take much notice of the paternal No. When he had gone, the mother, weeping for bliss, snatched the silent form to her embrace; but Liana wept not so easily upon her bosom as once out of love, whether it was that her heart was too much exalted, or that it came back just as slowly into the old condition as it went out of it. "Receive thanks, daughter," said the mother; "I shall now make thy life more happy." "It was happy enough. I was to die; therefore I must needs love," said she. So she went smiling into the arms of sleep, with hard-beating heart. But in dream it appeared to her as if she were sinking away in a swoon, losing her mother, and struggling up again fearfully out of the grasp of flying death, and then weeping for joy that she lived again. Thereupon she awoke, and the glad drops, softly released by the dream, still flowed from her open eyes, and softened like a thawing-wind the stiff soil of life.

Ye great or blessed spirits above us! When man here, under the poor clouds of life, throws away his fortune, because he prizes it less than his heart, then is he as blessed and as great as you. And we are all worthy of a holier earth, because the sight of the sacrifice exalts, and does not oppress us, and because we shed burning tears, not from pity, but from the deepest, holiest love and joy.

81. CYCLE.

Warmly and brilliantly did the sun, who today, like the unhappy one, was to be eclipsed, begin his morning race. Liana awoke on the burial-day of her love, not with yesterday's strength, but faint and languid, somewhat cheered, however, by the prospect of a return of her peaceful time. The mother, although herself sickly, pressed her, early in the morning, to her heart, in order to prove the pulse of the heart most precious to her. Liana looked affectionately and yearningly, with moist eye, into her moist eye a long time, and was silent. "What wilt thou?" asked her mother. "Mother, love me more now, as I am alone," said she. Then in her mother's presence she bound together all Albano's letters, without reading them, except the one in which he begs her brother for his love. She sported with her mother, as fate does with us and as poor parents do with their children, who at first give them bright, gay garments, because these are more easily dyed into dark ones.

Her mother sought gradually to take away from her her spiritual fantasies, the death-moss, as it were, which clung sucking to her green, young life. "Thou seest," said she, "how thy angel can err, since he approved thy love, which thou now condemnest." But she had an answer: "No, the pious father said, it had been right until the time when he told me the secret, and that the Bible says, one must forsake everything for love." Thus, then, does this poor creature, as they tell of the bird of Paradise, soar straight upward in heaven, until she drops down dead.

She manifested to her mother almost a feverish gayety,--a sunshine on the last day of the year. She said, how it refreshed her, that she could now speak freely with her dear mother of her former lovely days. She portrayed to her Albano's great, glowing heart, and how he deserved the sacrifice, and the "pearly hours" which they had lived together. "After all," said she, cheerfully, but in such a way that tears came into the hearer's eyes, "nothing of it has really passed away. Remembrances last longer than present reality, as I have conserved blossoms many years, but never fruits." Yes, there are tender female souls which intoxicate themselves only among the blossoms of the vineyard of joy, as others do only with the berries of the vine-hill. The Lector's note arrived with the intelligence that Albano was awaiting her in Lilar.

Now, as the hour of interview drew so near, she grew more and more uneasy. "If I can only persuade him," said she, "that I have acted as an upright maiden!" Before exchanging her morning chamber for the mourning-carriage, she set all things to rights there for drawing, when she should return; she had, she said, had a very bad dream, but she hoped it would not come to pass.

With her work-basket on her arm, in which the letters lay, she stepped into the carriage, which they had to open, because its sultry air oppressed her. But the sultriness was the breath and atmosphere of her own spirit, and everything beautiful which met her became to her to-day a benumbing poison-flower. Fearfully she kept grasping and pressing the hand of her mother, because every cry, every form that darted by, fluttered over her like a rustling storm-bird; a crier, with his rough tone, cut across her nerves; they trembled more gently again, only when a pastor and his servant passed by with the sick-cup for the evening drink of weary people. O, the fair way was long to her! She had so long to hold together with fainting powers the breaking heart, which was to speak so firmly and decidedly and distinctly with her beloved.

The sky was blue, and yet neither of them remarked that it was beginning to be dark without clouds, since the moon already stood with her night upon the sun. As they passed over the woodland bridge into the living Lilar, where on all branches hung the old bridal-dresses of a decorated past, Liana said, with intense earnestness, to her mother: "For God's sake, not into the old castle of the dead!"[18] "But which way then? That is his rendezvous," said the mother. "Anywhere else,--into the Dream-temple. He sees us already; yonder he goes over the gates," said she. "God Almighty be with thee, and speak not long," said the weeping mother, as she went from her into the temple, in whose mirrors she could behold the parting of the innocent beings.

Albano came slowly along down through the walks; he had cleared his eye of tears and his heart of storms. O, how had he hitherto, like a long-tossed mariner, peered into his dark clouds, in order between their misty peaks to discover the mountain-peaks of a green continent!--that he was to-day to lose so much, namely all, his most mournful conclusions had not gone so far as that; nay, he maintained so much tranquillity, that he sent back overhead the little Pollux, who came dancing after, not with threats, but with presents.

At last he stood with quivering lips before the beloved, beautiful form, who, childlike, pale, trembling, and watching her work-basket, looked upon him a little, and then struggled with her sinking eyes. Then his heart melted; the flood of old love rushed back high into his life. "Liana," said he, in the softest tone, and drops fell from his eyes, "art thou still my Liana? I am still the same as ever; and hast thou too not changed?" But she could not say no. A gash was made into the arteries of her life, and tears sprang up instead of blood. His good form, his familiar, brotherly voice stood again so near to her, and his hand held hers again, and yet all was over; a hot sun-glance flashed across her former flowery garden-life, and showed it in a melancholy illumination, but it lay far from her. "Let us," he went on, "be strong now at this singular meeting again. Tell me very briefly everything, why thou hast hitherto been so silent and done so. I have nothing to say,--then let all be forgotten." He had unconsciously raised her hand, but the hand pressed itself down and trembled withal. "Dost thou tremble, or do I?" said he. "I, Albano," said she, "but not from any fault: I am true, O God, I am true even unto death!" He looked upon her with a wild, wondering look. "To you, to you I am so, but it is all over," she cried, confounded and confounding. "No," she added, commandingly, as he was accidentally on the point of going with her out of the perspective range of the Dream-temple,--"no, my mother wishes to see us from the Dream-temple yonder."

He grew red at the maternal espionage; his eye flashed into hers a certain resentment against the "you," and his hot looks wanted to draw out of her agitated face the delaying riddle. Necessity commanded strength; she began.

"Here"--she stammered, and could hardly raise the basket for trembling, "your letters to me!" He took them gently. "I have resigned you," she continued; "my parents are not to blame, although they did not like our love. There is a mystery, which concerns merely you and your happiness, that has constrained me to part from you and from every joy." "Do you wish your letters too?" said he. "My parents--" said she. "The mystery about me?" said he. "An oath binds me," said she. "Last night in the church at Blumenbühl before the priest?" he asked. She covered her eyes with her hand and nodded slowly.

"O God!" cried he, weeping aloud, "is it thus with life and joy and all truth? So? How ye have lied"--he looked at his letters--"about eternal fidelity and love! Whom did you mean then, ye hellish liars?" He flung them away. Liana was about to pick them up; he trod on them violently, and looked bitterly upon the affrighted one. Now he fell into a storm, and drew and poured out, like a water-wheel during the influx of the floods, his tumultuous, suffering breast, and ceased not his cruel pictures of his love, her weakness, her coldness, his pain, her former oaths, and her present violated one about his mysterious fortune, which he said he did not want at all. Her silence wrought him up to a wilder whirl. Her quick, intense breathing he heard not.

"Do not torment thyself. It is all impossible now," she answered, imploringly. "O," said he indignantly, "I will not re-change the change, for the Lector and the Pope would again change that!" He fell now into that induration and palsy of the heart which is peculiar to man; the stream of love hung as a frozen, jagged waterfall over the rocks.

"I did not think thou wert so hard," said she, and smiled strangely. "I am harder still," said he; "I speak as thou actest." "Leave off, leave off, Albano,--it grows so dark to me. O, I will instantly to my mother!" she cried suddenly. The two old black spiders, let down by Fate, stood again over her fair eyes and overspun them, busily spinning, with a closer and closer web; and over the golden strips of life already grew a gray mould.

"It is the solar eclipse," said he, ascribing the blindness to the faintly gleaming sickle of the quarter-sun. He saw overhead in the blue heaven the lunar lump cast like a gravestone into the pure sun. Not so much as a real shadow, but only enervated shadows lived in the uncertain gray light; the birds fluttered timidly around; cold shudders played like ghosts of the noonday hour in the little, faint lustre which was neither sunlight nor moonlight. Gloomy, gloomy lay life before the youth; through the long black marble colonnade of the years sorrows came stalking on like panthers, and grew brightly spotted under the retreating sun-glances of the past.

"This is indeed very fitting for to-day," he continued; "such a sudden night without evening-twilight. Lilar must be covered up to-day. Look up at the moon,--how darkly it has rolled over the sun; once she too was our friend. O, make it still gloomier, utter night!" "Albano, forbear; I am innocent, and I am blind. Where is the temple and my mother?" she cried, moaning; the spiders had fast closed the wet, tearful eyes.

"By the Devil, it is the eclipse of the sun!" said he, and gazed into the blindly groping, timid face, and guessed all; but he could not weep, he could not console. The black tiger of the most cruel anguish hung clambering on his breast and carried him away. "No, no," said Liana, "I am blind, and I am innocent too."

Little Pollux, made happy by his presents, had led along a begging mute, who followed with the ringing mute's-bell. "The dumb man cannot say anything," said Pollux. Liana cried, "Mother, mother! my dream comes, the death-bell tolls."

The Minister's lady rushed out. "Your daughter," said Albano, "is blind again, and God send the father and the mother, and whoever is to blame for it, their retribution of misery." "What is the matter?" cried Spener, suddenly stepping out, who had previously seen the meeting, and had come to the mother. "A wretched maiden; your work too!" replied Albano.

"Farewell, unhappy Liana!" said he, and was about to depart; but stopped, and after gazing wildly on the beautiful, tortured countenance which wept with its blind eyes, he cried, "Dreadful!" and went away.

Long did he lie, up in the thunder-house, with his eyes buried in his arms, and when he at last, and quite late, without knowing where he was, roused himself, as from a dream, he saw the whole landscape illumined by a serene day, the sunshine unveiled and warm in the pure blue, and the close carriage with the blind one rolled rapidly across the woodland bridge. Then Albano sank down again on his arms.

NINETEENTH JUBILEE.

Schoppe's Office of Comforter.--Arcadia.--Bouverot's Portrait-painting.

82. CYCLE.

Now that Albano lived without love or hope; now that he had seen the polar-star of his life fall like a shooting-star into a wilderness still as death; now that every one of his actions and every recollection darted out a scorpion-sting, and he sent back Liana's letters, forsook Lilar, the house of the Doctor, the Lector, Liana's relatives, and the pious father; now that he directed his face, gradually growing pale, only to books and stars; men who know no higher sorrow than selfish sorrow must needs imagine that nothing weighs upon his bosom but the ruins and rubbish of the shattered air-castles of his hope and youthful love. But he was more nobly unhappy and disconsolate: he was so, because he had for the first time made a human creature and the best of beings miserable,--his beloved blind! Into this abyss of his heart all neighboring fountains of sorrow flowed together. The smallest gayly-painted shards of his urn of fortune were as if shattered afresh, when he heard from day to day that the poor girl, although daily stationed in the bath-house before the healing fountains, was nevertheless brought back each time without a ray of light or hope, and that she now feared nothing more, lamented nothing more on this robbers' earth, than that death might perhaps close her eyes before they had seen her mother again.