Part 31
Disturbed, impetuous, with dishevelled hair, Hiort came back, and said, in a low voice, "It is done; I was blest; no one will be so after me." "With that yellow one,[133] and now in the night-hour, I will answer for nothing," said Gaspard. Albano reddened with shame at the impudent presumption, and still more at Roquairol's crime of dishonoring and seducing, even in the play, his holy beloved. "Music, but tender and good!" he cried, and let himself be fanned by the zephyr of harmony, and drank incessantly "funeral draughts," or wine,--both to the annoyance of the Knight, who abhorred drinking, and shunned music, because this or both made one weak.
He laid himself down on the turf, and the pistol beside him, and said, stammering, "So, then, I lie in the warm ashes of my burnt-out life, and my cold ashes will be added soon." He put his double opera-glass close to his eyes, and cast sparkling looks over at Linda. "I have had her on my heart, the divine beauty, my eternal love,--my tulip, which at evening closes at length over the bee, that he may die in the flower-cup. On the roses of my life I rest and die; I still look with bliss on the sweet one; I cannot repent. Only forgive, poor Carlos; I wipe away the crime with blood, but with tears of penitence I cannot. Should that which time has washed away from this shore cleave again to the shore of eternity, then it must fare badly with me there: I can change there as little as here."
At this moment a cannon-shot was fired in the city to announce a deserter. He took his pistol into his hand. "Yes, yes, a shot signifies a fugitive,--a fugitive out of the world, too. O, when shall the sharp sickle lift itself in the east, and cut life in twain? I am so weary!" He looked toward the eastern heavens, but a cloud, which already faintly thundered, overcast the gateway of the moon. He smiled bitterly.
"Even this little, last joy also destiny begrudges me! I shall see the moon no more. Well, I shall, perhaps, mount higher than it or its storm-cloud,--only my dear spectators and auditors of my death are driven away from me by the rain. Yes, if thou art out, then am I out!" He pointed to the flask.
"Wild, awful tones, come up from the deep! Bring me my bloody bridal dress! It is time; declining joy casts behind a long, lengthening shadow." Albano and Julienne recognized with a shudder, in the little coat which they brought him, the blood-sprinkled one which he had worn at the masquerade, when, as a boy, he had meant to murder himself before Linda. "You must lay it on my cold breast," said he, as he received it from Falterle. The thunder rolled nearer, the lightnings became more glowing, and one cloud after another swelled the tempest. He drank the glasses fast. "Nothing can now harm me," said he; "even the lightning not specially, although I lie under trees; in this tube there is a lightning that defies all lightnings,--a real lightning-rod." The hastening storm drove him, on the spectators' account, to the conclusion, and he was roused to indignation at the mockery of Providence over his theatrical preparations.
"Nothing is more pleasant and timely than this tempest," said Gaspard; "however, talking and waiting seem to gratify him tolerably." The other spectators were agonized by the scene, and yet not one tore himself away. Orders had been given to the fellow-performers to take the shot as the signal-word, and not to come before it. He said, "The death-snake rattles in the neighborhood; yonder, on the wave of the future, the corpse comes swimming on." They perceived that he spoke at random and extempore, vexed by the storm. He looked upon the pistol. "A glance at thee! So is the look at life taken, and again hidden under the eyelid. A spark, a single spark, and the theatre-curtain blazes up, and I see the spectators stand, spirits, or even nothing at all, and the eternal, heavy cloud fills the wide ether of the world. So stand I, then, by the dead sea of eternity; so black, still, wide, deep it lies below me; one step, and I am in there, and sink forever. Let it come! I swam therein even before my birth. Now, now," said he, while it sprinkled, and he took the last glass, "the rain will chill the poor wretch already sinking into the chill of death. Play now something soft and beautiful, good people!"
Thereupon he cocked his weapon, stood up, said, weeping, "Farewell, beautiful and hard life! Ye two fair stars, ye that still look down from above, may I come nearer to you? Thou holy earth, thou wilt still often quake, but no more shall he quake with thee who sleeps in thy bosom; and ye good, far-off beings who loved me, and ye near ones whom I so loved, may you fare better than I, and condemn me not too harshly! I do verily punish myself, and God immediately judges me. Farewell, my dear, offended, but very hard Albano, and thou, thou even unto death ardently loved Liana, forgive me, and weep for me! Liana, if thou still livest, then stand by thy brother in the last hour, and pray for me before God!" Here he suddenly pointed the weapon at his forehead, fired, and fell headlong; some blood flowed from the cloven skull, and he breathed yet once, and then no more.
Bouverot flew out, according to his part, and began it: "Even now, my dear Hiort, my Carlos bethinks himself"; but he started back before the corpse, stammering, "_Mais! mon Dieu! il s'est tué re vera! Diable! il est mort! Oh! qui me payera?_" Linda sank powerless on Julienne's bosom, and the latter stammered, "O, the sinner and suicide!" The Princess exclaimed, indignantly, "_Oh, le traitre!_" Albano cried, "Ah, Charles! Charles!" and plunged into the lake, and swam over, threw himself upon the shattered form, and groaned, weeping, "O, had I known this! Brother and sister dead! and I am to blame! O, had I remained unsuccessful! Ah, my Charles, Charles, forgive! I was not thy foe. How deplorably shattered it lies there,--the great temple!" "Be more calm, I pray," said Gaspard, who had at last come over in the boat, and who bore every mutilation with an anatomical coldness and curiosity; "he had his regiment debts also, and feared the investigation which a new administration would bring about. Now, one can, after all, have respect for him; he has actually carried through his character."
Albano raised himself up erect, and said, in the deafness of anguish, "Who spake that? you, miserable Bouverot? you know nothing but debts!" "Monsieur le Comte!" said he, defyingly. "I said it," said Gaspard to his son. "O my Dian!" cried Albano, and stretched out his hand toward him, who, himself weeping, held his weeping Chariton, "come thou hither; let us bandage him; there may yet be help for it."
The Counsellor of Arts Fraischdörfer stepped up to the astounded Princess, who remained upon her side of the lake, with the words, by way of diverting her attention, "Viewed on the side of art merely, it were a question whether this situation was not borrowed with effect. One must, as in that wonderful creation of Hamlet, weave a play into the play, and in that make the pretended death a real one; of course it were then only a show of show, playing reality in real play, and thousand-fold, wonderful reflex! But how it rains now!" Something was whispered in the ear of the Princess by her Haltermann. She flung up her arms, and cried, "O, monster! homicide! My poor, innocent Gibbon! Thou monster!" She had heard of the ape's murder, and departed inconsolable.
All at once the naked moon emerged into the deep blue, and every one remarked it; but the rain previous no one but Fraischdörfer had been aware of. Albano saw now full clearly the dead eyes and white, stiff lips. "No, they stir not," said he. Then it sounded as if out of Roquairol's breast and iron mouth, "Be still; I am judged!" And immediately began the jay, as concluding chorus of the last act, "The poor man now lies fast asleep, and you can cover him up!"
Gaspard looked very earnestly at his brother. "By heavens!" replied the latter, "it is written so in his part."
The whole starry sky cleared up. The company went homeward. Albano and Dian, with Chariton, stayed by the corpse.
THIRTY-THIRD JUBILEE.
Albano And Linda.--Schoppe and the Portrait.--The Wax Cabinet.--The Duel.--The Madhouse.--Leibgeber.
131. CYCLE.
Albano meant to incarcerate himself the next day, weep bitterly, and do penance, and not cheer himself with the sunshine of love; but he found at evening the following billet, written by an unknown hand, on his table:--
"Sir Count: You are hereby informed, that on Friday night, when you were gone journeying, the deceased Captain R. von Froulay played your part with the Countess Romeiro through _all_ the acts, in the flute-dell. You must, for the sake of rivals, get yourself another voice, and the Countess eyes to use by night, although to her it may not be altogether disagreeable to be often deceived respecting you in this manner. Farewell, and be in future a little more discreet!"
With pale face he stared at the skeleton which two giant hands forcibly held up before him, drawn out all at once from the flesh of blooming, youthful limbs. But the fire of pain speedily shot up again and illumined the whole circle of woe. With the might of agony, with bloody arms, must his spirit hurl back and forth the thought, heavy as a rock, the tombstone of his life, in order to prove whether it fitted into the burial vault;--the dreadful thought fell in so completely with Roquairol's whole play and end and life,--but not, on the other hand, with Linda's character, and with the divine moment which he had spent with her in Liana's last garden,--and yet it did, again, very much with her sudden reconciliation and with single, detached words,--and yet, perhaps, after all, this poisoned letter was only a fruit of the vengeance of the Princess, of whose indignation at Roquairol's murder of himself and the ape Dian had told him.
So painfully did he move himself on his wounds to and fro, and at last he resolved, this very evening to seek out Linda, wherever she might be, when he received from her the following billet:--
"Come to me, I pray, this evening, to Elysium; it will certainly be fair. I give the invitation now, as thou didst lately. Thou shalt lead me upon the fair mountains, and it shall be enough for me if only thou canst see and enjoy. Julienne we need less and less. Thy father urges our union with proposals which you shall this evening hear and weigh. Come without fail! In my heart there are still standing so many sharp tears about the evil tragedy. Thou must change them into tears of another kind, my beloved!
"The Blind One."
He laughed at the _changing_. "Into frozen ones, rather," said he. Hot love was to him a passionate kiss into his wound. He went to Lilar gloomily and hastily, deeply enveloped in a red cloak, as if against foul weather,--blind and deaf to himself and the world,--and like a dying man who awaits the moment when he either shall vanish in smoke and be annihilated, or soar away reanimated into divine worlds.
When he entered the precincts of Lilar, the garden did not distort itself as lately, but it merely disappeared, from him. He went along close by some disguised people, who seemed to be making a grave. "It's wrong, I vow," said one of them; "he ought to be buried out in the meadow, like other cattle." Albano looked that way, saw a covered corpse, and thought with a shudder it was the suicide, until he heard the second grave-digger say, "An ape, Peter, if he is kept with distinction, in clothes, looks more reputable than many a man, and I believe he, too, would rise again from the dead, if he were only regularly baptized."
Just as this Gibbon of the Princess, whom they were burying here, recalled before his soul that stormy Friday, he espied Linda, not far from the Dream-temple, on the arm of a seeing gentlewoman. She gave him, according to her manner before others, only a slight greeting, and said to the woman, "Justa, stay here in the Dream-temple; I am going to walk up and down here."
By this limitation of herself to the visual range of the Dream-temple she excluded every fair, visible sign of love, and Albano knew already that silent contentment of hers, with the mere presence of the beloved one, just as he did sometimes the wildness of her sweet lips. When he touched her with trembling, and saw her again near him, then did this powerful being come back to him with the whole divine past. But he deferred not the infernal question, "Linda, who was with thee on Friday evening?" "No one, dearest; where?" replied she. "In the flute-dell," he stammered. "My blind maiden," she answered, calmly. "Who else?" he asked. "God! thy tone distresses me," said she. "Roquairol killed the ape that night. Did he meet thee?"
"O horrible murderer! Me?" he cried; "I was travelling all night long; I was not with thee in any flute-dell." "Speak out, man," cried Linda, grasping him violently with both hands; "didst thou not write to me of having given up thy journey, and then didst thou not come?" "No, nothing like it," said he; "all infernal lies. The dead monster Roquairol used my voice,--thy eyes,--and so it was,--tell the rest." "_Jesu Maria!_" screamed she, struck by the dashing flood into which the black cloud burst, and grasped with both arms through the leafy branches of the wooded avenue, and pressed them to her, and said supplicatingly, "Ah, Albano, thou wast certainly with me."
"No, by the Almighty, not! Tell the rest," said he.
"Fly from me forever; I am _his_ widow!" said she, solemnly. "That thou remainest," said he, severely, and called Justa out of the temple of dream.
"So it must live on,--thy pain, my pain: I see thee nevermore. I will say a farewell to thee. Say thou none to me!" said he. She was silent, and he went. Justa came, and he still heard her praying in the arbor: "Leave me, O God, this eclipse to-morrow; spare the gloomy widow thy daylight!" The maiden roused her, took her by the hand, and she rejoiced, when hanging on her arm, in her night-blindness.
Albano went out into the night. All at once he stood as if he had been carried up on a jagged, rocky peak, below which dashed a foaming stream. He turned back and said, "Thou mistakest, evil genius; I loathe suicide; it is too easy, and belongs to ape-murderers,--but there is something better, and thou shalt attend me."
He lost himself,--could not find his way to the city,--thought he was in Lilar again, and ran round anxiously without any way of egress, until at last he sank exhausted, and as if drawn down into the arms of slumber. When he awoke in the morning, he was in the Prince's garden, and the slumber island waved with its tree-tops before him. A jagged rocky peak over a rushing stream there was not in the whole landscape.
He looked upon the heavens, and the day, and his heart. "Yes, such, then, is life and love," said he. "A good, true fire-work, especially when one is to have a Linda after many preparations! Long it stands there with a gay, high scaffolding, full of statues, with smaller edifices, columns, and wondrous is it, and promises still more than it hides and betrays. Then comes the night in Ischia; a spark darts, the moulds burst, white, shining palaces and pyramids and a hanging city of the sun hover in heaven,--in the night-air a busy, flying world unfolds itself majestically between the stars, and fills the eye and the poor heart, and the happy spirit, itself a fire between heaven and earth, hovers too,--for the space of a whole instant; then it becomes night again and a blank waste, and in the morning there stands the scaffolding dull and black."
132. CYCLE
"War,"--this word alone gave Albano peace; science and poetry only thrust their flowers into his deep wounds. He made himself ready for a journey to France. Only one thing still delayed his breaking up,--Schoppe's non-appearance, whom he with his riddles must await and, if possible, induce to go away with him. He kept himself in the woods all day so as to avoid his father and Julienne and everybody. Linda's unhappy night had sunk deep into his breast, and only he alone saw down into it, no stranger. He hoped that she herself would keep silent toward Julienne, because the latter, according to the sacred, womanly rules of her order, knew no indulgence for this sin. His first jealous ebullition had now given place to a painful sympathy for the deceived Linda, whose holy temple had been rifled. What pained him insufferably was the feeling of humiliation with which the proud fair one must now, as he imagined, think of him, and which he, with his present bitter contempt of Roquairol, entertained so much the more strongly. "Never, never, though she were my sister, can we see each other more; I can well see her bleeding before me, but not bowed down," he said to himself. Sometimes there came over him a cold fury against a destiny, which always swept with a sudden whirlwind through his embraces, and forced all asunder,--then an indignation against Linda, who had not acted like a Liana, and who was herself partly guilty of the error of the substitution by her principle of forgiving love everything,--then again deep sympathy, since she could not have confounded persons without any spiritual resemblances, as the secret tribunal of conscience told him, and since she now alone was atoning for it, that she was willing to sacrifice herself to him, even to him.
Inexpressibly did he hate the dead seducer, because by his act his death had become only a cowardly flight. The poor deserter, whose escape had been reported during the tragedy, he saw led along as a prisoner before him; but his captain had escaped the hand of vengeance forever. After some days papers of the dead were put into his hands; but, full of abhorrence, he could not look on them. They contained justifications, and at the same time additional sins. Roquairol had, after the pleasure-night, spent the whole morning in the Prince's garden writing, in order to color the remembrance, which alone (so he wrote) had rewarded and satisfied him, that he had not that very night played out the fifth act of the drama of life.
The Lector delivered in Albano's absence short letters from Julienne, wherein she begged him to make his appearance, and appointed him place and time at the castle, whither she had gone from Lilar. He went not. Sometimes it seemed to him as if distant men tracking him stole round him in wide circles.
Once at evening he was still standing at the foot of a woody hill, when he espied overhead a wolf stalk out of the thicket; the wolf saw him, sprang down upon him, and changed into Schoppe's wolf-dog. Soon his friend himself, with an old man, stepped out from the trees above, saw him, hurriedly gave the man money, and came down to him slower than he went up to him. "Ah, a good evening, Albano," said Schoppe, with the old coldness with which he spoke, when he did not write, and smiled at the same time with so many lines and wrinkles that he appeared to Albano altogether strange. Albano pressed him tightly to his heart, and transformed the hot words which his friend did not love into hot tears. It was an old star out of the spring morning when his Liana still lived and loved; it had gone down before him on a grave in that night of his journey; now it rose, and Albano was again unhappy.
Schoppe surveyed with visible complacency Albano's ripened form, and drew asunder, as it were, the young man's shining wings. "Thou hast," said he, "spread out and colored thyself right well,--hast May and August on one bough, like an orange-tree." Albano took no pleasure in this. "Only relate to me thy life, my brother," said he. "Thou shouldst tell thine first, methinks; I am tired even to stupidity," said Schoppe, seating himself and unbuckling his hunting-pouch. "Hereafter," replied Albano, "what thou hast occasion for I will tell thee. I got thy letters,--I really loved the well-known one,--a misfortune divided us,--I am innocent and she is great;--O God, be satisfied with this for to-day!" Never could he complain of misfortunes to his friends; still less now expose the misery of a beloved. "And still longer," replied Schoppe; "only say, does it add new misery if I bring with me from Spain and proceed to unpack proofs of your being related as brother and sister?" "No," said Albano, "I need tremble at no past." "Thou art still going to France?" asked Schoppe. "To-morrow, if thou wilt go too," replied Albano.
"By all means, as thy regiment chaplaincy. Not for want of the spirit of art, as thou writest from Rome, but from a superfluity of it, thou goest among soldiers. I should see it with pleasure, if thou wert to consider that even Dante, Cæsar, Cervantes, Horace, served before they wrote so preciously,--only students invert it, and compose something short and sweet, and take up service afterward. To come to my travels,--it costs me much, namely, time, merely to tell thee that I caught thy absurd uncle with a carriage full of baggage in the little nest of _Ondres_, a post and a half from Bayonne. I owned to him I was going to Valencia to dissect the silk-stocking-weavers' looms in that place, to enjoy, at the same time, my drop of ice and a waistcoat-pocket full of Valencia almonds, and to visit the few professors who had produced the best compends for three thousand reals.[134] He should certainly arrive before me, he said. We arranged to put up at the same inn in Valencia. I found my account in him, as he could most easily introduce me to Romeiro's house. But I waited and watched there for him fourteen days in vain. With the steward of the house I found no hearing, although I cut out his stupid profile five times, with the request that he would unlock to a travelling painter the picture cabinet, where I wished to find the maternal picture of the Countess.
"Now was I half and half resolved to become pregnant, and in this guise to demand everything for my satisfaction, which even the Spanish King refuses to no pregnant woman.[135] In Italy they carry the child on the arm, in order to beg; in Spain it needs not so much as this visibleness. But fortunately thy uncle came. The picture-gallery door was thrown open. I set myself to copying a stupid kitchen-piece, and looked everywhere after my island portrait. But nothing was to be seen." (Here he drew a wooden case out of his hunting-bag, and laid it before him and went on.) "Until at last I saw it,--a picture leaned on the floor against the wall, turning toward me its back- and wintry-side,--it was the child of my pencil, and I was touched by the neglect it had suffered,--inwardly vexed, but outwardly calm, I put it by,--and snapped off short in the kitchen-piece in the middle of a half-finished pole-cat. Look at the likeness!"
He took off the box-cover, and Linda beamed upon his friend with a stream of mind and charms, only dressed in older fashion. Albano could scarcely stammer for emotion. "That were my father's spouse and my dear mother? And thou knowest assuredly that this picture here is the one you made of her on Isola Bella?"