ELEVENTH JUBILEE.

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Embroidery.—Anglaise.—Cereus Serpens.—Musical Fantasies.

56. CYCLE.

J

Joyfully did Roquairol, on the first evening when he knew his father had gone a journey, bear to his friend the invitation to go with him to his mother. Albano blushed charmingly for the first time, at the thought of that fiery night which had wrung from him the oldest mystery; for hitherto neither of them, in the common hours of life, had retouched the sacred subject. Only the Captain could easily and willingly speak of Linda as well as of every other loss.

Liana always beheld her brother—the creator and ruling spirit of her softest hours—with the heartiest joy, although he generally wanted to get something when he came; for joy she flew to meet him, with the book in her hand which she had been reading as her mother embroidered. She and her mother had spent the whole day pleasantly and alone, alternately relieving each other at embroidering and reading; as often as the Minister travelled, they were at once free from discord and from the visiting Charivari. With what emotion did Albano recognize the eastern chamber, from which he had seen, for the first time, the dear maiden, only as a blind one, standing in the distance between watery columns! The good Liana received him more unconstrainedly than he could meet her, after Charles's initiation into his wishes. What a paradisiacal mingling of unaffected shyness and overflowing friendliness, stillness and fire, of bashfulness and grace of movement, of playful kindness, of silent consciousness! Therefore belongs to her the magnificent surname of Virgil, the maidenly. In our days of female Jordan-almonds, academical, strong-minded women, of hop-dances and double-quick-march steps in the flat-shoe, the Virgilian title is not often called for. Only for ten years (reckoning from the fourteenth) can I give it to a maiden; afterward she becomes more manneristic. Such a graceful being is usually at once thirteen and seventeen years old.

Why wast thou so bewitchingly unembarrassed, tender Liana! excepting because thou, like the Bourignon, didst not once know what was to be avoided, and because thy holy guilelessness excluded the suspicious spying out of remote designs, the bending of the ear toward the ground to listen for an approaching foe, and all coquettish manifestoes and warlike preparations? Men were as yet to thee commanding fathers and brothers; and therefore didst thou lift upon them, not yet proudly, but so affectionately, that true pair of eyes!

And with this good-natured look, and with her smile,—whose continuance is often, on men's faces, but not on maidens', the title-vignette of falsehood,—she received our noble youth, but not him alone.

She seated herself at the embroidery-frame; and the mother soon launched the Count out into the cool, high sea of general conversation, into which only occasionally the son threw up a green, warm island. Alban looked on to see how Liana made her mosaic flower-pieces grow; how the little white hand lay on the black satin ground (Froulay's thorax is to wear the flowers on his birthday), and how her pure brow, over which the curly hair transparently waved, bent forward, and how her face, when she spoke, or when she looked after new colors of silk, lifted itself up, animated with the higher glow of industry in the eye and on the cheek. Charles sometimes hastily stretched out his hand towards her. She willingly reached hers across; he laid it between his two, and turned it over, looked into the palm, pressed it with both hands, and the brother and sister smiled upon each other affectionately. And each time Albano turned from his conversation with the mother, and true-heartedly smiled with them. But poor hero! It is of itself a Herculean labor to sit idly by where fine work is going on, such as embroidery, miniature painting, &c.; but above all, with a spirit like thine, which has so many sails, together with a couple of storms in behind, to lie inactively at anchor beside the embroidery-frame, and not to be, say, a spinning Hercules (that were easy), but only one that sees spinning,—and that, too, in the presence of a great spring and sunset out of doors,—and, in addition to all this, in the company of a mother, so chary of her words (in fact, before any mother, it is of itself an impossibility to introduce an edifying conversation with the daughter),—these are sore things.

He looked down sharply at the embroidered Flora. "Nothing pains me so much," said he,—for he always philosophized, and everything useless on the earth troubled him grievously,—"as that so many thousand artificial ornaments should be created in vain in the world, without a single eye ever meeting and enjoying them. It will touch me very nearly if this green leaflet here is not especially observed." With the same sorrow over fruitless, unenjoyed plantings of labor, he often shut his eyes upon wall-paper foliage, upon worked flowers, upon architectural decorations. Liana might have taken it as a painter's censure of the overladen stitch-garden, which, merely out of love for her father, she was sowing so full,—for Froulay, born in the days when they still trimmed the gold-lace with clothes, rather than the reverse, was fond of buttoning a little silk herbary round his body,—but she only smiled, and said, "Well, the little leaf has surely escaped that evil destiny: it is observed."

"What matters a thing's being forgotten and useless?" said Roquairol, taking up the word, full of indifference to the Lector, who was just entering, and full of indifference to the opinion of his mother, to whom, as well as to his father, only the entreaties of his sister sometimes made him submissive. "Enough that a thing is. The birds sing and the stars move in majesty over the wildernesses, and no man sees the splendor. In fact, everywhere, in and out of man, more passes unseen than seen. Nature draws out of endless seas, and without exhausting them; we, too, are a nature, and should draw and pour out, and not be always anxiously reckoning upon the profit, for watering purposes, of every transient shower and rainbow. Just keep on embroidering, sister!" he concluded, ironically.

"The Princess comes to-day!" said the Lector, and, delighted with the prospect, Liana kissed her mother's hand. She looked up often and confidentially from her embroidery at the courtier, who seemed to be very intimate, but who, as a refined man, was full as much respected and as respectful as if he were there for the first time.

The announcement of the Princess set the Captain into a charming state of easy good-humor; a female part was to him as necessary for society as to the French for an opera, and the presence of a lady helped him as much in teaching, as the absence of a button did Kant.[135] By way of drawing his sister off from the flowers, he removed the red veil from a statue on the card-table, and threw it, like a little red dawn, over the lilies on the face of the embroideress; just then the door opened and Julienne entered. Liana, trying to remove the veil, in her haste to welcome her, entangled herself in the little red dawn. Albano mechanically reached out to her his hand to relieve her of the veil, and she gave it to him, and a dear, full look besides. O how his enraptured eye shone!

Julienne brought with her a train of jeux d'esprit. The Captain, who, like a pyrotechnist, could give his fire all forms and colors, reinforced her with his; and his sister sowed, as it were, the flowers with which the zephyrettes of raillery could play. Julienne almost said no to yes, and yes to no; only toward the Minister's lady was she serious and submissive,—a sign that, on her arena of disputation, among the grains of sand particles of golden sand still lay, whereas for philosophers the arena is the prize and the ground,—at once the battle-field, the Champ de Mars, and the Champs ElysÉes. Upon the Count she fixed her passionate gaze as boldly as only princesses may venture to and love to; and when he returned the glance of her brown eye, she cast it down; but she remembered him, from her old visit in BlumenbÜhl, and inquired after his friends. He now entered with pleasure upon something that was as ardent as his own soul,—encomiums. It is against the finest politeness to praise or blame persons with warmth,—things one may. While he portrayed with grateful remembrance his sister Rabette, Julienne became so earnestly and deeply absorbed in his eye, that she started, and asked the Lector about the steps of the Anglaise which he had led at the masquerade. When he had done his best to give an idea of it, she said she had not understood a word of what he had been saying; one must, after all, execute it.

And herewith I suddenly introduce my fair readers in a body to a domestic ball of two couples. See the two sisters-in-soul, side by side, like two wings on one dove, harmoniously flutter up and down. Albano had expected Julienne would form a contrast, by nimble and sprightly fluttering, to the still, hovering movement of her friend; but both undulated lightly, like waves, by and through each other, and there was not a motion too much nor too swift.

Hence I have so often wished that maidens might always dance exactly like the Graces and the Hours,—that is to say, only with one another, not with us gentlemen. The present union of the female wave-line with the masculine swallow-like zigzag, as well in dress as in motion, does not remarkably beautify the dance.

Liana assumed a new ethereal form, somewhat as an angel while flying back into heaven lays aside his graceful earthly one. The dancing-floor is to woman's beauty what the horse's back is to ours; on both the mutual enchantment unfolds itself, and only a rider can match a dancing maiden. Fortunate Albano! thou who hardly dar'st take the finger-points of Liana's offered hand in thine! thou gettest enough. And only look at this friendly maiden, whose eyes and lips Charis so smilingly brightens for the dance, and who yet, on the other hand, appears so touchingly, because she is a little pale! How different from those capricious or inflexible step-sisters, who, with half a Cato of Utica on the wrinkled or tightly stretched face, hop, fall back, and slip round. Julienne flies joyfully to and fro; and it is hard to say before whose eyes she loves to flutter best, Liana's or Albano's.

When it was done, Julienne wanted to begin over again. Liana looked at her mother, and immediately begged her friend rather for a cooling off. A mere pretext! A female friend loves to be alone with a female friend; the two loved each other before people only with a veil upon their hearts, and longed for the dark arbor where it might fall off. Liana had a real loving impatience, till she could, with her duplicate-soul, her twin-heart, snatch moments free from witnesses in the garden of evening and May. They came back changed and full of tender seriousness. The lovely beings were perhaps as like each other in their innermost souls and in stillness as in the dance, and more so than they seemed.

And thus passed with our youth a fair-starred evening! Pardon him, however, that he grasped and pressed this nosegay so close as to feel some of the thorns. His heart, whose love grew painfully near another, could not help finding this other, where there was no sign of response, at once higher and farther off. Her love was love of man,—her smile was meant for every kind eye,—she was so cheerful. In Lilar she easily passed into emotion and general contemplations; not so here,—of course she would look right sympathetically upon her wildly loving brother, who, since that confession-night, had twined himself as if with oak-roots around the darling; but her half-blind love for the brother might indeed be only, in the deceiving light of reflection, shining upon his friend. All this the modest one said to himself. But what he had enjoyed in full measure of ecstasy was the increasing, clear, tender, steadfast love of his soul's-brother.

57. CYCLE.

As to Liana's secret inclination and Zesara's prospects I shall never once institute any conjectures, although I might erase them again before printing. I remember what came of it, when I and others, on a former occasion, covered over with our hands Hafenreffer's official reports upon matters of consequence, and undertook to unfold at length, by pure fancy, how things might have gone on;—it was of no use! And naturally enough; for women and Spanish houses have, to begin with, many doors and few windows, and it is easier to get into their hearts than to look into them. Particularly maidens', I mean; since women, physiognomically and morally, are more strongly marked and boldly developed, I would rather undertake to guess at and so portray ten mothers than two daughters. The bodily portrait-painters make the same complaint.

Whoever observes the influence of night, will find that the doubts and anxieties which he had contracted the evening previous about the heroine of his life it has, for the most part, completely killed by the time it gets to be towards morning. Albano, in the spring morning, opened his eyes upon life as in a triumphal car, and the fresh steeds stamped before it, and he could only let them have the reins.

He alighted with his friend at Liana's after a few years, that is, days; the Minister had not yet come back. Heavens! how new and bloomingly young was her form, and yet how unchanged her demeanor! Why is it, thought he, that I can get only her motions, not all her features, by heart? Why can I not imprint this face, even to the least smile, like a holy antique, cleanly and deeply upon my brain, that so it may float before me in eternal presence? For this reason, my dear: young and beautiful forms are the very ones which are hard for the memory as for the pencil; and coarse, old, masculine ones easier for both. Again he filled himself with joys and sighs by looking at her,—and these were increased by the nearness of the garden, wherein June with his evening splendor lay encamped. O, if only one moment could come to him, in which his whole soul might speak its inspiration! Out of doors there lay the young, fiery spring, basking, like an AntinoÜs, in the garden, and the moon, impatient for the fair June-night, stood already under the gate of the east, and found the living day and the lingering sun still in the field. But the mother refused to the asking look of Liana the sight of sunset,—"on account of the unwholesome Serein."[136] Albano, with his heart full of manly blood, thought this maternal barrier around a child's health very small.

The hour for shutting gates upon to-day's Eden would have struck for him the next minute, had it not been for the Captain and the Cereus serpens.

The Captain came running down from the Italian roof, and announced that the Cereus would bloom this evening at ten o'clock, the gardener said, and he should stay there. "And thou too," he said to Albano. All that the double limitations of forbearing tenderness toward sister and friend would allow he lovingly set at stake, for the sake of pleasing the latter. Liana herself begged him to wait for the blooming; she was so delighted to find it was so near! Her soul hung upon flowers, like bees and dew. Already had her friend, the pious Spener, who fixed an enraptured eye upon these living arabesques of God's throne, made her a friend to these mute, ever-sleeping children of the Infinite; but still more had her own maidenly and her suffering heart done it. Have you never met tender, female souls, into whose blossoming time fate had thrown cold clouds, and who now, like Rousseau, sought other flowers than those of joy, and who wearied themselves with stooping, in valleys and on rocks, to gather and to forget, and to fly from the dead Pomona to the young Flora? The thorough-bass and Latin, wherewith Hermes proposes to divert maidens, must yield here to the broad, variegated hieroglyphics of Nature, the rich study of Botany.

A nameless tenderness for Liana came into Albano's soul at the little four-seated supper-table; it seemed to him as if he were now nearer to her, and a relative; and yet he comprehended not his kinswoman, when, from every serious mood into which her mother sank, she strove to win her back with pleasantries. Out of doors the nightingales were calling man into the lovely night; and no one pined more to be abroad than he.

For the soul's eyes, the blue of heaven is what the green of earth is to the bodily eyes, namely, an inward strengthening. When Zesara, at length, came free and clear out of the fetters of the room,—out of this spiritual house-arrest into the free realm of heaven, and beneath all the stars and on the magic Olympus of statues, at which he had so often longingly looked up,—then did his forcibly contracted breast elastically expand: how the constellations of life moved to meet each other in brighter forms; how did spring and night sit enthroned!

The old gardener, who, simply from a grateful attachment to "the good-souled, condescending FrÄulein," had, with rare pains, forced these early blossoms from the Cereus serpens, stood up there already, apparently as an observer of the flowers, but in fact as an expectant of the greatest praise, with a brown, indented, pitted, and serious face, which did not challenge praise with a single smile.

Liana thanked the gardener before she came to the blossoms; then she praised them and his pains. The old man merely waited for every other one of the company to be astonished also; then he went drowsily off to bed, with a firm faith that Liana would to-morrow remember him in such a way as to make him contented.

The exotic beads of nectar-fragrance which hung in five white calyxes, crowned as it were with brown leaf-work, seized the fancy. The odors from the spring of a hotter clime drew it away into remote dreams. Liana only stroked with a soft finger, as one glides over eyelids, the little incense-vases, without touching with predatory hand the full little garden of tender stamina which crowded together in the cup. "How lovely, how very tender!" said she, with childlike happiness. "What a cluster of five little evening stars! Why come they only by night,—the dear, shy little flowers?" Charles seemed to be on the point of breaking one. "O let it live!" she begged; "to-morrow they will all have died of themselves. Charles! thus does so much else fade," she added, in a lower tone. "Everything!" said he, sharply. But the mother, against Liana's will, had heard it. "Such death-thoughts," said she, "I love not in youth; they lame its wings." "And then," replied Liana, with a maiden-like turning of the tables, "it just stays with us, that's all, like the crane in Kleist's fable, whose wings they broke, so that he could not travel with the rest into the warm land."

This gay, motley veil of deep earnestness was not transparent enough for our friend. But by and by the good maiden took pains to look just as the careful mother wished. The benumbing lily which the earth wears on her breast, the moon; and the whole dazzling Pantheon of the starry heavens; and the city, with its pierced-work of night-lights; and the high, majestic, dark avenues; and on meadows and brooks the milk-white lunar-silver, wherewith the earth spun itself into an evening-star; and the nightingales singing out of distant gardens;—did not all this stir omnipotently every heart, till it would fain confess with tears its longing? And the softest heart of all which beat at this moment below the stars, could it have succeeded in wholly veiling itself? Almost! She had accustomed herself, before her mother, to dry away with her eye, so to speak, the tear, before it grew big enough to fall.

Singular was her appearance, the next minute, to the Count. The mother was speaking with her son; Liana stood, far from the latter, with face turned half aside, and a little discolored by the moon, near a white statue of the holy Virgin, and looking out into the night. All at once she looked upon him and smiled, just as if a living being had appeared to her in the abyss of ether, and her lip would speak. Earthly form more exalted and touching had never before met his eyes; the balustrade by which he held swayed to and fro (but it was he himself who shook it), and his whole soul cried, "To-day, now, I love the heavenly one with the highest, the deepest love I have felt." So he also said lately, and so will he say oftener: can man, with the innumerable waves of love, institute measurements of altitude, and point to that one which has mounted the highest? Thus does man, whereever he may be standing, always imagine himself standing in the centre of heaven.

Ah, at this moment he was again surprised, but it was with an "Ah!" Liana went to her mother, and when she felt in the hand of her darling a slight shudder, she importuned her to go out of the night-air, and would not give over till she left with her the magic spot.

The friends stayed behind. According to Albano's reckoning, it would not, of course, have been too much, if, in this frank time, wherein our holier thoughts, hidden by the common light of day, reveal themselves like stars, they had all lingered on the roof till toward morning. The two walked for a time up and down in silence. At last the incense-altar of the five flowers held them fast. Albano clasped accidentally the neighboring statue with both hands, and said: "On high places, one wants to throw something down,—even himself oftentimes; and I, too, would fain throw myself off into the world, into far-distant lands, as often as I gaze into the nightly redness yonder, and as often as I come under orangery-blossoms, as under these. Brother, how is it with thee? The heavens and the earth open out so broadly: why, then, must the spirit so creep into itself?" "Just so do I feel," said he; "and in the head, generally, has the spirit more room than in the heart." But here, by a delicate guess, he arrived, through agreeably circuitous routes, at the accidental discovery of the reason why his sister had hurried down so soon.

"Even to obstinacy," said he, "she pushes her care for her mother. The last time, when she observed that mother saw her grow pale under the dance, she immediately ceased. To me alone she shows her whole heart, and every drop of blood, and all innocent tears therein; especially does she believe something in respect to the future, which she anxiously conceals from mother." "She smiled to herself just before she went away," said Albano, and drew Charles's hand over his eyes, "as if she saw up there a being from the veiled world." "Didst thou too see that?" replied Charles. "And then did her lip stir? O friend, God knows what infatuates her; but this is certain, she firmly believes she is to die next year." Albano would not let him speak further. Too intensely excited, he pressed himself to his friend's breast; his heart beat wildly, and he said: "O brother, remain always my friend!"

They went down. In the apartment which adjoined Liana's they found her piano-forte open. Now that was just what the Count had missed. In passion—even in mere fire of the brain—one grasps not so much at the pen as at the string; and in that state alone does musical fantasying succeed better than poetic. Albano, thanking, meanwhile, the muse of sweet sounds that there were forty-four transitions,[137] seated himself at the keys, with the intention now to beat a musical fire-drum, and roar like a storm into the still ashes, and drive out a clear, sparkling swarm of tones. He did it, too, and well enough, and better and better; but the instrument struggled, rebelled. It was built for a female hand, and would only speak in female tones, with lute-plaints, as a woman with a friend of her own sex.

Charles had never heard him play so, and was astonished at such fulness. But the reason was, the Lector was not there; before certain persons—and he was one of them—the playing hand freezes, so that one only labors and lumbers to and fro in a pair of leaden gloves; and, secondly, before a multitude it is easier playing than before one, because the latter stands definitely before the soul, the former floats vaguely. And, besides all that, blessed Albano, thou knowest who hears thee. The morning air of hope flutters around thee in tones,—the wild life of youth stalks with vigorous limbs and loud strides up and down before thee,—the moonlight, undesecrated by any gross earthly light, hallows the sounding apartment. Liana's last songs lie open before thee, and the advancing moonshine will let thee read them soon,—and the nightingale in the mother's neighboring chamber contends with thy tones, as if summoned by the Tuba to the field.

Liana came in with her mother, not till late, because the heavy din of tones had something in it hard and painful to both. He could see the two sitting sidewise at the lower window, and how Liana held her mother's hand. Charles, after his manner, walked up and down with long steps, and sometimes stood still near him. Albano, in this nearness of the still soul, soon came out of the wilderness of harmony into simple moonlit passages, where only a few tones moved delicately like graces, and quite as lightly linked as they. The artistical hurly-burly of unharmonious ignes fatui is only the forerunner of the melodious Charites; and these alone insinuate themselves into the softer souls. It seemed to him—the illusion was complete—as if he were speaking aloud with Liana; and when the tones, like lovers, went on ever repeating the same thing from heartiness and zest, did he not mean Liana, and say to her, "How I love thee! O how I love thee!" Did he not ask her, "Why mournest thou? why weepest thou?" And did he not say to her, "Look into this mute heart, and fly not from it, O pure, innocent one, my own!"

How did the good youth blush, when suddenly the caressing friend placed his hands over his friend's eyes, which hitherto, unseen in the darkness, had been overflowing for love! Charles stepped warmly to his sister, and she, of her own accord, took his hand and said words of love. Then Albano took refuge in the murmuring wilderness of sounds, until his eyes were dried enough for the leave-taking by lamp-light; by slow degrees he let the cradle of our heart cease rocking, and closed so mildly and faintly, and was silent for a little while, and then slowly rose. O, in this mute, young bosom lived every blessed thing which the most glorious love can bestow!

They parted seriously. No one spoke of the music. Liana seemed transfigured. Albano dared not, in this spirit-hour of the heart, with an eye which had so recently calmed itself, rest long upon her mild blue ones. Her deeply touched soul expressed itself, as maidens are wont, to her brother only, and that by a more ardent embrace. And from the holy youth she could not, in parting, conceal the tone and the look, which he will never forget.

That night he awoke often, and knew not what it was that so blissfully rocked his being. Ah! it was the tone whose echo rang through his slumber, and the dear eye which still looked upon him in his dreams.

FOOTNOTES:

[135] He is said, in teaching, to have always looked at the spot on a student's coat where the button was gone; and was embarrassed when it was sewed on again.

[136] The evening hour, which people in southern countries shun so much.

[137] From one key to another.—Tr.


                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           

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