Roquairol's Love.—Philippic against Lovers.—The Pictures.—Albano Albani.—The Harmonic TÊte-À-tÊte.—The Ride to BlumenbÜhl. 60. CYCLE.O Out of the drops which the harmonica had wrung from Rabette's heart the old enchanter, Fate, is perhaps preparing, as other enchanters do out of blood, dark forms; for Roquairol had seen it, and wondered at the sensibility of a heart which hitherto had been set in motion more by occupations than by romances. Now he drew nearer to her with a new interest. Since the night of the oath, he had drawn his heart out of all unworthy fetters. In this freedom of victory, he went forward proudly, and stretched out his arms more lightly and longingly after noble love. He now visited his sister incessantly; but he still kept to himself. Rabette was not fair enough for him, beside his tender sister. She was an artificial ribbon-rose beside one by Van der Ruysch; she said herself, naively, that she looked, with her village-complexion in white lawn, like black-tea in white cups. But in her healthy eyes, not yet corroded into dimness by tragical drops, and on her fresh lips, life glowed; her powerful chin and her arched nose threatened and promised And now he let all the dazzling powers of his multi-form nature play before her,—the sense of his ascendency permitted him to move freely and gracefully, and the careless heart seemed open on all sides,—he linked so freely earnestness and jest, glow and glitter, the greatest and the least, and energy with mildness. Unhappy girl! now art thou his; and he snatches thee from thy terra firma with rapacious wings up into the air, and then hurls thee down. Like a vine running on a lightning-rod, thou wilt richly unfold thy powers and bloom up on him; but he will draw down the lightning upon himself and thy blossoms, and strip thee of thy leaves and rend thee utterly. Rabette had never conceived of such a man, much less seen one; he made his way by main force into her sound heart, and a new world went in after him. Through Liana's love for the Captain, hers mounted still higher; and the two could speak of their brothers in friendly reciprocation. The good Liana sought to bring to the help of her friend many a thing which would hardly take hold, particularly mythology, which, by reason of the French pronunciation of the names of the gods, was So stood matters with her when Charles once playfully stole behind her and covered her eyes with his hand, in order, under the mask of her brother's voice, to give her soft, sisterly names. She confounded the similar voices; she pressed the hand heartily, but her eye was hot and moist. Then she discovered the mistake, and flew with the concealed evening and morning redness of her countenance out of the room. Now he looked closer into the eyes of Liana, who blamed him for it, and hers too had wept. She would fain at first conceal from him the object of the sisterly emotion; but another's No was to him, of old, an auxiliary verb,—a fair wind blowing him into port. Liana grew more and more agitated; at last she related how Rabette's account of Albano's youthful history had drawn from her in turn the history of his early relations, and that she had portrayed to her the bloody night of the masquerade, and even shown his bloody dress. "And then," said Liana, "she wept with me as heartily as if she had been thy sister. O, it is a dear heart!" Charles saw the two linked together like two pastures, namely, by the rainbow which stands over both with its drops; he drew her with thankful love to his breast. "Art thou then She must needs disclose to him her full heart, and tell him all. He heard with astonishment, how that whole Tartarus-night, on which the unknown voice had promised Linda de Romeiro to his friend, had been made known to her. By whom? She held an inexorable silence; he contented himself, because, to be sure, it could only have been Augusti, who was the only one that knew of it. "And now believest thou, thou heart from heaven," said he, "that I and the brother of my soul could ever separate by robbing each other? O, it is all otherwise, all otherwise! He curses the mock-spirits and the object of the mimicry. O he loves me; and my heart will rejoice in the day when it is his!" The touching ambiguity of these last words dissolved him in a sacred melancholy. But she, in the midst of the heartiest overflow of feeling, took part, as if out of piety, with the spirits, and said: "Speak not thus of spiritual apparitions! They exist, that I know,—only one needs not fear them." Here, however, with firm hand she held fast the veil over her experiences; he too had known long since, that, notwithstanding her most tremblingly delicate feelings, which shrunk even from the sight of the blue veins on the lily hand, as from a wound, she had appeared unexpectedly courageous before the dead and in the ghostly hours of fantasy. Behind the waves of so different an emotion which now drove his heart up and down, Rabette was eclipsed. He burned now only for the hour when he could tell his Albano the singular treachery of the Lector. 61. CYCLE.Even before the Captain disclosed to his friend Augusti's probable treachery, Albano was almost entirely at variance with his two tutors. In a circle full of young hearts which beat for one another, and still more fondly fight for one another, two always take an indissoluble hold of each other, and become one at others' expense. Albano boldly broke with every one whom Charles displeased. Besides, Schoppe had long been loved by few, because few can endure a perfectly free man; the flower-chains hold better, they think, when galley-chains run through them. He, therefore, could not bear it, when one "with too close a love clambered up round him so tightly that he had the freedom of his arms no more than if he wore them in bandages of eighty heads." The good Schoppe had one fault which no Albano forgives, namely, his intolerance toward the "female saintly images of isinglass," as he expressed it,—toward the tender errors of the heart, the sacred excesses by which man weaves into this short life a still shorter pleasure. On one occasion Charles walked up and down with arms akimbo and drooping head, as on a stage, and said, accidentally, so that the Titular-librarian overheard him, "O I was very little understood by the world in my youth." He said nothing further; but let anybody "Mr. Von Froulay, I have somewhat often compared Alban, who never light-mindedly forgave, silently separated himself from a heart, which, as he unjustly said, quenched the flames of love with satiric gall. In the chain of friendship with Augusti, one ring after another absolutely broke in twain. The Count found in the Lector a spirit of littleness which was more revolting to him than any bad spirit. The elegance of a good courtier, his propensity to keep the smallest secrets as faithfully as the greatest, his passion for starting up behind every action a long plan, his thirsty curiosity for Now, in addition to all this, the Lector bore the Captain a hearty grudge, because he cost the Minister's lady many anxious hours, and Liana, and even the Count, much money, and because he seemed to him to pervert the youth. The otherwise directly ascending flame of Albano was now, by the obstacles thrown in the way of his love, bent on all sides, and, like soldering fire, burned more sharply; but this sharpness Augusti ascribed to the friend. Albano appeared to those whom he loved warmer, to those whom he endured colder, than he was, and his earnestness was easily confounded with defiance and pride; but the Lector imagined that Albano's love was stolen from him by Charles. He undertook, with equal refinement and frankness, to play off on the Count a good map-card of the spots which were thickly sown in the heavenly body of this Jupiter. But he tore every map. Charles's painful confessions on that night extinguished all additions by other hands. And Albano's grand faith, that one must shield a friend entirely, and trust him entirely, warded off every influence. O it is a holy time, in which man desires offerings and priests, without fail, for the altar of friendship and love, and—beholds them; and it is a too cruel time, in which the so often cheated, belied bosom prophesies to itself, on another's bosom, in the midst of the love-draught of the moment, the cold neighborhood of bankruptcy! As the Lector saw perfectly that Alban, at many of his charges against Charles,—for instance, of his wildness and disorder,—remained cold, for the reason that he might deem himself to be reproached over another's shoulders, as the French (according to Thickness) give strangers praise over their own; he now, instead of the point of similarity, took hold of an entire dissimilarity of the Captain, his light-mindedness toward the sex. But this only made the matter worse. For, in matters of love, Charles was to him the higher fire-worshipper, and the Lector only the one whom the coal of this fire blackens. Augusti cherished, in regard to love, pretty nearly the principles of the great world, which, merely for honor's sake, he never coined into action, and he assigned only the cloud-heaven near the earth to love. The Captain, however, spoke of a third heaven, or heaven of joy, as belonging thereto, wherein only saints are the blest. Augusti, after the manner of the great world, spoke much more freely than he acted, and sometimes as openly as if he were dining in the hall of a watering-place. Charles spoke like a maiden. The virgin ear of Albano, which was mostly closed in good visiting-parlors, and which in study-chambers remained open, united to his want of the experience that a cynical tongue is often found in the most continent men, for instance, in our buffoonery-loving forefathers, and an ascetic one in modest libertines,—these two things must naturally have involved the pure young man in a double error. Thus did Augusti start up within him more and more storm-birds. Both came often to the verge of a complete feud and challenge; for the Lector had too much honor to fear any one thing, and dared in cold blood as much as another in hot. Now, at length, did Charles disclose fully to his friend, though with all the tenderness of friendship, Liana's acquaintance with that Tartarus-night. "The otherwise reserved Lector must be after nearer advantages with his tattling," Albano concluded, and now the toad of jealousy, which lives and grows in the living tree without any visible way in or out, nursed itself to full size in his warm heart. Unanswered love is besides the most jealous. God knows whether he is not scenery-master of these ghost scenes working in and through each other with so many wheels. All these are Albano's private conclusions; open accusations were forbidden by his sense of honor. But his warm heart, always expressing itself, demanded a warmer society, and this he found when he followed the pious father, and went to Lilar into the Thunderhouse, into the midst of the flowers and summits, in order, lying nearer to the heart of Nature, to dream and enjoy more sweetly. There was only one warm, sun-bright spot for him in Charles's historical picture; namely, the hope that perhaps only the mistakes about his relation to the Countess, out of which Liana had been helped by her brother, had dictated to her the evenly cold deportment which she had hitherto maintained towards him. On this sunny side Rabette threw a billet, in which she wrote him that she was going back to her parents on Saturday, because the Minister was coming. That hope, this intelligence, the prospect of less favorable circumstances, his going to Lilar,—all this decided him in the purpose of snatching to himself a solitary moment, and therein casting off before Liana the veil from his soul and hers. 62. CYCLE.Singularly did events cut across each other on the day when Albano came into the Ministerial house to take leave of Rabette, and (a trembling voice said within him) of Liana, too. Rabette beckoned to him, from the window, to come to her chamber. She had folded together the Icarus's wings of her apparel into the trunks. Over her inner being a prostrating storm swept to and fro. Charles had disturbed the equilibrium of her heart by his warmth, and had not restored it again by a word of recompense. Like the doves, she flutters around the high conflagration. O may she not, like them, escape with singed feathers, and come back again, and at last fall into it! She said she had longed for her friends, ever since she saw yesterday a flock of sheep driven through the city. She should accompany, on Saturday, Liana and her mother to attend the consecration of the church, and the interment of the princely couple. He begged her, so abruptly and eagerly, to contrive for him to-day a solitary moment with her friend in the garden, that he absolutely did not hear her sweet news of Liana's intention to stay there and make her a visit. Alas! he found with the Minister's lady that showman of magnificent pictures, who, like Nature, made not only a beginning of his spring, but an end of his autumn, with poisonous flowers, The German gentleman went on, and now placed beside each other Raphael's Joseph, telling his brothers a dream, and the older Joseph, interpreting one to a king, and began to translate the three Raphaels into words, and that with so much felicity, and not only with so much insight into mechanics and genius, but also with such a precise setting forth of every human and moral lineament, that Albano took him for a hypocrite, and Liana for a very good man. She seized every word with a wide-open heart. When Bouverot painted the prophesying Joseph, as at once childlike, natural, still, There also dropped from the German gentleman much thought about Da Vinci's boy Christ in the Temple, about the magnificently executed fraternization and adoption of the boy and the youth in one face. Liana had also copied the copy, but she and her mother were modestly silent on the subject. But at last Franciscus Albani disturbed the calm that had hitherto prevailed, by his "Repose during the Flight." While he acted the dream-interpreter to these picturesque dreams, and Rabette had her eyes fastened sharply on the Saint Joseph of this picture, sitting beside Mary, with an open book, Liana said, unluckily, "A fine Albani!" "I should think not," Rabette whispered; "brother is much more beautiful than this praying Joseph!" She had confounded Albani with Albano; her whole picture-gallery lay in the hymn-book, whose hymns she separated from each other with golden-red saints. The others did not comprehend; they knew him only as Count of Zesara,—but Liana, sweetly blushing, flung at Rabette a tenderly reproving glance, and looked, with mute endurance, more closely at another picture. Never before in Albano,—in whom the strongest and the tenderest feelings coupled, as the echo makes thunder louder and music lower,—had the bitter-sweet mingling of love and pity and shame wrought more warmly, and he could have at once knelt down before the maiden, and yet have kept silent. The German gentleman had finished, and said to the men, with a look full of victory, "He had, however, something more in his case, which bore away the palm from the Raphaels; and he would beg them to follow With a fiery glance of contempt, he turned away, and wondered that the Lector remained. It seems to be unknown to him that painting, like poetry, only in its childhood related to gods and divine service, but that by and by, when they grew up to a higher stature, they must needs stride out from this narrow churchyard,—as a chapel Albano had seen the maidens through the window in the alley, and hastened down to take leave of his sister, and to something more weighty. He came, with fuller roses on his cheeks than those which glowed around him, to a grassy bank, where Liana, with his sister, was sitting behind the red parasol, with half-drooping eyelids, and head bent aside, softly absorbed in the harvest of evening, suffused with a sunny redness by the parasol, in white dress, with a little slender black cross on her Rabette had nothing in her mind but the solitary minute, which she would fain leave her brother to enjoy with her. She begged her, in a lively manner, to play for her yet once more on the harmonica. Albano, at this proposal, plucked for himself a moderate nosegay from the—foliage of the tree that hung over his head. Liana looked at her warningly, as much as to say: "I shall spoil thy cheerfulness for thee again." But she insisted. At the entrance into the water-house, a light blush flitted across Albano, at the thought of the latest past and the nearest future. Liana speedily opened the harmonica, but the water, the colophonium When, in the meadows of Persia, a happy one, who, on the luxuriant enamel has been sleeping down among the pinks and lilies and tulips, blissfully opens his eyes at the first evening call of the nightingale upon the still, tepid world, and the motley twilight, through which some gold threads of the evening sun float glowingly: that blissful one is like the youth Albano in the enchanted chamber,—the Venetian blinds scattered round broken lights, trembling green shadows; and there was a holy twilight as in groves around temples; only murmuring bees flew, out of the loud, distant world, through the silent cell, into the noise again. Some sharp streaks of sunshine, like lightnings before sleepers, were wafted romantically to and fro with the rose; and in this dreamy grotto, amid the rustling wood of the world, the solitude was not disturbed by so much as the shadowy existence of a mirror. Into this enchantment she let the tones fly out of her hands like nightingales,—the tones were propelled towards Albano, as by a storm, now more clearly, and now more faintly; he stood before her, with folded hands, as if in prayer, and hung with thousand looks of love on Now the great eyelids immovably closed upon the sweet looks, and gave her, like a sleep, the appearance of absence; she seemed a white May-flower on wintry soil, hanging down its blossom-bells. She was a dying saint in the devotion of harmony, which she heard rather than made; only the red lip she took with her as a warm reflection of life, as a last rose, that was to deck the fleeting angel; O could he disturb this prayer of music with a word of his? With narrower and narrower circles did the magnetic vortex of tones and of love clasp him round,—and now, when the drawing of the harmonica, like the water-drawing of the scorching sun, licked up his heart; and when the lightnings of passion darted over his whole life, and illumined the mountain-ridges of the future and the valleys of the past, and when he felt his whole being concentrated into one moment, he saw some drops trickle out from Liana's drooping eyes, and she looked up cheerfully to let them fall; then Albano snatched her hand away from the keys, and cried, with the heart-rending tone of his longing, "O God, Liana!" She trembled, she blushed, she looked at him, and knew not that she still wept and looked on, and continued to play no more. "No, Albano, no!" she said, softly, and drew her hand out of his, and covered her face, started at the pause of the musical tones, and collected herself and again made them flow out slowly, and said, with trembling voice: "You are a noble being. You are like my Charles, but quite as passionate. Only one request! I am about to leave the city for a while." His alarm at this became ecstasy, when she named the place, his BlumenbÜhl. She went on with difficulty before the delighted lover; her hand often lay for a long time on the dissonance in forgetfulness of the analysis; her eyes glimmered more moistly, although she said nothing more than this: "Be to my brother, who loves you inexpressibly, as he has loved no other yet,—O be to him everything! My mother recognizes your influence. Draw him,—I will speak it out!—especially draw him off from playing deeply!" He could hardly, for his confusion, asseverate the "Yes," when Rabette came running in with the almost unsuitably accented tidings, that the mother was coming. Probably she had seen that Rabette was alone. Albano parted from the pair with abrupt wishes of a pleasant journey, and forgot, in the flurry, to answer in the affirmative Rabette's request for a visit. The mother, meeting him, ascribed his ardor to a brother's emotion at taking leave. While he hastened through the wealth of the season, he thought of the rich future,—of Liana's stammering and veiling: do not fair female souls, like those angels before the prophet, need only two wings to lift them, but four to veil themselves? The sea of life ran in high waves, but everywhere it flashed on its broad surface, and sparks dropped from the oar. 63. CYCLE.Ah, on the morning following this, the evening redness of a whole heaven had grown, to be sure, into a sad cloudiness. For Liana walked before the youth in such long, thick veils. Any mystery of trouble throws up cold cloister-walls between hearts drawn near together; On Saturday, when the Minister's lady and the pair of friends were about to start for BlumenbÜhl, in order to behold the burial and the consecration, the Captain came to the Count, not only full of joy,—for he had gladly, out of love to Rabette, helped make for Liana, not wings indeed, but still wing-shells, and out of a threefold interest for his friend, helped tighten the fly-work,—but also full of anxiety. But, ye muses! why in the poetical world are there rarely any occurrences which have such manifold motives as often in the actual? His anxiety was simply this, lest his father should arrive earlier than his mother went off,—for he knew the Minister. The latter intended, according to his letters, to arrive on Monday or Tuesday (Saturday at the latest); but this might—as Froulay loved to let his friends swim in the broad play-room of expectation—still more certainly threaten that he—because, like the Basle clocks, At three o'clock in the afternoon, our friends went to walk beneath the loveliest sky. Everything had been already arranged; Charles proposed to follow to-morrow; Albano not till Monday, after the general return (his tender motives, and the hard ones of others, decided it); and there floated through the whole vaulted blue no cloud but Charles's concern lest the second depositing of the princely corpse might draw his father along as early as to-day,... when he suddenly cried out, with a curse: "There he comes!" He knew him by the tiger-spotted |