Titan: A Romance Volume I Part 24

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."[164] The sarcastic liveliness of his pantomime chilled the Captain, by having the appearance of a somewhat stricter observation, more than did the composed face of the Lector, who from that very circ.u.mstance took everything more sharply into his still eye.

The good Schoppe had one fault which no Albano forgives, namely, his intolerance toward the "female saintly images of isingla.s.s," 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 t.i.tular-librarian overheard him, "O I was very little understood by the world in my youth." He said nothing further; but let anybody shake, in jest, a baker's dozen[165] of hornets, a basket of crabs, a mug of wood-pismires, all at once over the Librarian's skin, and take a flying observation of the effect of the stinging, nipping, biting; then can one, in a measure at least, conceive what a quivering, swelling, and irritation there was in him, so soon as he heard the above-mentioned phraseology. "Mr. Captain!" he began, drawing in a long breath, "I can stand through a good deal on this rusty, stupid earth,--famine, pestilence, courts, the stone, and fools from pole to pole; but your phraseology surpa.s.ses the strength of my shoulders. Sir Captain, you may, most certainly, use this rhetoric with perfect justice, because you, as you say, are not understood. But, O heavens! O devils! I hear, in fact, thirty thousand young men and maidens, from one circulating-library to another, all with inflated breast, saying and groaning round and round, that n.o.body understands them, neither their grandfather nor their G.o.d-parents, nor the conrector, when, in fact, the wrapping-paper,[166] commonplace pack does not itself understand. But the young man means by this merely a maiden, and the maiden a young man; these can appreciate each other. Out of love will I undertake, as out of potatoes, to serve up fourteen different dishes; let one just shear off, as they do off of the bears in Gottingen, its beastly hair, and no Blumenbach would any longer recognize it.

"Mr. Von Froulay, I have somewhat often compared this cursed exaltation of souls, merely from low motives, with the English horsetails, which also always stand pointing to heaven, only because their sinews have been cut. Must not one be mad, when one hears every day, and reads every day, how the commonest souls, the very doggerels and trumpeters' pieces of Nature, think themselves exalted by love above all people, like cats that fly with hogs' bladders buckled on to them; how they rendezvous in the hare's form and emporium of love, the other world, as on a Blocksberg, and how, on this finch-ground, in this theatrical green-room (or dressing-room, which then becomes the opposite), they drive their business until they are coupled. Then it's all over; fancy and poesy, which now should be to them for the first time serviceable, are caught!

They run away from them like lice from the dead, although on these the hair continues to sprout out. They shudder at the next world; and when they become widowers and widows, they do their courting very well without the hogs' bladders, and without the decoy-feathers, and the folding screen of the next world. Such a thing as this now, Sir Captain, provokes one, and then, in the heat, the just must suffer with the unjust, as your ears unfortunately attest!"

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 friends.h.i.+p 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 pa.s.sion for starting up behind every action a long plan, his thirsty curiosity for genuine historical sources, at court and in the city, and his coldness toward philosophy, so dried up the overstrained image which Albano had formed of him, that it wrinkled up and grew full of rents. Such dissimilarities never rise among cultivated men to open feuds; but they secretly put upon the inner man one piece of armor after another, till he stands there in solid mail, and strikes out.

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 s.h.i.+eld 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 friends.h.i.+p 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 s.e.x. But this only made the matter worse.

For, in matters of love, Charles was to him the higher fire-wors.h.i.+pper, 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 a.s.signed 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 friends.h.i.+p, 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. G.o.d 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 Sat.u.r.day, because the Minister was coming. That hope, this intelligence, the prospect of less favorable circ.u.mstances, his going to Lilar,--all this decided him in the purpose of s.n.a.t.c.hing 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 Sat.u.r.day, 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,[167] Mr. Von Bouverot.

Dian had sent him four heavenly copies from Rome; these he opened with dry, artistic palate. Liana received the Count again as ever. Was, perhaps, Raphael's _Madonna della Sedia_, in whose heaven-descended palladium her tender soul was absorbed, the seal-keeper of her holiest mystery? The all-forgetting artistic pa.s.sion became her so gracefully!

Her optic nerves had become, by her long painting, like delicate feelers, which closed fast around lovely forms. Certain female forms, like this one, stirred up her whole soul. For she had, in childhood, sketched in her inner heaven s.h.i.+ning constellations of the heroines of romances, and in general of unseen women; great ideas of their spirit, their heavenly walk, their exaltation above all that she had ever seen; and she had felt equal shyness and longing to meet one such. Hence she went forth out of this colossal nympheum[168] of her fancy, so easily dazzled, and with such warm, heartfelt reverence, to meet pure female friends and the Countess Romeiro. Now certain pictures brought back these altar-pieces like copies. The good girl thought not of _this_, but her friend may well have done so, that one needed only to quicken into life the eyes of this loving, down-gazing Mary, and merely to warm these lips with tones, and then one had Liana.

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, and firm as a rock, and glowing and threatening, there stood the original at her side.

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 blus.h.i.+ng, 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 him into the adjoining apartment." On the way, he observed, that few works were executed with such magnificent freedom and bold abandon. In the room he unpacked a little bronze Satyr, against whom an overtaken nymph is defending herself. "Divine!" said Bouverot, and held the group by a thread, in order not to rub off the rust. "Divine! I set the Satyr against the Christ!" Few have even a moderate idea of the amazement of my hero, when he saw the critic set virtue and vice at once at a round table, without any quarrel for precedency.

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 G.o.ds 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[169] was originally a church with church-music, until both were left out, and the pure music retained. Bouverot had the regard for pure form in so high a degree, that not only the s.m.u.ttiest, most immoral subject, but even the most pure and devout, could not contaminate his enjoyment; like slate, he stood the two proofs of heating and freezing, without undergoing any change.

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 gra.s.sy 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 tender bosom, and with a full rose; she looked upon our lover so simply, her voice was so sisterly, and all was such pure, careless love! She told him how delighted she was with the scenes of his youth, and with country life, and how Rabette would conduct her everywhere; and particularly to the consecration discourse, which her father-confessor, Spener, was to deliver on Sunday. She talked herself into a glow, with picturing how greatly the great breast of the old man would be moved by the dirge and paean over the ashes of his princely friend.

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[170]

of the bells, was wanting. Rabette was just going to fill a gla.s.s down at the fountains, for the sake of leaving them alone; but the Count, from manly awkwardness about entering at once into a ruse, stepped courteously before her and fetched it himself. Hardly, at length, had the lovely, pleasing creature laid, with a sigh, her delicate hands on the brown bells, when Rabette said to her, she would go down into the alley to hear how it sounded at a distance. As if at the painful sunstroke of a too sudden and great pleasure, his heart started up, he heard the triumphal car of love rolling afar off, and he was fain to leap into it and rattle away into life. The credulous Liana took the withdrawal for a veil which Rabette wished to throw over her eye, sweetly breaking into tears at music, and immediately removed her hands from the bells; but Rabette kissed her entreatingly, pressed back her hands upon them, and ran down. "The true heart!" said Liana; but this pure, guileless confidence in her friend touched him, and he could not say, Yes.

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 suns.h.i.+ne, 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 the downward gazing form; all at once she lifted upon him that holy eye, full of sympathy, but she suddenly cast it down before the sun-glance of his.

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 pa.s.sion 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 s.n.a.t.c.hed her hand away from the keys, and cried, with the heart-rending tone of his longing, "O G.o.d, 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 n.o.ble being. You are like my Charles, but quite as pa.s.sionate. 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 Blumenbuhl. She went on with difficulty before the delighted lover; her hand often lay for a long time on the dissonance in forgetfulness of the a.n.a.lysis; 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, a.s.severate 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; that is manifest. Hitherto accidents of various kinds had bent aside some flowers which Liana had drawn as a veil over her heart (as the ground stories in cities prevent looking in at the windows by flowers and grape-vines), and had disclosed the darkest corner of the background, in which something like the reverse side of a bust hung, which, turned round, would perhaps resemble the Count. But as yet the image hangs with its face toward the wall. However, a female heart is often like marble; the cunning stone-cutter strikes a thousand blows, without the Parian block showing the line of a crack; but all at once it breaks asunder into the very form which the cunning stone-cutter has so long been hammering after.

On Sat.u.r.day, when the Minister's lady and the pair of friends were about to start for Blumenbuhl, 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-sh.e.l.ls_, 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 (Sat.u.r.day 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,[171] he always struck an hour too early, and came in the hope of catching his people at some right odious thing--might at any minute come driving in at the court-yard gate. If he came driving furiously up this forenoon, or at the moment when the servant was lifting the daughter into the carriage, and the mother already sat therein, then was this much certain, by a thousand conclusions from observance, that both would have to go up into the house again; that he would order all trunks and boxes unpacked, and, as to the daughter of the Provincial Director, after her ten thousand entreaties,--although her very second would freeze upon her lips,--he would, in a friendly manner, with quite jocose equanimity, let her be carried home, as a solitary member of a conclave, in a close carriage.

Certain men--and he is their generalissimo--know no sweeter cordial for themselves, than to put under lock and key, before the very nose of their friends, the garden-gates of some Arcadia or other, for which they have not drawn up for them a map of the route and region, and judicially to seal them up. Besides, just before a pleasure party, most parents secrete gall; if Froulay, in fact, could absolutely prevent one, that was as much for him as if he were himself returning home from one red and gay.

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 post-team, and still more by the long line of horses tackled on tandem. A purgatorial moment of life! The carriage rattled swiftly down the street; the head horses streamed forth in a longer and quite disorderly train; the people stared. At last the pulling distance became an acre long,--that seemed quite impossible,--when Albano's eagle eye discovered that there was no leather connection between the post-train, and at last, that in fact there was merely a strange churl, with two horses, accidentally riding along before the carriage, and at this moment they saw the open triumphal car, with the female trinity slowly moving up the Blumenbuhl heights, and the blended tulip-bed of the three parasols glimmered long after them.

FOOTNOTES:

[163] Basa Metzia, c. 4, m 10.

[164] The _head_ of a bandage is a technical term in surgery.--TR.

[165] The German word _mandel_ (literally _almond_) means a collection of _fifteen_. There being no one word expressing it collectively in English, _baker's dozen_ (which means thirteen) seems to come near enough.--TR.

[166] See Dr. Franklin's verses, comparing different cla.s.ses of people to different kinds of paper. Sparks's edition of Franklin's Works, Vol. II. p. 161.--TR.