Titan: A Romance Volume I Part 12

At no hour of his life was Albano's love so tender and holy as at this, or his sympathy so fervent. Fortunately, the Minister's lady was all the time looking out of the window into the garden, and did not perceive his emotion. At last she went on to point out Liana's harmonica, which stood near; then was his heart too full and visible; he started with the hasty words, _he had never yet heard one_, and stepped before it. Ah, he was fain to touch something whereon her finger had so often rested. He laid his hand, as upon a sacred thing, on those prayer-bells which had so often trembled under hers for pious thoughts; but they gave him no answer, till the Lector, a connoisseur in the A B C as in the technology of all arts, gave him in three words the indispensable instructions. Now did he drink into his soul, full of sighs and struggles, the first tri-clang, the first plaintive syllables of that mother-tongue of the pining breast,--ah, of those _mutes'-bells_ which the inner man shakes in his hand, because he has no tongue! and his veins beat wildly like wings which wafted him up from the ground, and bore him to a higher prospect than that which opens into the last joy or the last agony. For in strong men great pains and joys become overlooking heights of the whole road of life.

I know not whether many readers will believe the fault _possible_, which he now _actually_ committed. The Minister's wife, in the course of conversation, had very naturally--_apropos_ of Liana and Roquairol--fallen upon the proposition that no school is more necessary to children than that of patience, because, either the will must be broken in childhood or the heart in old age. Ah, she and her daughter themselves knelt, indeed, full of patience, before fate, whether loading or armed; although the mother's was a pious patience, which looked more to Heaven than to the wound, Liana's a loving patience, which resigns itself to new sorrows as to old sicknesses, as a queen does on coronation-day to the pains and friction of her heavy jewelry, and like a child that sweetly sleeps away and more sweetly dreams away his scars.

But Zesara, who like a wolf fled the very clanking of a chain, and new, exasperated, against everything of the kind, from the light carcanets and chains of knighthood even to the heavy harbor-chains which obstruct the pa.s.sage of youth out into the laboring sea, could not restrain himself, especially with that heart of his so full of emotions, from saying, in too great warmth: "Man must defend himself; sooner would I, in a free struggle, empty all my veins on the stirring battle-field than shed one drop from them bound to the rack."--"Patience," said the Minister's lady, who was full of it, "contends and conquers also, only in the heart."--"Dear Count," said Augusti, alluding not merely to Arria,[67] "the women must always say to the men, 'It does not hurt!'"

I have not till now had an opportunity to make known this fault of Albano, that he never spoke his opinion more freely and strongly than just then when he had reason to fear losing one or two heavens of his life by the stake; in cases of less danger he could be more yielding.

Although, therefore, he observed that the Minister's lady was painfully reminded thereby of the muscular, but also hard-grasping, hand of her wild son,--or much rather _for the very reason_ that he observed it, and because he proposed to be armor-bearer to this future friend,--he stuck to his opinion, threw all instruments for breaking in the young manly will out of the school-rooms into the street, and said, in his strongly relieved style: "The Goths preferred never to send their children to school, in order that they might remain lions. Even if maidens must be soaked in milk a day before planting them out in the civil world, boys, however, must be stuck, like apricots, with the stony sh.e.l.l in the earth, because they will soon enough throw off and forsake the stone by their rooting and growth."--The Lector, with his fine openness,--a crystal vase with golden edge,--remarked, with a gentle reprimand of Alban's impetuosity, that at least the way in which they had severally adduced their proofs was one of those very proofs themselves; and women needed and showed more patience with persons, and we more with things.

The Minister's wife, who imagined herself listening more to her son than to his friend, was silent, and stepped nearer to the window. Amid these war-troubles the evening had wheeled her resplendent moon up over the eastern mountains, and the streams of her light flowed in at this moment, from all quarters, through the whole garden that lay stretched out before the eastern room, and lay in its broad alleys and flower-circles, when all at once a little round house appeared through upshooting water-jets, kindled into triumphal arches by the moon-light, and stood, even to its Italian trellised roof, all in a blaze. With soft emotion, the Minister's lady said: "On that water-house stands my Liana; she is trying the evaporation of the fountain; the physician promises himself much therefrom. And Providence grant it!"

But the agitated Zesara, with all his sharp eyes, could not, however, in the full dazzling light of the level moon, and behind the quivering nunnery-grate of confined silver-or lymphatic-veins, individualize anything at this moment from the glimmering Eden, except an undistinguishable, still, white form. But it was enough for a weeping and burning heart. "Thou angel of my youthful dreams," thought he, "may it be thou! I greet thee with a thousand woes and joys. Ah! can there then be sorrows in thee, thou heavenly soul!" And it came over him, that if she were here in the room, with her afflicted and enchanting form, she would melt his whole being with sympathy, and he could now have cast off the embrace of the brother, by whose hand fate had closed her soft eyes in that long dream.

The stifling air of the most painful sympathy caused him to look away, and turn round, and fasten on the open Messiah those eyes whose drops he would not show; but the recollection that he was repeating her last reading-pleasure made them fall only hotter and thicker. Suddenly something darkening, which fluttered down before the window like a falling raven, directed his look again to Liana, over whom stood a fully illuminated little cloud, as if it were a risen or descending saintly halo. Immortals seemed to dwell thereupon as on Ossian's clouds, awaiting their sister; and when she at length moved and slowly sank down into the water-house, seemed it not then as if her garment of flesh were pa.s.sing into the earth, and her peaceful spirit into the cloud?

Here Augusti, as the mother had to follow the returning invalid into the sick-chamber, gave him the hint for departure, which he took willingly; his love contented itself for the present with solitude, and with the hope of another meeting. Young love and young birds need, in the beginning, only to be _warmed_ by _covering_, and not till later to be _nourished_.

But a paraclete or comforter whispered softly in the ear of the youth's heart as they departed: to-morrow thou wilt see her only a few steps from thee in the garden! And that is very easily brought about; he has only, at evening-twilight to-morrow, when the evening-walker makes use of her eye-medicine, to repair to the alley, and from among the leaves look freely up into the magic countenance, and then drink in the whole doctrine of felicity in one paragraph, one pa.s.sage, breath, moment;--but what a prospect!

The Count begged the Lector not to sit long with the busy Minister. When they found him again, he hardly--behind a pile of public doc.u.ments--remembered, after considerable (perhaps counterfeited) thought, that they had been there, and deeply regretted that they were going away. Ah, the comforter is whispering all the evening and all night,--To-morrow, Albano!

35. CYCLE.

As the juggling night threw our Albano from one side and vision to the other,--for not the near past but the near future wearies us with rehearsals of our waking acts, with dreams,--how glad he was, in the morning, that his fairest future had not yet gone by. Two very Eulenspiegelish wishes often lodge in man: I often form the wish with my whole heart, that some real joy of mine, e. g. a master-work, a pleasure-journey, &c., might yet at last have an end; and, secondly, the wish above referred to, that one or another pleasure might stay away a little longer.

The evening came with the greatest pleasure of all, when Zesara, like Le Gentil starting for the East Indies, set off for the eastern park of the Minister, to observe the transit of his evening star Venus; but only through the moon. Before the lighted windows of the palace he stopped among the people, and reflected, whether it were quite allowable thus to run into the garden; but really, had he been turned back, his thirsting heart would have carried him in through a whole Clerus and Diplomatic Congress posted before the gate. Boldly he strode along through the noisy palace before a barricade of tackled carriages, turned the iron lattice-gate, and stepped hastily into the nearest leafy avenue. Here, attended by a torch-dance of gleaming hopes, he went to and fro, but his eye was a telescope, and his ear was a hearing-trumpet. The green avenue wound up over the garden till it grew into another near the bath-house; into this he entered so as not to meet the blind one, or rather her attendant.

But nothing came. To be sure he had not, like the moon,--as was, indeed, to have been expected of him,--come a half-hour too late, but in fact a half-hour too early. The moon, that star which leads wise men full of incense to the adoration, at last let fall broad, long, silver-leaves, like festive tapestry, into Liana's eastern room,--the Madonna on the palace was arrayed in the halo and nun's-veil of her rays,--the Minister's wife stood already at the window,--Nature played the larghetto[68] of an enchanted evening in deeper and deeper strains,--when Albano caught nothing further except a smaller one, made up of mere tones, which came from the bath-house, the pleasure-seat of all his wishes, and which, dying, would fain breathe its last with the spring-day. But he could not guess who played it. One might have inferred that it was Roquairol, merely because he afterward, as I shall relate, according to the April-like nature of his musical temperament, sprang up out of pianissimo into a too wild fortissimo. The brother, exiled by his father, could at least in the bath-house see and console his dear sister, and show her his love and his penitence; although his stormy repentance makes a second necessary, and at last became only a more pious repet.i.tion of his fault.

Although Albano's fancy was a retina of the universe, on which every world sharply pictured itself, and his heart the sounding-board of the sphere-music, in which each revolved, yet neither the evening nor the larghetto, with their rays and tones, could pierce through the high waves which expectation as well as anxiety (both obscure nature and art) dashed up within him. The bank of the fountains is entwined around with a green ring of orange-trees, whose blossoms, in the East, according to the Selam-cipher, signify _hopes_; but really one after another was short-lived, when he thought of the cold, clear mother, or of his perhaps vain waiting. The fountains leaped not yet,--he kept plucking away, like a premature autumn, more and more of the broad fan-leaves from his blooming Spanish wall, and still, through all his widening windows, saw no Liana coming down along the pebbly path (which was impossible, for the very reason that she had been long standing in the bath-house with her brother), and he began to despair of her appearance, when the brother suddenly stormed into the above-mentioned fortissimo, and all the fountains sent up before the moon murmuring wreaths of sparkling silver. Albano looked out....

Liana stood up there in the glimmer of the moon, behind the fluttering water. What an apparition! He tore asunder the twigs of the foliage before his face, and gazed, uncovered and breathless, upon the sacredly beautiful form! As Grecian G.o.ds stand and look unearthly before the torch, so shone Liana before the moon, overshadowed with the myriad glancing reflections of the silvery rainbows, and the blest youth saw irradiated the young, open, still Mary's-brow, upon which no vexation and no effort had as yet cast a wave,--and the thin, tender, scarcely-arched line of the eyebrows,--and the face like a perfect pearl, oval and white,--and the loosely flowing ringlets lying on the May-flowers over her heart,--and the delicate grace's-proportions, which, like the white attire, seemed to exalt the form,--and the ideal stillness of her nature, which made her place, instead of an arm, only a finger upon the bal.u.s.trade, as if the Psyche only floated over the lily-bells of the body, and neither shook nor bowed them,--and the large blue eyes, which, while the head sank a little, opened upward with such inexpressible beauty, and seemed to lose themselves in dreams and in distant plains reflecting the evening-twilight's glow!

Thou too fortunate man!--to whom the only visible G.o.ddess, Beauty, appears so suddenly, in her omnipotence, and attended by all her heavens! The present, with its shapes, is unknown to thee,--the past fades away,--the near tones seem to steal from the depth of distance,--the unearthly apparition overflows and overpowers with splendor the mortal breast!

Ah, why must a deep, cold cloud steal through this pure and lofty heaven? Ah, why didst thou not find the heavenly one earlier or later?--and why must she herself remind thee of her sorrow?

For Liana--into whose veiled eye only a strong light could trickle through--was looking for the moon, which was a little overhung by its own aurora, and she turned her head around gropingly, because she thought a linden-top concealed it;--and this uncertain inclination so suddenly pictured to him her misfortune in a thousand colors! A quick pang pressed his eyes, so that tears and sparks darted from them, and pity cried within him: "O thou innocent eye! why art thou veiled? Why from this grateful, good soul is May and the whole creation taken away?

And she sends round in vain a look of love after her mother and her companion, and--O G.o.d! she knows not where they stand."

But the curtain of the moon soon floated aside, and she smiled serenely on its radiance, as the blind Milton in his immortal song smiles upon the sun, or as an inhabitant of earth smiles upon the earliest splendor of the next life.

A nightingale, who hitherto, while hopping after a glow-worm among the distant flowers, had responded to the tones in the chamber only with single game-calls and complemental notes of joy, flew nearer to Liana, and the winged miniature-organ drew out at once all its flute-stops, so that Liana, forgetting her blindness, looked down, and Albano started back alarmed, as if she were looking upon him. Then was her pale face, upon the cheeks of which a light redness played, as upon the white pink, tenderly suffused with the faint red bloom of emotion under the mingling tones of the brother and of the nightingale,--the eyelids quivered oftener over the gleaming eyes,--and at last the gleam became a quiet tear,--it was not a tear of pain nor of joy, but that soft tear in which the longing of the heart overflows; as, in spring, overfull twigs, though unwounded, weep.

There dwells in man a rough, blind cyclops, who in our storms always begins to speak, and gives us fatal counsel. Frightfully at this moment, in Zesara, did the whole awakened energy of his bosom bestir itself,--that wild spirit which drags us on condor's wings to the brink of the precipice; and the cyclops cried aloud in him: "Rush out,--kneel before her,--tell her thy whole heart;--what though thou then art lost forever, if thou hast only caught one sound of this soul!--and then cool and sacrifice thyself in the cold waters at her feet." Verily he thirsted for the fresh basin in which the fountains leaped back. But ah!

before this gentle, this afflicted and pure one? "No," said the good spirit in him, "wound her not again, as her brother did. O spare her! be silent, respectful: then thou lovest her."

Here he stepped out on the illuminated earth as into a heavenly hall, and took the open sun-path, but softly, along before the fountains. As he pa.s.sed by her, all at once the arcade of drops, which had half latticed her round, collapsed, and Liana stood cloudless, as a pure Luna, without her cloud-court, in the deep blue of heaven; a s.h.i.+ning lily[69] from the next world, which, to herself, is a sign that she is soon to pa.s.s thither. O his heart, full of virtue, felt with trembling the nearness of virtue in another; and, with all signs of the deepest veneration, he walked along by the quiet being, who could not observe them.

Not till, at every step, a heaven had escaped from him, and he at last had none but the one above his head, did he become quite gentle; and then he was glad that he had not been bolder. How the earth now s.h.i.+nes to him, how the heaven of suns approaches him, how his heart loves! O, at some future time after yet many years, when this _glowing_ rose-garden of rapture already lies far behind thy back, how softly and magically will it, when thou turnest round and lookest toward it, glimmer after thee as a _white_ rose-parterre of memory!

FOOTNOTES:

[63] The t.i.tle of a man, among the Romans, who walked behind the corpse and acted out the looks and character which the deceased had when living.--_Pers._, Sat. 3.

[64] As Solomon says, "Desire shall fail."--TR.

[65] It had formerly refused to give the Spanish knight the hand of the Princess; but I have had the promise of satisfactory doc.u.ments on this weighty article.

[66] Dian's family reside at Lilar.

[67] Roman Arria, who stabbed herself to show her Poetus how to die.--TR.

[68] A movement in music a little more than two degrees quicker than adagio.--TR.

[69] It used to be believed that a lily lying in the singing-seats signified the death of the person to whom it belonged.

SEVENTH JUBILEE.

ALBANO'S PECULIARITY.--THE INTRICATE INTERLACINGS OF POLITICS.--THE HEROSTRATUS OF GAMING-TABLES.--PATERNAL "MANDATUM SINE CLAUSULA."--GOOD SOCIETY.--MR. VON BOUVEROT.--LIANA'S SPIRITUAL AND BODILY PRESENCE.

36. CYCLE.

If the Feudal-Provost Von Hafenreffer had no existence except as a creature of my fancy, I should certainly proceed with my history, and tell the world, as matter of fact (and the whole romance-writing set would go to the death upon it[70]), that Albano was sitting there the next morning, blind and deaf, behind the broad bandage which the bandage-maker Cupid had bound before his eyes,--that he had not been able to count more than _five_, except at evening, when he cast up the strokes of the clock, in order, afterward, to run in a magic circle round the Froulay water-house, like one who sets out to _charm the fire_ which glides snake-like after him,--that he had, through those two blow-holes[71] wherewith sentimental whales blubber right out in bookstores, spouted out considerable streams,--for the rest, had never looked at another book (except some leaves in the book of Nature), nor at another human being (except a blind man),--"and to this my surgeon's certificate of erotic wound-fevers (I would say at the conclusion of my lies) Nature manifestly sets her privy seal."

That she does not, says Hafenreffer; these are nothing but confounded lies; the case is quite otherwise, thus:--

Zesara never stole a second time into Froulay's garden; a proud blush of shame darted over him at the very thought of the painful blush with which he should come in contact, for the first time, with a mistrustful or inquiring eye.

But in this wise the dear soul remained hid from him until her recovery, as the May-month did from her; and he silently tormented himself with reckonings up of her sufferings and doubts of her cure. He was ashamed to be taking any pleasure during her period of sadness, and forbade himself the enjoyment of spring and the visiting of Lilar: ah! he knew too, full well, that the loving spring and Lilar, where she had received so many joys and the last wound, would make his heart too ungovernable and too full.

His thirst for knowledge and worth, his pride, which bade him stand in a glorious light with his father and his two friends, impelled him onward in his career. With all his native fire he threw himself upon jurisprudence, and took no longer any other walks than between the lecture-room and his study-chamber. To this zeal he was driven by a characteristic pa.s.sion for completeness; everything imperfect was to him almost a physical horror; he was shocked at defective collections, broken sets of monthly magazines, lawsuits left to sleep, libraries, because he could never read them out, people who died as aspirants for office, or in the midst of building-plans, or without a rounded system of thought, or as journeymen clothiers' boys or shoemakers' apprentices, and even Augusti's flute-playing, which he only took up _by the way_. It was the same energy which made him hold the bridle of Psyche's winged horse tight, and stick the rowel of the spur into him; even when a child he had experimented on this kind of force, in the holding of his breath, or in the painful pressure of a sore spot,--and, by Heaven! he now, figuratively, did both again. There dwelt in him a mighty will, which merely said to the serving-company of impulses, Let it be! Such a will is not stoicism, which rules merely over internal _malefactors_, or _knaves_, or _prisoners of war_, or _children_, but it is that genially energetic spirit, which conditions and binds the healthy _savages_ of our bosoms, and which says more royally to itself, than the Spanish regent to others, I, the king!

Ah, of course (how could his warm soul do otherwise?) he often stood, at midnight, before the breezy window, and looked tearfully at the white Madonna of the ministerial palace, silvered by the pure moon. Yes, in the daytime, he often sketched in his souvenir (it happened to be a fountain and a form behind it, nothing more), or he read in the Messiah (naturally going on with the canto which he had already begun at the house of the Minister's lady), or he informed himself about nervous maladies, (was he, perhaps, with all his studying, guarded against them?) or he let the fire of his fingers run over the strings,--nay, he would have plucked nothing but roses, although with thorns, had this been their blooming season.

And this sighing, stifled soul must shut itself up! O, he began already to fear every key of the harpsichord would become a stylus, the instrument itself a box of letters, and all actions treacherously legible words. For he must keep silent. The first young love, like that of business people (those of the Electorate of Saxony excepted), needs no instruments of speech, at most only a portable inkstand and pen. Only worldly people, who repeat their declarations of love quite as often as the players, are in a situation--and on similar grounds--to publish them, just as the players do. But in the holier season of life the image of the most beloved soul is hung, not in the parlor and antechamber, but in the dim, silent oratory: only with loved ones do we speak of loved ones. Ah, it was with reluctance that he even heard others speak of his saint; and he often stole (with the altar of incense in his bosom) out of the room where people were carrying round for her a censer more full of coal-smoke than of frankincense.

37. CYCLE.

They were expecting every day in Pest.i.tz the return of the German gentleman M. de Bouverot, who had been in Haarhaar, putting the last retouching hand to the almost sketched marriage contract between Luigi and a Haarhaar princess, Isabella. Augusti was not partial to him, and even said Bouverot had no _honnetete_;[72] and related the following, but with the soft irony of a man of the world:

Some years before, Bouverot had been sent by the court of Haarhaar[73]

to the Pope at Rome, in relation to certain canonical difficulties; just at the time when Luigi also made the princely procession to Rome, together with his Romish indictions.[74] Now Haarhaar, which in truth already went _chapeau-bas_ with the princely hat of Hohenfliess, and had every possible officinal prospect of wearing it, would not, for this very reason, present the appearance of looking with cold eyes on the extinction of the race of Hohenfliess, the more, as the very male support of the line, Luigi, even in his first years, was not a hero of any great nervous significance. Nay, it must needs be a matter of some consequence to the court of Haarhaar that the good thin autumn-flowerage should return, if possible, _otherwise_ than it went out; and even on such grounds it privily instructed the German gentleman to rule and watch over all his pleasures and pains as _maitre de plaisirs_,--especially with _maitresses de plaisirs_,--in such a manner as to give perfect satisfaction in this respect. Meanwhile, if our princely abiturient[75] had started pure as a foetus, unhappily he was brought back ground down to a _punctum saliens_, especially as, by sundry caprioles and other leaps through the hoop of pleasure, he was spoiled for the leap into the knight's saddle. It may be possible that the German gentleman was too sanguine in his expectations of the rejuvenescence of the Prince; yes, he may have imitated the youth-restoring, wondrous essence of the Marquis d'Aymar,[76] whereby an innocent old lady, who anointed herself with the elixir more than her years required, was, through the excessive renovation, reduced to a little child. In short, by this crusade under the Knight of the Cross, Bouverot, the princely seat of Hohenfliess--as is often the consequence of crusades--will be left open at the proper time, and Haarhaar will seat itself thereon.