Titan: A Romance Volume II Part 2

How he extorted from her the promise to renounce her Albano forever is a mystery watched and hidden by the Great Sphinx of the oath which she swore to him,--only the far-off man, who lost the fair soul, had from the observatory of the suns gazed at the bright church-windows and discovered behind them disturbing apparitions, without knowing that they were true, and decided his life.

She went back again coldly across the meadows and mountains of old days, which had once been so bright, to the dwelling of the old man, who dismissed her with greater reverence than had marked his reception of her. On the night-journey she was mute, and wrapped up in herself, and exchanged not a word with her maiden. Her parents still awaited her; the mother looked anxiously out into the night and into the future. At length the living carriage rolled into the court. Great and mighty as one who, having been executed in innocence, starts up into life again before the dissector and, regarding him as the judge on high, speaks with unfettered freedom and gladness, so did she come into the presence of her parents: like the cold marble of a G.o.d's form, she stood there, pale, tearlessly cold and calm. She knew it not, and she willed it not, but she soared high over life, even beyond a child's love,--she could not kiss her mother so fervently as once,--she stood undismayed before her bl.u.s.tering father, and said, then, without a tear, without emotion, without a blush, and with soft voice, "I have this night renounced my love before G.o.d. The pious father has convinced me." "And had the man better reasons for it _in petto_ than I?" said Froulay. "Yes," said she; "but I have sworn in the Temple to keep silence until time discloses all. Now I pray you by the All-just One only to allow me to give him back in person his letters, and tell him that I cease to be his, not, however, from fickleness, but from duty; I entreat this, dear parents. Then may G.o.d dispose of the rest, and I shall never be disobedient to you again." The wretched father, puffed up still more by this triumph, would fain have made this last prayer of the dying heart bitter to her, and even insinuated a flying suspicion of the motive of the interview; but the mother, smitten in her fair soul by the fairest, interceded warmly, and contemptuously and arbitrarily decided in the affirmative. Nor did Liana seem to take much notice of the paternal No. When he had gone, the mother, weeping for bliss, s.n.a.t.c.hed the silent form to her embrace; but Liana wept not so easily upon her bosom as once out of love, whether it was that her heart was too much exalted, or that it came back just as slowly into the old condition as it went out of it. "Receive thanks, daughter,"

said the mother; "I shall now make thy life more happy." "It was happy enough. I was to die; therefore I must needs love," said she. So she went smiling into the arms of sleep, with hard-beating heart. But in dream it appeared to her as if she were sinking away in a swoon, losing her mother, and struggling up again fearfully out of the grasp of flying death, and then weeping for joy that she lived again. Thereupon she awoke, and the glad drops, softly released by the dream, still flowed from her open eyes, and softened like a thawing-wind the stiff soil of life.

Ye great or blessed spirits above us! When man here, under the poor clouds of life, throws away his fortune, because he prizes it less than his heart, then is he as blessed and as great as you. And we are all worthy of a holier earth, because the sight of the sacrifice exalts, and does not oppress us, and because we shed burning tears, not from pity, but from the deepest, holiest love and joy.

81. CYCLE.

Warmly and brilliantly did the sun, who today, like the unhappy one, was to be eclipsed, begin his morning race. Liana awoke on the burial-day of her love, not with yesterday's strength, but faint and languid, somewhat cheered, however, by the prospect of a return of her peaceful time. The mother, although herself sickly, pressed her, early in the morning, to her heart, in order to prove the pulse of the heart most precious to her. Liana looked affectionately and yearningly, with moist eye, into her moist eye a long time, and was silent. "What wilt thou?" asked her mother. "Mother, love me more now, as I am alone,"

said she. Then in her mother's presence she bound together all Albano's letters, without reading them, except the one in which he begs her brother for his love. She sported with her mother, as fate does with us and as poor parents do with their children, who at first give them bright, gay garments, because these are more easily dyed into dark ones.

Her mother sought gradually to take away from her her spiritual fantasies, the death-moss, as it were, which clung sucking to her green, young life. "Thou seest," said she, "how thy angel can err, since he approved thy love, which thou now condemnest." But she had an answer: "No, the pious father said, it had been right until the time when he told me the secret, and that the Bible says, one must forsake everything for love." Thus, then, does this poor creature, as they tell of the bird of Paradise, soar straight upward in heaven, until she drops down dead.

She manifested to her mother almost a feverish gayety,--a suns.h.i.+ne on the last day of the year. She said, how it refreshed her, that she could now speak freely with her dear mother of her former lovely days.

She portrayed to her Albano's great, glowing heart, and how he deserved the sacrifice, and the "pearly hours" which they had lived together.

"After all," said she, cheerfully, but in such a way that tears came into the hearer's eyes, "nothing of it has really pa.s.sed away.

Remembrances last longer than present reality, as I have conserved blossoms many years, but never fruits." Yes, there are tender female souls which intoxicate themselves only among the blossoms of the vineyard of joy, as others do only with the berries of the vine-hill.

The Lector's note arrived with the intelligence that Albano was awaiting her in Lilar.

Now, as the hour of interview drew so near, she grew more and more uneasy. "If I can only persuade him," said she, "that I have acted as an upright maiden!" Before exchanging her morning chamber for the mourning-carriage, she set all things to rights there for drawing, when she should return; she had, she said, had a very bad dream, but she hoped it would not come to pa.s.s.

With her work-basket on her arm, in which the letters lay, she stepped into the carriage, which they had to open, because its sultry air oppressed her. But the sultriness was the breath and atmosphere of her own spirit, and everything beautiful which met her became to her to-day a benumbing poison-flower. Fearfully she kept grasping and pressing the hand of her mother, because every cry, every form that darted by, fluttered over her like a rustling storm-bird; a crier, with his rough tone, cut across her nerves; they trembled more gently again, only when a pastor and his servant pa.s.sed by with the sick-cup for the evening drink of weary people. O, the fair way was long to her! She had so long to hold together with fainting powers the breaking heart, which was to speak so firmly and decidedly and distinctly with her beloved.

The sky was blue, and yet neither of them remarked that it was beginning to be dark without clouds, since the moon already stood with her night upon the sun. As they pa.s.sed over the woodland bridge into the living Lilar, where on all branches hung the old bridal-dresses of a decorated past, Liana said, with intense earnestness, to her mother: "For G.o.d's sake, not into the old castle of the dead!"[18] "But which way then? That is his rendezvous," said the mother. "Anywhere else,--into the Dream-temple. He sees us already; yonder he goes over the gates," said she. "G.o.d Almighty be with thee, and speak not long,"

said the weeping mother, as she went from her into the temple, in whose mirrors she could behold the parting of the innocent beings.

Albano came slowly along down through the walks; he had cleared his eye of tears and his heart of storms. O, how had he hitherto, like a long-tossed mariner, peered into his dark clouds, in order between their misty peaks to discover the mountain-peaks of a green continent!--that he was to-day to lose so much, namely all, his most mournful conclusions had not gone so far as that; nay, he maintained so much tranquillity, that he sent back overhead the little Pollux, who came dancing after, not with threats, but with presents.

At last he stood with quivering lips before the beloved, beautiful form, who, childlike, pale, trembling, and watching her work-basket, looked upon him a little, and then struggled with her sinking eyes.

Then his heart melted; the flood of old love rushed back high into his life. "Liana," said he, in the softest tone, and drops fell from his eyes, "art thou still my Liana? I am still the same as ever; and hast thou too not changed?" But she could not say no. A gash was made into the arteries of her life, and tears sprang up instead of blood. His good form, his familiar, brotherly voice stood again so near to her, and his hand held hers again, and yet all was over; a hot sun-glance flashed across her former flowery garden-life, and showed it in a melancholy illumination, but it lay far from her. "Let us," he went on, "be strong now at this singular meeting again. Tell me very briefly everything, why thou hast hitherto been so silent and done so. I have nothing to say,--then let all be forgotten." He had unconsciously raised her hand, but the hand pressed itself down and trembled withal.

"Dost thou tremble, or do I?" said he. "I, Albano," said she, "but not from any fault: I am true, O G.o.d, I am true even unto death!" He looked upon her with a wild, wondering look. "To you, to you I am so, but it is all over," she cried, confounded and confounding. "No," she added, commandingly, as he was accidentally on the point of going with her out of the perspective range of the Dream-temple,--"no, my mother wishes to see us from the Dream-temple yonder."

He grew red at the maternal espionage; his eye flashed into hers a certain resentment against the "you," and his hot looks wanted to draw out of her agitated face the delaying riddle. Necessity commanded strength; she began.

"Here"--she stammered, and could hardly raise the basket for trembling, "your letters to me!" He took them gently. "I have resigned you," she continued; "my parents are not to blame, although they did not like our love. There is a mystery, which concerns merely you and your happiness, that has constrained me to part from you and from every joy." "Do you wish your letters too?" said he. "My parents--" said she. "The mystery about me?" said he. "An oath binds me," said she. "Last night in the church at Blumenbuhl before the priest?" he asked. She covered her eyes with her hand and nodded slowly.

"O G.o.d!" cried he, weeping aloud, "is it thus with life and joy and all truth? So? How ye have lied"--he looked at his letters--"about eternal fidelity and love! Whom did you mean then, ye h.e.l.lish liars?" He flung them away. Liana was about to pick them up; he trod on them violently, and looked bitterly upon the affrighted one. Now he fell into a storm, and drew and poured out, like a water-wheel during the influx of the floods, his tumultuous, suffering breast, and ceased not his cruel pictures of his love, her weakness, her coldness, his pain, her former oaths, and her present violated one about his mysterious fortune, which he said he did not want at all. Her silence wrought him up to a wilder whirl. Her quick, intense breathing he heard not.

"Do not torment thyself. It is all impossible now," she answered, imploringly. "O," said he indignantly, "I will not re-change the change, for the Lector and the Pope would again change that!" He fell now into that induration and palsy of the heart which is peculiar to man; the stream of love hung as a frozen, jagged waterfall over the rocks.

"I did not think thou wert so hard," said she, and smiled strangely. "I am harder still," said he; "I speak as thou actest." "Leave off, leave off, Albano,--it grows so dark to me. O, I will instantly to my mother!" she cried suddenly. The two old black spiders, let down by Fate, stood again over her fair eyes and overspun them, busily spinning, with a closer and closer web; and over the golden strips of life already grew a gray mould.

"It is the solar eclipse," said he, ascribing the blindness to the faintly gleaming sickle of the quarter-sun. He saw overhead in the blue heaven the lunar lump cast like a gravestone into the pure sun. Not so much as a real shadow, but only enervated shadows lived in the uncertain gray light; the birds fluttered timidly around; cold shudders played like ghosts of the noonday hour in the little, faint l.u.s.tre which was neither sunlight nor moonlight. Gloomy, gloomy lay life before the youth; through the long black marble colonnade of the years sorrows came stalking on like panthers, and grew brightly spotted under the retreating sun-glances of the past.

"This is indeed very fitting for to-day," he continued; "such a sudden night without evening-twilight. Lilar must be covered up to-day. Look up at the moon,--how darkly it has rolled over the sun; once she too was our friend. O, make it still gloomier, utter night!" "Albano, forbear; I am innocent, and I am blind. Where is the temple and my mother?" she cried, moaning; the spiders had fast closed the wet, tearful eyes.

"By the Devil, it is the eclipse of the sun!" said he, and gazed into the blindly groping, timid face, and guessed all; but he could not weep, he could not console. The black tiger of the most cruel anguish hung clambering on his breast and carried him away. "No, no," said Liana, "I am blind, and I am innocent too."

Little Pollux, made happy by his presents, had led along a begging mute, who followed with the ringing mute's-bell. "The dumb man cannot say anything," said Pollux. Liana cried, "Mother, mother! my dream comes, the death-bell tolls."

The Minister's lady rushed out. "Your daughter," said Albano, "is blind again, and G.o.d send the father and the mother, and whoever is to blame for it, their retribution of misery." "What is the matter?" cried Spener, suddenly stepping out, who had previously seen the meeting, and had come to the mother. "A wretched maiden; your work too!" replied Albano.

"Farewell, unhappy Liana!" said he, and was about to depart; but stopped, and after gazing wildly on the beautiful, tortured countenance which wept with its blind eyes, he cried, "Dreadful!" and went away.

Long did he lie, up in the thunder-house, with his eyes buried in his arms, and when he at last, and quite late, without knowing where he was, roused himself, as from a dream, he saw the whole landscape illumined by a serene day, the suns.h.i.+ne unveiled and warm in the pure blue, and the close carriage with the blind one rolled rapidly across the woodland bridge. Then Albano sank down again on his arms.

NINETEENTH JUBILEE.

Schoppe's Office of Comforter.--Arcadia.--Bouverot's Portrait-painting.

82. CYCLE.

Now that Albano lived without love or hope; now that he had seen the polar-star of his life fall like a shooting-star into a wilderness still as death; now that every one of his actions and every recollection darted out a scorpion-sting, and he sent back Liana's letters, forsook Lilar, the house of the Doctor, the Lector, Liana's relatives, and the pious father; now that he directed his face, gradually growing pale, only to books and stars; men who know no higher sorrow than selfish sorrow must needs imagine that nothing weighs upon his bosom but the ruins and rubbish of the shattered air-castles of his hope and youthful love. But he was more n.o.bly unhappy and disconsolate: he was so, because he had for the first time made a human creature and the best of beings miserable,--his beloved blind! Into this abyss of his heart all neighboring fountains of sorrow flowed together. The smallest gayly-painted shards of his urn of fortune were as if shattered afresh, when he heard from day to day that the poor girl, although daily stationed in the bath-house before the healing fountains, was nevertheless brought back each time without a ray of light or hope, and that she now feared nothing more, lamented nothing more on this robbers' earth, than that death might perhaps close her eyes before they had seen her mother again.

O, the wound of conscience is no sear, and time cools it not with his wing, but merely keeps it open with his scythe! Albano called back to remembrance Liana's bitter entreaty for indulgence; and then it was no consolation to him, that, during that eclipse of the sun, he had not wished to sacrifice her eyes, but only her heart. In the burning-gla.s.s and magnifying-mirror of consequences fate shows us the light, playing worms of our inner man as grown-up and armed furies and serpents. How many sins pa.s.s through us unseen and with soft looks, like nightly robbers, because, like their sisters in dreams, they steal not out from the circle of the breast, and get no outward object to fall upon and strangle. The fair soul readily detects in an accident a sin. Only those hard stormers of heaven and earth before whose triumphal chariots there starts up beforehand a wagon-rampart full of wounds and corpses,--that is, the fathers of war, which, in the long course of history, ministers have oftener been than princes,--only these can calmly kindle all the volcanoes of earth, and let all their lava-torrents stream down, merely that they may have--fair prospects.

They manure Elysian fields into a battle-field, in order to raise therein a redder rose-bush for a mistress.

The first thing Albano did, when he arrived at the Doctor's house, was to trudge out of it down into the remote valley town, in order neither to see the suspected Lector, still less to hear daily the malicious Doctor Sphex upon the relapse of the blindness. Only the faithful Schoppe jogged off with him, especially as he, by a well-adapted course of behavior, had contrived to get up an opposition party against himself in the Sphex family, which could no longer suffer him in the house. The Librarian's warmth toward the Count had grown very much with the Lector's coldness, and on similar grounds. The bold march out to Lilar and the pa.s.sionate wildness of the youth had fastened him more closely to Albano's side. "I thought at first," said Schoppe, "the young man was coming to be nothing but an elderly one, when I saw him stalking along so to school. I often held the man in the moon--where notoriously, from an absence of thirst and atmosphere, there is nothing to drink--to be a greater tippler than he. But at last he strikes out.

A youth must not, like old Spener, represent everything in bird's-eye perspective, from the apex downward. He must, in the beginning, like incipients in authors' studies and painters' studios, make all lines a little too large, because the little ones come of themselves. There are thunder-steeds, but no thunder-a.s.ses and thunder-sheep; as, however, the tutors and lectors would be glad if there were, and would be glad to have such to drive along before them,--they who, like the billiard-markers, suffer no open fire in the pipe, but only one under cover."

Albano lived alone now among books. Liana's brother came to him seldom, and then ice-cold, and said nothing of the patient, although he always stayed for her sake. As he himself had once woven the first web of her blindness, he must, of course, especially with his _un_painted fire of love for his sister, have a real hatred for him who had drawn it over her again; so Albano thought, and gladly bore it as a punishment. So much the oftener did the Captain let himself be drawn to the German gentleman's, upon whose good graces he now, contrary to what was to be expected, always won. It is a question--that is to say, there can be no question--whether his talent and inclination for winding himself around the most unlike men was not mere coldness toward all hearts, all of which he only travels over, because he does not mean to dwell in any one.

Rabette, also, wrote the Count several bills of impeachment about the Captain's growing coolness. In one she even says, "Could I only see thee, in order for once to have some one who would let me weep, for laughter I have not for a considerable time any longer known." The good Albano entered this desertion also upon his sin-register, as if it were grandchild to his devil's children.

The Princess prevailed occasionally to allure him out of solitude, when she put the gentle bird-whistle to her fair lips. She seemed, for the father's sake, to take a veritable interest in the melancholy son, who showed no grief, to be sure, but also no joy. Besides, the masculine woman, more helmeted than hooded, loves to place the pillow of rest under the sick head, and under the faint head her arm as a chair-back; and such a one consoles fondly and tenderly, often more tenderly than the too feminine woman. Almost every day she visited her future court-dame and visionary sister[19] at the Minister's, and could therefore tell the lover all about her. Meanwhile, she acted as if she knew nothing of Albano's relations to the blind one;--the very dissembling betrays tender forbearance toward two beings at once, Albano said;--so she could freely give him all the medical reports of the fair sufferer's case, as well as the opinions entertained about her in general. After the manner of the strong women, she bestowed upon her all just praise, without any petty womanish deduction, and wished nothing so much as her restoration and future company.

"I am capable of doing everything _for_ an uncommon woman, as well as everything _against_ a common one," said she, and asked whether his father had already written him about her plan with Liana. He said no, and begged her for it. She referred him, however, to the paternal letter, which must soon come. She found fault only with Liana's propensity to be always embroidering fantasy-flowers into the groundwork of her life, and called her a rich Baroque pearl.

But from all these conversations Albano returned only more confused to Schoppe; he heard only lip-solace, and the death-sentence, that the long-suffering soul from whom he had stolen creation was becoming more and more immured in the deepest cavern of life, near which only the deeper one of the grave lies bright and open. Every soft, soothing, warm gale wafted to him by the sciences or by human beings pa.s.sed over that cold cavern, and became to him a sharp norther. O, had he been called to release her from his sinking arms amidst lovely days, into a long, eternal Paradise, and had she forgotten him in the intoxication of rapture, he too could have forgotten that; but that he should have thrust her away into a cold realm of shadows, and that she must needs remember him for sorrow,--this must he forever remember.

Schoppe knew no "plaster" for all this distress (to use his own fine play on words) "except the plaster of Paris,"[20] namely, an excursion.

At least, he concluded, when one is out in the country, all inquiries about one's health are done with, and all these poisonous anxieties about the answer; and on return one finds much pain spared or in fact all the trouble gone.

Albano obeyed his last friend; and they rode off into the Princ.i.p.ality of Haarhaar.

83. CYCLE.

Whoever thinks that Schoppe, on the way, was to Albano a flying field-lazaretto of consolation,--an _antispasmodic.u.m_,--a Struve's table of ailments and remedies,--a pulverized _Fox's lung_ for the hectic of the heart, &c., and that at every milestone he delivered a consolatory sermon,--whoever thinks so, Schoppe himself laughs him to scorn.

"What then," said he, "if misfortune does knead a young man thoroughly and soundly in her kneading-trough? The next time, he, who is now in the power of grief, will have her in his power. Whoso has never borne anything, never learns to bear up under anything."[21] As regards weeping, he, as a Stoic, was, as may well be imagined, an enemy to it at least; Epictetus, Antonine, Cato, and several such, men made less of ice than of iron, would very willingly, as he so often said, have allowed the body these extreme unctions of sorrow, provided only the spirit beneath and behind all had kept itself dry. The true disconsolateness is to desire and to accept consolation; why will not one then for once just go through with the pang out and out without any physic?

But his view of things and his actual life became, without his express intention, powerful over the Count, whom everything great only enlarged, as it belittles others. Schoppe sat like a Cato upon ruins, but, to be sure, upon the greatest of all; if the wise man ought to be a barometer-tube at the Equator, in which even the tornado produces little displacement, he was a wise man. Accidentally he tore open the Count's glued-up wings at an inn by means of the _Hamburg Impartial Correspondent_, which he found lying there. Schoppe read aloud out of it two extensive battles, wherein, as by an earthquake, lands instead of houses were buried, and whose wounds and tears only the evil genius of the earth could be willing to know; thereupon he read,--after the death-marches of whole generations, and the rending open of the craters of humanity,--with uninterrupted seriousness, the notices, under the head of Intelligence, where one solitary individual mounts upon an unknown little grave and announces and a.s.severates to the world, which surely condoles with him,--"Frightful was the blow which laid our child of five weeks--"; or, "In the bitterest anguish which ever--"; or, "Overwhelmed with the loss of our father in the eighty-first year of his age," &c.