Titan: A Romance Volume II Part 9

He obeyed; it was a sketch which she had made with trembling hand to represent Linda's n.o.ble head. Albano did not look upon the leaf. "Take it to thyself," said she; he did so. "How kind and compliant thou art!"

said she. "Thou deservest her,--I name her not to thee,--as the reward of thy fidelity towards me. She is more worthy of thee than I; she is blooming, like thyself, not sick, like me; but never do her wrong; it is my last wish that thou shouldst love her. Wilt thou distress me, determined spirit, by a vehement No?"

"Heavenly soul!" he cried, and looked upon her beseechingly, and presented her the stifled No as an offering to the dead. "I answer thee not. Ah, forgive, forgive that earlier time!" For now he saw for the first time, how meekly, gently, and yet fervently, the still, tender soul had loved him, who even yet, in the dissolution of the body, spoke and loved as in the beautiful days of Lilar, just as the melting bell in the burning steeple still continues, from the midst of the flames, to sound out the hours.

"Now, then, farewell, beloved!" she said, calmly, and without a tear, and her feeble hand offered to press his; "a happy journey into the beautiful land! Accept eternal thanks for thy love and truth, for the thousand joyous hours which I will, up yonder, at length deserve;[60]

for Lilar's fair flowers.... The children of my Chariton have put them on me.[61] ... _Je ne suis qu'un songe_.[62] What was I going to say to thee, Albano? My farewell! Forsake not my brother! O how thou weepest!

I will still pray for thee!"

The dying have dry eyes. The tempestuous weather of life ends with cold air. They know not how their babbling tongue cuts into widely rent hearts. This most gentle soul knew not how she thrust sword upon sword through Albano, who now felt that to the saint whom already the spring-gales, the spring-fragrances of the eternal sh.o.r.e were floating to meet and welcome, he could be nothing more, give nothing more, nor even so much as take from her her humility.

When she had said it, her head, with the crown of flowers, raised itself upright; inspired, she drew her hand out of his, and prayed aloud with fervor: "Hear my prayer, O G.o.d! and let him be happy till he enters into thy glory. And should he err and waver, then spare him, O G.o.d, and let me appear to him and exhort him. But to thee alone, O all-gracious one, be praise and thanks uttered for my pleasant, peaceful life on the earth; thou wilt, after I have rested, bestow on me up yonder the fair morning in which I may work.... Wake me early from the sleep of death.... Wake me, wake!... Mother, the morning-red[63] lies already upon the trees."

At this moment, her mother, with other persons, rushed into the chamber. Her vision, bewildered with the drowsiness of death and the wandering of her speech, announced that the cold sleep with open eyes was now at hand. "Appear to me, thou art indeed with G.o.d!" cried Albano, distracted. In vain would Augusti have led him away; without answering, without stirring, he stood fast-rooted there. Liana grew paler and paler; death arrayed her in the white bridal garment of Heaven; then his eye ceased its weeping, grief froze, and the broad, heavy ice of anguish filled his breast.

Liana's eye was fixed steadily on a light spot of the softly veiled evening heavens, as if seeking and waiting for the heavens to lift and show the sun. Indifferent to all present, her brother stormed in with his lamentation: "Go not to G.o.d, or I shall see thee no more! Look on me, bless, sanctify me, give me thy peace, sister!" She was silently lost in the lightening and breaking sun-cloud. "She takes thee for me,"

said Albano to Charles, on account of the similarity of their voices, "and gives thee not her peace." "Steal not my voice!" said Charles, angrily. "O, leave her in peace," said the mother, out of whose downcast eyes only a few light tears fell trembling on the garland of the daughter, whose faint head, upturned toward heaven, she held, leaning against herself, with both hands.

All at once, when the sun opened the clouds like eyelids, and looked serenely from beneath, the still form quivered. The dying see double; she saw two sun-b.a.l.l.s, and cried, clinging to her mother, "Ah, mother, how large and fiery his eyes are!" She saw Death standing in heaven.

"Cover me with the pall," she begged, distressfully,--"my veil!" Her brother caught it up, and covered with it the wandering eyes and the flowers and locks. The sun, too, mercifully veiled himself again with clouds.

"Think on Almighty G.o.d!" said the pious father to her, in a loud voice.

"I think of him," answered the veiled one, in a low tone. The aurora of the second world stands black before mortals. They all trembled. Albano and Roquairol grasped and pressed each other's hands, the latter from hatred, Albano from agony, as one gnashes at metal. The chamber was full of uncongenial, discordant people, whom death made equal. At one side Albano saw that a strange form, repulsive to him, had stolen in.

It was his impenetrable father, whose great, dark eyes were fastened sharply and sternly on his son. Out of a second chamber two tall, veiled female forms gazed at the third, and saw no face, and no one saw theirs.

Liana played with her fingers at the veil. Evening stood in the chamber, and the silence between the lightning-flash and the thunder-clap. "Think upon Almighty G.o.d!" cried Spener. She answered not. He continued: "Of our source, and of our sea; he alone stands by thee now in the dark, when the earth, and its dwellers, and all lights of life, are sinking away beyond thy reach!" Suddenly she began, and said, with a low tone of gladness, and with words swiftly following each other, as when one talks in sleep, and with increasing rapture and rapidity, "Caroline! here, here, Caroline! This is my hand,--how beautiful thou art!" The invisible angel who had consecrated her first love, who had attended her whole life, gleamed again, like a new-risen moon, over the whole dark scene of death; and the splendor gently melted the little May night into the great spring morning of the second world.

Now the veiled nun of heaven leaned, quite still, on her mother. The death-angel stood invisible and wrathful among his victims. With great wings hung the screech-owl of anguish over mortal eyes, and pecked with black beak down into the breast, and nothing was heard in the stillness but the owl. More darkly rolled the Knight's melancholy eyes to and fro in their deep sockets between the still bride and the still son; and Gaspard and the destroying angel gazed upon each other gloomily.

At that moment Liana's harp sent out a clear, high, ringing tone far into the silence. The Fatal Sister who spun at her life knew the signal, checked herself, and stood up; and the sister with the scissors came. Liana's fingers ceased to play, and beneath the veil all became still and motionless.

"Thy head is heavy and cold, my daughter," said the disconsolate mother. "Tear the veil away!" cried the brother; and when he drew it down, there lay Liana, peaceful and smiling beneath it, but dead,--the blue eyes open toward heaven, the transfigured mouth still breathing love, the maidenly lily-brow encircled with the flower-wreath which had sunk down around it; and pale and glorified with the moonlight of the higher world was the strange form which pa.s.sed majestically forth from the midst of the puny living among its lofty dead.

Then gushed the golden sun through the clouds and through all the tears, and circ.u.mfused with the blooming evening twilight, with the youthful rose-oil of his evening clouds, the faded sister of heaven; and the transfigured countenance wore again the bloom of youth. In heaven all the clouds, touched with her wings as she swept through them, burst out into long, red blossoms; and through the high, misty veil, fluttering up over the earth, glowed the thousand roses which had been strown about or sprung up on the cloud-path on which the virgin pa.s.sed up over the earth to the Eternal.

But Albano, the forsaken Albano, stood without tears or eyes or words among the commonplaces of sorrow, in the crimson evening fire of the holy chamber of transfiguration, amidst the earthly bustle that went on round the still form. In the depths of the past, Sorrow showed him a Medusa's-head; and he still looked upon it when his heart was already petrified by it, and he heard continually the gloomy head murmur the words, "How bitterly did the dead one, when in Lilar, weep at the harsh Albano!" Her brother, upon his rack, said many barbarous words to him.

He heard or heeded them not, because he was listening to the horrible Gorgon head.

"Son," cried Gaspard Cesara, earnestly,--"son, dost thou not know me?"

Through the heavy, deathly heart a life-voice flashes upon him. He looks round, and sees his father, with terror arranges him into a shape, and falls upon his breast, and cries only, "Father!" and again and again, "Father!" He continued to cry out, grasping him violently like a foe, and said: "Father, that is Liana!" Still more pa.s.sionate grew the embrace, not from love, only from agony. "Come to thyself, and to me, dear Albano," said the Knight. "O, I will do so; she is dead now, father!" said he, with a choked voice; and now his grief broke upon his father like a cloud upon a mountain, into one incessant tear,--it streamed forth as if the innermost soul would bleed itself to death out of all the open veins,--but the weeping only stirred up his sorrows, as a-rain-storm does a battle-field: he became more inconsolable and impetuous, and sullenly repeated the previous exclamation.

"Albano!" said Gaspard, after some time, with stronger voice, "wilt thou accompany me?" "Gladly, my father!" said he, and followed him, as a bleeding child with its wound follows its mother. "To-morrow I will speak," said Albano, in the carriage, and took his father's hand. His wide-open eyes hung swollen and blind upon the warm evening-sun, which already rested on the mountains; he continued smiling and pale, and weeping softly; nor did he mark when the sun went down, and he arrived in the city.

"To-morrow, my father!" said he languidly and beseechingly to the Knight; and shut himself in. Nothing more was heard from him.

TWENTY-FOURTH JUBILEE.

The Fever.--The Cure.

97. CYCLE.

Albano for a long time remained mute in a by-chamber. His father left him to the healing influence of quiet. Schoppe waited for him patiently, that he might console him by looking upon and listening to him. At last they heard him in there praying fervently: "Liana, appear to me and give me peace!" Directly after he stepped out strong and free as an unchained giant, with all the blood-roses on his face,--with lightnings in his eyes,--with hasty tread. "Schoppe," said he, "come with me to the observatory; there hangs high in heaven a bright star; on that she is buried: I must know that, Schoppe!"

The n.o.ble soul lay in the violent hands of a fever. He was just going out with him, when he beheld the Knight, who gazed upon him intently.

"Only do not become numb and palsied again, my father!" said he, embraced him but gently, and forgot what he had been going to do.

Schoppe went for Doctor Sphex. Albano returned to his chamber, and walked slowly up and down there with bowed head and folded hands, and said to himself consolingly, "Only wait, however, till it strikes again." Sphex came and saw and--said, "It is simply an inflammatory fever." But no force could bring him to the point of undressing himself for bed, or even for a bleeding. "What!" said he, modestly; "she may surely appear to me at any moment and give me peace. No! no!" The physician prescribed a whole cooling snow-heaven for the purpose of snowing the crater full. These coolings and frost-conductors also the wild youth refused. But then the Knight a.s.sailed him with that thundering voice of his, and with that fury in his eye which revealed the ever-enduring but covered wrath-fire of the haughty breast: "Albano, take it!" Then the patient became considerate and compliant, and said: "O my father, I do indeed love thee!"

Through the whole night, of which the faithful Schoppe remained watcher and physician, the crazed body kept on playing its feverish part, driving the youth up and down, and at every stroke of the clocks constraining him to kneel down and pray: "Liana, do appear, and give me peace!" How often did Schoppe, otherwise so poor in expression, hold him fast with a long embrace, only to beguile the hara.s.sed one into a short repose. Incomprehensible to the physician the next morning were the energies of this iron and white-hot nature, which fever, pain, and walking had not yet bowed, and on which all prescribed ice-fields hissed and dried up,--and frightful appeared to him the consequences, as Albano continued to be his own incendiary, and, at every striking of the hour, fell on his knees and languished and looked for the heavenly apparition.

His father, however, left him, like a humanity, to his own energies; he said he was glad to see such a rare case of unenfeebled youthful vigor, and felt no fear at all; and he gave, too, with perfect calmness, his orders about packing up everything for the journey to Italy. He visited the court, i. e. everybody. Upon any one who knew what he was wont to demand of men and deny to them, this general complaisance towards all the world inflicted the pang of wounded honor, even if Gaspard addressed him too. He first visited the Prince, who, although the Knight, when in Italy, had quietly administered to him the poisoned Host of love, together with her poison-chalice, always hung upon him familiarly. The Knight inspected with him the new accessions to the works of art; the two sharply and freely compared their opinions in regard to them, and gave each other commissions for the approaching absence.

Thereupon he went to his travelling companion, the Princess, towards whom, indeed, his galling pride had not left behind one particle of flower-dust from his former love, who, however, in the smooth, cold mirror of his epic soul, in which all figures moved about freely and in clear conception, occupied, by virtue of her powerful individuality, the foreground, as a central figure. As he placed freedom, unity, even license of spirit, far above sickly pietism, hypocritical imitation of other people's talents and penitent warfare with one's self, he held the Princess, even with her cynicism of tongue, as "in her way dear and deserving." She inquired with much interest after his son's condition and prospect of travelling with them; he gave her, with his old calmness, the best hopes.

The Princess Julienne was inaccessible. She had been compelled to see how the faithful playmate of her youth had been drawn by a harsh, hostile arm from the flowery sh.o.r.e into the flood of death, and how the poor girl had drifted away exhausted; this completely prostrated her, and gladly would she have plunged headlong after the victim. She had not been, the day before, in a condition to go with the two veiled ones to the castle.

Gaspard now hastened to one of these, the Countess Romeiro, with whom he found the other also, the Princess Idoine. The latter had not been able to read so much in every letter about the sister of her face and soul, without travelling from her Arcadia in person to see her and prove the fair relations.h.i.+p; but when she arrived in her veil at the house of mourning, her kinswoman had already drawn hers over her dying eye; and when it arose, she saw herself extinguished, and beheld, in the deep mirror of time, her own dying image. She kept silence within herself, as if before G.o.d, but her heart, her whole life, was stirred.

The resemblance was so striking that Julienne begged her never to appear before the afflicted mother. Idoine was, it is true, taller, more sharply cut and less rosy than Liana in her days of bloom; but the last pale hour, wherein the latter appeared beside her, made the whitened form taller and the face n.o.bler, and withdrew the flowery veil of maidenhood from the sharp outline.

Idoine said little to the Knight, and only looked on and saw how her friend Linda overflowed with real childlike love in return for his almost paternal affection. Both maidens he treated with a respectful, warm, and tender morality, which must have appeared wonderful to an eye (for example, the Prince's) which had often witnessed the unmerciful irony wherewith he so loved to draw downward in a slow spiral of licentious discourses, rotten, worm-eaten hearts,--half installed in G.o.d's church and half in the Devil's chapel,--shy, soft, sensitive sinners, inwardly-bottomless Fantasts, the Roquairols, for instance, more and more deeply and with ever-increasing pleasure to the centre of infamy. The Prince thought, in such cases, "He thinks exactly as I do;"

but Gaspard did with him just so.

Even the trembling, pale Julienne stole in, at last, to see him. They avoided, so far as they could, for her sake, the open grave of her friend; but she asked, herself, after the sick lover of that friend very urgently. The Knight, who for most answers of moment had provided himself with an original phrase-book of nothings, particularly with ice-flowers of speech, such as, "It is going on as well as can be expected under the circ.u.mstances," or, "Such things are to be looked for," or, "It will all come right," made use on this occasion of the last-named flower of rhetoric, and replied, "It will all come right."

When he reached home, nothing had come right, but the flood of the evil was at its highest. There lay the youth--dressed, in bed,--unable to walk any longer,--in a burning heat,--talking wildly,--and yet at every stroke of the clock uttering his old prayer to the high, shut-up heavens. Hitherto his firm, vigorous brain had been able to hold fast its reason, at least for all that did not touch Liana; but gradually the whole ma.s.s went over into the fermentation of the fever. In vain did his father, once, when he knelt and prayed for the apparition of the dead, arm himself with all the wrath and thunder of his personality. "Give me peace!" Albano continued to pray, softly, and, as he said it, looked him softly in the face.

Schoppe, at this point, with the look of one who has a weighty mystery, took the father aside, and said he knew an unfailing remedy. Gaspard evinced curiosity. "The Princess Idoine," said he, "must not concern herself at all about miserable childish trifles, but just when it strikes and he kneels, boldly present herself to him as the blessed spirit, and conclude the plaguy peace." Contrary to what might have been presumed, the Knight said, ill-humoredly, "It is improper." In vain Schoppe sought to preach him over to the sunny side,--he only went farther over to the wintry side at the appearance of another's intention; no one could bring him to a gentle warmth but himself.

At last Gaspard, after his manner, let so much drift-ice of above-mentioned phrases drive over the permanent ground-ice of his character, that Schoppe proudly and indignantly held his peace.

Besides, the preparations for the journey went on as if the father meant to s.n.a.t.c.h his son as a brand from the fever-burning, and tear him distractedly out of the old circles of love. Schoppe made known to him his intention of staying at home; he said he had nothing against it.

Now did Schoppe feel on his own scratched-up face the cutting North of this character, to which he had generally been partial: "'Trust no long, lank Spaniard,' was the just saying of Carda.n.u.s,"[64] said he.

Albano was sick, and therefore not inconsolable. He drew from the Lethe of madness the dark draught of oblivion of the present; only when he knelt did he see mirrored in the stream his lacerated form and a cloudy heaven. He heard nothing of this,--how the poor named their names, that they might weep gratefully around their sleeping benefactress, and how under their lamentations the once healing music of their countenances now lay deaf and dumb. He heard nothing of the raving of her brother, nor of the loud (acoustically arranged) grief of her father, nor of the stiff mother wrapped in dull anguish. He knew not beforehand that the pale Charis would appear one evening in her coronation-chamber in the midst of lights for the last time on earth, crowned, decked, and slumbering. To him, indeed, at every hour died an infinite hope, but each hour bore him also a new one.

"Poor brother," said Schoppe the next day, in n.o.ble indignation, "I swear to thee, thou shalt get thy peace to-day." The pale patient looked upon him imploringly. "Yes, by Heaven!" Schoppe swore, and almost wept.

98. CYCLE.

Schoppe had resolved not to trouble himself at all about the Knight,--who divided his evening between the Minister and Wehrfritz in Blumenbuhl,--but to betake himself at once to the presence of the Princess Idoine with the great pet.i.tion. First, however, he would get the Lector as porter or _billeteur_ of the locked court-doors, and as surety for his words. But Augusti was indescribably alarmed; he insisted the thing would not do,--a Princess and a sick young man, and an absolutely ridiculous ghost-scene, &c.; and his own father, indeed, already saw through it. Schoppe upon this became a spouting fire-engine, and left few curses or comparisons unused upon the man-murdering nonsense of courtly and female decorum,--said it was as beautifully shaped as a Greek fury,--it bound up the wound on a man's neck as the cook-women did on a goose's, not till after it had bled to death, so that the feathers might not be stained,--and he was as much of a _courtisan_, he concluded ambiguously, as Augusti, and knew what decency was. "May I not propose it to the Furstinn, then, who certainly esteems him so highly?" Augusti said, "That does not alter the case."

"Nor yet to Julienne?" "Nor yet to her," said he. "Nor yet to the most satanic Satan?" "There is surely a good angel between," replied Augusti, "whom you can at least with more propriety use as an intercessor, because she is under obligations to the Knight of the Fleece,--the Countess of Romeiro." "O, why not, indeed?" said Schoppe, struck with the idea.

The Lector--who was one of those men that never use their own hands, but love to do everything by a third, sixth, farthest possible one, after a system of _handing_ a.n.a.logous to the fingering-system--urged upon the reflecting Schoppe his ready willingness to introduce him to Linda, and her ability to do something in this "_epineuse affaire_."