Titan: A Romance Volume II Part 22

125. CYCLE.

On the morning after the two friends took their journey to Arcadia, Julienne, although more troubled on account of the increased illness of her sick brother, cheered herself by her reliance upon a plan which, in spite of her a.s.surance, she had sketched for the good fortune of the _well_ one, and which she was to carry out in Arcadia. She, unlike others who hide their heads behind the dark, mourning-fan of sorrow and sensibility, oftener hid her head, with its designs, behind the gay dress-fan of smiles, which turned to the spectators the painted side; amidst laughing and weeping she pursued and pondered them. Thus she had made the request to Albano to join in the visit to Idoine only for show, and in the certainty that he would refuse, or in case he should not, that then Idoine would; for she knew, from Idoine's visits in the previous winter, that she had frequently thought in conversations of the fair fever-patient who had been restored by her, and that she had just fled before his arrival, in order not to overshadow his bright, loving present, which had become known to her in the easiest manner through the Princess, by coming upon him like a cloud out of the past full of melancholy resemblances. Julienne had even ascertained that the Princess had vainly wished to keep and reserve the Princesse longer, in order, perhaps, by means of her, to remind, terrify, change, or punish the youth. Julienne's love for the Princesse would perhaps have been made as warm by that tender flight from Albano, as her love towards Linda was, had not this very love stood between; at least, this beautiful flight had given her an unlimited confidence--which is exactly the true and only kind--in the Princesse.

The day of the journey was a beautiful harvest morning, full of thickly-peopled cornfields, full of coolness and dew and zest. Linda expressed a childlike joy in Idoine, and gave the reasons in a glad tone. "First, because she saved thy brother's life,--and because she knew, after all, what she wanted, and insisted upon it with spirit, and did not, like other Princesses, transform herself into a victim to the Throne,--and because she is the most German Frenchwoman that I know except Madame Necker. Yes, in my eyes she belongs strictly, with all her fair youth, among old ladies, and these I have always sought out, for there is at least something to be learned from them. She loves thee exceedingly, me, I believe, less. To one who is such a charming medium between the nun and the married woman, I seem too worldly, though it is not the case."

The two companions arrived early in the beautiful, enchanted village in the afternoon before dinner, just as the neat children were already banding together to go to gleaning, and the wagons were already going out to meet the gatherers of the sheaves. Idoine's brother, the future hereditary Prince of Hohenfliess,--the Dwarf of Tivoli,--looked out of the window, and Julienne almost regretted the journey. Idoine flew to meet her, and clasped her heartily to her breast. When Julienne had before and upon her face that great blue eye and every transfigured feature of the form which once her brother had so blissfully and painfully loved, she fancied herself, now that she had become his sister, to receive, as his representative, the love of the representative of Liana; and she must needs, as she had done every time since that death at the first reception, weep heartily.

Linda was received by the Princess with such a deep tenderness that Julienne wondered, since the two generally lived in an alternation of coldness and love. There stood the Minister's lady, Froulay, so old with mourning, so cold, still, and courteous, so cold towards the occasion and the company (except the fac-simile of her daughter), particularly towards Linda, whose bold, decided, philosophical tone seemed to her unwomanly, and like a trumpet on two female lips.

The future hereditary Prince of Hohenfliess fortunately withdrew himself soon from so inconvenient a place, where he navigated a s.h.i.+pwreck plank instead of a gondola. After inquiring of Julienne with interest about the state of her brother, his present predecessor, and reminding her and Linda of her and his Italian tour, he became so fretful and out of tune at Julienne's frigidity, and at the moral discourses of the women, and at a certain oppressiveness premonitory of a moral tempest,--which sensualists experience in the presence of women, where everything rude, selfishness, arrogance, screams like discord,--and at the general, plaguy hypocrisy,--which he could not but immediately take it all to be,--that he was glad to break away, and relieve this pastoral life of the only wolf who had crept into it.

Voluptuaries can never hold out long among _many_ n.o.ble women, tormented as they are by their many-sided, sharp observations, although they can more easily with one, because they hope to ensnare her. What made him feel worst of all was, that he was compelled to p.r.o.nounce them all hypocrites. He found no good women, because he had faith in none; since we must believe in them in order to see them where they are, just as one must exercise virtue in order to be acquainted with it, though not the reverse.

With him a black cloud seemed to draw off out of this Eden and ether.

The Minister's lady received a card from her son Roquairol, who had just arrived, and she went too, to the joy of Julienne, who found in her a little obstacle to her plan of conversion for Linda, because the latter looked upon the Minister's lady as a one-sided, narrow, anxious, unyielding nature. Idoine begged the two maidens to travel over her little kingdom with her. They went down into the clean, wide village.

On the steps they were met by cheerful, obliging faces. From the distant apartments of the palace was heard now singing, now blowing of wind instruments. As on the bird the s.h.i.+ning feathers slide swiftly and smoothly under each other and out again, so did all occupations move around Idoine; her economical machine was no clumsy, jarring steeple-clock, but a musical picture-watch, which conceals the hours behind tones, the wheels behind images.

In a meadow-garden the youngest children were playing wildly with each other. Moravian and Dutch neatness had scoured and painted the village to a sleek, bright fancy-shop. New and s.h.i.+ny hung the bucket over the well; under the linden-rotunda of the village the earth-floor was swept clean; everywhere were seen clean, whole, fair clothes, and happy eyes; and Idoine showed, under the unusual gayety, an earnest meaning in the looks with which she inspected her Arcadia, flower after flower.

She led her friends over the various Sunday dancing-places of the different ages, along before the house of the steward,--wherein the Minister's lady resided, and now, to Julienne's fear, her son was,--to the bright, plain church. Soon came the parson and steward, for whom her pa.s.sing by had been a hint, following her into the church, and received commissions from her. Both were fair young men, with open brow and a little youthful pride. When the party were out of the church, she said through these young men she ruled over the place, and them she guided gently; that only young people were furnished with hatred and spirit against conventionalism, and with enthusiasm and faith. She added, jocosely, she governed nothing but a school of girls, upon which she laid more stress than upon the other, because education was the formation of habits and manners, and these a girl needed more than a boy, whom the world, after all, would not allow to have any; and she had, she said, some inclination to be a _la Bonne_, because she had, even when a girl, often been obliged to be one with her sisters.

Thereupon she introduced the two to several houses; everywhere they found well-whitened, neatly-ordered apartments, flowers and vine-cl.u.s.ters over the windows, fair women and children, and now a flute, now a violin, and nowhere a spinning child. In all she had charges to give, and what seemed a mere walk was also business. She showed a sharp insight through people, and their perverted, crooked ways, and a talent for business, which possessed and united at once the universal and the particular. "I should be glad, of course," said she, "to have only pleasures and amus.e.m.e.nts about me; but without labor and seriousness the best good of the world dies: not so much as a real play is possible without real earnestness." Linda commended her for training all to music,--that real moonlight in every gloomy night of life.

"Without poesy and art," she added, "the spirit grows mossy and wooden in this earthly clime." "O what were mine without tones!" said Idoine, glowingly.

Linda inquired about the right of citizens.h.i.+p in this pleasant state.

"It is mostly possessed by Swiss families," said Idoine, "with whom I became acquainted at hearth and home on my travels. Immediately after the French women I rank my Swiss." Julienne replied, "You repeat to me riddles." She solved them for her; and Linda, who had been in France shortly after her, confirmed it, that there, among the women of a certain higher tone, to whom no Crebillon had ever come up, a development prevailed, unusual in Germany, of the most delicate morality, almost holiness. "Only," added Linda, "they had in morality, as in art, prejudices of fine taste, and more delicacy than genius."

They went out through the village, toward the loveliest evening sun; Alpine horns responded to each other on the mountains, and in the vale gay old men went to light employments. These Idoine greeted with peculiar love. "Because," she said, "there was nothing more beautiful than cheerfulness on an old face; and among country people it was always the sign of a well-regulated and pious life."

Linda opened her heart to the golden scene before her, and said: "How must all this delight in a poem! But I know not what I have to object to the fact that it now exists so in the real reality."

"What has this same reality," said Idoine, playfully, "taken away from you or done to you? I love it; where then are _you_ to be found for us except in reality?" "I," said Julienne, "am thinking of something quite different; one is ashamed here, that one has yet done so little with all one's willing. From willing to doing is, however, to be sure, a long step here," she subjoined, while she placed her little finger on her _heart_, and stretched the fore-finger as if vainly attempting to span from there to her _head_. "Idoine, tell me, how then can one think of what is great and what is little at once?" "By thinking of the greatest first," said she; "when one looks into the sun, the dust and the midges become most visible. G.o.d is, surely, the sun of us all."

The earthly sun stood now looking toward them far down on an immeasurable plain amid mild roses of Heaven. A distant windmill flung its arms broadly through the fair purple glow; on the mountain declivities children sang near the pastured herds, and their smaller brothers and sisters were playing under their eye; the evening bell, which in Arcadia was always tolled at the farewell of the sun, rocked sun and earth to slumber with its vibrations; not only in youthful, but even in childlike beauty lay the soft little village and its world round about them. No storm, one said to one's self, can intrude into this soft land, no winter stalk in in heavy panoply of ice: here, one thought, only spring winds and rosy clouds come and go: no rains fall, except early rains, and no leaves, except those of the blossoms: only dust from the flowers rises here; and the rainbow,--only forget-me-nots and May-flowers hold it upon their little blue and white leaves; the landscape and life and all seemed here to be only a continuous morning twilight, so fresh and new, full of presentiment and contentment, without glow or glitter, and with a few stars over the morning red.

Children with wreaths of grain in their hands sat on other people's wagons full of sheaves, and rode proudly in.

Idoine hung with hearty love, as if this evening made it all new, upon the double groups. "Only the countryman is so fortunate," said she, "as to live on in all the Arcadian relations of his childhood. The old man sees nothing around him but implements and labors which as a child he also saw and plied. At last he goes up into that garden over yonder, and sleeps it out." She pointed to the churchyard on the hill, which was a veritable garden, with flower-beds and a wall of fruit-trees.

Julienne looked thither with agitation,--she saw the dark curtain tremble behind which her sick brother was soon to be borne.

Transparent evening gold-dust was wafted over the garden; the loud day was m.u.f.fled, and life peaceful; olive-branches and their blossoms sank slowly down out of the quiet heavens. "There is the only place,"

said Idoine, "where man concludes an eternal peace with himself and others, as a French clergyman so beautifully said to me." "Such Christian-catholic night-thoughts," replied Linda, "are as disagreeable to me as the clergymen themselves. We can as little experience an immortality as an annihilation." "I do not understand that," said Julienne. "Ah, Idoine, if now there were no immortality, what would you do?" "_J'aimerais_," said she to her, in a low voice.

Suddenly they heard some one singing before them, as at a great distance: "Taste"--then after some time--"of life's"--at last--"pleasure."[121] "That is the echo from the churchyard," said Idoine, and endeavored to persuade the party to return. "Echo and moons.h.i.+ne and churchyard together," she continued playfully, "may well be too strong for female hearts." At the same time she touched her eye, with a hint to Julienne, as much as to say how sorry she was that the eyes of the Countess could only see through a mist the beautiful evening coming on afar off. "The singing voice sounds so familiar to me," said Linda. "It's Roquairol, that's all; shall we go on?" said Julienne. But Linda begged to stay, and Idoine courteously agreed.

Now did the echo--the moonlight of sound--give back tones like dirges from the funeral choir; and it was as if the united shades of the departed sang them over in their holy-week under the ground,--as if the corpse-veil stirred on the white lip, and out of the last hollows sounded again a hollow life. The singing ceased; Alpine horns began on the mountains; then the echo of the concert came over again in enchanting tones, as if the departed still played behind the breastwork of the grave-mound, and rehabilitated themselves in echoed tones,[122]

All men bear dead or dying ones in their breast; so did the three maidens. Tones are the garments of the past fluttering back with a glimmer, and they excite the heart too much thereby.

They wept, and neither could say whether for sadness or joy. The hitherto so moderate Idoine grasped Linda's hand, and laid it softly on her heart, and let it sink again. They turned round silently and with one accord. Idoine held Linda by the hand. The subterranean waters of the echoes of the dead and the Alpine horns murmured after them, though more distantly. It did not escape Julienne how Idoine continually turned her face, merely in order to withdraw it from _her_, with the great drops in her large eyes, towards the thickly-veiled Linda; and she inferred therefrom that Idoine knew and was acquainted with much, and respected the bride of the youth to whom she had by her fair resemblance given back a happy life.

"What now do we get from all this?" said Idoine, by and by, and near the village. "We foresee that we should be too tender, and yet we give ourselves up. For that very reason men call us weak. They prepare themselves for their future by mere hardenings, and only we do it with mere softening processes." "What shall one do, then," said Julienne,--"leap into rivers, up mountains, on horseback, and so on?"

"No," said Idoine. "For I see it by my peasant-women: they suffer in their nerves, with all their muscular labor, as well as others. With the mind, I imagine, we must all do and seek more; but we always let only the fingers and eyes exercise and stir themselves. The heart itself knows nothing thereof, and does what it pleases the while: it dreams, weeps, bleeds, dances. A little philosophizing would be of service to us; but, as it is, we give ourselves up, bound, to all feelings, and if we think, it is merely to give them additional aid."

They came back into the village; it was full of busy evening noise.

Children came dancing to meet Idoine; alp-horns sounded in from the heights, and from the houses flutes and songs. Idoine gave cheerfully evening commands. "How easily, after all," said she, "outward tranquillity breaks up the internal. A busied heart is like a vessel of water swung round; hold it still, and it runs over."

Julienne had already several times, but in vain, s.n.a.t.c.hed at the helm of the hour and the conversation, to carry out her plan; now, when she observed Linda's silence, emotion, and dreaminess, she fancied she had hit upon the long-expected, favorable moment when some words which Idoine let drop on the subject of marriage would find in Linda a softened soil for their roots. By the easy turn of a eulogy which she p.r.o.nounced upon Idoine for her spirited opposition against launching into a hated princely marriage, and her gain of a perpetual young life, she brought the Countess to the point of expressing her heretical hatred of marriage, and saying that it laid the flower painfully fastened with a sharp iron ring to its frame; that love without freedom, and from duty, was nothing but hypocrisy and hatred; and that acting according to morality, so called, was as much as if one should choose to think or poetize according to a system of logic which he had before him, and that the energy, the will, the heart of love, was something higher than morals and logic.

At this moment came a note from the Minister's lady, wherein she excused her to-day's absence on the score of the too sad farewell which her son had this evening so strangely and as if forever bid her.

However many silent thoughts this intelligence left behind in Julienne and Linda, Idoine was not drawn by it out of the lively emotion into which the previous discourse had thrown her; but, with a n.o.ble indignation, which made out of the beautiful maiden a beautiful youth, and put Minerva's helmet on her head, she made to her lofty adversary, who was less to be roused by others' pa.s.sions than by opposing sentiments, this declaration of war: Certainly her aversion to marriage was chargeable only upon her other aversion to "priests"; for was the marriage bond anything else than eternal love, and did not every real love hold itself for an eternal one? A love which thinks to die at some time or other was already dead, and that which feared to live forever, feared in vain. If even friends were joined at the altar, as is said to be somewhere or other the case,[123] they would at most only be more sacredly attached to each other in love. One might count quite as many if not more unhappy intrigues than unhappy marriages. One might, indeed, be a mother, but not a father, without marriage, and the latter must honor the former and himself by a decent respect for morality. "I am a German," she concluded, "and respect the old knightly ladies, my ancestors, highly. Blessed is a woman like Elizabeth and a man like Gotz von Berlichingen, in their holy wedlock." All at once she found herself surprised by her warmth and her fluency. "I have really," she added, smiling, "become a pedantic parson's widow. This comes of my being the highest authority in the village, and from the fact that, as in almost every cottage a happy refutation of single blessedness dwells, I do not love to let other sentiments come up here."

"O," said Julienne, pleasantly, because she saw Linda serious, "girls always talk together about love and marriage a little; they love to draw flowers for themselves out of a bride's bouquet."

"That, as you know, I could not well do," said Idoine, alluding to the sworn promise which she had been obliged to give her parents, who were suspicious of her enthusiastic boldness, never to marry below her princely rank, which, to her, according to her sharp propensities and parts, amounted to as much as celibacy. "You were right, however,"

pursued Julienne, and would fain continue in her mirthful mood; "love without marriage is like a bird of pa.s.sage, who seats himself upon a mast, which itself moves along. I praise, for my part, a fine, green-rooted tree, which stays there and admits a nest."

Contrary to her custom, Linda did not laugh at this, but went alone, without saying a word, down into the garden and the moonlight.

"The Countess," said Idoine to her friend, troubled about the meaning of that silent seriousness, "has not, I hope, misunderstood us." "No,"

said Julienne, with glad looks at the thought of having gained her point so far that the discourse had made an impression on Linda; "she has the rarest gift to understand, and the most common misfortune not to be understood." "The two things always go together," said she, remained a moment in thought, looked at Julienne, and at last said, "I must be entirely true. I knew the Countess's relation through my sister. Friend, is he entirely worthy of her?"--a question whose source the Princesse could seek only in the supposition of revengeful insinuations on the part of the Princess.

"Entirely!" answered she, strongly. "I gladly believe you," replied Idoine, with rapidity in her tones, but tranquillity in her looks. She looked longer and longer upon the sister of Albano; her great, blue eyes gleamed more and more strongly; Minerva's helmet was removed from the maidenly head; the soft countenance appeared lovely, tranquil, clear, not more strongly moved than a prayer to G.o.d permits it to be, and with as little of pa.s.sionate desire as a glorified saint has, and yet s.h.i.+ning more and more celestially. Julienne's fair heart leaped up; she saw Liana again, as if she had come from heaven to press the beloved man with a blessing to a new heart; she said, with tears, "Thou, thou didst once give him peace." Idoine was surprised; two tears gushed from her bright eyes; with emphasis she answered, "Gave!" in an agitated and pa.s.sionate manner pressed herself to her friend, saying, "I loved you long ago," and they said nothing further.

Quickly she collected herself, reminded Julienne of Linda's night-blindness, and begged her to go directly after her as her friend, although she herself would gladly steal this service from her if she dared. Julienne hastened into the garden, but remembered with emotion that Idoine had not reciprocated her _thou_; Idoine avoided the female _thou_. Unlike the Oriental women, who leave off the veil before relations, she, like her fair French neighbors, transferred the delicate laws of _politesse_ into matters of the heart.

Julienne found her friend in the garden in a dark bower, still, with deep, sunken eyes, buried in dreams. Linda started up: "She loves him!"

said she, with pain and heat. "Hear it, Julienne: she loves him!" The latter, upon this utterance of a truth with which she had herself come directly from Idoine's arms, could do nothing but express her terror; but Linda took it for astonishment, and went on: "By Heaven! my eye has detected her. O, once she was not by far so lively and earnest and sensitive and soft. Her deep emotion at beholding me, and her weeping at Roquairol's voice because it resembles his, and her long and earnest marriage-sermon, and her soul-like glances at me,--O, did she not see him in the great, glorious moment when the blooming one knelt weeping, and lifted his G.o.dlike head to heaven, and called down the saint and peace? O, that she should have so much as ventured to personate either before him! And can she forget that?"

Julienne at last got the word: "Well, suppose it, then; is not Idoine, however, n.o.ble and good?" "I have nothing to say against her or for her," answered Linda. "But when he sees her now, when he finds the saintly one once more like the departed, when his whole first love returns and triumphs over the second ... By Heaven! No," she added, proudly and strongly, "no, that I cannot brook; I will not beg, will not weep nor resign, but I will battle for him. Am not I, too, beautiful? I am more so, and my spirit is more boldly shaped for his.

What can she give which I cannot offer him three times over? I will give it to him,--my fortune, my being, even my liberty; I can marry him as well as she; I will ... O speak, Julienne! But thou art a cold German, and secretly attached to her from like G.o.dliness. O G.o.d, Julienne! am I, then, beautiful? a.s.sure me of it, I pray. Am I not at all like the glorified one? Should I not look exactly as he would wis.h.!.+

Why was I not his first love, and his Liana, and even dead too? Good Julienne, why dost thou not speak?"

"Only _let_ me speak," said she, although not with entire truth. She had been struck and punished by Linda's home-coming truth, and by her own consciousness that she had laid out a plan of doing away Linda's prejudices against marriage, the very supports of which plan had been antic.i.p.ated and reckoned over by Linda as justifications of jealousy, and that she had set a rock in motion on the point of a rock, and brought it to the point of falling, which she could now no longer manage. She was confounded, too, yes, angered, by what she felt to be a strange impetuosity of love, before which she could not at all speak out the Job's-comfort that Albano would always act according to the _obligations_ of fidelity. Beautifully was she surprised by the prospered conversion to a readiness for marriage. With some uncertainty as to the result, however, on the part of Linda, who by the moonlight and the mild, distant mountain-music had only been made more stormy, she continued: "I would not willingly interrupt thee with praise of thy marriage resolution; in all other particulars thou art wrong. To be sure, she is now more serious; but she stood at the deathbed of her likeness, and saw herself grow pale in Liana; that does much to chasten. Touching him, had he seen thee earlier ..."

"Did he not see early the image on _Lago Maggiore_, but unlike, as he said?"

"I will, then, confess it to thee, wild one," replied Julienne, "because one must not surprise thee, that I yesterday begged him to join us in our visit to the Princesse, and that he, even out of regard and dislike to all resemblances, gave me a downright refusal; but he awaits us to-morrow in the Prince's garden."

Changed, softened, with transfigured eyes, and with sinking voice, Linda said, "Does my friend love me so greatly? But I love him exceedingly too,--the pure one. To-morrow will I say to him, take my freedom, and stay forever with me. We will go from the altar, my Julienne,--thou and I and he,--to Valencia, to Isola Bella, or whithersoever he will, and stay together. Thanks, dear moon and music!

How childlike the tones and the rays play with each other! Embrace me, my beloved; forgive that Linda has been naughty!" Here the storm of her heart dissolved into sweet weeping. So, in countries upon which the sun s.h.i.+nes vertically down, is the blue sky daily transformed into thunder, tempest, and black rain, and daily the sun goes down again blue and golden.

Julienne only replied, "Beautiful! now will we go up!"--being less capable than Linda of swift transitions. When they saw, above, the tranquil, bright, contented Idoine again,--always steadfastly and serenely active,--undisturbed by regret or expectation,--wearing only the harvest-wreath of action, never the flowery bridal-wreath,--so many white blossoms at her feet, lying ungathered for garland or festoon,--her pure, radiant soul like a clear, bright tone, which bears the charm of its melody through moist, cloudy air, undisturbed and unbroken,--then did she feel that Idoine was connected with her by a more sisterly tie than Linda. The former was to her an _ideal_ and a constellation in her heaven above her; the latter, an unknown one, which sparkles far off and invisible in a second hemisphere of the heavens; but in her the womanly power of loving on, almost even to the degree of hatred, worked on more intensely than in any one woman, and she remained constant to her old friend. Idoine was one of those female souls which resemble the moon; pale and faint must she stand in the magnificent evening sky, which splendor and burning clouds adorn, and not a single shadow can she dislodge on the earth, and mounts with invisible rays, but all other light grows pale, and hers grows out of the shadow, until at last her supernatural radiance invests the earthly night, and transforms it into a second world, and all hearts love her, weeping, and the nightingales sing in her beams.

All was now settled and ended. Linda kept herself reserved, and merely from respect to the law of social propriety, which she never overstepped. Idoine, guessing a change, softly drew herself back out of her former familiarity. Early in the dark morning they parted, but Julienne told not her friend, how, when they left each other, she had seen Idoine turn away with wet eyes.

126. CYCLE.