Zesara had tasted only three glasses of wine; but the must of his thick,
hot blood fermented under it mightily. The day grew more and more into a
Daphnian and Delphic grove, in whose whispering and steamy thicket he
lost himself deeper and deeper,--the sun hung in the blue like a white
glistening snow-ball,--the glaciers cast their silvery glances down into
the green,--from distant clouds it thundered occasionally,[12] as if
spring were rolling along in his triumphal chariot far away towards us
at the north,--the living glow of the climate and the hour, and the holy
fire of two raptures, the remembered and the expected, warmed to life
all his powers. And now that fever of young health seized upon him, in
which it always seemed to him as if a particular heart beat in every
limb,--the lungs and the heart are heavy and full of blood,--the breath
is hot as a Harmattan wind,--and the eye dark in its own blaze,--and the
limbs are weary with energy. In this overcharge of the electrical cloud
he had a peculiar passion for destroying. When younger, he often
relieved himself by rolling fragments of rock to a summit and letting
them roll down, or by running on the full gallop till his breath grew
_longer_, or most surely by hurting himself with a penknife (as he had
heard of Cardan's doing), and even bleeding himself a little
occasionally. Seldom do ordinary, and still seldomer extraordinary, men
attain full-blooming youth of body and spirit, but when it does happen,
so much the more luxuriantly does one root bear a whole flower-garden.
With such emotions Albano now stood alone behind the palace towards the
south, when a sport of his boyish years occurred to him.
He had, namely, often in May, during a heavy wind, climbed up into a
thick-limbed apple-tree, which supported a whole green hanging cabinet,
and had laid himself down in the arms of its branches. And when, in this
situation, the wavering pleasure-grove swung him about amidst the
juggling play of the lily-butterflies and the hum of bees and insects
and the clouds of blossoms, and when the flaunting top now buried him in
rich green, now launched him into deep blue, and now into the sunshine,
then did his fancy stretch the tree to gigantic dimensions: it grew
alone in the Universe, as if it were the tree of endless life, its root
pierced far down into the abyss, the white-red clouds hung upon it as
blossoms, the moon as a fruit, the little stars glistened like dew, and
Albano reposed in its infinite summit, and a storm swayed the summit
from day into night and from night into day.
And now he stood looking up to a tall cypress. A southeast breeze had
arisen from its siesta in Rome, and flying along had cooled itself by
the way in the tops of the lemon-trees and in a thousand brooks and
shadows, and now lay cradled in the arms of the cypress. Then he climbed
up the tree, in order at least to tire himself. But how did the world
stretch out before him, with its woods, its islands, and its mountains,
when he saw the thunder-cloud lying over Rome's seven hills, just as if
that old spirit were speaking from the gloom which once wrought in the
seven hills as in seven Vesuviuses, that had stood before the face of
the earth so many centuries with fiery columns, with erect tempests, and
had overspread it with clouds and ashes and fertility, till they at last
burst themselves asunder! The mirror-wall of the glaciers stood, like
his father, unmelted before the warm rays of heaven, and only glistened
and remained cold and hard,--from the broad expanse of the lake the
sunny hills seemed on every hand to rise as from their bath, and the
little ships of men seemed to lie fast stranded in the distance,--and,
floating far and wide around him, the great spirits of the past went by,
and under their invisible tread only the woods bowed themselves, the
flower-beds scarcely at all. Then did the outward past become in Albano
his own future,--no melancholy, but a thirst after all greatness that
inhabits and uplifts the spirit, and a shrinking from the unclean baits
of the future painfully compressed his eyelids, and heavy drops fell
from them. He came down, because his internal dizziness grew at last to
a physical. His rural education and the influence of Dian, who
reverenced the modest course of nature, had preserved the budding garden
of his faculties from the untimely morning sun and hasty growth; but the
expectation of the evening and the journey he had taken had conspired
to make the day of his life now too warm and stimulating.
Roaming and dreaming, he lost himself among orange-blossoms. Suddenly it
was to him as if a sweet stirring in his inmost heart made it enlarge
painfully, and grow void, and then full again. Ah, he knew not that it
was the fragrances which he had here in childhood so often drunk into
his bosom, and which now darkly but powerfully called back every fantasy
and remembrance of the past, for the very reason that fragrances, unlike
the worn-out objects of the eye and ear, seldomer present themselves,
and therefore the more easily and intensely renew the faded sensations.
But when he happened into an arcade of the palace, which was colored
mosaically with variegated stones and shells, and when he saw the waves
playing and dancing on the threshold of the grotto, then did a
moss-grown past all at once reveal itself: he sounded his
recollections,--the colored stones of the grotto lay as it were full of
inscriptions of a former time before his memory. Ah, here had he been a
thousand times with his mother! She had showed him the shells and
forbidden him to approach the waves; and once, as the sun was rising and
the rippled lake and all the pebbles glistened, he had waked up on her
bosom, in the midst of the blaze of lights.
O, was not, then, the place sacred, and was not here the overpowering
desire pardonable, which he had so long felt to-day, to open a wound in
his arm for the relief of the restless and tormenting blood?
He scratched himself, but accidentally too deep, and with a cool and
pleasant exaltation of his more lightly-breathing nature he watched the
red fountain of his arm in the setting sun, and became, as if a burden
had fallen off from him, calm, sober, still, and tender. He thought of
his departed mother, whose love remained now forever unrequited. Ah,
gladly would he have poured out this blood for her,--and now, too, love
for his sickly father gushed up more warmly than ever in his bosom. O
come soon, said his heart, I will love thee so inexpressibly, thou dear
Father!
The sun grew cold on the damp earth,--and now only the indented mural
crown formed by the gold wedges of the glacier-peaks glowed above the
spent clouds,--and the magic-lantern of nature threw its images longer
and fainter every moment, when a tall form, in an open red mantle, came
slowly along towards him round the cedar-trees, pressed with the right
hand the region of its heart, where little sparks glimmered, and with
the half-raised left crushed a waxen mask into a lump, and looked down
into its own breast. Suddenly it stiffened against the wall of the
palace in a petrified posture. Albano placed his hand upon his light
wound, and drew near to the petrified one. What a form! From a dry,
haggard face projected between eyes which gleamed on, half hid beneath
their sockets, a contemptuous nose with a proud curl,--there stood a
cherub with the germ of the fall, a scornful, imperious spirit, who
could not love aught, not even his own heart, hardly a higher,--one of
those terrible beings who exalt themselves above men, above misfortune,
above the earth, and above conscience, and to whom it is all the same
whatever human blood they shed, whether another's or their own.
It was Don Gaspard.
The sparkling chain of his order, made of steel and precious stones,
betrayed him. He had been seized with the catalepsy, his old complaint.
"O father!" said Albano, with terror, and embraced the immovable form;
but it was as if he clasped cold death to his heart. He tasted the
bitterness of a hell,--he kissed the rigid lip, and cried more
loudly,--at last, letting fall his arm, he started back from him, and
the exposed wound bled again without his feeling it; and gnashing his
teeth with wild, youthful love and with anguish, and with great
ice-drops in his eyes, he gazed upon the mute form, and tore its hand
from its heart. At this Gaspard, awaking, opened his eyes, and said,
"Welcome, my dear son!" Then the child, with overmastering bliss and
love, sank on his father's heart, and wept, and was silent. "Thou
bleedest, Albano," said Gaspard, softly holding him off; "bandage
thyself!" "Let me bleed; I will die with thee, if thou diest! O, how
long have I pined for thee, my good father!" said Albano, yet more
deeply agitated by his father's sick heart, which he now felt beating
more heavily against his own. "Very good; but bandage thyself!" said he;
and as the son did it, and while hurrying on the bandage, gazed with
insatiable love into the eye of his father,--that eye which cast only
cold glances like his jewelled ring; just then, on the chestnut-tops
which had been to-day the throne of the morning sun, the soft moon
opened soothingly her holy eye, and it was to the inflamed Albano, in
this home of his childhood and his mother, as if the spirit of his
mother were looking from heaven, and calling down, "I shall weep if you
do not love each other." His swelling heart overflowed, and he said
softly to his father, who was growing paler in the moonlight, "Dost thou
not love me, then?" "Dear Alban," replied the father, "one cannot answer
thee enough: thou art very good,--it is very good." But with the pride
of a love which boldly measured itself with his father's, he seized
firmly the hand with the mask, and looked on the Knight with fiery eyes.
"My son," replied the weary one, "I have yet much to say to thee to-day,
and little time, because I travel to-morrow,--and I know not how long
the beating of my heart will let me speak." Ah, then, that previous sign
of a touched soul had been only the sign of a disordered pulse. Thou
poor son, how must thy swollen sea stiffen before this sharp air,--ah,
how must thy warm heart cleave to the ice-cold metal, and tear itself
away not without a skin-peeling wound!
But, good youth! who of us could blame thee that wounds should
attach thee as it were by a tie of _blood_ to thy true or false
demigod,--although a demigod is oftener joined to a demi-beast than a
demi-man,--and that thou shouldst so painfully love! Ah, what ardent
soul has not once uttered the prayer of love in vain, and then, lamed by
the chilling poison, like other poisoned victims, not been able any
longer to move its heavy tongue and heavy heart! But love on, thou warm
soul! like spring-flowers, like night-butterflies, tender love at last
breaks through the hard-frozen soil, and every heart, which desires
nothing else than a heart, finds at last its bosom!