The Knight took him up to a gallery supported by a row of stone pillars,
which lemon-trees strewed all over with perfumes and with little, lively
shadows, silver-edged by the moon. He drew two medallions from his
pocket-book,--one represented a remarkably youthful-looking female face,
with the circumscription, "Nous ne nous verrons jamais, mon fils."
"Here is thy mother," said Gaspard, giving it to him, "and here thy
sister"; and handed him the second, whose lines ran into an indistinct,
antiquated shape, with the circumscription, "Nous nous verrons un jour,
mon frère." He now began his discourse, which he delivered in such a low
tone and in so many loose sheets (one comma often coming at one end of
the gallery and the next at the other), and with such an alternation of
quick and slow paces, that the ear of any eavesdropping inquisitor
keeping step with them, under the gallery, had there been one down
there, could not have caught three drops of connected sound. "Thy
attention, dear Alban," he continued, "not thy fancy, must now be put on
the stretch. Thou art, unhappily, to-day too romantic for one who is to
hear so many romantic things. The Countess of Cesara ever loved the
mysterious; thou wilt perceive it in the commission which she gave me a
few days before her death, and which I was obliged to promise I would
execute this very Good-Friday."
He said further, before beginning, that, as his catalepsy and
palpitation of the heart increased critically, he must hasten to Spain
to arrange his affairs, and, still more, those of his ward, the Countess
of Romeiro. Alban made one brotherly inquiry about his dear sister, so
long separated from him; his father gave him to hope he should soon see
her, as she intended to visit Switzerland with the Countess.
As I do not perceive what people will gain by it, if I insert those (to
me) annoying geese-feet[13] with the everlasting "said he," I will
relate the commission in person. There would, at a certain time (the
Knight said), come to him three unknown persons,--one in the morning,
one at noon, and one in the evening,--and each one would present him a
card, in a sealed envelope, containing merely the name of the city and
the house wherein the picture-cabinet, which Albano must visit the very
same night, was to be found. In this cabinet he must touch and press all
the nails of the pictures till he comes to one behind which the pressure
makes a repeating-clock, built into the wall, strike twelve. Here he
finds behind the picture a secret arras-door, behind which sits a female
form with an open souvenir and three rings on her left hand, and a
crayon in her right. When he presses the ring of the middle finger, the
form will rise amidst the rolling of the internal wheel-work, step out
into the chamber, and the wheel-work, which is running down, will stop
with her at a wall whereon she indicates, by the crayon, a hidden
compartment, in which lie a pocket-perspective glass and the waxen
impression of a coffin-key. The eye-glass of the perspective arranges by
an optical anamorphosis the snarl of withering lines on the medallion of
his sister, which he had to-day received, into a sweet, young form, and
the object-glass gives back to the immature image of his mother the
lineaments of mature life. Then he is to press the ring-finger, and
immediately the dumb, cold figure will begin to write with the crayon in
the souvenir, and designate to him, in a few words, the place of the
coffin, of whose key he has the waxen impression. In the coffin lies a
black marble slab, in the form of a black Bible; and when he has broken
it he will find a kernel therein, from which is to grow the
Christmas-tree of his whole life. If the slab is not in the coffin, then
he is to give the last ring of the little finger a pressure,--but what
this wooden Guerike's weather-prophet of his destiny would do, the
Knight himself could not predict.
I am fully of opinion that from this bizarre testament the
repeating-work and half of the wheel-work might easily be broken out,
(just as clocks are now made in London with only two wheels,) without
doing the dial-work or the movement of the hands the least injury.
Upon Albano all this testamentary whirl and whiz had, contrary to my
expectation, almost no effect; excepting to produce a more tender love
for the good mother who, when she already beheld, in the stream of life
below, the swift image of the pouncing hawk of death, thought only of
her son. Upon the fixed, iron countenance of his father he so gazed
during this narrative with tender gratitude for the pains he had taken
to remember and relate, as almost to lose the thread of the discourse,
and in the moonshine and to the eye of his fancy the Knight grew to a
Colossus of Rhodes, hiding half the horizon of the present, a being for
whom this testamentary memory-work seemed almost too trivial.
Thus far Don Gaspard had spoken merely as a genuine man of the world,
who always excludes from his speech (into which no special, intimate
relations enter) all mention or flattery of a person, of others as well
as of himself, and regards even historical persons merely as conditions
of things, so that two such impersonalities with their grim coldness
seemed to be only two speaking logics or sciences, not living beings
with beating hearts. O, how softly did it flow, like a tender melody,
into Albano's lovesick heart, which the pure and mild moon, and the
glimmering island-garden of his early days, and the voice of his mother
sounding on and echoing in his soul, all conspired to melt, when at
length the _father_ said: "So much have I to tell of the Countess. Of
myself I have nothing to say to thee but to express my constant
satisfaction hitherto with thy life." "O, give me, dearest father,
instruction and counsel for my future government," said the enraptured
man, and as Gaspard's right hand twitched convulsively toward his more
hurriedly beating heart, he followed it with his left to the sick spot
and pressed intensely the hysterical heart as if he could arrest by
grasping at the spokes this down-hill-rolling wheel of life. The Knight
replied: "I have nothing more to say to thee. The _Linden City_
(Pestitz) is now open to thee; thy mother had shut it against thee. The
hereditary Prince, who will soon be Prince, and the minister, Von
Froulay, who is my friend, will be thine. I believe it will be of
service to thee to cultivate their acquaintance."
The sharp-sighted Gaspard saw at this moment suddenly flit across the
pure, open countenance of the youth strange emotions and hot blushes,
which nothing immediate could explain, and which instantly passed away,
as if annihilated, when he thus continued: "To a man of rank, sciences
and polite learning, which to others are final ends, are only means and
recreations; and great as thy inclination for them may be, thou wilt,
however, surely, in the end give actions the preference over enjoyments;
thou wilt not feel thyself born to instruct or amuse men merely, but to
manage and to rule them. It were well if thou couldst gain the minister,
and thereby the knowledge of government and political economy which he
can give thee; for in the sketch of one country as well as of one court
thou hast the grand outlines of every greater one to which thou mayest
be called, and for which thou wilt have to educate thyself. It is my
wish that thou shouldst be even a favorite of the Prince and the Court,
less because thou hast need of connections than because thou needest
experience. Only through men are men to be subdued and surpassed, not
by books and superior qualities. One must not display his worth in order
to gain men, but gain them first, and then, and not until then, show his
worth. There is no calamity like ignorance; and not so much by virtue as
by understanding is man made formidable and fortunate. Thou hast at most
to shun men who are too like thee, particularly the noble." The
corrosive sublimate of his irony consisted here, not in his pronouncing
"noble" with an accented, ironical tone, but in his pronouncing it,
contrary to what might have been expected, coldly and without any tone
at all. Albano's hand, still on his, had for some time slipped down from
his father's heart along the sharp-edged steel chain of his order to the
golden, metal-cold lamb that hung from it. The youth, like all young men
and hermits, had too severe notions of courtiers and men of the world:
he held them to be decided basilisks and dragons,--although I can still
excuse that, if he means by basilisks only what the naturalists
mean,--wingless lizards,--and by dragons, nothing but winged ones, and
thus regards them only as amphibia, hardly less cold and odious than
Linnæus defines such to be. Besides, he cherished (so easily does
Plutarch become the seducer of youth whose biographer he might have
been, like me) more contempt than reverence for the _artolatry_ (loaf
and fish service) of our age, always transubstantiating (inversely) its
_god_ into _bread_,--for the best bread-studies or bread-carts,--for the
making of a _carrière_,--for every one, in short, who was not a
dare-devil, and who, instead of catapultas and war machines, operated
with some sort of invisible magnetic wands, suction-works, and
cupping-glasses, and took anything in that way. Every young man has a
fine season in his life when he will accept no office, and every young
woman has the same in hers, when she will accept no husband; by and by
they both change, and often take one another into the bargain.
As the Knight advanced the above propositions, certainly not offensive
to any man of the world, there swelled in his son a holy, generous
pride,--it seemed to him as if his heart and even his body, like that of
a praying saint, were lifted by a soaring genius far above the
race-courses of a greedy, creeping age,--the great men of a greater time
passed before him under their triumphal arches, and beckoned him to come
nearer to them: in the east lay Rome and the moon, and before him the
Circus of the Alps,--a mighty Past by the side of a mighty Present. With
the proud and generous consciousness that there is something more
godlike in us than prudence and understanding, he laid hold of his
father, and said: "This whole day, dear father, has been one increasing
agitation in my heart. I cannot speak nor think rightly for emotion.
Father, I will visit them all; I will soar away above men; but I despise
the dirty road to the object. I will in the sea of the world rise like a
living man by _swimming_, and not like a drowned man by _corruption_.
Yes, father, let Fate cast a gravestone upon this breast, and crush it,
when it has lost virtue and the divinity and its own heart."
What made Albano speak so warmly was that he could not avoid an
irrepressible veneration for the great soul of the Knight; he
continually represented to himself the pangs and the lingering death of
so strong a life, the sharp smoke of so great a coldly quenched fire,
and inferred from the emotions of his own living soul what must be those
of his father, who in his opinion had only gradually thus crumbled upon
a broad bed of black, cold worldlings, as the diamond cannot be
volatilized except on a bed of dead, burnt-out, blacksmith's coals. Don
Gaspard, who seldom, and then only mildly, found fault with men,--not
from love, but from indifference,--patiently replied to the youth: "Thy
warmth is to be praised. All will come right in good time. Now let us
eat."