What a singular night followed upon this singular day! Sleepy with
travelling, all went to rest; only Albano, in whom the hot eventful day
still burned on, said to the Knight that he could not now, with his
breast full of fire, find coolness and rest anywhere but under the cold
stars and the blossoms of the Italian spring. He leaned against a statue
on the upper terrace, near a blooming balustrade of citrons, that he
might sweetly shut his eyes beneath the starry heaven, and still more
sweetly open them in the morning. Even in his earlier youth had he, as
well as myself, wished himself upon the Italian roofs of warm lands, in
order, not as a night-walker, but as a regular sleeper, to wake up
thereon.
How magnificently there does the eye open upon the radiant hanging
gardens full of eternal blossoms above thee, whereas on thy German
sweltry feather-pillow thou hast nothing before thee, when thou lookest
up, but the bed-tail!
While Zesara was thus traversing waves, mountains, and stars with a
stiller and stiller soul, and when at last garden and sky and lake ran
together into one dark Colossus, and he sadly thought of his pale
mother, and of his sister, and of the announced wonders of his future
life, a figure dressed all in black, with the image of a death's-head on
its breast, came slowly and painfully, and with trembling breath, up the
terraces behind him. "Remember death!" it said. "Thou art Albano de
Zesara?" "Yes," said Zesara, "who art thou?" "I am," it said, "a father
of death.[17] It is not from fear, but from habit, I tremble so."
The limbs of the man continued to quake all over, in a frightful and
almost audible manner. Zesara had often wished an adventure for his idle
bravery; now he had it before him. Meantime, however, he kept a sharp
watch with his eye, and when the monk said, "Look up to the evening star
and tell me when it goes down, for my sight is weak," he threw only a
hasty glance upwards. "Three stars," said he, "are still between it and
the Alps." "When it sets," the father continued, "then thy sister in
Spain gives up the ghost, and thereupon she will speak with thee here
from Heaven." Zesara was hardly touched by a finger of the cold hand of
horror, simply because he was not in a room, but in the midst of young
Nature, who stations her mountains and stars as watchmen around the
trembling spirit; or it may have been because the vast and substantial
bodily world, so near before us, crowds out and hides with its
building-work the world of spirits. He asked, with indignation: "Who art
thou? What knowest thou? What wilt thou?" and grasped at the folded
hands of the monk, and held both imprisoned in one of his. "Thou dost
not know me, my son," said the father of death, calmly. "I am a
Zahouri,[18] and come from Spain from thy sister; I see the dead down in
the earth, and know beforehand when they will appear and discourse. But
their apparition above ground I do not see, and their discourse I cannot
hear."
Here he looked sharply at the youth, whose features suddenly grew rigid
and lengthened, for a voice like a female and familiar one began slowly
over his head: "Take the crown,--take the crown,--I will help thee." The
monk asked: "Is the evening-star already gone down? Is _it_ talking with
thee?" Zesara looked upward, and could not answer; the voice from Heaven
spake again, and said the same thing. The monk guessed as much, and
said: "Thus did thy father hear thy mother from on high, when he was in
Germany; but he had me thrown into prison for a long time, because he
thought I deceived him." At the mention of his "father," whose disbelief
of the spiritual Zesara knew, he hurried the monk, by his two hands
held fast in his own single and strong one, down the terraces, in order
to hear where the voice might now be. The old man smiled softly; the
voice again spake above him, but in these words: "Love the beautiful
one,--love the beautiful one,--I will help thee." A skiff was moored to
the shore, which he had already seen during the day. The monk, who
apparently wished to do away the suspicion of a voice being concealed
anywhere, stepped into the gondola, and beckoned him to follow. The
youth, relying on his bodily and mental strength and his skill in
swimming, boldly pushed off with the monk from the island; but what a
shudder seized upon his innermost fibres, when not only the voice above
him called again, "Love the beautiful one whom I will show thee,--I will
help thee," but when he even saw, off toward the terrace, a female form,
with long, chestnut-brown hair, and dark eyes, and a shining, swan-like
neck, and with the complexion and vigor of the richest climate, rise,
like a nobler Aphrodite, revealed down to her bosom, from out the
deepest waves. But in a few seconds the Goddess sank back again beneath
the surface, and the spirit-voice continued to whisper overhead, "Love
the beautiful one whom I showed thee." The monk coldly and silently
prayed during the scene, of which he heard and saw nothing. At length he
said: "On the next Ascension-day, at the hour of thy birth, thou wilt
stand beside a heart which is not within a breast, and thy sister will
announce to thee from Heaven the name of thy bride."
When before us feeble, rheumy creatures, who, like Polypuses and
flowers, only _feel_ and _seek_, but cannot _see_ the light of a higher
element, a flash darts, in the total eclipse of our life, through the
earthly mass which hangs before our higher sun,[19] that ray cuts in
pieces the nerve of vision, which can bear only _forms_, not _light_; no
burning terror wings the heart and the blood, but a cold shudder at our
own thoughts, and in the presence of a new, incomprehensible world,
chains the warm stream, and life becomes ice.
Albano, from whose teeming fancy a chaos might spring as easily as a
universe, grew pale; but it was with him as if he lost not so much his
spirit as his understanding. He rowed impetuously, almost unconsciously,
to the shore,--he could not look the father of death in the face,
because his wild fancy, tearing everything to pieces, distorted and
distended all forms, like clouds, into horrid shapes,--he hardly heard
the monk when he said, by way of farewell, "Next Good Friday, perhaps, I
may come again." The monk stepped on board a skiff which came along of
itself (propelled, probably, by a wheel under the water), and soon
disappeared behind, or in, the little Fisher's island (Isola peschiere).
For the space of a minute Alban reeled, and it appeared to him as if the
garden and the sky and all were a floating and fleeting fog-bank,--as if
nothing _were_, as if he had not lived. This arsenical qualm was at once
blown away from his stifled breast by the breath of the Librarian,
Schoppe, who was piping merrily at the chamber window; all at once his
life grew warm again, the earth came back, and existence _was_. Schoppe,
who could not sleep for warmth, now came down to make his own bed also
on the tenth terrace. He saw in Zesara an intense inward agitation, but
he had long been accustomed to such, and made no inquiries.