The paternal letter, which shook Albano's soul in all its joints, runs,
when translated, thus:--
"Dear Albano: I regret to say, that in the Campanian vale I received a
letter informing me of the continued recurrence and increasing violence
of thy sister's asphyxias; it was written on Good Friday, and looked
forward to her death as a settled thing. I, too, am prepared for the
event. So much the more am I struck with thy account of the juggler of
the Island, who would play the prophet. Such a prediction presupposes
some circumstance or other, which I must trace out more nearly in Spain.
I think I already know the impostor. Be thou, on thy birthday, watchful,
armed, cool, and bold, and, if possible, hold the _jongleur_ fast; but
bring no ridicule upon thyself by speaking of the subject. Dian is in
Rome, working away right bravely. Put on court-mourning for the dear old
Prince, out of courtesy. Addio!
"G. DE C."
"Ah, precious sister!" he sighed inwardly, and drew out her medallion,
and looked through his tears upon the features of an old age which was
denied her, and read with dim eyes the refuted subscription: "We see
each other again." Now, when life was opening before him broad and
smiling, it came home to him much more nearly, that fate laid its hand
so darkly and heavily upon his sister; to which was added, too, the
melancholy question, whether he was not guilty of her disappearance and
decline, since on his account the frightful Zahouri of the Island had
carried on perhaps a sacrificing jugglery: even the circumstance that
she was his weakly twin-sister was a pang. But now his feelings stood
contending against each other in his mind, as on a battle-field. "What
destiny is on its way to meet me!" thought he. "Take the crown!" that
voice had said. "What one?" his ambitious spirit rose up and asked, and
boldly conjectured whether it consisted of laurels or thorns or metals.
"Love the beautiful one!" it had said; he asked not, however, in this
case, "What one?" only he feared, since the father of Death seemed
terribly to certify his name and credentials, that the voice announced
for the ascension- and birth-night might name some other name than the
most beloved.
In the evening, after the three new-comers had fairly got through their
household arrangements,--which, however, had never yet been able to
efface from Albano's undulating soul the multiplied magic splendor of
the Linden-city,--the Lector introduced the Count to the hereditary
prince, Luigi. That individual was engaged half an hour every day
copying in the picture-gallery; and appointed the two to attend him
there. They went in. Any other than myself would have set before the
world a bill of fare _raisonné_ of all the show-dishes in the gallery;
but I cannot so much as present it with the seventeen pictures, over
whose charms those silken shame-aprons or veils hung, which a Paris dame
would gladly take off from her own, merely for the sake of modestly
covering therewith works of art. One may easily conceive that our Alban,
in this picture-gallery, must have been vividly reminded of that one of
his mother's,[50] and that he would gladly have pressed every nail, had
no one been there.
But the Princess Julienne was there, whom he (as we all do) still
recognized right well as a Blumenbühl acquaintance, as she also did him.
She was truly full of youthful charms, but one did not find these out
till one had been for two days violently in love with her; that made her
every minute afterward prettier, as in fact love is rather the father
than the son of the goddess of grace, and his quiver the best casket of
jewels and the richest toilet-box, and his bandage the best _mouchoir
de Venus_ and beauty-patch that I know.
She was just sketching the gypsum-cast of a noble old head, which seemed
to the Count as if it must have been drawn from the antique-cabinet of
his memory, and toward which his swelling heart flowed out right
lovingly; but he could not recall the original. At last Julienne, in
despite of etiquette, said, looking up most kindly, "Ah, dear Augusti,
my father lies dead in Lilar." The word Lilar suddenly colored, in
Albano, the pale image of recollection,--perfectly like this white bust
had the old man in the moonshine looked, who, in that poetical
summer-night, pressed Zesara's hands together on the mountain for
prayer, and said, "Go home to sleep, dear son, ere the storm comes." Now
another would have inquired after the name of the bust, and then, and
not till then, have disclosed the nocturnal history; but the Count, in
his warmth, did merely the latter, after waiting a short time for the
conversation to run out. Augusti, when Albano began the history--to
_him_ a foreign one--of his acquaintance with the original, was on
thorns to interrupt him; but Julienne gave him a nod, to let him go on,
and the youth true-heartedly communicated to the sympathizing soul the
beautiful meeting, with a tenderness of emotion and fire, both of which
increased when her eyes flowed over into her smiles. "It was my
father,--that is his cast," said Julienne, weeping and glad. Albano,
after his manner, clasped his hands together, with a sigh, before the
bust, and said, "Thou noble, heartily-beloved form!" and his large eye
gleamed with love and sorrow.
The good female soul was carried away by a sympathy so uncourtly, and
she gave herself up completely to her inborn fire. Female and court life
is truly only a longer _punishment of bearing arms_ (as, according to
the model of the yes-sirs, there are no-sirs, so royal governesses are
true no-ma'ams); the seven-colored cockade of gay, dancing liberty is
there torn off, or runs into the black of court-mourning; every female
pleasure-grove must be an unholy one; I know nothing more fatal,--but
the curly-haired Julienne, in spite of you and me, broke through the
eternal imprisonment (with sweet bread and strong water), some twelve
times a day, and laughed to the free heavens, and offended (herself and
others never) the royal governess always. She now related to the Count
(while from nervous weakness and vivacity she continued to smile more
brightly and speak more rapidly) how her dear, feeble father, more
childlike than childish, whose old lips and disabled thoughts could not
possibly any longer do more than lisp a response to prayers, had shut
himself up with a snowy-headed mystical court-preacher in an oratory at
Lilar (a gray head loves to hide itself before it disappears forever,
and seeks, like birds, a dark place for going to sleep),--and how she
and Fräulein von Froulay (Liana) had alternately read prayers before the
half-blind old man, and, as it were, tolled the evening-bell of devotion
to the weary, sleep-drunken life. She painted how, in this antechamber
of the tomb, he had outlived or forgotten all that he had once loved;
how he had kept always asking after her mother, whose death was ever
slipping again from his memory; and how the dimmed eye had taken every
hour of the day for evening, and accordingly every one who went out as
one going to bed.
We will not look too long at this late time of life, when men again,
like children, shrink up for the more lasting cradle of the
grave; and when, like flowers sleeping at evening, they become
_undistinguishable_, and grow all alike, even before death makes them
so.
The Lector, like all courtiers, was particularly ill-suited with these
funereals; he would also fain heal the Job's malady of her lamentation
by changing the current of discourse, and bringing it nearer to Liana.
But in the very act of describing the sympathy and sacrifices of this
friend, and when memory brought back to her the long, tearful embrace in
which Liana had locked her and pain at once as it were fast to her
bosom, then came back into her heart anew every dark, heavy drop of
blood which her powerful arteries had sent forth, and she ceased to
portray either this history or the head upon which she had been engaged.
The two female friends were none of those who send a kiss to each other
through two thicknesses of veil, or who know how to hug each other
without wounding or bruising a curl, or whose love-feast every year, as
the sacramental bread every century, breaks lighter and thinner; but
they loved each other intensely,--with eyes, lips, and hearts,--like two
good angels. And if hitherto joy had taken her harvest-wreath and made
it a wedding-ring of friendship, so now did grief seek to do the same
with his girdle of thorns. You good souls! to me it is very easily
imaginable how such a pure, bright linking of souls should at once
painfully distend and blissfully exalt the heart of your friend Albano,
as the aerostatic ball at once destructively swells and soars. For
Liana's entry, there stood besides beautifully decorated triumphal gates
to the highest heavens in his innermost being!
Meanwhile a stranger would not, without this pen of mine (nor I myself
without the fee-provost Hafenreffer), have been able to observe
anything in the Count, while speaking, except a mild, wandering glow in
his face, and rapidity of utterance.