As the juggling night threw our Albano from one side and vision to the
other,--for not the near past but the near future wearies us with
rehearsals of our waking acts, with dreams,--how glad he was, in the
morning, that his fairest future had not yet gone by. Two very
Eulenspiegelish wishes often lodge in man: I often form the wish with my
whole heart, that some real joy of mine, e. g. a master-work, a
pleasure-journey, &c., might yet at last have an end; and, secondly, the
wish above referred to, that one or another pleasure might stay away a
little longer.
The evening came with the greatest pleasure of all, when Zesara, like Le
Gentil starting for the East Indies, set off for the eastern park of the
Minister, to observe the transit of his evening star Venus; but only
through the moon. Before the lighted windows of the palace he stopped
among the people, and reflected, whether it were quite allowable thus to
run into the garden; but really, had he been turned back, his thirsting
heart would have carried him in through a whole Clerus and Diplomatic
Congress posted before the gate. Boldly he strode along through the
noisy palace before a barricade of tackled carriages, turned the iron
lattice-gate, and stepped hastily into the nearest leafy avenue. Here,
attended by a torch-dance of gleaming hopes, he went to and fro, but his
eye was a telescope, and his ear was a hearing-trumpet. The green avenue
wound up over the garden till it grew into another near the bath-house;
into this he entered so as not to meet the blind one, or rather her
attendant.
But nothing came. To be sure he had not, like the moon,--as was, indeed,
to have been expected of him,--come a half-hour too late, but in fact a
half-hour too early. The moon, that star which leads wise men full of
incense to the adoration, at last let fall broad, long, silver-leaves,
like festive tapestry, into Liana's eastern room,--the Madonna on the
palace was arrayed in the halo and nun's-veil of her rays,--the
Minister's wife stood already at the window,--Nature played the
larghetto[68] of an enchanted evening in deeper and deeper
strains,--when Albano caught nothing further except a smaller one, made
up of mere tones, which came from the bath-house, the pleasure-seat of
all his wishes, and which, dying, would fain breathe its last with the
spring-day. But he could not guess who played it. One might have
inferred that it was Roquairol, merely because he afterward, as I shall
relate, according to the April-like nature of his musical temperament,
sprang up out of pianissimo into a too wild fortissimo. The brother,
exiled by his father, could at least in the bath-house see and console
his dear sister, and show her his love and his penitence; although his
stormy repentance makes a second necessary, and at last became only a
more pious repetition of his fault.
Although Albano's fancy was a retina of the universe, on which every
world sharply pictured itself, and his heart the sounding-board of the
sphere-music, in which each revolved, yet neither the evening nor the
larghetto, with their rays and tones, could pierce through the high
waves which expectation as well as anxiety (both obscure nature and art)
dashed up within him. The bank of the fountains is entwined around with
a green ring of orange-trees, whose blossoms, in the East, according to
the Selam-cipher, signify _hopes_; but really one after another was
short-lived, when he thought of the cold, clear mother, or of his
perhaps vain waiting. The fountains leaped not yet,--he kept plucking
away, like a premature autumn, more and more of the broad fan-leaves
from his blooming Spanish wall, and still, through all his widening
windows, saw no Liana coming down along the pebbly path (which was
impossible, for the very reason that she had been long standing in the
bath-house with her brother), and he began to despair of her appearance,
when the brother suddenly stormed into the above-mentioned fortissimo,
and all the fountains sent up before the moon murmuring wreaths of
sparkling silver. Albano looked out....
Liana stood up there in the glimmer of the moon, behind the fluttering
water. What an apparition! He tore asunder the twigs of the foliage
before his face, and gazed, uncovered and breathless, upon the sacredly
beautiful form! As Grecian gods stand and look unearthly before the
torch, so shone Liana before the moon, overshadowed with the myriad
glancing reflections of the silvery rainbows, and the blest youth saw
irradiated the young, open, still Mary's-brow, upon which no vexation
and no effort had as yet cast a wave,--and the thin, tender,
scarcely-arched line of the eyebrows,--and the face like a perfect
pearl, oval and white,--and the loosely flowing ringlets lying on the
May-flowers over her heart,--and the delicate grace's-proportions,
which, like the white attire, seemed to exalt the form,--and the ideal
stillness of her nature, which made her place, instead of an arm, only a
finger upon the balustrade, as if the Psyche only floated over the
lily-bells of the body, and neither shook nor bowed them,--and the large
blue eyes, which, while the head sank a little, opened upward with such
inexpressible beauty, and seemed to lose themselves in dreams and in
distant plains reflecting the evening-twilight's glow!
Thou too fortunate man!--to whom the only visible goddess, Beauty,
appears so suddenly, in her omnipotence, and attended by all her
heavens! The present, with its shapes, is unknown to thee,--the past
fades away,--the near tones seem to steal from the depth of
distance,--the unearthly apparition overflows and overpowers with
splendor the mortal breast!
Ah, why must a deep, cold cloud steal through this pure and lofty
heaven? Ah, why didst thou not find the heavenly one earlier or
later?--and why must she herself remind thee of her sorrow?
For Liana--into whose veiled eye only a strong light could trickle
through--was looking for the moon, which was a little overhung by its
own aurora, and she turned her head around gropingly, because she
thought a linden-top concealed it;--and this uncertain inclination so
suddenly pictured to him her misfortune in a thousand colors! A quick
pang pressed his eyes, so that tears and sparks darted from them, and
pity cried within him: "O thou innocent eye! why art thou veiled? Why
from this grateful, good soul is May and the whole creation taken away?
And she sends round in vain a look of love after her mother and her
companion, and--O God! she knows not where they stand."
But the curtain of the moon soon floated aside, and she smiled serenely
on its radiance, as the blind Milton in his immortal song smiles upon
the sun, or as an inhabitant of earth smiles upon the earliest splendor
of the next life.
A nightingale, who hitherto, while hopping after a glow-worm among the
distant flowers, had responded to the tones in the chamber only with
single game-calls and complemental notes of joy, flew nearer to Liana,
and the winged miniature-organ drew out at once all its flute-stops, so
that Liana, forgetting her blindness, looked down, and Albano started
back alarmed, as if she were looking upon him. Then was her pale face,
upon the cheeks of which a light redness played, as upon the white pink,
tenderly suffused with the faint red bloom of emotion under the mingling
tones of the brother and of the nightingale,--the eyelids quivered
oftener over the gleaming eyes,--and at last the gleam became a quiet
tear,--it was not a tear of pain nor of joy, but that soft tear in which
the longing of the heart overflows; as, in spring, overfull twigs,
though unwounded, weep.
There dwells in man a rough, blind cyclops, who in our storms always
begins to speak, and gives us fatal counsel. Frightfully at this moment,
in Zesara, did the whole awakened energy of his bosom bestir
itself,--that wild spirit which drags us on condor's wings to the brink
of the precipice; and the cyclops cried aloud in him: "Rush out,--kneel
before her,--tell her thy whole heart;--what though thou then art lost
forever, if thou hast only caught one sound of this soul!--and then cool
and sacrifice thyself in the cold waters at her feet." Verily he
thirsted for the fresh basin in which the fountains leaped back. But ah!
before this gentle, this afflicted and pure one? "No," said the good
spirit in him, "wound her not again, as her brother did. O spare her! be
silent, respectful: then thou lovest her."
Here he stepped out on the illuminated earth as into a heavenly hall,
and took the open sun-path, but softly, along before the fountains. As
he passed by her, all at once the arcade of drops, which had half
latticed her round, collapsed, and Liana stood cloudless, as a pure
Luna, without her cloud-court, in the deep blue of heaven; a shining
lily[69] from the next world, which, to herself, is a sign that she is
soon to pass thither. O his heart, full of virtue, felt with trembling
the nearness of virtue in another; and, with all signs of the deepest
veneration, he walked along by the quiet being, who could not observe
them.
Not till, at every step, a heaven had escaped from him, and he at last
had none but the one above his head, did he become quite gentle; and
then he was glad that he had not been bolder. How the earth now shines
to him, how the heaven of suns approaches him, how his heart loves! O,
at some future time after yet many years, when this _glowing_
rose-garden of rapture already lies far behind thy back, how softly and
magically will it, when thou turnest round and lookest toward it,
glimmer after thee as a _white_ rose-parterre of memory!