While he stood at the gate awaiting his sword, a group of new masks
(mostly representatives of lifelessness, e. g. a boot, peruke-stand,
&c.) came running into the city, and peered with astonishment at the
tall, white, knightly stranger. He took his sword with him, but no
servant. Whatever the danger into which the visit of a secluded, gloomy
catacomb-avenue, and the foreknowledge of this visit on the part of
others, might plunge him, his character left him no other choice than
the one which he had made; no, he would sooner have let himself be
murdered than shamed before his father.
How thy spirit mounted aloft, like a lightning-flash darting upward
toward heaven, when the great Night, with her saintly halo of stars,
stood erect before thee!--Beneath the heavens there is no terror, only
under the earth!--Broad shadows lay across his road to Elysium, which on
Sunday had been colored with dew-drops and butterflies. In the distance
fiery prongs grew out of the earth and moved along;--it was the hearse
with the torches in the lower road. When he came to the cross-way which
leads through the ruined castle into Tartarus, he looked round toward
the enchanted grove, on whose winding bridge life and songs of joy had
met him; all was dumb therein, and only a long gray bird of prey
(probably a paper dragon) wheeled over it to and fro.
He passed through the old castle into an orchard that had been sawed
down, and looked like a tree-churchyard; then into a pale wood, full of
peeled May-trees, which with faded ribbons and banners all looked toward
Elysium,--a withered pleasure grove of so many happy days. Some
windmills, with their long shadow-arms, struck into the midst, and were
continually seizing and vanishing.
Impetuously Albano ran down a stairway darkened with hangings, and came
upon an old battle-field,--a gloomy waste with a black wall, of which
the monotony was broken only by white gypsum heads, which stood in the
earth as if they were on the point of sinking or of resurrection; a
tower full of blind gates and blind windows stood in the midst, and the
solitary clock talked with itself therein, and, with its iron rod
swaying to and fro, seemed fain to divide the wave of time, which ever
tended to run together again: it struck three quarters to twelve, and
deep in the wood the echo murmured as if in sleep, and softly spake once
more to fleeting man of fleeting time. The road ran in an eternal circle
round about the churchyard wall, without coming to a gate. Alban must,
according to his information, seek a spot in the wall where it roared
and reeled under him.
At last he stepped upon a stone which sank with him; then a section of
the wall fell down; and a tangled wood, full of clumps of trees, whose
stems twined together into bush-work, intercepted every beam of the
moon. As he looked round him under the gate, there hung over the shadowy
stairway a pale head like a bust of the murder-field, and passed down
without a body, and the bloodless dead seemed to awake and run after
it;--the cold hellstone[116] of horror contracted his heart: he stood:
the death's-head hovered immovable over the last step!
All at once his heart sucked in warm blood again; he turned toward the
misshapen wood with drawn sword, because he was bearing along his life
in his hand near armed Death. He followed in the darkness of the
moss-green towers the roar of the subterranean flood and the rocking of
the ground. Unfortunately he looked round again, and there stood the
death's-head behind him still, but high in the air on the trunk of a
giant. The extreme of horror always drove him with compressed eyes full
upon a phantom; he called twice through the echoing wood, "Who's there?"
But when, at this moment, a second head seemed all at once to stand
beside the first, then his hand clove, frozen, to the ice-cold key of
the gate of the world of the dead, and he tore it away bleeding.
He fled, and plunged through thicker and thicker twigs, till at last he
came out into an open garden and into the splendor of the moon; here, ah
here, when he saw the holy, immortal heavens and the rich stars in the
north gleaming again, which never rise nor set, the pole-star and
Friederich's-Ehre,[117] the Bear and the Serpent, and Charles's Wain
and Cassiopæa, which looked down upon him mildly, as if with the bright
winking eyes of eternal spirits, then his spirit asked itself, "Who can
lay hands on me? I am a spirit among spirits"; and the courage of
immortality beat again in his warm breast.
But what a singular garden! Great and little flowerless beds, full of
yew, rue, and rosemary, divided it among them; a circle of weeping
birches drooped like a funeral train around the mute spot; under the
garden murmured the buried brook, and in the middle stood a white altar,
near which lay a man.
Albano was strengthened by the appearance of the common dress and the
mechanic's bundle on which the sleeper rested; he stepped quite close to
him, and read the golden inscription of the altar: "Take my last
offering, all-gracious one!" The heart of the Prince must here be
mouldering in the altar.
Ah, after these rigid scenes, it soothed his soul even to tears to find
here human words and a human sleep, and the remembrance of God; but as
he looked with emotion at the sleeper, suddenly that sister's voice
which he had heard on Isola Bella said softly in his ear, "I give thee
Linda de Romeiro." "Ah, good God!" he cried, and turned round; and there
was nothing on either side of him, and he held himself up by the corner
of the altar. "I give thee Linda de Romeiro," it said again; frightfully
the thought seized him, that the hovering death's-head might be speaking
near him, and he shook the sound sleeper, who woke not, and shook and
called still more violently, when the voice spake for a third time.
"What?" said the drowsy man, "directly! What will he?--you?" and raised
himself reluctantly and with a yawn; but at the sight of the naked sword
fell down on his knees, and said: "Mercy! I will, indeed, give up all!"
"Zesara!" a cry came from the wood,--"Zesara, where art thou?" and he
heard his own voice; but now he boldly called back, "At the altar!" A
black form rushed out, with a white mask in hand, and hesitated in the
moonlight before the armed one. Then at length Albano recognized the
brother of Liana, for whom he had so long panted; he flung his sword
behind him, and ran to meet him. Roquairol stood before him mute, pale,
and with a sublime repose on his countenance. Albano continued to stand
near him, and said with emotion, "Hast thou been seeking me, Charles?"
Roquairol nodded silently, and had tears in his eyes, and opened his
arms. Ah, then could the blissful man, with all the flames and tears of
love fall upon the long-loved soul, and he kept saying incessantly, "Now
we have each other! now we have each other!" And more and more
passionately he embraced him, as the pillar of his future, and melted
into tears, because now, indeed, the buried love of so many years and so
many choked up fountains of the poor heart could at once gush forth.
Roquairol, trembling, only clasped him to himself gently with one arm,
and said, but without passion, "I am a dying man, and that is my face,"
holding forth the yellow death-mask; "but I have my Albano, and will die
on his bosom."
Wildly they twined around each other; the sap of life, Love, ran through
them with a creative power; the ground over the rolling, subterranean
flood shook more violently; and the starry heaven, with the white, magic
breath of its trembling stars, floated around the magic glow.
Ah ye happy ones!