Some men are born fast friends; their first finding of each other is
only a second, and they then, like those who have been long parted,
bring to each other not only a future, but a past also;--this latter our
happy ones demanded of one another impatiently. Roquairol answered
Alban's question, How he came hither, in a fiery manner: "He had been
following him this whole evening,--he had gazed at him at the window
during the funeral pomp with such a painful longing, and had almost been
constrained to fly and embrace him,--he had already, but a moment ago,
stood close by him, and at his question, 'Who's there?' immediately
taken off his mask." Now did Albano's fallen arm strike again tensely
through the thin magic-lantern show of ghostly fear, as he now
learned that the two-headed giant had grown entirely out of an
optically-magnifying, mistaken notion of the distance of a form which
was so near, and the death's-head had forfeited its body on the stairway
only by the dark curtains and its black dress; even the hard
spirit-scene at the altar seemed to him now less insuperable through the
rich gain of living love.
Roquairol asked him what woe or joy had driven him hither at midnight to
a _Moravian_ churchyard, and whither he had sent the man with the sword.
Albano did not know that Moravians reposed here; and, moreover, he had
not observed that the sword, probably from fear of its being used, had
been stolen. He answered, "My dead sister was fain to speak with me at
the altar; and she has spoken"; but he feared to say more of this. Then
Roquairol's countenance suddenly changed; he stared at him, and demanded
confirmation and explanation; during this he looked into the air as if
he would draw faces from it by his looks, and said monotonously, fixing
his eyes, however, on Albano the while, "Dead one, dead one, speak
again!" But only the death-flood went on speaking under them, and
nothing more. But he threw himself before the altar on his knees, and
said in measured tone, and yet with trembling lips: "Fly open,
spirit-gate, and show thy transparent world. I fear not you, the
transparent ones; I become one of you, when you appear, and walk with
you, and become an apparition myself." "O my good one, forbear," Albano
entreated, not only from piety, but from love also; for an accident, a
night-bird shooting over, might, indeed, kill them by horror: this
horror stood, too, not far from them; for on the illuminated side of the
weeping birches stepped out a white, majestic old form. But when
Roquairol, frantic with wine and fancy, reached out the dying mask into
the air, and said, turning toward the grave of the heart, "Take this
face, if thou hast none, old man, and look at me from behind it!" Alban
seized him; the white form stepped back with bowed head and folded arms
into the branches; the round tower on the battle-field struck the hour,
and the dreamy region, murmuring, struck a response.
"Come to my warm heart, thou passionate soul. O that I were permitted to
receive thee on my very birthday, at my very birth-hour!" This sound
melted at once the ever-changing man, and he hung upon him with wet eyes
of joy, and said: "And to keep me even till our dying hours! O look not
upon me, thou unchangeable, because I appear so wavering and broken; in
the waves of life man breaks and crinkles as the staff flickers in the
water, but the essential being stands nevertheless firm as the staff. I
will follow thee into other parts of Tartarus; but still relate the
history."
To give this history amounted to opening a _sanctum sanctorum_ of the
inner man, or even a coffin to the light of day; but do you believe that
Albano bethought himself a minute? or would you yourselves? We are all
better, franker, warmer friends than we know and show; only let the
right spirit meet you,--such a one as thirsting Love ever
demands,--pure, large, clear, and tender and warm,--and you give him
everything, and love him without measure, because he is without fault.
Albano found in this stranger the first friend who ever responded to his
whole heart with like tones, the first eye which his shy feelings did
not shun, a soul before whose first tear flowers started up out of his
whole future life as out of the dry wastes of torrid climes during the
rainy season;--hence love gave his strong spirit only the equable, broad
motion of a sea, whereas his friend, although older and longer-trained,
was a stream with waterfalls.
Charles led him into the so-called catacomb, while he listened to the
ghost-story of Isola Bella, which, however, from having been exhausted
by the former, he heard with diminished fear. A dreary, charred vale,
full of sunken shafts, basked gray in the moonshine; out of the wood
crept forth the death-flood below their feet, and leaped down a stony
stairway into the catacombs. The two followed it on another that ran by
its side. The entrance bore as frontispiece an old dial-plate, of which
the lightning had once struck away the hour _one_. "One?" said Albano;
"singular!--just our coming hour!"
How adventurously does the catacomb now wind onward! The long
death-flood murmurs obscurely far in through the darkness, and glimmers
at times under the silvery stream which the moonlight sends in through
the shaft-openings; immovable creatures--horses, dogs, birds--stand
drinking on the dark bank, that is to say, their stuffed skins; small
gravestones, worn smooth by time, with a few names and limbs, are the
pavement; on a brighter niche we read that a nun was immured here; in
another stands the petrified skeleton of a miner, who was buried alive,
with gilded ribs and thighs; in scattered spots were black paper hearts
of men shot by the arquebuse, and heaped-up nosegays of poor sinners;
the rod which had whipped a forgiven penitent to death, a glass bust
with a phosphorus point in the water, chrisom-cloths[118] and other
children's clothes and playthings, and a dwarf skeleton.
As the explanatory words of Roquairol, whose life-path always ran down
into vaults and out over graves, beat out life more and more thin and
transparent before him, Zesara, after his manner, at once shaking his
head, heaving forward his breast, stamping in the sand, and cursing
(which he easily did in terror and in strong emotion), broke out with
the words: "By the Devil! thou crushest my breast and thine own. It is
not so! Are we not together? Have I not thy warm, living hand? Burns not
within us the fire of immortality? Burnt-out coals are these bones, and
nothing more; and the heavenly flame which has consumed them has again
seized upon other fuel, and blazes on. O," he added, as if comforted,
and stepped into the brook and looked through the opening of the shaft
up to the rich moon, which streamed down from heaven, and his great eyes
filled with splendor,--"O, there is a heaven and an immortality; we
remain not in the dark hole of life; we, too, sweep through the ether
like thee, thou shining world!"
"Ah, thou glorious one," said Charles, whose soul consisted of souls, "I
will now bring thee to a more cheerful place." They had hardly gone
eight steps, when it darkened behind them, and a sword, flung in
overhead, came perpendicularly down, and struck with its point in the
sand under the waves. "O thou infernal devil up there!" cried the
infuriate Roquairol; but Albano was softened at the thought of the iron
virgin[119] of the death-hour, who had folded her sharp arms together so
near him. They clasped each other more warmly, and went silent and sad
towards a low music and a grave-mound. They seated themselves upon it
opposite an avenue which formed a right angle with the tormenting
catacomb, lined with green moss, and of which crumbled sparks of rotten
wood pointed out the extent. It lost itself in an open gate, and a
prospect of Elysium, of which only the white summits of some
silver-poplars were distinguishable, and in the distance was seen the
spring redness of midnight blooming in the heavens, and two stars
twinkling overhead. The gate, however, was grated, and guarded by a
skeleton with an Æolian harp in his hand, which seemed to strike upon it
the thin minor tones which the draught of wind just now wafted into the
cavern.
"Here," said Charles, at the beautiful spot, and made more curious by
the deadly fling of Albano's sword, "finish your narrative of to-day!"
Albano reported to him candidly the word which the sister's voice had
spoken: "I give thee Linda de Romeiro." In the tumult of his inner being
he thought not of the anecdote, that she was the very one for whom
Charles when a boy had proposed to die. "Romeiro?" he started up. "Be
still! She? O thou mocking executioner, Fate! Why she, and to-day? Ah,
Albano, for her I early braved death," he continued, weeping, and sank
upon his breast, "and that is what has made my heart so bad, because I
have lost her. Do thou only take her, for thou art a pure spirit; the
glorious shape which appeared to thee on the sea, so she looks, or now
still fairer. Ah, Albano!" This noble youth trembled at the complicated
plot, and at the destiny, and said: "No, no, thou dear Charles, thou
thinkest falsely about everything."
Suddenly it was as if all the constellations rang, and a melodious
spirit-choir thronged in through the gate. Albano was startled.
"Nothing; let be," said Charles. "It is not the skeleton; the _pious
father_ is walking in the _flute-dell_, and is just drawing out his
flutes, because he prays. But how sayest thou, I think falsely of
everything?" "How?" repeated Albano, and could not, in the magic circle
of these echoes, which all-powerfully brought back to him that Sunday
morning, either think or speak. For did not the silver-poplars wave to
and fro against the stars, and rosy clouds lie couched about the
heavens, and did not the whole Elysium pass openly by with the sounds
which had floated through it, with the tears which had besprinkled it,
and with the dreams which no heart forgets, and with the holy form which
eternally abides in his breast? And now he held so fast the hand of her
brother; so near was he to love and friendship, those two foci in the
ellipse of life's pathway; impetuously he embraced the brother, with the
words: "By Heaven, I say to thee, she whom thou hast just named concerns
me not, and never will."
"But, Albano, thou dost not surely know her yet?" said Charles, pursuing
his inquiries, perhaps, too hardly; for the noble youth beside him was
too bashful and too steadfast to unlock the sanctuary of wishes to the
kinsman of his loved one; to a stranger he could have done it much more
easily. "O torment me not," he answered sensitively; but he added more
softly, "Believe me, I pray you believe me, this first time, my good
brother!" Charles yielded full as seldom as he; and although swallowing
the inquisitive tone, and speaking in a right loving one, nevertheless
said this: "By my bliss, I'll do it, and with joy; a heart must have
been heartily loved and divinely blessed which can renounce such a one."
Ah, does Albano, then, know that! He only leaned silently, with his
fiery cheek full of roses, on Liana's brother, shunning scrutiny for
shame; but when the expiring calls of the flute-dell gathered together
like sighs in his breast, and reminded him too often how that Sunday
morning closed, how Liana stole away, and how he looked after her with
dim, wet eyes from the altar; then, although his heart did not break,
his eye broke into tears, and he wept violently, but silently, on his
first friend.
Then, with mute souls, they turned homeward, and looked thoughtfully
toward the long, vanishing ways of the future; and when they parted,
they well felt that they loved each other right heartily, that is, right
bitterly.
On the morrow the pious father lay prostrate under a shock which was
more blissful than mournful; for he said he had in the night seen his
friend, the deceased Prince, walking, clad in white, through Tartarus.