They alighted down in Ratto's Italian Cellar. The house seemed to the
Count at first, after the contemplation of broad nature, like a fragment
of rock rolled upon it,--although every story, indeed, groans under
architectural burdens,--but the heavy feeling of subterranean
confinement[130] soon forgot itself, and singular was the sound that
came down into the Italian vault of the rattling of carriages overhead.
The Captain bespoke a _punch royal_. If he goes on so in his
good fire-regulation, and always has a full cask at home as
extinguishing-apparatus, and his hose-pipes well proved, then my book
cannot be touched by the objection, that, as in Grandison, too much tea
is consumed; more likely is it that too much strong drink will be
absorbed.
Schoppe was sitting in the Italian souterrain. He loved not the Captain,
because his inexorable eye spied out in him two faults which to him were
heartily intolerable, "the chronic ulcer of vanity and an unholy
guzzling and gormandizing upon feelings." Charles paid him back his
dislike; the hottest waves of his enthusiasm immediately bristled up in
ice-peaks before the Titular Librarian's face. Only not to-day! He drank
so amply of king's-punch,--whereof a couple of glasses might have burnt
through all the heads of Briareus or of the Lernean serpent,--that he
then said everything, even pious things. "By heavens!" said he, healing
himself in this Bethesda-pool by--drawing from it, "since it is all
fiddle-faddle about this growing better, one should obfuscate
himself[131] with a shot, in order that the baited spirit may once for
all go free from its wounds and sins." "From sins?" said Schoppe; "lice
and tape-worms of the better sort will by all means emigrate from my
territory, when I grow cold; but the worst of them my inner man will
certainly carry up with it. By the hangman! who tells you, then, that
this whole churchyard of poor sinners here below shall at once march
home as an invisible church full of martyrs and Socrateses, and every
Bedlam come out a high-light lodge? I was thinking to-day of the next
world, when I saw a woman in the market with five little pigs, every one
of which she would fain drive before her with a string tied to its leg,
but which shot off from her and from each other like wisps of electric
light; now, said I, we, with our few faculties and wishes, which this
cultivating age sets out _in quintuplo_, fare already as pitifully as
the woman with her drove; but when we get ten or more new farrows by the
rope, as the second world, like an America, must surely bring new
objects and wishes, how will the Ephorus[132] manage his office there? I
prepare myself to expect there greater indescribable distresses, feudal
crimes and oppositions." But Roquairol was in his red blaze; he exalted
himself far above Schoppe and above himself, and denied immortality
plumply, by way of parodying Schoppe. "An individual man," said he,
"could hardly, on his own account alone, believe in immortality; but
when he sees the masses, he has pity, and holds it worth the while, and
believes the second world is a _monte testaceo_ of human potsherds. Man
cannot come nearer to God and the Devil hereafter than he does already
here; like a tavern-sign, his _reverse_ is painted just like his
_obverse_. But we need the fictitious future for a present; when we
hover ever so still above our slime, we yet are continually flapping,
like carps lying still, with poetic fins and wings. Hence we must needs
dress up the future paradise so gloriously that only gods shall fit into
it, but, just as in princes' gardens, no dogs. Mere trumpery! We cut
out for ourselves glorified bodies, which resemble soldiers'-coats;
_pockets_ and _buttonholes_ are wanting; what pleasure can they hold,
then?" Albano looked upon him with amazement. "Knowest thou, Albano,
what I mean? Just the opposite." So easy is everything for fancy, even
freaks of humor.
At this moment he was called out. He came back with a red billet-doux.
He put on his cravat,--he had been sitting there _à la Hamlet_,--and
said to Albano he would fly back in an hour. At the threshold he paused,
still thinking whether he should go, then ran swiftly up the steps.
In Albano the cup of joy, into which the whole day had been pouring,
overflowed with the sparkling foam of a waggish humor. By heaven!
drollery became him as charmingly as an emotion, and he often walked
round for a long time without speaking, with a roguish smile, as
slumbering children smile, when, as the saying is, angels are playing
with them.
Roquairol came back with strangely excited eyes; he had stormed wildly
into his heart; he had been wicked, for the sake of despairing, and
then, on his knees, at the bottom of the precipice, confessing to his
friend the nature of his life. This man, so wilful, lay involuntarily
bound to the windmill wings of his fancy, and was now fettered by a
calm, now whirled round by the storm, which he imagined himself cutting
through. He was now, after the analogy of the fire-eaters, a
fire-drinker, in the uneasy expectation of Schoppe's departure. The
latter departed at last, despite Albano's entreaty, with the answer:
"_Redeem the time_, says the Apostle; but that means, Prolong your life
all you can: _that_ is time. To this end the best shops of the times,
the apothecaries', require that a man, after _punch royal_, shall go to
bed and sweat immoderately."
Now how changed was all! When Zesara joyfully fell on his neck,--when
the delirium of youth grew to the melodies of love, as the rain in
Derbyshire-hollow at a distance becomes harmonies,--when from the
Count's lips flowed sweetly, as one bleeds in his sleep, his whole inner
being, his whole past life, and all his plans of the future, even the
proudest (only not the tenderest one),--and when, like Adam in the state
of innocence (according to Madame Bourignon), he placed himself in such
crystal transparency before his friend's eye, not from weakness, but
from old instinct, and in the faith that such his friend must be,--then
did tears of the most loving admiration come into the eyes of the
unhappy Roquairol at the unvarnished purity, and at the energetic,
credulous, unsophisticated nature, and at the almost smile-provoking
_naïve_ and lofty earnestness of the red-cheeked youth. He sobbed upon
that joy-drunken bosom, and Albano grew tender, because he thought he
was too little so, and his friend so very much in that mood.
"Come out o' doors,--out o' doors!" said Charles; and that had long been
Albano's wish. It struck one, as they saw, on the narrow cellar-stairs,
the stars of the spring heaven overhead glistening down through the
entrance of the shaft. How freshly flowed the inhaled night over the hot
lips! How firmly stood the world-rotunda, built with its fixed rows of
stars high and far away over the flying tent-streets of the city! How
was the fiery eye of Albano refreshed and expanded by the giant masses
of the glimmering spring, and the sight of day slumbering under the
transparent mantle of night! Zephyrs, the butterflies of day, fluttered
already about their dear flowers, and sucked from the blossoms, and
brought in incense for the morning; a sleep-drunken lark soared
occasionally into the still heavens with a loud day in her throat; over
the dark meadows and bushes the dew had already been sprinkled, whose
jewel-sea was to burn before the sun; and in the north floated the
purple pennons of Aurora, as she sailed toward morning. With an exalting
power the thought seized the youth, that this very minute was measuring
millions of little and long lives, and the walk of the sap-caterpillar
and the flight of the sun, and that this very same time was being lived
through by the worm and God, from worlds to worlds, through the
universe. "O God!" he exclaimed, "how glorious it is to exist!"
Charles merely clung, with the drooping, heavy feathers of the
night-bird, to the cheerful constellations around him. "Happy for thee,"
said he, "that thou canst be thus, and that the sphinx in thy bosom
still sleeps. Thou knowest not what I am about to do. I knew a wretch
who could portray her right well. In the cavern of man's breast, said
he, lies a monster on its four claws, with upturned Madonna's face, and
looks round smiling, for a time, and so does man too. Suddenly it
springs up, buries its claws into the breast, rends it with lion's-tail
and hard wings, and roots and rushes and roars, and everywhere blood
runs down the torn cavern of the breast. All at once it stretches itself
out again, bloody, and smiles away again with the fair Madonna's face.
O, he looked all bloodless, the wretch! because the beast so fed upon
him and thirstily lapped at his heart."
"Horrible!" said Albano; "and yet I do not quite understand thee." The
moon at this moment lifted herself up, together with a flock of clouds
that lay darkly camped along her sides, and she drew a storm-wind after
her, which drove them among the stars. Charles went on more wildly: "In
the beginning, the wretch found it as yet good: he had as yet sound
pains and pleasures, real sins and virtues; but as the monster smiled
and tore faster and faster, and he continued to alternate more and more
rapidly between pleasure and pain, good and evil; and when blasphemies
and obscene images crept into his prayers, and he could neither convert
nor harden himself; then did he lie there, in a dreary exhaustion of
bleeding, in the tepid, gray, dry mist-banks of life, and thus was dying
all the time he lived.--Why weepest thou? Knowest thou that wretch?"
"No," said Albano, mildly. "I am he!" "Thou? Terrible God, not thou!"
"O, it is I; and though thou despisest me, thou wilt be what I ... No,
my innocent one, I say it not. See, even now the sphinx rises again. O
pray with me, help me, that I may not be obliged to sin,--only not be
obliged! I must drink, I must debauch, I must be a hypocrite,--I am a
hypocrite at this moment." Zesara saw the rigid eye, the pale, shattered
face, and, in a rage of love, shook him with both arms, and stammered,
with deep emotion, "By the Almighty! this is not true! thou art indeed
so tender and pale and unhappy and innocent."
"Rosy-cheek," said Charles, "I seem to thee pure and bright as yonder
orb; but she too, like me, casts a long shadow up toward heaven." Zesara
let go of him, took a long look toward the sublime, dark Tartarus,
encompassing Elysium like a funeral train, and pressed away bitter
tears, which flowed at the remembrance how he had found therein his
first friend, who was now melting away at his side. Just then the
night-wind tore up a fir-tree which had been killed by the
wood-caterpillar, and Albano pointed silently to the crashing tree.
Charles shrieked: "Yes, that is I!" "Ah, Charles, have I then lost thee
to-day?" said the guiltless friend, with infinite pain; and the fair
stars of spring fell like hissing sparks into his wounds.
This word dissolved Charles's overstrained heart into good, true tears;
a holy spirit came over him, and bade him not torment the pure soul with
his own, not take away its faith, but silently sacrifice to it his wild
self, and every selfish thought. Softly he laid himself on his friend's
bosom, and with magical, low words, and full of humility, and without
fiery images, told him his whole heart; and that it was not wicked, but
only unhappy and weak, and that he ought to have been as heartily
sincere towards him, who thought too well of him, as towards God; and
that he swore, by the hour of death, to be such as he,--to confess to
him everything, always,--to become holy through him. "Ah, I have only
been loved so very little!" he concluded. And Albano, the
love-intoxicated, glowing man, the good man, who knew by his own
experience the sacred excesses and exaggerations of remorse, and took
these confessions to be such, came back, inspired, to the old covenant
with unmeasured love. "Thou art an ardent man!" said Charles; "why do
men, then, always lie frozen together on each other's breasts, as on
Mount Bernard,[133] with rigid eye, with stiffened arms? O why camest
thou to me so late? I had been another creature. Why came she[134] so
early? In the village down below there, at the narrow, lowly
church-door,--there I first saw her through whom my life became a
mummy. Verily, I am speaking now with composure. They carried along
before me, as I went out to walk, a corpse-like white youth on a bier
into Tartarus: it was only a statue, but it was the emblem of my future.
An evil genius said to me, 'Love the fair one whom I show thee.' She
stood at the church-door, surrounded by people of the congregation, who
wondered at the boldness with which she took up, in her two hands, a
silver-gray, tongue-darting snake, and dandled it. Like a daring
goddess, she bent her firm, smooth brow, her dark eye, and the
rose-blossoms of her countenance upon the adder's head, which Nature had
trodden flat, and played with it close to her breast. 'Cleopatra!' said
I, although a boy. She, too, even then, understood it, looked up calmly
and coldly from the snake, and gave it back, and turned round. O, on my
young breast she flung the chilling, life-gnawing viper. But, truly, it
is now all gone by, and I speak calmly. Only in the hours, Albano, when
my bloody clothes of that night, which my sister has laid up, come
before my eyes, then I suffer once more, and ask, 'Poor, well-meaning
boy! wherefore didst thou then grow older?' But, as I said, it is all
over now. To thee, only to thee, may a better genius say, 'Love the fair
one whom I show thee!'"
But what a world of thoughts now flew at once into Albano's mind! "He
continues to torment himself," thought he, "with the old jealousy about
Romeiro. I will open heart to heart, and tell the good brother that it
is indeed his sister I love, and that eternally." His cheeks glowed, his
heart flamed, he stood, priest-like, before the altar of friendship,
with the fairest offering, sincerity. "O Charles," said he, "now,
perhaps, she might be otherwise disposed towards thee. My father is
travelling with her, and thou wilt see her." He took his hand, and went
with him more quickly up to a dark group of trees, to unfold, in the
shadow, his tenderly blushing soul. "Take my most precious secret," he
began, "but speak not of it,--not even with me. Dost thou not guess it,
my first brother? The soul that I have loved, as long as I have loved
thee?"--softly, very softly he added,--"thy sister?" and sank on his
lips to kiss away the first sounds.
But Charles, in the tumult of rapture and of love, like an earth at the
up-coming of Spring, could not contain himself; he pressed him to
himself; he let him go; he embraced him again; he wept for bliss; he
shut to Albano's eyes, and said, as if he had found his sister anew,
"Brother!" In vain did Albano seek to stifle, with his hand, every other
syllable on his lips. He began to paint to the excited youth--who, amid
the secluded and poetic book-world, had acquired a higher tenderness
than the actual intercourse of society teaches--the portrait of Liana;
how she did and suffered; how she watched and pleaded for him, and even
impoverished herself to wipe out his debts; how she never severely
blamed, but only mildly entreated him, and all that, not from artificial
patience, but from genuine, ardent love; and how this, after all, made
up hardly the accessories of her picture. In this purer inspiration than
the foregoing evening had granted him, what crowned his bliss was, that
he could love his sister, among all beings, the most intensely and the
most disinterestedly, and with a love the most free from poetic luxury
and caprice. Really strengthened by the feeling that he could, for once,
exult with a pure and holy affection, he lifted once more in freedom his
disengaged hands, hitherto, like Milo's, jammed and caught in the tree
of happiness and life, which he would fain have torn open; he breathed
fresh, living air and courage, and the plan of his inner perfection was
now gracefully rounded by new good fortune and a consciousness full of
fair objects.
The moon stood high in heaven, the clouds had been driven away, and
never did the morning-star rise brighter on two human beings.