As to Liana's secret inclination and Zesara's prospects I shall never
once institute any conjectures, although I might erase them again before
printing. I remember what came of it, when I and others, on a former
occasion, covered over with our hands Hafenreffer's official reports
upon matters of consequence, and undertook to unfold at length, by pure
fancy, how things might have gone on;--it was of no use! And naturally
enough; for women and Spanish houses have, to begin with, many _doors_
and few _windows_, and it is easier to _get_ into their hearts than to
_look_ into them. Particularly maidens', I mean; since women,
physiognomically and morally, are more strongly marked and boldly
developed, I would rather undertake to guess at and so portray ten
mothers than two daughters. The bodily portrait-painters make the same
complaint.
Whoever observes the influence of night, will find that the doubts and
anxieties which he had contracted the evening previous about the heroine
of his life it has, for the most part, completely killed by the time it
gets to be towards morning. Albano, in the spring morning, opened his
eyes upon life as in a triumphal car, and the fresh steeds stamped
before it, and he could only let them have the reins.
He alighted with his friend at Liana's after a few years, that is, days;
the Minister had not yet come back. Heavens! how new and bloomingly
young was her form, and yet how unchanged her demeanor! Why is it,
thought he, that I can get only her motions, not all her features, by
heart? Why can I not imprint this face, even to the least smile, like a
holy antique, cleanly and deeply upon my brain, that so it may float
before me in eternal presence? For this reason, my dear: young and
beautiful forms are the very ones which are hard for the memory as for
the pencil; and coarse, old, masculine ones easier for both. Again he
filled himself with joys and sighs by looking at her,--and these were
increased by the nearness of the garden, wherein June with his evening
splendor lay encamped. O, if only _one_ moment could come to him, in
which his whole soul might speak its inspiration! Out of doors there lay
the young, fiery spring, basking, like an Antinoüs, in the garden, and
the moon, impatient for the fair June-night, stood already under the
gate of the east, and found the living day and the lingering sun still
in the field. But the mother refused to the asking look of Liana the
sight of sunset,--"on account of the unwholesome _Serein_."[136] Albano,
with his heart full of manly blood, thought this maternal barrier around
a child's health very small.
The hour for shutting gates upon to-day's Eden would have struck for him
the next minute, had it not been for the Captain and the _Cereus
serpens_.
The Captain came running down from the Italian roof, and announced that
the Cereus would bloom this evening at ten o'clock, the gardener said,
and he should stay there. "And thou too," he said to Albano. All that
the double limitations of forbearing tenderness toward sister and friend
would allow he lovingly set at stake, for the sake of pleasing the
latter. Liana herself begged him to wait for the blooming; she was so
delighted to find it was so near! Her soul hung upon flowers, like bees
and dew. Already had her friend, the pious Spener, who fixed an
enraptured eye upon these living arabesques of God's throne, made her a
friend to these mute, ever-sleeping children of the Infinite; but still
more had her own maidenly and her suffering heart done it. Have you
never met tender, female souls, into whose blossoming time fate had
thrown cold clouds, and who now, like Rousseau, sought other flowers
than those of joy, and who wearied themselves with stooping, in valleys
and on rocks, to gather and to forget, and to fly from the dead _Pomona_
to the young _Flora_? The thorough-bass and Latin, wherewith _Hermes_
proposes to divert maidens, must yield here to the broad, variegated
hieroglyphics of Nature, the rich study of Botany.
A nameless tenderness for Liana came into Albano's soul at the little
four-seated supper-table; it seemed to him as if he were now nearer to
her, and a relative; and yet he comprehended not his kinswoman, when,
from every serious mood into which her mother sank, she strove to win
her back with pleasantries. Out of doors the nightingales were calling
man into the lovely night; and no one pined more to be abroad than he.
For the soul's eyes, the _blue_ of heaven is what the _green_ of earth
is to the bodily eyes, namely, an inward strengthening. When Zesara, at
length, came free and clear out of the fetters of the room,--out of this
spiritual house-arrest into the free realm of heaven, and beneath all
the stars and on the magic Olympus of statues, at which he had so often
longingly looked up,--then did his forcibly contracted breast
elastically expand: how the constellations of life moved to meet each
other in brighter forms; how did spring and night sit enthroned!
The old gardener, who, simply from a grateful attachment to "the
good-souled, condescending Fräulein," had, with rare pains, forced these
early blossoms from the _Cereus serpens_, stood up there already,
apparently as an observer of the flowers, but in fact as an expectant of
the greatest praise, with a brown, indented, pitted, and serious face,
which did not challenge praise with a single smile.
Liana thanked the gardener before she came to the blossoms; then she
praised them and his pains. The old man merely waited for every other
one of the company to be astonished also; then he went drowsily off to
bed, with a firm faith that Liana would to-morrow remember him in such a
way as to make him contented.
The exotic beads of nectar-fragrance which hung in five white calyxes,
crowned as it were with brown leaf-work, seized the fancy. The odors
from the spring of a hotter clime drew it away into remote dreams. Liana
only stroked with a soft finger, as one glides over eyelids, the little
incense-vases, without touching with predatory hand the full little
garden of tender stamina which crowded together in the cup. "How lovely,
how very tender!" said she, with childlike happiness. "What a cluster of
five little evening stars! Why come they only by night,--the dear, shy
little flowers?" Charles seemed to be on the point of breaking one. "O
let it live!" she begged; "to-morrow they will all have died of
themselves. Charles! thus does so much else fade," she added, in a lower
tone. "Everything!" said he, sharply. But the mother, against Liana's
will, had heard it. "Such death-thoughts," said she, "I love not in
youth; they lame its wings." "And then," replied Liana, with a
maiden-like turning of the tables, "it just stays with us, that's all,
like the crane in Kleist's fable, whose wings they broke, so that he
could not travel with the rest into the warm land."
This gay, motley veil of deep earnestness was not transparent enough for
our friend. But by and by the good maiden took pains to look just as the
careful mother wished. The benumbing lily which the earth wears on her
breast, the moon; and the whole dazzling Pantheon of the starry heavens;
and the city, with its pierced-work of night-lights; and the high,
majestic, dark avenues; and on meadows and brooks the milk-white
lunar-silver, wherewith the earth spun itself into an evening-star; and
the nightingales singing out of distant gardens;--did not all this stir
omnipotently every heart, till it would fain confess with tears its
longing? And the softest heart of all which beat at this moment below
the stars, could it have succeeded in wholly veiling itself? Almost! She
had accustomed herself, before her mother, to dry away with her eye, so
to speak, the tear, before it grew big enough to fall.
Singular was her appearance, the next minute, to the Count. The mother
was speaking with her son; Liana stood, far from the latter, with face
turned half aside, and a little discolored by the moon, near a white
statue of the holy Virgin, and looking out into the night. All at once
she looked upon him and smiled, just as if a living being had appeared
to her in the abyss of ether, and her lip would speak. Earthly form more
exalted and touching had never before met his eyes; the balustrade by
which he held swayed to and fro (but it was he himself who shook it),
and his whole soul cried, "To-day, now, I love the heavenly one with the
highest, the deepest love I have felt." So he also said lately, and so
will he say oftener: can man, with the innumerable waves of love,
institute measurements of altitude, and point to that one which has
mounted the highest? Thus does man, whereever he may be standing, always
imagine himself standing in the centre of heaven.
Ah, at this moment he was again surprised, but it was with an "Ah!"
Liana went to her mother, and when _she_ felt in the hand of her darling
a slight shudder, she importuned her to go out of the night-air, and
would not give over till she left with her the magic spot.
The friends stayed behind. According to Albano's reckoning, it would
not, of course, have been too much, if, in this frank time, wherein our
holier thoughts, hidden by the common light of day, reveal themselves
like stars, they had all lingered on the roof till toward morning. The
two walked for a time up and down in silence. At last the incense-altar
of the five flowers held them fast. Albano clasped accidentally the
neighboring statue with both hands, and said: "On high places, one wants
to throw something down,--even himself oftentimes; and I, too, would
fain throw myself off into the world, into far-distant lands, as often
as I gaze into the nightly redness yonder, and as often as I come under
orangery-blossoms, as under these. Brother, how is it with thee? The
heavens and the earth open out so broadly: why, then, must the spirit
so creep into itself?" "Just so do I feel," said he; "and in the head,
generally, has the spirit more room than in the heart." But here, by a
delicate guess, he arrived, through agreeably circuitous routes, at the
accidental discovery of the reason why his sister had hurried down so
soon.
"Even to obstinacy," said he, "she pushes her care for her mother. The
last time, when she observed that mother saw her grow pale under the
dance, she immediately ceased. To me alone she shows her whole heart,
and every drop of blood, and all innocent tears therein; especially does
she believe something in respect to the future, which she anxiously
conceals from mother." "She smiled to herself just before she went
away," said Albano, and drew Charles's hand over his eyes, "as if she
saw up there a being from the veiled world." "Didst thou too see that?"
replied Charles. "And then did her lip stir? O friend, God knows what
infatuates her; but this is certain, she firmly believes she is to die
next year." Albano would not let him speak further. Too intensely
excited, he pressed himself to his friend's breast; his heart beat
wildly, and he said: "O brother, remain always my friend!"
They went down. In the apartment which adjoined Liana's they found her
piano-forte open. Now that was just what the Count had missed. In
passion--even in mere fire of the brain--one grasps not so much at the
pen as at the string; and in that state alone does musical fantasying
succeed better than poetic. Albano, thanking, meanwhile, the muse of
sweet sounds that there were forty-four transitions,[137] seated himself
at the keys, with the intention now to beat a musical fire-drum, and
roar like a storm into the still ashes, and drive out a clear,
sparkling swarm of tones. He did it, too, and well enough, and better
and better; but the instrument struggled, rebelled. It was built for a
female hand, and would only speak in female tones, with lute-plaints, as
a woman with a friend of her own sex.
Charles had never heard him play so, and was astonished at such fulness.
But the reason was, the Lector was not there; before certain
persons--and he was one of them--the playing hand freezes, so that one
only labors and lumbers to and fro in a pair of leaden gloves; and,
secondly, before a multitude it is easier playing than before one,
because the latter stands definitely before the soul, the former floats
vaguely. And, besides all that, blessed Albano, thou knowest who hears
thee. The morning air of hope flutters around thee in tones,--the wild
life of youth stalks with vigorous limbs and loud strides up and down
before thee,--the moonlight, undesecrated by any gross earthly light,
hallows the sounding apartment. Liana's last songs lie open before thee,
and the advancing moonshine will let thee read them soon,--and the
nightingale in the mother's neighboring chamber contends with thy tones,
as if summoned by the Tuba to the field.
Liana came in with her mother, not till late, because the heavy din of
tones had something in it hard and painful to both. He could see the two
sitting sidewise at the lower window, and how Liana held her mother's
hand. Charles, after his manner, walked up and down with long steps, and
sometimes stood still near him. Albano, in this nearness of the still
soul, soon came out of the wilderness of harmony into simple moonlit
passages, where only a few tones moved delicately like graces, and quite
as lightly linked as they. The artistical hurly-burly of unharmonious
_ignes fatui_ is only the forerunner of the melodious Charites; and
these alone insinuate themselves into the softer souls. It seemed to
him--the illusion was complete--as if he were speaking aloud with Liana;
and when the tones, like lovers, went on ever repeating the same thing
from heartiness and zest, did he not mean Liana, and say to her, "How I
love thee! O how I love thee!" Did he not ask her, "Why mournest thou?
why weepest thou?" And did he not say to her, "Look into this mute
heart, and fly not from it, O pure, innocent one, my own!"
How did the good youth blush, when suddenly the caressing friend placed
his hands over _his_ friend's eyes, which hitherto, unseen in the
darkness, had been overflowing for love! Charles stepped warmly to his
sister, and she, of her own accord, took his hand and said words of
love. Then Albano took refuge in the murmuring wilderness of sounds,
until his eyes were dried enough for the leave-taking by lamp-light; by
slow degrees he let the cradle of our heart cease rocking, and closed so
mildly and faintly, and was silent for a little while, and then slowly
rose. O, in this mute, young bosom lived every blessed thing which the
most glorious love can bestow!
They parted seriously. No one spoke of the music. Liana seemed
transfigured. Albano dared not, in this spirit-hour of the heart, with
an eye which had so recently calmed itself, rest long upon her mild blue
ones. Her deeply touched soul expressed itself, as maidens are wont, to
her brother only, and that by a more ardent embrace. And from the holy
youth she could not, in parting, conceal the tone and the look, which
he will never forget.
That night he awoke often, and knew not what it was that so blissfully
rocked his being. Ah! it was the tone whose echo rang through his
slumber, and the dear eye which still looked upon him in his dreams.