It was a romantic day for Zesara, even outwardly; sun-sparks and
rain-drops played dazzlingly through the heavens. He had received a
letter from his father, dated at Madrid, which stamped at last the black
seal of certainty on the threatened death of his sister, and in which
there was nothing agreeable but the intelligence that Don Gaspard, with
the Countess of Romeiro, whose guardianship he was now concluding, would
travel in autumn (the Italian spring) to Italy. Two tones had been, in
his life, stolen away from the musical scale of love; he had never known
by experience what it was to love a brother or a sister. The coincidence
of her death-night with that night in Tartarus, this whole clawing into
the holy images and wishes of his heart, stirred up his spirit, and he
felt with indignation how impotently a whole assailing world might seek
to remove Liana's image from his soul; and again he painfully felt, that
this very Liana herself believed in her near decline.
In this situation was he found by an unexpected invitation from the
Minister's lady herself,--sun-sparks and rain-drops played in his heaven
also. He flew; in the antechamber stood the angel who broke the six
apocalyptic seals,--Rabette. She had run to meet him from a bashfulness
before company, and had embraced him sooner than he her. How gladly did
he look into the familiar, honest face! with tears he heard the name of
brother, when he had lost a sister to-day!
The reason of her appearance was this: when the Director was at the
Minister's lady's the last time, the latter had, with easy, disguised
hand, opened her house to his daughter, "for the sake of a knowledge of
empty city life, and for change,"--in order that she might hereafter
venture to knock at _his_ door on her own daughter's behalf. He said he
would "forward the female wild deer to her with pleasure, and all
possible despatch." And as in Blumenbühl Rabette had answered him No,
then Yes, then No, then Yes, and had held with her mother, even before
midnight, an imperial-exchequer-revision, a mint-probation-day about
everything which a human being from the country can wear in the city,
she packed up there and unpacked here.
"Ah, I am afraid in there," said she to Albano; "they are all too
clever, and I am now so stupid!" He found beside the domestic trio the
Princess also, and the little Helena from Lilar, that lovely medallion
of a fine day to his stirred heart. Indescribably was he smitten with
Liana's womanly advances to Rabette, as if he shared her with her. With
courtesy and tenderness, a mildness also, which was without falsehood or
pride, came to the help of the embarrassed playmate, on whose face the
inborn gayety and eloquence of nature now singularly contrasted with her
artificial dumb gravity. Charles, with his ready familiarity, was more
in a condition to entangle than to extricate her; only Liana gave to her
soul and tongue, if only by the embroidery-frame, a free field; Rabette
could write with the embroidering needle, no illuminated and initial
letters, indeed, but still a good running-hand.
She gave--turning her face toward her brother's, in order to pluck
courage therefrom--a clear report of the dangerous road and upsets,
laughing all the while, after the manner of the people when they are
telling their mishaps. Her brother was to her, at the company's expense,
both company and world; upon him alone streamed forth her warmth and
speech. She said she could from her chamber see him "play on the
harpsichord." Liana immediately led both thither. How richly and
sublimely, beyond Rabette's demands upon city-life, was the maidenly
_hospitium_ set out, from the tulip (not a blooming one, but a
work-basket of Liana's,--although every tulip is such a basket for the
finger of spring) even to the piano-forte, of which she, of course, for
the present can use no more than seven treble-keys for half a waltz?
Five moderate trunks of clothes--for therewith she thought to come out,
and show the city that the country too could wear clothes--represented
to him in their well-known flower-pieces and tin bands the old
impressions (_incunabula_) of his earliest days of life; and to-day
every trace of the old season of love refreshed him. She made him look
for his windows, from one of which the Librarian was fixing a hard gaze
on a paving-stone in the street to see how often he could hit it by
spitting.
Here alone, in the presence only of the brother, Liana spoke more loudly
to the sister the word of friendship, and assured her how happy she
meant to make her, and how sincere she was in all that she promised. O
look not into the flame of the pure, religious, sisterly love with any
yellow eye of jealousy! Can you not comprehend that this fair soul even
now distributes its rich flames among all sisterly hearts, until love
concentrates them into _one_ sun; as, according to the ancients, the
scattered lightnings of night gather themselves in the morning into one
solid solar orb? She was, everywhere, an eye for every heart; like a
mother, she never once forgot the little in the great; and she poured
out (let no one deny me the privilege of printing this minute example)
for little Helena the cup of coffee, which the Doctor forbade, half
full of cream, in order that it might be without strength or harm.
The impatient Princess had already looked ten times toward the heavens,
through which now beams of light, now rain-columns flew, till at length
out of the consumed cloud-snow the broad fields of blue grew up, and
Julienne could lead out the delighted young people into the garden, to
the annoyance of the Minister's lady, who did not like to expose Liana
to the _Serein_,--five or six blasts of the evening-wind, and the wading
through rain-water that stood a nineteenth of a line[159] deep. She
herself stayed behind. How new-born, glistening, and inviting was all
down below! The larks soared out of the distant fields like tones, and
warbled near over the garden,--in all the leaves hung stars, and the
evening air threw the liquid jewelry, the trembling earrings, from the
blossoms down upon the flowers, and bore sweet incense to meet the bees.
The Idyl of the year, Spring, parcelled its sweet pastoral land among
the young souls. Albano took his sister's hand, but he listened vacantly
to her intelligence from home. Liana went far in advance with the
Princess, and bathed herself in the open heavens of confidential
communion.
Suddenly Julienne stood still, chatting playfully with her, in order to
let the Count come up, and to inquire after letters from Don Gaspard,
and after tidings of the Countess Romeiro. He communicated, with glowing
countenance, the contents of to-day's letter. In Julienne's physiognomy
there was a smile almost of raillery. To the intelligence of Linda's
intended journey she replied: "That is just herself; she will fain learn
everything,--travel over everything. I wager she climbs up _on_ Mont
Blanc and _into_ Vesuvius. Liana and I call her, for this reason, the
Titaness." How graciously did Liana listen, with her eyes wholly on her
female friend! "You are not acquainted with her?" she inquired of the
tortured one. He answered, emphatically, in the negative. Roquairol came
up; "_Passéz, Monsieur_," said she, making room, and giving him a sign
to move on. Liana looked very earnestly after. "_La voici!_" said
Julienne, letting the cover of a likeness spring up, by a pressure, on a
ring of her little hand. Good youth! it was exactly the form which
arose, that magic night, out of Lago Maggiore, sent to thee by the
spirits! "She is hit there, exactly," said she to the agitated man.
"Very," said he, confusedly. She did not investigate this
contradictory[160] "very"; but Liana looked at him; "very--beautifully
and boldly!" he continued; "but I do not love boldness in women." "O,
one can readily believe that of men!" replied Julienne; "no hostile
power loves it in the other party."
They passed along now through the chestnut avenue by the holy spot where
Albano had seen, for the first time, the bride of his hopes shining and
suffering behind the water-jets. O it was here that he would gladly,
with that soul of his painfully excited by the mutual reaction of
wonderful circumstances, have knelt down before the still angel so near
him! The tender Julienne perceived that she had to spare an agitated
heart; after a tolerably loud silence, she said, in a serious tone: "A
lovely evening,--we'll go to the water-house. There is where Liana was
cured, Count! The fountains must leap, too." "O the fountains!" said
Albano, and looked with indescribable emotion upon Liana. She thought,
however, he meant those in the flute-dell. Helena cried out behind for
them to wait, and came tripping along after with two little hands full
of dewy auriculas, which she had plucked, and gave them all to Liana,
expecting from her, as collatress of benefices, the flower-distribution.
"The little one, too, still thinks of the beautiful Sunday at Lilar,"
said Liana. She gave the Princess one or two, and Helena nodded; and
when Liana looked at her, she nodded again, as a sign the Count should
have something too: "More yet!" she cried, when he had got some; and the
more Liana gave, the more did the child cry, "More,"--as children are
wont to do, in the hyperboles of their tendency to the infinite.
They went over a green bridge, and came into a neat room. Instead of the
piano-forte formerly there, stood a glass chapel of the goddess of
music, a harmonica. The Captain screwed in behind a tapestry-door, and
immediately all the confined spring-waters shot up outside with silvery
wings toward heaven. O how the sprinkled world burned as they stepped
out on the top!
Why wast thou, my Albano, just at this hour not entirely happy? Why,
then, do pains pierce through all our unions,--and why does the heart,
like its veins, bleed most richly when it is heated? Above them lay the
still, wounded heavens in the bandage of a long, white mass of cloud;
the evening sun stood as yet behind the palace, but on both sides of it
his purple mantle of clouds floated in broad folds away across the sky;
and if one turned round toward the east to the mountains of Blumenbühl,
green living flames streamed upward, and, like golden birds, the _ignes
fatui_ danced through the moist twigs and on the eastern windows, but
the fountains still threw their white silver into the gold.
Then the sun swam forth, with red hot breast, drawing golden circles in
the clouds, and the arching water-shoots burned bright. Julienne bent
upon Albano--near whom she had constantly remained, as if by way of
atonement--a hearty look, as if he were her brother, and Charles said to
Liana, "Sister, thy evening song!" "With all my heart," said she; for
she was right glad of the opportunity to withdraw herself, with the
melancholy seriousness of her enjoyment, and down below in the solitary
room to utter aloud, on the harmonica-bells, all that which rapture and
the eyes bury in silence.
She went down; the melodious requiem of the day went up,--the zephyr of
sound, the harmonica, flew, waving, over the garden-blossoms,--and the
tones cradled themselves on the thin lilies of the up-growing water, and
the silver lilies burst aloft for pleasure, and from the brightness of
the sun, into flamy blossoms, and over yonder reposed mother sun in a
blue pasture, and looked greatly and tenderly upon her human children.
Canst thou, then, hold thy heart, Albano, so that it shall remain
concealed with its joys and sorrows, when thou hearest the peaceful
virgin walking in the moonlight of tones? O when the tone which trickles
down in the ether announces to her the early wasting away of her life,
and when the soft, long-drawn melodies flow away from her like the
rose-oil of many crushed days; dost thou not think of that, Albano? How
the human creature plays! The little Helena flings up auriculas at the
flashing water-veins, in order that she may dash one of them with the
spray of the intercepted jet, and the youth Zesara bends far over the
balustrade, and lets the stream of water leap off from his sloping hand
upon his hot face and eye, in order to cool and conceal himself. The
fiery veil was snatched from him by his sister; Rabette was one of
those persons whom this musical tremor gnaws upon even physically, just
as, on the other hand, the Captain was little affected by the harmonica,
and indeed was always least moved when others were most so; there were
no pains with which the innocent girl was less familiar than with sweet
ones; the bitter-sweet melancholy into which she sank away in the idle
solitude of Sundays, she and others had scolded at as mere sullenness.
At this moment she felt all at once, with a blush, her stout heart
seized, whirled round, and scalded through as by hot whirlpools. Besides
it had to-day already been swayed to and fro by the meeting with her
brother again, the leaving of her mother, and her confused bashfulness
before strangers, and even by the sight of the sunny-red mountain of
Blumenbühl. In vain did the fresh brown eyes and the overripe full lip
battle against the uprending pain; the hot springs tore their way
through, and the blooming face with the strong chin grew red and full of
tears. Painfully ashamed, and dreading to be taken for a child,
especially as all her companions' emotions had remained invisible, she
pressed her handkerchief over her burning face, and said to her brother,
"I must go away, I am not well, I shall choke,"--and ran down to the
gentle Liana.
Yes, thou needest only carry thither thy shy pangs! Liana turned, and
saw her hastily and violently drying her eyes. Ah, hers too were indeed
full. When Rabette saw it, she said, courageously, "I absolutely cannot
hear it,--I must scream,--I am really ashamed of myself." "O thou dear
heart," cried Liana, joyfully falling upon her neck, "be not ashamed,
and look into my eye! Sister, come to me, as often as thou art troubled;
I will gladly weep with thy soul, and dry thy eye even sooner than my
own." There was an overmastering enchantment in these tones,--in these
looks of love, because Liana fancied she was mourning over some eclipsed
star or other of her life. And never did trembling gratitude embrace
more freshly and youthfully a venerated heart than did Rabette Liana.
And now came Albano. Awakened by the dying away of the cradle-song, he
had hurried after her, leaving all the cold and other drops unwiped from
his fiery cheeks. "What ails thee, sister?" he asked, hastily. Liana,
still lingering in the embrace and the inspiration, answered quickly,
"You have a good sister; I will love her as her brother does." The sweet
words of the so deeply affected souls and the fiery storm of his being
carried him away, and he clasped the embracing ones and pressed the
sisterly hearts to each other and kissed his sister; when, at the sight
of Liana's confused bending aside of her head, he was terrified and
flamed up crimson.
He must needs fly. With these wild agitations he could not stay in the
presence of Liana, and before the cold, mirroring glances of the
company. But the night was to be as wonderful as the day; he hastened
with live looks, that appeared like angry ones, out of the city to the
Titaness, Nature, who at once calms and exalts us. He went along by
exposed mill-wheels, about which the stream wound itself in foam. The
evening clouds stretched themselves out like giants at rest, and basked
in the ruddy dawn of America, and the storm swept among them, and the
fiery Briareuses started up; night built the triumphal-arch of the
milky-way, and the giants marched gloomily under. And in every element
Nature, like a storm-bird, beat her rustling wings.
Albano lay, without knowing it, on the woodland bridge of Lilar, under
which the wind-streams went roaring through. He glowed like the clouds
with the lingering tinges of _his_ sun; his inner wings were, like those
of the ostrich, full of spines, and wounded while they lifted him; the
romantic spiritual day, the letter of his father, Liana's tearful eyes,
his boldness, and then his bliss and remorse about it, and now the
sublime night-world on all sides round about him, passed to and fro
within him and shook his young heart; he touched with his fiery cheek
the moistened tree-tops, and did not cool himself, and he was near to
that sounding, flying heart, the nightingale, and yet hardly heard her.
Like a sun, his heart goes through his pale thoughts, and quenches on
its path one constellation after another. On the earth and in the
heavens, in the past and in the future, stood before Albano only one
form; "Liana," said his heart, "Liana," said all nature.
He went down the bridge and up the western triumphal-arch, and the
glimmering Lilar lay before him in repose. Lo! there he saw the old
"pious father" on the balustrade of the arch, fast asleep. But how
different was the revered form from the picture of it which he had
shaped to himself according to that of the deceased Prince. The white
locks, flowing richly down under the Quaker hat, the femininely and
poetically rounded brow, the arched nose and the youthful lip, which
even in late life had not yet withered, and the childlikeness of the
soft face, announced a heart which, in the evening-twilight of age,
takes its rest and looks toward the stars. How lonely is the holy sleep!
The Death-angel has conducted man out of the light world into the dark
hermitage built over it; his friends stand without near the cell;
within, the hermit talks with himself, and his darkness grows brighter
and brighter, and jewels and pastures and whole spring-days gleam out at
last,--and all is clear and broad! Albano stood before the sleep with an
earnest soul, which contemplates life and its riddles;--not only the
incoming and the outgoing of life are hidden with a manifold veil, but
even the short path itself; as around Egyptian temples, so around the
greatest of all temples sphinxes lie, and, reversing the case as it was
with the sphinx, he only solves the riddle who dies.
The old man spoke, behind the speech-grating of sleep, with dead ones
who had journeyed with him over the morning meadows of youth, and
addressed with heavy lip the dead Prince and his spouse. How sublimely
did the curtain of the venerable countenance, pictured over with a long
life, hang down before the pastoral world of youth dancing behind it,
and how touchingly did the gray form roam round with its youthful crown
in the cold evening dew of life, taking it for morning-dew, and looking
toward the east, and toward the sun! The youth ventured only to touch
lovingly a lock of the old man; he meant to leave him, in order not to
alarm him with a strange form, before the rising moon should have
touched his eyelids and awakened him. Only he would first crown the
teacher of his loved one with the twigs of a neighboring laurel. When he
came back from it, the moon had already penetrated with her radiance
through the great eyelids, and the old man opened them before the
exalted youth, who, with the glowing rosy moon of his countenance,
glorified by the moon overhead, stood before him like a genius with the
crown. "Justus!" cried the old man, "is it thou?" He took him for the
old Prince, who, with just such blooming cheeks and open eyes, had
passed before him in the under-world of dreams.
But he soon came back out of the dreamy Elysium into the botanical, and
knew even Albano's name. The Count, with open mien, grasped his hands,
and said to him how long and profoundly he had respected him. Spener
answered in few and quiet words, as old men do who have seen everything
on the earth so often. The glory of the moonlight flowed down now on the
tall form, and the quietly open eye was illumined,--an eye which not so
much penetrates as lets everything penetrate it. The almost cold
stillness of the features, the youthful gait of the tall form, which
bore its years upright as a crown upon the head, not as a burden upon
the back, more as flowers than as fruit, the singular mixture of former
manly ardor and of womanly tenderness,--all this called up before Albano
the image of a prophet of the Eastern land. That broad stream which came
roaring down through the alps of youth, glides now calmly and smoothly
through its pastures; but throw rocks before it, and again it starts up
roaring.
The old man looked upon the youthful youth, the oftener the more warmly.
In our days youth is, in young men, a bodily and spiritual beauty at
once. He invited him to accompany him this beautiful night to his quiet
cottage, which stands overhead there near the church-spire, that looks
down from above into flute-dell. On the singular, mazy paths which they
now took, Lilar was transformed to Albano's eyes into a new world; like
flying silver clouds of night, the glimmering beauties were continually
shifting and arranging themselves together into new groups, and
occasionally the two companions penetrated through exotic shrubbery with
lively-colored blossoms and wondrous odors. The pious father asked him
with interest about his former and present life.
They came to the opening of a dark passage into the earth. Spener, in a
friendly manner, took Albano's right hand, and said this way led _up_ to
his mountain-abode. But soon it seemed to go downward. The stream of the
vale, the Rosana, sounded even in here, but only single drops of
moonlight trickled through scattered mountain openings overspun with
twigs. The excavation extended farther downward; still more remotely
murmured the water in the vale. And yet a nightingale sang a lay that
grew nearer and nearer. Albano was composed and silent. Everywhere they
went along before narrow gates of splendor which only a star of heaven
seemed to fling in. They descended now to a distant, illuminated magic
bower of bright red and poisonous dark flowers, arched over at once with
little peaked leaves and great broad foliage; and a confusing white
light, partly sprinkled about by the living rays that gushed in, and
partly flying off from the lilies only as white dust, drew the eye into
an intoxicating whirl. Zesara entered with a dazzled eye, and as he
looked to the right, in the direction of the fire that rained in, he
found Spener's eye sharply fixed upon something to the left; he looked
thither, and saw an old man, entirely like the deceased Prince, dart by
and stalk into a side cavern; his hand quivered with affright, so did
Spener's,--the latter pressed hastily on downward; and at last there
glistened a blue, starry opening: they stepped out....
Heavens! a new starry arch; a pale sun moves through the stars, and they
swim, as in play, after him,--below reposes an enraptured earth full of
glitter and flowers; its mountains run gleaming away up toward the arch
of heaven, and bend over toward Sirius; and through the unknown land
delights glide, like dreams over which man weeps for joy.
"What is that? Am I on or under the earth?" said Albano, astounded; and
his wandering eye fled for refuge to the face of a living man,--"I saw a
dead man." Much more affectionately than before, the old man answered,
"This is Lilar; behind us is my little house!" He explained the
mechanical illusion[161] of the descent. "Here, now, have I stood so
many thousand times, and feasted myself with so fervent a heart on the
works of God. How looked the form, my son?" "Like the dead Prince," said
Alban. In a startled, but almost commanding tone, Spener said, with a
low voice, "Be silent, like me, until his time,--it was not he. Thy
salvation and the salvation of many hangs thereon. Go no more to-day
through the passage."
Albano, half-angered by all the experience of this singular day, said,
"Well, then, I go back through Tartarus. But what means the ghostly
creation that everywhere pursues me?" "Thou hast," said the old man,
lovingly and refreshingly, laying a finger on the youth's brow, "nothing
but invisible friends about thee,--and cast thyself everywhere upon God.
There are a great many Christians who say, God is near or far off, that
his wisdom and his goodness appear quite specially in one age or
another,--truly that is idle deception; is he not the unchangeable,
eternal Love, and does he not love and bless us at one hour just as much
as at another?" As we ought, properly, to call the eclipse of the sun an
eclipse of the earth, so it is man who is obscured, never the Infinite;
but we are like the people who look at the obscuration of the sun in the
water, and then, when the water trembles, cry out, "See how the
glorious sun struggles!"
Albano stepped into the solitude of the old man's neatly ordered
dwelling, only with heaviness, because, in the hot ashes of his volcano,
every feeling put forth and throve the more luxuriantly. Spener
pointed over from his mountain-ridge to the little so-called
"Thunderhouse,"[162] and advised him to occupy it this summer. Albano
took his leave at length, but his agitated heart was a sea, in which the
morning sun is glowingly still half reflected, and into which, at
evening, a lead-colored storm dips, and which swells glistening under
the storm. He looked up from below at the old man, who was looking after
him; but he would hardly have wondered to-day if _he_ had either sunk or
ascended. With indignant and spirited resolutions, to stake and
sacrifice his life for his love, at which cold hands were grasping, he
strode without any fear through Tartarus, which, by the magnifying
mirror of night, was distorted into a black giant armament: thus is the
spirit-world only a region of our inner world, and _I_ fear only
_myself_. When he stood before the altar of the heart in the dumb night,
where nothing was audible but the thoughts, then did the bold spirit
advise him repeatedly to call upon the dead old man, and swear aloud by
his heart, full of dust; but when he looked up to the fair heavens, his
heart was consecrated, and only prayed, "O good God, give me Liana!"
It grew dark; the clouds, which he had taken for the shining mountains
of a new earth, stretching away into the heavens, had reached the moon,
and overshadowed it with darkness.