Singularly did events cut across each other on the day when Albano came
into the Ministerial house to take leave of Rabette, and (a trembling
voice said within him) of Liana, too. Rabette beckoned to him, from the
window, to come to her chamber. She had folded together the Icarus's
wings of her apparel into the trunks. Over her inner being a prostrating
storm swept to and fro. Charles had disturbed the equilibrium of her
heart by his warmth, and had not restored it again by a word of
recompense. Like the doves, she flutters around the high conflagration.
O may she not, like them, escape with singed feathers, and come back
again, and at last fall into it! She said she had longed for her
friends, ever since she saw yesterday a flock of sheep driven through
the city. She should accompany, on Saturday, Liana and her mother to
attend the consecration of the church, and the interment of the princely
couple. He begged her, so abruptly and eagerly, to contrive for him
to-day a solitary moment with her friend in the garden, that he
absolutely did not hear her sweet news of Liana's intention to stay
there and make her a visit.
Alas! he found with the Minister's lady that showman of magnificent
pictures, who, like Nature, made not only a beginning of his spring, but
an end of his autumn, with poisonous flowers,[167] Mr. Von Bouverot.
Dian had sent him four heavenly copies from Rome; these he opened with
dry, artistic palate. Liana received the Count again as ever. Was,
perhaps, Raphael's _Madonna della Sedia_, in whose heaven-descended
palladium her tender soul was absorbed, the seal-keeper of her holiest
mystery? The all-forgetting artistic passion became her so gracefully!
Her optic nerves had become, by her long painting, like delicate
feelers, which closed fast around lovely forms. Certain female forms,
like this one, stirred up her whole soul. For she had, in childhood,
sketched in her inner heaven shining constellations of the heroines of
romances, and in general of unseen women; great ideas of their spirit,
their heavenly walk, their exaltation above all that she had ever seen;
and she had felt equal shyness and longing to meet one such. Hence she
went forth out of this colossal nympheum[168] of her fancy, so easily
dazzled, and with such warm, heartfelt reverence, to meet pure female
friends and the Countess Romeiro. Now certain pictures brought back
these altar-pieces like copies. The good girl thought not of _this_, but
her friend may well have done so, that one needed only to quicken into
life the eyes of this loving, down-gazing Mary, and merely to warm these
lips with tones, and then one had Liana.
The German gentleman went on, and now placed beside each other Raphael's
Joseph, telling his brothers a dream, and the older Joseph, interpreting
one to a king, and began to translate the three Raphaels into words, and
that with so much felicity, and not only with so much insight into
mechanics and genius, but also with such a precise setting forth of
every human and moral lineament, that Albano took him for a hypocrite,
and Liana for a very good man. She seized every word with a wide-open
heart. When Bouverot painted the prophesying Joseph, as at once
childlike, natural, still, and firm as a rock, and glowing and
threatening, there stood the original at her side.
There also dropped from the German gentleman much thought about Da
Vinci's boy Christ in the Temple, about the magnificently executed
fraternization and adoption of the boy and the youth in one face. Liana
had also copied the copy, but she and her mother were modestly silent on
the subject.
But at last Franciscus Albani disturbed the calm that had hitherto
prevailed, by his "Repose during the Flight." While he acted the
dream-interpreter to these picturesque dreams, and Rabette had her eyes
fastened sharply on the Saint Joseph of this picture, sitting beside
Mary, with an open book, Liana said, unluckily, "A fine Albani!" "I
should think not," Rabette whispered; "brother is much more beautiful
than this praying Joseph!" She had confounded Albani with Albano; her
whole picture-gallery lay in the hymn-book, whose hymns she separated
from each other with golden-red saints. The others did not comprehend;
they knew him only as Count of Zesara,--but Liana, sweetly blushing,
flung at Rabette a tenderly reproving glance, and looked, with mute
endurance, more closely at another picture. Never before in Albano,--in
whom the strongest and the tenderest feelings coupled, as the echo makes
thunder louder and music lower,--had the bitter-sweet mingling of love
and pity and shame wrought more warmly, and he could have at once knelt
down before the maiden, and yet have kept silent.
The German gentleman had finished, and said to the men, with a look full
of victory, "He had, however, something more in his case, which bore
away the palm from the Raphaels; and he would beg them to follow him
into the adjoining apartment." On the way, he observed, that few works
were executed with such magnificent freedom and bold abandon. In the
room he unpacked a little bronze Satyr, against whom an overtaken nymph
is defending herself. "Divine!" said Bouverot, and held the group by a
thread, in order not to rub off the rust. "Divine! I set the Satyr
against the Christ!" Few have even a moderate idea of the amazement of
my hero, when he saw the critic set virtue and vice at once at a round
table, without any quarrel for precedency.
With a fiery glance of contempt, he turned away, and wondered that the
Lector remained. It seems to be unknown to him that painting, like
poetry, only in its childhood related to gods and divine service, but
that by and by, when they grew up to a higher stature, they must needs
stride out from this narrow churchyard,--as a chapel[169] was originally
a church with church-music, until both were left out, and the pure music
retained. Bouverot had the regard for pure form in so high a degree,
that not only the smuttiest, most immoral subject, but even the most
pure and devout, could not contaminate his enjoyment; like slate, he
stood the two proofs of heating and freezing, without undergoing any
change.
Albano had seen the maidens through the window in the alley, and
hastened down to take leave of his sister, and to something more
weighty. He came, with fuller roses on his cheeks than those which
glowed around him, to a grassy bank, where Liana, with his sister, was
sitting behind the red parasol, with half-drooping eyelids, and head
bent aside, softly absorbed in the harvest of evening, suffused with a
sunny redness by the parasol, in white dress, with a little slender
black cross on her tender bosom, and with a full rose; she looked upon
our lover so simply, her voice was so sisterly, and all was such pure,
careless love! She told him how delighted she was with the scenes of his
youth, and with country life, and how Rabette would conduct her
everywhere; and particularly to the consecration discourse, which her
father-confessor, Spener, was to deliver on Sunday. She talked herself
into a glow, with picturing how greatly the great breast of the old man
would be moved by the dirge and pæan over the ashes of his princely
friend.
Rabette had nothing in her mind but the solitary minute, which she would
fain leave her brother to enjoy with her. She begged her, in a lively
manner, to play for her yet once more on the harmonica. Albano, at this
proposal, plucked for himself a moderate nosegay from the--foliage of
the tree that hung over his head. Liana looked at her warningly, as much
as to say: "I shall spoil thy cheerfulness for thee again." But she
insisted. At the entrance into the water-house, a light blush flitted
across Albano, at the thought of the latest past and the nearest future.
Liana speedily opened the harmonica, but the water, the colophonium[170]
of the bells, was wanting. Rabette was just going to fill a glass down
at the fountains, for the sake of leaving them alone; but the Count,
from manly awkwardness about entering at once into a ruse, stepped
courteously before her and fetched it himself. Hardly, at length, had
the lovely, pleasing creature laid, with a sigh, her delicate hands on
the brown bells, when Rabette said to her, she would go down into the
alley to hear how it sounded at a distance. As if at the painful
sunstroke of a too sudden and great pleasure, his heart started up, he
heard the triumphal car of love rolling afar off, and he was fain to
leap into it and rattle away into life. The credulous Liana took the
withdrawal for a veil which Rabette wished to throw over her eye,
sweetly breaking into tears at music, and immediately removed her hands
from the bells; but Rabette kissed her entreatingly, pressed back her
hands upon them, and ran down. "The true heart!" said Liana; but this
pure, guileless confidence in her friend touched him, and he could not
say, Yes.
When, in the meadows of Persia, a happy one, who, on the luxuriant
enamel has been sleeping down among the pinks and lilies and tulips,
blissfully opens his eyes at the first evening call of the nightingale
upon the still, tepid world, and the motley twilight, through which some
gold threads of the evening sun float glowingly: that blissful one is
like the youth Albano in the enchanted chamber,--the Venetian blinds
scattered round broken lights, trembling green shadows; and there was a
holy twilight as in groves around temples; only murmuring bees flew, out
of the loud, distant world, through the silent cell, into the noise
again. Some sharp streaks of sunshine, like lightnings before sleepers,
were wafted romantically to and fro with the rose; and in this dreamy
grotto, amid the rustling wood of the world, the solitude was not
disturbed by so much as the shadowy existence of a mirror.
Into this enchantment she let the tones fly out of her hands like
nightingales,--the tones were propelled towards Albano, as by a storm,
now more clearly, and now more faintly; he stood before her, with folded
hands, as if in prayer, and hung with thousand looks of love on the
downward gazing form; all at once she lifted upon him that holy eye,
full of sympathy, but she suddenly cast it down before the sun-glance of
his.
Now the great eyelids immovably closed upon the sweet looks, and gave
her, like a sleep, the appearance of absence; she seemed a white
May-flower on wintry soil, hanging down its blossom-bells. She was a
dying saint in the devotion of harmony, which she heard rather than
made; only the red lip she took with her as a warm reflection of life,
as a last rose, that was to deck the fleeting angel; O could he disturb
this prayer of music with a word of his?
With narrower and narrower circles did the magnetic vortex of tones and
of love clasp him round,--and now, when the drawing of the harmonica,
like the water-drawing of the scorching sun, licked up his heart; and
when the lightnings of passion darted over his whole life, and illumined
the mountain-ridges of the future and the valleys of the past, and when
he felt his whole being concentrated into one moment, he saw some drops
trickle out from Liana's drooping eyes, and she looked up cheerfully to
let them fall; then Albano snatched her hand away from the keys, and
cried, with the heart-rending tone of his longing, "O God, Liana!"
She trembled, she blushed, she looked at him, and knew not that she
still wept and looked on, and continued to play no more. "No, Albano,
no!" she said, softly, and drew her hand out of his, and covered her
face, started at the pause of the musical tones, and collected herself
and again made them flow out slowly, and said, with trembling voice:
"You are a noble being. You are like my Charles, but quite as
passionate. Only one request! I am about to leave the city for a
while."
His alarm at this became ecstasy, when she named the place, his
Blumenbühl. She went on with difficulty before the delighted lover; her
hand often lay for a long time on the dissonance in forgetfulness of the
analysis; her eyes glimmered more moistly, although she said nothing
more than this: "Be to my brother, who loves you inexpressibly, as he
has loved no other yet,--O be to him everything! My mother recognizes
your influence. Draw him,--I will speak it out!--especially draw him off
from playing deeply!"
He could hardly, for his confusion, asseverate the "Yes," when Rabette
came running in with the almost unsuitably accented tidings, that the
mother was coming. Probably she had seen that Rabette was alone. Albano
parted from the pair with abrupt wishes of a pleasant journey, and
forgot, in the flurry, to answer in the affirmative Rabette's request
for a visit. The mother, meeting him, ascribed his ardor to a brother's
emotion at taking leave.
While he hastened through the wealth of the season, he thought of the
rich future,--of Liana's stammering and veiling: do not fair female
souls, like those angels before the prophet, need only two wings to lift
them, but four to veil themselves? The sea of life ran in high waves,
but everywhere it flashed on its broad surface, and sparks dropped from
the oar.