Under a fresh morning-blue, Albano, full of hopes that he should to-day
clear up his life, so constantly running into white fog, took the same
old road which once brought him hither by night (in the 23d Cycle) in
order on the mountain to see Elysium and Liana. The whole blooming path
was to him a Roman earth, out of which he dug up the beautifully
pictured vases of the past; and the nearer the village, so much the
broader grew the hallowed spots. He wondered that the lambs and
shepherd-boys had not, like the grass, shot up taller during his
absence, which, itself, in consequence of the growth of his heart and
the many-complexioned vicissitude of his experiences, appeared very much
prolonged to his imagination. Like a morning draught of clear
alpine-water, the old clang of the herdsman's horn gushed into his
breast; but the narrow alder-path, into which he used to drive the
Director's riding-horse before unsaddling, and the very court-yard, even
the four walls and the ceiling-pictures of domestic bliss, cramped up
both root and summit in his swelling soul, which longed to grow into the
earth and into the heavens; he was yet in the years when one opens high
to the air with a treadle the tympan of life's clavichord, in order that
the harmonious roar may swell out everywhere.
In the castle how profusely was his heart covered with hearts, and the
youngest love drowned by the old, from the easily weeping mother,
Albina, even to the hand-extending old servants, who, on his account,
stirred more briskly their petrified limbs! He found all his
loves--Liana excepted--in Wehrfritz's study,[172] because he loved
"young folk" and discourse, and always insisted that they should set out
the breakfast on his table of papers, which, he said, was as good as a
breakfast-table with varnished scrap-pictures that nobody saw. Albano
tormented himself with the fear that the Minister's lady had been the
church-robber of a very goddess, and carried Liana back yesterday,--till
the Captain hastily explained the non-appearance. The good soul had had
yesterday to atone for the commotion of her sympathizing heart with
sick-headache. Her loved teacher, Spener, with his sublime
soul-stillness,--those eyes, which wept no more over the earth, buried
with the princely pair,--standing with his head under the cold polar
star of eternity, so that now, like the pole, it no longer saw any stars
rise or set,--calmly, and with hands apostolically folded in one
another, speaking so all-persuasively upon the sorrow and the great end
of this pale life, pressing, with his inspired speech, men's hearts to
the verge of tearful emotion, and yet with exalted tenderness drawing
them back from extreme grief, that so only the heart may weep without
the eye,--and then the consecration of the coupled coffins and of the
church,--O, in the delicate Liana these emotions could not surely fail
to grow into sorrows, and all that her teacher buried in silence was in
her spoken aloud. In addition to this, she had not taken the usual
medicine of keeping still, but had disguised all her pangs behind active
joy, so as to give her departing mother no pains, although herself far
too great ones.
Into the midst of this explanation she herself entered pleasantly, in a
white morning-dress, with a nosegay of Chinese roses,--a little pale and
tired,--looking up with a dreamy softness,--her voice somewhat low,--the
roses on her cheeks closed into buds,--and, like a child, smiling upon
every heart;--thou angel of heaven! who may dare to love and reward
thee? She beheld the lofty youth;--all the lilies of her still face
were, contrary to her wont, baptized into a heavenly morning-red of joy,
and a tender purple lingered upon them.
She asked him, with an open manner, why he had not come yesterday to the
festivities, and disclosed, as a matter of moment, that they would all
to-day visit the pious father, for whom she had been tying her
dwarf-roses. He took gladly the fourth voice in the concert of the
pleasure-party. What a magnificent hanging garden, with its loveliest
flowers and prospects, is built out into the evening-hours! How many
happy ones a single roof covers!
The ingenuous Rabette, more brisk and busy for her still gladness, was,
unweariedly, Liana's sick-nurse and Roquairol's lion-keeper and
_maîtresse de plaisirs_, who made every one of the mother's ground-plans
of pleasure broader by a half, and her whole being was so happy! Ah, her
poor innocent heart had not yet, indeed, been loved by any one, and
therefore it glows, with the fresh energies of the first love, so
brightly and truly before a mighty one which seems to come down to it
with a blessing, like a loving god, drawing after it a whole heaven!
Roquairol saw how bewitchingly a busy activity shook aside in the
play-room of her character and her occupations the heavily hanging
foliage, which in the visiting parlor darkly overspread her real worth;
she was even made more lovely by the darker, neat house-dress, since he
by his preaching had sent back every white drapery of her brunette
person into the wardrobe. She would not obey her mother in this matter,
till he had demanded it. Nay, he had yesterday brought her to the point
of really wearing about with her the watch which the proud Minister's
lady had presented her, though she blushed like fire at the unwonted
ornament. Meanwhile he proposed to take with her, as it were, a true
serpentine flowery way to the altar of his love's _loud_ Yes,--the
_silent_ one he was saying all the time;--he knew she would get in at
once so soon as he rode forth with the conch-chariot of Venus, to which
he had tackled a dove and a hawk.
How gloriously the forenoon flew away on golden wing-shells and on
transparent wings! The beloved Albano was introduced into all the
changes of the house; the finest was in his study-chamber, which Rabette
had transformed into her toilet-chamber, sewing-room, and study, and
which again, since yesterday, had become guest-chamber and library to
Liana. How gladly did he step to the western window, where he had so
often caused his invisible father and the beloved one to appear, in an
unearthly manner, in the crystal mirror of his fancy! On the panes were
many L's and R's drawn by his boyish hand. Liana asked what the R's
meant; "Roquairol," said he, for she did not inquire after the L. With
infinite sweetness did the thought flow around his heart, that his
beloved was indeed to live through some blooming days in the dreamy cell
of his first fresh life. Liana showed him with childlike joy how she
shared everything, that is, the chamber, fairly with Rabette, in her
double housekeeping and chum-ship, and how she made her very hostess her
guest.
I have often admired with envy the fine, light, nomadic life of maidens
in their Arcadian life-segments; easily do these _doves of passage_
flutter into a strange family, and sew and laugh and visit there, with
the daughter of the house, one or two months, and one takes the
ingrafted shoot for a family twig; on the other hand, we _house-pigeons_
are inhabitive and hard to transplant, and generally, after a few days,
journey back again. Since we, as more brittle material, less easily melt
in with the family ore; since we do not weave our work into that of
others so easily as maidens do theirs,--because carriages full of
working-tools must follow after us,--and since we need much and contrive
much;--from all this our claim to a passport is very well deduced,
without the least detriment to our characters.
After a half-eternity of dressing,--since, in the neighborhood of the
loved one, an hour of absence lasts longer than a month when she is far
off,--the maidens entered, equipped for travelling, in the black dress
of brides. How charmingly the roses become Rabette, in her dark hair,
and the lace edging on the white neck, and the timid flames of her pure
eye, and the flitting blushes! And Liana--I speak not of this saint.
Even the good old Director, when the innocent face looked upon him so
childlike from beneath the white veil of India muslin, sprinkled with
gold wire, which was simply thrown over her head after the manner of the
nuns, could not but give his satisfaction words: "Like a nun, like an
angel!" She answered: "I wanted once really to be one with a friend; but
now I take the veil later than she," she added, with a wondrous tone.
She hung to-day with tender enthusiasm upon Rabette, perhaps from the
weakness of ill health, perhaps from love for Albano and the parents,
and perhaps because Rabette, in her love, was so good and beautiful, and
because she herself was nothing but heart. She had, besides, the sacred
fault of forming too enthusiastic conceptions of her female
friends,--into which the nobler maidens easily fall, and which belongs
less to married women,--carried to an unusual height; thus, for
instance, her friend Caroline, who had met her like a heroine of romance
only on the romantic playground of friendship and beautiful nature, she
could not, in the beginning, without a rending away of the saintly halo,
at all conceive of as having hands, which drove the needle and
flat-iron, and other implements of the female field of labor.
Whoso will feel the tenderest participation in joy, let him look not at
happy children, but at the parents who rejoice to see them happy. Never
did the blue-eyed and round-eyed Albina--across whose face time had
struck many a note of life thrice over, among which, however, no
step-motherly discord appeared--look oftener to and fro, and more
benignantly, than from one to another of these couples; for such they
were, according to the maternal astrology of the aberrations and
perturbations of these double-stars. The father, who maintained the
"hypocrisy and spiritlessness[173] of the young people now-a-days,"
compared with the ambition of his contemporaries and comrades, was
chained to the Captain, who, as manager of his inner theatre, had to-day
assigned himself the part of a gay youth. He pleased him even by the
pithy flowers of speech, which the hidden breeze let fly from him; for
as every genius must have its rough idiom, its doggerel verse, so had
he--(others have the devil, the deuse)--the journeyman's greeting of
genius, _Rascal_, together with the derivatives, _rascality_, &c. But
how much more mightily did Albano carry away all female hearts by the
stillness with which, like a quiet aftersummer, he let fall his fruits.
The parents ascribed this reserve to city life: as if Charles had not
been longer to this painter's school! No, Love is the Italian school of
man; and the more vigorous and elevated he is, of precisely so much the
higher tenderness is he capable, as on high trees the fruit rounds
itself into a milder and sweeter form than on low ones. Not in unmanly
characters does mildness charm, but in manly ones; as energy does, not
in unwomanly ones, but in the womanly.
The good youth! While Charles, unhappily, always knew clearly when his
glance burned and lightened, how innocently blazes from thy eyes a
glowing heart, which knows it not! May thy evening be the seed-corn of a
youth full of blossoms! The chariot rolls on, without thy knowing
whether it is to be a chariot of Elijah or of Phaeton, whether thou art,
by means of it, to soar to heaven or to fall therefrom!