Now that Albano lived without love or hope; now that he had seen the
polar-star of his life fall like a shooting-star into a wilderness
still as death; now that every one of his actions and every
recollection darted out a scorpion-sting, and he sent back Liana's
letters, forsook Lilar, the house of the Doctor, the Lector, Liana's
relatives, and the pious father; now that he directed his face,
gradually growing pale, only to books and stars; men who know no higher
sorrow than selfish sorrow must needs imagine that nothing weighs upon
his bosom but the ruins and rubbish of the shattered air-castles of his
hope and youthful love. But he was more nobly unhappy and disconsolate:
he was so, because he had for the first time made a human creature and
the best of beings miserable,--his beloved blind! Into this abyss of
his heart all neighboring fountains of sorrow flowed together. The
smallest gayly-painted shards of his urn of fortune were as if
shattered afresh, when he heard from day to day that the poor girl,
although daily stationed in the bath-house before the healing
fountains, was nevertheless brought back each time without a ray of
light or hope, and that she now feared nothing more, lamented nothing
more on this robbers' earth, than that death might perhaps close her
eyes before they had seen her mother again.
O, the wound of conscience is no sear, and time cools it not with his
wing, but merely keeps it open with his scythe! Albano called back to
remembrance Liana's bitter entreaty for indulgence; and then it was no
consolation to him, that, during that eclipse of the sun, he had not
wished to sacrifice her eyes, but only her heart. In the burning-glass
and magnifying-mirror of consequences fate shows us the light, playing
worms of our inner man as grown-up and armed furies and serpents. How
many sins pass through us unseen and with soft looks, like nightly
robbers, because, like their sisters in dreams, they steal not out from
the circle of the breast, and get no outward object to fall upon and
strangle. The fair soul readily detects in an accident a sin. Only
those hard stormers of heaven and earth before whose triumphal chariots
there starts up beforehand a wagon-rampart full of wounds and
corpses,--that is, the fathers of war, which, in the long course of
history, ministers have oftener been than princes,--only these
can calmly kindle all the volcanoes of earth, and let all their
lava-torrents stream down, merely that they may have--fair prospects.
They manure Elysian fields into a battle-field, in order to raise
therein a redder rose-bush for a mistress.
The first thing Albano did, when he arrived at the Doctor's house, was
to trudge out of it down into the remote valley town, in order neither
to see the suspected Lector, still less to hear daily the malicious
Doctor Sphex upon the relapse of the blindness. Only the faithful
Schoppe jogged off with him, especially as he, by a well-adapted course
of behavior, had contrived to get up an opposition party against
himself in the Sphex family, which could no longer suffer him in the
house. The Librarian's warmth toward the Count had grown very much with
the Lector's coldness, and on similar grounds. The bold march out to
Lilar and the passionate wildness of the youth had fastened him more
closely to Albano's side. "I thought at first," said Schoppe, "the
young man was coming to be nothing but an elderly one, when I saw him
stalking along so to school. I often held the man in the moon--where
notoriously, from an absence of thirst and atmosphere, there is nothing
to drink--to be a greater tippler than he. But at last he strikes out.
A youth must not, like old Spener, represent everything in bird's-eye
perspective, from the apex downward. He must, in the beginning, like
incipients in authors' studies and painters' studios, make all lines a
little too large, because the little ones come of themselves. There are
thunder-steeds, but no thunder-asses and thunder-sheep; as, however,
the tutors and lectors would be glad if there were, and would be glad
to have such to drive along before them,--they who, like the
billiard-markers, suffer no open fire in the pipe, but only one under
cover."
Albano lived alone now among books. Liana's brother came to him seldom,
and then ice-cold, and said nothing of the patient, although he always
stayed for her sake. As he himself had once woven the first web of her
blindness, he must, of course, especially with his _un_painted fire of
love for his sister, have a real hatred for him who had drawn it over
her again; so Albano thought, and gladly bore it as a punishment. So
much the oftener did the Captain let himself be drawn to the German
gentleman's, upon whose good graces he now, contrary to what was to be
expected, always won. It is a question--that is to say, there can be no
question--whether his talent and inclination for winding himself around
the most unlike men was not mere coldness toward all hearts, all of
which he only travels over, because he does not mean to dwell in any
one.
Rabette, also, wrote the Count several bills of impeachment about the
Captain's growing coolness. In one she even says, "Could I only see
thee, in order for once to have some one who would let me weep, for
laughter I have not for a considerable time any longer known." The good
Albano entered this desertion also upon his sin-register, as if it were
grandchild to his devil's children.
The Princess prevailed occasionally to allure him out of solitude, when
she put the gentle bird-whistle to her fair lips. She seemed, for the
father's sake, to take a veritable interest in the melancholy son, who
showed no grief, to be sure, but also no joy. Besides, the masculine
woman, more helmeted than hooded, loves to place the pillow of rest
under the sick head, and under the faint head her arm as a chair-back;
and such a one consoles fondly and tenderly, often more tenderly than
the too feminine woman. Almost every day she visited her future
court-dame and visionary sister[19] at the Minister's, and could
therefore tell the lover all about her. Meanwhile, she acted as if she
knew nothing of Albano's relations to the blind one;--the very
dissembling betrays tender forbearance toward two beings at once, Albano
said;--so she could freely give him all the medical reports of the fair
sufferer's case, as well as the opinions entertained about her in
general. After the manner of the strong women, she bestowed upon her
all just praise, without any petty womanish deduction, and wished
nothing so much as her restoration and future company.
"I am capable of doing everything _for_ an uncommon woman, as well as
everything _against_ a common one," said she, and asked whether his
father had already written him about her plan with Liana. He said no,
and begged her for it. She referred him, however, to the paternal
letter, which must soon come. She found fault only with Liana's
propensity to be always embroidering fantasy-flowers into the
groundwork of her life, and called her a rich Baroque pearl.
But from all these conversations Albano returned only more confused to
Schoppe; he heard only lip-solace, and the death-sentence, that the
long-suffering soul from whom he had stolen creation was becoming more
and more immured in the deepest cavern of life, near which only the
deeper one of the grave lies bright and open. Every soft, soothing,
warm gale wafted to him by the sciences or by human beings passed over
that cold cavern, and became to him a sharp norther. O, had he been
called to release her from his sinking arms amidst lovely days, into a
long, eternal Paradise, and had she forgotten him in the intoxication
of rapture, he too could have forgotten that; but that he should have
thrust her away into a cold realm of shadows, and that she must needs
remember him for sorrow,--this must he forever remember.
Schoppe knew no "plaster" for all this distress (to use his own fine
play on words) "except the plaster of Paris,"[20] namely, an excursion.
At least, he concluded, when one is out in the country, all inquiries
about one's health are done with, and all these poisonous anxieties
about the answer; and on return one finds much pain spared or in fact
all the trouble gone.
Albano obeyed his last friend; and they rode off into the Principality
of Haarhaar.