"She can see again," cried Charles to the Count the morning after, in
the intoxication of joy, without concerning himself at all about the
cold relations of the recent period; and was entirely his old self. His
enmity was more frail and fleeting than his love, for the former dwelt,
in his case, on the ice, which soon melted and ran away, the latter
upon the fluid element, on which he always sailed. Coloring, Albano
asked who had been the ophthalmist. "A well-meant fright," said he;
"the German gentleman made as if he would paint her, when my parents,
according to appointment, were not there,--or he really painted
her,--at this moment I have but a confused idea of the whole,--all at
once she heard a strange man's voice, and terror and fright worked
naturally like electric shocks!" Although the Captain heard, down on
the bottom of his billowy sea, all voices only confusedly, nevertheless
he had this time heard correctly; for Liana had extorted from her
mother the concealment of the martyrology, in order to take away from
her brother the occasion of proving his love to her by a duel with her
adversary.
Albano laid up many questions about the dark history in his breast; and
broke off the conversation by a description of his journey.
After some days he heard that Liana with her mother had left the city,
and gone to visit the mountain-castle of a solitary old noble widow,
which lay above Blumenbühl. Out in the clean country, it was hoped
light would fall again upon her life, and the maternal hand was to
paint over anew its fading colors. The Minister, who, like other old
men and like old hair, was hard to frizzle and to shape, was, in this
last and deepest pitfall of fate, struck quite spiritless, so that he
did not devour Liana, who was also caught therein, but let her go. The
whole story was to the public eye very much covered over and beflowered
like the wall of a park. Only the Lector knew it in full, but he could
hold his tongue. He demanded back the miniature from the German
gentleman, in the name of the mother; that personage gave in its stead
cold, hollow lies; nevertheless Augusti, at the entreaty of mother and
daughter, knew how to control himself, and sacrifice to them the
challenge wherewith he was going to take satisfaction for all.
Our friend was now, since his conscience had been appeased with respect
to accidental consequences, smitten with new and unmingled sorrow over
the emptiness of his present condition; the most precious soul was
nothing to him any longer; his hours were no more harmoniously
sounded out by the chime of love and poesy, but monotonously by the
steeple-clock of every-day routine. Therefore he took refuge with men
and friendship, as under trees still blooming in greenness near the
smouldering ruins of a conflagration; women he shunned, because
they--as strange children do a mother who has lost hers--too painfully
reminded him of his loss. How gayly, on the contrary, does a general
lover, who celebrates only all-souls' and all-saints' days, go about
like one new-born, when he has happily slipped the noose of a heart
which had caught him, and now can reckon up all female forms again with
the prospect of a redeemed estate! The very feeling of this freedom may
animate him to surrender himself the oftener, by way of tasting it
again, as prisoner to a female heart.
Albano let himself be drawn by the hands of Roquairol and Schoppe to
wild festivals of men,--which would fain render the sphere-music of joy
on the kettle-drum;--they were only the thorn-festivals after the
feasts of roses. So there is a despair which relieves itself by
revelry; as, for example, during the plague at Athens,--or in the
expectation of the last day,--or in the anticipation of a Robespierre's
butcher-knife. The Captain went back deeper into his old labyrinth and
wilderness, and drew, so far as he could, the innocent youth into his
popular festivals with so-called sons of the muses, into his recruiting
places of pleasure, just as if he had need on his own account to bring
his friend down to himself a little.
Albano fancied, with these Dithyrambics, his weeping soul would be
quite sung to sleep, and he only gave it in addition a gentle rocking.
Meanwhile, although he would not have confessed it, his young rosy
cheeks grew as pale as a forehead, and his face fell in like a
piano-forte key upon the snapping of a string. It was touching and hard
at once, when he sat laughing among his friends and their friends with
a colorless face,--with higher, sharper bones of eyes and nose,--with a
wilder eye, which blazed out of a darker socket. From music, especially
Roquairol's, wherein under the hackneyed, artistical alternation of
damper and thunder, the passionate rolling and plunging of our ship
were too vividly represented, his ear and heart fled as from a
destroying siren. The broken-off lance-splinter of the wound rankled
and festered in his whole being. O, as, in the years of childhood, when
the rosy cloud in heaven seemed to him to lie directly on the mountain
where it was so easy to be reached, the magnificent pile retired far
into the sky so soon as he had climbed the mountain, so now did the
aurora of life and the spirit, which he would fain seize and hold near
to him, stand so high and far overhead beyond his reach in the blue!
Painfully does man attain the alp of ideal love; still more painful and
dangerous--as in the case of other alps--is the descent from it.
One day Chariton came into town, merely to hand him at last a letter of
her husband's,--for Dian, like all artists, much more easily and
agreeably executed a work of art than a letter,--wherein he expressed
his joy that he should see Albano so soon. "Is he coming back, then?"
asked the Count. She exclaimed, with a sad tone: "Body o' me!--that
indeed!--according to his former letter he has still to stay his year
longer." "I do not understand him so," said Albano.
The same evening he was invited by the Princess to see the engravings
of Herculaneum, which had come by the same post with Chariton's letter.
She welcomed him with that animated look of love which we put on before
one who will immediately, as we hope, pour out before us the unmeasured
thanks of his heart. But he had nothing to pour out from his. She asked
at length, somewhat surprised, whether he had received no letters
to-day from Spain. She forgot that the post is courteous and
expeditious toward no house except the princely house. As, however, his
letter must certainly be already lying in his chamber, she allowed
herself to take upon herself the part of Time, who brings all things to
daylight, and told what was in the letter, namely, "that she should in
autumn undertake a little artistic journey to Rome, upon which his
father would accompany her, and he him if he liked; that was the whole
secret." It was only the half; for she soon added, that she should be
most glad to extend the pleasure of this tour to the best draughtsman
in the city, as soon as she recovered,--Liana.
As the whole heart is suddenly illuminated with joy, when, after a
long, dark rainy day, at last in the evening the sun arches for himself
under the heavy water a golden, open western gate, stands therein pure
and brilliant as in a rose-bower before the mirroring earth, announces
to her a fairer day, and then, with warm looks, disappears from the
open rose-bower, so was it with our Albano.
The fair day had not yet come, but the fair evening had. He left the
Herculanean pictures under their rubbish, and hastened, as quickly as
gratitude allowed, back to the letter of his father, who so seldom sent
such a favor.